GOP

gimmesometruth27

the mypillow guy started a new twitter account today and was permabanned again in a few hours.

mickeyrat

gift article....

https://wapo.st/3MVQgTd 

 How federal pandemic aid helped Texas pay for its border crackdown
By Tony Romm
May 06, 2022 at 10:00 ET
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and top state lawmakers shifted around roughly $1 billion in federal coronavirus aid to help pay for their campaign to arrest migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, exposing gaps in a law meant to bolster the country’s response to the ongoing pandemic.
Relying on the availability of generous federal relief funds, Texas repeatedly in recent months rerouted state money toward its controversial immigration crackdown — all without leaving a massive hole in its budget. But critics say the money would have been put to better use tending to a public health crisis that has killed more than 86,000 people in the state.

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mickeyrat

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/06/hotze-texas-recording-ballots/

GOP donor described botched vote fraud probe in recording, prosecutors say

By Shawn Boburg

Yesterday at 6:42 p.m. EDT

Listen to article

12 min

Steven F. Hotze, left, and attorney Jared Woodfill held a news conference in Houston in December 2020 to discuss the arrest of an investigator hired by Hotze’s nonprofit group to probe election fraud claims. (Steve Gonzales/Houston Chronicle)

On Oct. 17, 2020, influential GOP donor Steven F. Hotze made an urgent request during a phone call with a top federal prosecutor in Texas, according to a court filing Friday by the Houston district attorney’s office.

Hotze claimed that private investigators funded by his nonprofit group had been trailing a mysterious white van as it shuttled phony ballots around the city in an effort to rig the upcoming election. He asked if federal authorities would help stop the van and apprehend its driver, but he added that one of his hard-nosed investigators was prepared to do the job himself, according to the filing by prosecutors in Harris County that included a transcript of the exchange.

“In fact, he told me last night, ‘hell … the guy’s gonna have a wreck tomorrow night. I’m going to run into him and I’m gonna make a citizen’s arrest,” Hotze told the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Ryan Patrick, a Trump appointee, who recorded the conversation.

Two days after the call, the private investigator Hotze had named ran a white van driven by an air-conditioning repairman off the road in Houston and held the driver at gunpoint during a futile search for forged ballots, county prosecutors allege.

Police have said the man was innocent. His truck contained repair parts.

The filing Friday illuminates one of the most extreme tactics that far-right groups have employed in an effort to substantiate former president Donald Trump’s unproven allegations of widespread voting fraud in the election he lost. Groups have tried to gain access to sensitive election equipment, pushed for audits of the 2020 election by handpicked outside groups and recruited volunteers to scrutinize local election officials, sometimes leading to threats of violence.

The disclosure of the call transcript came in an ongoing criminal case brought by the district attorney’s office that charges Hotze and the private investigator with assault with a deadly weapon and unlawful restraint in the alleged ramming. Prosecutors disclosed the transcript in a filing notifying the court that they intend to use it as evidence against Hotze.

The filing marks the first time prosecutors have publicly revealed evidence to support the charges against Hotze, who was not at the crash scene. His nonprofit Liberty Center for God and Country paid $261,000 for the election fraud probe, a Houston police report stated.

The recorded conversation also appears to contradict statements Hotze made earlier this year during a sworn deposition separately obtained by The Washington Post. The deposition was taken in a lawsuit filed by the air-conditioning repairman, David Lopez-Zuniga, against Hotze and the nonprofit. In the deposition, Hotze insisted that he had no knowledge of the surveillance or investigation of Lopez-Zuniga.

“I did not know about any investigation about David Lopez at all,” Hotze said during questioning that occurred months before his April 20 criminal indictment. He also said in his deposition that he had not talked to any law enforcement official about the investigation.

During his Jan. 4 deposition, Steven F. Hotze said he had not talked to any law enforcement officials about his probe. Hotze's statement was in response to a lawyer asking him whether he had spoken with a particular state police agency about the probe. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, Hotze received regular briefings about the private investigation from a former Houston police officer hired to run the probe, he said in his deposition. During weekly calls, he said, the ex-cop, Mark Aguirre, detailed his pursuit of a sensational theory: Democrats were using undocumented Hispanic children to forge signatures on hundreds of thousands of phony ballots to rig the election in Harris County, home to Houston.

“From what he told me, it appeared he was hot on a trail,” Hotze said in the deposition.

Hotze and Aguirre have not yet been arraigned or entered a plea to the charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and unlawful restraint, but Hotze has said publicly that he is not guilty.

Jared Woodfill, an attorney for Hotze, said the statements in the deposition were not at odds with the remarks in the call transcript. He declined to elaborate.

The transcript of Hotze’s private phone conversation is notable not only for its content but also because authorities said the call was recorded by the former U.S. attorney. Patrick is a son of Texas’s Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has received nearly $100,000 in political campaign donations from Hotze since 2005, state campaign records show.

The younger Patrick, who resigned in February 2021 after President Biden took office and now works at a law firm, declined to comment Friday about the transcript of the phone call.

Hotze has pledged more investigations. In early April he hosted a sold-out fundraiser to help bankroll them through his nonprofit. The keynote speaker at the event was My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a prominent promoter of baseless claims — rejected by court after court — that Trump lost in a rigged election.

Hotze, 71, who runs a natural-health and hormone replacement clinic, has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative candidates in Texas. He has filed lawsuits, with mixed results, seeking to limit mail-in voting in the state and to dismiss ballots submitted via drive-through voting sites in the 2020 presidential election.

Woodfill said the recording did not capture the complete conversation between Hotze and Patrick. “The Ryan Patrick tape further demonstrates that the indictment of Dr. Hotze was politically motivated and that Dr. Hotze is innocent of any criminal or civil wrongdoing.”

Aguirre, a 65-year-old former Houston police captain, was charged in December 2020 and on April 20 was indicted by a grand jury, a required step in a felony case in Texas. An attorney for Aguirre declined to comment. “I’m not trying my case in the paper,” Aguirre, who was released on $30,000 bail, told The Post in a brief phone interview on Dec. 16, 2020. “I don’t care about public opinion. I’m trying my case against these corrupt sons of [expletives].”

In a statement to The Post, District Attorney Kim Ogg, a Democrat who was first elected in 2016, called the voter fraud operation a “misguided fantasy.”

“The defendants were charged as part of a bizarre scheme that crossed the line from dirty politics to violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed,” she said Friday. “The entire plan was backward from the start, alleging massive voter fraud occurred and then trying to prove it happened.”

Friday’s filing did not specify how or when authorities had obtained a record of the 2020 phone call, and the district attorney’s office declined to answer detailed questions about the transcript. The filing stated that it was an “informal transcript” that would be followed by a certified version.

The 2020 election

In September 2020, as Trump was floating claims that the presidential election would be rigged, Aguirre and a team of other investigators set out to find voter fraud in Harris County, with funding from Hotze’s nonprofit, court records show.

By mid-October the investigators had set their sights on Lopez-Zuniga, setting up a command post at a hotel near his mobile home and tracking his movements for four days before the alleged assault, police have said.

During his call with the U.S. attorney, Hotze offered an explanation for why private investigators were tracking the white van, according to the transcript. “We’ve surveilled them for the last two nights,” he said, according to the transcript.

Investigators had spotted the van outside the apartment complex of a Harris County Democratic political operative they were surveilling, he said. They followed the van to a mobile home park where boxes were moved between the truck and a building behind it, Hotze said. Later, the same truck stopped at a post office, he said, suggesting that ballots were being dropped in the mail.

“They literally have boxes with thousands of votes in it, and they’re just taking these down and voting them,” he added. “I mean, this is the way these guys operate, Ryan. The criminal ring is so incredible.”

During the call, Hotze repeatedly referred to the truck’s owner by the last name of “Perez.” The district attorney’s office declined to answer a question Friday about who that was.

Hotze asked Patrick if he could dispatch a “federal marshal” to help Aguirre “capture” the purported phony ballots, according to the transcript. “Can you help out at all?” Hotze asked.

Patrick demurred, saying that he had no control over federal marshals and that his office would need to establish probable cause — and possibly get approval from Justice Department prosecutors in Washington — to take such a step. It is not clear from the filing whether any action was taken.

During the call, Hotze expressed confidence that Aguirre, whom he named, would crack the case without help from law enforcement, according to the transcript. Aguirre, he said, had “enough balls that he would just, that he would go in and make a citizen’s arrest.” He added that Aguirre would probably extract a confession from the driver of the truck “in five minutes,” in part by threatening to get him and his family deported, the transcript shows.

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Halifax2TheMax

Only the best for the GOP.

https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2022/05/08/indiana-candidate-accused-of-killing-his-wife-wins-gop-primary-from-jail/?p1=hp_featurestack

gimmesometruth27

Halifax2TheMax said:

Only the best for the GOP.

https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2022/05/08/indiana-candidate-accused-of-killing-his-wife-wins-gop-primary-from-jail/?p1=hp_featurestack

you really cannot make this shit up.

gimmesometruth27

michigan replaced the electors that did not vote for trump. so it is starting there.

michigan has a real problem with the right wing lunatics.

mickeyrat

 https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/no-books-no-money-just-the-truth?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct

static111

mickeyrat said:

 https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/no-books-no-money-just-the-truth?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct

Where's the beef?

cblock4life

I’ve said time and time again, all politicians are POS - all of them.  This should surprise no one.  These career politicians are as corrupt as any other pos human disgrace.  None of us are perfect.  Sometimes I just wonder why any semi-intelligent human doesn’t see the evil in politics. 

nicknyr15

cblock4life said:

I’ve said time and time again, all politicians are POS - all of them.  This should surprise no one.  These career politicians are as corrupt as any other pos human disgrace.  None of us are perfect.  Sometimes I just wonder why any semi-intelligent human doesn’t see the evil in politics. 

Be careful with that “both sides” mentality here. 

mrussel1

mickeyrat said:

 https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/no-books-no-money-just-the-truth?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct

I think this is interesting, but it's really confusing and poorly written.  

1. How is Megan bullying him?
2. What was JM's connection to the Russian oligarchs and how did that corrupt him or US policy?  There are no conclusions drawn.
3. Who was the random lobbyist trying to kill herself?

Just a strange writing. 

cblock4life

nicknyr15 said:

cblock4life said:

I’ve said time and time again, all politicians are POS - all of them.  This should surprise no one.  These career politicians are as corrupt as any other pos human disgrace.  None of us are perfect.  Sometimes I just wonder why any semi-intelligent human doesn’t see the evil in politics. 

Be careful with that “both sides” mentality here. 

Thanks, I’m aware how sensitive some are about their obsession, but I know there’s also quite a few (like you) who sees politicians who they really are no matter which party they’re affiliated with.  I think we need a third political party named “realists”.  

Halifax2TheMax

cblock4life said:

nicknyr15 said:

cblock4life said:

I’ve said time and time again, all politicians are POS - all of them.  This should surprise no one.  These career politicians are as corrupt as any other pos human disgrace.  None of us are perfect.  Sometimes I just wonder why any semi-intelligent human doesn’t see the evil in politics. 

Be careful with that “both sides” mentality here. 

Thanks, I’m aware how sensitive some are about their obsession, but I know there’s also quite a few (like you) who sees politicians who they really are no matter which party they’re affiliated with.  I think we need a third political party named “realists”.  

The reality is is that they’re not all POS or corrupt. Some just aren’t who they pretend to be and they make everyone look bad. But yea, both sides it is. John McCain was a repub. Add him to a long list of them. And I’m still waiting for the Hillary indictments to drop. Gonna celebrate with my boy Roles when they do.

jpgoegel

mrussel1 said:

mickeyrat said:

 https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/no-books-no-money-just-the-truth?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct

I think this is interesting, but it's really confusing and poorly written.  

3. Who was the random lobbyist trying to kill herself?

Just a strange writing. 

Vicki Iseman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain_lobbyist_controversy

Go Beavers

cblock4life said:

nicknyr15 said:

cblock4life said:

I’ve said time and time again, all politicians are POS - all of them.  This should surprise no one.  These career politicians are as corrupt as any other pos human disgrace.  None of us are perfect.  Sometimes I just wonder why any semi-intelligent human doesn’t see the evil in politics. 

Be careful with that “both sides” mentality here. 

Thanks, I’m aware how sensitive some are about their obsession, but I know there’s also quite a few (like you) who sees politicians who they really are no matter which party they’re affiliated with.  I think we need a third political party named “realists”.  

I wouldn't call it an obsession, it that's factually you're incorrect, and people like facts in here.

Merkin Baller

The whole "both sides" thing was out the window once the GOP galvanized themselves behind an anti-democratic aspiring autocrat. 

HughFreakingDillon

generalizations are never accurate. 

DewieCox

When did dems support an admitted murderer in a primary?

mrussel1

DewieCox said:

When did dems support an admitted murderer in a primary?

Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster.  Twice.  

Gern Blansten

wow....I wasn't aware of any of this shit between Schmidt and McCain