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    Stacey Abrams’ Group Gave Millions to Law Firm Run by Her Campaign Chair

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    Office of U.S. House Speaker, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is in hot water once again.

    New reports indicate Abrams’ voting rights group Fair Fight Action has funneled millions of dollars to a law firm led by the chairwoman for Abrams’s gubernatorial campaign.

    According to The Washington Examiner, Fair Fight Action spent $9.4 million in 2019 and 2020 with Lawrence & Bundy, a boutique Atlanta law firm that counts Abrams’s campaign Chairwoman Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, a close friend of the candidate, as one of its two partners, according to the nonprofit group’s 2019 and 2020 IRS tax filings.

    There are no definitive reports to show how much Lawrence-Hardy’s firm has received from Fair Fight Action in 2021 and 2022. The organization has been involved in a legal fight against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) for the past years. Fair Fight Action filed the lawsuit after Abrams lost her 2018 gubernatorial bid to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whom she is currently running against, claiming the secretary of state engaged in voter suppression. In September, U.S. district judge Steve Jones ruled against Abrams and found no evidence of voter suppression.

    “This is a win for all Georgia election officials who dedicate their lives to safe, secure and accessible elections,” Raffensperger said at the time. “Stolen election and voter suppression claims by Stacey Abrams were nothing but poll-tested rhetoric not supported by facts and evidence.”

    “Judge Jones’ ruling exposes this legal effort for what it really is: a tool wielded by a politician hoping to wrongfully weaponize the legal system to further her own political goals,” Kemp said in a statement celebrating the ruling.

    The $9.4 million that Lawrence & Bundy received accounts for over 37% of the roughly $25 million in legal fees that Fair Fight Action has racked up in the past two years, according to Politico, which first reported on the payments to Lawrence-Hardy’s law firm.

    Fair Fight Action raised over $61 million in 2019 and 2020 after being founded in 2018. At least one-third of that money has gone toward the lawsuit against Raffensperger, while $20 million has been put in cash reserves, tax records show. While there are eight separate law firms that worked on the case against the secretary of state, Lawrence & Bundy has earned the most in fees.

    Abrams and Lawrence-Hardy were classmates together at Georgia’s Spelman College, and Abrams graduated from Yale Law School three years after Lawrence-Hardy.

    Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the left-wing think tank Public Citizen, says that Abrams’s years-long friendship with Lawrence-Hardy represents a clear conflict of interest.

    Despite Abrams’s accusations of rampant voter suppression in the Peach State early voting data reports Georgians to have already broken records for early turnout. According to The Hill, Saturday’s turnout surpassed the 2020 election’s sixth day of early voting by 20 percent.

    The 79,682 voters who cast ballots on Saturday also marked a 159 percent increase from the first Saturday of early voting in the 2018 midterm elections, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

    Georgia also smashed early voting on the first day polls opened last week, when 131,318 ballots were cast in-person, far above the 70,849 reported in 2018 and close to the 136,739 mark in 2020.

    “Early Voting is strong because Georgia’s voter registration system is strong,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a statement. “Every eligible Georgian who wants to be registered to vote is registered to vote.”

    However, despite the record-breaking data Abrams is still claiming voter suppression is underway in Georgia.

    “In 2018, we had record turnout,” Abrams said in a press conference Monday. “We had record turnout that shattered records for Democrats among communities of color and in that same election … we know that 85,000 Georgians were denied their right to vote due to voter suppression tactics that shut down their precincts. We know that 50,000 voters had their right to vote held hostage by the exact match process which was proven to be voter suppression tactics. We know that thousands of people stood in lines for hours because of voter suppression tactics.”

    Amanda Head: OUTRAGEOUS! Steve Bannon Will Serve Time In Prison

    By
    Amanda Head
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    Gavel via Wikimedia Commons Image

    On Friday, Judge Carl Nichols sentenced former Trump strategist Steve Bannon to pay a $6,500 fine and serve four months in prison.

    Watch Amanda break down the shocking news below:

    Trump Adviser Steve Bannon Sentenced to Four Months in Prison

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    0
    Thor Brødreskift / Nordiske Mediedager, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

    Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon received his sentence Friday morning following his conviction on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress after he defied a subpoena from the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol raid.

    Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced Bannon to four months in prison and has been ordered to pay a fine of $6,500.

    The judge said that Bannon “has expressed no remorse for his actions” and hasn’t demonstrated that he has any intention of complying with the subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee.

    Federal prosecutor J.P. Cooney argued that Bannon is not above the law and should be sentenced and treated like any other citizen, according to ABC News.

    “It must be made clear to the public and the grand jury … that no one is above the law,” Cooney said. “He hid behind a fabricated claim of executive privilege, to thumb his nose at Congress.”

    “He had an interest in making a public spectacle of the committee’s hearings,” Cooney told the judge, saying that Bannon “has tried to make it about nothing but politics and retribution.”

    During Friday’s proceeding’s Bannon attorney David Schoen hit back against the prosecutor’s claim Bannon did not have a legitimate claim of executive privilege when he rejected the committee’s subpoena.

    In particular, Schoen went after Trump lawyer Justin Clark, who told DOJ investigators in July that at no point did former President Donald Trump ever invoke executive privilege over Bannon’s testimony.

    “You wouldn’t believe a thing he says,” Schoen said of Clark, who also contradicted other claims made by Bannon’s defense team in their case.

    Last week, the Justice Department announced it pushing for a more severe sentence for Bannon of at least 6 months. (RELATED: Feds Recommend Jail Time for Bannon)

    Bannon’s attorney David Schoen argued that there should not be a 30-day mandatory minimum of jail time for the offense.

    Nichols, however, rejected that argument, saying the statute is clear on the point that there is a mandatory minimum of 30 days and a mandatory maximum of 12 months.

    In comments to reporters after the ruling Bannon appeared to hint at an appeal in the near future and said, “this thing about I’m above the law is an absolute and total lie.”

    It wasn’t long before individuals went to Twitter to

    Arizona Rejects Biden’s Demand To Remove Shipping Container Border Wall

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    Image via Gage Skidmore Flickr

    Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is rejecting President Biden’s demand to remove shipping containers that are being used to block a portion of the state’s border with Mexico.

    On Wednesday, Gov. Ducey said, “Arizonans cannot — and will not — wait for federal bureaucrats to do their job and secure the border. We’re taking action now.”

    Governor Ducey’s refusal comes after Biden’s Department of Interior said in a letter last week that Arizona was violating federal law by placing the containers on federal land and on the land of Cocopah Indian Tribe’s West Reservation, according to The Daily Wire.

    reclamationlettertoduceyDownload

    “The unauthorized placement of those containers constitutes a violation of federal law and is a trespass against the United States,” the letter read. “That trespass is harming federal lands and resources and impeding Reclamation’s ability to perform its mission.”

    A spokesperson for Ducey responded to the letter stating the governor will not entertain any proposals that directly endanger Arizonians’ safety.

    “The suggestion by any federal bureaucracy, that we take action to make the border easier to cross, is completely unacceptable. Gov. Ducey takes the responsibility to protect Arizona very seriously — that’s why we put up these containers,” Ducey’s communications director, C.J. Karamargin, said in a call with the outlet. “What they’re suggesting, that we take them down and make Arizona less safe, is a nonstarter.”

    The shipping container border barrier was created after the Governor signed an August order that authorized the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs to begin emergency construction to fill in a 1,000-foot-long gap in the border wall in the Yuma sector.

    “Arizona has had enough,” Ducey said. “We can’t wait any longer. The Biden administration’s lack of urgency on border security is a dereliction of duty. For the last two years, Arizona has made every attempt to work with Washington to address the crisis on our border. Time and time again we’ve stepped in to clean up their mess. Arizonans can’t wait any longer for the federal government to deliver on their delayed promises.”

    Arizona has experienced a massive influx of migrants since President Biden signed an executive order on his first day in office that stopped the construction of the border wall authorized by Trump. The nearly two-year crisis has caused multiple Arizona border towns to declare a state of emergency.

    Andrew Cuomo to Launch New Podcast with First Guest Anthony Scaramucci

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    2
    Photos from the opening of the new Delta Air Lines terminal in LaGuardia Airport in Queens, NY, on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2019. (Chris Rank for Rank Studios) (Photos from the opening of the new Delta Air Lines terminal in LaGuardia Airport in Queens, NY, o

    Look at how far Andrew Cuomo has sunk.

    After resigning as New York Governor due to allegations of sexual misconduct Cuomo announced he plans to start a new business venture. Cuomo’s newest foray into the public sphere comes in the shape of a podcast and one of his first guests is scheduled to be President Donald Trump’s former communications director Anthony Scaramucci.

    Scaramucci, who briefly served the Trump administration in 2017, has emerged as a critic of Trump and expressed his support for Biden in the 2020 election.

    According to The Hill:

    Cuomo will this week debut a new hourlong show he is calling “As a Matter of Fact” on podcast streaming service Quake, he told Axios, and the show will aim to “hear from people — their questions, their issues — and have that dialogue.”

    The former governor told Axios this week he has “learned from the entire situation.”

    “There’s a fundamental problem with the entire system here,” Cuomo told the outlet of the media ecosystem writ large. “We have such division of people and we have such dysfunction of government, and part of it is this hyper-partisan, extreme dialogue that goes on.”

    “There is a new sensitivity that I didn’t fully appreciate that some people have, and some people have a new sense of cultural boundaries that I didn’t appreciate enough,” Cuomo said.

    It seems the disgraced governor is following in his brother’s footsteps. Chris Cuomo, who was a leading anchor at CNN during the Cuomo sex scandal, also started a new podcast after being fired from the network.

    NYT Poll Reveals What Americans View as ‘Greatest Threat to Democracy’

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    2
    Donald Trump via Gage Skidmore Flickr

    Trump hater’s favorite narrative just went out the window.

    A recent New York Times/ Siena poll revealed what Americans view as the primary threat to democracy and to liberals’ dismay it’s not former President Donald Trump. Among the voters who expressed that concern over the state of democracy, more agreed the media was a threat than agreed on any other source individually, including President Joe Biden, ex-president Donald Trump, Republicans as a party, Democrats as a party, or even just the federal government generically.

    Among registered voters and likely voters, 59% see the mainstream media as a major threat and 24% as a minor threat. That beats Trump, Biden, the Supreme Court, and the other answers.

    Screenshot from New York Times/ Siena poll.
    Screenshot from New York Times/Siena poll.

    The poll is devastating news for Democrats who have desperately tried to weaponize Trump during this year’s midterms in hopes of maintaining their control in Congress.

    According to Mediaite:

    Aaron Blake argued in his Washington Post analysis that Democrats have failed to “make 2022 about the threat to democracy.” Essentially, Blake argues that the Democrats have been ineffective, especially in individual races across the country, at convincing voters about the threat to the very Democratic process posed by the GOP at large — a key talking point among Democratic leaders and pundits, and echoed daily by the mainstream press.

    In the abstract it’s true that the noted intent among Democratic leadership to get that message across seems unrealized. But the argument that Democrats failed to make the election “about the threat to democracy” could be slightly off-point.

    It might be more accurate to say that Democrats and the media have indeed made the election in large part about the threat to democracy. They just didn’t anticipate where voters will think that threat is originating.

    Report: Pelosi Threatened to Physically Assault Trump

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    0
    Nancy Pelosi via Gage Skidmore flickr

    It seems Nancy Pelosi’s hatred of former President Donald Trump almost came to physical blows last year.

    According to footage released by Alexandra Pelosi, a documentary filmmaker and the daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker boasted that she would “punch” former President Donald Trump if he traveled to the Capitol building on Jan. 6th, 2021.

    The Daily Wire reports:

    “If he comes, I’m going to punch him out,” Pelosi bragged to aides. “I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds, I’m going to punch him out. And I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”

    Pelosi’s habit of bellicose language regarding Trump predated the January 6 remarks. In July 2020, the day after an interview in which President Trump indicated he might not accept the results of the November election, Pelosi told MSNBC that if Trump would not leave the White House, he would be “fumigated out.”

    Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Pelosi said, “The fact is, whether he knows it yet or not, he will be leaving. Just because he might not want to move out of the White House doesn’t mean we won’t have an inauguration ceremony to inaugurate a duly-elected President of the United States.”

    “I’m second in line to the presidency and just last week I had my regular continuation of government briefing,” Pelosi continued. “This might interest you because I say to them, ‘This is never going to happen. God willing it never will.’ But there is a process. It has nothing to do with the certain occupant of the White House doesn’t feel like moving and has to be fumigated out of there because the presidency is the presidency. It’s not geography or location.”

    On Thursday, the Pelosi-connected House Select Committee voted unanimously to subpoena the former president over his alleged role in the Jan. 6th attack.

    Robert Stone Loses His Cool When Trump Refused to Pardon Him

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    0
    Donald Trump via Gage Skidmore Flickr

    A new video has come to light showing a first-hand look into former Trump adviser Robert Stone’s reaction when he learned he would not be pardoned by Trump for his actions surrounding the events of Jan. 6.

    In the video, Stone was shown traveling in a car on President Joe Biden’s inauguration day visibly enraged by former President Trump’s decision.

    “Jared Kushner has an IQ of 70. He’s coming to Miami. We will eject him from Miami very quickly; he will be leaving very quickly,” Stone said, visibly irked. “He has 100 security guards. I will have 5,000 security guards. You want to fight. Let’s fight. F*** you, f*** you and your abortionist b**** daughter.”

    The “abortionist b**** daughter” retort referred to Ivanka Trump, filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen, who was part of a Danish camera crew that filmed the clip. The clip is part of an unreleased documentary titled A Storm Foretold. The team followed Stone around for roughly two years, according to The Washington Examiner.

    https://twitter.com/cguld/status/1580927465341747201

    Jan. 6 committee member reportedly hand-selected the clip from the documentary but opted not to show the footage during public hearings.

    Stone previously tapped members of the Proud Boys for protection. The Danish filmmakers also filmed him meeting with the Oath Keepers — something that the Jan. 6 committee showcased during its public hearings. Members of both right-wing groups have faced charges for their activity in the run-up to the Capitol riot. Stone has not.

    “Any claim or assertion that I was involved at any time in any effort of any kind by any person or group to delay, hinder or otherwise obstruct the certification of presidential electors by Congress, pursuant to the Constitution of the United States, is also categorically false,” Stone said in a statement following the public hearing Thursday.

    Trump had previously commuted a sentence against Stone for alleged obstruction of congressional inquiries into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election which former president later promoted to a full pardon. However, Stone was reportedly expecting to receive a second pardon to shield him from potential prosecution over the 2020 election.

    Stone has threatened to file a $25 million lawsuit against Guldbrandsen and his film partner, per the Daily Beast.

    Report: Key Mar-a-Lago witness said to be former White House Employee

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    13
    Marine One lifts-off after returning President Donald J. Trump to Mar-a-Lago Friday, March 29, 2019, following his visit to the 143-mile Herbert Hoover Dike near Canal Point, Fla., that surrounds Lake Okeechobee. The visit was part of an infrastructure inspection of the dike, which is part of the Kissimmee-Okeechobee Everglades system, and reduces impacts of flooding for areas of south Florida. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian) [Photo Credit: The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

    The call is coming from inside the house…

    New reports indicate a key witness in the ongoing Justice Department and FBI investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents is a former Trump official.

    According to sources close to the matter, Walt Nauta is a Navy veteran who followed the former president to Florida after serving as a valet in the Trump White House and later provided key evidence to investigators.

    The Washington Post reported Wednesday that an unnamed Trump employee had provided critical evidence to investigators — telling them that he moved boxes at the former president’s request at a time when the government was seeking the return of classified material, including some highly sensitive items, from Mar-a-Lago.

    The witness account was corroborated by security-camera footage, the people familiar with the case said, giving investigators key evidence of Trump’s behavior as they probe potential crimes including obstruction, destruction of government records or mishandling classified information.

    When FBI agents first interviewed Nauta, he denied any role in moving boxes or sensitive documents, the people familiar with the situation said in interviews before Nauta’s name became public. But as investigators gathered more evidence, they questioned him a second time and he told a starkly different story — that Trump instructed him to move the boxes, these people said.

    Nauta’s information marks the most direct look into Trump’s actions and instructions leading up to the FBI’s August 8th raid.

    The Justice Department is now ensnared in a contentious legal battle against the former President who has claimed no wrongdoing in the situation. The DOJ is investigating whether Trump violated the Espionage Act by improperly handling the sensitive materials.

    Last month, a Florida judge appointed an independent third party, known as a special master, to oversee the documents alleged by the DOJ to contain information sensitive to national security.

    Trump-era DOJ Official Sounds Alarm Over Plans to ‘Prosecute’ Social Media Users for ‘Disinformation’

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    0
    Chuck Kennedy for The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is becoming more and more political as the months go by.

    First, the DOJ announced it would target parents concerned by schools’ implementation of Critical Race Theory in classrooms and radical school boards. Now, the DOJ is launching a new “political operation” according to a former DOJ spokesperson under President Donald Trump, Alexei Woltornist.

    Woltornist says the recent letter from the American Medical Association to Merrick Garland calls for investigations on social media users spreading “disinformation” about child sex changes is part of the Biden DOJ’s “political operation.”

    Earlier this month, Journalist Christopher Rufo exposed the letter requesting the DOJ to “take swift action to investigate and prosecute all organizations, individuals, and entities” that have spread “misleading information targeting individual physicians and hospitals” that perform irreversible sex-change surgeries for minors.

    The Daily Caller reports:

    The letter, authored by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, specifically states that a “few high-profile users on social media” are responsible for spreading the “disinformation” about child sex-change surgeries, which have resulted in “bomb threats.”

    “The behavior from the AMA is straight from the Soviet playbook. The legal system should be used to protect the rule of law, not to punish political enemies,” Woltornist continued.

    When asked what the DOJ should do about the letter, Woltornist said, the “DOJ should be focused on restoring their credibility,” but that the perception that it’s a “political operation” can’t be reversed “with simple spin or messaging.”

    The DOJ so far has “declined any additional comment” on if the DOJ plans to carry out the investigations on the “social media users” or anyone else mentioned in the letter

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