As Americans continue to wait for official midterm results to trickle in Republicans are already diving themselves into two camps: Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump.
Who are you siding with?
Watch Amanda break it down below.
ANALYSIS – No surprise to me. I ran against this disgrace in 2010 in the GOP primary. I highlighted his obscene corruption, but much of the GOP establishment backed him to the hilt.
In the ‘you can’t make this up’ category, the discredited GOP ex-congressman David Rivera has been arrested by federal officials for conspiring to lobby on behalf of America’s Latin American nemesis, socialist Venezuela.
This, despite being the GOP’s South Florida poster boy for ‘anti-communism,’ an image he assiduously cultivated for years to curry favor with the Miami conservative base and deflect from his myriad failings.
When I ran against Rivera in the South Florida 2010 GOP congressional primary as a Tea Party outsider, my motto was ‘the Marine vs. the Machine’ due to Rivera’s lifelong ties to the GOP establishment.
During that race, Rivera, a termed-out state representative, got a massive number of Republican congressional leaders to back him, even though I was beating the drum about his corruption and lack of integrity.
Rivera won that primary, in part because a politically unknown woman, and possibly Democrat-linked spoiler, named Marili Cancio jumped into the race and siphoned off about 12% of the GOP voters I would have gotten.
Rivera then went on to win the congressional seat.
However, his corruption finally caught up with him and he lost his reelection to an equally distasteful Democrat – Joe Garcia.
That was the first time the GOP had lost that seat in 30 years, and Rivera became radioactive to most in the GOP afterward.
Thankfully, Democrat Joe only lasted one term himself.
But back to Rivera’s arrest.
CNBC reports that Rivera:
A former Miami congressman who signed a $50 million consulting contract with Venezuela’s socialist government was arrested Monday on charges of money laundering and representing a foreign government without registering.
Scandals have marred Rivera since he represented parts of the Miami metro area in Congress a decade ago.
The eight-count indictment against Rivera and lobbyist Esther Nuhfer chronicles the nefarious duo’s alleged dealings with Venezuela to help revive its state-run oil company.
The investigation stretches back to the start of the Trump administration when Rivera reportedly arranged meetings with an unnamed senator and a congressman as part of a conspiracy to ease tensions between the United States and South America’s socialist holdout. The unsavory politician ultimately hoped to lift sanctions on a regime universally reviled in South Florida.
Rivera began his efforts after signing a $50 million contract. Per Bloomberg, the indictment lays out the reputed method by which he unlawfully enriched himself:
The Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Delcy Rodriguez, directed executives at CITGO, a Texas-based unit of PDVSA, to draw up a consulting contract with Rivera’s company, according to the indictment.
The contract was between Interamerican and PDV USA, which prosecutors allege was used by CITGO to facilitate “special projects” ordered by executives of the state-owned parent company.
Additional charges against Rivera and Nuhfer include conspiracy to commit offense against the US, conspiracy to commit money laundering and engaging in transactions in criminally deprived property. Nuhfer couldn’t immediately be located for comment.
At one point, note prosecutors, Rivera received a $5 million payment from PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company and personal piggy bank for its corrupt socialist leaders, in an account at Gazprom Bank in Russia.
Thankfully Rivera’s illegal pro-Venezuela outreach effort ultimately failed, as Trump in 2019 recognized opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s legitimate leader and imposed stiff oil sanctions on the OPEC nation in a bid to unseat Maduro.
The U.S. Marshals Service said Rivera bailed out of jail Monday afternoon after making an initial appearance in Atlanta federal court.
Even more concerning, though, the Associated Press’ initial report detailed how Rivera attempted to arrange a meeting between a prominent female Trump campaign adviser-turned-White House “counselor” and a pro-Maduro businessman on his jet in Miami on June 27, 2017.
Kellyanne Conaway was in Miami that day to headline a Republican Party fundraiser. At the time, she served the Trump White House as the Senior Counselor to the President.
This wouldn’t surprise me either, as Conway was very close to Rivera, and may have been behind efforts to keep me from entering the Trump administration during his term, at the behest of Rivera.
Trump’s hiring of Conway, who I admired and knew casually from years in conservative circles, was one of the reasons I believed Trump could win and helped convince me to back him.
Sadly, it seems Conway’s ties to slimy Rivera may have slimed her too.
All this should remind us all to be very careful when blindly backing politicians, no matter who they are.
Opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Joe Biden has officially announced his campaign for a second term in the White House.
Things are about to get interesting.
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Former President Donald Trump is right: There’s no reason he should sign a GOP loyalty oath in order to participate in the candidates’ debates.
Such oaths, which the Republican National Committee employed in the 2016 presidential primary – only to see the last remaining candidates, including Trump, abandon it – aren’t just signs of a party’s weakness; they are also profoundly silly and even un-American.
Yes, we swear plenty of legally enforceable oaths – in court cases, for example, or declarations on tax forms and other legal documents. But oaths binding candidates to support someone who they’ve campaigned against, throwing elbows, mud and other rhetorical barbs at them for months to convince voters the guy was a bum?
I’ll defer to what Sen. Ted Cruz said of such an oath back in the 2016 presidential primary:
Cruz has dodged the question of whether the pledge still holds by insisting he will be the nominee. Though on Friday, in an apparent reference to Trump, Cruz said, “I don’t make a habit out of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my family.”
We all know that Cruz eventually did support Trump’s candidacy and became one of his biggest defenders in the Senate (which was amusing).
But the oath? Nah. The 2016 primary should have been instructive to party leaders that such commitments are transactional at best and unenforceable in fact. Which brings us to the state parties.
They have been long-time players in loyalty oaths, often attempting to bind voters to the party’s eventual nominees. While such pledges are even sillier and utterly unenforceable, that hasn’t stopped new ones from cropping up this year. Consider the case of Florida‘s pledge:
Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida GOP, said in an email that the loyalty pledge is an effort to “ensure maximum unity” headed into the 2024 general election.
“The days of outlier party grifters – such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – using Republican Party resources to secure a title and then weaponize that title against our own team must end,” Ziegler said, referring to two former House members, who are among Trump’s most vocal GOP critics.
“Contested primaries are part of the process,” he said, “but we must always remember that the Democrats are the true threat to the America we love and we must be unified to defeat every single one of them.”
The true threat to America is noxious oaths that bind us to men rather than pledges or oaths that bind individuals to uphold the law or tell the truth.
You know, like the only oath that should ever matter for a presidential candidate: the one the Constitution requires:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Every other partisan oath is legally dubious, intellectually suspect and, in the end, not worth the paper it’s printed on.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk. It first appeared in American Liberty News.
ANALYSIS – Yes, it’s a big deal, that former President Donald Trump has been booked and charged in federal court with 37 counts of violating federal law. And we should be talking about it.
It’s definitely not Watergate, but some of the charges, such as obstruction, are similar to those Richard Nixon faced before he resigned in 1974.
Thirty-one of the counts are for violating the Espionage Act through “willful retention” of classified records. The other six counts include obstruction of justice and false statements stemming from his alleged efforts to impede the investigation.
Meanwhile, the media is conveniently ignoring all of Joe Biden’s brewing scandals, which are far worse; even surpassing Watergate.
We should be talking about Biden corruption, not Trump stubbornness.
Many Trump loyalists argue that the Trump indictment proves there is a double standard compared to how Biden is being treated. And I would agree.
The investigation into Hunter Biden should not have taken five years and still be unresolved.
That is an outrage.
And then there are the bribery and foreign influence peddling allegations against Joe Biden himself.
That should be the big story today. Not Trump’s rants on Truth Social about his latest legal woes.
Hillary Clinton was also treated with kid gloves by the Justice Department (DOJ) and FBI, even though she destroyed evidence from hard drives and deleted 30,000 emails, some of which may have contained classified information.
She got off. That was absolutely wrong.
If Republican ex-presidents and current presidential candidates are going to be indicted so should Democrat former Secretaries of State running for president. If not, then we have a partisan, two-tiered justice system.
And I have written about this a lot. But here is where I see things a bit differently.
We are today talking about Donald Trump and his drama, primarily because of Donald Trump. He did this one mostly to himself.
Trump could have avoided this criminal legal battle had he simply turned over all classified materials he had in his possession when asked for them over an 18-month period.
That’s what Joe Biden and former vice president Mike Pence both did when they were discovered to have ‘unknowingly’ kept classified documents after leaving office. They actually turned them over right away.
Did Biden do more than that, we don’t really know yet. But neither have been charged with any crimes.
And Trump was not charged over any materials or records that he returned. Only those he willfully kept.
Trump first made ludicrous claims about the documents, including that he had declassified them, which he hadn’t. And he fought back in court and delayed and delayed until he was forced to finally give 15 boxes of records to the National Archives and Records Administration.
But a lot more remained.
Then he began obstructing and moving the remaining boxes of records, including classified materials at his home in Florida. Despite repeated efforts by the FBI and DOJ to try to get them back, Trump refused.
And like Watergate, the cover-up is what gets you in trouble.
That is why the FBI finally raided Mar-a-Lago in August of last year. It was an unprecedented action, which I condemned at the time.
We have also since learned that the FBI had preferred to continue trying to get Trump’s lawyers to turn over the remaining classified materials and surveil Trump home in case anyone tried to remove materials, but DOJ insisted on the raid.
Maybe the raid could have been (should have been) avoided, but it was legal. And what the raid uncovered was that Trump had hidden a lot of classified materials in numerous unsecure places in his home.
Further investigation showed that Trump also had admitted on tape that he didn’t have the authority to declassify documents after leaving office, and that he hadn’t done so prior to leaving. He also reportedly flashed highly classified plans to attack Iran in front of the faces of uncleared persons visiting him.
None of this is good for Trump or the nation. The classified documents included “defense and weapons capabilities” of the United States and foreign countries.
But none of this would have been a legal issue if Trump simply turned over these extremely sensitive national security materials when requested, or at some point over the 18 months in question.
So, now instead of talking about all of the incredible Biden corruption, we are here again talking about Trump-created drama.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
The popular video game “Sims” has always blurred the lines between reality and fantasy but now the game is trying to appeal to a woke crowd.
The disturbing new features allow users as young as 13 to be able to create gender-confused avatars…Parents are rightfully concerned.
Watch Amanda explain the controversy below.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – HALLELUJAH! – As Joe Biden’s radical open door border policies allow tens of thousands of illegal migrants to flood into the country weekly, former president Donald Trump is vowing to deport many, if not most of them.
And that is one of the best things I have heard from Trump recently. This is the only way to reverse the massive foreign illegal invasion Biden has created.
While other GOP presidential candidates have talked tough on the border, so far only Trump has promised massive deportations.
There should always be exceptions, but in my estimation, most who have come here illegally under Biden must go.
Trump’s comments come as the numbers of illegal aliens are again skyrocketing at the border. In the past five days alone, there have been over 45,000 migrant encounters both at the ports of entry and between them, including multiple days of over 8,000 illegal immigrant encounters.
There were reportedly around 230,000 migrant encounters in August, though the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have not provided official figures yet.
This is unprecedented.
Blasting Biden for the “nation-wrecking catastrophe on our southern border,” during a speech in Dubuque, Iowa Wednesday evening, Trump promised that, if elected, he would carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
“Following the Eisenhower Model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said, as reported by Fox News.
Trump also said he would “immediately” invoke the Alien Enemies Act — part of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 – a federal law granting the president unilateral power to detain and deport foreign aliens in the United States who are over 14 years old.
As NBC News reported, the law says a president may order non-citizens “to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies” when he or she “makes public proclamation” than an “invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation.”
And as I have pointed out repeatedly, this current crisis certainly counts as an “invasion or predatory incursion,” in many ways controlled and directed by Mexican drug cartels.
Trump said he would use the Act to target suspected gang members, drug dealers and cartel members.
“I’ll…invoke immediately the Alien Enemies Act to remove all known or suspected gang members…the drug dealers, the cartel members from the United States, ending the scourge of illegal alien gang violence once and for all,” Trump vowed.
Trump added: “Under my leadership, we had the most secure border in U.S. history. Now, we have the worst border in the history of the world.”
Of course, you can’t solve the problem solely by deporting two million or more illegal migrants, especially criminals and gang members, numerous other Biden policies must also be quickly reversed.
And Trump addressed that too, in Iowa, saying that in his second term he would begin by “immediately” terminating “every Open Borders policy of the Biden Administration.”
At the top of his list, Trump promised to reinstate and “expand” the “travel ban” that he implemented during his first term.
The ban, which Joe Biden ended on his first day in office, barred most individuals from seven countries with high terrorism indices — including five Muslim-majority countries — from entering the United States.
But he didn’t stop there, Trump added that he would expand his travel ban to “deny entry to all communists and Marxists to the United States.”
“Those who join our country must love our country—and we are going to keep foreign Christian-hating communists, Marxists, and socialists the hell out of America,” Trump declared.
That might be trickier to do, but I like how he is thinking.
The former president also said he plans to “shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement,” including some of the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
“I will make clear that we must use any and all resources needed to stop the invasion—including moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to our OWN southern border,” Trump said, emphasizing that “before we defend the borders of foreign countries, we must secure the border of our country.”
This is the most clear and comprehensive response proposed to date by anyone, to counter Biden’s illegal immigrant catastrophe.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Election results are still pouring in on Wednesday as Americans wait with anticipation to see which party will gain control of Congress.
Watch Amanda break down the situation below:
ANALYSIS – It isn’t news that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has proven to be vulnerable to political pressure. Just look at the threat assessments produced in 2020 that single out ‘white supremacists’ as the ‘most lethal domestic terror threat’ in the U.S., despite their numbers being minuscule.
According to that report, self-described ‘white supremacists’ were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks spread across more than a decade and a half – from 2000 to 2016.
Yes, that’s more murders than any other specific domestic extremist group but let’s get real.
There are more murders in Chicago in one weekend than the entire number of white supremacist killings nationwide in those sixteen years.
This DHS report, though produced under the last year of Trump’s term, like many others recently by different federal agencies, like the FBI, is part of a wider political campaign that conflates the relatively small number of white supremacists, and other so-called right-wing extremists, with the tens of millions of mainstream conservatives and Trump supporters.
And we can now add traditional Catholics to the feds’ “most wanted” list.
The FBI recently produced a memo by its Richmond, Virginia, Field Office that was leaked on Jan. 23, 2023.
That memo, according to a group of 20 GOP state attorney generals, “identifies ‘radical-traditionalist Catholic[s]’ as potential ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.’”
In their letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Fox News reported, the AGs told the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) to “desist from investigating and surveilling Americans who have done nothing more than exercise their natural and constitutional right to practice their religion in a manner of their choosing.”
The AGS also asked that the DOJ and the FBI “reveal to the American public the extent to which they have engaged in such activities.”
The AGs letter notes that the FBI memorandum deploys “alarmingly detailed theological distinctions to distinguish between the Catholics whom the FBI deems acceptable, and those it does not.”
It’s in this context of politicized and weaponized federal law enforcement agencies, that this latest report of DHS malfeasance deserves special attention.
Specifically, we are talking about the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA), whose leadership, according to Politico, was called “shady” and run “like a corrupt government.”
For years it has been operating a secretive domestic-intelligence gathering program that many DHS employees have complained may be illegal.
The OIA’s Overt Human Intelligence Collection Program allows DHS officials to bypass lawyers and seek intelligence interviews with individuals being held in local jails, federal prisons, and immigrant detention centers.
While most law-abiding U.S. citizens may not care much about this DHS target group, remember this is just another example of how elements of DHS appear corrupt, and play fast and loose with the law, and all our civil liberties.
But the Department’s politicization is probably the biggest danger according to documents obtained by Politico.
As the New York Post reports:
The ability of DHS to be impartial and withstand caving to political pressure was also a major concern, documents show.
An internal analysis during the Trump administration found a “significant number of respondents cited concerns with politicization of analytic products and/or the perceptions of undue influence that may compromise the integrity of the work performed by employees. This concern touches on analytic topics, the review process, and the appropriate safeguards in place to protect against undue influence.”
The document adds that “a number of respondents expressed concerns/challenges with the quality and effectiveness of I&A senior leadership” such as the “inability to resist political pressure.”
“The workforce has a general mistrust of leadership resulting from orders to conduct activities they perceive to be inappropriate, bureaucratic, or political,” the document continues.
It is clearly time to rein in rogue elements at DHS and FBI, but also to clean house at the top levels of both organizations, and DOJ.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ALERT – Could your state be next? In yet another insane proposal in the left’s radical ‘gender bending’ agenda, a bill in the Minnesota Legislature is changing the definition of “sexual orientation” to include pedophilia.
This is an extreme and radical move that would make pedophiles a legally protected class of people in the state. And it isn’t getting the attention it deserves.
This sickening bill, promoted by 17 of the state’s Democrats, is working its way through the legislature.
It has a growing list of sponsors and has already had its “second reading,” which means it can appear on the floor for a vote at any time.
Does this make the state’s Democrats “sexual groomers” of children?
It seems so.
It’s also a natural, if perverse, continuation of the extreme ideology which makes gender identity and transgenderism a priority for the left.
The bill shows how their slippery slope works at the state level, which eventually moves to other states, and then to the federal government.
First, you create a law that makes sexual orientation a protected class by prohibiting discrimination of any kind based on sexual orientation. In Minnesota, as in many other places, that law has been around for a while.
Laws like that are used to support countless far-left lawsuits, discriminatory quotas and all the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that are wreaking havoc across America.
Then you quietly amend that law to remove a provision that excludes pedophilia as a legitimate sexual orientation.
In this case, they have deliberately stricken the provisions of the current law that specifically carved out pedophilia from the definition of sexual orientation.
The current law says: “Sexual orientation does not include a physical or sexual attachment to children.” [emphasis added]
But in the new Democrat proposal, that line will be removed, essentially making pedophiles a protected class along with transgender people and every other sexual orientation the left can invent.
Pedophiles will also get the same legal protections against discrimination as gays and lesbians, who legitimately deserve it, and be lumped together with them in the same legal category.
While this amendment to current law won’t make pedophilia “legal” (yet) in Minnesota, discrimination against pedophiles will be prohibited if this bill becomes law.
What does this actually mean?
David Strom explains in Hot Air that:
You will be subject to lawsuits if you discriminate against pedophiles. You have to hire them, house them, and serve them in your restaurant regardless of your objection to their evil desires. They will have more rights than you. Because they are pedophiles.
Strom adds: “anybody who wants to opt out of affirming crazy people will be turned into targets of lawsuits and harassment.”
And legalization will come soon after. He continues: “…the next stop is going to be explicitly legalizing pedophilia.”
Strom notes how this part of the left’s slippery slope works, too:
Once the Rubicon of declaring children mature enough to make lifetime medical decisions at ages as young as 8 it makes no sense to assert that they aren’t mature enough to engage in “consensual” relationships. If you can get permission from a child to sterilize and mutilate them, why stop there? They have been essentially declared adults in sexual matters.
He concludes, not wrongly: “The Democrat Party is becoming the party of sexual groomers. It really is that simple.”
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
