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White House social media director Dan Scavino violated Hatch Act with tweet targeting GOP congressman

White House social media director Dan Scavino Jr. violated a federal law that bars public officials from using their positions for political activity when he urged President Trump's supporters to defeat a GOP congressman, the Office of Special Counsel has concluded.

That way, he said, when the nation’s highest officeholders look up from the floor of the House to those watching from the gallery, they will not be able to avoid seeing the human toll that guns can exact.

But like no one else in Congress, Mr. Langevin serves as what he calls “a visible symbol” of the danger of weapons.

“at least it gets them to pause and think. It makes it real, the damage that guns can do.”

'Body slam' Republican congressman Gianforte to plead guilty

Greg Gianforte is accused of attacking a reporter from the UK's Guardian newspaper a day before his election.

Gallatin county attorney Marty Lambert told AP the congressman had requested the court hearing after reaching a civil settlement this week.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, who's facing a federal investigation into sex trafficking allegations, was recently denied a meeting with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate as the ex-President and his allies continue to distance themselves from the Florida congressman.

Gaetz tried to schedule a visit with Trump after it was first revealed that he was being investigated, but the request was rejected by aides close to the former President,

a spokesman for Gaetz, said the congressman did not request a meeting with Trump this week.

Two days after the midterm elections, I met up with a man named Ira Glasser, the former longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Glasser is a First Amendment absolutist. And to him, that means that he supports the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on Citizens United because he believes virtually all campaign finance laws violate the First Amendment.

But what about what happens after the election? It is not the spending itself that is the problem, but rather the purpose of that spending.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) stood on the Senate floor Wednesday morning for his first public remarks since the seismic events of the day before: The president’s former personal lawyer pleaded guilty to fraud and breaking campaign finance laws, implicating the president in a crime; the president’s former campaign chairman was convicted on eight counts of financial crimes, making him one of five members of Trump’s team who have been convicted or have admitted guilt; and a Republican congressman was indicted, the second of Trump’s earliest congressional supporters to be charged this month.

McConnell’s counterpart in the House, Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), was equally cowardly. “We are aware of Mr. [Michael] Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges” was his office’s official statement. “We will need more information than is currently available at this point.”

What more do you need, Mr. Speaker? What more will it take, Republicans? It seems nothing can bring them to state what is manifestly true: The president is unfit to serve, surrounded by hooligans and doing incalculable harm.

(CNN)A Republican congressman from Florida announced his support for a ban on assault weapon sales Friday in an op-ed in The New York Times.Rep. Brian Mast, who himself carries a concealed pistol, said in the op-ed that he supports "defining what constitutes an assault or tactical firearm and not allowing them for future purchase." An Army veteran, Mast said the rifle he used during combat in Afghanistan is "very similar to the AR-15-style semiautomatic weapon used to kill students, teachers and a coach I knew at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where I once lived."

Mast also said he supports providing "behavior detection training" to anyone seeking a federal firearms license, making more resources available to schools to improve security measures, holding the "FBI and state agencies accountable for their failures to identify a threat like Nikolas Cruz" and "conducting further research into the nexus of gun violence, violence in mass media and mental illness."

if Trump starts to seem like he’s hurting the GOP’s popularity more than he is helping it, he has no reserve of personal goodwill or substantive support for his ideas on which to fall back

Trump’s unpopularity was illustrated most colorfully by an unnamed GOP representative quoted by conservative commentator Erick Erickson. “I say a lot of shit on TV defending him,” the legislator said. “But honestly, I wish the motherfucker would just go away. We’re going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn’t led. He wakes up in the morning, shits all over Twitter, shits all over us, shits all over his staff, then hits golf balls. Fuck him. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town.” The unnamed congressman even declared of the president he has defended on television, “If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherfucker.”

The populist right of 1994 to 2014 might have seemed rudderless, insofar as it appeared to drift from the Contract with America to late 1990s anti-interventionism to panicked anti-jihadism to Iraq War boosterism to the Tea Party to Donald Trump-style white nationalism.

Dressed in a blue flight suit adorned with a US flag and her name, Martha McSally, the US Congresswoman representing this Tucson, Arizona crowd, scanned the airline hangar filled with supporters. Saluting, as the retired Colonel is well accustomed to doing from her 26 years in the US Air Force, McSally pledged to crack a political ceiling with a rallying cry that echoes her entire career.

But McSally is a rare bright spot for the GOP when it comes to female participation in this year's elections. In 2018, a year where unprecedented, historic levels of women are registering to run for office, the Republican Party is seeing unchanged engagement from women. From the grassroots training organizations to the registration rolls of national candidates, the so-called Year of the Woman has largely been only among Democratic women.

But of the 440 women candidates running for the House, 332 are Democrats and 108 are Republican, according to a CAWP tally. In the Senate contests, again, Democratic women outnumber Republican women. The female partisan gap in the Senate races is smaller, at 32 Democrats to 22 Republicans, the CAWP research shows.

Washington — Democrats on Capitol Hill are coming to Speaker Nancy Pelosi's defense after she dramatically ripped up her copy of President Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night, earning condemnation from the president's supporters.

Pelosi called the speech a "manifesto of mistruths" and told reporters that ripping it up was "courteous" compared to the alternatives. Republicans likened the move to a "temper tantrum," and Mr. Trump retweeted two dozen tweets disparaging Pelosi in the hours after the address.

But Democrats defended and even praised the speaker. Congressman Hakeem Jeffries quipped that "as far as I'm concerned the shredder wasn't available, and so she did what she needed to do." Congressman Jerry Nadler said he was "delighted" by Pelosi's action, saying the president's speech was full of "lie after lie."

(CNN)President Donald Trump suggested that a Republican congressman be unseated for potentially jeopardizing the passage of the $2 trillion stimulus package, which will provide Americans economic relief amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The President also added that it was "HELL" dealing with Democrats to negotiate what went into the stimulus bill and that his administration had to "give up some stupid things in order to get the 'big picture' done."

CNN has previously reported that members of both parties are furious with Massie for potentially thwarting a voice vote on the bill, since it puts them in the position to choose between traveling back to DC and risking their health or skipping the vote on the historic stimulus package.

S President Donald Trump will likely decide to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the head of a Congressional fact-finding mission into a possible relocation said on Sunday.

“To see this happen 50 years after the liberation of Jerusalem is going to be exciting for a lot of people in the US, and I know it’s going to be very exciting for a lot of Israelis here in Jerusalem.”

rump, who during his campaign vowed to move the embassy and, according to reports was willing to do it on his first day in office, has recently backtracked, saying he is still studying the matter.

Over the past decade in particular, the internet and social media have changed the game. They speed people to like-minded warriors and give them the impression of broader company or sturdier validation than really exist.

What people find on the web “creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once unthinkable,” Simas told Remnick. Obama, in his own comments to Remnick, picked up that thread, saying, “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.”

“The capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate,” Obama added. Suspicion blossoms into certainty. Pique flowers into fury.

A judge on Monday ordered Kenneth R. Hubert of Missouri held in jail, saying his words rose to the level of posing danger.

A Missouri man who prosecutors say threatened to lynch a Black congressman the day after the Jan. 6 siege at the U.S. Capitol and a Jewish congressman in 2019 was ordered by a federal judge on Monday to remain in custody.

In a May 6, 2019, phone call to Mr. Cohen’s office in Washington, Mr. Hubert told a staff member that he had “a noose with the congressman’s name on it” and planned to “put a noose around his neck and drag him behind his pickup truck,” according to a transcript released by prosecutors.

A Democratic congressman called out his progressive colleagues for provoking anti-Semitism by referring to Israel as "a terrorist or apartheid state."

"And just as the former president called COVID the ‘China flu’ — which wrote the tax on Asian-Americans — calling Israel a terrorist state or an apartheid state, to me, is doing the same thing to the Jewish community, which has been persecuted for so many generations," Phillips said.

Last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and GOP Rep. David Kustoff introduced a bill with the mission to prevent anti-Semitic hate crimes amid a violent wave of attacks against Jewish Americans in the United States. 

The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump are facing a wave of anger at home, with Republican officials, donors and voters condemning their votes and primary challengers launching their campaigns early.

The group of 10 Republicans includes moderates in swing districts, as well as some reliable conservatives, including the No. 3-ranking House Republican, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, and South Carolina Rep. Tom Rice.

"I believe that her impeachment vote revealed who she has allegiance to, and I don't think the voters will forget it any time soon," Bouchard said.

Thursday the 12th was the day Mr. Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.

with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media.

Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.

Texas is set for a heavyweight match-up between Abbott, a prolific fundraiser with a $50 million war chest, and O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman who has been his party’s only hope at winning statewide in recent years.

Abbott, who is seeking a third term, was always the favorite to win his party’s nomination despite far-right criticism of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in its early days. But he spent $15 million to be sure of it, fending off former Florida congressman and Texas Republican Party chairman Allen West and former state Sen. Don Huffines.

O’Rourke, meanwhile, is seeking office for the third time in five years. His near-miss in the 2018 race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz ignited Texas Democrats’ hopes that the state, with a diverse and growing population and suburbs that have moved leftward, would soon become a battleground.

It’s crunch time for the Affordable Care Act.Days after a long, thorough speech from President Obama defending the law and laying out his vision for it in the years ahead, the administration released confirmation of what the industry had been signaling for most of the past few months: double-digit percentage point premium increases for benchmark plans for people insured through plans purchased on the Obamacare insurance marketplaces, known as exchanges, this upcoming year.

Young people are still slow to sign up, premiums have steadily risen in the exchanges, and big insurers like Aetna have left the exchanges, leaving several counties and at least one entire state with only one insurer.

Republicans seeking to destroy the law, and Democrats who have become increasingly vocal about further reforms or radical changes to the law. But will the bad news about Obamacare actually affect the election in a meaningful way?