Republican Rep. Reveals Just How far GOP Will Go to Attack Fauci

In the latest erosion of personal freedoms at the hands of Republicans, a GOP lawmaker has requested to dig through the personal emails of a private citizen. But it’s OK, because the citizen in question is Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who Republicans are convinced has done something really wrong, despite his repeated testimony to the contrary.

Last month, Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified before the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about a disturbing set of emails in which he wrote that he’d been able to skirt requests under the Freedom of Information Act by deleting official correspondence and using his personal Gmail account.

During an interview on Fox Business on Tuesday morning, Representative Brad Wenstrup, the Republican chair of that subcommittee, confirmed that to follow up on Morens’s emails, he intends to dig through Fauci’s personal emails too.

“Dr. Morens said in his emails that, ‘Tony uses Gmail, too. I can contact Tony on Gmail, or I can just walk right into his office, or I can go to his house,’” said Wenstrup. “So, we have asked for Dr. Fauci’s Gmails, and I think it’s important that we get them.”

“Yesterday he said, ‘No, I never did any official business on my Gmail.’ Well, we’re gonna try and find out just as we did with Dr. Morens,” said Wenstrup. The Ohio Republican and foot doctor, who has opposed vaccine mandates, requested Fauci’s personal emails and phone records on May 29.

In his opening remarks before the subcommittee on Monday, Fauci testified that he “knew nothing” about Dr. Morens’s conduct and insisted that the two didn’t really work together. He also tried to put the Gmail rumors to rest.

“To the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business using my personal email,” said Fauci, who has previously said he has complied with all of the panel’s requests.

Wenstrup condemned Fauci during the hearing for his role in creating supposedly “oppressive” federal rules to usher Americans through the early days of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, taking aim at mask mandates and social distancing guidelines.

“Americans were aggressively bullied, shamed, and silenced for merely questioning or debating issues such as social distancing, masks, vaccines, or the origins of Covid,” Wenstrup whined.

Rooting through Fauci’s emails seems to be the latest pivot for Republicans, after they tried to pin everything from alleged misconduct to tedious safety measures on the former health official.

The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents trial, Aileen Cannon, is so unpopular that a federal appeals court was forced to announce it will no longer accept complaints about her.

The 11th Circuit Judicial Council, which oversees the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida where Cannon serves, said in a May 22 opinion that its clerk has received more than 1,000 complaints about Cannon since May 16.

The complaints “raise allegations that are similar to the allegations raised in previous complaints” and seem to be part of an “orchestrated campaign,” according to the council, which ordered its clerk to stop accepting complaints about Cannon.

Specifically, these complaints claim Cannon’s is delaying issuing rulings in the classified documents case as well as making incorrect rulings. Many complaints also ask that Cannon be removed from the case altogether.

Cannon’s conduct certainly appears questionable. On Monday, she agreed to hear Trump’s arguments that the FBI plotted to assassinate him—a completely made-up conspiracy theory. Last week, she blocked a gag order request from special counsel Jack Smith because it was “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy.” Last month, she effectively delayed Trump’s case indefinitely to resolve pretrial motions. Even one of Trump’s former lawyers, Ty Cobb, thinks that Cannon is doing a terrible job with the case.

And it’s not just Cannon’s favorable actions toward Trump that raise eyebrows—the infrequent trial proceedings don’t paint her in a favorable light. Cannon herself seems to be having trouble understanding basic legal proceedings and principles, leading to long explanations that she still doesn’t appear to grasp. One hearing with a Trump co-defendant devolved into a shouting match. Plus, her conduct has disillusioned some of her clerks, two of whom decided to quit as a result of her conduct on the classified documents case as well as an allegedly hostile work environment.

Legal experts think that Cannon’s actions could be part of a plan for the Trump appointee to eventually dismiss the case altogether. Trump has made no secret of how much he appreciates Cannon’s efforts. But thus far, the only responses to her actions have been the complaints to the 11th Circuit and online petitions, neither of which carry much weight.

Donald Trump might already be in jail by the time he accepts the GOP nomination for president at the Republican National Convention—at least according to RNC Chair Michael Whatley.

Whatley told Newsmax Tuesday that the GOP organization is already planning for the possibility.

“We’re working on that right now,” Whatley said. “We expect that Donald Trump is going to be in Milwaukee, and he is going to be able to accept that nomination. And if not, we will make whatever contingency plan we need to make for it. But the fact is, he is going to be our nominee, and he’s going to be the 47th president of the United States.”

When pressed for the details on the “contingency plans”—such as whether Trump would have to deliver a speech from prison or if he would need to prerecord a speech before he was sentenced—Whatley said he couldn’t elaborate but added that “everything is being thought about” and everything was being “considered at this point in time.”

“We will have to wait and see what the courts present us with the opportunity to do, but look, Donald Trump will communicate directly with the American voters the way that he always does,” Whatley said.

“Believe me, Mr. Chairman, I can feel the audience right now upset that I’m asking these questions, but I have to ask them just because we are in such uncharted territory,” responded Newsmax host Rob Finnerty.

Meanwhile, the tides are turning against Republicans who dared to respect the rule of law and the judgment of 12 jurors who convicted Trump. After a weekend of waffling on the fate of former Maryland governor and Republican Senate candidate Larry Hogan, Whatley flatly said that the Republican primary winner “has to run his own race.”

“The RNC is not behind Larry Hogan?” pressed Finnerty.

“We are behind the Republican nominee, and we will support that nominee, but Larry Hogan is going to have to have that conversation with his voters there,” Whatley said.

“So the RNC won’t support Larry Hogan … as the guy on the ballot?” continued Finnerty.

“I didn’t say that. We’re making decisions based on investments in races every single day as we go forward with it,” Whatley said evasively. “Right now, we will evaluate it as we move forward in the election cycle.”

In the conspiracy world, white supremacist conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson is evidently a triumph of independent antiestablishment thought. At least if you ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running mate (and billionaire) Nicole Shanahan.

“I’m sitting across from Tucker, and he and I are so on the same page in every single way,” Shanahan boasted during a campaign stop last week in Maine, provoking cheers from the small audience. “We are on the same page because we have left ‘establishment thinking’ once and for all.”

While touting his campaign as a defiant underdog battling against the forces of establishment control, former so-called Democrat Kennedy has long been a conspiracy theorist who routinely finds himself apologizing for pushing antisemitic rhetoric and appalling conspiracies—like nonsensically claiming Covid-19 was created to spare Jews, and that vaccine requirements are worse than the Holocaust.

The anti-vax nonprofit Kennedy chairs, Children’s Health Defense, was a major propagator of anti-vaccine disinformation in 2021 and often found itself rubbing shoulders with QAnon-addled Trumpsters and election-denialist insurrectionists. According to The Washington Post, Children’s Health Defense has peddled the “great reset” conspiracy, which claims “global elites” (billionaires, like Shanahan?) planned to use the coronavirus pandemic to “push forward a globalist or Marxist plot to destroy American sovereignty and prosperity and control the population.”

Tucker Carlson was ousted at Fox News after repeatedly pushing the deeply racist ‘great replacement’ theory, a racist conspiracy that falsely claims nonwhite immigrants are relocating to the United States with the explicit intention of eliminating “white culture.” Great replacement is a staple conspiracy among the extreme far right, and has been frequently touted by racist mass shooters.

Shanahan’s embrace of Carlson, both ultrarich and espousing conspiracies either covertly or overtly rooted in racism, is just another example of how the “antiestablishment” label is often just a scam to get people buying into authoritarian, extremist ideologies.

After a tumultuous, side-winding hearing on Capitol Hill, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared particularly unimpressed by a line of questioning directed at him by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

During his testimony Monday before the House oversight committee about the origins on Covid-19, Greene torched Fauci, the medical leader of America’s pandemic response, refusing to refer to him as a doctor and claiming that he belongs “in prison” for committing “crimes against humanity.”

Afterward, Fauci took to CNN to explain how rhetoric like hers immediately and inevitably results in an increase in death threats for himself and his family.

“Whenever somebody gets up, whether it’s a news media—you know, Fox News does it a lot—or it’s somebody in the Congress who gets up and makes a public statement that I’m responsible for the deaths of x number of people because of policies or some crazy idea that I created the virus—immediately, it’s like clockwork, the death threats go way up,” Fauci told Kaitlan Collins.

“So that’s the reason why I’m still getting death threats. When you have performances like that unusual performance by Marjorie Taylor Greene in today’s hearing, those are the kinds of things that drive up the death threats because there are a segment of the population out there that believe that kind of nonsense,” Fauci said.

But Greene wasn’t the only representative who threw inexplicable curveballs at the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Several GOP lawmakers all played the same game while Fauci was in the chair: New York Representative Nicole Malliotakis and Arizona Representative Debbie Lesko tried and failed to implicate him in popular conspiracy theories with evidence they didn’t have; committee Chair James Comer wouldn’t let him speak, claiming he had too many questions to get through; and Ohio Representative Jim Jordan threw him such irrelevant questions that it caused Fauci to ask, “What does that have to do with me?”

“I have testified literally hundreds of times over the last 40 years, over [at] Congress, and there’s always been differences of opinion, differences of ideology, criticisms, and things like that,” Fauci told CNN. “But the level of vitriol that we see now just in the country in general—but actually played out during this hearing was really quite unfortunate.”

And, ultimately, those questions distracted from and derailed a hearing with a real purpose: to educate Congress to better protect the American people ahead of another pandemic, according to Fauci.

Only time will tell if they learned something.

Donald Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt doesn’t seem to have a sense of irony when it comes to calling Republicans the party of “law and order” in defense of their presumptive nominee, who as of last week is an actual felon.

During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Representative Adam Schiff discussed Trump’s menacing warning about the public reaching a “breaking point” when he is sentenced for his various crimes. Schiff said the former president’s comment was “clearly Donald Trump once again inciting violence, potential violence, when he is sentenced.”

The next day, Leavitt hit back at Schiff during an interview on Newsmax, and conveniently ignored her client’s felony convictions to accuse the Democrats of being lawless and violent. 

“Adam Schiff is a vile and disgusting human being, and the Democrat Party is the party of violence; they are the party that have called to threaten the lives of Trump supporters,” she said.  

“It’s Maxine Waters who said, ‘Do whatever you have to do to go after them.’ It’s Adam Schiff who lied to the American public for years over a fake ‘Russia-Russia-Russia’ hoax that was paid for and concocted by the Democrat Party, just like this political persecution of Joe Biden’s opponent is today,” she said. 

“Republicans stand for law and order, Democrats stand for violence,” Leavitt continued. “The violence we see taking place in our inner cities, at our southern border, and all around this world is the result of Democrat policies.”

One might want to set aside Leavitt’s mischaracterizations of Waters’s comment—in which the California representative encouraged her supporters to hound Trump officials, not his MAGA followers—and of Schiff’s failed investigation into allegations that Trump had colluded with Russian officials, but really they shouldn’t. It’s all symptomatic of the Trump press secretary’s necessary break with reality, as she embraces her new job description: selling a criminal as the “Law & Order president.”

How do Republicans in Congress feel about their presidential nominee being a convicted felon? Quite dismissive, according to interviews conducted by CNN’s Manu Raju.

On the network’s OutFront show Monday, Raju spoke to several House Republicans in districts that supported Joe Biden for president in 2020 about whether they had misgivings about Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts during his hush-money trial, and how that would affect their electoral chances.

“My district is full of very smart people with a firm grasp on reality. They can smell bullshit,” said Representative John Duarte of California.

Some shot down the question outright.

“I have no issues in supporting Donald Trump for president of the United States,” said Representative Anthony Esposito, despite the fact that the New York 4th congressional district that he represents was won by Joe Biden by 14 points in 2020.

Representative Mike Garcia from California also blew off any possibly negative effects on him from Trump’s conviction.

“I think the American people saw what happened in New York,” Garcia said. “They saw two, what were typically misdemeanors, being elevated to 34 felonies.”

New York’s Representative Nick LaLota said his constituents saw “a tainted process.”

“A lot of my constituents were focused on the trial not being fair, the process not being fair. And they’re upset, and they’re angry,” LaLota said.

The question was too controversial for at least two members of Congress, though. Representatives Mike Lawler of New York and Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey refused to speak to Raju, either out of fear of alienating constituents or getting on Trump’s bad side.

These reactions are not surprising. The entire Republican Party has effectively been taken over by Trump and his acolytes, so we’re likely to continue to see prominent members of the party either offering full-throated defenses of the convicted felon and presidential nominee Trump or trying to avoid critical journalists altogether. This is despite the fact that having taken over the Republican National Committee, Trump is keeping party funds for himself and refusing to help their reelection campaigns, no matter how close their races may be.

Watch part of the segment here:

Republican Representatives Matt Gaetz and Nancy Mace are living high on the hog thanks to a shadowy reimbursement program for House lawmakers passed last year, according to records released by the House and reviewed by The Washington Post.

Mace submitted $19,395 in reimbursement claims from the program last year—and according to two former staffers who spoke with the Post, Mace directed her staff to find the maximum reimbursement she could get, regardless of her actual expenses. Her staff told her she couldn’t conceivably net more than $1,726 in monthly reimbursements, but Mace requested reimbursements at an average of over $2,000 a month anyway.

Meanwhile, one of the program’s top spenders, Representative Matt Gaetz reimbursed himself more than $10,000 for food last year—double the household average—and nearly $30,000 for lodging.* According to The Washington Post, Gaetz got reimbursed for more than $4,000 for lodging for two months in 2023—twice the average cost of rent in Washington, D.C.—and more than $3,000 for five months.

The reimbursement program, launched in 2023, issued $5.2 million in total reimbursements to more than 300 of the House’s 435 members last year. Intended to reflect private-sector reimbursement for business-related expenses, the program is a stopgap in lieu of the deeply unpopular move of Congress voting to give themselves raises. It provides a per-diem maximum spending on lodging and food as laid out by the General Services Administration, which oversees per diems for federal employees.

According to the GSA’s rate chart, a House lawmaker who spends 100 percent of the year working in Washington, D.C.—with no breaks for holidays, the end of legislative session, or weekends—could conceivably collect a maximum reimbursement of $80,377 for the 2023–2024 fiscal year in just lodging. For that same period and parameters, they could conceivably collect $28,835 in food reimbursements. To be crystal clear: These numbers are unachievable for lawmakers, who take weekends and holidays, who travel to their home states, and take legislative breaks. Gaetz somehow managed to achieve half that impossible expense.

Craig Holman of Public Citizen, a nonprofit government watchdog and public interest lobbying group, harshly criticized the reimbursement plan, pointing out its lack of requiremenet of receipts as a “ridiculous loophole” that opens opportunities for abuse.

“Clearly it becomes very difficult to tell whether or not it’s a legitimate payment and whether it’s proper,” Holman told The Washington Post.

A spokesperson for Gaetz defended his splurges, claiming the lawmaker raked up more costs because he’s just a really hard worker and spent more days than most in Washington working. “In 2023, Rep. Gaetz dedicated significant time to his work on the Weaponization Subcommittee, requiring his presence to be in Washington, D.C., on days often when there were no votes, which incurred additional reimbursement expenses to conduct depositions,” the spokesperson told The Washington Post.

While lawmakers aren’t required to provide receipts, running afoul of the rules to fleece the system could result in corruption charges. For lawmakers endorsing a felon for president, that’s practically a badge of honor.

* An earlier version of this article said that Representative Matt Gaetz was the reimbursement program’s top spender for 2023. That was based on outdated data reviewed by the Post, which has since updated its article. The program’s top spender was Representative Jack Bergman, another Republican.

Donald Trump is now looping his baseless conspiracies into his fundraising emails.

On Monday, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee escalated his claims that President Joe Biden authorized the FBI to shoot and kill him during its 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, this time promising to punish his two-time opponent for the alleged assassination attempt.

“Biden’s day of reckoning is coming,” the Trump campaign wrote in a fundraising email distributed Monday. “He tried to publicly torture and humiliate me … but he failed. He tried to raid my home and take me out with deadly force … but he failed.”

Trump’s blow-up accusation that the Biden administration had authorized the FBI to shoot him during its search and seizure of Mar-a-Lago is, in actuality, a wild misread of a standard policy statement regarding the agency’s use of deadly force during investigations.

But the ominous threat of revenge is a particularly odd attack from a man whose legal team argued that presidential immunity could cover political assassinations. In January, Trump’s legal team suggested that even a direct order for SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent could avoid prosecution under a former president’s broad immunity.

The former president faces 42 felony charges in the case related to willful retention of national security information, corruptly concealing documents, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. But the judge actually overseeing the former president’s classified documents case seems to have no motivation to move forward with the trial.

In May, Judge Aileen Cannon ordered a stay on Trump’s legal requirement to give the government advance notice of which classified materials will be discussed in his classified documents case—but offered no expiration date for the theoretically temporary reprieve.

The Georgia Court of Appeals has set a date to hear the Trump legal team’s appeal to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the Georgia election interference case. Oral arguments are set to begin in October—all but guaranteeing to delay the election racketeering trial until past the election and well into 2025.

In mid-March, Judge Scott McAfee ruled that Willis could continue to prosecute the case, so long as she cut ties with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, with whom she was accused of having an improper relationship. Two weeks later, Trump and eight of his 18 co-defendants in the case filed an application with the Georgia Court of Appeals asking it to reconsider McAfee’s decision, and last month, the court agreed to hear the case.

With Willis’s status on the fraud case pushed late in the year, the odds of the trial even beginning before the election in November have shrunk to zero. It’s a success for the convicted felon and Republican presidential candidate, whose legal strategy in the many cases against him has been to delay them so they can’t affect his chances of winning back the presidency.

Between this delay, Judge Aileen Cannon stalling Trump’s classified documents trial, and the Supreme Court’s examination of presidential immunity, Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges in his hush-money trial may be the only legal consequences he faces for a long time. Even though sentencing is set to be decided in July in that case, Trump still can appeal the conviction and push his sentence further down the road.

If he’s elected president, the convicted felon plans to recruit his Republican allies to make it illegal to prosecute him for the crimes he commits, forever. He also wants to go after everyone who has tried to hold him accountable before the law.

It seems that, except for his hush-money trial conviction, what started out as a perilous year for Trump is looking better and better as his other legal cases get delayed and he evades further consequences. The only avenue for accountability may be for Trump to be soundly defeated In five months.