Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t think Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine is a threat to the rest of Europe, and she wishes everyone would shut up about it.
“This whole thing is the most repulsive, disgusting thing happening, and the American people are the ones writing the check,” the far-right Georgia congresswoman said Friday in an interview on Steve Bannon’s War Room program. “Vladimir Putin has not said he wants to go march across Europe and take Europe, and the reality is Ukraine is not even a NATO member nation.”
“I absolutely hate everybody here who is doing this … Vladimir Putin has not said he wants to go march across Europe and take Europe” — Marge on members of Congress who support Ukraine aid pic.twitter.com/WfFXXBjJrC
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 12, 2024
It’s quite a bold claim to make, considering that European countries in addition to Ukraine have made no secret that they fear Russia. For example, Germany, Poland, and France are discussing the revival of a decades-old alliance to strengthen their cooperation because of Russia. Sweden just joined NATO last month, following neighbor Finland’s accession to the alliance last year, over concerns Russia might try to invade them next.
So, is Greene simply echoing Russian talking points? Several of her Republican colleagues in Congress have warned that Russian propaganda is influencing their constituents and politicians like Greene, following revelations last week of a vast Russian-backed corruption network in Europe. Belgium is even investigating Russian interference in the European Parliament’s upcoming elections.
Former Colorado Representative Ken Buck even came up with a derisive nickname for Greene due to her pro-Russia stance.
“Moscow Marjorie is focused now on this Ukraine issue and getting her talking points from the Kremlin and making sure that she is popular, and she is getting a lot of coverage,” he said in an interview on CNN Monday.
Greene has turned her guns on Speaker Mike Johnson in recent weeks due to her opposition to any aid for Ukraine in its fight against Russia, with Republicans bitterly divided over the issue. The fight could cost Mike Johnson his speakership, which is held together by a razor-thin Republican margin in the House. Greene even put forth a motion to oust him last month, although it has not yet been brought for a vote.
More on Russia’s influence on U.S. politics:
The Louisiana Supreme Court has decided to strip sexual assault survivors of an avenue of justice, ruling 3–4 that it’s the due process rights of priests and their enablers to not be held accountable in instances of sexual assault.
The case, Bienvenu v. Diocese of Lafayette, was brought by Douglas Bienvenu and several other plaintiffs who claimed they were sexually molested by a Roman Catholic priest during the 1970s, when they were between the ages of 8 and 14.
But in its majority opinion issued on March 22, the court argued that while the facts of the case were largely undisputed, the priest—and the religious institution he was a part of—was actually protected under the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause, which says that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
“Given these constitutional limitations, the issue presented by this case turns on whether the revival provisions operate to disturb defendants’ vested rights,” wrote Louisiana Justice James Genovese, specifying that “we are constrained to find the statutory enactment is contrary to the due process protections enshrined in our constitution and must yield to that supreme law.”
The Louisiana Child Victims Act, according to the court, “cannot be retroactively applied to revive plaintiffs’ prescribed causes of action” on the basis that such an action would “divest defendants of their vested right to plead prescription.”
The Louisiana legislature passed the act in 2021 to establish a “look-back” window for sexual assault victims. The legislation provided victims of sexual abuse crimes from any period with an opportunity to pursue justice against their alleged abusers, so long as they filed their lawsuits before June 2024. But the court effectively ruled that the look-back window was actually unconstitutional.
Louisiana is not the only state to repeal such a law. Courts in Utah and Colorado also found similar look-back windows to be unconstitutional, and other windows across the country continue to be challenged due to the complications of prosecuting crimes with minimal evidence and which may have taken place decades in the past.
More about the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal:
Donald Trump has lost another lawyer—and the former president’s loss could be special counsel Jack Smith’s massive gain.
Evan Corcoran left the Trump legal team some time in the last few months, CNN reported late Thursday. He was the last of Trump’s attorneys to have handled one of the former president’s federal cases from the beginning, and was originally brought on to help in Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
But Trump and his aides allegedly misled Corcoran, telling him not to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago office for any documents. Trump refused to reveal where he kept the documents and instead encouraged Corcoran and other attorneys to lie to the Justice Department in order to withhold those documents.
This all came to light last year when Corcoran was summoned before the grand jury in the classified documents investigation. His testimony was crucial to Smith’s indictment.
Corcoran’s departure could prove to be very bad for Trump’s case. Corcoran kept memos detailing his interactions with the former president, revealing how Trump was scheming to undermine a subpoena from prosecutors, according to Smith. Trump even allegedly told Corcoran to hide any sensitive documents that he found.
Smith will likely call Corcoran as a key witness in the trial, although it is not yet clear when Trump will actually go to trial over the classified documents. The start date has been repeatedly delayed as presiding Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, continues to hand the former president win after win.
Trump’s lawyers have a difficult job. Two of them quit his legal team last year amid reports of infighting, and the former president regularly insults court staff and judges, resulting in gag orders that he then goes on to violate. He also has a record of failing to pay his legal counsel, with Rudy Giuliani even complaining that Trump owes him $2 million.
Read about what it’s like to be a Trump lawyer:
The financial backer covering Donald Trump’s $175 million bank fraud bond has already been revealed as a “king of subprime car loans” with sketchy business practices. But the financial situation behind the dubiously leveraged suretor, Knight Specialty Insurance Company, has gotten even more complicated: Apparently, its parent company is located in the Cayman Islands, a popular tax haven for corporations and the ultrarich.
That should ring alarm bells for the New York attorney general’s office, according to former industry regulators who spoke with The Daily Beast, since the locale not only allows companies to skirt taxes but also allows them to minimize oversight and evade some U.S. regulations—all things that could potentially make collecting the cash even harder.
“This just stinks to high heaven,” former California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones told the Beast.
“Taken in its totality, this dog does not hunt. Along every step of the way, this purported bond is problematic. It’s just one issue after another that calls into question whether this bond could ever possibly satisfy the judgment,” said Jones.
At the center of the fiasco is one key question: Can the suretor actually pay up? Previous analyses of Knight indicate that the answer might be no.
In a court filing last week, Knight revealed that its liquid assets don’t meet the needs of Trump’s already minimized bond. According to a financial assessment, the company, owned by billionaire Don Hankey, had just $138 million in “surplus.” Knight would therefore need to spend 127 percent of its reserves in order to cover Trump’s bond—far more than the 10 percent of a state-regulated suretor’s surplus that’s allowed by New York law.
Hankey told Forbes that Knight initiated the deal with the criminally charged GOP presidential nominee, and explained that Trump had used both cash and investment-grade bonds to secure the money with hi
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