Showing posts with label climate of deception. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

GOP Rep Heckled at Trainwreck Town Hall as Trump Backlash Boils Over

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-rep-mike-flood-heckled-at-nebraska-town-hall-amid-trump-backlash-over-doj-anti-weaponization-fund/

GOP Rep Heckled at Trainwreck Town Hall as Trump Backlash Boils Over

‘SLUSH FUND FOR CROOKS’

Will Neal

Reporter

Updated May 27 2026 8:57AM EDT Published May 27 2026 6:07AM EDT

Republican Rep. Mike Flood had to fend off waves of jeers and boos while trying to defend the Trump administration from irate voters in his home state.

The Nebraska congressman met with a barrage of questions on everything from the Epstein Files and the war with Iran to the Justice Department’s new “anti-weaponization” fund and Trump’s architectural vanity projects in Washington, D.C.

Flood made headlines last year for a similarly bruising series of town halls. He remains an outlier among House Republicans, many of whom have stopped holding open town halls specifically to avoid this kind of footage going viral.

Republican Mike Flood addresses a Town Hall meeting in Nebraska. — Flood made headlines for three brutal town halls with his constituents last year. screen grab

“Iran war, White House ballroom, security for the White House ballroom, immigration enforcement, Trump arch, the Reflecting Pool renovation, slush fund for crooks, and the farm bill,” as one person in the audience summed up their collective gripes.

“How do we pay for all this?” they added, to waves of applause.

“How can your morals let you fall into life with Trump?” another person raged. “Liar, liar, liar!” a third person shouted toward the end of the event.

Voters at the Tuesday event in Norfolk, Flood’s hometown, were particularly unhappy about how Trump has now set up an almost $1.8 billion slush fund for political allies who claim they were unfairly prosecuted under the Joe Biden administration.

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts on the stage on the day of delivering remarks at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York, U.S., May 22, 2026. — Voters at the Nebraska event were furious about Trump’s performance during his second term. Kylie Cooper/REUTERS

The Justice Department announced the fund as part of a bid to resolve the legal conundrum posed by a president suing his own administration for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns during his first term. Previous presidents have volunteered such information.

“Last year you talked about fiscal conservatism,” as one member of the audience put it to Flood. “How is that fiscally conservative?”

Many people have raised concerns that payouts could be made to participants in the 2021 Capitol Riots, including offenders who assaulted police officers trying to quell the violence.

Flood insisted he neither had nor wanted any involvement in the fund. “I have never approved that. I do not think one penny of any fund should ever go to any Jan. 6 insurrectionist that was in the Capitol,” he said.

todd blanche — The crowd booed Flood over plans by the DOJ, led by Trump's former lawyer Todd Blanche, to create a slush fund for MAGA allies. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

“I want to be very clear,” he went on. “I do not think we should be creating a fund for people that commit physical violence against law enforcement.”

His comments earned a faint patter of applause from the audience—only for the barrage to then continue.

One person in the audience put questions to flood about the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein Files saga. “We know that Trump is in them tons of times,” she asked Flood. “Why do you continue to protect the pedophiles and Trump’s DOJ as they continue to break the law?”

Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in Cambridge, MA on 9/8/04. Epstein is connected with several prominent people including politicians, actors and academics. Epstein was convicted of having sex with an underaged woman. (Photo by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images) — Audience members were also irate over Trump’s handling of the release of files pertaining to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

Trump, once a close friend of the late pedophile, pledged full transparency on the notorious sex trafficking conspiracy throughout his 2024 campaign.

He then backpedaled on those promises after retaking the White House, only releasing a portion of the documents after a bipartisan campaign of pressure in both Congress and the Senate.

His administration has published what is thought to be half of the DOJ’s total case files. Many of the documents contain significant redactions. Critics have slammed the omissions for doing more to protect Epstein’s co-conspirators than his victims.

Lebanon — The cost of Trump's war with Iran also featured prominently. Reuters

Flood, facing an uproar over the controversy, clung to the party line that if there was any dirt on Trump in the files, the Biden administration would have gleefully trumpeted it.

“If President Trump was in the Epstein files, it would have been released,” he said over jeers from the audience.

Trump features extensively in the released documents. His presence in the unreleased files and what those files may say remain subject to intense speculation.

This Is What Makes Trump’s Slush Fund Worse Than Nixon’s NIXED

David Gardner

A photo illo illustration of President Trump and Richard Nixon and money flying.

Angry voters also took Flood to task over the president’s war with Iran, which Trump has framed, among other things, as an effort to prevent the Islamist regime from obtaining a nuclear bomb.

“President Trump wants to kill 89 million Iranians because they were born on the wrong side of the world,” as one person put it to the congressman, referring to Trump’s threat last month to wipe Iranian civilization off the map. “Is that a Christian approach?” they added.

The conflict has sent shockwaves rippling across the global economy, particularly in the energy sector.

During Trump’s war, the national average gas price has skyrocketed to $4.46 per gallon after the Islamic Republic shuttered the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. attacks. The strait is a vital waterway, and one-fifth of the world’s global oil supply passes through it each year.

Flood struggled to argue with the impact those costs are having on everyday Americans. “I’ll be the first to tell you, prices are too high right now,” he conceded. “It costs too much when you go to the grocery store, it costs too much when you try to buy a new car.”

“Everything costs too much, and I don’t want to hide that one bit,” Flood went on, before hastily adding: “I also don’t want Iran with a nuclear weapon.”

The Daily Beast has contacted Flood’s office for comment.

Will Neal

Reporter

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Sunday, May 24, 2026

Democrats vow a redistricting counterpunch but are facing hurdles Republicans don’t

https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-democrats-congress-republicans-independent-commissions-8628980ac7e2e1fc209d9e6511dfc45c

Politics

Democrats vow a redistricting counterpunch but are facing hurdles Republicans don’t

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI

Updated 7:47 AM EDT, May 24, 2026

Democrats are poised to finish several seats behind Republicans in 2026 in the nationwide race to redraw maps for the U.S. House. They can catch up in 2028, but only if they overcome a series of redistricting hurdles that the GOP does not face.

That’s because Democrats, in many states, can draw partisan political lines only if they evade constraints — some self-imposed — on their ability to counterpunch.

In Colorado, New Jersey, New York and Washington, redistricting commissions draw boundaries that are not supposed to benefit either party. Democrats will have to gain voters’ permission to nullify those politically popular bodies and replace their balanced maps with ruthlessly gerrymandered ones to match what Republicans did after President Donald Trump last year demanded a sweeping redrawing in Republican-controlled states in an attempt to help his party keep its House majority.

If the Democrats get a detail wrong in their process, courts could unwind the new maps. That is what happened in Virginia this month when the state Supreme Court invalidated voter-approved maps that would have given Democrats four more winnable seats. The court found the Democratic-controlled legislature did not follow the correct procedure when it placed the measure on the ballot.

“It’s going to be expensive, it’s going to be unpopular, and it’s going to be a challenge for them to do what they want,” said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust.

The next census will present another challenge for Democrats

Democrats remain favored to win control of the House this year despite recent setbacks in redistricting. The most consequential was the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, allowing Republicans to swiftly eliminate at least three majority-Black House seats in the South that Democrats now hold.

Strategists for both parties expect Democratic gains in November that are typical when the party of an incumbent president faces voter backlash in a midterm election. In Trump’s first midterm in 2018, for example, Democrats added 40 seats in the House.

But a 2028 House majority looks much harder for Democrats.

Presidential votes are usually much closer than midterm ones. Under the recent high court decision, Republicans next year could easily eliminate another five or more majority-minority Democratic-held districts in states whose maps were already set for 2026. They can likely gain an additional four seats by redrawing maps in Indiana, where some state lawmakers balked last year and were punished by Republican primary voters, and in Kentucky and Kansas, where Democratic governors who have been able to block Republican maps will reach their term limit.

The mapmaking pressure is high for Democrats to try to boost their chances of winning the House in 2028 as the party also hopes to take back the Senate and White House that year. Only then could it try again to pass a national ban on partisan gerrymandering that could rob the Republicans of what could become a durable advantage for them.

After the 2030 census, House seats will be reallocated to states seeing the fastest population gains, which are mainly ones that Republicans control. They are projected to pick up as many as 10 seats, largely at the expense of Democratic strongholds such as California and New York.

“Looking at the next census makes me all the more stressed to ban partisan gerrymandering at the federal level,” said John Bisogano, executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

Constitutional and legislative barriers confront Democrats

Republicans face some of their own legal hoops in the redistricting competition.

In Florida, their redrawn congressional map hinges on the conservative-majority state Supreme Court throwing out that state’s constitutional ban on partisan gerrymandering.

But Democrats face far more obstacles and need to execute a series of complex political maneuvers.

Only in Illinois and Oregon would Democrats have a chance to draw additional winnable seats without many impediments.

Among Colorado, New York and New Jersey, Democrats could rack up close to double-digit gains in House seats, but only if they likewise thread the needle to change their constitutions.

In Maryland, Democrats who balked at redrawing their map this year are moving to place a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would give them permission to eliminate the state’s sole Republican House seat in 2028.

Democrats note that their voters have embraced the idea of ditching the reform approach they once favored to let their party match the redistricting by Trump and his fellow Republicans. The biggest success came in California, where a ballot measure to adopt a new map to pick up as many as five seats easily passed last year. Virginia’s map passed more narrowly, but Democrats there remain resolute about implementing the 10-1 map in 2028.

In Washington state, Democrats’ only chance to revise the constitution and redraw maps would be to win a two-thirds majority of the Legislature in November, a tall order. Because Democrats expect to do well in November, they re also hoping to win a handful of state legislative seats that would give them control of maps in states such as Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Devin Remiker has floated new maps to let Democrats win up to six seats in a state where Republicans now hold six of the eight House districts. Such an aggressive move is necessary, he said, because of what Republicans are doing elsewhere.

“If we’ve learned anything, we’ve learned that when you know a knife fight is coming — bring a bazooka,” he said.

Redistricting reforms of the past are complicated to overcome

In other states, Democrats are confident their voters will be behind them.

“People in New York are pretty fired up given what they’ve seen around the country,” said U.S. Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat who is close to the top Democrat in the U.S. House, Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York.

But New York voters cannot enter the redistricting fight until next year because the state constitution will need to be amended by a statewide vote to permit it. That can happen only after the Democratic-controlled Legislature votes twice over two years to put the question on the ballot.

Likewise, Colorado Democrats embraced the idea of an independent commission redrawing lines in their state. Though many have had second thoughts, they cannot act until voters lift the commission’s map this fall and permit a Democratic redrawing for 2028.

Their proposed initiative faces a challenge at the state Supreme Court. Even if it is approved for the ballot, it could face a rival measure from Republicans to redraw the map to favor conservative candidates.

“Republicans are stealing votes of Americans all across the country, and Colorado voters will say: ‘Hey, you can’t do that,’” said Curtis Hubbard, a spokesman for Democrats pushing the Colorado redrawing.

Democrats see an existential threat in the GOP’s rush to gerrymander

Colorado is the most visible example of Democrats’ about-face on redistricting.

Republicans won control of numerous statehouses in the 2010 midterm election and used that to redraw maps across the country, giving them an edge in the U.S. House. Democrats responded by embracing nonpartisan redistricting, a push that reached its zenith in 2018 when Colorado Democrats rallied behind a measure creating such a body in their state.

Now, both candidates for the party’s nomination for governor support overruling the commission. Former Democratic President Barack Obama, who made redistricting reform a key pillar of his platform, has also had a change of heart, calling for aggressive map redrawing nationwide.

Nicholas Stephanopolous, a Harvard law professor, said it is clear that Democrats view Trump’s redistricting push as an existential threat.

“I think they’re going to move heaven and earth to respond,” he said.

___

Associated Press writer Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, contributed to this report.

Saturday, May 23, 2026

Trump's justice department scrubs its website of news releases about January 6 defendants

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/23/trump-justice-department-scrubs-website-january-6-defendants

People climb a wall and wave Trump flags. — Supporters of Donald Trump scale the west wall of the US Capitol as they try to storm the building on 6 January 2021. Photograph: José Luis Magaña/AP

Trump's justice department scrubs its website of news releases about January 6 defendants

Department of Justice acknowledges removal of information about criminal cases related to 2021 US Capitol rioters

The Department of Justice is acknowledging it has removed from its website news releases about criminal cases related to the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack, calling the information about the prosecutions “partisan propaganda”.

The purge of news releases documenting criminal charges, convictions and sentencings is the latest step by the Trump administration to dramatically rewrite the history of the assault on the US Capitol, when hundreds of supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in an effort to halt the congressional certification of his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026