President Donald Trump went on a Boxing Day Twitter rant, where he attacked the FBI, Justice Department, Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and other Senate Republicans for various claims related to voter fraud—claiming that it cost him the election to President-elect Joe Biden.
In a Saturday morning tweet directed at the Supreme Court, the president called it “incompetent and weak” for its handlings of his claims that there was fraud in the November election. Trump’s campaign has filed numerous lawsuits, alleging that it had evidence of widespread voter fraud in key swing states. As previously reported, almost all of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have been dismissed.
The president claimed to have “absolute PROOF” that widespread voter fraud occurred during the November election, but he said that the Supreme Court doesn’t “want to see it.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has been totally incompetent and weak on the massive Election Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election. We have absolute PROOF, but they don’t want to see it – No “standing”, they say. If we have corrupt elections, we have no country!
“The U.S. Supreme Court has been totally incompetent and weak on the massive Election Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election. We have absolute PROOF, but they don’t want to see it – No ‘standing’, they say. If we have corrupt elections, we have no country,” he wrote.
He also condemned the Department of Justice and FBI in a tweet: “The ‘Justice’ Department and the FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud, the biggest SCAM in our nation’s history, despite overwhelming evidence. They should be ashamed. History will remember.”
The “Justice” Department and the FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud, the biggest SCAM in our nation’s history, despite overwhelming evidence. They should be ashamed. History will remember. Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th.
In another Twitter message, the president blamed Republicans for not working hard enough to overturn the election results. Trump said that Republican senators’ Democratic counterparts would consider a “rigged & stolen” election “an act of war and [would] fight to the death”—before claiming that McConnell and the other Republican senators have done “nothing,” and taunted them by saying they have “NO FIGHT!”
If a Democrat Presidential Candidate had an Election Rigged & Stolen, with proof of such acts at a level never seen before, the Democrat Senators would consider it an act of war, and fight to the death. Mitch & the Republicans do NOTHING, just want to let it pass. NO FIGHT!
Trump also called for the release of “the Durham Report,” which was supposedly written by special counsel John Durham and his investigations into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. In his tweet, the president asked where the report was and said “They spied on my campaign, colluded with Russia (and others) and got caught.”
He also pointed to the Horowitz report—which is Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Trump campaign and Russia—saying that The New York Times (a favorite target of Trump’s media attacks) called it “bad.”
“They tried it all, and failed, so now they are trying to steal the election,” he tweeted.
Before changing the topics of his tweets to the COVID stimulus bill, Trump shared an anecdote that a “young military man” told him that elections in Afghanistan are securer and run better than the U.S. election this year.
A young military man working in Afghanistan told me that elections in Afghanistan are far more secure and much better run than the USA’s 2020 Election. Ours, with its millions and millions of corrupt Mail-In Ballots, was the election of a third world country. Fake President!
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-IL., on Trump supporters rallying in Washington and the ‘impact’ of ‘spreading misinformation’ amid the 2020 election legal challenges.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Saturday called out President Trump and House Republicans who back his “crazy conspiracies” and denials that he lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden.
The Illinois Republican took special aim at Trump’s accusations that the Justice Department (DOJ) and the FBI “should be ashamed” for somehow not joining him to call into question the 2020 presidential election results.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.
“My God. Trying to burn the place down on the way out because you can’t handle losing,” Kinzinger tweeted. “No evidence, nothing but your temper tantrum and crazy conspiracies. Embarrassing. #RestoreOurGOP.”
Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran who has served in Congress for 10 years, blasted his GOP colleagues for attempting to force a debate on election fraud on Jan. 6 when Congress is to certify Biden’s electoral college win, accusing them of just trying to raise money.
“All this talk about Jan 6th from @realDonaldTrump and other congressional grifters is simply explained: they will raise money and gain followers by blaming everyone else knowing full well they can’t do anything,” Kinzinger tweeted. “It’s sad, and an utter scam.”
Kinzinger got backup from Michigan Rep. Paul Mitchell, who is “disaffiliating” with the GOP over Trump’s ongoing election fraud claims.
“It is a scam of epic scale — hundreds of millions raised,” Mitchell tweeted of Trump’s continued fundraising. “And if you look at the fine print — little going to @realDonaldTrump legal fund the majority to his new PAC. And a non-profit has been formed to employ others of his minions. SCAMS!”
Meanwhile, a growing number of GOP members of Congress intend to object to the certification of Biden’s win on Jan. 6, according to Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
The long-shot effort is designed to force a prolonged debate on election fraud and respond to concerns from the base who believe, without evidence, that the election was stolen.
Congressional rules require a House member and senator to simultaneously challenge a state’s electoral slate when they jointly convene on Jan. 6. Greene said some senators are on board, though she declined to name them publicly.
The group intends to object to electors of at least six states — Michigan, Georiga, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada — all states that Biden carried. That could force a two-hour debate on the election results in each of those states and then a vote on accepting that state’s slate of electoral votes.
Republicans not backing the effort will face consequences at the ballot box, Greene said.
“Anyone not hopping on board to stand up against a stolen election and defend the people’s votes will have to answer to their constituents in 2022,” Greene, a hardline Trump supporter, told Fox News on Saturday.
“What most Republicans that have held office a long time don’t realize is that over the past four years, Republican voters have become loyal to Trump and the ‘America First’ agenda. These Republicans will find themselves in a new reality next cycle.”
Construction executive Marjorie Taylor Greene, third from left, claps with her supporters at a watch party event, late Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020, in Rome, Ga. Greene won the GOP nomination for northwest Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
She encouraged her colleagues to look at the evidence they plan to present on irregularities in voting in these swing states. To date, there has been no evidence produced by the Trump campaign of any systematic fraud that would overturn the election results.
“The Republican base is now fractured and the large majority is loyal to the leader that defends the people and puts Americans first,” Greene said. “This is what Americans have wanted for so long. And that leader is President Donald John Trump.”
Trump has repeatedly alleged he beat Biden and claims there was widespread voter fraud. But states have stood by their results and courts have rejected Trump’s legal claims in dozens of cases. Attorney General William Barr, who has since stepped down, said last month his Justice Department has not seen fraud on the kind of scale that could flip the election.
In addition to winning the Electoral College vote 306 to 232, Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes.
California health officials are bracing for the potential for a new round of infections from Christmas gatherings, though it could take several weeks to determine how bad such a wave would be.
A surge of COVID-19 fueled by Thanksgiving gatherings have pushed hospitals across Southern California to the breaking point, with intensive care units having few or no available beds, facilities running low on oxygen and other supplies and patients waiting hours for care. Infections are spreading unchecked, and deaths are also hitting new highs.
It’s difficult to know whether people followed the plea from health experts and avoided big Christmas gatherings. Los Angeles International Airport, however, saw surges in passengers, which some took as a bad sign.
“It’s getting worse, and we haven’t even hit the Christmas or New Year’s surge yet, so I feel like the number of people that are going to die because the hospital system is beyond overwhelmed will shoot up,” one doctor at an L.A. County hospital said.
Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, said California’s cases are being driven largely by gatherings indoors.
Holiday celebrations that bring together multiple generations may be particularly dangerous, with younger people who are more likely to be asymptomatic potentially exposing older, more vulnerable family members. People tend to feel safer indoors and also have a false sense of security when they are around their family members.
Clearing emergency rooms becomes vital as hospitals struggle with critical patients
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“These are your loved ones … You’re more likely to take off your mask and let down your guard,” he said. Humans are falsely programmed to feel as though “indoors is safe — indoors around my friends and family is even safer.”
The next big test will be whether there are many New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day gatherings.
L.A. County public health director Barbara Ferrer said in an interview last week that crowded shopping malls are also a big concern. Under the state’s regional stay-at-home orders, shopping malls are supposed to be capped at 20% of capacity, but it’s clear that those limits are not being followed.
“We’re going to take a hard look this weekend at the shopping malls because the pictures we’ve been seeing are … another little mini-disaster,” Ferrer said. “The occupancy is supposed to be down to 20%. But when you look around, they look way more crowded than 20%. And that just means a complete breakdown of what we are requiring.”
The question of how many people must be vaccinated to reach herd immunity against COVID-19 is of crucial importance. Experts say the number is probably higher than previously thought.
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Inspectors will be out over the post-Christmas weekend, Ferrer said, “and we’re going to have to take a hard look at what we see.”
“That’s just a place where it really be completely unacceptable for there to be crowding,” Ferrer said. “The only way that those malls conceivably could be opened is because there wasn’t going to be any crowding. So if there’s a lot of crowding, that’s a situation that we have to actually get fixed right away. That can get fixed by shopping malls taking more responsibility, or that can get fixed … by us going ahead and looking at whether we need to change [health] orders,” Ferrer said. “But I think the right place to start is to go and take a hard look at what’s going on.”
Shopping malls have come under fire from the L.A. County public health department recently. County investigators issue fines of up to $500 for serious violations of COVID-19 precautions. At malls, these would include not prohibiting eating and drinking, not facilitating social distancing in common spaces and not keeping occupancy below 20% of capacity, among other safety measures.The Glendale Galleria was cited last week. The Citadel Outlets in Commerce have been cited four times, and The Grove in Los Angeles twice.
Officials are most concerned about the situation in local hospitals.
Patients are waiting as many as eight hours in ambulances before they can enter the emergency room. With intensive care units having few or no available beds, health officials are urging that people avoid emergency rooms or dialing 911 for assistance unless absolutely necessary.
L.A. County is testing to see whether a potentially more contagious coronavirus strain is in the community. Mayor Eric Garcetti says it appears likely.
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Some hospitals in L.A. County are running dangerously low on their supplies of oxygen, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.
Oxygen is critical to treating severely ill COVID-19 patients who have begun to suffocate because the virus has inflamed their lungs. So now, hospitals need 10 times more oxygen than they did before. There have been periods of time when hospitals have run dangerously low on their stores of oxygen before obtaining additional supplies, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Hospitals are also running short of other key supplies, such as the special plastic tubes used to bring the oxygen into the lungs.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles County scientists have begun to test samples of the coronavirus from local patients to determine whether a new, potentially more contagious strain that is circulating in Britain has arrived, as some officials believe is likely amid a major surge of infections.
The variant is a concern because it may make the virus easier to be transmitted from one person to another, officials said. But once a person has the virus, the variant doesn’t appear to make the person more likely to die.
John Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat vying to oust the incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue, has become the highest-funded candidate for Senate in US history, The New York Times first reported.
According to data from the Federal Election Commission, Ossoff raised $106.7 million between October 15 and December 16.
Also in Georgia, Reverend Raphael Warnock, the Democrat seeking to replace the Republican incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler, raised $103.3 million during the same time, according to the data.
The Georgia runoff election, triggered with none of the candidates in either race received enough votes to win, has garnered national attention because the victors determine whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate.
Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat embattled in the heated runoff race against Republican Sen. David Perdue, the incumbent, has become the highest-funded senatorial candidate of all time, The New York Times first reported Friday.
The news comes following the release of the latest round of fundraising data from the Federal Elections Commission, covering the period between October 15 and December 16. During that period, Ossoff raised $106.7 million. Perdue raised $68 million during the same period, according to the FEC data.
Reverend Raphael Warnock, who is also embattled in a heated Georgia runoff race against incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler raised $103.3 million during the same period, according to the data. Loeffler raised approximately $64 million during the fundraising period, according to the FEC.
In both races during the general election, neither candidate received enough of the vote to be declared the winner, triggering a runoff election scheduled for January 5. The Georgia runoff races have captured nationwide attention because the winner of the races determines which party will control the US Senate.
If Ossoff and Warnock win both of their races, the Senate majority will be split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. But, if either Perdue or Loeffler wins, the GOP will continue to hold the power in the Senate, creating a roadblock for the Democrat-controlled House and president-elect Joe Biden, also a Democrat.
Biden flipped the state of Georgia blue during the general election, which was one of the states that proved key to his victory over President Donald Trump.
Nearly half of the donations to Warnock and Ossoff were under $200, The New York Times noted. Just about 30% of donations to Perdue and Loeffler were from small donors, according to the data.
Both Ossoff and Warnock’s fundraising during the quarter surpassed the previous record broken by Jaime Harrison, who raised $57 million in a single quarter in his failed campaign against South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has designated the airspace around the area of Friday’s bombing in downtown Nashville as a ‘national defense airspace,’ threatening ‘deadly force’ to any aircraft that poses as a possible security threat.
The FAA issued an alert on Friday night stating that an area of one nautical mile would be zoned off, along 2nd Avenue street where the explosion took place.
‘Pilots who do not adhere to the following procedures may be intercepted, detained and interviewed by law enforcement/security personnel,’ the alert reads.
Civil penalties may be imposed by the FAA, who may also suspend or revoke airmen certification if pilots don’t adhere to the restrictions.
The FAA has designated a temporary no-fly zone over the area of downtown Nashville where the explosion occurred. Flights were impacted in Nashville on Christmas because of telecommunications issues associated with explosion in downtown
In addition to the penalties from the FAA, the U.S. government ‘may pursue criminal charges’ or ‘deadly force’ against the airborne aircraft if it is determined that the aircraft ‘poses an imminent security threat.’
The restriction are valid until 4.45pm on December 30.
The FBI is probing whether Nashville’s Christmas Day bombing was deliberately designed to target police officers, after they were lured into the area prior to the massive explosion.
The blast – which injured three people and caused massive damage to the city’s downtown area – emanated from a white RV parked on 2nd Avenue at 6.40 am Friday.
The FAA issued an alert on Friday night stating that an area of one nautical mile would be zoned of
Officers had been called to the scene shortly before the explosion amid reports of a shooting. However, they arrived to find the vehicle playing an announcement saying that it would explode in 15 minutes.
One expert is now theorizing that the spooky recording was designed to bring as many cops and first responders as possible into the area with the intention of killing or maiming them.
‘I kind of think it was probably an idea to get first responders to come in,’ ex-NYPD Detective Bill Ryan told Fox News on Saturday.
Ryan served as part of an arson and explosions task force, and believes an entire group of people may be behind the possible attack on law enforcement.
‘You have to really wonder what the motivation of the bombers are – I don’t think this was one person, it was probably an organized group of people.’
Six cops have now been hailed as heroes after the descended on the area and tried to clear out pedestrians and residents before the bomb went off.
The FBI is probing whether Nashville’s Christmas Day bombing was deliberately designed to target police officers, amid reports that investigators have found human remains at the site of the blast. The RV which exploded is pictured
The blast injured three people and caused massive damage to the city’s downtown area
Meanwhile, Nashville police confirmed late Friday that they are investigating whether human remains have been found at the site of the bomb blast.
According to CNN, tissue was discovered at the scene, and forensic experts are now working to determine whether it is human.
It is unclear whether anybody was inside the RV at the time it detonated.
The gigantic blast caused damage to more than 40 buildings, with new videos showing the widespread impact it created.
One shocking clip shared on social media shows an apartment building violently shaking during the blast.
A resident told CNN on Saturday: I’ve never seen anything like it. It shook everything’
Meanwhile, other videos being shared widely on social media show people hiding for cover in buildings along 2nd Avenue as they were warned by cops that the RV could explode.
One man was walking his dog right by the RV and heard the warning message emanating from the vehicle.
Quick thinking cops quickly told him to get back just before the bomb went off. He told WKRN that it is a ‘Christmas miracle’ he is still alive.
One man was walking his dog right by the RV and heard the warning message emanating from the vehicle. He is seen in a lobby on the city’s downtown area just before the blast
Quick thinking cops quickly told him to get back just before the bomb went off. He told WKRN that it is a ‘Christmas miracle’ he is still alive.
This was the scene immediately after the explosion on Friday morning in downtown Nashville
As of Saturday morning, the area has still been cordoned off and there is a strong police presence in the area.
Nashville Mayor John Cooper says it will be ‘some time’ before 2nd Avenue is open as normal.
On Friday evening, he announced curfew on the area around the bomb site as the investigation continued.
‘A curfew will start at 4:30pm, Friday Dec 25. and be lifted Sunday, December 27 at 4:30pm,’ he revealed in a tweet.
The blast blew in windows from at least 41 buildings, according to CNN. One building is now partially collapsed.
The RV was parked outside an AT&T facility, with the explosion causing network outages to the company’s phone and internet services.
That issue sparked safety fears as 911 dispatchers were reportedly having trouble identifying the location of callers.
USA Today reports on Saturday that outage issues lasted into the evening. It is now believed they have all been resolved.
As of Saturday morning, the area has still been cordoned off and there is a strong police presence in the area
Nashville Mayor John Cooper says it will be ‘some time’ before 2nd Avenue and the surround downtown area is open as normal
Meanwhile, more information is being learned about the hero cops who tried to clear the area after they arrived to find the RV playing a recording saying it would explode.
They were named by Metro Police Chief John Drake as Officer Brenna Hosey, Officer James Luellen, Officer Michael Sipos, Officer Amanda Topping, Officer James Wells and Sergeant Timothy Miller, as he praised them for rushing into danger to save others.
The officers had been responding to reports of shots fired 40 minutes before the explosion when they found an RV located outside of an AT&T transmission building which was playing an announcement featuring a woman’s voice saying it would explode in 15 minutes.
There was no evidence of shooting at the scene and it is not known if the sounds could also have come from the RV’s recording. Cops have not revealed who made the initial shooting report.
They rushed to get people out of their homes while the ominous, pre-recorded message played over and over again with music playing inbetween each countdown, before the van eventually exploded at round 6.40am.
‘These officers didn’t care about themselves,’ Chief Drake said. ‘They didn’t think about that. They cared about the citizens of Nashville. They went in and we’d be talking not about the debris that we have here but potential people.’
Despite the devastation of the blast, miraculously only three people were injured.
They were rushed to hospital in non-life threatening conditions.
Pictured, Officer Amanda Topping, Officer Michael Sipos, Officer Richard Luellen
Pictured, Officer Brenna Hosey,Sgt. Timothy Miller, and Officer James Wells
This is what is left of Second Avenue in downtown Nashville after the explosion on Friday morning. Police have not yet identified a suspect
An aerial view of the scene in downtown Nashville on Friday morning after an ‘intentional’ explosion came from a parked car
The scale of the debris was enormous. All of 2nd Avenue between The entire street on second avenue was covered with it
FBI Special Agent in charge Matt Foster made a plea to the public for information on Friday night.
‘The FBI stands with the city of Nashville today in this very tragic Christmas Day event.
‘This is our city too. We live here, we work here. We’re putting everything we have into finding who was responsible for what happened here today.
‘There are leads that need to be pursued and technical works need to happen.’
Anyone with information about the incident has been asked to contact the FBI at www.fbi.gov/nashville or by calling them.
On Friday night, star of CNBC’s The Profit Marcus Lemonis also offered a $250,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the culprit.
It brought the reward total to $300,000 after previous smaller reward offers from Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., FOX Sports host Clay Travis, and Lewis Country Store.
Emergency personnel work near the scene of an explosion in downtown Nashville, Tenn., Friday, Dec. 25
A law enforcement member walks past damage from an explosion in downtown Nashville, Tenn., Friday, Dec. 25
A vehicle burns near the site of an explosion in the area of Second and Commerce in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. December 25, 2020. It’s unclear if this was the vehicle that caused the blast or not
That is a common issue in claims about “dead voters,’’ “double voters” and “out of state” voters — blind comparisons of official data often lead to “false positives” treating two people with the same names as the same person.
In Georgia, lawyers for the secretary of state are seeking to have the court reject an “expert” analysis declaring that Mr. Biden’s winning result included more than 10,000 ballots from dead citizens. The state’s own expert analyst in the case, the M.I.T. political scientist Charles Stewart III, concluded that the Trump campaign only appeared to “identify the unremarkable fact that some Georgians who voted share the name and birth year of a different person who died,” as state lawyers put it. In several other instances, the “dead voters” in whose names the Trump campaign said ballots were cast proved very much alive.
This past week in Pennsylvania, authorities did make one arrest based on an accusation the Trump campaign first leveled in November. Delaware County prosecutors said a man named Bruce Bartman cast an absentee ballot in his deceased mother’s name — for Mr. Trump. Mr. Bartman’s lawyer said Mr. Bartman had done so as a misguided “form of protest,” and the local prosecutor said it was nothing more than “evidence that one person committed voter fraud.”
A complaint ‘void of plausible allegations’
Mr. Trump and his allies have also attacked election officials themselves. In a new twist on voter fraud mythology, they have claimed the officials were either complicit in fantastical fraud schemes or willing participants. In multiple states such accusations were summarily thrown out by judges.
In Arizona, Republicans filed a federal lawsuit claiming that both election workers and Democratic officials overseeing the election “could” have perpetuated any number of fraudulent activities. Judge Diane J. Humetewa, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, dismissed the suit, saying “these innuendoes fail to meet” standards for fraud allegations.
In Michigan, Judge Timothy M. Kenny, a state judge, was asked to consider the claim that election officials “coached” people to vote — a claim that was made, the judge noted in dismissing it, without a location or date or other relevant details.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Many AT&T customers have taken to social media to voice their displeasure and inconvenience with the delay in restoring service to many areas affected by an outage caused by an explosion in downtown Nashville on Christmas morning.
AT&T has been responding to customers asking them to please be patient while they work to restore service. On Friday, News 2 reported that AT&T was working to bring in crews from all over the country and additional equipment to get service temporarily restored until service can be permanently restored.
The issues are affecting a broad spectrum of not just AT&T services but also T-Mobile services in several southeast and Midsouth metropolitan areas including telephone, internet, and television service.
“We are in contact with law enforcement & working as quickly as possible to restore service for some customers in Nashville & surrounding areas. This is due to damage to our facilities from the explosion. We appreciate your patience,” AT&T replied to an angry customer on Twitter.
News 2 has reached out to AT&T on Saturday morning for an update and received the following:
Our teams continue to work around the clock on recovery efforts from yesterday morning’s explosion in Nashville. We have two portable cell sites operating in downtown Nashville with numerous additional portable sites being deployed in the Nashville area and in the region.
At our facility, the focus of the restoration continues to be getting power to the equipment in a safe and secure way. Challenges remain, including a fire which reignited overnight and led to the evacuation of the building. Currently, our teams are on site working with safety and structural engineers. They have drilled access holes into the building and are attempting to reconnect power to critical equipment. Technical teams are also working as quickly as possible on rerouting additional services to other facilities in the region to restore service.
We continue to be grateful for the work of first responders as they respond to this event and help protect our team working to restore service for our customers.
We’ll provide additional updates here as our recovery progresses.
While Americans exchanged Christmas wishes for peace and goodwill, President Trump spent the holiday shuttling between the Southern White House and his West Palm Beach golf club tweeting grievances about the 2020 election, Twitter flagging his statements and a stalemate over COVID relief.
The amount of time the president spent at Trump International, as a federal financial lifeline to millions of Americans languished in limbo and downtown Nashville smoldered after a mysterious “intentional” blast, also became a source of social media debate.
On Friday afternoon, Christmas Day, Trump appeared to fire back at critics ridiculing a White House statement the president was working “tirelessly” while images surfaced of him playing golf.
“Made many calls and had meetings at Trump International in Palm Beach, Florida. Why would politicians not want to give people $2000, rather than only $600? It wasn’t their fault, it was China. Give our people the money!” Trump wrote in a tweet.
Problem is, the battle over the extra $1,400 is between the president and “politicians” from his own party. Congressional Republicans oppose bolstering the amount of per person assistance while rival Democrats support it.
Trump also issued not-so-veiled threats at fellow Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who he ripped for sitting back and watching while the president said he was fighting a “crooked and vicious foe, the radical Democrats.” Trump warned: “I will NEVER FORGET!”
Trump continued to rage on Twitter Saturday with another handful of tweets about an election he again claimed had been “Rigged & Stolen” despite his legal team having failed during ample opportunities to prove the president’s case in court. He vented his anger at Republicans, the U.S. Supreme Court, the FBI, the Justice Department and even repeated a hyperbolic comment told to him that elections in “Afghanistan are far more secure and much better run than the USA’s 2020 Election.”
The president’s elections-related tweets were labeled by Twitter as “disputed,” which also drew an irate missive from the president on. Trump lashed out at the social media platform writing: “Twitter is going wild with their flags, trying hard to suppress even the truth.”
In another tweet, Trump referenced a “Florida meeting” on Thursday in which “everyone was asking why aren’t the Republicans up in arms & fighting over the fact that the Democrats stole the rigged presidential election.” The president didn’t say where the meeting was held or who attended.
Top state Republican leaders did not speak of such a meeting on social media.
Neither the Florida Republican Party, nor Gov. Ron DeSantis, nor state GOP chairman Joe Gruters mentioned such a gathering in their Twitter holiday postings though Gruters tweeted support for the president again on Christmas Day.
There was also silence on the matter from U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott. And from U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, who vowed in West Palm Beach last week that he would lodge a “longshot” challenge the Electoral College vote in Congress on Jan. 6.
The holiday was not a typical one for the Trumps. The first couple did not attend Christmas Eve services at a local house of worship.
Their traditional church, Bethesday-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, opted for COVID-compliant virtual services. Family Church, the downtown West Palm Beach evangelical church where the president and first lady attended Christmas Eve services last year, did have have in-person services this year but the Trumps did not attend.
Trump tweeted Friday afternoon that he would give a “short speech” to U.S. troops via videoconferencing, another Christmas holiday staple for the president. But the president provided no details and added the “fake news” was not invited.
Over 100 devoted followers of the president lined the motorcade route along Southern Boulevard on Wednesday evening. The motorcade slowed while passing the crowd and the president waved through the window.
Those dotting the roadway, like the president, were in no mood to acknowledge the election defeat.
“This definitely is the last motorcade of this year,” said Stan Brown, refusing to concede that the holiday visit could be Trump’s last as president. “If he’s not given a second term I am going to fly my flag upside down for the next four years.”
Traveling with the president on Air Force One was Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. As he exited the Palm Beach International Airport tarmac, Giuliani said he was in town to continue discussions on legal challenges to the Nov. 3 election as well as the Dec. 14 Electoral College balloting.
Asked about the remaining legal options, Giuliani confirmed more challenges would be forthcoming, but declined to discuss specifics.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said when asked what the next move would be.
But at about the time he and first lady Melania Trump landed at PBIA, the president revealed on Twitter what he thinks should be the next step — a special counsel probe — in his so far failed and futile attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election result that saw him lose the popular vote by 7 million votes and trailing badly in the electoral tally, 306 to 232.
“After seeing the massive Voter Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election, I disagree with anyone that thinks a strong, fast, and fair Special Counsel is not needed, IMMEDIATELY,” read Trump’s tweet, which was marked as “disputed” by the social media platform. “This was the most corrupt election in the history of our Country, and it must be closely examined!”
As has been well-documented, legal challenges by Trump and GOP allies to voting results in key swing states have been summarily dismissed by judges for lack of any credible evidence to support the White House’s allegations of “massive” fraud.
In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court, including the three justices nominated by Trump, have refused to even hear two of those cases.
Before leaving Washington, Trump settled a score on another grievance front by pardoning two more key allies convicted of felonies as part of the Russia probe conducted by former special counsel Robert Mueller.
Wednesday’s additional 26 pardons included ones for former Palm Beach County commissioner Mary McCarty and developer James Batmasian. But those were overlooked by pardons for Trump’s campaign manager of four years ago, Paul Manafort, and South Florida political operative Roger Stone.
Trump this year had already commuted Stone’s prison sentence, which followed his conviction on charges of obstruction of Congress. Ironically, the pardon for Stone came almost a year to the day that Trump, when asked by the Palm Beach Post, said he had given no “thought” to a pardon to the well known South Florida political trickster and strategist.
Manafort and Stone now join two others — former national security adviser Mike Flynn and 2016 campaign aide George Papadopoulos — who were also charged by Mueller and who have recently received pardons from Trump.
The paradox, of course, is that acceptance of a pardon is also an admission of guilt.
So in accepting Trump’s pardon, all four have tacitly admitted culpability — belying the president’s claim the Mueller probe was a “hoax.” And, as he declared on the PBIA tarmac in March 2019, that the Mueller report exonerated him and his 2016 campaign.
However, the mood among Trump’s ardent supporters on Southern Boulevard was festive.
For many Trump supporters, flag-waving events on Friday nights and gathering along the motorcade route have become social affairs, with food, music and lots of Trump merch — from rhinestone necklaces to Trump dog attire.
“I have made friends for life,” said Michael Bafumo, of West Palm Beach. “We’re patriots … we’re not loyal to the Republican Party, we are loyal to Donald Trump.”
Because Trump’s schedule is now public, it has been easy to know what time to gather along the motorcade route. Tracking his schedule after he leaves office shouldn’t pose a problem, said Vinny Caldara, driver of the Trump Train, a converted EMS vehicle painted red, white and blue and decked out with Trump swag.
Caldara, who has driven the Trump Train to 15 states in the last three weeks, said if Trump is not re-inaugurated on Jan. 20, he expects the president will announce a 2024 comeback campaign. Once another campaign is underway, it is easy to know where and when Trump will be, Caldara said.
“That’s not going to happen,” said Caldara about Trump leaving office in January. “Until he hands the keys to the White House to someone else, we will be here.”
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union and the United Kingdom made public Saturday the vast agreement that is likely to govern future trade and cooperation between them from Jan. 1, setting the 27-nation bloc’s relations with its former member country and neighbor on a new but far more distant footing.
EU ambassadors and lawmakers on both sides of the English Channel will now pore over the “EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement,” which contains over 1,240 pages of text. EU envoys are expected to meet on Monday to discuss the document, drawn up over nine intense months of talks.
Businesses, so long left in the dark about what is in store for them, will also be trying to understand its implications.
Most importantly, the deal as it stands ensures that Britain can continue to trade in goods with the world’s biggest trading bloc without tariffs or quotas after the U.K. breaks fully free of the EU. It ceased to be an official member on Jan. 31 this year and is days away from the end of an exit transition period.
But other barriers will be raised, as the U.K. loses the kind of access to a huge market that only membership can guarantee. They range from access to fishing waters to energy markets, and include everyday ties so important to citizens like travel arrangements and education exchanges.
EU member countries are expected to endorse the agreement over the course of next week. British legislators could vote on it on Wednesday. But even if they do approve it, the text would only enter force provisionally on New Year’s Day as the European Parliament must also have its say.
EU lawmakers said last weekend that there simply wasn’t enough time to properly scrutinize the text before the deadline, and they will debate and vote on the document in January and February, if the approval process runs smoothly.
Despite the deal, unanswered questions linger in many areas, including security cooperation — with the U.K. set to lose access to real-time information in some EU law enforcement databases — and access to the EU market for Britain’s huge financial services sector.
(CNN)The explosion that rattled a historic Nashville street in the predawn hours of Christmas Day came after an RV repeatedly warned of an imminent explosion.
President Donald Trump spent part of his Christmas with ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham, in Palm Beach, Florida, amid his awaited decision to sign the COVID-19 relief bill.
“After spending some time with President @realDonaldTrump today, I am convinced he is more determined than ever to increase stimulus payments to $2000 per person and challenge Section 230 big tech liability protection,” Lindsey Graham tweeted on Friday night echoing Trump’s sentiments from earlier this week.
President Donald Trump spent his Christmas golfing in Florida as a government shutdown looms and COVID-19 relief hangs in the balance. Earlier in the day, he renewed calls for $2,000 stimulus checks, instead of the $600 included in a $900 billion COVID-19 relief package passed in both houses of Congress and is awaiting Trump’s signature.
In a Friday evening Tweet, Sen. Lindsey Graham doubled on Trump’s called for Americans $2,000 in aid.
“After spending some time with President @realDonaldTrump today, I am convinced he is more determined than ever to increase stimulus payments to $2000 per person and challenge Section 230 big tech liability protection,” Graham tweeted.
As Business Insider previously reported, Section 230 is “a provision in a 1996 law that protects companies on the internet like Twitter and Facebook from being regulated as publishers of third-party content like tweets and Facebook posts.” It is part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and allows the aforementioned internet companies to govern content on their platforms.
Trump has regularly railed against this provision and vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act due to the fact that it did not include changes to Section 230.
Trump in Florida for Christmas as the relief bill hangs in limbo
Trump, at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach for the holidays, had no events on his public schedule after throwing the future of a massive COVID-19 relief and government funding bill into question. Failure to sign the bill, which arrived in Florida on Thursday night, could deny relief checks to millions of Americans on the brink and force a government shutdown in the midst of the pandemic.
The White House declined to share details of the president’s schedule, though he was expected to golf Friday with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close ally.
White House spokesman Judd Deere said Trump was briefed on the explosion in downtown Nashville early Friday that authorities said appeared to be intentional, but the president said nothing publicly about it in the hours after.
Trump tweeted that he planned to make “a short speech to service members from all over the world” by video conference Friday to celebrate the holiday, but declared: “Fake News not invited!” Without giving details, the White House said only that Trump would work “tirelessly” during the holidays and has “many meetings and calls.”
Trump’s vacation came as Washington was still reeling over his surprise, eleventh-hour demand that an end-of-year spending bill that congressional leaders spent months negotiating to give most Americans $2,000 COVID relief checks — far more than the $600 members of his own party had agreed to. The idea was swiftly rejected by House Republicans during a rare Christmas Eve session, leaving the proposal in limbo.
The bipartisan compromise had been considered a done deal and had won sweeping approval in the House and Senate this week after the White House assured GOP leaders that Trump supported it. If he refuses to sign the deal, which is attached to a $1.4 trillion government funding bill, it will force a federal government shutdown, in addition to delaying aid checks and halting unemployment benefits and eviction protections in the most dire stretch of the pandemic.
“Made many calls and had meetings at Trump International in Palm Beach, Florida. Why would politicians not want to give people $2000, rather than only $600?” he tweeted after leaving the golf course Friday afternoon. “It wasn’t their fault, it was China. Give our people the money!”
Refusing to accept the results of the election
Trump’s decision to attack the bill has been seen, at least in part, as political punishment for what he considers insufficient backing by congressional Republicans of his campaign to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election with unfounded claims of voter fraud.
“At a meeting in Florida today, everyone was asking why aren’t the Republicans up in arms & fighting over the fact that the Democrats stole the rigged presidential election?” Trump tweeted Thursday.
“I will NEVER FORGET!” he later added.
Trump for weeks now has refused to accept the results of the election and has been pushing new, increasingly outrageous schemes to try to overturn the results. He has been egged on by allies like his lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who accompanied the president to Florida aboard Air Force One.
Trump has provided no credible evidence to support his election claims, which have been refuted by a long list of officials, among them judges, former Attorney General William Barr, Republican governors, and local election administrators.
The US is still reeling from the pandemic
Meanwhile, the nation continues to reel as the coronavirus spreads, with record infections and hospitalizations and more than 327,000 now dead. And millions are now going through the holidays alone or struggling to make ends meet without adequate income, food, or shelter thanks to the pandemic’s economic toll.
The Justice Department said Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen also was briefed on the Nashville blast and directed that all department resources be made available to help. The FBI will be taking the lead in the investigation, agency spokesman Joel Siskovic said.
Three people were treated in hospitals after a recreational vehicle, blaring a recorded warning of an imminent detonation, exploded in Nashville’s downtown. The blast caused widespread communications outages that took down police emergency systems and grounded flights at the city’s airport.
To mark the holiday, the president and first lady Melania Trump tweeted out a pre-recorded video message in which they wished Americans a Merry Christmas and thanked first responders and members of the military.
“As you know, this Christmas is different than years past,” said Mrs. Trump, who focused on the acts of “kindness and courage” the pandemic had inspired.
Trump hailed the vaccine doses now being delivered and thanked those responsible. “It is a truly a Christmas miracle,” he said.
Meanwhile, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have been trying to salvage the year-end legislation to try to prevent a shutdown. Democrats will call House lawmakers back to Washington for a vote Monday on Trump’s $2,000 proposal, though it would probably die in the Republican-controlled Senate. They are also considering a vote Monday on a stop-gap measure at least to avert a federal shutdown and keep the government running until Democrat Joe Biden is inaugurated Jan. 20.
In addition to the relief checks, the COVID bill that passed would establish a temporary $300 per week supplemental jobless benefit, provide a new round of subsidies for hard-hit businesses, restaurants and theaters and money for schools, and provide money for health care providers and to help with COVID vaccine distribution.
Sovereignty may mean the constitutional independence to make decisions, accountable only to your own people and without reference to others. But sovereignty isn’t the same as equality and in international affairs, other nations’ objectives must be taken into account.
And in international affairs, power matters, as the just-concluded pact between the U.K. and the EU shows. The EU is a much more important market to the U.K., accounting for some 43% of its exports, than the U.K. is to the EU as a whole or to any individual EU country.
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, right, met with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris last year to try to break a Brexit deadlock.
Photo:
Stefan Rousseau/Zuma Press
That asymmetry meant the EU could extract a price from the U.K. for tariff-free access to the bloc that it didn’t demand of Canada and Japan—less important potential competitors than the U.K.—in past free-trade deals. That price was a U.K. agreement not to undercut EU standards in areas like labor, the environment and subsidies to the private sector.
“People demand the right to take their own decisions—that’s something to be taken seriously—but it doesn’t mean that you always get your own way,” said
Lawrence Freedman,
an emeritus professor of War Studies at King’s College London. “That’s the underlying tension.”
Some critics of Brexit view it as a nostalgic and ultimately impossible quest to return to a time when Britain was a leading world power. Instead, they say, the U.K. has unmoored itself from one of the world’s three biggest economies: the U.S., China and the EU.
“There are two kinds of European nations,” said Denmark’s then-finance minister
Kristian Jensen
in 2017. “There are small nations and countries that have not yet recognized they are small nations.”
That is one of the main forces that has driven European federalism: pooling sovereignty with other nations of the EU may dilute control of what happens at home but in return increases a nation’s influence outside its borders.
In fact, among the countries of Europe, the U.K. is a more significant force than most. It vies with France to be its second-largest economy after Germany. It is also—like France—a recognized nuclear power that is one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, is a leading military contributor to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and part of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations.
Unlike France, though, it no longer has much influence in the EU, the world’s largest trading bloc, and that may reduce its importance as an interlocutor for the U.S.
Some experts say talking about sovereignty in the context of trade deals misses the point. Spain’s foreign minister,
Arancha González,
who is also an experienced trade negotiator, says trade deals aren’t about sovereignty—that is just a basic starting point. They are about finding ways for countries to beneficially coexist.
“It is clear when you do a trade deal that you are a sovereign nation,” she told Sky News earlier this month. Trade deals “are made to manage interdependence.”
An irony of Brexit is that it was the U.K. that was the chief architect of one of the most aggressive campaigns of the past to sweep away national regulations because it saw them being used to protect inefficient domestic companies on the Continent.
In the 1980s, Conservative Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher
drove the creation of the bloc’s internal market, which forced a harmonization of regulation to get rid of so-called “behind-the-borders” obstacles to trade.
To a later generation of Britons, at least those supporting Brexit, the single market and other developments that extended the writ of the EU over British life demanded too high a price in the constraints they placed on the ability of the British Parliament to decide what happens inside the country’s borders—in other words, to exert sovereignty.
Mr. Frost, the British lead negotiator, argued that one of the gains of Brexit would derive from exercising this sovereignty: Britain’s “good institutions and good politics” would make sure the country would make better decisions than would emerge from the Byzantine processes of Brussels.
In this 2017 photo, an anti-Brexit protester in London held a U.K. flag and an EU flag.
Photo:
daniel leal-olivas/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Some in the EU have expressed concerns the U.K. might win some advantages by being able to move faster than the EU. For example, German Chancellor
Angela Merkel
said last year that, in the digital economy, “the speed of how one agrees certain standards for data, how fast can one create diverse platforms, how can one bring the digital world into one’s country” could give the U.K. a competitive advantage over the EU.
“With the departure of Great Britain, a potential competitor will naturally arise, meaning Great Britain will join the ranks of the U.S. and China,” she said.
It is this view that has guided the EU through its negotiations—that the two sides will inevitably become economic competitors—and the trade agreement with the U.K. shouldn’t give it both the freedom to undercut EU competitors and have special access to the EU’s internal market at the same time. In other words, Britain had its sovereignty but if it wanted to exercise it to the full, it would come at the cost of easy access to the EU market.
Britain’s complaint about the EU stance in the talks was that it has been demanding that the U.K. continue to follow underlying European standards on issues like labor, social and environmental regulations and on government support for the private sector as the price of a tariff-free trade deal—when the bloc hadn’t demanded similar conditions of countries such as Canada and Japan with which it had already signed trade deals.
The EU has replied that Canada and Japan are distant countries with relatively modest trade with Europe. The U.K., on the other hand, is a large economy with almost $900 billion of two-way trade with the EU, sitting on the bloc’s doorstep.
And in the end, it was the EU that framed the outcome of the negotiations, not the U.K.: In trade negotiations, countries may be equally sovereign but they are not necessarily sovereign equals.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has long cited 60% to 70% as the level of COVID infection/vaccination the country would need to achieve herd immunity — for the disease to fade and life to return to normal, writes the New York Times’ Donald G. McNeil Jr.
But, but, but: “About a month ago, he began saying ’70, 75 percent’ in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said ’75, 80, 85 percent’ and ’75 to 80-plus percent,'” McNeil writes.
What’s new: “In a telephone interview,” McNeil continues, “Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goalposts.”
“He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.”
Fauci’s confession:
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent … Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here …. We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
Go deeper: Keep reading McNeil’s “How Much Herd Immunity Is Enough?” (subscription.)
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