Category Archives: Republicans

Senate Democrats to investigate Trump’s reported big oil ‘deal’

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Two committees inquiring after reports of ex-president’s offer to roll back dozens of regulations for $1bn campaign donations

Powerful Senate Democrats have launched an investigation into an alleged quid pro quo offer from Donald Trump to fossil fuel executives.

At a meeting at his Mar-a-Lago home and club last month, the former president reportedly told oil bosses he would immediately roll back dozens of environmental regulations if elected, and requested $1bn in contributions to his presidential campaign. It would be a “deal” for the executives because of the costs they would avoid under him, he reportedly said.

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Nikki Haley says she will vote for Donald Trump in 2024 election

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U-turn by ex-president’s most enduring rival during Republican primaries provokes swift backlash

Nikki Haley, who emerged as Donald Trump’s most enduring rival and trenchant critic during the Republican primary elections, has said she intends to vote for the former US president in November.

Haley was speaking at the Hudson Institute thinktank in Washington on Wednesday, her first public appearance since dropping out of the race in March. She was asked whether Joe Biden or Trump would do a better job on national security issues.

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Trump attends Houston lunch to ask oil bosses for more campaign cash

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Invitation-only meeting comes on heels of controversial dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump reportedly offered $1bn quid pro quo

Donald Trump was continuing to ask fossil-fuel executives to fund his presidential campaign on Wednesday, despite scrutiny of his relationship with the industry.

The former president attended a fundraising luncheon at Houston’s Post Oak hotel hosted by three big oil executives.

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Vince Fong wins Kevin McCarthy’s seat for rest of US House term

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Special election replaces speaker who was first ever voted out of the job, with election for next full term to take place in November

Vince Fong, backed by Donald Trump, has won a special election to finish the term of the former US House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who also lent his endorsement.

Fong, a California state assembly member, defeated fellow Republican and Tulare county sheriff Mike Boudreaux in the 20th congressional district, in the Central Valley farm belt.

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Rudy Giuliani pleads not guilty to charges in Arizona fake electors case

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Former New York mayor one of 12 defendants charged with illegally trying to keep Trump in power after 2020 election defeat

Rudy Giuliani denied charges of illegally trying to keep Donald Trump in power after his 2020 election defeat as he was arraigned to appear before a court in Arizona along with 10 other defendants on Tuesday.

Giuliani’s not guilty plea to nine felony charges came days after he was served an indictment as he left a party to celebrate his 80th birthday last Friday.

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TV meteorologist attacks DeSantis over Florida’s ‘don’t say climate change’ law

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Steve MacLaughlin of WTVJ in Miami urges viewers to vote – because ‘there are candidates that believe in climate change’

A TV meteorologist condemned the Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s so-called “don’t say climate change” law on air and urged viewers to vote.

Steve MacLaughlin of WTVJ in Miami addressed viewers on Saturday amid rising heat records across the state, saying: “On Thursday, we reported … that the government of Florida was beginning to roll back really important climate-change legislation and really important climate-change language.”

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Marco Rubio says he would not accept 2024 election results ‘if it’s unfair’

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Republican senator’s comments come as he is considered among Trump’s top candidates for vice-president

The Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio said on Sunday he would not commit to accepting the 2024 presidential election results, insisting that “if it’s unfair” his party will “go to court and point out the fact that states are not following their own election laws”.

Rubio’s statements on Meet the Press come as he is considered among former president Donald Trump’s top candidates for vice-president. Trump has continuously said falsely that the 2020 election was stolen.

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‘Scary’: public-school textbooks the latest target as US book bans intensify

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A school district in Houston has voted to redact chapters on vaccines and climate change, and parents and educators are worried

The wave of book bans sweeping the US, typically reserved for works of fiction deemed controversial, has hit textbooks used in public schools, marking the next step in Republicans’ war on education.

The board of trustees for the Cypress Fairbanks independent school district in Houston voted 6-1 earlier this month to redact certain chapters in science textbooks, including those about vaccines, human growth, diversity, and climate change.

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Missouri Republican party fails to boot KKK-linked candidate from gubernatorial ticket

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Judge declines to remove Darrell McClanahan, who claims one-year honorary membership in terror group, from GOP primary race

A long-shot Missouri gubernatorial candidate with ties to the Ku Klux Klan will stay on the Republican ticket, a judge ruled on Friday.

Cole county circuit court judge Cotton Walker denied a request by the Missouri GOP to kick Darrell McClanahan out of the August Republican primary.

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‘She’s in the pantheon now’: Kristi Noem and the politicians who hit self-destruct

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The dog-killing South Dakota governor’s VP hopes are in tatters. But she’s not the first politician to flame out with an own goal

She could have been a contender. But then she wrote a book. And suddenly Kristi Noem was caught like a rabbit – or a rambunctious puppy – in the headlights.

The governor of South Dakota found herself insisting that a false claim she met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had been put in her book by accident. Wait, said Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation, you recorded the whole audiobook version and read this passage out loud. Why didn’t you take it out then?

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Biden and Trump are betting on debates to help magnify the other’s weaknesses

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Trump will look to again cast Biden as greatly diminished while Biden will aim to remind voters why they rejected Trump in 2020

It’s game on for a pair of presidential debates between two unpopular candidates most Americans wish weren’t running for the nation’s highest office.

In a ratatat social media exchange on Wednesday, Joe Biden and Donald Trump agreed to participate in two debates on 27 June, hosted by CNN, and on 10 September, hosted by ABC.

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Biden asserts executive privilege to block release of special counsel interviews

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House Republicans seek recordings of classified documents case interviews, in what Democrats call a ‘purely political’ move

Joe Biden asserted executive privilege to stop House Republicans obtaining recordings of his interviews with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s retention of classified information after his time as a senator and as vice-president to Barack Obama.

In a letter reported by the New York Times and other outlets on Thursday, the White House counsel, Edward Siskel, told the Republican chairs of the House judiciary and oversight committees: “The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal – to chop them up, distort them and use them for partisan political purposes.

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Biden should have pardoned Trump on federal charges, Mitt Romney says

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Republican senator tells MSNBC that ‘frankly, the country doesn’t want to have to go through prosecuting a former president’

Joe Biden should have pardoned Donald Trump on all federal criminal charges the moment they were announced, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said.

“Had I been President Biden,” Romney said, “when the justice department brought out indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him. I’d have pardoned President Trump.”

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Joe Biden and Donald Trump agree to two US presidential debates

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Both candidates agreed upon two dates for debates: 27 June and 10 September, and Trump also posted about a third date in October

Shortly after the Biden-Harris re-election campaign proposed two TV debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump ahead of November’s presidential vote, both men have agreed upon two debate dates: 27 June and 10 September.

CNN confirmed that it would host the first debate of 2024 on that date at 9pm ET from the crucial battleground state of Georgia.

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Don’t panic about presidential polls – yet

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Trump’s criminal hush-money trial continues in New York, while both Trump and Biden fight for voters in swing states

Hello! Welcome back to our new US elections newsletter.

Non-Trump supporters have been all jittery this week, after a poll appeared to show Joe Biden getting royally stuffed by Trump in the election.

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Democrat Angela Alsobrooks to face ex-governor Larry Hogan in Maryland Senate race

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Alsobrooks beats Dave Trone and Hogan wins Republican primary, setting up November clash that could determine control of Senate

Democrat Angela Alsobrooks will face off against former Republican governor Larry Hogan in the Maryland Senate race this November, setting up an unexpectedly competitive election in the reliably Democratic state. Republicans have a rare opportunity to flip a Senate seat in Maryland, and the outcome of that race could determine control of the upper chamber in November.

Alsobrooks and Hogan won their parties’ Senate primaries on Tuesday, as Maryland voters cast ballots in the presidential race as well as congressional elections. Joe Biden and Donald Trump easily won the state’s primaries after already securing enough delegates to capture their parties’ nominations.

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Kristi Noem banned by two more Native tribes in South Dakota

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Governor, plagued by dog-killing story, unwelcome in 20% of her state after she accused tribal leaders of benefiting from cartels

Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who was once considered one of Donald Trump’s top vice-presidential contenders, has been banned from nearly one-fifth of the state after two more tribes voted to prohibit her from their lands.

The move by the Yankton Sioux tribe and the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe last week follows criticism from the governor who has – without evidence – accused tribal leaders of “personally benefiting” from drug cartels. The Oglala, Rosebud, Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux tribes banished Noem earlier this year.

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Trump praises fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter during rally speech

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Ex-president calls Hopkins’ cannibalistic Lecter ‘late, great’ while condemning ‘people who are being released into our country’

Donald Trump on Saturday praised fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter “as a wonderful man” before segueing into comments disparaging people who have immigrated into the US without permission.

The former president’s remarks to political rally-goers in Wildwood, New Jersey, as he challenges Joe Biden’s re-election in November were a not-so-subtle rhetorical bridge exalting Anthony Hopkins’ cannibalistic Lecter in Silence of the Lambs as “late [and] great” while simultaneously condemning “people who are being released into our country that we don’t want”.

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Rudy Giuliani suspended by New York radio station over 2020 election lies

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WABC owner says Trump ally received warnings not to discuss ‘election fallacies’ and that refusal to do so ‘left me no option’

The former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s troubles deepened on Friday when he was suspended by WABC radio, for trying to use his show to discuss the lie that the 2020 presidential election was lost by Donald Trump because of electoral fraud.

John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire, Republican donor and owner of WABC, told the New York Times: “We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election. We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning that he refuses not to talk about it.

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Court upholds Steve Bannon’s conviction for defying Jan 6 committee subpoena – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed. For the latest on Bannon’s case, you can read our full report:

Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaigns are a study in contrasts.

While Biden spends his Friday fundraising on the west coast, making campaign stops in California and Washington, Trump sits through another day of his New York trial over Trump’s alleged falsification of business records in connection with hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

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