Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Ivanka Trump while working in her father’s administration had 41 trademarks fast tracked by China.
Even with their threadbare House majority, Republicans doubled down this week on using their new power next year to investigate the Biden administration and, in particular, the president’s son.(Read More Here).
But the midterm results have emboldened a White House that has long prepared for this moment. Republicans secured much smaller margins than anticipated, and aides to President Joe Biden and other Democrats believe voters punished the GOP for its reliance on conspiracy theories and Donald Trump-fueled lies over the 2020 election.
They see it as validation for the administration’s playbook for the midterms and going forward to focus on legislative achievements and continue them, in contrast to Trump-aligned candidates whose complaints about the president’s son played to their most loyal supporters and were too far in the weeds for the average American. The Democrats retained control of the Senate and the GOP’s margin in the House is expected to the slimmest majority in two decades.
“If you look back, we picked up seats in New York, New Jersey, California,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist and public affairs executive. “These were not voters coming to the polls because they wanted Hunter Biden investigated — far from it. They were coming to the polls because they were upset about inflation. They’re upset about gas prices. They’re upset about what’s going on with the war in Ukraine.”
But House Republicans used their first news conference after clinching the majority to discuss presidential son Hunter Biden and the Justice Department, renewing long-held grievances about what they claim is a politicized law enforcement agency and a bombshell corruption case overlooked by Democrats and the media.
“From their first press conference, these congressional Republicans made clear that they’re going to do one thing in this new Congress, which is investigations, and they’re doing this for political payback for Biden’s efforts on an agenda that helps working people,” said Kyle Herrig, the founder of the Congressional Integrity Project, a newly relaunched, multimillion-dollar effort by Democratic strategists to counter the onslaught of House GOP probes.
Inside the White House, the counsel’s office added staff months ago and beefed up its communication efforts, and staff has been deep into researching and preparing for the attacks. They’ve worked to try to identify their own vulnerabilities and plan effective responses.
This is Benton's second conviction for campaign finance violations. In May 2016, he was found guilty of illegally facilitating the transfer of $73,000 to an Iowa state senator in exchange for endorsing Ron Paul during his 2012 presidential bid. Trump pardoned Benton in December 2020, soon before leaving office.
Prosecutors indicted Benton and Doug Wead, a conservative evangelical pundit involved in multilevel marketing, in September 2021. Wead, who died later that year at age 75, was accused of connecting Vasilenko to Benton.
Benton's lawyer, Brian Stolarz, argued during the trial that Vasilenko was just a self-promoter willing to pay to get photos of himself with celebrities, and he and Wead settled on Trump after looking into photo ops with Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Stephen Seagal, The Washington Post reports. "If Oprah was available," he said in his closing argument, "we wouldn't even be here." Stolarz said Vasilenko was interested in a photo with "the guy who used to be on The Apprentice," not a future president, and Trump appeared only briefly at the fundraiser and "just talked about polls."
Prosecutors disputed the idea that Vasilenko wasn't interested in Trump's political cachet, noting he was running for a seat in Russia's parliament at the time, and his photo with Trump helped get him on Russian television. And Benton, they said, clearly should have known he was violating federal campaign finance laws after his 2016 conviction.
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