Re: “Release the Epstein files, and let’s get rid of the ‘Epstein class’,” Nov. 19 commentary

Anita Chabria makes a good point about the oligarchy, their arrogance, and not-so-innocent interaction with girls. It is time to out those folks and get them off the public stage.

She acts as if publicizing the files is a Democratic coup. Why didn’t they do this when they had the majority?

This vote is a victory for decency and common sense. And let us hope it is a sign that Congress is finding its spine.

Stan Moore, Lakewood

I am amazed that I now consider Rep. Lauren Boebert and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to be heroes. They met with the Epstein victims and have resolutely stood solid with the victims since. No Republican congressmen can say that. If any of the congresswomen had caved, President Donald Trump would not have been forced to back the bill. Yeah, Boebert!

Daniel Badher, Denver

Trump’s ‘Quiet, piggy’ remark demonstrates insecurity

On Friday, President Trump’s asking about the Jeffrey Epstein files — pointing a finger and snarling “Quiet, piggy” — was more than rude. It was a blatant attempt to silence a journalist simply doing her job.

We’ve seen hostility toward the press before, from Nixon to Agnew, but this level of contempt makes those moments seem mild. Finger-pointing, name-calling, and mocking a reporter’s legitimacy are not signs of strength — they are signs of insecurity and disregard for transparency.

America should welcome tough questions. Journalists are not intruders or “piggies”; they are essential to holding power accountable. When the leader of our nation dismisses a question with personal insult, it undermines the democratic ideals we claim to uphold.

Civility in public discourse matters. Respect for the press matters. And in this case, “Quiet, piggy” should matter to every American concerned about the health of our democracy.

Dan Wilinsky, Englewood

Saudi prince doesn’t deserve Trump’s celebration

Re: “,” Nov. 19 news story

Just what do our long-term allies think now? Presidents and prime ministers from around the globe have crossed the threshold of the White House, yet none of them have received the pompous greeting that President Donald Trump gave to Mohammed bin Salman.

This is the man who has been identified by our country for ordering the assassination of a journalist working for the Washington Post. He is also the ruler of the nation from which many of the 9/11 attackers came to kill thousands of our fellow Americans. It was so obvious that Trump was gleeful. This open affection has never been shown to any other leader. None of them has been given such a dinner.

We all know the Trump family has multiple businesses in Saudi Arabia. What exactly is going on?

Barbara Wells, Aurora

Time running out for Colorado delegates to help extend health tax credits

I know how it feels to hear the words, “You have cancer.” The sentence sucks the air out of the room. Your mind sprints to all the plans you had for your future. Everything hangs on that next question: Is it treatable? The answer has a lot to do with whether you have health insurance.

Cancer care is expensive. Without comprehensive health insurance, it¶¶Òőap out of reach.

For the hundreds of thousands of Coloradans who rely on enhanced health care tax credits to afford their health insurance through Connect for Health Colorado, Congress currently holds the answer to that next question. You see, some of these health care tax credits are set to expire at the end of this year. But Congress can do something about that by extending these enhanced tax credits.

With open enrollment underway, Coloradans are seeing their premiums skyrocket for next year’s plans. If the enhanced health care tax credits aren’t extended, millions of people, including cancer patients, will lose access to lifesaving care.

I’m urging Rep. Gabe Evans and Rep. Jeff Hurd to consider the people who are depending on these tax credits to access health coverage. Work with your fellow members of Congress to extend them now. Time is running out.

Sabrina Wright-Hobart, Aurora

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

“It¶¶Òőap frankly ridiculous, and just plain false. This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” said Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It¶¶Òőap really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people, and that¶¶Òőap what we’re here to do. We have had the complete support of the state,” she said, referring to North Carolina.

Republicans, led by the former president, have helped foster a frenzy of misinformation over the past week among the communities most devastated by Helene, promoting a number of false claims, including that Washington is to people in Republican areas.

of spending all its money to help immigrants who are in the United States illegally, while other critics assert that the government spends too much on Israel, Ukraine and other foreign countries.

“FEMA absolutely has enough money for Helene response right now,” Keith Turi, acting director of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery said. He noted that Congress recently replenished the agency with $20 billion, and about $8 billion of that is set aside for recovery from previous storms and mitigation projects.

There also are outlandish theories that include warnings from far-right extremist groups that officials plan to bulldoze storm-damaged communities and seize the land from residents. A falsehood pushed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., asserts that Washington used to steer Helene toward Republican voters in order to tilt the presidential election toward Democrat Kamala Harris.

Criswell said on ABC’s “This Week” that such baseless claims around the response to Helene, which caused catastrophic damage from Florida into and a death toll that rose Sunday to at least 230, have created a sense of fear and mistrust from residents against the thousands of FEMA employees and volunteers on the ground.

“We’ve had the local officials helping to push back on this dangerous — truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear of trying to reach out and help us or to register for help,” she said.

President Joe Biden said in a statement Sunday that his administration “will continue working hand-in-hand with local and state leaders –- regardless of political party and no matter how long it takes.”

Meantime, FEMA is preparing for , which rapidly intensified into a Category 1 storm on Sunday as it heads toward Florida.

“We’re working with the state there to understand what their requirements are going to be, so we can have those in place before it makes landfall,” she said.

Last week, the party’s Twitter account hyped between Dave Williams, chair of the state’s GOP, and Laura Loomer, a self-described white nationalist and islamophobe, her words, not mine. Loomer routinely spreads loony conspiracy theories about mass shootings and elections including her own loss in a Florida congressional primary race. Naturally, she blamed election fraud and has refused to concede.

Loomer was banned from ride-share services Lyft and Uber after a daylong Twitter harangue against Muslims. She tweeted that she will not “support another Islamic immigrant driver” and tagged both companies in the post. Smart. Loomer has also accused Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and other Democrats of scheming to institute Sharia law in Minnesota.

Banned from Twitter for extremist posts, she sued the social media giant and the Council on American-Islamic Relationships which she claimed colluded with Twitter to have her removed. She lost her case and had to pay over $124,000 in court costs to those she falsely impugned.

Loomer has proved too insane for the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman who believes Jewish bankers light wildfires with space lasers. MTG warned former President Trump’s reelection against hiring Loomer, which they were considering, because the congresswoman believes the white nationalist is too deranged and too dishonest for the job. That¶¶Òőap saying something.

A couple days after tweeting about the Loomer-Williams interview, the Colorado Republican Party welcomed Kari Lake, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate, as the party’s annual fundraising dinner speaker. Lake, an election conspiracy theorist, has yet to concede her loss to Katie Hobbs in 2022 blaming election fraud sans evidence. She attempted to overturn the election results in court but thus far has lost every case. Lake is being sued for defamation by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Rich for falsehoods she spread about him after the 2020 presidential election that made him a target of death threats.

Lake has accused Gov. Hobbs and other elected Democrats of taking bribes from drug cartels and pushed for the imprisonment of Hobbs and journalists for unspecified election crimes. Humdrum as conspiracy theories go, the accusation lacks a certain, je ne sais quoi. However, Lake did recently release a song titled “81 Million Votes, My A**.” No mere retread of old 2020 conspiracy theory material, it¶¶Òőap a catchy song! This kind of creative crackpottery should give her an edge with election deniers.

As for her own election prospects, if at first you don’t succeed, try cheating; failing that try again. Lake is now running for Senate though trailing behind Independent Senator Krysten Sinema and Democrat Ruben Gallego in early polling. She also appears to be in a “death race” with Marjorie Taylor Greene to be Trump’s number two according to a Rolling Stone source. Greene called Lake a grifter and a scammer.

As for the Colorado Republican Party, they deserve props for consistency. In one week they promoted two unhinged election conspiracy theorists who have lost elections, refused to concede their losses, impugned innocent people, filed frivolous lawsuits, and raised money by brazenly lying to their fellow Americans. I’m not a public relations expert, but this seems non compos mentis, that is, mad, cray-cray, barmy, nuts. Their association with the Colorado Republican Party discredits the party of Lincoln and Reagan. It¶¶Òőap like Williams and company want Colorado to go a deeper shade of blue.

Stupid is always fair game for pundits and partisans and they’re handing Democrats material just when they need it. Democrats’ far-left brethren are marching down the street screaming the genocidal chant “from the river to the sea.” Tent cities still blight urban landscapes in Democrat-run cities. Prices continue to rise thanks to unconstrained federal spending. The Democrat¶¶Òőap 2024 presidential candidate struggles to speak a cogent sentence. How about letting their crazy shine for a moment?

Krista L. Kafer is a weekly Denver Post columnist. Follow her on Twitter: @kristakafer.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Buck, for his part, earned their wrath because he would rather focus on issues that matter to voters in his district like inflation, southern border security, and crime, rather than embrace and evangelize their fantasy political sideshow.

Strike one: Buck, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, doesn’t believe the House has produced any evidence that Biden profited off his son’s foreign deals and has called the timeline for an impeachment inquiry absurd as he has seen no evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor. and Chief of the Criminal Division of the United States Attorney’s Office, but that is not a detail true believers respect — they only value blind allegiance. Buck is refusing to get in the party line on this issue telling an editor with the Daily Beast that “it’s crazy” to assume Democrats will help Republicans with critical spending bills that need to be passed in the coming days if the impeachment inquiry goes forward.

Strike two: In December of 2020, Buck, along with 125 of his other Republican colleagues signed onto an amicus brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election, which the Supreme Court declined to hear on the basis that Texas lacked standing to challenge the results of another state.  Buck, however, voted to certify the 2020 election results and was not one of the 147 House Republicans who objected.

Strike three: In a 4-page letter Buck eviscerated the inane claims made by El Paso County Republican Party Vice Chairman Todd Watkins that the January 6th defendants have been grossly mistreated and abused by our legal system.  Watkins’ letter refers to America as a “despotic, tyrannical, banana republic”. Buck’s detailed point-by-point response, correctly notes that Watkins’ letter “makes a number of factually incorrect claims, and then proceeds to overstate the threat to our Republic based on these false claims.”

If the Republican party continues to put extreme candidates on the ballot who are out of step with Colorado values and priorities, they will continue to lose traction in this state and will lose seats like his to moderate Democratic candidates. In 2024, a Trump-led Republican party will trigger another Colorado avalanche that will wipe out what¶¶Òőap left of the Colorado Republican party if they don’t begin to push back and find stronger mainstream candidates that are focused on issues that matter and not bird-brained conspiracy theories that are devoid of facts.

But it turns out that speaking the truth and having integrity — even if you are one of its most conservative members — is a dangerous place to be in the Republican Party today as they will not hesitate to eat their own if they don’t participate in their Kabuki theater.

Just ask Former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Like Cheney, Colorado Congressman Ken Buck has an impeccable conservative record.

Cheney, once the third-ranking Republican in the House and highest-ranking woman in GOP leadership, was stripped of her leadership position because of her stance on the Capitol riot, her vote to impeach Trump and her opposition to Trump’s Big Lie about the outcome of the 2020 election. She was then challenged in a Republican primary and lost her seat.

Buck is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, an ultra-conservative group of Republican members of Congress.  His voting record authenticates his core conservative values. The Conservative Political Action Committee’s rankings for conservative voting records gave him the 2022 Award for Conservative Excellence for a 90% or higher ranking. Heritage Action for America, which fights for conservative policies in Washington DC, gave Buck a 99% lifetime score. And, he wasn’t anti-Trump. Buck voted with President Trump’s position 87% of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.

But like Cheney, Buck now faces retaliation for following his constitutional oath.

There are now widespread media reports that there is a serious effort to find a suitably extreme Republican candidate to mount a primary challenge against Buck. And, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claims there is an “unbelievable” level of frustration with Buck amongst the House Republican conference. and she doesn’t think he should serve on the Judiciary panel or the GOP whip’s team.

However, Colorado, is not Wyoming and the play won’t work. Colorado Democrats will not pass up a chance to take this seat if Republicans replace Buck and nominate an off-putting, far-right fringe candidate.

Colorado once a Republican stronghold and then a true purple state, is now a deep blue state. Every statewide elected office is held by a Democrat. Democrats have a supermajority in the state House of Representatives, 46-19, and a majority in the Senate, 23-12. Five of the eight congressional districts are controlled by Democrats. Of the three Republican districts, Rep. Lauren Boebert barely beat newcomer Democrat Adam Frisch by 546 votes in a plus 9 district in large part because of her unbridled support for Trump. It’s not far-fetched to see how the Republicans could lose this seat too.

Conservatives like Ken Buck are critical to making our two-party system viable. His speaking out reflects common values like integrity, honesty and the courage to call out falsehoods when they are plainly visible. That¶¶Òőap the Colorado way.

Doug Friednash grew up in Denver and is a partner with the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck. He is the former chief of staff for Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

It took just 68 minutes for the White House to fire back with a blistering statement that such a vote would mean that House Republicans had “caved to the hard-core fringe of their party in prioritizing a baseless impeachment stunt over high-stakes needs Americans care about deeply” like drug enforcement and disaster relief.

The White House, as it turns out, is not waiting for a formal inquiry to wage war against impeachment. With a team of two dozen attorneys, legislative liaisons, communications specialists and others, the president has begun moving to counter any effort to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors with a best-defense-is-a-good-offense campaign aimed at dividing Republicans and taking his case to the public.

The president¶¶Òőap team has been mapping out messaging, legal and parliamentary strategies for different scenarios. Officials have been reading books about past impeachments, studying law journal articles and pulling up old court decisions. They have even dug out correspondence between previous presidential advisers and congressional investigators to determine what standards and precedents have been established.

At the same time, recognizing that any impeachment fight would be a political showdown heading into an election season, outside allies have been going after Republicans like Greene and Speaker Kevin McCarthy. A group called the Congressional Integrity Project has been collecting polling data, blitzing out statements, fact sheets and memos and producing ads targeting 18 House Republicans representing districts that voted for Biden in 2020.

“As the Republicans ramp up their impeachment efforts, they’re certainly making this a political exercise and we’re responding in kind,” said Kyle Herrig, the executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project. “This is a moment of offense for Democrats. They have no basis for impeachment. They have no evidence. They have nothing.”

The White House preparations do not indicate that Biden’s advisers believe an impeachment inquiry is inevitable. But advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal thinking said that it was important to take on the prospect aggressively and expressed hope that the situation could be turned to their advantage.

Republican congressional investigations have turned up evidence that Hunter Biden traded on his family name to generate multimillion-dollar deals and a former partner, Devon Archer, testified that Hunter Biden would put his father on speakerphone with potential business clients to impress them.

But Archer testified that the elder Biden only engaged in idle chitchat during such calls, not business, and no evidence has emerged that the president directly profited from his son’s deals or used his power inappropriately while vice president to benefit his son’s financial interests.

Republicans have not identified any specific impeachable offenses, and some have privately made clear that they do not see any at the moment. The momentum toward an impeachment inquiry appears driven in large part by opposition to Biden’s policies and is fueled by former President Donald Trump, who is eager to tarnish his potential rival in next year’s election and openly frames the issue as a matter of revenge. “Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION,” he demanded of Republicans on his social media site this past week. “THEY DID IT TO US!”

That stands in sharp contrast to other modern impeachment efforts. When impeachment inquiries were initiated against Presidents Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Trump, there were clear allegations of specific misconduct, whether or not they necessarily warranted removal from office. In Biden’s case, it is not clear what actions he has taken that would be defined as a high crime or misdemeanor.

McCarthy, R-Calif., cited “a culture of corruption” within the Biden family in explaining on Fox News last weekend why he might push ahead with an impeachment inquiry. “If you look at all the information we’ve been able to gather so far, it is a natural step forward that you would have to go to an impeachment inquiry,” he said.

Even if Republican investigators turned up evidence that Biden had done something as vice president to help his son’s business, it would be the first time a president was targeted for impeachment for actions taken before he became president, raising novel constitutional issues.

For now, though, it is hardly certain that Republicans would authorize an inquiry. McCarthy told Breitbart News on Friday that if they pursued such an inquiry, “it would occur through a vote on the floor,” not through a decree by him, and veteran strategists in both parties doubt he could muster the 218 votes needed to proceed.

The speaker’s flirtation with holding such a vote may be simply a way of catering to Greene and others on his right flank. He has used the thirst to investigate Biden as an argument against a government shutdown, suggesting that a budgetary impasse would stall House inquiries.

But some Republicans have warned that a formal impeachment drive could be a mistake. Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., has said that “impeachment theater” was a distraction from spending issues and that it was not “responsible for us to talk about impeachment.” Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, said impeachment could “unleash an internal Republican civil war” and if unsuccessful lead to “the worst, biggest backfire for Republicans.”

The White House has been building its team to defend against Republican congressional investigations for more than a year, a team now bracing for a possible impeachment inquiry. Richard Sauber, a former federal prosecutor, was appointed special counsel in spring 2022, and Ian Sams, a longtime Democratic communications specialist, was brought on as spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s Office. Russell Anello, the top Democratic staff member for the House Oversight Committee, joined last year as well.

After Republicans won control of the House in the November midterm elections, more people were added to handle the multitude of congressional investigations. Stuart Delery, the White House counsel who is stepping down this month, will be replaced by Ed Siskel, who handled Republican investigations into issues like the Benghazi, Libya, terror attack for President Barack Obama’s White House.

A critical adviser for Biden will be his personal attorney, Bob Bauer, one of the most veteran figures in Washington’s legal-political wars. As a private lawyer, he advised the House Democratic leader during Clinton’s impeachment and then the Senate Democratic leader during the subsequent trial, helping to shape strategies that kept Democrats largely unified behind their president. And Biden aides including Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed served in the Clinton White House at the time.

Biden has seen four impeachment efforts up close during his long career in Washington. He was a first-term senator when Nixon resigned rather than face a seemingly certain Senate trial in 1974 and a fifth-term senator when he voted to acquit Clinton in 1999. It was Biden whom Trump tried to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating, leading to the former president¶¶Òőap first impeachment in 2019. And it was Biden’s victory in 2020 that Trump tried to overturn with the help of a mob that attacked Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to a second impeachment.

The Clinton impeachment battle has provided some lessons for the Biden team, although the circumstances are significantly different and the political environment has shifted dramatically in the 25 years since then. Much as the Clinton White House did, the Biden White House has tried to separate its defense against Republican investigators from the day-to-day operations of the building, assigning Sams to respond mostly off camera to issues arising from the investigations rather than White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during her televised briefings.

As in the late 1990s, the strategy now is to paint Republicans as rabid partisans only interested in attacking the president of the other party out of political or ideological motives in contrast to a commander in chief focused on issues of importance to everyday voters, like health care and the economy.

The approach worked for Clinton, whose approval ratings shot up to their highest levels of his two terms, surpassing 70%, when he was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice. Biden’s approval ratings remain mired in the low 40s, but advisers think a serious impeachment threat would rally disaffected supporters.

Herrig’s Congressional Integrity Project, founded after last year’s midterm elections, hopes to turn the Republican impeachment drive against them. His group’s board chair, Jeff Peck, is a longtime Biden ally, and it recently hired Kate Berner, a former White House deputy communications director.

The group has teams in New York and California and plans to expand to other battleground districts. “This is a political loser for vulnerable Republicans,” Herrig said. “McCarthy’s doing the bidding of Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and putting his majority at risk.”

This article originally appeared in .

Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

That¶¶Òőap because the unprecedented indictment of Donald Trump by a New York County grand jury on charges of paying “hush money” to a former porn star is almost certainly the first of several criminal charges he will face.

The former president faces potentially far more serious allegations, most stemming from his extra-legal efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat. They include pressuring Georgia officials to change the state’s outcome, resisting efforts to retrieve illegally possessed classified documents and inciting the insurrection to prevent Congress from ratifying electoral votes.

These cases – and any indictments and trials that may flow from them – are likely to dominate the political news for months, freezing the current situation in which Trump is the solid GOP front-runner and the November 2024 outlook remains very much in doubt.

That also means that the arguments – and the forecasts – that partisans and independent analysts have been making in recent days are unlikely to change much as Americans confront the spectacle of a former president brought before the bar of justice.

On one side, Trump’s Republican Party has lined up virtually unanimously against New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of the former president – though not necessarily supporting Trump’s ever-changing explanation of the events in question.

“The American people will not tolerate this injustice, and the House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account,” tweeted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “This is an outrage,” said former Vice President Mike Pence, who just recently said history will hold Trump “accountable” for the Capitol insurrection.

The GOP enthusiasm for Trump prompted some Republicans to make premature predictions. “Alvin Bragg just single-handedly secured Donald Trump the 2024 presidential election,” Texas Republican Rep. Troy Nehls told Axios.

Meanwhile, Democrats played it generally low-key, declaring that the former president¶¶Òőap indictment shows that everyone faces equal treatment under the law.

“A nation of laws must hold the rich and powerful accountable, even when they hold high office,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, the floor manager for one of the two failed impeachments of Trump. “Especially when they do. To do otherwise is not democracy.”

In the short term, analysts agree, Trump’s indictment complicates the task of his opponents for the Republican nomination. Recent polls show Trump increasing his lead nationally over his closest challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, but in a less commanding position in the key early states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

But it will likely be much harder now for Trump’s challengers to make a strong case against his nomination while at the same time supporting his challenge of the New York indictment.

In addition, it will be hard for any of them to get much media attention if daily news accounts – especially those on 24-hour cable TV – are dominated by Trump and the legal issues swirling around him.

Even without this, the first important test for the entire GOP field won’t take place for many months, a multi-candidate debate scheduled for August in the city that will host the party’s 2024 convention, Milwaukee.

Here’s something else to consider: The history of many past contested races suggests they often don’t come into clear focus until the final weeks before voters cast their first caucus and primary votes, either in late January or early February next year.

Meanwhile, the latest proceedings against Trump are giving new impetus to those House Republicans who want to use their newly gained majority to investigate everything possible about the Democrats, starting with President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Even before the New York grand jury indicted Trump, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, and two other GOP chairs demanded that Bragg testify before Congress and produce documents about the probe. Bragg refused.

Meanwhile, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene went to New York to demonstrate against the former president¶¶Òőap indictment.

These events underscore the degree that Trump – and the House Republican support for him – is dominating the work of the House GOP majority, far overshadowing its efforts to implement some of its pre-election legislative agenda.

Meanwhile, President Biden can revel in the fact that, while Republicans soft-pedal some normal political jockeying to join one another in opposing the case against Trump, Biden is being seen daily as carrying out the people’s business.

Last Friday, for example, while Republicans fulminated against Bragg and the national news was dominated by the plans for Trump’s Tuesday arraignment, Biden was in Mississippi, consoling victims of recent devasting tornadoes and promising federal help to rebuild.

On Monday, the president was in Minneapolis for the latest in a series of trips to highlight his administration’s measures dealing with climate change, infrastructure upgrading and inflation.

The president¶¶Òőap own job approval remains in the lower 40s, none too strong for his anticipated re-election bid, and his matchup numbers with Trump and DeSantis continue to suggest a close 2024 race.

That may not change for months. Still, it remains hard to see how the events of the past week – and those likely to unfold over the coming months – will strengthen Trump’s 2024 general election chances, even if they increase the likelihood that his solid GOP support will net him a third straight Republican nomination.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com. ©2023 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Last week, The New York Times reported on an outrageous example of such weaponization, the flagrant use of federal law enforcement powers to target an administration’s political enemies. I’m talking, of course, about the John Durham special counsel investigation, which was meant to root out the ostensibly corrupt origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and quickly came to embody the sins that Donald Trump and his allies projected onto the FBI.

Trump’s circle insisted, falsely, that the Mueller inquiry was a hit job that employed Russian disinformation — via the Steele dossier — to frame Trump, all part of a plot cooked up by the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign. Durham seems to have bought into this Trumpist conspiracy theory, and to help prove it, he tried to employ what appears to be Russian disinformation to go after the Clinton camp. More specifically, he used dubious Russian intelligence memos, which analysts believed were seeded with falsehoods, to try to convince a court to give him access to the emails of an aide to George Soros, which he believed would show Clinton-related wrongdoing.

Astonishingly, the Times found that while Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr and Durham were in Europe looking for evidence to discredit the Russia investigation, Italian officials gave them a “potentially explosive tip” linking Trump to “certain suspected financial crimes.” Rather than assign a new prosecutor to look into those suspected crimes, Barr folded the matter into Durham’s inquiry, giving Durham criminal prosecution powers for the first time.

Then the attorney general sat back while the media inferred that the criminal investigation must mean Durham had found evidence of malfeasance connected to Russiagate. Barr, usually shameless in his public spinning of the news, quietly let an investigation into Trump be used to cast aspersions on Trump’s perceived enemies. (The fate of that inquiry remains a mystery.)

This squalid episode is a note-perfect example of how Republican scandal-mongering operates. The right ascribes to its adversaries, whether in the Democratic Party or the putative deep state, monstrous corruption and elaborate conspiracies. Then, in the name of fighting back, it mimics the tactics it has accused its foes of using.

Look, for example, at the behavior that gave rise to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump falsely claimed that Joe Biden, as vice president, used the threat of withholding American loan guarantees to blackmail the Ukrainian government into doing his personal bidding. Hoping to get Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to substantiate his lies, Trump tried to use the threat of withholding American aid to 
 blackmail the Ukrainian government into doing his personal bidding. The symmetry between accusations and counter-accusations, in turn, fosters a widespread cynicism about ever finding the truth.

It¶¶Òőap important to keep this in mind because we’re about to see a lot more of it. Now that they control the House, Republicans have prioritized investigating their political opponents. McCarthy has stacked the Oversight Committee, central to the House’s investigative apparatus, with flame-throwing fantasists, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert. Further, as Politico reported in a “field guide” to the coming Republican inquiries, McCarthy has urged Republicans to treat every committee like the Oversight Committee, meaning all investigations, all the time.

There are going to be investigations into Hunter Biden, and investigations into the origins of the pandemic. There will likely be scrutiny of the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and Biden’s handling of classified documents. And, as my colleague David Firestone on the editorial board put it over the weekend, “Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt” for proof that the FBI and other intelligence agencies were “weaponized” against conservatives.

These all promise to be congressional equivalents of the Durham inquiry. Certainly, most if not all congressional investigations are politically motivated, but there is nevertheless a difference between inquiries predicated on something real, and those, like the many investigations in the Benghazi attack, meant to troll for dirt and reify Fox News phantasms. House Democrats examined Trump’s interference with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the acute stage of the pandemic. House Republicans plan to look into what Republican congressman Jim Banks termed the military’s “dangerous” COVID vaccine mandates. There might be an equivalence in the form of these two undertakings, but not in their empirical basis.

It remains to be seen whether our political media is up for the task of making these distinctions. The coverage of Trump and Biden’s respective retention of classified documents offers little cause for optimism. Again and again, journalists and pundits have noted that, while the two cases are very different, there are seeming similarities, and those similarities are good for Trump. This is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since by speculating about political narratives, you help create them.

“John Durham has already won,” said the headline of a Politico article from last year, noting his success in perpetuating the right¶¶Òőap fevered counter-history of Russiagate. Of course he didn’t win; he would go on to lose both cases arising from his investigation as well as the honorable reputation he had before he started it. What he did manage to do, however, was spread a lot of confusion and waste a lot of time. Now the Republican House picks up where he left off.

Michelle Goldberg became an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in 2017 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. This article originally appeared in .

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Antisemitic vitriol, which she has spewed numerous times in her official capacity as Congresswoman, has no place in American society and should not be rewarded with a position of authority. We must not allow antisemitism to reside in the heart of Congress.

In a 2019 series of tweets, Omar evoked the ancient and still prevalent antisemitic trope of Jewish money when she wrote that “Benjamins” from AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, were responsible for consistent U.S. support for the Israeli people. This remark brought criticism from both the left and the right.

While she issued , she didn’t apologize to members of Congress like myself who have wholeheartedly supported Israel in Congress. Her unretracted slur against us is that we support Israel and the long-oppressed Jewish people for money and not because it is the right thing to do.

Last Congress, , stating: “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked @SecBlinken where people are supposed to go for justice.”

It is bad enough that Rep. Omar puts America and Israel in the same breath as the Taliban and Hamas. But to further allege the commission of “unthinkable atrocities,” where none exist, only provides ammunition to those promoting violence against Jews.

Not content with allegations of “unthinkable atrocities,” Congresswoman Omar further claimed that the U.S. was “underwriting crimes against humanity,” implying such crimes were being committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. Israeli defense against indiscriminate rocket fire lobbed by Palestinians into apartment blocks, daycare facilities, and other clearly civilian targets is not a crime. To insinuate that Israel is committing such crimes, again without evidence, serves only to provide cover for actual terrorists.

The Democrats and their leadership made a grievous error when they once again placed Omar on the House Foreign Affairs Committee this Congress, granting Omar a seat on this powerful and wide-reaching committee provides her a world stage from which she can continue to spread her antisemitic hatred. This misrepresents to the world the strong bipartisan support for Israel in Congress and in the United States.

I fully support a vote to remove Congresswoman Omar from her spot on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. To be clear, I only support a targeted and specific measure to remove her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. I am not in favor of removing the congresswoman from all her other committee assignments – just the one which affords her the greatest microphone with which to spread her antisemitism.

When Democrats in the last Congress removed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from all of her committee assignments for controversial comments, including suggesting that Omar “,” it was a broad and sweeping penalty intended to politically damage those representatives in the eyes of their constituents. It was not an action targeted on a single committee as is the case with Rep. Omar. There is no comparison. Similarly, Rep. Paul Gosar was removed from all of his committees after posting an animated video showing a cartoon character killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But this measure is applicable only to Omar. The rest of her cohorts in “The Squad”, such as Ocasio-Cortez, are equally guilty of making antisemitic statements as well as advocating to end funding for the purely defensive Iron Dome missile defense system. However, other members of “The Squad” are not afforded the same access to classified material and the same international platform that a seat on the prestigious House Foreign Affairs Committee provides, or we would need to address them as well.

I cannot, in good conscience, let a vocal and active antisemite continue to sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Despite weak apologies, Congresswoman Omar has continually invoked the worst tropes, stereotypes, and conspiracies against the Jewish people and their homeland.

That is why I want to strip Omar of her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Not to do this is to allow hatred against Jewish people to continue. I hope my fellow representatives, both Republican and Democrat, support this measure as well.

U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn has represented Colorado’s 5th Congressional District since 2007.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Polls and politicos said far-right incumbent U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert was supposed to have as much as a . Now, all that¶¶Òőap gone as Colorado and the rest of the country watch a neck-and-neck, back-and-forth race unfold. Boebert’s only leading Democratic challenger Adam Frisch by a fraction of a percentage point.

Frisch, a former Aspen City Councilman, held the country’s attention for much of the week, forcing even the most skeptical observers to wonder if he could beat the incumbent congresswoman, of Silt.

Ultimately, Boebert jumped ahead in the vote count Thursday and held the advantage into Friday. Her lead sits a few hundred votes outside of Colorado’s automatic-recount threshold and Frisch’s only hope of a comeback rests with the scattered and undetermined number of ballots flowing in from out-of-state. Those votes aren’t expected to be counted and reported until later next week.

No matter who wins in the end, Democrats and Republicans alike are studying the race, trying to figure out how it wound up like this.

“Did he over-perform or did she underperform?” Justin Gollob, a political scientist with Colorado Mesa University, asked. “It¶¶Òőap hard to ignore the argument that this was an anti-Boebert election.”

Even before Boebert won the office away from then-incumbent U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton in the 2020 primary election and then Democrat Diane Mitsch Bush in the general election, Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District was considered a relatively safe Republican seat.

The district is the largest in the state and covers the Western Slope and much of southern Colorado, reaching as far north as Pueblo, its largest city. Congressional redistricting, finalized last year, deepened the seat¶¶Òőap Republican bent.

Not only did that redistricting benefit Boebert¶¶Òőap party generally but she also held the power of incumbency, a strong advantage anywhere in the country. Plus she had deep pockets full of cash, a strong fundraising system in place and a louder voice on social media than most politicians.

But the congresswoman was not without her disadvantages, even if they weren’t immediately apparent, according to Casey Burgat, a legislative affairs program director at George Washington University.

While Boebert is widely considered to be a star of the far-right, her constant tweeting and confrontational demeanor pushed voters away as much as it garnered attention. The congresswoman’s first term in office has been marred by controversy far more than it benefitted from policy successes.

Boebert on Thursday on low enthusiasm for up-ticket Republican candidates.

Republicans underperformed both in Colorado and across much of the rest of the country. And turnout in Boebert¶¶Òőap district , nearly matching the under Tipton, who was far less successful in exciting the Republican base than Boebert.

Still, Burgat said Boebert¶¶Òőap own behavior is likely the biggest factor in the CD3 race.

America saw a similar effect in the 2020 presidential election when then-President Donald Trump lost ground with some traditional Republican voters, Burgat said.

Boebert has not only embraced Trump’s style of governing but also the former president himself, along with his penchant to spread conspiracy theories and attack political opponents.

Voters shifting away from the congresswoman can be seen as a direct repudiation of her behavior, Burgat said. And, to a lesser extent, Trump.

“Voters sometimes get tired of defending the actions of their representatives,” Burgat, a Colorado native, said. “They get tired of explaining ‘I agree with her on policy but, man, I’m so tired of how she’s representing that policy.’”

Perhaps one sign of the trouble ahead for Boebert was a primary challenge from state Sen. Don Coram. While she beat him in a landslide (65% to his 35%), that still meant a sizeable chunk of Republicans in the district were moving to oust the congresswoman.

Enter Frisch, who began watching Boebert early in her first term and figured she was much more vulnerable than her contemporaries in Congress like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan.

Frisch said after the June primary that he believed he could grab some of the Republicans that supported Coram and like-minded independent voters. So he hit the district broadcasting an even-keeled message and continually lambasting Boebert¶¶Òőap position in what he calls the “anger-tainment” industry.

“I knew I could earn the trust of some Republicans and a lot of independents and build a coalition,” Frisch told The Denver Post Tuesday night. “Now people are listening with a little more seriousness.”

“She was acting like she had a 75% win margin like Marjorie Taylor Greene but she never bothered to look and nobody bothered to let her know that she only won by five points in 2020,” Frisch added.

Eventually Frisch gained steam, landed spots in the national media and even began raising more money than Boebert. But he had outside help.

Among the most prominent anti-Boebert campaigners was David Wheeler, head of the American Muckrakers political action committee, which helped unseat the similarly controversial in his North Carolina primary bid earlier this year.

Wheeler amplified stories – some of dubious origin – highlighting Boebert¶¶Òőap negative traits and uplifted Frisch’s positive traits.

Among the most impactful stories, Wheeler said, were those surrounding several dogs shot and killed on Boebert¶¶Òőap property (she didn’t shoot them) and a recording of a 911 call after Boebert¶¶Òőap husband confronted neighbors during an argument.

In the end, Gollob said Frisch’s strongest argument for voters on the fence was probably just that he wasn’t Boebert.

Plus, the congresswoman committed a few unforced errors, Wheeler said. She spent a lot of time outside of her district when she should have been courting votes. He called it “Campaign 101 malpractice.”

“Look where she spent her time in the last month,” Wheeler said. “Florida, Tennessee. She was in North Carolina on Sept. 23. That is un-freakin’-heard-of.”

Little reason existed on paper for the congresswoman to change course, Gollob noted. Most political experts considered Frisch to be such a longshot that there wasn’t much polling done in the district. The few polls published showed Boebert with a sizable lead, but Frisch argued he was still within striking distance of the congresswoman.

In the meantime, Frisch kept his head down and stuck with campaign fundamentals, Wheeler said. Ultimately, all the factors combined against Boebert.

“It¶¶Òőap the cumulative effect of all the bulls—,” Wheeler said.

Boebert lost ground in many of her district¶¶Òőap most populous counties. She received a this year in Alamosa, La Plata, Mesa, Moffat and Pueblo counties than she did in 2020. She also lost in her home territory of Garfield County by over 13%, more than twice her losing margin there in 2020.

Boebert¶¶Òőap race against Frisch isn’t yet finished. Even if either candidate wins with enough votes to avoid an automatic recount, they can still request one themselves, so long as they’re willing to pay for it.

Out-of-state ballots can continue to be counted as long as they arrive by Wednesday and votes needing additional signature verification can be fixed until then too. In a race this close, those scattered votes could make all the difference.

Soon after the FBI searched Donald Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend.

Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000% in just a few hours as Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on radio programs and podcasts, as measured by Critical Mention, a media-tracking firm.

Posts mentioning “civil war” jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Trump and “MAGA Republicans” a threat to “the very foundations of our republic” in a speech on democracy in Philadelphia.

Now experts are bracing for renewed discussions of civil war, as the Nov. 8 midterm elections approach and political talk grows more urgent and heated.

More than a century and a half after the actual Civil War, the deadliest war in U.S. history, “civil war” references have become increasingly commonplace on the right. While in many cases the term is used only loosely — shorthand for the nation’s intensifying partisan divisions — observers note that the phrase, for some, is far more than a metaphor.

Polling, social media studies and a rise in threats suggest that a growing number of Americans are anticipating, or even welcoming, the possibility of sustained political violence, researchers studying extremism say. What was once the subject of serious discussion only on the political periphery has migrated closer to the mainstream.

But while that trend is clear, there is far less agreement among experts about what it means.

Some elements of the far right view it literally: a call for an organized battle for control of the government. Others envision something akin to a drawn-out insurgency, punctuated with eruptions of political violence, such as the attack on the FBI’s Cincinnati field office in August. A third group describes the country as entering a “cold” civil war, manifested by intractable polarization and mistrust, rather than a “hot” war with conflict.

The question is what does ‘civil war’ look like and what does it mean,” said Elizabeth Neumann, assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the Homeland Security Department under Trump. “I did not anticipate, nor did anyone else as far as I know, how rapidly the violence would escalate.”

Neumann now works for Moonshot, a private security company that tracks extremism online. Moonshot found a 51% increase in “civil war” references on the most active pages on 4Chan, the fringe online message board, in the week after Biden’s Sept. 1 speech.

But talk of political violence is not relegated to anonymous online forums.

At a Trump rally in Michigan on Saturday night, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said that “Democrats want Republicans dead,” adding that “Joe Biden has declared every freedom-loving American an enemy of the state.” At a recent fundraiser, Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser, said that governors had the power to declare war and that “we’re probably going to see that.”

On Monday, federal prosecutors showed a jury in Washington an encrypted message that Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers armed extremist group, had sent his lieutenants two days after the 2020 presidential election: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.”

Experts say the steady patter of bellicose talk has helped normalize the expectation of political violence.

In late August, a poll of 1,500 adults by YouGov and The Economist found that 54% of respondents who identified as “strong Republicans” believed a civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next decade. Only about a third of all respondents felt such an event was unlikely. A similar survey conducted by the same groups two years ago found nearly 3 in 5 people feeling that a “civil war-like fracture in the U.S.” was either somewhat or very unlikely.

“What you’re seeing is a narrative that was limited to the fringe going into the mainstream,” said Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.

The institute’s researchers tracked tweets mentioning civil war before and after Trump announced the search on Mar-a-Lago. In the five preceding days, they logged an average of roughly 500 tweets an hour. That jumped to 6,000 in the first hour after Trump published a post on Truth Social on the afternoon of Aug. 8, saying “these are dark times for our Nation.” The pace peaked at 15,000 tweets an hour later that evening. A week later, it was still six times higher than the baseline, and the phrase was once again trending on Twitter at month’s end.

Extremist groups have been agitating for some sort of government overthrow for years and, Pape said, the most radical views — often driven by white supremacy or religious fundamentalism — remain marginal, advanced by no more than 50,000 people nationwide.

But a far larger group, he said, are the people who have been influenced by Trump’s complaints about the “Washington swamp” and “deep state” forces working against him and his allies.

Those notions, stirred in a smoldering crucible with QAnon conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine views and election denialism, have fueled a growing hostility toward the federal government and rising talk about states’ rights.

“Did you know that a governor can declare war?” Flynn said at the fundraiser on Sept. 18, for Mark Finchem, a Republican running for secretary of state in Arizona. “And we’re going to probably, we are probably going to see that.”

Neither Flynn nor Finchem responded to a request for comment about the inaccurate remarks. The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war and, in fact, specifically bars states from engaging in war “unless actually invaded.”

However far-fetched, such ideas are often amplified by a proliferating set of social media channels such as the right-wing platform Gab and Trump’s Truth Social.

Social media platforms are rife with groups and boards dedicated to discussions of civil war. One, on Gab, describes itself as a place for “action reports,” “combat vids” and reports of killed in action in “the civil war that is also looking to be a 2nd American Revolution.”

In August, a single tweet stating “I think civil war has just been declared” managed to reach over 17 million profiles despite coming from an account with under 14,000 followers, according to Cybara, an Israeli firm that monitors misinformation.

“Ideas go into echo chambers and it¶¶Òőap the only voice that¶¶Òőap heard; there are no voices of dissent,” said Kurt Braddock, an American University professor who studies how terrorist groups radicalize and recruit.

Braddock said he did not believe these posts indicated any planning for a war. But he worries about what academics call “stochastic terrorism” — seemingly random acts of violence that are, in fact, provoked by “coded language, dog whistles and other subtext” in statements by public figures.

Trump is adept at making such statements, said Braddock, citing Trump’s April 2020 tweet reading “Liberate Michigan!” Less than two weeks later, mobs of heavily armed protesters occupied the state Capitol in East Lansing. He also pointed to Trump’s speech before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when he encouraged thousands of supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol and, later in the same remarks told them, “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

“The statements Trump makes are not overt calls to action, but when you have a huge and devoted following, the chances that one or more people are activated by that are high,” Braddock said.

A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump used the term “civil war” in 2019, when he declared in a tweet that “it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal” if he was removed from office. Last month, Trump said there would be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before” if he was indicted over his handling of the classified documents that were the target of the FBI search.

Other Republicans have used language suggesting the country is on the brink. Greene wrote in August that the Mar-a-Lago search reflected the “type of things that happen in countries during civil war,” in posts to her nearly 900,000 combined followers on Facebook and Telegram. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida likened the FBI to the Gestapo, the secret police in Nazi Germany, saying “this cannot be our country.”

Late last month, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told The Texas Tribune he believed immigration legislation was unlikely in part because of a “political civil war.” He has made similar comments before, including a November 2021 call for Texas to secede if Democrats “destroy the country.”

Nick Dyer, a spokesman for Greene, said that she was “vehemently opposed to political violence” and that her civil war comments were about Democrats, who “are acting like a regime launching a war on their opposition.”

McKinley Lewis, communications director for Scott, said he had “ZERO tolerance for violence of any kind” but added that he “continues to demand answers” related to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search.

Republicans have often argued that their language is political rhetoric and blamed Democrats for twisting it to stoke divisions. It¶¶Òőap Democrats and the left, they said, who are courting violence by labeling Trump’s supporters adherents of what Biden has called “semi-fascism.”

In response to a query about Cruz’s comments, Maria Jeffrey Reynolds, a spokesperson for the senator, said Cruz placed blame on Biden, claiming that he has “driven a wedge down the middle of our country.”

After Biden delivered his speech on democracy, Brian Gibby, a freelance data entry specialist in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote in a Substack post that he believed “the Second Civil War began” with the president¶¶Òőap remarks.

“I have never seen a more divisive, hate-filled speech from an American president,” Gibby wrote.

Asked by The New York Times to explain his views, Gibby said he believed Biden was “escalating a hot conflict in America.” He worries something will happen around the November elections that will be “akin to Jan. 6, but much more violent,” where armed protest groups from both sides of the political spectrum come to blows.

“Plan ahead, stock up, stay safe, get out of cities if you can,” he wrote.

This article originally appeared in .