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Gov. Brian Kemp brought an unusual prop when he took the stage at a Republican conference just days after Donald Trump was charged with a far-reaching conspiracy in an explosive Atlanta indictment. A few minutes into his remarks, the Republican pulled out a tiny pencil.

It was meant to demonstrate, he told conservative activists, how President Joe Biden and Democrats are pencil-whipping Georgians with control of the nations regulatory system. And until Republicans win the pencil battle, he said, they cant put an eraser to his policies.

The sprawling Fulton County indictment last week accusing Trump and 18 allies of orchestrating a broad criminal enterprise has only heightened the paradox for Kemp and other mainstream Republicans who fear his mountain of legal problems and fixation on his 2020 defeat will doom him in 2024.

Trump is now facing 91 charges across four jurisdictions that carry significant prison sentences, but he remains the unquestioned front-runner in the race for the presidency, with massive double-digit leads over his closest rivals.

And Trumps critics are wrestling with the reality that hes waging his comeback on his own terms, dominating the GOP field despite the unprecedented legal peril he faces and grave misgivings from some of the partys top leaders.

That dynamic was on vivid display this weekend at the Gathering, a two-day conference in Atlanta that drew a half-dozen White House contenders where Trump loomed large despite organizer Erick Ericksons preference to avoid mention of his name.

Some, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, tiptoed around mention of Trump and his mountain of legal problems. Business executive Vivek Ramaswamy promised to pardon Trump on day one if hes elected, calling the indictments a politicization of the justice system.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Only former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie leaned into criticizing Trump, saying hes doomed to lose Georgia and the White House if Republicans choose him as their nominee for a third consecutive presidential campaign.

Theres nothing more selfish than what hes doing, said Christie, who is lagging in single digits in most public polls. Hes been charged with four different crimes. And yet he still persists in insisting that he has to be a candidate for president.

Yet with Trumps huge leads in most public polls, Georgia Republicans are also coming to grips with the likelihood or at least the growing possibility that hell be back atop the GOP ticket in 2024.

Already, many state Republicans and activists are vowing to back Trump if hes the nominee, casting any conservative contender as better than four more years of Biden in the White House.

I was on Team Trump, but Ive had it with him. I have to begin to wonder why he cant accept reality, said JoEllen Artz of Rutledge, one of hundreds of conservatives at the conference. Do I really want him to be president? No, but Ill still vote for him. Anyone who runs on the Democratic side represents even worse.

Of course, her sentiment also underscores the partys challenge in Georgia, one of a handful of politically competitive states on the 2026 map.

Former football star Herschel Walkers troubled campaign for the U.S. Senate promoted by Trump collapsed last year as legions of Georgians who cast ballots for other GOP statewide candidates split their ticket to back Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock in the Senate campaign.

And a bloc of moderate and independent voters revolted against Trump in 2020 to help flip the state to the Democratic column for the first time since 1992. Georgia Democrats envision another battleground victory particularly if Trump is atop the ballot.

Republicans can plug their extreme, out-of-touch agenda of cutting Medicare and Social Security, banning abortion nationwide, and raising costs for families all they want, said U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, chair of the state Democratic Party.

But Georgians already rejected MAGA extremism in 2020, she said, and well do it again in 2024.

Credit: Nathan Posner for The AJC

Credit: Nathan Posner for The AJC

For now, many state Republicans are engaged in a tightrope act, neither condemning Trump nor praising his actions. Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns, whose fractious caucus includes far-right conservatives and mainstream Republicans, tried to navigate those competing pressures in a letter this week to members.

I agree with Governor Brian Kemps statement released on Tuesday: The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus, he wrote.

Any hint of disloyalty to Trump can bring backlash, too. After Kemp publicly rebuked Trumps lies about a rigged 2020 election in Georgia, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene warned it could spur an ultraconservative revolt and publicly mused over a Senate bid in 2026 when Kemp may seek the office.

He could be stopping what (Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis is) doing, as a Republican governor, but instead he came out and wants to basically argue with President Trump all in an effort to defend his own ego, said Greene, one of Trumps most ardent Georgia allies. And Republican voters in Georgia are not going to be very forgiving of that.

Kemps tried to find his own balance. Like other Republican leaders, hes pledged to support Trump if he wins the GOP nod. He tells Republicans they can believe whatever you want about the 2020 election so long as they focus on the 2024 vote.

If we dont win, we dont get to govern, Kemp said. We dont get the pencil. Its that simple to me.

Staff writer Tia Mitchell contributed to this report.

Excerpt from:
Trump is front-runner, but indictments worry Georgia Republicans - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Photo: Saquan Stimpson/CNP for NY Post/Shutterstock

The implosion of the proposed criminal plea agreement between the Justice Department and Hunter Biden left plenty of questions in its wake for legal observers, as well as plenty of room for some old-fashioned political opportunism. Last year, congressional Republicans had urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to provide David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney for Delaware who has overseen the wide-ranging criminal investigation since 2018, with special counsel authorities and protections in order to insulate his investigation from political pressure. They finally got what they wanted, but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, among many other Republicans, nevertheless criticized the appointment and accused Weiss of an effort to whitewash the Biden family corruption.

The supposed reason for this about-face is that the now-scuttled plea agreement Weiss and his team offered Biden was a sweetheart deal a claim that Republicans have been making for months even though Weiss was appointed as U.S. Attorney by then-President Donald Trump, is a registered Republican, and was confirmed by voice vote in the Senate while it was controlled by the GOP. New reporting in recent days, however, strongly suggests that Biden has been treated worse not better than typical people in his position thanks to the apparent incompetence of Weisss team and some successful ref-working by Republicans.

As I noted last week, Bidens plea deal publicly fell apart after the presiding judge in Delaware questioned the scope of an immunity provision contained in one of the documents submitted to the court as part of the proposed agreement. That provision specified that Biden would get immunity for any federal crimes encompassed by the facts described in the proposed plea documents, which concerned Bidens alleged failure to pay taxes on income from his consulting business and his unlawful possession of a gun as a drug user. The proposed resolution would have required Biden to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and enter a pretrial diversion program to resolve the gun charge.

When pressed on the scope of immunity by the judge, a prosecutor on Weisss team told her that the deal would not preclude charging Biden with other crimes in the future, including violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act connected to work for his overseas clientele. Bidens lawyers balked, saying that they would not agree to a deal that did not definitively resolve the long-running inquiry. The judge did not accept the plea, instead sending everyone home to do some more work and answer some of her questions.

The whole thing was odd. Plea hearings sometimes go awry, but it is rare to see them go off the rails as the result of legal questions that both sides could (or should) easily have anticipated.

After the hearing, according to reporting late last week from the Washington Post, prosecutors and lawyers for Biden tried to refashion a deal, but the effort failed as a result of the federal governments insistence that any immunity offered be narrow while the FBI keeps investigating Hunter Bidens work for foreign entities and by the younger Bidens equally fervent demand that any agreement he signs should put his legal troubles behind him.

The confusion on the part of Biden and his lawyers makes more sense in light of additional information provided over the weekend by the New York Times which reported, most notably, that earlier this year Weiss appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. (This would have been what prosecutors call a declination a decision not to file any charges against someone at the conclusion of a criminal investigation and it happens regularly in the ordinary course of federal prosecutors work.)

Republicans no doubt would have thrown a fit in this scenario, but judging by the publicly available facts, this would have been a very defensible resolution to the investigation, particularly given the way comparable cases have been handled by the department. People get off without criminal charges for failing to pay much larger sums of money than Biden owed to tax authorities. The gun charge is similarly dubious, and the notion that there is a chargeable case against Biden under FARA or a related statute an idea that is basically now taken for granted in conservative media is also open to serious doubt. In fact, government lawyers in recent years have seen a slew of high-profile, embarrassing court losses amid a supposed crackdown on foreign lobbying in FARA-related cases.

According to the Times, Weiss at one point even told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses. (A law enforcement official forcefully denied this claim to the paper.)

So what happened? The Times reports that the posture of Weisss office changed around the time that two IRS whistleblowers came forward earlier this year publicly claiming that Biden had received preferential treatment. The whistleblowers account is far from airtight, but it has drawn extraordinary attention and support from congressional Republicans and conservative media outlets. Amid the publicity, per the Times, Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.

A senior law enforcement official disputed that political pressure played a role in the shift, but this is very hard to take at face value. As a prosecutor considering a plea agreement, you need to be cognizant of maintaining and maximizing your leverage like anyone negotiating a settlement within both legal and ethical bounds. It makes very little sense to suggest to a potential defendant that you are even considering a declination if you do not seriously mean it, because doing so makes clear that you see serious weaknesses in your case thereby undercutting your own negotiating leverage if (or when) you need it.

A second deeply curious feature of this saga is Weisss teams recent insistence that their investigation was going to meaningfully continue even after the plea deal went through. Again, this makes very little sense as a straightforward matter of prosecutorial practice. A successful plea agreement requires the government to have some leverage ideally as much as possible under the circumstances and the main way to get it is by pursuing and compiling the most comprehensive list of chargeable offenses before approaching the defense to propose a deal limited to a smaller number of charges.

Under the circumstances, most competent defense lawyers faced with a proposed deal along the lines of the aborted Biden agreement would have assumed that the investigation was ending. Why else would prosecutors have proposed it, and if you were Bidens lawyer, why would you agree if you thought the government could simply pocket the plea deal and then later charge him with more crimes related to the same facts? (Indeed, one of Bidens current lawyers made this point explicitly in an interview on Friday.)

Despite all this, the Times and Posts reports do not entirely exonerate Bidens lawyers. There appear to have been warning signs along the way to the now-notorious plea hearing including revisions by Weisss team to a draft of the immunity provision and their insistence that Bidens lawyers not issue a public press release saying that the investigation had ended. In hindsight, these changes should have raised red flags that at least prompted Bidens lawyers to have a more explicit discussion with Weisss team about the exact status of their investigation at the time the deal was announced, but apparently that never happened.

The upshot of all this is that congressional Republicans, despite all of their public hemming and hawing this year and their more recent claims that Biden was getting a sweetheart deal, appear to have gotten a good deal of what they wanted out of Weiss and Garland. Weisss team is now free to file the same and possibly more charges against Biden in another venue. They have said that they intend to go to trial, and if that happens, the proceedings are likely to extend through much of next year unless another deal comes together to resolve the case.

At the same time, the specter of additional charges is likely to hang over Biden throughout the prosecution which, depending on where and when the next round of charges is eventually filed, could conceivably last through much of his fathers campaign for reelection next year. To top it all off, there will be a wrap-up report that probably will make Biden look even worse. None of this looks much like a sweetheart deal of any sort, either in the form of the proposed deal or the actual, much messier reality that has followed.

We do not have to look that far in the past for another time when Republicans used their control of Congress and investigative powers to significantly damage a Democratic presidential contender. In 2015, McCarthy himself accidentally admitted that his party was conducting a congressional investigation over Benghazi to politically damage thenpresidential candidate Hillary Clinton. We appear to be in the midst of a replay of that effort, with Weisss team now evidently providing an assist.

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Link:
Actually, Hunter Biden Is Getting It Worse From the DOJ - New York Magazine

On the Issues

The economy is almost always one of the most important issues to voters, and that is certainly the case now. Inflation is declining from the abnormally high levels of 2022, but its still high.

For the most part, the Republican presidential candidates have stuck to general calls to reduce taxes, spending and regulations. But the details, like which taxes they would lower, by how much and for whom; what they would spend less on; or which regulations they would lift, are often lacking.

He deployed traditional Republican moves like tax cuts alongside protectionism.

As president, Donald J. Trump mixed Republican orthodoxy on the economy with populism.

He has cast conservative economic plans as a way to stick it to elites.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has framed his economic plan as a way to disempower bureaucrats and elites. His 10-point blueprint is titled We Win. They Lose.

He has called for reducing spending and regulations, but hasnt given many specifics.

We have to turn the spigot off and stop spending money we

dont have,

trying to impress people that are not impressed anywhere

in the world.

If we cut taxes back to where they

were just a few years ago, we can put $4,000 back

in the pockets like we did just a few years ago so

that you get to make your decisions on how

to support your household, and not expect the government

to figure it out for you.

He says he would increase G.D.P. growth by stopping efforts to combat climate change.

Our Federal Reserve

the U.S. Fed

its been trying to play God over the financial system

for far too long.

Except effectively, its been the equivalent of playing God

with a fat finger.

The Fed has done a disastrous job

in its mandate of trying to balance

inflation and unemployment.

Its like the equivalent of trying to hit two targets

with a single arrow.

Im going to put the Fed back in its place by telling them

to focus on stabilizing the U.S. dollar.

You could say as measured against a basket

of currencies.

And that should be their sole mandate.

You shouldnt even know who most Americans,

at least shouldnt know the name of whos leading

the Federal Reserve because it should be such a

ministerial function.

She says shes more serious about cutting spending than other Republicans.

He wants to cut agencies and regulations and narrow the Federal Reserves mandate.

Former Vice President Mike Pence attributes inflation largely to government spending, which he says is unsustainable, and to climate policies, which he calls a war on American energy. His plan for reducing costs includes:

He has called for reducing spending and regulations, but hasnt given many specifics.

Like most Republicans, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey blames Democratic spending for the high, though now declining, inflation rates of the past couple of years.

He wants to balance the budget and cut the federal nonmilitary work force by 10 percent.

The aim of former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas to balance the federal budget is an extraordinarily difficult task, one that would likely require cuts to popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, which he has left the door open to.

He has called for cutting taxes and reducing regulations, but hasnt given many specifics.

Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota has said that strengthening the economy needs to be the absolute top priority. However, he has stuck to broad terms, without detailing how he would do so.

He has called for reducing spending, but hasnt given many specifics.

Former Representative Will Hurd of Texas argues that President Biden has focused too much on monetary policies, like interest rates, and too little on fiscal policies, like taxes and spending.

He has called for reducing spending and taxes, but hasnt given many specifics.

Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami has not provided many details on his economic plans, beyond calling generally for lower spending and taxes. His campaign did not respond to a request for more information.

Read the rest here:
Republican Presidential Candidates on the Economy and Inflation - The New York Times

Theres an old, misguided saying: If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Donald Trump has found out that does not work with everyone. The indictments keep coming and more will come forth. How long does it take for Republican candidates and the Republican Party to stop sitting on the fence, step forward and take a stand against Mr. Trump?

The Republican National Convention is almost a year away, in July 2024. Theres still time for Republican candidates and others to make their move.

Do we really want a president who is so corrupt and delusional?

Peter Ferrante Portland

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Letter to the editor: Republicans need to leave Trump behind - Press Herald

To participate in the first Republican presidential debate on Aug. 23, candidates must meet challenging new criteria, including having at least 40,000 donors and voter support of at least 1 percent in three approved polls. But the requirement causing the most consternation is a pledge to support the eventual nominee.

The candidates will be sent the pledge only after meeting the other qualifications, according to a person familiar with the process, and will have until 48 hours before the debate to meet those criteria, giving them until the last minute to make up their minds. Here is what they have said:

Unclear. Former President Donald J. Trump has not said whether he will sign the pledge.

In February, he refused to commit to supporting the eventual nominee, telling the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, It would have to depend on who the nominee was. But that was before the Republican National Committee made the pledge a debate requirement.

Even if he signs, it is unlikely to mean much. He signed the same pledge in 2015 and then reneged on it.

Unclear. Asked last month whether he would support Mr. Trump in a general election, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida didnt give a straight answer.

Mr. DeSantis vaguely indicated he might make the pledge, saying, You respect the process, and you respect the peoples decisions. But he made no commitment.

Yes. Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota has indicated that he will sign the pledge.

Im going to support whoever the Republican candidate is going forward in 2024, he told ABC News.

Mixed messages. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has suggested he will sign the pledge: I will do what I need to do to be up on that stage, he told CNN.

Im going to take the pledge just as seriously as Donald Trump took it in 2016, he said, adding that he considered it useless and had told the R.N.C. as much.

Yes. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and former United Nations ambassador, has committed to signing the pledge.

Absolutely irresponsible that Trump, DeSantis, and others wont commit 100% to supporting the Republican nominee, she wrote on Twitter. Theres no room for personal vendettas in this battle to save our country.

No. Former Representative Will Hurd of Texas is the only candidate who has ruled out signing the pledge.

I cant lie to get access to a microphone, he told CNN, adding: Im not going to support Donald Trump. I recognize the impact that it has on my ability to get access to the debate stage, but I cant lie.

Mixed messages. Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas has ruled out voting for Mr. Trump if he is convicted of a felony, but said he would sign the pledge out of confidence that Mr. Trump wouldnt win the primary.

You would have to make the pledge based on the fact that Donald Trump is not going to be our nominee and youre confident of it, he told ABC News.

He asked the R.N.C. to clarify that there is no pledge to support a nominee if they are found guilty of espionage or a serious felony. (The R.N.C. said no.) At the same time, he says he will do whatever is required because the debates are important.

Mixed messages. Former Vice President Mike Pence initially seemed to commit during a CNN town hall event, saying, Ive always supported the Republican nominee for president in the United States, and Ill support the Republican nominee in 2024.

But he struggled to reconcile that with his assertion that anyone who puts themselves above the Constitution, as he says Mr. Trump did, should never be president.

He said he did not believe that Mr. Trump would win and dodged follow-up questions. I dont think my old running mate is going to be the Republican nominee for president, and Im very confident, very confident, that well be able to support the Republican nominee, he said, suggesting that he might not if it is Mr. Trump.

Mixed messages. The entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has waffled on the pledge.

In February, he said he would make it. But last month, he gave a caveat: If the other candidates in this race make that pledge, I will stand by and be willing to, he told Fox News, adding, Im ready to play ball, but I require the other candidates to play ball as well.

Yes. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has indicated that he will sign.

All Republican candidates would be better than any Democrat candidate, he told Fox News, while saying he was confident he would win the nomination.

Yes. Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami didnt vote for Mr. Trump in 2020 but says he will sign the pledge.

I think every single Republican candidate who wants to be on the debate stage has to pledge to support the nominee, and I will do that as well, he told ABC News.

Go here to see the original:
Which Republicans Have Pledged to Support Their Nominee - The New York Times