And here he is again:

The subpoena [in Arctic Frost] requested records and communications related to over 430 individual and organizations — all of them appear to be aimed at Republicans,” the Iowa Republican [Grassley] added, noting requests sent to the late conservative icon Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and the Republican Attorneys General Association.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of the nine Republicans whose phone metadata was sought, said “Arctic Frost is Joe Biden’s Watergate.”

“Merrick Garland was a fundamentally corrupt attorney general. Jack Smith was a fundamentally corrupt prosecutor. This was a political enemies list from the beginning,” he told reporters, brandishing the court order that demanded AT&T hand over his cell records to the feds.

The order was signed by US District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg and barred the cell carrier from letting Cruz know about the request “for at least one year,” he said.

The Texas Republican and others called for Boasberg’s impeachment in the House, with Cruz claiming the judge was “abusing his power” by asserting in the order there were “reasonable grounds to believe that such disclosure will result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses and serious jeopardy to the investigation.” …

“If a judge signs an order reaching a factual conclusion for which there is zero evidence whatsoever, that judge is abusing his power. I am right now calling on the House of Representatives to impeach Judge Boasberg.”

Boasberg issued a scathing order against the Trump administration earlier this year to halt deportation flights of alleged MS-13, Tren de Aragua and other gang members from the US to a Salvadoran mega-prison.

The MSM doesn’t seem to be covering this; certainly not in the way it deserves. If Watergate had occurred under a Democrat administration, it would have been a nothingburger in the MSM as well.

But impeachment won’t lead to conviction in the Senate, for obvious reasons: no Democrat would vote for it. Attorney “Shipwreckedcrew” writes, however:

Impeachment by the House, even if a conviction in the Senate is unlikely, would have the salutary effect of having the entire episode aired publicly, and forcing the Dem. Senators to vote in such a way that has them affirm their approval of this kind of effort against sitting Senators of the opposition party.

unfortunately, I believe Democrat voters would applaud. That’s what it’s come to.

The post Our old friend Judge Boasberg enabled Arctic Frost appeared first on The New Neo.

Sen. Ted Cruz to FBI Director Wray: “DOJ has become thoroughly politicized. I think this is a problem that began during the Obama admin. I think it metastasized with career officials during the Trump admin. And I think it continues and is even worse today under the Biden admin.” pic.twitter.com/AzV7C0GC9r

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 4, 2022

If you want some clarification on the Gadsden flag, see this, which also describes the leftist reaction to the fact that Florida now has a Gadsden flag variant available, proceeds from the sale of which will go to benefit veterans.

More from Cruz and Wray:

Under questioning from Sen. Ted Cruz, FBI Director Chris Wray admits the FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Detroit Field Office who oversaw the Whitmer kidnapping entrapment and "absolute debacle" is now in charge of the Washington, D.C. Office, overseeing the J6 investigation. pic.twitter.com/85Y7QJXeyy

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 4, 2022

By the way, Wray’s retort to Cruz, beginning at 00:48, that the Michigan case “is now pending a retrial” is quite misleading. The first reason is that it’s only two out of four defendants who are being retried, because the jury in the original trial was hung for two of them and acquitted two others outright. Both the original trial and the retrial were federal cases, and so it’s the federal government that made the decision to keep going after the two defendants – the same federal government that entrapped them in the first place. The acquittals and the hung jury were a great embarrassment to the federal government and the FBI – as Wray certainly knows despite his Sergeant Schultz impersonation – and the feds refuse to drop the case because they are determined to redeem themselves even though the evidence remains lousy. Who knows, they may even get their convictions. If they don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.

The post Head of the FBI Wray testifies in the usual manner appeared first on The New Neo.

I’m not one of those people, though. His statement took his standing down a notch in my eyes, but it didn’t invalidate his lengthy record and to me it’s at least plausible that his explanation is true: that he was using a term he’s used for many years to describe people who attack police, no matter what their politics, and by no means did he mean all the January 6th defendants.

Rejection of Cruz for his statement is the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from a lot of people on the right, though. It seems to me to be a zero tolerance policy that sometimes backfires and leads to Democrat victory and some very bad outcomes. I do believe that “the perfect is often the enemy of the good.”

So, what has Cruz previously said on these subjects? I did a bit of research, and here are some statements from Cruz last August about the long-term imprisonment of the January 6th defendants:

Republican Senator Ted Cruz is under fire for arguing that some participants in the Capitol riot should be spared prosecution.

Mr. Cruz told HuffPost that people who “assaulted a police officer” should spend “a long, long time in jail”, but balked at criminal charges for participants who entered the Capitol but did not harm anyone.

Here’s the HuffPost article:

“If, on the other hand, the Biden administration is targeting and persecuting people for exercising political speech that is nonviolent and simply expressing their peaceful support for a political party different from that in power, that is not the purpose of our criminal justice system,” he added.

There’s also this letter from Cruz to Merrick Garland:

In June, Mr Cruz and Senator Tommy Tuberville sent a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland complaining that Capitol rioters are facing harsher treatment than people who protested during the George Floyd demonstrations in 2020.

“DOJ’s apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals who allegedly committed crimes during the spring and summer 2020 protests stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of the individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 breach of the US Capitol,” the duo wrote.

Also, from the same article (which is very anti-Cruz in the usual manner of the MSM):

Mr Cruz and many of his Republican colleagues have repeatedly tried to downplay the insurrection on 6 January. The senator has a vested interest in doing so, as he led the charge to reject the electoral ballot count the day the riot occurred.

Cruz was one of the main members of Congress defending the challenge to the 2020 election. He also voted against the Jan 6th commission’s establishment.

And what of Cruz’s previous use of the term “terrorist” to describe those who attack police? Well, there’s this from August of 2020 during the BLM/Antifa riots:

‘What you and I don’t have the right to do is to hurt somebody else, to physically assault someone else, to firebomb police cars, to loot and destroy a small business, to murder a police officer and sadly we’ve seen all of that in riots across our country.’

As well as blaming the violence on Antifa, Cruz also laid into Black Lives Matter organizers who he said are ‘pursuing a radical agenda’.

‘These are violent leftists, many of them are anarchists, some of them are affiliated with Antifa the national terrorist organization, some are affiliated with the group called Black Lives Matter which is founded by and is run by open Marxists – people who are calling for a Marxist government in the United States,’ he said.

‘We’re seeing radicals whose objective is what’s going on in Portland every night – they’re assaulting the federal courthouse and trying to burn it down.’…

‘The federal police officers are doing their job of stopping terrorists burning the courthouse to the ground,’ Cruz insisted….

[Many Democrats have made] the very unfortunate political determination that…given the choice between standing with innocent Americans or violent terrorists seeking to hurt their fellow citizens, to date too many of them have stood with terrorists.’

Last March, when Cruz was questioning FBI director Wray, Cruz said this:

In the past year, we have seen massive rioting and violence as extremists, many of them leftist extremists, took to the streets across the country, in just two weeks, at the end of May and early June, over 700 law enforcement officers were injured. Looking at all of 2020, over 14,000 people had been arrested in 49 cities, and at least 25 people have died in the violence. And it’s estimated that the property damages from these riots could exceed $2 billion. What is the FBI doing to counter this ongoing pattern of domestic terrorism?

Also, because Cruz was one of the people heading up the legal procedural challenges to the certification of the electoral votes on January 6th, 2021, as such he drew virulent criticism both before and after the January 6th demonstrations and violence:

U.S. Congressman Joaquin Castro and Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa both said on Wednesday that Cruz should resign…

“I think that’s what it was intended to be: a coup,” he said. “This is an effort by people — who were being encouraged by the President of the United States, and people like Ted Cruz — to take the law into their own hands, and to force the declaration of Donald Trump to be the president of the United States, when he lost the election, when the people in the United States voted by almost 8 million votes to kick him out of office.”

He said Cruz should resign, and the Republican Party should take steps to restore trust in American democracy.

Not that Cruz ever considered resigning, but he probably has extra reason for being angry at the demonstrators/protestors who got out of hand and committed violent acts on January 6th, because he was blamed for it, along with Trump.

I think that, not only did Cruz make an error in calling the January 6th defendants “terrorists,” but I also think that Cruz’s previous remarks defending the non-violent among them haven’t been as strong as I would have liked. But he did defend them previously, and Cruz’s nature has never been to be a firebrand.

My opinion about Cruz even prior to these recent remarks of his is that he never was going to become president. He simply doesn’t have the personality. He’s smart and he can actually be very humorous, but he’s stiff – and the lawyer in him is always in the forefront. Most people don’t warm to him for those reasons, and I think there are better Republican contenders for 2024.

But I’m not turning on him, either; not for this. I think that would be wrong, given his history. He’s been one of the better GOP senators for a long time.

The post On throwing Ted Cruz under the bus appeared first on The New Neo.

A while back their rage was directed at Tom Cotton, who had the temerity to suggest that Trump had a right to call federal troops to stop the widespread destructive looting and rioting in American cities. This was, of course, before the Democrats decided to make Washington DC into an armed camp to supposedly protect their precious selves from right-wing rioters who had broken some windows and apparently killed and burned no one and nothing. But at the time of Cotton’s op-ed in the Times, its mere publication resulted in large numbers of hard-boiled young Times reporters getting the vapors, and in the demonization of the terrible tyrant Cotton.

Josh Hawley is in their sights, as is Governor DeSantis of Florida – really, any GOP member who is perceived as a presidential possibility and who is not a RINO. Come to think of it, there are no RINO presidential possibilities at the moment, and I would guess not in the foreseeable future. But the Democrats would dearly like to leave only the RINOs standing.

The post One by one, the Democrats will be trying to destroy all the Republicans they fear for 2024 appeared first on The New Neo.

After the 2020 election, Republicans need to rebrand their party as the champions of working-class voters and steer away from its traditional embrace of big business, Sen. Marco Rubio said in an interview with Axios.

Why it matters: Rubio told me he is leaving the door open for a 2024 presidential run — so his comments are some of the earliest signals of how the GOP contenders may try to acknowledge President Trump’s successes while finding their own path.

“The future of the party is based on a multiethnic, multiracial working class coalition,” said Rubio…

Rubio said Republicans have long believed in and supported the free market, “but the free market exists to serve our people. Our people don’t exist to serve the free market.”…

He added that working class Americans [are] “very suspicious, quite frankly, dismissive of elites at every level. And obviously that’s a powerful sentiment.”

What to make of this?

(1) Rubio thinks Trump has reshaped the Republican Party and given it a clear direction.
(2) Rubio would like to run for president in 2024.

Rubio is an interesting politician – at least, to me. He has a habit of annoying the Republican base by being too cooperative with Democrats, particularly on immigration – at least, he was in the past. But I’ve long felt he’s got some pluses that make him attractive as a politician. The first is that he’s actually pretty smart and can speak quite well. The second is that he’s young and the third is that he’s Hispanic. Hispanics may be a new strength for the Republican Party.

Ted Cruz – whom I prefer – has the same characteristics but is smarter and without the baggage of compromise. But Cruz is (or used to be) personally off-putting to a lot of people. I was not one of them; I’m a Cruz fan. But I recognize that some people just plain don’t like him.

Neither Cruz nor Rubio has forsaken Trump at this point, either. I saw a clip of Cruz saying that Trump has every right to challenge irregularities in the election (can’t find it at the moment), and here’s Rubio on it:

“At the core of our republic, its legitimacy comes from people’s confidence in the elections,” Rubio, a Republican, told Fox News host Sean Hannity Tuesday evening. “Right now, you got half this country that has doubts about the veracity of this election.”…

Rubio appeared to back Trump’s push for recounts in the 2020 election, saying that both Democrats and Republicans “should be welcoming of having this process be open and transparent.”

“That’s why the process that exists in the law, there’s a process in the law that exists, after the election, before the results are certified,” Rubio said.

“That process has to be allowed to move forward. Otherwise, we’re going to have a result here that half the country will harbor significant doubts about.”

Why am I talking about 2024? Well, why not? It’s a very depressing time right now. I’m well aware – very aware – that if massive fraud is really occurring in elections (as may be the case), it really doesn’t matter who runs. I don’t need to be reminded of that.

But I also know that I don’t see the future and I need to also focus on things that don’t bring me down. I try to have a balance here, and in addition that means that I sometimes talk about frivolous things, or history, or art, or the deeper questions of life, or any number of non-political topics.

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