Foreign

Epstein File Fight Sparks GOP Tensions

By Web News 297

US President Donald Trump has urged House Republicans to vote to release all government-held files on the late convicted paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, saying “we have nothing to hide.”

Trump reversed his earlier opposition on Sunday night after House Democrats released a small batch of Epstein-related emails, some referencing him.

He has long denied any involvement in Epstein’s crimes and dismissed renewed attention as a Democrat-driven “hoax.”

Republicans increasingly appear ready to support the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which would force the Justice Department to publish all unclassified records.

The bill is expected to pass the House this week, though the Senate outcome is uncertain.

On his Truth Social platform, Trump said the Justice Department had already released “tens of thousands of pages” and insisted, “the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!” He urged Republicans to “get BACK ON POINT.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson backed Trump’s position, saying Democrats were using the issue as a political weapon.

“Trump has clean hands… He’s not worried about it,” Johnson told Fox News.

Democrats last week released three email exchanges between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, including a 2011 email in which Epstein wrote: “that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump… [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him.”

The White House said the victim was Virginia Giuffre and that the emails do not allege wrongdoing by Trump.

Republicans later published 20,000 additional files, accusing Democrats of “cherry-picking” to “slander” the president.

The push for transparency has sparked a feud between Trump and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who accused him of abandoning “America First.”

Trump called her “wacky” and a “traitor” and suggested she should be unseated.

Survivors and Giuffre’s family urged lawmakers to support full disclosure, writing: “Imagine if you yourself were a survivor. What would you want for yourself?”

The Justice Department has confirmed it is also examining Epstein’s ties to major banks and prominent Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

BBC/Maxwell Oyekunle

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Foreign

US Speaker: Stalemate Persists after 3 Days, 11 Votes

By Web News 595

The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, has failed in his latest bid to get elected Speaker in a paralysis of US government not seen since the pre-Civil War era.

A cohort of right-wingers in his party derailed an 11th attempt to elect him on the third day of voting.

Republicans took over the House in November’s midterm elections, but the impasse has left the chamber unable to swear in members or pass bills.

The House has adjourned until Friday.

Not since 1860, when the United States union was fraying over the issue of slavery, has the lower chamber of Congress voted so many times to pick a Speaker. Back then it took 44 rounds of ballots.

A group of 20 hard-line Republican lawmakers are refusing to give Mr McCarthy the necessary 218 votes.

The rebels are sceptical of the California congressman’s conservative bona fides, despite his endorsement from former President Donald Trump.

One of the dissidents, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, told the BBC he simply does not trust Mr McCarthy.

The congressman said Mr McCarthy’s team had threatened political retaliation against them if they did not fall in line, in the weeks leading up this deadlock.

“We were going to be thrown off committees,” Mr Norman said. “We’re going to lose every privilege we had.

“And we’d basically told them, ‘If we can’t ask questions, if we can’t vet out the most powerful person that we’re getting ready to put in office, then we’re out.'”

Meanwhile, the minority Democrats continued to vote in unison for their leader, New York’s Hakeem Jeffries, the first black person ever to lead a party in Congress. But it seems unlikely that he could win over six Republican defectors to become Speaker.

Lawmakers in the sharply divided chamber will reconvene at noon (17:00 GMT) on Friday, the second anniversary of a riot by Trump supporters at the US Capitol.

Despite the holdouts, Mr McCarthy – who has served as the top House Republican since 2019 – has won support from more than 200 Republicans, over 90% of his caucus. They are growing restless as their agenda stalls.

“I’m very worried about it and I’m on the intelligence committee,” said Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick. He added that he and the other committee members are not able to received classified briefings until lawmakers are sworn in.

Rules do not require the speaker to be a member of the House, and on Thursday, Florida Republican rebel Matt Gaetz cast a protest ballot for Mr Trump to serve in the role.

“This ends in one of two ways: either Kevin McCarthy withdraws from the race or we construct a straitjacket that he is unwilling to evade,” he said.

Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert nominated a lawmaker from Oklahoma, telling her colleagues to move past Mr McCarthy.

“It is not happening,” she said, adding that Republicans “need to get to a point where we start evaluating what life after Kevin McCarthy looks like”.

Mr McCarthy has offered a number of concessions to the rebels, including a seat on the influential rules committee, which sets the terms for debate on legislation in the chamber. He also agreed to lower the threshold for triggering a vote on whether to unseat the Speaker, to only one House member.

During Thursday’s eight-hour session, he was seen huddling with aides and having animated one-on-one talks with colleagues.

The Speaker of the House is the second in line to the presidency, after Vice-President Kamala Harris. They set the agenda in the House, and no legislative business can be conducted there without them.

In November, Republicans won the House by a slender margin of 222 to 212 in the 435-seat chamber. Democrats retained control of the Senate.

BBC/Simeon Ugbodovon

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Foreign

America Mid-term Election: Democrats, Republican Battle for Congress

By Web News 572

Millions of Americans will vote in the midterm elections on Tuesday, with the balance of power in Congress at stake.

The entire US House of Representatives, about a third of the Senate and key state governorships are up for grabs.

Democrats currently control the White House and – by razor-thin margins – both chambers of Congress.

The party in power typically sheds an average of two dozen or so seats in the midterms, which fall midway through a president’s four years in office.

While Mr Biden himself is not up for re-election on Tuesday, midterms are often seen as a referendum on a president’s leadership.

Despite delivering on promises to lower prescription drug prices, expand clean energy and revamp US infrastructure, Mr Biden has seen his popularity suffer following the worst inflation in four decades, record illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border, and voter concerns about crime.

A political thumping for Democrats on Tuesday could embolden murmurs within the party about whether Mr Biden, who turns 80 this month, should run for re-election in 2024.

According to a tally by the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, more than half of Republican midterms candidates have raised doubts about the integrity of the 2020 White House election, echoing Mr Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud.

Mr Trump spent the eve of election day holding a final rally in Ohio alongside Republican Senate candidate JD Vance.

The former president, who has been teasing a 2024 White House comeback bid, said he would make a “very big announcement” at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago on 15 November.

Mr Trump’s party needs to net only five seats to flip the House and a single seat to take over the evenly divided Senate.

Non-partisan election observers project the Republicans will pick up roughly 15-25 seats in the 435-seat House.

But the battle for the upper chamber of Congress could go either way, according to most political forecasts, and is expected to come down to hotly fought races in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.

More than 43.5m early votes have already been cast, according to the US Elections Project.

But it might be days or weeks before the outcome of the midterms is clear if races are close, as some states allow ballots to be posted on election day, and there could be recounts.

BBC/Oluwayemisi Owonikoko

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Foreign

Marjorie Taylor Greene: US House Votes to Strip Republican of Key Posts

By Web News 613

The US House of Representatives has voted to expel a Republican congresswoman from two committees over incendiary remarks she made before being elected last November.

Marjorie Taylor Greene had promoted baseless QAnon conspiracy theories and endorsed violence against Democrats.

Before the vote, she said she regretted her views, which included claims that school shootings and 9/11 were staged.

Eleven Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the motion by 230-199.

It means the representative – who was elected in November, representing a district in the southern state of Georgia – cannot take up her place on the education and budget committees.

This would limit her ability to shape policy as most legislation goes through a committee before reaching the House floor. Committee positions can determine the influence of individual lawmakers in their party.

It is highly unusual for one party to intervene in another party’s House committee assignments.

How did she explain her comments?

According to The Hill, a political news outlet, Mrs Greene received a standing ovation at a closed-doors meeting with members of her party on Wednesday after she apologised for her past remarks, and on Thursday before the vote, she expressed regret for her past comments.

On the floor of the House, she said her controversial remarks had been made before she ran for office last year.

  • She said she had “stopped believing” in QAnon – a conspiracy theory claiming that former President Donald Trump was waging a clandestine war on a Satan-worshipping cabal of child-abusers and cannibals – sometime in 2018 after finding “misinformation, lies and things that weren’t true” in the group’s posts
  • She walked back comments suggesting that school shootings – such as the 2012 attack at Sandy Hook elementary school and the 2018 Parkland shooting – were staged. “School shootings are absolutely real,” Mrs Greene said on Thursday
  • She retracted a past claim suggesting that no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11. “I want to tell you 9/11 absolutely happened,” she said. “I do not believe that it’s fake.”

“These were words of the past. These things do not represent me,” she said.

Mrs Greene said she had been “upset about things” happening in the US and did not trust the government when she came upon conspiracy theories online in 2018.

The 46-year-old also sought to pin blame on the media, saying they were “just as guilty as QAnon for promoting lies”.

But she did not address a series of past inflammatory remarks:

  • She once liked a Facebook post calling for Mrs Pelosi to get “a bullet to the head” and replied to another calling for Barack Obama to be hanged: “Stage is being set”
  • In 2019, she heckled a teenage survivor of the Parkland school shooting and called him “a coward”
  • She said the 2018 midterm elections ushered in “an Islamic invasion of our government”
  • In 2018, she suggested the California wildfires were started by a space laser beam which was controlled by the Rothschilds, a prominent Jewish banking company

BBC