‘Total dumpster fire’: Republicans fume over speaker’s spending plan days from shutdown deadline
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(WASHINGTON) — Several House Republicans stormed out of Tuesday morning’s conference meeting furious over Speaker Mike Johnson’s handling of the government funding bill – which still isn’t ready and puts the federal government on the brink of a shutdown at the end of the week.
Republicans had initially promised to release bill text over the weekend with the aim of holding a vote early in the week, but outspoken criticism from within their ranks has continually delayed negotiators from finalizing the legislation.
Johnson denied that the evolving package amounts to a so-called “Christmas tree omnibus,” but confirmed that the measure is not a clean continuing resolution and will include a disaster relief package — reported to be more than $100 billion — as well as $10 billion for the agricultural community.
Missouri Republican Rep. Eric Burlison called the speaker’s funding plan presented at the conference meeting a “total dumpster fire.”
“I think it’s garbage,” Burlison said, adding that he has conveyed his frustrations to Johnson, who is seeking to retain the speaker’s gavel in the new year.
“I’m disappointed,” Burlison said when asked about Johnson’s future. “I think that he can do better. He can communicate better. The fact that we haven’t seen the language today and we’re supposed to vote on it this week is unacceptable.”
South Carolina Republican Rep. Ralph Norman said he is frustrated with the funding plan as well.
“I’m not voting for the CR [continuing resolution],” he said.
Texas GOP Rep. Chip Roy, a frequent critic of the leadership’s spending bills, said, “This is not the way to do business right.”
“We’re just fundamentally unserious about spending. And as long as you got a blank check, you can’t shrink the government. If you can’t shrink the government, you can’t live free,” Roy said.
The Texas congressman did not respond when asked if he’ll support the speaker in January.
Georgia Republican Rep. Rich McCormick said as he left the meeting, “I’m frustrated with the whole approach to this, because I think, once again, we’re just adding to the deficit without having any clear plan forward,”
After relying on Democrats for bipartisan support to pass the past five continuing resolutions, Johnson brushed off the criticism bubbling up within his ranks, stressing that the bill has not been released.
“I got a couple of friends who will just say that about any end of year funding measure,” Johnson said. “This is not an omnibus, OK? This is a small CR that we’ve had to add things to that were out of our control. These are not manmade disasters. These are things that the federal government has an appropriate role to do.”
Despite the growing tensions, Johnson expressed optimism that his speakership will overcome the challenges to buy the conference time until Republicans have unified control over Washington next year.
“I’m not worried about the speaker’s vote. We’re governing. Everybody knows we have difficult circumstances. We’re doing the very best we can under those circumstances,” Johnson said. “These are the hard choices that lawmakers have to make, but we will get the job done, as we always do. We will. We will keep moving forward, and in January, we have a new lease on all this.”
With government funding set to lapse at the end of the week, Johnson was steadfast that the House must abide by a 72-hour rule, where the clock starts to tee up a vote once bill text is released.
“I believe in the 72-hour roll rule,” Johnson said. “We’re committed to all of that. We’re going to take care of these obligations and get this done, and then we’re going to go to work in unified government in the 119th Congress. It begins in January.”
(WASHINGTON) — Since becoming President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard’s rosy posture toward Moscow has prompted some Democratic critics to suggest that she could be “compromised,” or perhaps even a “Russian asset” — claims the ex-Hawaii representative and Army officer has forcefully denied.
But former advisers to Gabbard suggest that her views on Russia and its polarizing leader, Vladimir Putin, have been shaped not by some covert intelligence recruitment as far as they know — but instead by her unorthodox media consumption habits.
Three former aides said Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022, regularly read and shared articles from the Russian news site RT — formerly known as Russia Today — which the U.S. intelligence community characterized in 2017 as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.”
While it was not clear to those former staffers whether or when she stopped frequenting the site, one former aide said Gabbard continued to circulate articles from RT “long after” she was advised that the outlet was not a credible source of information.
Doug London, a retired 34-year veteran intelligence officer, said Gabbard’s alleged penchant to rely at least in part on outlets like RT to shape her view of the world reflects poorly on her suitability to fulfill the responsibilities of a director of national intelligence.
“That Gabbard’s views mirror Russia’s narrative and disinformation themes can but suggest naïveté, collusion, or politically opportunistic sycophancy to echo whatever she believes Trump wants to hear,” London said, adding, “none of which bodes well for the president’s principal intelligence adviser responsible for enabling the [U.S. intelligence community] to inform decision-making by telling it like it is.”
Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team, said in a statement to ABC News that “this is false and nothing but a few former, conveniently anonymous, disgruntled staffers.”
“Lt. Col. Gabbard’s views on foreign policy have been shaped by her military service and multiple deployments to war zones where she’s seen the cost of war and who ultimately pays the price,” Henning said.
‘The Russian playbook’
Former congressional and campaign advisers said it was unclear to what extent Gabbard’s views were shaped by what she read in RT — and they emphasized that she would consume news from a wide range of outlets, including left-wing and right-wing blogs.
But over the past decade, Gabbard’s views on Russian aggression in Europe have evolved in a particularly dramatic fashion.
In 2014, when Russian troops annexed Crimea, Gabbard — then a first-term Democratic U.S. representative from Hawaii — released a statement advocating for “meaningful American military assistance for Ukrainian forces” and for the U.S. to invoke “stiffer, more painful economic sanctions for Russia.”
“The consequences of standing idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine are clear,” she wrote at the time. “We have to act in a way that takes seriously the threat of Russian aggression against its peaceful, sovereign neighbor.”
By 2017, however, her tune had changed. In a lengthy memo to campaign staff laying out her views on foreign policy, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News, Gabbard blamed the U.S. and NATO for provoking Russian aggression and bemoaned the United States’ “hostility toward Putin.”
“There certainly isn’t any guarantee to Putin that we won’t try to overthrow Russia’s government,” she wrote in the memo from May 2017, titled “fodder for fundraising emails / social media.”
“In fact, I’m pretty sure there are American politicians who would love to do that,” she wrote.
She also condemned the very sanctions she had previously supported, writing that, “historically, the U.S. has always wanted Russia to be a poor country.”
“It’s a matter of respect,” she wrote. “The Russian people are a proud people and they don’t want the U.S. and our allies trying to control them and their government.”
Gabbard’s sentiment in the 2017 memo is “basically the Russian playbook,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration.
“It’s dangerous,” said Daalder. “That strain of thinking is not unique to Tulsi Gabbard, but it is certainly not where you would think a major figure in any administration would like to be, intellectually.”
By 2022, at the outset of the latest Russia-Ukraine conflict, Gabbard suggested on X that Russia’s invasion was justified by Ukraine’s potential bid to join NATO, “which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border” — a narrative perpetuated by Russian propaganda channels, including RT, and denounced by the U.S. and NATO as “false.”
Gabbard’s messaging has at times aligned so closely with Kremlin talking points that at least one commentator on Kremlin state media has referred to her as “Russia’s girlfriend.”
A ‘nefarious effort’
The U.S. government first called out RT as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Kremlin in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, three years after Gabbard was elected to Congress.
This past September, the State Department wrote that it had evidence that “RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities.” The U.S. also issued fresh sanctions against executives at RT, including its editor-in-chief, who the U.S. accused of engaging in a “nefarious effort to covertly recruit unwitting American influencers in support of their malign influence campaign.”
The Justice Department also indicted two RT employees in September for their alleged role in what the DOJ called a scheme to pay right-wing social media influencers nearly $10 million to “disseminate content deemed favorable to the Russian government.”
In the decade since Gabbard arrived in Washington, experts say she has regularly promoted views consistent with those espoused in RT and other Russian propaganda channels.
In its 2017 assessment, for example, the U.S. intelligence community wrote that RT “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks” and “routinely gives [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States.”
Gabbard has long been an outspoken supporter of Assange, arguing in a June 2024 appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher” that “[Assange’s] prosecution, the charges against him, are one of the biggest attacks on freedom of the press, that we’ve seen, and freedom of speech.”
In Congress, Gabbard also co-sponsored a resolution calling on the federal government to “drop all charges against Edward Snowden,” the former contractor for the National Security Agency who supplied WikiLeaks with secret documents in order to expose what he called “horrifying” U.S. government surveillance capabilities.
RT frequently reports glowingly on Snowden, who has for more than a decade lived under asylum in Russia.
‘Undeniable facts’
But it is Gabbard’s framing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has most galvanized her critics in the national security sphere.
In March 2022, Gabbard posted a video to Twitter — now X — sharing what she said were “undeniable facts” about U.S.-funded biolabs in the war-torn country, claiming that “even in the best of circumstances” they “could easily be compromised” — a debunked theory regularly promoted by RT and other Kremlin propaganda channels.
Experts say RT and other Russian state-controlled news agencies have frequently capitalized on Gabbard’s public comments to support the biolab conspiracy theory and other disinformation, recirculating clips in which she repeats the Kremlin propaganda as evidence backing the false claims — effectively engineering an echo-chamber to magnify their propaganda machine.
Even so, Brian O’Neill, a former senior intelligence official with experience in senior policymaker briefing, expressed confidence that career intelligence officials can support Gabbard with “a constant barrage of new information” that will help shape her understanding of emerging world events.
“New appointees in such roles always bring preconceptions, but like her predecessors, she will be subject to comprehensive briefings grounded in solid evidence provided by individuals of high integrity and expertise,” O’Neill said.
“That said,” O’Neill cautioned, “Trump’s well-documented hostility and skepticism toward the [intelligence community] will shape the environment she steps into. If she adopts a similar posture, there’s a risk she might deprioritize intelligence community input or dismiss inconvenient truths presented to her.”
ABC News’ Shannon Kingston contributed to this report.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — In the tumultuous weeks following the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump and his allies scrambled to challenge his election loss with a flurry of lawsuits.
Their efforts failed, with judges across the country condemning their scattershot claims. But as Election Day 2024 approaches, Trump and the Republican National Committee have adopted what they say is a more aggressive pre-election legal strategy.
“Trump learned his lesson from 2020, and he has a really good legal team at the campaign and the RNC,” said Mike Davis, a lawyer and Trump ally who has been floated for a potential appointment in a Trump administration. “We are so much better prepared.”
Earlier this year, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign announced what they described as an “historic” “election integrity” program with the mission of deploying 100,000 volunteers and attorneys in battleground states, and implementing what they called a “proactive litigation effort.”
According to a Republican National Committee official, in recent months the program has engaged in over 130 election lawsuits across 26 states, and recruited approximately 5,000 volunteer attorneys who are ready to be activated on Election Day.
Democrats, too, have taken on an offensive posture. They have aggressively pushed back in the courts, intervening in “dozens of baseless Republican lawsuits to debunk their lies and defeat them in court,” according to an internal memo prepared by Vice President Kamala Harris’ chief attorney, Dana Remus.
“We know how to defeat Trump’s tactics,” said the memo, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News.
Some election experts have also expressed concern about the GOP-led legal strategy, accusing some Republicans of peddling lies and seeking to create confusion about voting laws in order to sow chaos should Trump lose the election.
Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, told ABC News that the 2024 election has become “both the disinformation and the litigation election.”
“We’re seeing a record number of lawsuits filed before the election — nearly every day — in a seemingly coordinated push to use the legitimacy of the courts to lay the groundwork for discrediting an unfavorable result,” Weiser said. “The lawsuits are not about getting legal relief, but about spreading conspiracy theories.”
Following the 2020 election, Trump and his allies filed over 60 lawsuits challenging the election’s outcome based on allegations of fraud, despite no evidence of widespread fraud that could have impacted the result. Nearly every single lawsuit was rejected, thrown out, or withdrawn— including two denials from the Supreme Court. In some cases, judges dismissed the lawsuits while expressing frustration over the lack of evidence, and some attorneys who publicly represented the president have since been disbarred, faced defamation claims, or been criminally charged.
Allies of the former president say that this time, they’re determined to be more aggressive in the lead-up to Election Day.
“If you wait till after the election to take legal action, you’re not going to get a judge to side with you,” Davis said. “You need to get injunctions ahead of time on signature verification and other issues, because if you wait till after the election, good luck.”
Some issues have already begun bubbling up in one of the most hotly contested states: Arizona. The Arizona Republican Party recently announced that it had brought in attorney and Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon to take over its election integrity operation.
Dhillon’s name was announced following the resignation of Kory Langhofer, who had served as chief legal counsel for the Arizona operation until the first week of October.
Sources familiar with the situation tell ABC News that Langhofer had long planned to hand over the reins. The move, however, reflects what sources said is a broader concern among some Republican lawyers in Arizona who have grown weary about the party’s legal strategies in the state, with some involved already having to halt others from bringing frivolous legal complaints.
Republicans in Arizona have set up a team tasked with receiving and sorting through reported election issues from around the state, which one source familiar with the operation described as a “daily turn of frivolous problems.”
On election night, the RNC is planning to have volunteer attorneys help staff a hotline where poll watchers and others on the ground can report issues, the RNC official said. In some states, there will be lawyers on the ground as well. Already, staff is on the ground in 18 states to handle the “election integrity” effort, the RNC official said.
Responding to critics, the RNC’s Election Integrity communications director Claire Zunk said their “unprecedented election integrity operation is committed to defending the law and protecting every legal vote” and that they will “continue to fight for a fair and transparent election for all Americans.”
Republicans’ efforts this year come after the RNC in 2018 was released from its decadeslong consent decree that had blocked it engaging in “ballot security” measures since the early 1980s.
The Harris campaign, meantime, has marshaled a centralized legal team of over half a dozen lawyers to handle election claims.
“The 2024 presidential election is already the most litigated in American history,” according to the internal Harris campaign memo, “but we are also the most prepared campaign in history for what we face.”
The group is led by Dana Remus, who provides overall strategic direction and leads the campaign’s legal election protection programs. Lawyers including Seth Waxman of Wilmer Hale, Don Verrilli of Munger, Tolles & Olson, and John Devaney of Perkins Coie are litigating cases and working with local counsel in battleground states. Lawyers including Bob Bauer and Marc Elias are also advising the team.
It’s part of an effort that lawyers from the Harris campaign told ABC News they’ve been building up for years, since President Joe Biden took office in 2021 and they immediately began planning for the next cycle. One of the first things that was done when Biden launched his reelection effort in 2023, the lawyers said, was to call a meeting to start putting together the post-election plan.
“We’ve brainstormed the worst scenarios, and are ready to go if we see them,” said Maury Riggan, the general counsel for the campaign, in an interview with ABC News.
“The veteran lawyers who fought and won in 2020 have been preparing for dozens of scenarios, drafting thousands of pages of legal briefs, and working directly with hundreds of lawyers and experts on the ground in battleground states so we are ready for whatever the other side throws our way,” the Harris campaign’s internal memo said.
Together, the Democratic National Committee, with support from the Harris campaign, is involved in 35 lawsuits around the country, lawyers with the Harris campaign told ABC News.
Earlier this month, for example, the DNC, filed a lawsuit in Georgia after the state’s pro-Trump State Election Board passed a series of controversial voting rules over the objection of some of the highest Republican elections officials in the state.
The Democrats won the suit last week after a judge struck down a controversial “hand count” rule that would have required election workers to hand count the ballots on election night — a process they said would invite “chaos” on election night and beyond. Six other rules were struck down as well.
“From the beginning, this rule was an effort to delay election results to sow doubt in the outcome, and our democracy is stronger thanks to this decision to block it,” said a joint statement from the Harris campaign, the DNC, and Georgia Democrats. “We will continue fighting to ensure that voters can cast their ballot knowing it will count.”
The RNC has appealed the decision, with RNC Chairman Michael Whatley saying the judge “exemplified the very worst of judicial activism.”
The Democrats’ aggressive legal posture has trickled down to the individual states. In the battleground state of Nevada, the Democrat secretary of state said his office has started pre-drafting legal filings with his attorney general to try to anticipate any issues that may come up — a process he likened to a game of “Mad Libs.”
“You know the county, you fill in the county name, you fill in the date, you fill in the facts,” said Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar in an interview with ABC News’ Terry Moran. “And you file that thing as soon as you can before the Nevada Supreme Court.”
According to Marc Elias, a prominent election litigation lawyer brought on by the Harris campaign this cycle, there have been almost 180 election lawsuits filed around the country this year — a number he said is “a record for the most new cases ever filed in a single year.”
Active litigation is pending in 39 states, Elias said in a recent post on X, with prominent battleground states seeing the most activity. Georgia leads the way with 23 lawsuits, followed by Pennsylvania with 16.
