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Tag: Republican critics

  • Bill and Hillary Clinton face House showdown over Epstein ties

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    For some of their conservative critics, this is the scandal that could finally topple them. Their resistance to testifying proved futile. And now, staring down another epic fight, they’re harnessing their considerable political skills to try to turn the tables on their accusers.For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the 1990s are back.The Clintons are slated to testify Thursday and Friday in a House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, part of a deal with Republicans after it became clear that Congress — with the help of some Democrats — was on track to hold them in contempt if they refused to cooperate. For the battle-hardened couple, it amounts to one more Washington brawl. And like so many of the battles that came before, this one is another mix of questionable judgment, sexual impropriety, money and power.Video above: Justice Department releases more than 3 million items in final batch of Epstein filesDuring his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton pitched his candidacy as “two for the price of one,” previewing a presidential marriage like none that had come before, with a spouse whose professional credentials rivaled his. In the years since, that partnership helped the Clintons weather repeated scandals, including those so personal that many other relationships would have shattered. When his political career was ending, hers was ascending when she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, then served as secretary of state before becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.For those who have long watched the Clintons, this moment is a reminder that the couple — weaned on the politics of the Vietnam War and Watergate — has never been far from the heat of a cultural fight. And with the Epstein case unfolding unpredictably around the world, the Clintons are once again ensnared in the scandal of the moment.“It’s kind of a sad but fitting coda to extraordinary political lives,” said David Maraniss, who has written two biographies of Bill Clinton.There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Clinton when it comes to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who committed suicide in 2019 while he was in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.But Epstein had ties to Bill Clinton for years, visiting the White House multiple times in the 1990s, according to visitor logs. After Clinton left office, Epstein was involved in his philanthropy and the former president flew multiple times on his private jet.“Traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,” Bill Clinton wrote in his 2024 memoir. “I wish I had never met him.”Bill Clinton’s ties to EpsteinBy last summer, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for the Clintons. For months, Bill Clinton, 79, and Hillary Clinton, 78, largely ignored the matter in public, but that became harder to sustain in December when the former president was featured prominently in the first batch of Epstein files.Among thousands of documents made public, some photos showed him on a private plane, including one with a woman, whose face is redacted, seated alongside him with her arm around him. Another showed Bill Clinton in a pool with Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and a person whose face was redacted. Yet another photo portrayed Bill Clinton in a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted.The oversight panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they didn’t comply with the subpoenas, a historic move considering a former president has never been compelled to appear before Congress. Between his first and second terms, Donald Trump invoked that precedent to fend off a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.While there was no context surrounding the photos of Bill Clinton, they underscored how his political promise has always been tempered by personal indiscretions.The 1992 campaign that represented the emerging preeminence of the Baby Boom generation was the same one dogged by rumors of an affair with Gennifer Flowers. A presidency largely defined by economic prosperity was nearly derailed when Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice when he denied engaging in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.Each time, many Republicans thought they finally found leverage over the Clintons. But each time, the Clintons found a way out of the vise.Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican congressman from Arkansas who was a House manager during Clinton’s impeachment trial, described the couple as “a smart lawyer and brilliant communicator.”The Clinton playbook: fight back fiercelyAs each crisis surfaced, a pattern emerged: the Clintons fiercely denied the allegations and often dismissed women who came forward with claims. They villainized the GOP and re-centered the public’s attention on more favorable themes like the booming economy of the era.Bill Clinton, who famously told voters “I feel your pain,” always managed to stay connected with the public. Indeed, he enjoyed some of the highest approval numbers of his presidency during his impeachment inquiry and trial, when about 7 in 10 U.S. adults approved of the way he was handling his job.Hillary Clinton similarly dispatched Republicans who sensed an opening in her handling of a 2012 attack on a compound in Libya that killed four Americans. She came out of an 11-hour televised congressional hearing in 2015 appearing poised. Even the Republican chair of the committee probing the attack said he wasn’t sure she revealed anything new about an issue many in his party considered a scandal.That experience has informed how the Clintons are approaching this week’s testimony. Hillary Clinton has been especially vocal in calling for the proceedings to happen in public, rather than in private as Comer currently plans.“We have nothing to hide,” she told the BBC earlier this month.Bill Clinton’s communication operation has taken a sharper tone, recalling the political “war room” popularized during the 1992 campaign to respond to negative storylines.One release accused Comer of “lying in every appearance he’s made this week.” Another mocked GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona with a “hypocrisy award of the day,” noting how the Oversight Committee members defied subpoenas from the Jan. 6 panel.Meanwhile, the Clintons released a four-page letter to Comer on social media defiantly belittling a process they said was “literally designed to result in our imprisonment.”Much as they tried to refocus attention during the 1990s, the letter hit the White House for dismantling institutions, imposing a harsh immigration crackdown and pardoning those involved in the Capitol riot.Conservative attacks on the ClintonsThe Clintons’ rise to power paralleled the explosion of talk radio as a political force, with Rush Limbaugh using his daily show as a platform to constantly berate the White House. Today, conservative podcasters like Benny Johnson have filled Limbaugh’s space and were gleeful after the House panel moved last month to hold the couple in contempt.“Do you understand Donald Trump made good on his oldest promise arguably which is he told all of us 10 years ago that Hillary Clinton would be going to jail?” Johnson said last month.Still, some dynamics have changed.The lockstep support the Clintons enjoyed among congressional Democrats has eroded as a new generation of lawmakers has taken office — nine Democrats joined with Republicans on the House committee to advance the contempt resolution. Trump, who has faced scrutiny over his own ties to Epstein and may be uncomfortable with the precedent of forcing a former president to testify, has expressed rare concern for the Clintons.He told NBC News that it “bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.” He has described Hillary Clinton as a “very capable woman.”Even Hutchinson, who helped make the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, expressed sympathy for the couple.“It’s frustrating and disappointing that President Clinton and Secretary Clinton are having to go through this fact-finding ordeal,” he said. “That’s difficult for them.”

    WASHINGTON —

    For some of their conservative critics, this is the scandal that could finally topple them. Their resistance to testifying proved futile. And now, staring down another epic fight, they’re harnessing their considerable political skills to try to turn the tables on their accusers.

    For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the 1990s are back.

    The Clintons are slated to testify Thursday and Friday in a House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, part of a deal with Republicans after it became clear that Congress — with the help of some Democrats — was on track to hold them in contempt if they refused to cooperate. For the battle-hardened couple, it amounts to one more Washington brawl. And like so many of the battles that came before, this one is another mix of questionable judgment, sexual impropriety, money and power.

    Video above: Justice Department releases more than 3 million items in final batch of Epstein files

    During his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton pitched his candidacy as “two for the price of one,” previewing a presidential marriage like none that had come before, with a spouse whose professional credentials rivaled his. In the years since, that partnership helped the Clintons weather repeated scandals, including those so personal that many other relationships would have shattered. When his political career was ending, hers was ascending when she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, then served as secretary of state before becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

    For those who have long watched the Clintons, this moment is a reminder that the couple — weaned on the politics of the Vietnam War and Watergate — has never been far from the heat of a cultural fight. And with the Epstein case unfolding unpredictably around the world, the Clintons are once again ensnared in the scandal of the moment.

    “It’s kind of a sad but fitting coda to extraordinary political lives,” said David Maraniss, who has written two biographies of Bill Clinton.

    There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Clinton when it comes to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who committed suicide in 2019 while he was in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

    But Epstein had ties to Bill Clinton for years, visiting the White House multiple times in the 1990s, according to visitor logs. After Clinton left office, Epstein was involved in his philanthropy and the former president flew multiple times on his private jet.

    “Traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,” Bill Clinton wrote in his 2024 memoir. “I wish I had never met him.”

    Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein

    By last summer, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for the Clintons. For months, Bill Clinton, 79, and Hillary Clinton, 78, largely ignored the matter in public, but that became harder to sustain in December when the former president was featured prominently in the first batch of Epstein files.

    Among thousands of documents made public, some photos showed him on a private plane, including one with a woman, whose face is redacted, seated alongside him with her arm around him. Another showed Bill Clinton in a pool with Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and a person whose face was redacted. Yet another photo portrayed Bill Clinton in a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted.

    The oversight panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they didn’t comply with the subpoenas, a historic move considering a former president has never been compelled to appear before Congress. Between his first and second terms, Donald Trump invoked that precedent to fend off a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    While there was no context surrounding the photos of Bill Clinton, they underscored how his political promise has always been tempered by personal indiscretions.

    The 1992 campaign that represented the emerging preeminence of the Baby Boom generation was the same one dogged by rumors of an affair with Gennifer Flowers. A presidency largely defined by economic prosperity was nearly derailed when Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice when he denied engaging in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

    Each time, many Republicans thought they finally found leverage over the Clintons. But each time, the Clintons found a way out of the vise.

    Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican congressman from Arkansas who was a House manager during Clinton’s impeachment trial, described the couple as “a smart lawyer and brilliant communicator.”

    The Clinton playbook: fight back fiercely

    As each crisis surfaced, a pattern emerged: the Clintons fiercely denied the allegations and often dismissed women who came forward with claims. They villainized the GOP and re-centered the public’s attention on more favorable themes like the booming economy of the era.

    Bill Clinton, who famously told voters “I feel your pain,” always managed to stay connected with the public. Indeed, he enjoyed some of the highest approval numbers of his presidency during his impeachment inquiry and trial, when about 7 in 10 U.S. adults approved of the way he was handling his job.

    Hillary Clinton similarly dispatched Republicans who sensed an opening in her handling of a 2012 attack on a compound in Libya that killed four Americans. She came out of an 11-hour televised congressional hearing in 2015 appearing poised. Even the Republican chair of the committee probing the attack said he wasn’t sure she revealed anything new about an issue many in his party considered a scandal.

    That experience has informed how the Clintons are approaching this week’s testimony. Hillary Clinton has been especially vocal in calling for the proceedings to happen in public, rather than in private as Comer currently plans.

    “We have nothing to hide,” she told the BBC earlier this month.

    Bill Clinton’s communication operation has taken a sharper tone, recalling the political “war room” popularized during the 1992 campaign to respond to negative storylines.

    One release accused Comer of “lying in every appearance he’s made this week.” Another mocked GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona with a “hypocrisy award of the day,” noting how the Oversight Committee members defied subpoenas from the Jan. 6 panel.

    Meanwhile, the Clintons released a four-page letter to Comer on social media defiantly belittling a process they said was “literally designed to result in our imprisonment.”

    Much as they tried to refocus attention during the 1990s, the letter hit the White House for dismantling institutions, imposing a harsh immigration crackdown and pardoning those involved in the Capitol riot.

    Conservative attacks on the Clintons

    The Clintons’ rise to power paralleled the explosion of talk radio as a political force, with Rush Limbaugh using his daily show as a platform to constantly berate the White House. Today, conservative podcasters like Benny Johnson have filled Limbaugh’s space and were gleeful after the House panel moved last month to hold the couple in contempt.

    “Do you understand Donald Trump made good on his oldest promise arguably which is he told all of us 10 years ago that Hillary Clinton would be going to jail?” Johnson said last month.

    Still, some dynamics have changed.

    The lockstep support the Clintons enjoyed among congressional Democrats has eroded as a new generation of lawmakers has taken office — nine Democrats joined with Republicans on the House committee to advance the contempt resolution. Trump, who has faced scrutiny over his own ties to Epstein and may be uncomfortable with the precedent of forcing a former president to testify, has expressed rare concern for the Clintons.

    He told NBC News that it “bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.” He has described Hillary Clinton as a “very capable woman.”

    Even Hutchinson, who helped make the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, expressed sympathy for the couple.

    “It’s frustrating and disappointing that President Clinton and Secretary Clinton are having to go through this fact-finding ordeal,” he said. “That’s difficult for them.”

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  • Bill and Hillary Clinton face House showdown over Epstein ties

    [ad_1]

    For some of their conservative critics, this is the scandal that could finally topple them. Their resistance to testifying proved futile. And now, staring down another epic fight, they’re harnessing their considerable political skills to try to turn the tables on their accusers.For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the 1990s are back.The Clintons are slated to testify Thursday and Friday in a House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, part of a deal with Republicans after it became clear that Congress — with the help of some Democrats — was on track to hold them in contempt if they refused to cooperate. For the battle-hardened couple, it amounts to one more Washington brawl. And like so many of the battles that came before, this one is another mix of questionable judgment, sexual impropriety, money and power.Video above: Justice Department releases more than 3 million items in final batch of Epstein filesDuring his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton pitched his candidacy as “two for the price of one,” previewing a presidential marriage like none that had come before, with a spouse whose professional credentials rivaled his. In the years since, that partnership helped the Clintons weather repeated scandals, including those so personal that many other relationships would have shattered. When his political career was ending, hers was ascending when she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, then served as secretary of state before becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.For those who have long watched the Clintons, this moment is a reminder that the couple — weaned on the politics of the Vietnam War and Watergate — has never been far from the heat of a cultural fight. And with the Epstein case unfolding unpredictably around the world, the Clintons are once again ensnared in the scandal of the moment.“It’s kind of a sad but fitting coda to extraordinary political lives,” said David Maraniss, who has written two biographies of Bill Clinton.There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Clinton when it comes to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who committed suicide in 2019 while he was in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.But Epstein had ties to Bill Clinton for years, visiting the White House multiple times in the 1990s, according to visitor logs. After Clinton left office, Epstein was involved in his philanthropy and the former president flew multiple times on his private jet.“Traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,” Bill Clinton wrote in his 2024 memoir. “I wish I had never met him.”Bill Clinton’s ties to EpsteinBy last summer, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for the Clintons. For months, Bill Clinton, 79, and Hillary Clinton, 78, largely ignored the matter in public, but that became harder to sustain in December when the former president was featured prominently in the first batch of Epstein files.Among thousands of documents made public, some photos showed him on a private plane, including one with a woman, whose face is redacted, seated alongside him with her arm around him. Another showed Bill Clinton in a pool with Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and a person whose face was redacted. Yet another photo portrayed Bill Clinton in a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted.The oversight panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they didn’t comply with the subpoenas, a historic move considering a former president has never been compelled to appear before Congress. Between his first and second terms, Donald Trump invoked that precedent to fend off a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.While there was no context surrounding the photos of Bill Clinton, they underscored how his political promise has always been tempered by personal indiscretions.The 1992 campaign that represented the emerging preeminence of the Baby Boom generation was the same one dogged by rumors of an affair with Gennifer Flowers. A presidency largely defined by economic prosperity was nearly derailed when Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice when he denied engaging in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.Each time, many Republicans thought they finally found leverage over the Clintons. But each time, the Clintons found a way out of the vise.Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican congressman from Arkansas who was a House manager during Clinton’s impeachment trial, described the couple as “a smart lawyer and brilliant communicator.”The Clinton playbook: fight back fiercelyAs each crisis surfaced, a pattern emerged: the Clintons fiercely denied the allegations and often dismissed women who came forward with claims. They villainized the GOP and re-centered the public’s attention on more favorable themes like the booming economy of the era.Bill Clinton, who famously told voters “I feel your pain,” always managed to stay connected with the public. Indeed, he enjoyed some of the highest approval numbers of his presidency during his impeachment inquiry and trial, when about 7 in 10 U.S. adults approved of the way he was handling his job.Hillary Clinton similarly dispatched Republicans who sensed an opening in her handling of a 2012 attack on a compound in Libya that killed four Americans. She came out of an 11-hour televised congressional hearing in 2015 appearing poised. Even the Republican chair of the committee probing the attack said he wasn’t sure she revealed anything new about an issue many in his party considered a scandal.That experience has informed how the Clintons are approaching this week’s testimony. Hillary Clinton has been especially vocal in calling for the proceedings to happen in public, rather than in private as Comer currently plans.“We have nothing to hide,” she told the BBC earlier this month.Bill Clinton’s communication operation has taken a sharper tone, recalling the political “war room” popularized during the 1992 campaign to respond to negative storylines.One release accused Comer of “lying in every appearance he’s made this week.” Another mocked GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona with a “hypocrisy award of the day,” noting how the Oversight Committee members defied subpoenas from the Jan. 6 panel.Meanwhile, the Clintons released a four-page letter to Comer on social media defiantly belittling a process they said was “literally designed to result in our imprisonment.”Much as they tried to refocus attention during the 1990s, the letter hit the White House for dismantling institutions, imposing a harsh immigration crackdown and pardoning those involved in the Capitol riot.Conservative attacks on the ClintonsThe Clintons’ rise to power paralleled the explosion of talk radio as a political force, with Rush Limbaugh using his daily show as a platform to constantly berate the White House. Today, conservative podcasters like Benny Johnson have filled Limbaugh’s space and were gleeful after the House panel moved last month to hold the couple in contempt.“Do you understand Donald Trump made good on his oldest promise arguably which is he told all of us 10 years ago that Hillary Clinton would be going to jail?” Johnson said last month.Still, some dynamics have changed.The lockstep support the Clintons enjoyed among congressional Democrats has eroded as a new generation of lawmakers has taken office — nine Democrats joined with Republicans on the House committee to advance the contempt resolution. Trump, who has faced scrutiny over his own ties to Epstein and may be uncomfortable with the precedent of forcing a former president to testify, has expressed rare concern for the Clintons.He told NBC News that it “bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.” He has described Hillary Clinton as a “very capable woman.”Even Hutchinson, who helped make the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, expressed sympathy for the couple.“It’s frustrating and disappointing that President Clinton and Secretary Clinton are having to go through this fact-finding ordeal,” he said. “That’s difficult for them.”

    WASHINGTON —

    For some of their conservative critics, this is the scandal that could finally topple them. Their resistance to testifying proved futile. And now, staring down another epic fight, they’re harnessing their considerable political skills to try to turn the tables on their accusers.

    For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the 1990s are back.

    The Clintons are slated to testify Thursday and Friday in a House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, part of a deal with Republicans after it became clear that Congress — with the help of some Democrats — was on track to hold them in contempt if they refused to cooperate. For the battle-hardened couple, it amounts to one more Washington brawl. And like so many of the battles that came before, this one is another mix of questionable judgment, sexual impropriety, money and power.

    Video above: Justice Department releases more than 3 million items in final batch of Epstein files

    During his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton pitched his candidacy as “two for the price of one,” previewing a presidential marriage like none that had come before, with a spouse whose professional credentials rivaled his. In the years since, that partnership helped the Clintons weather repeated scandals, including those so personal that many other relationships would have shattered. When his political career was ending, hers was ascending when she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, then served as secretary of state before becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

    For those who have long watched the Clintons, this moment is a reminder that the couple — weaned on the politics of the Vietnam War and Watergate — has never been far from the heat of a cultural fight. And with the Epstein case unfolding unpredictably around the world, the Clintons are once again ensnared in the scandal of the moment.

    “It’s kind of a sad but fitting coda to extraordinary political lives,” said David Maraniss, who has written two biographies of Bill Clinton.

    There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Clinton when it comes to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who committed suicide in 2019 while he was in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

    But Epstein had ties to Bill Clinton for years, visiting the White House multiple times in the 1990s, according to visitor logs. After Clinton left office, Epstein was involved in his philanthropy and the former president flew multiple times on his private jet.

    “Traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,” Bill Clinton wrote in his 2024 memoir. “I wish I had never met him.”

    Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein

    By last summer, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for the Clintons. For months, Bill Clinton, 79, and Hillary Clinton, 78, largely ignored the matter in public, but that became harder to sustain in December when the former president was featured prominently in the first batch of Epstein files.

    Among thousands of documents made public, some photos showed him on a private plane, including one with a woman, whose face is redacted, seated alongside him with her arm around him. Another showed Bill Clinton in a pool with Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and a person whose face was redacted. Yet another photo portrayed Bill Clinton in a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted.

    The oversight panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they didn’t comply with the subpoenas, a historic move considering a former president has never been compelled to appear before Congress. Between his first and second terms, Donald Trump invoked that precedent to fend off a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    While there was no context surrounding the photos of Bill Clinton, they underscored how his political promise has always been tempered by personal indiscretions.

    The 1992 campaign that represented the emerging preeminence of the Baby Boom generation was the same one dogged by rumors of an affair with Gennifer Flowers. A presidency largely defined by economic prosperity was nearly derailed when Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice when he denied engaging in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

    Each time, many Republicans thought they finally found leverage over the Clintons. But each time, the Clintons found a way out of the vise.

    Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican congressman from Arkansas who was a House manager during Clinton’s impeachment trial, described the couple as “a smart lawyer and brilliant communicator.”

    The Clinton playbook: fight back fiercely

    As each crisis surfaced, a pattern emerged: the Clintons fiercely denied the allegations and often dismissed women who came forward with claims. They villainized the GOP and re-centered the public’s attention on more favorable themes like the booming economy of the era.

    Bill Clinton, who famously told voters “I feel your pain,” always managed to stay connected with the public. Indeed, he enjoyed some of the highest approval numbers of his presidency during his impeachment inquiry and trial, when about 7 in 10 U.S. adults approved of the way he was handling his job.

    Hillary Clinton similarly dispatched Republicans who sensed an opening in her handling of a 2012 attack on a compound in Libya that killed four Americans. She came out of an 11-hour televised congressional hearing in 2015 appearing poised. Even the Republican chair of the committee probing the attack said he wasn’t sure she revealed anything new about an issue many in his party considered a scandal.

    That experience has informed how the Clintons are approaching this week’s testimony. Hillary Clinton has been especially vocal in calling for the proceedings to happen in public, rather than in private as Comer currently plans.

    “We have nothing to hide,” she told the BBC earlier this month.

    Bill Clinton’s communication operation has taken a sharper tone, recalling the political “war room” popularized during the 1992 campaign to respond to negative storylines.

    One release accused Comer of “lying in every appearance he’s made this week.” Another mocked GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona with a “hypocrisy award of the day,” noting how the Oversight Committee members defied subpoenas from the Jan. 6 panel.

    Meanwhile, the Clintons released a four-page letter to Comer on social media defiantly belittling a process they said was “literally designed to result in our imprisonment.”

    Much as they tried to refocus attention during the 1990s, the letter hit the White House for dismantling institutions, imposing a harsh immigration crackdown and pardoning those involved in the Capitol riot.

    Conservative attacks on the Clintons

    The Clintons’ rise to power paralleled the explosion of talk radio as a political force, with Rush Limbaugh using his daily show as a platform to constantly berate the White House. Today, conservative podcasters like Benny Johnson have filled Limbaugh’s space and were gleeful after the House panel moved last month to hold the couple in contempt.

    “Do you understand Donald Trump made good on his oldest promise arguably which is he told all of us 10 years ago that Hillary Clinton would be going to jail?” Johnson said last month.

    Still, some dynamics have changed.

    The lockstep support the Clintons enjoyed among congressional Democrats has eroded as a new generation of lawmakers has taken office — nine Democrats joined with Republicans on the House committee to advance the contempt resolution. Trump, who has faced scrutiny over his own ties to Epstein and may be uncomfortable with the precedent of forcing a former president to testify, has expressed rare concern for the Clintons.

    He told NBC News that it “bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.” He has described Hillary Clinton as a “very capable woman.”

    Even Hutchinson, who helped make the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, expressed sympathy for the couple.

    “It’s frustrating and disappointing that President Clinton and Secretary Clinton are having to go through this fact-finding ordeal,” he said. “That’s difficult for them.”

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  • The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

    The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

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    It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party that his unprecedented criminal indictment is strengthening, not loosening, his grip.

    Trump was on the defensive after November’s midterm election because many in the GOP blamed voter resistance to him for the party’s disappointing results. But five months later he has reestablished himself as a commanding front-runner in the Republican presidential primary, even as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has delivered the first of what could be several criminal indictments against him.

    “It’s almost like an abusive relationship in that certain segments of MAGA voters recognize they want to leave, they are willing to leave, but they are just not ready to make that full plunge,” the GOP consultant John Thomas told me.

    David Frum: Never again Trump

    Trump’s ability to surmount this latest tumult continues one of the defining patterns of his political career. Each time Trump has shattered a norm or engaged in behavior once unimaginable for a national leader—such as his praise of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election result and instigating the January 6 insurrection—most Republican elected officials and voters have found ways to excuse his actions and continue supporting him.

    “At every point when the party had a chance to move in a different direction, it went further down the Trump path,” Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told me.

    Trump’s latest revival has dispirited his Republican critics, who believed that the party’s discouraging results in November’s election had finally created a pathway to forcing him aside. Now those critics find themselves in the worst of both worlds, facing signs that Trump’s legal troubles could simultaneously increase his odds of winning the GOP nomination and reduce his chances of winning the general election.

    Coincidentally, the former president’s indictment came on the same day that Wisconsin voters sent the GOP a pointed reminder about the party’s erosion in white-collar suburbs during the Trump era. The victory of the liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz in an election that gave Democrats a 4–3 majority on the state supreme court continued a clear trend away from Republicans since Trump unexpectedly captured Wisconsin in 2016. En route to a double-digit victory, she won more than 80 percent of the vote in economically thriving and well-educated Dane County (which includes the state capital of Madison), more than 70 percent in Milwaukee County, and she dramatically cut the Republican margin in the Milwaukee suburbs, which the GOP had dominated before Trump.

    Protasiewicz’s resounding victory followed a similar formula as the Democrats’ wins last November in the governorship races in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  In all three states, Democrats beat a Republican gubernatorial candidate whom Trump had backed. Like Protasiewicz’s victory yesterday, each of those 2022 results showed how the Trump stamp on the GOP, as well as Republican support for banning abortion, has allowed Democrats to regain an advantage in these crucial Rust Belt swing states. Those Rust Belt defeats last November, as well as losses for Trump-backed candidates in Arizona and Georgia, two other pivotal swing states, sparked a greater level of public GOP backlash against Trump than he’d faced at almost any point in his presidency.

    Amid Republican frustration over the midterm results, Trump started to look like a former Las Vegas headliner who had been reduced to playing Holiday Inns somewhere off the New Jersey turnpike. Many of his former fans turned on him. Two days after the election, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial whose headline flatly declared, “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.” The New York Post ran a front-page cartoon picturing Trump as a bloated “Trumpty Dumpty” who “had a great fall” in the election. Fox News reduced Trump’s visibility on the network so sharply that he did not appear on its programs between Sean Hannity interviews on September 22, 2022, and March 27, 2023, according to tracking by the progressive group Media Matters for America.

    It wasn’t just the Rupert Murdoch–verse that showed signs of Trump fatigue. Powerful interest groups such as the Club for Growth and the donor network associated with the Koch family openly called for Republicans to put Trump in the rearview mirror.

    Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump

    Even when Trump formally announced his 2024 candidacy, a week after the election at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the event had a frayed, musty feel. “On vivid display in this chapter of Trump’s life and political rise and (perhaps) fall,” Politico wrote, “was a crowd that was thick with ride-or-die conspiracists and conspicuously light on more prominent and powerful figures from the party he once totally held in his thrall.” Trump’s speech that night was a greatest-hits set delivered without conviction.

    Trump’s first few weeks as an announced candidate didn’t project any more energy or verve. “The Trump thing looked kind of haggard and worn,” Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told me. “It was deprived of any of its pizzazz. ” In her focus groups with GOP voters, Longwell said, former Trump voters “weren’t done with him [and] they weren’t mad at him,” but they were expressing an emotion that probably would horrify Trump even more: “People did feel a little bored.”

    From November through about mid-February, both state and national polls consistently showed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gaining on Trump. Thomas, who started a super PAC encouraging DeSantis to run, said that in the midterm’s immediate aftermath, he saw polls and focus groups that suggested GOP voters had reached “an inflection point” on Trump. Concerns about his future electability, Thomas said, outweighed their support for his policies or his combative demeanor. Thomas believes that DeSantis’s landslide reelection in Florida created “such a stark contrast” to the widespread defeat of Trump-backed candidates that many GOP voters started to view the Florida governor as a better bet to win back the White House. “That’s why you saw such huge movement in state and local polling over the next few months,” Thomas told me.

    But that movement away from Trump seemed to crest in late February or early March—and polls since have shown the current inside the GOP steadily flowing back toward him.

    Republicans both supportive and critical of Trump remain somewhat unsure about why the polls shifted back in his direction at that point. But Trump’s revival did coincide with him visibly campaigning more, starting with his truculent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. Even by Trump’s overheated standards, his latest rallies have offered incendiary new policy proposals, such as more federal intervention to seize control of law enforcement in Democratic cities. He now routinely declares that he will serve as his voters’ “warrior” and as their “retribution.”

    Trump also made a more explicit and extended argument against DeSantis; the former president has simultaneously attacked DeSantis from the left (calling him a threat to Social Security and Medicare) and the right (portraying him as a clone of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan). Many Republicans, meanwhile, thought DeSantis looked unsteady as he took his first national tour, to promote his new book. DeSantis flipped from emulating Trump’s skepticism of aiding Ukraine to (somewhat) distancing himself from his rival’s position; then, regarding the Manhattan indictment, DeSantis flopped from lightly criticizing Trump to unreservedly defending him.

    DeSantis’s “stumble on Ukraine” in particular “really caused more traditional Republicans to doubt whether he was the best alternative to Trump,” Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, told me.

    Around the same time, almost all of the other announced and potential GOP candidates, such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, rushed to defend Trump against the pending indictment—before seeing the charges. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who has announced his candidacy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who’s still considering the race, have been the only potential 2024 contenders to criticize Trump in any way over the indictment.

    Longwell says the candidates who have chosen to rally around Trump have boxed themselves into an untenable position. With Trump’s legal challenges now dominating both conservative and mainstream media, if the other Republican contenders do nothing but echo Trump’s accusations against those investigating him, “it creates this dynamic where all of the other 2024 contenders actually end up being supporting cast members in Donald Trump’s drama, and there is no other room for them to make an affirmative case for why they should be the 2024 nominee,” Longwell told a television interviewer this week.

    Fox and other conservative media have boosted Trump by echoing his claim that prosecutors were targeting him to silence his voters—the same argument those outlets made after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents last summer, notes Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. Those outlets “are reinforcing his position by telling their viewers that if they don’t defend Donald Trump, the left will be coming for them next,” Gertz told me. “That’s a very potent, very powerful argument, and one that really cuts off a lot of potential avenues” for Trump’s GOP critics and rivals.

    The reluctance by most declared and potential 2024 GOP hopefuls to criticize Trump over the indictment extends their refusal to publicly articulate any case for why the party should reject him. “As a rule of thumb, if you are running against someone and you are afraid to say your opponent’s name, that’s not a positive sign,” Stuart Stevens told me.

    Read: Why won’t Trump rivals just say it?

    One reason Trump’s rivals have been so reticent is that there is not much room in a GOP primary to criticize Trump over policy. On issues such as immigration and international trade, “it is incredibly difficult to create real daylight on policy, because he’s a good fit for the primary electorate,” John Thomas told me. That’s probably even more true now than in 2016, because Trump’s blustery messages tend to attract non-college-educated voters and drive away white-collar voters.

    Even so, Whit Ayres said that in his polling, only about one-third of GOP primary voters are immovable Trump supporters. He estimates that only about one-tenth are irrevocably opposed to him. Ayres classifies the remaining 55 to 60 percent of the GOP coalition as “Maybe Trump” voters who are not hostile to him but are open to alternatives.

    Trump has reached 50 percent support in some recent national polls of GOP voters, but more often he attracts support from about 40 percent of Republicans. That was roughly the share of the vote that Trump won while the race was competitive in 2016, but he captured the nomination anyway, because none of his rivals could consolidate enough of the remaining 60 percent.

    Many of Trump’s Republican critics see the 2024 field replicating the mistakes of his 2016 opponents. The other candidates’ refusal to make a clear case against Trump echoes the choice by the 2016 candidates to avoid direct confrontation with him for as long as possible.

    Now, as then, GOP strategists think Trump’s rivals are reluctant to engage him directly because they want to be in position to inherit his voters if he falters. Rather than face the danger of a full-scale confrontation with Trump, the 2024 candidates all are hoping that events undermine him, or that someone else in the field confronts him. “They all want to be the one that the alligator eats last,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant and the chair of the Republican Party in Travis County, Texas.

    But every Republican strategist I spoke with agreed that a key lesson of 2016 is that Trump won’t deflate on his own; the other candidates must give voters a reason to abandon him. Mackowiak, like Thomas and Longwell, told me that the prospect of multiple indictments could exacerbate Trump’s greatest potential primary weakness—concerns about his electability—but it’s unlikely that enough voters will consider him too damaged to win unless the other candidates explicitly make that case. “For Trump to pay a political price for all this uncertainty and the legal vulnerability he’s facing, Republican challengers are going to have to force that,” Mackowiak said.

    Nor is it clear that enough GOP voters will turn on Trump even if they do come to doubt his electability. Trump’s Republican critics fear that the cumulative weight of all the investigations he’s confronting will lower his ceiling of support and diminish his ability to win another general election. But a CNN poll last month found that only two-fifths of Republican primary voters put the highest priority on a candidate who can win the general election, while nearly three-fifths said they were most concerned with picking a nominee who agrees with them on issues. Katon Dawson, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party now supporting Haley, told me that “Republicans don’t care” about electability when voting in primaries. “They vote their values; they vote their wants and needs,” he said. “I’ve never ever seen them say ‘I am going to vote for who I think is the most electable.’”

    Trump’s rivals for the nomination still have many months left to formulate a case against him, particularly once the GOP presidential debates begin in August. But for Republicans resistant to Trump, the months since the November midterm have reversed the trajectory of the seasons. As winter began, many were blooming with optimism about moving the party beyond him. Now, as spring unfolds, they are seeing those hopes wither—and confronting the full measure of just how difficult it will be to loosen Trump’s hold on the GOP.

    “I’ve always believed Trump was going to be the nominee,” Stevens said. “Within so much of what we used to call the Republican establishment, there is still this denial” even after all these years of dealing with the former president “that Trumpism is what the party wants to be.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Liz Cheney Already Has a 2024 Strategy

    Liz Cheney Already Has a 2024 Strategy

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    The defiant speech from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming after her defeat in yesterday’s Republican primary could be reduced to a single message: This is round one.

    Cheney didn’t specify how, or where, she intends to continue her struggle against former President Donald Trump, after Harriet Hageman, the candidate Trump endorsed, routed her by more than two to one in the primary for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat.

    But Cheney dropped a big hint when she noted that the GOP’s Founding Father, Abraham Lincoln, lost elections for the House and Senate “before he won the most important election of all” by capturing the presidency. This morning, she went a step further, telling the Today show that she was “thinking about” joining the 2024 Republican presidential race.

    The magnitude of Cheney’s defeat yesterday underscores how strong Trump remains within the party, and how little chance a presidential candidacy based explicitly on repudiating him would have of capturing the nomination.

    Yet many of Trump’s remaining Republican critics believe that a Cheney candidacy in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries could help prevent him from capturing the next nomination—or stop him from winning the general election if he does. “Of course she doesn’t win,” Bill Kristol, the longtime strategist who has become one of Trump’s fiercest conservative critics, told me. But, he added, if Cheney “makes the point over and over again” that Trump represents a unique threat to American democracy and “forces the other candidates to come to grips” with that argument, she “could have a pretty significant effect” on Trump’s chances.

    In some ways, a Cheney 2024 presidential campaign would be unprecedented: There aren’t any clear examples of a candidate running a true kamikaze campaign.

    Cheney would have no trouble assembling the building blocks of a traditional presidential campaign. Her name identification is extremely high, for both her familial ties and her prominence as a Trump critic. Her potential fundraising base is strong: Through late July, she had already raised more than $15 million in her House race, and in a presidential run, she could tap into a huge pool of small-dollar donors (many of them Democrats) determined to block Trump. And with her unflinching attacks on the former president, she would be ensured bottomless media coverage.

    Cheney could face other logistical hurdles. She reduced her in-person campaign appearances in Wyoming because of security threats, and that problem would undoubtedly persist in any presidential campaign. Dave Kochel, a longtime Republican consultant with extensive experience in Iowa, told me that Cheney could likely find ways to deliver her message even amid such threats. “You would need a lot of security, no doubt about that,” he said. “But remember, these days you can do a lot of this stuff from the green room. You don’t have to be going to the diner or the Hy-Vee or the state fair. It’s essentially a media strategy.”

    More difficult to overcome would be obstacles erected by the national and state Republican parties. The laws governing which candidates can appear on a presidential primary ballot vary enormously across the states. For instance, in New Hampshire, anyone who meets the legal requirements for the presidency, fills out a one-page form, and pays $1,000 can appear on the venerable first-in-the-nation ballot. But in other states—including Iowa and South Carolina—the state party controls whose name can be included on the primary ballot. And in at least some of those places, either the state party or the Republican National Committee, which has subordinated itself to Trump under Chair Ronna McDaniel, would likely move to keep Cheney off the ballot as a means of protecting him.

    Debates could be another challenge for Cheney. The general feeling among Republicans I spoke with this week is that the RNC would go to almost absurd lengths to avoid allowing Cheney to appear on the same debate stage as Trump. Kristol predicted that the party might try to exclude her by requiring any candidate participating in a RNC-sanctioned debate to commit to supporting the party’s eventual nominee in the general election—something Cheney’s determination to stop Trump would not allow her to do. (In 2016, the RNC imposed such a loyalty oath primarily out of fear that Trump wouldn’t endorse the nominee if he lost. Trump signed it but characteristically renounced it in the race’s latter stage.)

    Read: The Mar-a-Lago ‘raid’ put Ron DeSantis in a box

    Even so, it would be difficult for any media organization that sponsors an RNC debate to agree to keep her off the stage. And if Cheney is registering reasonable support in the polls—say 5 percent or more—even state parties might think twice about barring her. “Every other candidate not named Trump is going to want Liz Cheney on the debate stage,” the GOP consultant Alex Conant, the communications director for Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, told me.

    No one I talked with thinks Cheney could come anywhere close to winning the GOP nomination behind an anti-Trump message. The widespread success of Trump-endorsed candidates, almost all of whom overtly echo his lies about the 2020 election, in this year’s GOP primaries has made clear that the former president remains the party’s dominant figure (despite occasional losses for his picks). With Cheney’s defeat yesterday, four of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 attack on the Capitol have now been ousted in primaries, and four others have retired; only two have survived to face voters in November. “Trump continues to own a majority share of the Republican Party and the GOP has remade itself in his image,” Sarah Longwell, founder of the Republican Accountability Project, a group critical of Trump, told me in an email.

    But many Republicans resistant to Trump believe that Cheney could rally the minority of party voters who continue to express reservations about the former president. In public polls, as many as one-fourth of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents reject Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, or criticize his efforts to overturn the result and his role in the January 6 insurrection. The share of Trump critics is usually slightly higher among Republicans holding at least a four-year college degree—a group that was notably cooler toward him during his first run to the nomination in 2016 and that sharply moved away from the GOP in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Some of those voters have since soured on President Joe Biden and the Democrats, but Cheney could spend months reminding them why they rejected Trump in the first place. “Especially among college-educated and donor-class Republicans, I think she continues to just chip away at Trump,” Kristol said.

    Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, believes that the core of Republican-leaning voters hostile to Trump is smaller—only about one in 10, rather than the roughly one in five suggested by some poll questions. But he believes a Cheney candidacy could reach beyond that circle to raise doubts among a much bigger group: Republicans who are neither hard-core Trump supporters or opponents, but are focused mostly on winning in 2024. Although Cheney might appeal solely to the thin sliver of die-hard Trump opponents “with a prophetic-moral case … about the importance of devotion to our democratic institutions and the U.S. Constitution,” Ayres said, that larger group might respond to “a very practical utilitarian case” that Trump has too much baggage to win a general election.

    The best-case scenario for the Trump critics if Cheney runs is that her battering-ram attacks weaken him to the point that someone else can capture the nomination. As Longwell told me, even if “Liz likely cannot win a Republican primary (though anything can happen!) … she can play a significant role in helping someone else beat Trump in a Republican primary.”

    The worst-case scenario raised by some Trump critics is that a sustained attack on him will encourage GOP voters, and even other candidates, to rally to his defense more than they would otherwise.

    But even those sympathetic to Cheney recognize that the 2024 primaries may offer only so much opportunity to change the party’s direction. Many of them view Trump’s strongest competitor in early polls, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, as little improvement over Trump in his commitment to a pluralistic democracy; Cheney recently told The New York Times that DeSantis has aligned himself so closely with Trump that she would find it “very difficult” to support him in 2024 either.

    These dynamics explain why many Cheney supporters believe that the real leverage for her—and other Trump critics—would come from working to defeat the former president, or a like-minded alternative, in the 2024 general election. The only plausible way to break Trump’s hold on the GOP, these critics believe, is to show that Trump, or Trumpism, cannot win national elections. Even if Cheney cannot deny Trump the nomination, she could still ultimately loosen his hold on the party, this thinking goes, if she persuades enough centrist and white-collar voters to reject him and ensure his defeat in a general election. To save the party, in other words, Cheney might first have to be willing to destroy it.

    Read: Liz Cheney, the Republican  from the state of reality

    Cheney signaled her willingness to accept such a mission yesterday, when her remarks condemned not only Trump but Republicans who have enabled him, especially those echoing his noxious discredited claims of fraud in 2020. But how she may pursue her goals remains unclear. Though most Republicans sympathetic to Cheney think she should run in the 2024 GOP primaries, others believe she might have more influence leading an outside movement against Trump. Cheney’s GOP supporters are even more divided over a possible general-election strategy; some sympathizers believe she would hurt Trump most by running as an independent third-party presidential candidate in the general election, and others worry that such a bid would help Trump by splitting voters resistant to him.

    Cheney has many months to resolve those choices. What she indicated yesterday is that when she talks about a long battle, she is looking not only past the Wyoming House GOP primary but even past the struggle for the next GOP presidential nomination. The real prize she’s keeping her eyes on is preventing Trump from ever occupying the White House again, whatever that takes.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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