What? He just now figured that out? Didn't he read the lawsuits he was filing?An attorney representing President Trump in one of his dozens of lawsuits challenging the 2020 election moved to withdraw from the case on Thursday, telling a federal court that the president used him to "perpetrate a crime."
Philadelphia-based attorney Jerome Marcus asked the court to allow him to withdraw, citing concerns over Pennsylvania's professional conduct standards for lawyers.
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The case Marcus was involved in was one of the earliest election challenges that Trump filed and one of the most short-lived. Submitted just two days after the election, it sought to halt the vote counting in Philadelphia, accusing elections officials of illegally excluding Trump's poll watchers from observing the process. A federal judge denied Trump's motion for an emergency injunction on the same day that the lawsuit was filed.
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Marcus wrote that "the client has used the lawyer's services to perpetrate a crime and the client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant and with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement."
The Hill
Apparently Senator Cramer has had his head in the sand for four years.Only six Republican senators ultimately voted to sustain an objection raised by Cruz to Arizona’s electoral slate on Wednesday after 13 Republicans signaled before the polls closed in Georgia Tuesday that they would support such an objection. Only seven GOP senators supported a second objection raised by Hawley to Pennsylvania’s election results.
The drop-off in support was a reflection of Trump’s plummeting political stock after the loss of the Senate majority and his response to the rioting in the Capitol.
Many Republicans are scrambling to distance themselves from Trump after he publicly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election at a joint session of Congress on Wednesday and then kept silent after a pro-Trump mobbed swarmed the Capitol and Senate chamber, sending lawmakers to secure rooms while police locked down the campus.
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Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who has been a strong Trump ally during his first term, late on Wednesday said [...] “I do think the president bears some responsibility. Certainly, he bears responsibility for his own actions and his own words and today in watching his speech, I have to admit I gasped,” Cramer said.
The Hill
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Friday that Donald Trump should resign the presidency immediately and that if the Republican Party cannot separate itself from Trump, she isn’t certain she has a future with the party.
Anchorage Daily News
What was that she said when she voted "no" on impeachment? Oh yeah, she said she thought he'd learned his lesson.
Fox News contributor and formerWhite House press secretary Ari Fleischer has vowed to no longer “defend” President Trump following Wednesday’s pro-Trump riot that overtook the Capitol.
“At this point, I won’t defend him anymore,” Fleischer, who served in the George W. Bush administration and who voted for Trump in 2020, told The Associated Press.
“I won’t defend him for stirring the pot that incited the mob,” the GOP strategist added. “He’s on his own.”
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Fleischer had previously vocalized support for Trump, writing in an October opinion piece for The Hill that he planned to cast his vote for the sitting president in the 2020 election, viewing the choice between Trump and Biden as “between a personally offensive outsider who signs good policies and a professionally offensive politician who will turn bad ideas into law.”
“Say what you will about Trump violating norms, he has never tried to redo the balance of power by irregular means,” Fleischer wrote at the time.
The Hill
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.The Defense Department's internal watchdog plans to review a recent Army Corps of Engineers decision to award a $400 million contract for border wall construction to a North Dakota company that has been publicly and privately endorsed by members of the Trump administration, including the president himself.
The review of the award to Fisher Sand & Gravel is an audit by the Pentagon's inspector general and comes in response to a request by Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Thompson said the decision to award the contract should be reviewed because Fisher's "proposals reportedly did not meet the operational requirements of U.S. Customs and Border Protection" and because of "concerns about the possibility of inappropriate influence" on the Army Corps of Engineers.
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Fisher was officially awarded the contract Dec. 2. The details of its winning design are not known. Fisher did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Thompson's request for a review.
Border agents have repeatedly said they want the ability to see through any barrier built along the border, and the concrete design Fisher originally proposed would not give them that ability. There was also doubt that Fisher has the ability to carry through the project, especially at the low cost it has estimated.
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"We had to explain the rules of federal procurement. You can't just pick a winner," said a person familiar with the conversations about Fisher with Trump in 2018. "He thought he could get three times the amount of wall because they were offering it for one-third of the price. But we were dubious."
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For years and in recent meetings, the president has pushed the Army Corps of Engineers to consider awarding a contract for border wall construction to Fisher, according to three sources familiar with the discussions. And in a trip to the border in November, Trump's new acting secretary of homeland security and the chief of the Border Patrol's El Paso Sector toured a privately funded wall built by Fisher.
The renewed push for Fisher by Trump and DHS officials caught many by surprise, given the controversy in which the company has been entangled. The Washington Post first reported Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., held up the confirmation of a White House official in his demands to see border wall contracts that had gone out to other companies.
Officials feared Cramer was attempting to share proprietary information with Fisher so that they could make their bid more competitive. Cramer was a proponent of Fisher, a company from his home state, and had repeatedly made outreach on their behalf to the White House.
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Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner has also been a proponent of Fisher's and We Build the Wall in internal meetings, according to a former DHS official, a congressional aide and a U.S. official.
NBC
If you want something from the government, get yourself on Fox News.The chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security on Wednesday called for an investigation into a $400 million border wall contract awarded this week to North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel, a company President Trump personally urged military officials to hire.
In a letter to the Defense Department Office of Inspector General, Rep. BennieThompson (D-Miss.) said there are reasons to be suspicious of the decision to bestow such a large contract on the company. Thompson cited Trump’s repeated promotion of Fisher to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a recent visit by the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to a span of privately financed barrier the firm built outside El Paso.
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Fisher was not among the companies the Army Corps initially selected as qualified bidders on nearly $10 billion in contracts for border barrier construction. But CEO Tommy Fisher made repeat appearances on Fox News and elsewhere to promote his company, claiming his crews could build the structure faster and for less money.
Maybe that's the wall Trump keeps saying is going up.Fisher, a GOP donor, also enlisted Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) to personally lobby the president. Cramer accused the Army Corps of treating Fisher unfairly, and at one point he stalled the confirmation of a White House budget office nominee to force military officials to provide copies of other construction firms’ contract bids.
Last month, Fisher was included for the first time in the pool of qualified eligible bidders, and the $400 million is the company’s only major border wall contract to date.
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Fisher also has worked with an activist group led by former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and other prominent right-wing Trump supporters who are building new border barriers on private land with millions of dollars in online donations.
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The group, We Build the Wall, completed a span of new barrier outside El Paso during the summer, hiring Fisher to perform the work. Chad F. Wolf, the acting homeland security secretary, visited the privately built barrier last month, and the area’s top Border Patrol official praised the structure as a “game changer.”
We Build the Wall is planning to build a new 3.5-mile span of fencing along the banks of the Rio Grande in southern Texas, on land it says Tommy Fisher purchased.
A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Tuesday to halt Fisher’s bulldozers, siding with the National Butterfly Center, a neighboring wildlife sanctuary whose director says the project will inflict irreparable harm on the local ecosystem.
