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newrepublic.com

Mike Johnson Completely Blindsided by Resignation in His Own Party

House Speaker Mike Johnson had no idea Representative Ken Buck is quitting, as the GOP is in complete shambles.
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Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling/

March 12, 2024/3:59 p.m. ET

Mike Johnson Completely Blindsided by Resignation in His Own Party​

House Speaker Mike Johnson had no idea Representative Ken Buck is quitting, as the GOP is in complete shambles.​

House Speaker Mike Johnson looks down while speaking before a mic. U.S. flags are behind him.

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Representative Ken Buck took to social media to announce his near-immediate leave from Congress, resigning so fast that even his party leaders were caught off guard by the decision.

“Today, I am announcing that I will depart Congress at the end of next week,” Buck said in a statement on Tuesday. “I look forward to staying involved in our political process, as well as spending more time in Colorado with my family.”

The less-than-two-weeks notice took practically everybody by surprise, including (or maybe especially) House Speaker Mike Johnson.

“I was surprised by Ken’s announcement,” Johnson told a crush of reporters inside the Capitol building. “I look forward to talking to him about that.”

“I didn’t know,” he added.



The Freedom Caucus member originally announced his intention to retire in November—though he had not indicated he would leave before the end of his term.

The loss is a huge problem for House Republicans, who have tried and failed to galvanize their caucus to pass party objectives for months. Buck’s resignation will trim the Republican tally in the House even more, bringing it to just 218 members and leaving behind an impossibly thin one-seat majority, given other vacancies.

The prolific GOP critic, meanwhile, took the resignation as an opportunity to serve one more dunk on his conservative colleagues.

“It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress,” Buck elaborated to CNN, describing the current iteration of the lower chamber as “dysfunctional” and the “worst year in 40, 50 years.”

“Instead of having decorum, instead of operating in a professional manner, this place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people.”
 
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www.salon.com

Experts: Transcript shows Robert Hur “lied” about Biden

The full transcript undercuts Hur's claims that Biden could not remember his son's death and had "poor" memory.
www.salon.com www.salon.com

“Can’t make it up”: Experts say transcript shows special counsel Robert Hur “lied” about Biden​

The full transcript undercuts Hur's claims that Biden could not remember his son's death and had "poor" memory​


By IGOR DERYSH​

Managing Editor

PUBLISHED MARCH 12, 2024 1:26PM (EDT)​


Special Counsel Robert Hur testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 12, 2024. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images))


Special Counsel Robert Hur testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 12, 2024. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images))

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The full transcript of President Joe Biden’s five-hour interview with special counsel Robert Hur’s investigators “paints a more nuanced portrait” of Biden’s memory than the special counsel’s report, according to The Washington Post, which noted that “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”

The transcript “could raise questions about Hur’s depiction of the 81-year-old president as having ‘significant limitations’ on his memory,” according to The Associated Press.

Hur in his report declined to charge Biden, arguing that it would be difficult to convince a jury to convict with a memory that the special counsel described as “faulty” and “poor,” noting that Biden could not recall when his son Beau died or when he served as vice president.

But Biden said exactly when his son died in the interview.

“What month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30,” Biden said. When two others in the room chimed in with the year, Biden asked, “Was it 2015 when he died?”

Hur soon suggested taking a brief break, an officer Biden rejected before launching into a long explanation of Beau’s death.

“Let me just keep going to get it done,” Biden said.



Biden after the report’s release denied that he forgot when his son died.

“Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, was it any of their damn business?” Biden said at a press conference last month.

The full transcript shows that Biden repeatedly joked with prosecutors “in a setting that seemed more chummy than antagonistic,” the Post reported.

“The FBI know my house better than I do,” Biden quipped at one point. “I just hope you didn’t find any risqué pictures of my wife in a bathing suit,” the president later joked. “Which you probably did. She’s beautiful.”

Biden insisted he had little involvement in packing or moving boxes that included classified documents at the end of the Obama administration.

Asked what might have been stored in the boxes in his garage, Biden replied, “I have no goddamn idea. I didn’t even bother to go through them.”

“Somebody must’ve packed this up, just picked up all the stuff, and put it in a box, because I didn’t,” he later added.

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The transcript also appears to shine a light on Hur’s claim that Biden could not remember when he served as vice president.

“My problem was I never knew where any of the documents of boxes were specifically coming from or who packed them,” he said. “Just did I get them delivered to me. And so this is — I’m, at this stage, in 2009, am I still vice president?”

Biden sought to clarify his answer but one of Hur’s deputies pushed to move on.

During another point, Hur pointed to an image of a notebook related to Afghanistan.

“The date is 4-20-09,” Biden said. “Was I still vice president? I was, wasn’t I? Yeah.”

Hur in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday denied that he “disparage[d] the president unfairly” and claimed “the evidence and the president himself put his memory squarely at issue.”

National security attorney Bradley Moss predicted that “Democrats are going to eat Hur alive at this hearing.”

“I *think* Biden might be owed an apology,” tweeted Vox reporter Zach Beauchamp.

Politico’s Kyle Cheney flagged a portion of the transcript in which Hur, in the first sentence of Biden’s interview, gets the time of day wrong.

“Can’t make it up,” he wrote.



“Hur's claim that Biden couldn't remember the day his son died was an outrageous lie,” argued Tommy Vietor, a former Obama staffer and commentator. “It's also cruel & irrelevant. Anyone who has experienced loss like that can remember images, smells, bit of conversations. The pain is burned into you. Dates blend together bc they're irrelevant.”

Attorney Andrew Laufer tweeted, “Hur lied. That’s really the only appropriate response.”

White House spokesman Ian Sams told CNN on Tuesday that Hur’s opening statement to the committee was also “misleading.”

“I think it lays bare pretty clearly that the result of this 15 month investigation that was led by a Trump appointee prosecutor who was named special counsel, found that there was no case here,” he said. “I think that some of those that language that you just laid out is a little bit misleading. In fact, later in the report, 200 pages in, not on page two, but 200 pages in, he says very clearly that the evidence does not fully support the idea that he willfully retained classified documents.”

 
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