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WASHINGTON– A growing number of establishment Republicans are warning former president Donald Trump not to run again for president and that if he does, he will not be the GOP nominee.
Responding to disappointing midterm results former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and former Vice President Mike Pence have each said they would not support Trump should he run again in 2024.
“Some people like Trump and some people don’t like Trump,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). “He’s the most dominant single figure in the party. That’s a fact.”
One of the most outspoken against Trump’s impending formal declaration is Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence.
“Well, there might be somebody else I’d prefer more,” Pence said last week when asked if he would vote for Trump if he was on the ballot in 2024.
Paul Ryan, who retired from the House in 2019 after multiple high profile disagreements with Trump, says a Trump 2024 run could cost Republicans the White House if he’s on the ballot.
“I think Trump’s unelectability will be palpable by then,” Ryan said. “We all know he will lose. Or let me put it this way: We all know he’s much more likely to lose the White House than anybody else running for president on our side of the aisle. So why would we want to go with that?”
Bush, who unsuccessfully ran against Trump for the GOP nomination in 2016, says he believes its time for “new blood.”
“I believe there will be a yearning for, A, a new generation of leadership in our country in 2024 and, B, candidates that are focused on the future, not necessarily the grievances of the past,” Bush told CNN.
Joe O’Dea, the GOP Senate candidate in Colorado who has seemingly found favor with red voters in a very blue state by distancing himself from Trump also says Trump should not be on the 2024 ballot.
“I don’t think Donald Trump should run again,” O’Dea said on CNN. “I’m going to actively campaign against Donald Trump and make sure that we have got four or five really great Republicans right now. Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, they could run and serve for eight years.”
WASHINGTON– Former President Donald Trump had launched a full on war against one time political ally turned rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
In a slew of attacks issued from his Save America PAC Trump labeled DeSantis as an “average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations.”
“Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he’s going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, ‘I’m only focused on the Governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future,’” Trump raged. “Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.”
Trump’s newest criticisms toward DeSantis come days after a less than victorious midterm for Republicans where pundits had predicted an easy landslide.
“Governor Ron DeSanctimonious,” the former president said, “an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations, who didn’t have to close up his State, but did, unlike other Republican Governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average—middle of the pack—including COVID, and who has the advantage of SUNSHINE, where people from badly run States up North would go no matter who the Governor was, just like I did!”
Trump went on to claim DeSantis “came to me in desperate shape in 2017—he was politically dead, losing in a landslide.”
“Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse him, he could win … I said, ‘Let’s give it a shot, Ron,’” Trump said. “When I Endorsed him, it was as though, to use a bad term, a nuclear weapon went off.”
DeSantis, who easily won re-election by nearly 20 percentage points Tuesday night over Democrat Charlie Crist, has issued no public response to Trump’s verbal assaults.
WASHINGTON (Breitbart)– President Donald Trump argued Monday that he should be declared the winner of the 2020 election, citing fraud and election interference by the FBI.
The former president pointed to reports that the FBI worked to bury the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop on social media right before the 2020 election.
“This is massive FRAUD & ELECTION INTERFERENCE at a level never seen before in our Country,” Trump wrote on social media.
Trump said the FBI purposefully tried to stop him from winning the 2020 election.
He proposed two solutions.
“REMEDY: Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!” Trump wrote.
It is unclear how a presidential election would be declared fraudulent and redone through the court system, and unclear whether it is even permissible by the Constitution.
Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI warned his company of an imminent “dump” of “Russian propaganda” putting them on “high alert” right before the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in the days before the 2020 election.
The FBI did not deny Zuckerberg’s story.
Facebook censored the story as disinformation right before the 2020 election although it ultimately proved to be factual.
“Yeah. I mean, it sucks. I mean, it turned out after the fact, I mean the fact-checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false, right?” Zuckerberg admitted to Rogan. “So basically it had this period where it was getting less distribution.”
Breitbart’s Charlie Spiering contributed to the contents of this report.
WASHINGTON (New York Post) — The Florida federal magistrate judge who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort left the local US Attorney’s office more than a decade ago to rep employees of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein who had received immunity in the long-running sex-trafficking investigation of the financier.
Sources tell The Post that Judge Bruce Reinhart approved the warrant that enabled federal agents to converge on the palatial South Florida estate on Monday in what Trump called an “unannounced raid on my home.”
Reinhart was elevated to magistrate judge in March 2018 after 10 years in private practice. That November, the Miami Herald reported that he had represented several of Epstein’s employees — including, by Reinhart’s own admission to the outlet, Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, who Epstein once reportedly described as his “Yugoslavian sex slave.”
Kellen and Marcinkova were among Epstein’s lieutenants who were granted immunity as part of a controversial 2007 deal with federal prosecutors that allowed the pervert to plead guilty to state charges rather than federal crimes. Epstein wound up serving just 13 months in county jail and was granted work release.
According to the outlet, Reinhart resigned from the South Florida US Attorney’s Office effective on New Year’s Day 2008 and went to work for Epstein’s cohorts the following day. Epstein, who was found dead in August 2019 of an apparent suicide in the Manhattan Correctional Center while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, had hired a stable of high-powered lawyers, including former independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
Reinhart was later named in a civil lawsuit that accused him of violating Justice Department policies by switching sides in the middle of the Epstein investigation, suggesting he had used inside information about the probe to build favor with the notorious defendant, the Herald reported in 2018.
In a 2011 affidavit, Reinhart denied he had done anything improper and insisted that since he was not involved in the federal investigation of Epstein, he was not privy to inside information about the case.
However, in a 2013 court filing, Reinhart’s former colleagues contradicted him, saying that he had “learned confidential, non-public information about the Epstein matter.” Reinhart noted to the Herald in response that a complaint filed against him by a lawyer for Epstein’s victims had been dismissed by the Justice Department.
In his 12 years as a federal prosecutor, according to his official biography, Reinhart “managed a docket that covered the full spectrum of federal crimes, including narcotics, violent crimes, public corruption, financial frauds, child pornography and immigration.”
Reinhart is one of three federal magistrate judges in the West Palm Beach offices of the US District Court for the Southern District Court of Florida, along with William Matthewman and Ryon McCabe.
Two recent warrant applications were assigned to Reinhart and entered into the court system on Monday, the Miami Herald reported, but those warrants and information about who they targeted remain sealed. Records show another warrant was issued by Reinhart on Friday, but its contents were also sealed.
Trump confirmed media reports of a raid at his Florida resort on Monday evening, saying Mar-a-Lago was “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.”
The agents were reportedly searching the seaside property for boxes of classified documents Trump allegedly brought to the ritzy resort after he left the White House in January 2021, which would be a violation of federal record-keeping laws.
The National Archives and Records Administration said in February that it found classified documents in 15 boxes at Mar-a-Lago and alerted the FBI.
The removal of classified documents to unauthorized locations is banned under federal law, although Trump had wide powers when he was president to declassify documents.
The raid on Mar-a-Lago comes amid the House select committee’s continuing investigation into Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol as Congress met to certify the 2020 presidential election results.
A federal grand jury is also investigating the riot and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The New York Post’s Miranda Devine, Mark Moore and Samuel Chamberlain contributed to the contents of this report.