#jason chaffetz

[saywhat-politics]

Former National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien explained President-elect Donald Trump's plan to "extract the minerals and oil" from Greenland by making the territory "part of Alaska."

During a Sunday interview on Fox News, host Jason Chaffetz asked O'Brien about Trump's threat to annex Greenland.

"Well, the latest is Greenland is a highway from the Arctic all the way to North America to the United States," O'Brien opined. "Now, the kingdom of Denmark owns Greenland, and they've got an obligation to defend Greenland."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Gideon Taaffe and Noah Dowe at MMFA:

The Trump administration deported two women along with their U.S. citizen children to Honduras last week, including a 4-year-old who was “receiving treatment for metastatic cancer.” While the Trump administration claims the mothers took the children with them willingly, lawyers for the families noted that the mothers were not given meaningful access to lawyers or family members to make alternate arrangements.  Right-wing media have defended the administration’s actions by claiming migrants are using children as “anchor babies,” blaming the parents for their children being removed from the country, and calling it “a nonstory.” 

The Trump administration deported two women alongside their U.S. citizen children, reportedly without giving them access to their lawyers

Three U.S. citizen children were deported to Honduras along with their mothers, including a 4-year-old “with Stage 4 cancer who was sent without medication.” As the BBC reported, “Three young children who are US citizens — including one with cancer — were deported to Honduras alongside their mothers last week, according to advocacy groups and the families' lawyers.” [BBC, 4/28/25]

The Trump administration has claimed that the kids weren’t technically deported, but were allowed to leave as the mothers wanted to take them. Trump “border czar” Tom Homan added, “This is parenting 101. You can decide to take that child with you, or you can decide to leave a child here with a relative or another spouse.” [CBS News, 4/27/25]

The lawyers for the families have said they were given no real opportunity to make alternate arrangements for the children. According to NBC News, “One mother who was about to be deported was allowed less than two minutes on the phone with her husband to figure out what would become of her 2-year-old U.S. citizen child. Another mother wasn’t allowed to speak with attorneys or family members before she was deported, accompanied by her U.S.-born children, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement knew one of them had Stage 4 cancer.” [NBC News, 4/28/25]

A federal judge in Louisiana stated his “strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process,” even as the father was trying to keep her in the country. According to Politico, lawyers had filed an emergency petition trying to get the child released from ICE custody. [Politico, 4/25/25]

The ACLU of Louisiana issued a statement condemning the “deeply troubling circumstances” of the case, which they say “raise serious due process concerns” and “stand in direct violation of ICE’s own written and informal directives.” The statement is co-signed by seven human rights and immigration figures. Ware Immigration’s Erin Hebert said that “deporting U.S. citizen children is illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral,” and Teresa Reyes-Flores of the Southeast Dignity not Detention Coalition argued, “ICE’s actions show a blatant violation of due process and basic human rights.” [ACLU, 4/25/25] 

Right-wing media being heartless ghouls as usual on the Trump Regime’s deportations of children with US citizenship.

[fhear]

This is the deep state at its worst: Jason Chaffetz

[liberalsarecool]

The outrage is all performance. Do people think turkeys cost $90? And do people think Joe Biden sets the price of turkeys or raises turkeys?

Jason Chaffetz left politics in disgrace. No wonder he is on FOX hyping bullshit.

[mariacallous]

“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” President Trump told reporters on March 22. In the span of a week, the president “forgot” that he invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport hundreds of people to a Salvadoran gulag.

“Other people handled it, but Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that,” he mumbled vaguely.

The media framed the debacle as a clever effort to “downplay his involvement” in the ugly episode, rather than evidence that the president is totally checked out and letting other people run the government.

And yet, just five days before his own memory lapse, Trump “declared” his predecessor’s pardons of the January 6 Committee “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” because Biden was too senile to understand them.

The post is part of an ongoing campaign to undo Biden’s presidency by claiming that he was too incompetent by the end to exercise actual power, and some unnamed, shadowy figure was running the White House instead. It’s shockingly inappropriate, of course. But the juxtaposition is even more jarring as we are daily confronted with a president who is disengaged from the details of his job, preferring to outsource most of his authority to an unelected billionaire.

President 4chan

Undoing pardons is not a thing. Not even if Biden used an autopen. As the Supreme Court made clear in Trump v. US, the president’s exercise of his “core” powers, specifically the pardon, is unreviewable. But Trump is captured by internet memes, and so he’s thrilled to amplify the “autopen” conspiracy currently flooding the rightwing media ecosystem.

“The person that operated the autopen, I think we ought to find out who that was because I guess that was the real president,” Trump said in the Oval Office on March 20.

As the New York Times points out, the “autopen” story was a conservative op from the get-go. Mike Howell, a Heritage Foundation operative who describes himself on Twitter as “Top Deportation Scientist. Official Pardon/Autopen Inspector,” spent the past four years trying to undermine the Biden administration through more or less questionable means. Looking to recycle that work in the Trump era, Howell is now trying to find ways to undo Biden’s work.

Heritage’s official position, at least since January 20, is that the president has un-challengeable authority over virtually every aspect of government. In 2024, even as the conservative think tank spearheaded litigation to challenge Biden’s supposedly tyrannical abuses, Heritage published Project 2025, a blueprint for imposing conservative rule. But consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and so, as Trump rushed to implement the Project 2025 agenda in the first weeks of his second stint, Howell and former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz were trawling through Biden’s signatures hoping to find a way to magic away his executive actions.

On March 5, Missouri Attorney General Andy Bailey unknowingly boosted Howell’s project.

“I am calling for a federal investigation into President Biden’s mental decline and legality of executive orders, pardons, and all other actions issued in his name,” he blustered on social media. “I am urging the Department of Justice to determine whether unelected White House staff exploited the president’s cognitive declined to issue executive orders without his knowing approval.”

The post was accompanied by a fake news release bearing the seal of Bailey’s office.

Bailey, who is no stranger to using his position for political stunts, cited zero evidence that President Biden lacked mental capacity. But for Howell, the signal boost was a godsend.

“Whoever controlled the autopen controlled the presidency,” he tweeted.

Howell’s post went viral, and soon rightwing media was running the story wall-to-wall.

Smear early, smear often

Perhaps reasoning that no one but liberals reads the “fake news” New York Times, Howell gleefully described the plan to reporters.

“We determined that the most legally vulnerable documents were the pardons,” he gushed, tacitly admitting that the goal was destruction for its own sake, not to further any policy goal or because the orders were themselves defective.

It’s an odd strategy. Even conservative stalwart Jonathan Turley is rolling his eyes at the idea of invalidating Biden’s pardons. And, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed out in her partial dissent, the Court’s immunity decision would make it impossible to prosecute a president for selling a pardon, much less auto-signing one away, since questioning his advisors in court is now illegal.

Which is a lucky thing for Trump, who just pardoned Trevor Milton, a convicted fraudster who just so happened to have made a $1.8 million donation to the president’s campaign. Trump seemed not to know that Milton was found guilty by a jury of defrauding investors in his electric car company.

“He was exonerated. It was a big celebration,” he babbled, adding that “They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. He supported Trump. He liked Trump.”

Trump went on to call the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York “vicious people.”

“They’re violent,” he ranted, accusing the Justice Department of going after “thousands” of innocent people. He appeared blissfully unbothered that pardoning Milton will likely deprive his victims of hundreds of millions of dollars that would have gone to restitution.

Trump, who, at 78, is just three years younger than Biden, is clearly decompensating before our eyes. And yet, even as he free associates on live television, back-formulating justifications for orders he’s obviously never read, the right leans ever harder into the story of Biden’s supposed incompetence. Last week a federal judge on the Fifth Circuit took the occasion of an unrelated appeal to bring it up in a wholly unrelated case.

“Questions have arisen about the flurry of last-minute pardons issued by the Biden Administration,” Judge Andy Oldham wrote conspiratorially, without saying who was raising those questions.

“Some or all were allegedly effectuated via autopen,” he intoned, again omitting to mention who is doing the alleging.

“Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, stated that President Biden ‘genuinely did not know what he had signed’ in at least one instance toward the end of his presidency,” he went on, as if Johnson’s interview with conservative journalist Bari Weiss was cognizable evidence.

Judge Oldham went on to condemn Biden’s “pardon” of the defendant as “a stain on the noble prerogative of executive mercy.” In fact, it wasn’t a pardon at all, but a commutation of the death sentence for a murderer who will never leave prison. But Andy Oldham really wants to be a Supreme Court justice, so when he saw an opening to abuse the president’s former rival while expressing his support for the death penalty, he took it.

Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it to create confusion

“If Obama …” or “If Biden …” is a pointless exercise. And yet we are daily confronted with a president who is vigorously, confidently not doing his job.

Trump doesn’t know what he’s signed when it comes to pardons, executive orders, or anything else. He’s outsourced the job to an unelected billionaire who is currently slashing through the government, bragging on social media about feeding entire federal agencies “to the woodchipper.” Elon Musk leads cabinet meetings, dispatches his henchcoders to take over agency after agency, and purports to cancel federal contracts at will. He has no statutory authority, but claims only to be acting as an extension of the president.

In short, Musk is the autopen, illegitimately usurping executive power while claiming to be a mere extension of the president, mechanically recording his wishes and codifying his orders. And so, to compensate, Trump leans into the old, familiar foil.

It’s not the Trump kids who are trading on their father’s position to enrich themselves. It’s Hunter Biden. It’s not the Trump administration storing classified information on unsecured devices. It’s Hillary Clinton. And it’s not Donald Trump who signs whatever his aides put in front of him, no matter how corrupt. It’s Joe Biden.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Heatmap News:

Americans love their public lands — particularly Americans living in the West, where easy access to the region’s undeveloped forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, and lakes is a point of identity and pride. But on Friday, in its first action as a voting body, the House of Representatives for the 119th Congress approved a rules package that reintroduces a provision making it easier for lawmakers to cede control of federal lands to local authorities. That, in turn, could result in vast swaths of the West being opened up to drilling or auctioned off to private owners, according to critics.

“It’s an obscure provision that [Congress] is using to essentially obfuscate the paving of the way towards selling off federal public lands,” Michael Carroll, the BLM Campaign Director at the Wilderness Society, told me of the rulemaking maneuver.

Republicans have tried this before. In 2017, during the party’s trifecta, the House approved a rules package with a near-identical provision that essentially declared that public lands do not have a budgetary value that needs to be accounted for when they’re sold, streamlining potential handovers. New Mexico Democratic Representative Raúl Grijalva described the provision at the time as allowing Congress to “give away every single piece of property we own, for free, and pretend we have lost nothing of any value.”

Utah Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz subsequently attempted to take advantage of the provision by introducing legislation that would have transferred 3 million acres of Western federal land to state control — a bill that was met by so much opposition from hunters, anglers, and his own furious constituents that he ultimately withdrew it.

The provision briefly disappeared from the rules packages of the 116th and 117th Congresses, when the House was controlled by Democrats, then reappeared again in 2023, when Congress was split but the House was in Republican control. But to advocates for public lands, the provision’s inclusion in the 119th Congress’ rules seems like a mere extension and more like a tactical teeing-up for the incoming Republican trifecta. “Utah politicians aren’t stupid. They learn from their mistakes,” Carroll said.

He described an anticipated three-pronged approach to land privatization headed into 2024: the judiciary route, with the Supreme Court poised to decide whether or not to hear a Utah lawsuit over the constitutionality of federal control of BLM lands later thisweek; the legislative route, which began with Friday’s rule package; and the administrative route, with Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who supports Utah’s lawsuit, under a directive to increase drilling. “It’s all backed up by the amount of money that the state of Utah appropriated to support their lawsuit — $20 million that they didn’t have that last time,” Carroll added.

He doesn’t expect Republicans to sit around twiddling their thumbs, either. In 2017, the “Trump administration was pretty new to governing and the levers of power.” He expects in 2024 “we’re going to see, in the next two weeks, legislation that moves to privatize public lands.”

“We need to hear Republicans when they say, ‘Drill, baby drill,’” Carroll went on. “That has real consequences for federal public lands.”

[nerdykeith]

Conservatives on #FoxNews again proving just how clueless they are. If iPhones are to be entirely manufactured in the US, it will not aid inflation; it will make it worse. Main reasons? The labour pay will have to increase dramatically. Eat it? Right back at ya! But of course they'll find someone else to blame. These rightists always find some excuse to lack accountability.

[new876868767]

[ad_1] House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) suggested during a Fox News interview Friday night that former FBI director James Comey may have been attempting to incite "some kind of coup or some type of insurrection" against President Trump with a now-deleted social media post that read "86 47." "Look they're losing their minds over Trump's success in securing the border, and all the things the media said President Trump couldn't do that he did in the first three weeks of his term," Comer told former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who is now a Fox News personality. "It has made people like Comey very anxious now, and who knows what led to the decision to post that picture?" The Secret Service interviewed Comey on Friday amid GOP outrage over a photo he posted on Instagram on Thursday that showed seashells on a beach spelling out "86 47." Trump, his top allies and other Republicans have accused Comey of calling for the 47th president's assassination. Comey, 64, has denied that the social media post was a call for Trump’s death and clarified in a follow-up statement that he "didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence." "It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took down the post," he wrote. The term "86" is typically understood as slang for rejecting or throwing out something or someone. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed in a post on the social platform X that Comey agreed to a voluntary interview at the Secret Service’s Washington Field Office on Friday. Comer told Chaffetz that his opinion of the former FBI chief "is so bad" that he didn't know what to make of the intent behind Comey's post. "Everything that he was involved in that I was involved in investigating, there were mistakes made, there were lies told, there was incompetence demonstrated at every step of the way," the Kentucky Republican said. "I could see that he made a simple mistake, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if that was intentional." [ad_2] Source link

[10bmnews]

JASON CHAFFETZ: Democrats have made a fatal error opposing DOGE

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Forced to defend the indefensible, Congressional Democrats are having trouble coming up with rational arguments against fighting the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse being exposed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).  The combination of legal nitpicks, personal attacks, and apocalyptic warnings reflects a scattershot…

[qubixo1]

Jason Chaffetz: Democrats have made an error in the

NewYou can listen to the wolf texts! When it is forced to protect an unknown, Privitinal Hotels are difficult to quarrel with the removal of waste, deception, and abuse known by Elon Musele The Role-Freedom Department (Douge). The combination of aitpicks of legal variations, and the warnings Aocayptic indicates the solution of scatterhot that does not agree with the logical monkeys. Coor Coor…

[saywhat-politics]

Jason Chaffetz of Fox News is “offended” that President Joe Biden gave former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) an award on Thursday.

Chaffetz, a Fox News contributor and former member of Congress, guest-hosted Thursday’s Hannity, where he interviewed Reps. James Comer (R-KY), Byron Donalds (R-FL), and Ronny Jackson (R-TX). Hours earlier, President Joe Biden bestowed upon Cheney the Presidential Citizens Medal, which is the second-highest award the president can give to a civilian. Biden also gave the award to Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who chaired the Jan. 6 committee on which Cheney also served. Republicans have long maligned that panel, which investigated Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Allison Fisher at MMFA:

As part of the conservative campaign to brand Vice President Kamala Harris as the “most radical left-wing person ever to run for the presidency of the United States,” right-wing media are falsely claiming that she wants to ban red meat – a position that they have repeatedly tried to attach to Democrats. The false claim that Harris wants to ban red meat is purportedly based on a comment she made about revising the food pyramid to encourage healthy eating habits during the Democratic primary in 2019.

[...]

When the Green New Deal resolution was introduced by Democrats in the House and Senate in 2019, right-wing media falsely insisted that the package included banning cows because of their contribution to the greenhouse gas methane. [Media Matters, 7/26/19]

In 2021, right-wing media spread a fake story that President Joe Biden wanted to ban hamburgers. Fox News ran a rare correction on its role in spreading the story. [Media Matters, 4/27/21, 4/26/21]

In 2022, Tucker Carlson aired a documentary on Fox Nation focused on the conspiracy theory that world leaders are trying to ban meat and replace it with insect protein. Others in the right-wing media also pushed this conspiracy: In July 2022, for example, “Great Reset” conspiracy theorist Peter Sweden got over 12,000 likes on a tweet saying, “In Belgium there are now talks about an ‘environment tax’ on meat. They want you to eat bugs and be happy. Are you enjoying The Great Reset?” Similarly, Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said that meat is a “symbol of freedom” that “globalists” want to ban during a 2022 interview with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. [Fox Nation, Let Them Eat Bugs, 4/14/23; Media Matters, 11/08/22]

Paranoid weirdo right-wingers push false claim that Kamala Harris desires to “ban red meat.”

[newtras]

Jason Chaffetz: Democrats made an error kills doge

NewThen you can listen to the Fox newsbooks! Compensation to protect unlimited, fishing have a problem from clear controversy against the combat of waste, robbery and vulnerable abuse Department of Government Operations (Doge). The Nitpickinkinian mixture, human and apocalypec attacks indicate a clear scalpetershot style that does not like a plain degeput appeal. The point is a point in the…

[satrthere]

Jason Chaffetz: Democrats made an error kills doge

NewThen you can listen to the Fox newsbooks! Compensation to protect unlimited, fishing have a problem from clear controversy against the combat of waste, robbery and vulnerable abuse Department of Government Operations (Doge). The Nitpickinkinian mixture, human and apocalypec attacks indicate a clear scalpetershot style that does not like a plain degeput appeal. The point is a point in the…

[labelleperfumery]

Donald Trump Seeking a 3rd Term Triggers Blowup on '2 Angry Men' Podcast

Donald Trump may not leave the White House at the end of his term — so says Steve Bannon — and it triggered a fairly furious argument on our “2 Angry Men” podcast. Harvey got into it with former Utah congressman and current FOX news contributor… from TMZ.com https://www.tmz.com/2025/03/21/2-angry-men-trump-third-term-jason-chaffetz/