Klobuchar says rural stations would go under due to GOP cuts
'My hope is that we find some way to get through this, and so we don't see a bunch of rural stations going under, which is what will happen and it won't be the big city ones, it will be the rural ones,' Klobuchar told The Hill's Alex Bolton at the Hill Nation Summit.
The bill, which the House passed in June, includes around $8 billion in cuts for the United States Agency for International Development and another $1 billion cut to CPB. Some GOP senators, including Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine), have expressed concerns over the proposed cuts to public broadcasting.
Klobuchar, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, discussed the roles radio and television stations play in Minnesota's rural communities.
'These rural stations are often the lifeblood of these communities when it comes to emergency alerts,' Klobuchar said, pointing to the station's coverage of air quality and wildfires in neighboring Canada.
'These are things that, they sound small, but they are what bring communities together,' she said.
Klobuchar said on Wednesday that she has been contacted by former Republican state legislators in Minnesota, who live in rural areas and sit on the boards of local TV stations.
'We know there's going to be some changes to the bill, so it's going to go back to the House. So I was disappointed in the vote last night. I think we should be asserting our power,' the Minnesota Democrat said.
Senate Republicans argue that they have enough votes to pass the package, which would be another victory for President Trump, who signed his 'big, beautiful' reconciliation package into law on July 4.
Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, struck a side agreement with Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) to repurpose Interior Department money to aid around 28 radio stations in 14 states that broadcast on tribal lands.
Minutes before Klobuchar spoke on Wednesday, Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) said that CPB, the nonprofit that funds PBS and NPR, was 'an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.'
'I don't think that's the role of the federal government,' said the Texas Republican.
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New York Post
10 minutes ago
- New York Post
How the Hunter Biden cover-up continues to this day
In the same week that Hunter Biden burst back onto the public stage to play the victim and lash out at Democrats, we also heard from his one time protector turned reluctant nemesis, Special Counsel David Weiss, with similarly self serving and disingenuous testimony to Congress. Weiss, the former US Attorney in the Bidens' home state of Delaware who presided over the troubled five year investigation into the former First Son, told the House Judiciary Committee that there just wasn't enough evidence to justify charging Hunter under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). His investigators 'couldn't put together a sufficient case,' he said in June testimony released last week. Advertisement That's pretty rich, considering that those very IRS investigators complained bitterly about the obstruction and slow walking they faced on Weiss' watch every time they pursued an investigative trail that led to Joe Biden and the lucrative foreign lobbying Hunter did in his father's name. That's why IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler blew up their successful careers and became whistleblowers. Hunter's business model during his father's vice presidency and beyond revolved around foreign lobbying — including for the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma that was paying him a million dollars a year, Chinese government-linked firms BHR and CEFC, and an oligarch client in Romania. Advertisement In fact, the very first email this newspaper published from Hunter's infamous laptop was from a Burisma executive, thanking him for arranging a meeting with his father the previous night. It wasn't just any old meeting, either. Hunter had invited VP Biden to a private dinner at Georgetown restaurant Cafe Milano in April 2015 to meet his partners from Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, as his former 'best friend in business' Devon Archer told Congress. In their upcoming tell-all book, 'The Whistleblowers v the Big Guy,' Shapley and Ziegler point out that, along with that Burisma bombshell, emails and communications they recovered from the laptop showed that Hunter's relationship with DC lobbying shop Blue Star Strategies was tied to his position on the Burisma board and that the firm had been hired 'to influence U.S. government officials on Burisma's behalf.' Advertisement 'These connections raised red flags about potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act FARA and any comprehensive warrant would naturally include references to individuals who may have been involved, even tangentially.' And so, when their team drafted a search warrant related to potential FARA violation, Weiss' top U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf ordered them to remove all references to 'Political Figure 1,' the DOJ pseudonym for Joe Biden. 'Please focus on FARA evidence only. There should be nothing about Political Figure 1 in here,' Wolf wrote in an August 2020 email, according to their whistleblower testimony to Congress. Advertisement Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! Whenever their investigations might lead to Joe Biden they found subpoenas were denied, interviews were canceled or not allowed, and Hunter's lawyers were tipped off before search warrants could be executed. Prosecutors cited bad 'optics' or questioned whether the 'juice was worth the squeeze' For instance, Shapley testified that Wolf refused to approve a search warrant for a guest house Hunter had been staying in on Joe's palatial Delaware estate as part of FARA-related evidence collection. When they discovered incriminating WhatsApp messages Hunter wrote to a business partner at Chinese energy company CEFC on July 30, 2017, citing his father, the investigators were blocked from using phone location data to confirm that Joe really was in the room. 'I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,' Hunter wrote, demanding $10 million. 'I am very concerned that the Chairman has either changed his mind and broken our deal without telling me or that he is unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept.' Advertisement Hunter also threatened that his father would retaliate if the Chinese did not do as he commanded: 'I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.' Here was Hunter explicitly claiming his father was involved in his business negotiations. Apart from the fact that Joe claimed that he knew nothing about his son's overseas business dealings, Shapley and Ziegler decided there were serious tax implications to the conversation, but they were blocked from pursuing them. They weren't even allowed to find out if Hunter had sent the message from Joe's house. 'The message was clear,' Shapley and Ziegler write in 'The Whistleblowers v. the Big Guy.' 'Although we were investigating Joe Biden's son — who, it seemed, had often involved his father in his shady overseas business dealings — none of our materials were supposed to mention Joe Biden. Advertisement 'Even when we needed material that might be in one of Joe Biden's homes or storage units, we couldn't mention him. The document might leak to the press, and that would make the Biden campaign look bad. 'And in the summer of 2020, there was nothing that the leadership of the FBI wanted less than to make Joe Biden look bad. Doing so might help elect Donald Trump for a second time.' How different was the way the FBI handled Donald Trump compared to Joe Biden. Whether it was the fake Steele Dossier the FBI treated as if it were legitimate evidence, or the raid on Mar a Lago, there was no concern about the 'optics' of investigating a sitting president or presidential candidate when it was Trump. Advertisement As for FARA, the once little-used law against lobbying the US on behalf of foreign interests has been selectively used to target Trump allies and Democrat enemies. For example, Paul Manafort, former chairman of Trump's 2016 campaign, was charged with FARA. So, too, was Gal Luft, the original Hunter Biden whistleblower, who told FBI and DOJ officials in a March 2019 secret meeting in Brussels that Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden were on the payroll of the Chinese. His accurate information was buried and then, one week before Republicans took back the House in 2022, Luft was charged with FARA and other violations. He is currently languishing in jail in Cyprus while Hunter escaped scot free. Advertisement In the last days of his presidency, Joe issued a uniquely tailored pardon for his son, stretching back 11 years and covering Hunter's conviction on gun charges and guilty plea on felony tax evasion charges that Weiss was forced to press after the sweetheart plea deal he'd stitched together with Hunter's lawyers fell apart in the wake of Shapley and Ziegler's revelations. In the end, Weiss forced the IRS to remove Shapley and Ziegler from the investigation as soon as he suspected Shapley had blown the whistle. The Office of Special Counsel last year determined that the IRS had illegally retaliated against the pair by removing them from the investigation after they made protected disclosures to Congress about DOJ interference in the probe. All the obstruction and interference and slow walking past statutes of limitation happened under the benign leadership of David Weiss. So spare us his mealy mouthed justifications for squibbing what should have been the most consequential political corruption investigation in history.
USA Today
40 minutes ago
- USA Today
What's Trump's approval rating? Latest polls on job performance, immigration
A string of recent polls shows President Donald Trump's approval rating has remained largely steady over the last week, even as a new Gallup survey gave him his lowest numbers of his second term. Aggregations of recent approval polling from the New York Times and RealClearPolitics place Trump's approval between 44% and 45%, respectively, with a 53% to 42% disapproval. See last week's polling: Trump approval drops in new poll as more Americans oppose immigration policies In a July 25 poll from Emerson College, the president had a 46% approval rating and 47% disapproval. That's a one-point increase on both counts from the survey's June results. "About six months into the second Trump administration, the president's approval rating has stabilized in the mid-40s," the poll's executive director, Spencer Kimball, said in statement. "While his disapproval has steadily increased about a point each month since the inauguration and now stands at 47%." In a Gallup poll released a day prior, the president's approval rating was significantly lower, coming in at 37%. The pollsters called it the lowest mark of his second term and only a few points higher than his all-time-low rating of 34% at the end of his first term. Both polls showed what has long been a deep divide between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to Trump and his policies, especially over immigration, foreign policy and the economy. Here's a round-up of some of the last week's polls. Emerson College poll Trump notched his highest single-issue approval rating on immigration, the poll said, with 45% approving and 46% disapproving of Trump's policies. The highest disapproval numbers were on the economy, with a 41% approval rating and 51% disapproval. That continued to sink with Trump's tariff policy, with 36% approving while 50% disapproved. Trump's support – both on overall job performance and on specific issues – was fueled by Republican respondents in the poll. Just 10% of Democrats said they like the president's job performance, compared to 87% of Republicans and 38% of independents. The difference support was widest by party on immigration, with 12.9% of Democrats approving compared to 80% of Republicans. More: 16% of voters approve of Trump's handling of Epstein files, poll shows The survey of 1,400 registered voters was conducted July 21-22 and has a margin of error of ±2.5 percentage points. Gallup poll The poll marks a 10-point drop from the 47% approval rating Americans gave Trump at the beginning of his second term in January. About 29% of independent voters said they're pleased with Trump's job performance in the new survey, the lowest Gallup has tracked with the group in either of Trump's two terms. It's a 17-point decline from the 46% the president enjoyed among independents at the start of his second term earlier this year. Trump's ratings on some of the most significant issues facing the country also faltered, according to Gallup pollsters. He received the strongest support for his handling of the conflict with Iran, at 42% approving, followed by foreign policy at 41%. The president's handling of Iran – where U.S. troops bombed three nuclear sites last month – earned Trump the greatest support from independents, at 36%, while the federal budget gave him the lowest at 19%. The survey of 1,002 Americans was conducted July 7-21, and has a margin of error of ±4 percentage points. Fox News poll Trump's support was lowest on issues of inflation and tariffs, with 36% of respondents backing the way Trump has approached two central forces in America's economy. He received his highest ranking for border security, with 56% of respondents approving and 44% disapproving. Along party lines, support was highest among Republicans, with 88% backing the president. Thirty-seven percent of independents and 7% of Democrats agreed. The survey was conducted by Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research. 1,000 registered voters were surveyed July 18-21, and the poll has a margin of error of ±3 percentage points. Kathryn Palmer is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at kapalmer@ and on X @KathrynPlmr.
The Hill
40 minutes ago
- The Hill
Trump this time is trying to help GOP avoid messy primary fights
President Trump is using his influence to help Republicans avoid messy primary fights as the party prepares for the midterms. Trump recently waded into both Michigan's Senate race and the New York gubernatorial contest in an effort to convince notable candidates — Rep. Bill Huizenga (R) and Rep. Mike Lawler (R), respectively — to opt out of the contests. In both cases, the candidates bowed to pressure. The president's moves underscore how Republicans are already seeking to coalesce around candidates in some of next year's most high-profile races, as they look to buck historical trends that suggest the president's party will lose congressional seats and other contests. 'He's clearly far more involved in this round than he was in 2017 and 2018 but at the same time it's a totally different situation,' one national Republican operative said of Trump. The different situation is the narrow House GOP majority. It leaves Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) dealing with very tight margins on crucial votes. The president's political operation is effectively being led by Chris LaCivita, a Republican operative who served as co-campaign manager on Trump's 2024 presidential bid. One source close to the White House said Trump and his team would like to avoid messy, drawn-out GOP primaries in state-wide races that could damage candidates for the general election or divide the resources and attention of Republicans. The source pointed to the contentious Pennsylvania Senate primary in 2022 between now-Sen. Dave McCormick and Mehmet Oz, who prevailed in the primary but lost in the general election. Trump spoke directly with Huizenga earlier this month and urged him not to launch a Senate bid, a source familiar with the meeting confirmed to The Hill. NOTUS first reported that Trump had directly asked Huizenga to stay out of the race, effectively clearing the field for former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), whom Trump endorsed Thursday. In North Carolina, Trump is backing Michael Whatley, who is expected in the coming days to announce his campaign to replace retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). The source said Whatley would not have entered the race without Trump's blessing to leave his position at the Republican National Committee. 'They're also at the same time trying to do a balancing act where they want to be supportive of people who have been loyal to the president and drive who and what they think is in their best interest,' the national Republican strategist said. The strategist said those two criteria are 'not a perfect match,' pointing to Trump's backing of Whatley. The strategist argued that a candidate like Whatley is a riskier bet in the swing state. 'He essentially sacrificed Tillis who was a much safer bet than Lara Trump would have been or Whatley today,' the strategist said. 'If I were drawing a map, I would shade North Carolina in light blue.' Other Republicans push back on the notion, pointing to Whatley's deep ties to the state's grassroots from his history as chair of the North Carolina GOP. 'No polling has indicated that Thom Tillis was going to be a better candidate than a pro-Trump Republican,' said a second national Republican operative, noting that Trump has won North Carolina three times in the past. Republicans are also seeking to put a bow on Georgia's GOP Senate primary as the party looks to oust Sen. Jon Ossoff, arguably the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent up for reelection in the upper chamber. One other race to watch for Trump's influence is the Kentucky Senate campaign to replace outgoing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R). Trump has so far not weighed in as multiple Republicans have announced their candidacies. In Georgia, Fox News reported Friday that Trump's political operation and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's (R) had butted heads over their preferred candidates, with Kemp pushing former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley. Businessman Nate Morris has been building his pro-Trump resume. He announced his candidacy on Donald Trump Jr.'s podcast and has already scored endorsements from Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), both staunch Trump allies. Morris is also close with Vice President Vance. Trump also has not waded into the Texas Republican Senate primary, where state Attorney General Ken Paxton is taking on incumbent Sen. John Cornyn. Both Republicans are considered Trump allies, with Paxton being popular with the president's base and Cornyn a key GOP voice in the Senate. Most polls show Paxton with a considerable lead over Cornyn, but hypothetical general election polling shows Cornyn performing better than Paxton against Democratic candidates. Last week Cornyn said Trump has relayed to him that he is not ready to endorse in the race. Democrats argue that their chances at flipping Texas at the Senate level are boosted with a Paxton nomination. 'Paxton can't win a general but Cornyn probably can't win a primary,' the GOP strategist said. 'There's very complicating factors, but I think they're trying to balance their MAGA loyalties with the practicalities of making sure they keep the Senate comfortably and try to find a map that gives them a House majority that includes redistricting.' Redistricting has become a major topic of conversation in national political circles as Texas Republicans pursue redistricting ahead of the midterms. Trump spoke earlier this month with Texas Republicans, where he urged leaders in the state to redraw congressional maps to boost the GOP. The president has also made clear he would support other red states doing the same. 'Just a very simple redrawing, we pick up five seats,' Trump said of Texas. 'But we have a couple of other states where we'll pick up seats also.' Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) floated 'middecade' redistricting to reporters Thursday, noting that he has spoken to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the matter. 'They said they were going to redo the count in time for 2026,' the governor said, referring to the census. 'They would have to do that relatively soon because you need time to draw maps and you need time to get that done.' Population shifts in states like Florida could benefit House Republicans, particularly in south Florida, where Democratic Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jared Moskowitz and Lois Frankel could be negatively impacted. 'Any advantage you can get the better,' the GOP strategist noted. 'That gives you a lot of breathing room even if you lose some tough races.' Trump's poll numbers have wavered in recent surveys, a result largely attributable to independents souring on his handling of key issues like the economy and immigration. But Trump allies argued the president's endorsement is still a make-or-break factor in primaries because of his enduring popularity within the party. 'His numbers are stronger than ever before with the Republican base,' one Trump ally said. 'Republican voters are happier with him now than ever before.' The second national Republican operative called Trump's popularity 'a huge asset' in the midterms. 'If you are trying to run a campaign that wants to win you need to replicate the pro Trump coalition,' the operative said, referring to the president's general election win last year.
