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Senator Hawley sent a letter on Monday to Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Chris Coons (D-DE) arguing that the seven senators who submitted an ethics complaint against Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) last week issued a "frivolous complaint to accomplish impermissible partisan purposes.""These Senators have engaged in improper conduct that may reflect upon the Senate. The Committee should discipline these Members to ensure that the Senate's ethics process is not weaponized for rank partisan purposes."Hawley's pushback comes as he faces fierce criticism for his actions on Jan. 6 — including calls for him to resign or be expelled from the Senate — after he and Cruz led the challenges against Pennsylvania's and Arizona's election results, respectively.
Democratic Senators. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), Ron Wyden (OR), Tina Smith (MN), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Mazie Hirono (HI), Tim Kaine (VA) and Sherrod Brown (OH) last week sent a complaint to the Ethics Committee asking that it investigate Hawley and Cruz and "offer recommendations for strong disciplinary action, including up to expulsion or censure, if warranted by the facts uncovered."
Hawley has denounced the violence after rioters breached the Capitol, resulting in the death of five people, but he has stood by his decision to try to challenge President Biden's win in Pennsylvania. Hawley made his objection after the joint session resumed after being suspended for hours because rioters stormed the building.
Hawley on Monday appeared to reference calls for him to resign, writing in a separate letter to the Democratic senators that had "considered whether I should call for you to resign or be expelled from the Senate.""The First Amendment does not ... give you carte blanche to abuse the Senate ethics process. I have today filed a complaint with the ethics committee that details your deliberate and partisan abuse of this process, including your apparent coordination with various dark money groups, and requests that you be appropriately disciplined."
"Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context. We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable. Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors."Twitter's announcement via video shows how a false claim, in this case the claim that "whales are not real" but "robots funded by the government," can go viral in minutes and can change the narrative about, in this case, whales. Then they say that "You can't trust everything you see online," and that this is why they're "introducing Birdwatch."
"Well, for somebody who's not very political, I assume what happened to me was the quintessential political hit job, to have that many people come out, without even talking to me, or having a conversation without doing a single background check.
"I still feel a little bit upset about that. I have people that I've known for a long time, they're convinced that I'm a tool, or I've been a pawn or I got huge payout. And it's completely decimated my business. I had to leave town."
Comment: That these tax havens exist and have been used to cover and support ongoing nefarious activity in the UK in particular, and elsewhere in the West, is not news, so one wonders just what else is behind these recent maneuvers: