Speaker Mike Johnson’s Right-Wing Ties Keep Getting Stranger and Scarier

Before joining Congress, Representative Mike Johnson was a lawyer for conservative Christian causes. And one of his regular clients was a violent radical Christian activist who described himself and Johnson as “brothers.”

Johnson worked for years alongside anti-gay activist and former radical Christian preacher Grant Storms, The Daily Beast reported Tuesday. Storms told the Beast that Johnson had done copious amounts of legal work for him in the early to mid-2000s, all for free.

“We were brothers on the path,” Storms told the Beast. “He always had our back.”

Storms met Johnson in the early 2000s when the latter was working at Alliance Defending Freedom, the far-right Christian group that has recently sought to ban the abortion medication mifepristone and public drag performances. Johnson worked at the ADF for nearly a decade.

Storms initially reached out for help removing what he called “lewd” imagery from a bus station ad. He claimed the ad included an image of men having sex.

Johnson continued working with Storms after that, and he helped convince New Orleans officials to grant Storms a permit for a protest against an annual Pride celebration. Storms’s protest ended up getting national attention when an anti-gay protester attempted to murder a man with a steak knife. Storms said the attacker was not part of his organization, but the assailant later told police he went to Storms’s event because he wanted to “kill a gay man.”

Johnson represented Storms a few more times until 2005, when Storms said they lost touch. But just four years later, Johnson represented Storms’s son Jason in a violent anti-abortion case.

Jason Storms is the head of Operation Save America, one of the largest—if not the largest—militant anti-abortion groups in the country. The group made national headlines in 2009 when it was linked to the murder of Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas abortion provider. The group, then called Operation Rescue, said the killer was not a member. But he had been in touch with an Operation Rescue official about Tiller’s whereabouts.

That same year, Johnson represented Jason Storms and several other anti-abortion extremists, arguing their free speech rights had been violated when a federal court barred them from protesting outside abortion clinics.

Jason Storms also participated in the January 6 insurrection—almost fitting given that Johnson led the amicus brief that more than 100 Republicans signed in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

It is, unfortunately, no longer a shock that Johnson supports far-right beliefs. He has described abortion as a “holocaust,” blamed the fall of Rome on LGBTQ people, and cited the “great replacement theory,” the far-right theory that white people are being replaced by nonwhite immigrants. Johnson flies a Christian nationalist flag outside his office and speaks regularly at far-right events.

But it is shocking—and terrifying—that Johnson is able to espouse these beliefs with no pushback on Capitol Hill. His ideological leanings suggest that the issues he supports and plans to prioritize in legislation will stray further and further into the fringes. And that could come at the cost of democracy.

Republicans are leaving nothing up to interpretation. On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson unequivocally admitted that the conservative party is doctoring footage of the January 6 insurrection to prevent the identification of the rioters in an investigation by the Justice Department.

“We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” Johnson said.

“That’s a slow process to get it done, we’re working steadily on it. We’ve hired additional personnel to do that and all of those tapes ultimately will be out so everybody can see them and draw their own conclusions,” he added.

The blur could also be an attempt to stop armchair sleuths on the internet from identifying the rioters—a process that could help expedite the lengthy investigation required to process more than 40,000 hours of footage and put names and histories to the 2,000 rioters in attendance that day.

Johnson previously claimed he would release the footage so people could see for themselves what happened on January 6. But apparently, he didn’t mean without edits.

Liz Cheney is dishing everything Donald Trump–related in a new book—including details on a phone call that unraveled a “chilling” plan to stop Vice President Mike Pence from ratifying the election, mere days before January 6.

“I had heard, obviously, there had been talk about having these electors meet, but it wasn’t clear to me what the contours of this particular part of the plan were until I got onto that phone call,” Cheney said on The Rachel Maddow Show.

“Listening to them describe how these fake electors would be used, and the fact that they anticipated that Vice President Pence was going to use them to count legitimate electors, was certainly a moment of intense concern,” she added.

As Cheney tells it, she “ran” to the Office of the Parliamentarian of the House to inform them, but little could be done by then.

“If you’re in a joint session of Congress, you’re not in a position where there are a lot of legislative steps that you can take except to basically move to adjourn, so it was a very dangerous and chilling moment,” Cheney said. “I learned later through the investigation that Vice President Pence and his counsel were having discussions with the Senate parliamentarian and that the vice president ultimately, of course, did his duty bravely.”

Cheney’s latest book, Oath and Honor, comes paired with the news that the former Wyoming representative is weighing the possibility of running as a third-party candidate in the 2024 presidential election—a choice that could skim some moderate Republican votes away from Trump.

“Several years ago, I would not have contemplated a third-party run,” Cheney told The Washington Post. “I happen to think democracy is at risk at home, obviously, as a result of Donald Trump’s continued grip on the Republican Party, and I think democracy is at risk internationally as well.”

During an interview with CBS News Sunday Morning, Cheney warned that the U.S. would be “sleepwalking into dictatorship” if it chose to reelect Trump for a second term. She has also come down on Speaker Mike Johnson’s new role as the highest serving member of the House, noting that she would not want to see Johnson in a leadership position come 2025.

“What I learned was he was willing to do things he knew to be wrong in order to placate Donald Trump,” Cheney told Maddow on Monday. “And again, a situation where you have a speaker of the House, who … so clearly set aside what he knew to be the facts, what he knew to be the law, what he knew to be our obligations under the Constitution in order to try to help Donald Trump in his efforts in 2020.”

Representative James Comer is doubling down on his claim that Hunter Biden repaying his father for a loan is proof that the president is corrupt.

Comer, who has spearheaded the investigation into the Biden family, released more of Hunter’s bank records on Monday, claiming they showed illicit payments to his father, Joe Biden. In reality, the documents likely showed repayments for a truck.

But Comer remained adamant that Hunter paying his father back in any form meant Biden had benefited from his son’s overseas business.

“You can loan people money. If they pay you back, then you benefited directly from the influence-peddling!” Comer insisted on Newsmax Monday night.

The Kentucky Republican also claimed no one in his family repays him after he loans money. “When my son needs help, or my daughter, who’s in college, needs it, I just give her money. Nobody ever pays me back!” Comer said.

Comer made no mention of his own business deals with his brother, which reportedly include Comer loaning his brother Chad $200,000 in 2019. His brother repaid him through land swaps.

The bank record released Monday shows Hunter transferred $1,380 to his father in September 2018, when Joe Biden was not in office. Comer’s accompanying press release does not mention that Hunter made only two additional payments to his father in the same amount, on October 15, 2018, and November 15, 2018—a total of less than $4,500.

Comer also does not mention the previously reported emails from Hunter’s laptop that indicate those transfers were paying his father back for a pickup truck. Instead, he makes it seem that Hunter has been making shady monthly payments to his father for years.

Republicans have claimed for months that Biden has benefited from his son’s foreign business dealings, but they have yet to produce any actual evidence of wrongdoing by the president. Ranking Oversight Committee Member Jamie Raskin slammed Comer for pushing the loan repayment as proof.

“Chair Comer is digging up old public reporting, distorting the facts, and presenting it as ‘breaking news,’” Raskin said on X (formerly Twitter).

“If Chairman Comer had any actual evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden, he would not repeatedly resort to distorting the facts and recycling Trump-Giuliani conspiracy theories.”

A new House resolution condemning antisemitism isn’t quite what it seems.

House Resolution 894 doesn’t simply call for the public denouncement of antisemitic behavior. It also equates any and all anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

The four-page resolution “clearly and firmly” cements the false conflation that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” That would plaster any Jewish anti-Zionist as an antisemite, and would likely warrant character attacks on any lawmaker who objects to the current iteration of the bill.

The resolution, which could be voted on as soon as this week, condemns not just the October 7 assault that claimed 1,200 Israeli lives but also popular chants utilized by peaceful protesters that are plainly protected by the First Amendment, including “From the River to the Sea,” “Palestine Will Be Free,” and “Gaza Will Win.”

The resolution blatantly vilifies pro-Palestinian sentiment, including calls for the end of Israel’s 56-year occupation in the Middle Eastern country. As one example, it mischaracterizes a protest and candlelight vigil at the Democratic National Committee headquarters last month as “endangering” people’s lives.

As of Monday, more than 15,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed in the conflict since the initial attack by Hamas, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Fighting resumed on Friday after a weeklong truce to exchange hostages. Since then, an additional 800 Palestinians have been killed in a weekend ground offensive headed by Israeli troops in southern Gaza.

Meanwhile, Americans overwhelmingly support a cease-fire in the war-torn region. Last month, an Economist/YouGov poll indicated that 65 percent of surveyed Americans wanted a cease-fire, while only 16 percent said they didn’t.

Money poses another issue. While Congress battles to pass a foreign aid package to Israel, just 32 percent of Americans felt that the current level of aid to the right-wing government should continue, while 23 percent said they wanted less.