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Republicans Secure Special Election Victory in Biden-Won District in New Hampshire

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A Republican defeated a Democrat in a New Hampshire House special election Tuesday in Merrimack, a town President Joe Biden carried by six points in the 2020 presidential race.

In the state’s first special election since the 2020 cycle, Town Councilor Bill Boyd beat out former state Rep. Wendy Thomas by eight percent, strengthening Republicans’ majority in the 400-seat House, 213–186.

“The turnout was huge by special election standards, reflecting the enthusiasm on both sides,” local outlet WMUR observed. The seat became vacant after the death of state Rep. Dick Hinch, a Republican who had just been elected speaker of the House before he died in December.

The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) said in a press release after Boyd’s win that Democrats had perceived the race as a “bellwether” for the upcoming 2021 and 2022 elections.

The RSLC reported that in a Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) fundraising email in April, the latter group had written of the race, “This is an early chance for Democrats to get a head start and lay the groundwork for victory in one of the hardest-fought swing states of the 2022 midterms.” The DLCC poured $30,000 into electing Thomas, while the RSLC reported spending $10,000 on Boyd.

WMUR noted the race was “believed to be the most expensive special election in state history.” An estimated $100,000 was spent on the election, per the Union Leader.

The win is especially noteworthy for Republicans as it also defies results of the higher-profile down-ballot races in Merrimack in which incumbent First Congressional District Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) edged out Republican Matt Mowers and incumbent Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) defeated Republican Corky Messner.

Mowers issued a congratulatory statement after Boyd’s victory, saying, “Bill has dedicated his life to service on behalf of the residents of Merrimack and he will continue that dedication by working tirelessly on their behalf in Concord.”

In a testament to the national attention the small-scale election received, Mowers noted in the statement that he had hosted fundraisers with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), raising more than $15,000 for the New Hampshire GOP’s special election efforts.

In a Twitter thread that also pointed to a Republican special election win on Tuesday in Connecticut, the RSLC wrote, “The RSLC continues to build on its 2020 momentum in New England!” The group added, “State Republicans continue to run strong candidates with the right policies, and the RSLC continues to make smarter investments than its counterparts”:

The wins indeed represent a continuation of Republican state-level successes in the otherwise deeply blue Northeast region of the country.

In the Granite State in particular, both chambers of the legislature flipped to Republicans in 2020.

The Senate inverted from a 14-10 Democrat majority to a 14-10 Republican majority, the 400-seat House went red after gaining 56 seats, and the party also took control of the powerful Executive Council, 4-1. The Executive Council, unique to New Hampshire, appoints government officials, controls the release of money from Treasury, and can make pardons.

Write to Ashley Oliver at [email protected].

Neo-Conservatives, Foreign Policy Establishment Push to Keep U.S. Military Involvement in Afghan War Going

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Neo-conservatives and foreign policy establishment figures unsurprisingly blasted the Biden Administration for its plans to continue the Trump administration’s drawdown of American forces from Afghanistan, and they issued dire warnings if President Joe Biden were to go through with it.

House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) released a statement Tuesday that said the decision “abandons our global leadership position, and plays into our adversaries’ hands.”

“President Biden’s decision hands the Taliban and al Qaeda a propaganda victory, abandons our global leadership position, and plays into our adversaries’ hands,” said Cheney, a critic of former President Donald Trump and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney — along with House Democrat Rep. Jason Crow (CO) — fought to prevent the Trump Administration from drawing down U.S. forces from Afghanistan, sponsoring legislation to make a drawdown more difficult.

Max Boot, a Never Trumper and champion of the 2003 Iraq War, penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that warned of a fall-of-Saigon scenario. “If Biden pulls out as planned in September absent a binding peace settlement, he will be consigning them to the same fate as our abandoned South Vietnamese allies. The fall of Kabul could be as ugly as the fall of Saigon,” he wrote.

He also warned of a “massive civil war” if U.S. troops leave, despite Afghanistan being involved in a civil war at least since 2001, if not since 1979. According to the Brown University’s Watson Institute, about 157,000 have been killed in the war since 2001, including more than 43,000 civilians. The war has cost the U.S. more than an estimated $2.2 trillion, according to the Institute.

Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, who served as CIA director and commander of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, also slammed the decision. “Ending U.S. involvement in an endless war doesn’t end the endless war. It just ends our involvement. And I fear that this war is going to get worse,” he said at a recent event, according to Defense One.

A number of Republican senators also criticized the decision. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) echoed Cheney, calling the decision an “abdication” of American leadership, in a Senate floor speech Tuesday:

New reporting suggests the Biden administration plans to turn tail and abandon the fight in Afghanistan. Precipitously withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan is a grave mistake. It is a retreat in the face of an enemy that has not yet been vanquished, an abdication of American leadership.

Leaders in both parties, including me, offered criticism when the prior administration floated the concept of a reckless withdrawal from Syria and  Afghanistan. Those same voices in both parties should be equally concerned about the Biden administration’s announcement today.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of the Senate’s leading hawks, called the decision “a disaster in the making” and “dumber than dirt.”

“A full withdrawal from Afghanistan is dumber than dirt and devilishly dangerous. President Biden will have, in essence, cancelled an insurance policy against another 9/11,” he said in a statement, pushing for a residual counterterrorism force as an “insurance policy.”

At least one Republican issued a statement in support of Biden’s decision — libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY):

It’s great when we can find places to agree. I’m grateful President Biden is keeping President Trump’s plan to leave Afghanistan, even with a delay until fall. The time to bring our troops home is now or as soon as possible. Enough endless wars.

Democrats refrained from criticizing Biden’s decision, with only those in support of it issuing statements, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY), Dick Durbin (IL), Chris Coons (DE), Christopher Murphy (CT), Elizabeth Warren (MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Coons criticized former President Donald Trump for trying to negotiate a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan almost two years ago exactly.

“I agree that we should not fully withdraw from Afghanistan until we’ve got with conditions on the ground that would prevent it from becoming once again a haven for terrorists who might attack us as happened on 9/11,” he said on CBS News’ Face the Nation on April 9, 2019.

Although it seemed unclear whether Biden would adopt Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, he ended up doing so after a few months of deliberation.

A Biden senior administration official said Tuesday the withdrawal would be completed by September 11, 2021 — the 20th anniversary of the war. Trump negotiated a May 1 withdrawal with the Taliban, but Biden officials suggested in recent weeks that deadline would not be met largely due to logistical reasons.

There are approximately 3,500 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan. At the height of the war, which began in late 2001, there were more than 100,000 U.S. troops in the country.

U.S. troops first went into Afghanistan after al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden planned and masterminded the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks from a safe haven in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. U.S. forces succeeded in quickly toppling the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan that granted bin Laden safe haven. However, as then-President George W. Bush turned the U.S.’s attention to the Iraq War, the Taliban regained strength and mounted an insurgency that has lasted over the last 20 years.

In an effort to end the war with a victory, the Obama administration ordered a troop surge to Afghanistan in 2009, but simultaneously announced a withdrawal by 2011 — which many experts argued undercut the surge by incentivizing the Taliban to wait the U.S. out. Obama ended up reversing his decision, leaving office in 2016 with 8,600 troops in the country.

Trump temporarily bumped up the number to 14,600, but by the end of his term, left office with approximately 3,500 in the country and a peace agreement with the Taliban to withdraw the remaining forces by May 1.

Experts from Defense Priorities who support ending the war pushed back against criticism that withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan meant that the U.S. was abdicating its global leadership role.

“The opposite is true. It just increases our global commitment to our security and that of our allies,” said Retired Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, senior fellow and military expert. Davis added:

Most people around the world recognize we should have been out Afghanistan a long time ago. They’re scratching their heads and wondering why would we continue year after year in a failing process that has no prospect of success…[Now] we’re going to be able to pay more attention to other things around the world.

Will Ruger, Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador of Afghanistan, said:

The goal of American foreign policy is not leadership…it’s to secure [U.S.] vital interests. You don’t aim towards leadership, you aim towards making us safer, providing for the conditions of our prosperity, and protecting our liberal democratic system at home.

George Washington University adjunct lecturer and Defense Priorities Policy Director Ben Friedman said, “Really I think these are just arguments made as a last ditch attempt to extend wars that people are afraid will end.”

Marine veteran Gil Barndollar added: “I don’t think we’re inspiring any admiration or even respect from most of our allies and partners by continuing a fruitless and intractable war in Afghanistan.”

Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook. 

Cotton: Biden Admin Says Same Things about American Racism that China, USSR Used to Say

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On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox News Primetime,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) reacted to U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s statements about racism being a part of America’s founding documents by saying that under the Biden administration, our own diplomats are saying the same things about America that we used to hear Chinese or Soviet officials say about the U.S.

Cotton said, “Amazing. Yeah, you used to listen to Communist Chinese or Communist Soviets call Americans racists at the United Nations. In the Biden administration, you hear that from our own ambassador. That’s disgraceful.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

Fact Check: Joe Biden Claims, Falsely, He Vowed to Pursue Osama bin Laden to 'Gates of Hell'

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CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed that he would pursue Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the “gates of Hell.”

VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. John McCain said that, not Biden, who opposed the bin Laden raid. Biden used the phrase for ISIS.

In a nationally-televised address from the White House on Wednesday, President Biden announced that the U.S. would pull all troops out of Afghanistan by Sep. 11, 2021 — twenty years after the 9/11 terror attacks planned by bin Laden from the country, then under Taliban control. (It was also a goal President Donald Trump had committed to achieve by May 1, 2021, the tenth anniversary of the mission that killed bin Laden.)

Biden’s remarks, billed by the White House (without irony) as the “way forward in Afghanistan,” said (emphasis added):

I believed that our presence in Afghanistan should be focused on the reason we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.  We did that.  We accomplished that objective.

I said, among — with others, we’d follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell if need be.  That’s exactly what we did, and we got him.  It took us close to 10 years to put President Obama’s commitment to — into form.  And that’s exactly what happened; Osama bin Laden was gone.

That was 10 years ago.  Think about that.  We delivered justice to bin Laden a decade ago, and we’ve stayed in Afghanistan for a decade since.  Since then, our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear, even as the terrorist threat that we went to fight evolved.

It was McCain, who ran against Obama and Biden in 2008, who was well-known for his “gates of Hell” promise:

Biden, notably, opposed the daring raid by Navy Seals that succeeded in taking out the Al Qaeda leader in 2011.

He later recalled telling Obama: “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.”

Biden then used — or copied — the phrase in 2014, when vowing to pursue the so-called “Islamic State,” or ISIS (referred to, doggedly, as ISIL by the Obama administration.

“When people harm Americans we don’t retreat, we don’t forget. We take care of those who are grieving and when that’s finished, they should know we will follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice. Because hell is where they will reside,” Biden said in New Hampshire.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Biden's Intel Community Agrees with Rubio: Chinese Virus 'Plausibly' Originated at a Wuhan Lab

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The U.S. intelligence community conceded Wednesday that China is still keeping America in the dark about the true origins of the novel coronavirus, stressing that it may have accidentally leaked out from a lab in Wuhan, China.

American diplomats cited the Wuhan lab for subpar safety standards in 2019. The lab specializes in modifying bat coronavirus to create synthetic viruses that can make human beings ill.

During a hearing Wednesday on worldwide threats to U.S. national security, Marco Rubio from Florida, the top Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hosting the event, grilled the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines, the CIA Director William Burns, and the National Security Agency (NSA) Director Gen. Paul Nakasone on the origins and true source of the coronavirus.

Rubio noted that there were two competing hypotheses for the origins of the virus, telling the witnesses:

The official answer for why it’s happened — and it is a possible answer — is that this was a new zoonotic transmission; it crossed over from an animal into a human. But there’s another hypothesis which is plausible. And that is that there was an accident at a laboratory that ended up impacting the world the way we’ve seen. And there’s reason to believe that’s plausible.

In highlighting the plausibility that COVID-19 may have originated from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology known for modifying bat coronavirus to create synthetic viruses known to make human beings ill, Rubio declared:

Number one, researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have demonstrated from their publication record that they were skilled at techniques in which they genetically modified bat coronaviruses in order to create new man-made viruses that were highly capable of creating disease in human beings,” Rubio pointed out in highlighting the hypothesis that COVID-19 may have originated from a lab accident.

Second, there have been several lab leaks documented that have occurred in China, including one involving the original SARS virus. And third, U.S. diplomats who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019 warned of the risk of the subpar safety standards that they observed.

He then went on to grill the witnesses, asking them a two-part question. Rubio asked:

We can’t conclude definitively that the virus that causes COVID-19 emerged naturally until there’s a transmission chain [that identifies] how the virus evolved and transmitted between species. And to date, no such path of zoonotic transmission has been definitively identified. Are those two things accurate?”

DNI Haines, the head of the U.S. intelligence community, responded:

It is absolutely accurate the Intelligence Community does not know exactly where, when, or how COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially. And basically, components have coalesced around two alternative theories.

The scenarios are it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, or it was a laboratory accident as you identified. And that is where we are right now, but we’re continuing to work on this issue and collect information, and, to the best we can, essentially to give you greater confidence in what the scenario is.

Echoing complaints from the Trump administration, President Joe Biden’s CIA Director Burns conceded that Communist China has been reluctant to provide the U.S. with the information it needs to determine the origins of the virus on its own.

Director Burns testified:

The one thing that’s clear to us and to our analysts is that the Chinese leadership has not been fully forthcoming or fully transparent in working with the W.H.O. or in providing the kind of original, complete data that would help answer those questions. So we’re doing everything we can using all the sources available to all of us on this panel to try to get to the bottom of it.

Gen. Paul Nakasone, the NSA director, added that his agency is working with the international community and academia to gather and analyze information about the origins of the coronavirus.

President Joe Biden reversed his predecessor’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization (W.H.O.), a U.N. agency, for helping China hide the extent of the virus at the beginning stages, allowing the deadly and contagious disease to spread across the world.

Still, even the Biden administration has expressed skepticism of the W.H.O’s investigation into the virus’s origins.

Like its predecessor, the Biden Administration wants to deploy experts from America to judge the origins of the virus, particularly after a joint study from the W.H.O. and China determined it is “extremely unlikely” the pandemic virus occurred through a laboratory leak.