President Johnson to meet with Trump, offer Marjorie Taylor Greene advisory role for her own work

WASHINGTON (AP) — With his job on the line, House Speaker Mike Johnson rushes to Florida to meet Donald Trump this week and offered far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene a seat in her own “kitchen cabinet” as he aligns with the MAGA forces that now dominate the GOP.

Wednesday’s sudden decisions come as the House is at a standstill, plunged once again into chaos.

House Republicans are torn apart, unable to work together to push the party’s priorities through Congress, while watching their majority waste days without a coherent agenda and little to show for their 15 months in office.

Johnson failed to pass a national security surveillance bill that was rejected by his own Republican majority shortly after Trump pushed them to “kill” him. But at the same time, the president has been warned not to collude with Democrats on this bill and others, including aid to Ukraine, or risk Greene calling an early vote which could oust him from the president’s office.

All of this leaves Johnson, after just six months on the job, in a position similar to that of Kevin McCarthy, the former Speaker of the House who was unceremoniously removed from his chair last fall – the first in history to be knocked down.

“We’re going to regroup and consider next steps,” Johnson, R-La., told reporters as he called an impromptu meeting of Republicans in the Capitol basement.

As the November election approaches, Johnson has linked his party’s prospects and his own political survival to those of Trump, believing that the presumptive presidential nominee and his MAGA supporters will strengthen Republican lawmakers and ensure that they keep control of the House from Democrats.

On Friday, Trump and Johnson will appear at a news conference on “election integrity” at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to a Trump campaign official.

They are expected to make a “joint announcement,” another person familiar with the planning said.

Once a skeptic of Trump, Johnson has become a key supporter. He led one of the major legal challenges to the 2020 election, in the lead-up to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters attempting to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. Biden.

The issue of election integrity has been an obsession for Trump since he lost the 2020 election, even though the election is generally secure and every state in the union has certified its 2020 results which were sent to Congress the day of the siege of the Capitol.

It’s unclear exactly what the Trump-Johnson announcement will entail, but since becoming Speaker of the House, Johnson has tried to maintain a close relationship with Trump.

Johnson revived a House committee’s effort to reexamine the House select committee’s findings on the Jan. 6 attack as Trump calls for pardons for those involved in the bloody mob siege. More than 1,300 people have been charged in connection with the attack, as rioters battled police, stormed the Capitol and roamed the halls. Five people died during the siege and immediately afterward.

Trump and Johnson speak regularly, including Tuesday night, as the speaker works to keep his own critics, particularly Greene, at bay.

A right-wing Georgia Republican close to Trump, Greene filed a motion to vacate the presidency, a procedural tool that allows for a quick vote on his direction, and which now weighs on Johnson’s every move.

Johnson met with Greene for nearly an hour Wednesday at the Capitol, and she said the exchange was “direct and heated.”

She is highly critical of Johnson, with her grievances outlined in a five-page letter sent to colleagues this week, and particularly opposes aid to Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion , and warned Johnson not to put an aid package for Ukraine to a vote.

Greene also rallied against expanding provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, before Wednesday’s vote failed, despite Johnson’s efforts to get it approved.

Just before the vote, Trump also took to social media, asking Republicans to vote against it. “Kill FISA,” Trump wrote in all caps. Trump has said the law was used to spy on him, but a former adviser to his 2016 presidential campaign was targeted because of his potential ties to Russia under another section of the surveillance law. With a threadbare majority, Johnson can only lose one or two Republicans per vote, but nearly 20 are eliminated.

Johnson offered to give Greene a place in a proposed “kitchen cabinet” of advisers to the president, she said after the nearly hour-long session.

But Greene told reporters that she would “wait and see” on his offer, but was more interested in how he would handle several issues before Congress, particularly aid to Ukraine and the House vote. FISA.

“I explained to him that it wasn’t personal,” she said. “But he hasn’t done the job we elected him to do.”

Greene said Johnson had thrown the Republican majority into “chaos,” particularly pointing to government spending bills he passed to prevent a federal government shutdown over Republican objections.

“It’s chaos for a Republican majority: sending your Republican colleagues and members home to their districts, having to campaign in a Republican House that funded the Biden administration,” she said Tuesday evening at the Capitol.

Other Republicans, even those who ousted McCarthy, have been cool to Greene’s efforts to oust Johnson, unenthusiastic about navigating the turmoil of trying to elect a new president.

Last fall, it took Republicans nearly a month to replace McCarthy with Johnson, a spectacle that exposed the party’s dysfunction in rounds of failed votes and brought all other House business to a virtual halt.

Greene has not publicly discussed when she might bring the motion to overturn and told reporters she does not yet have a “red line” for taking that action.

The planned meeting between Johnson and Trump was first reported on CNN.

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Associated Press journalists Farnoush Amiri and Eric Tucker contributed to this report. Colvin reported from New York.