Four months after abruptly quitting Congress amid a sexual harassment scandal, former Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) still doesn’t think he did anything wrong.

In fact, the former GOP lawmaker says he “took a bullet for the team” by resigning. He insists he’s right not to repay $84,000 in taxpayer money he spent on a sexual harassment settlement. He ripped the House Ethics Committee for not caring about facts. And he blames “f-tards” and the Me Too movement for driving him out of a job.

Yeah, it’s a lot. And that’s just a sample of Farenthold’s comments in an Aug. 1 deposition he gave in a lawsuit over his new job at a Texas port authority. The Victoria Advocate, a local newspaper, sued the port authority in May for not giving required public notice that it was hiring Farenthold and creating a $160,000-a-year lobbyist job for him.

HuffPost obtained a transcript of Farenthold’s deposition, along with copies of his texts and emails submitted for the lawsuit. What’s clear is that he blames everyone but himself for his downfall and that his reasons for not repaying the $84,000 are bonkers. You can read 79 pages of his deposition yourself, here, or just read below for the bits we thought were particularly bananas.

“There is simply no way to construe this arbitration clause in this agreement to prevent … pursuing harassment claims in court. The arbitration clause could have been written to require any disputes arising out of … employment to go to arbitration. … But it did not,” wrote Bluth.

Bluth’s ruling became public today when Denson tweeted a copy of the order. It is notable because Denson is representing herself and still defeated the Trump campaign’s lawyers. The judge’s decision represents a rare victory for a pro se litigant, the legal term for a person proceeding in court on their own behalf against a party represented by licensed attorneys. Denson, a young actress, declined to comment on this story.

Democrats are threatening to take the GOP to court to keep Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), who’s been charged with insider trading, on the November ballot.

New York Democrats believe they have a better shot of flipping the red, Buffalo-area seat if the embattled congressman’s name stays on the ballot, and they want to keep Republicans from replacing him with a potentially less toxic candidate.

“Our contention and a lot of people’s contention is this is fraudulent to get him off the ballot,” Erie County Democratic Party Chairman Jeremy Zellner told The Hill on Tuesday.

“This is borderline fraud,” Zellner added. “It is too late to get him off the ballot.”
Federal officials last week arrested and charged Collins with securities fraud related to his involvement with an Australian pharmaceuticals company, giving Democrats hope they could win a GOP-held seat that wasn't even on campaign officials’ radar days ago.

In 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the western New York district by nearly 25 percentage points.