Indictment watch is an ongoing activity these days. The Dog Days of Summer are ongoing. This week, every day will be authentically over 100 degrees, and the heat index will be way above that. I’m just glad I have very few reasons to leave my house, although I need a much better AC if this is a new reality. The dog and I barhop at night. I do it for the artic blast of all those window A/C units. Her motivation is the dog biscuits behind the bar and very dog-friendly bartenders. We feel better afterward, and I never complain about the boatload of ice in my Tanq and Tonic. Temple is actually quite good at navigating the Bywater Barumuda Triangle. She quickly learned the route and the whereabouts of the preferred biscuit jar. She also knows which bartenders will shower her with biscuits if she gives them the right look.
CNN analyst Ella Nilsen answers one of my ongoing questions. “Why Republicans can’t get out of their climate bind, even as extreme heat overwhelms the US.”
Deadly heatwaves are baking the US. Scientists just reported that July will be the hottest month on record. And now, after years of skepticism and denial in the GOP ranks, a small number of Republicans are urging their party to get proactive on the climate crisis.
But the GOP is stuck in a climate bind – and likely will be for the next four years, in large part because they’re still living in the shadow of former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.
Even as more Republican politicians are joining the consensus that climate change is real and caused by humans, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has driven the party to the right on climate and extreme weather. Trump has called the extremely settled science of climate change a “hoax” and more recently suggested that the impacts of it “may affect us in 300 years.”
Scientists this week reported that this summer’s unrelenting heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” were it not for the planet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels. They also confirmed that July will go down as the hottest month on record – and almost certainly that the planet’s temperature is hotter now than it has been in around 120,000 years.
Yet for being one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century, climate is rarely mentioned on the 2024 campaign trail.
“As Donald Trump is the near presumptive nominee of our party in 2024, it’s going to be very hard for a party to adopt a climate-sensitive policy,” Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, told CNN. “But Donald Trump’s not going to be around forever.”
When Republicans do weigh in on climate change – and what we should do about it – they tend to support the idea of capturing planet-warming pollution rather than cutting fossil fuels. But many are reticent to talk about how to solve the problem, and worry Trump is having a chilling effect on policies to combat climate within the party.
“We need to be talking about this,” Rep. John Curtis, a Republican from Utah and chair of the House’s Conservative Climate Caucus, told CNN. “And part of it for Republicans is when you don’t talk about it, you have no ideas at the table; all you’re doing is saying what you don’t like. We need to be saying what we like.”
With a few exceptions, Republicans largely are no longer the party of full-on climate change denial. But even as temperatures rise to deadly highs, the GOP is also not actively addressing it. There is still no “robust discussion about how to solve it” within the party, said former South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis, who now runs the conservative climate group RepublicEn, save for criticism of Democrats’ clean-energy initiatives.
“The good news is Republicans are stopping arguing with thermometers,” Inglis told CNN. Still, he said, “when the experience is multiplied over and over of multiple days of three-digit temperatures in Arizona and record ocean temperatures, people start to say, ‘this is sort of goofy we’re not doing something about this.’”
Meanwhile, the impacts of a dramatically warming atmosphere are becoming more and more apparent each year. Romney and Curtis, two of the loudest climate voices in the party, both represent Utah – a state that’s no stranger to extreme heat and drought, which scientists say is being fueled by rising global temperatures.
“There are a number of states, like mine, that are concerned about wildfires and water,” Romney said, adding he believes Republican governors of impacted states have been vocal about these issues.
Great Peacock Moth, Vincent van Gogh,1889
NPR actually focuses on New Orleans for the kinds of problems that cities are facing with the heat and public health. “In broiling cities like New Orleans, the health system faces off against heat stroke.” I’ve actually had two episodes of heat sicknesses during July but have managed to find my way to a cold bath with a carefully placed fan where I rate how fucking hot it is by how many times I repeat this ritual. I can tell precisely hot it is by where Dinah is in the back part of the house. Right now, she’s here in my room, but that will be short-lived. She heads for the floor under the highboy, where the a/c can really cool her down when it’s peak hot. Kristal and Temple are fond of lying in front of the bathtub when I’m in there reading and chilling. Keely just hides under the bed near Dinah. The A/C manages to keep that bedroom fairly cool.
As the hour creeps past three in the afternoon, New Orleans’ streets are devoid of tourists and locals alike. The heat index is over 105 degrees.
At the city’s ambulance depot, the concrete parking lot seems to magnify the sweltering heat, circulating the air like a convection oven.
New Orleans Emergency Medical Services has been busy this summer, responding to heat-related emergency calls and rushing patients to nearby hospitals.
Capt. Janick Lewis and Lt. Titus Carriere demonstrate how they can load a stretcher into an ambulance using an automated loading system.
Lewis wipes sweat from his brow as the loading arm whirs and hums, raising the stretcher into the ambulance — “unit” in official terminology.
But the mechanical assistance isn’t the best thing about the new vehicle. “The nicest thing about being assigned a brand new unit, is it’s a brand-new air conditioning system,” Lewis says.
The new AC is much more than just a luxury for the hard-working crews. These days they need the extra cooling power to help save lives.
“The number one thing you do take care of somebody is get them out of the heat, get them somewhere cool,” Lewis says. “So the number one thing we spend our time worrying about in the summertime is keeping the truck cool.”
Like much of the country, New Orleans has been embroiled in an almost relentless heat wave for weeks. As a result, more people are falling ill with heat-related conditions than ever before. Just last week, EMS responded to 29 heat-related calls — more than triple compared to the same period last year.
As the city’s emergency medical systems deal with the influx of patients, scientists say these dangerous heat levels — and the increasing stress they put on human bodies and medical systems — may be the new norm.
At the same time, New Orleans EMS has struggled with funding and staffing challenges. It’s currently operating with only 60% of its needed staff. The city’s chief of EMS has called for increased funding for higher wages to attract more workers.
Lewis says they’re making do with the resources they have, and prioritizing one-time expenses like new ambulances to help them meet the challenges they’re facing.
“We’re going to provide the care everybody needs, regardless of how hot it gets,” Lewis says. “We’d love to have all the help in the world, but we’re getting the job done with what we have right now.”
If you’re feeling a bit brain-fogged these days, you might not be wrong to blame it on the heat.
Several summers back, researchers in Boston studied young adults living in college dorm rooms during a heat wave. Some had central AC and slept at a cool 71 degrees Fahrenheit. Others slept in rooms without air-conditioning, where the temperature hovered around 80 degrees.
Each morning for nearly two weeks, the students took a few tests, administered on their cellphones. The people who slept in the hotter dorm rooms performed measurably worse on the tests.
The tests included a math test requiring simple addition and subtraction and a second test, the Stroop test, that jumbles colors and words. “So, if I show the word ‘red’ in the color blue, participants have to respond ‘blue,'” says study author Jose Guillermo Cedeño Laurent, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health.
It’s easy to get tripped up if your attention or reaction time is slowed, he says, and that’s exactly what heat appears to be doing. “The magnitude of the effect was really striking,” Cedeño Laurent says. “We saw reductions in the order of 10% in their response times and also their accuracy.”
Part of this effect may be explained by interrupted sleep. It can be hard to get a good night’s rest if you’re not accustomed to the heat, and a lack of sleep could certainly impair reaction time and focus. But there’s a body of evidence suggesting it may be something about the heat itself that interferes with cognition.
Anastasiya Markovich, Effect of Butterfly (date unknown)
Yup. That would be me. A lot of service industry folks rely on buses and streetcars. It can be a long wait in the sun followed by a street car with fans or a bus with the A/C. This is the worst we’ve ever seen things down here.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is speaking just ahead of potential charges being filed against former President Donald Trump and his allies.
It’s still unclear if Trump will be charged by D.A. Willis, but 11Alive is getting a little more insight into what we can expect in the coming days after speaking with Willis at a back-to-school event in Sandy Springs.
Willis said her back-to-school events are her favorite time of the year. And it’s bringing her joy before the big decisions she has to make in the next few weeks.
“I was a single mom,” Willis said. “And I can remember at the beginning of school years, that’s one more financial hit. We want to relieve that stress for parents.”
Mother-of-three Amiria Otiti said she hadn’t even started back-to-school shopping yet. However, events like this take the load off.
“It helps tremendously because everything is priced high,” Otiti said. “And anything I can do to save, I want to save.”
Willis was all smiles giving away free school supplies at Morgan Falls Overlook Park in Sandy Springs, but after this, it’s back to business. While the kids prepare for school, Willis is preparing for a potential indictment of former President Trump and his allies for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
“Some people may not be happy with the decisions that I’m making,” Willis said. “And sometimes, when people are unhappy, they act in a way that could create harm.”
She didn’t give many details, but Willis said another way she’s preparing is by upping security. She explained she wrote a letter to the Fulton County Sheriff Patrick “Pat” Labat.
“I think that the sheriff is doing something smart in making sure that the courthouse stays safe,” Willis said.
That includes the grand jury.
“I’m not willing to put any of the employees or the constituents that come to the courthouse in harm’s way,” Willis said.
Willis said she’s holding true to her commitment to giving the American people an answer by Sep. 1. This could be Trump’s third indictment case of the year.
Saturday students got what they needed to do their homework. And Willis said she’s doing hers too.
“The work is accomplished,” Willis said, “We’ve been working for two-and-a-half years. We’re ready to go.”
The newest Donald Trump indictment dropped last week, and above all it is ridiculous.The spectacle of the two gormless henchmen creeping around the basement pointing flashlights at security cameras and the servers they’d been dispatched by to wipe — all the while being captured by those very same cameras! — is almost too ludicrous to bear. Who knew there could be something more preposterous than that photo of the tacky bathroom with the boxes stacked in the shower?
The excitement started last Thursday morning with reports that Trump was about to be indicted in DC for his role in the January 6 Capitol riot. Instead, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment in the Florida documents case, introducing us to a new defendant: Carlos De Oliveira, the Mar-a-Lago property manager. Like Walt Nauta, De Oliveira started as a valet before being promoted in 2022. And like Nauta, De Oliveira participated in the shell game with the former president’s “beautiful mind boxes” to avoid the prying eyes of the FBI, as well as Trump’s hapless lawyer, Evan Corcoran.
The original indictment laid out the scheme by which Nauta allegedly moved the boxes of swiped presidential records in and out of the storage locker near the Mar-a-Lago pool, allowing Trump to cull what he planned to keep before Corcoran could conduct a search on June 2, 2022, for the documents subpoenaed by the grand jury. Mindful that classified documents require certain protocols, the lawyer placed 38 records with classified markings in a Redweld folder sealed with clear duct tape supplied by Nauta, and then delicately ignored suggestions from his client that he “pluck” out anything too incriminating.
The next day, Corcoran and attorney Christina Bobb, previously a reporter at One America News, met at Trump’s club with Jay Bratt, the head of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence Division. During the meeting, they handed Bratt a false declaration, prepared by Corcoran and signed by Bobb, representing that “a diligent search was conducted of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida” and “any and all documents responsive to the subpoena accompany this certification.” This scheme, which was (of course!) documented in a long voice memo Corcoran dictated the next day, forms the basis for counts 34 through 38 of the newest indictment.
But during that visit, Corcoran showed Bratt the storage locker, inadvertently revealing a security camera in the corridor outside it and setting off the chain of events which constitute the four new counts in the superseding indictment.
On June 22 of last year, prosecutors told Trump’s lawyers that they planned to subpoena the camera footage, at which point it dawned on Trump that the feds were going to figure out that he’d pulled a fast one on his own lawyer. The next day, Trump had a 24 minute phone call with Carlos De Oliveira.
Two days later, when the subpoena actually dropped, Trump and his minions sprung into action. Trump, who was then at his Bedminster club in New Jersey, summoned Nauta for a confab, after which the valet abruptly changed his plans to accompany his boss to Illinois, sending a flurry of conflicting text messages which might just as well have shouted, DON’T LOOK IN THE TRUNK OFFICER, BECAUSE THERE’S DEFINITELY NO BODY IN THERE.
Earlier this month, there was a brief flurry of agitation on the right over what was presented as an effort to silence testimony from someone with information damaging to President Biden. The Justice Department unsealed an indictment against a man named Gal Luft, who, the government claims, had aided Chinese government interests and worked to evade sanctions on Iran as he served as a director at a D.C.-area think tank. Luft had previously been identified as a potential anti-Biden witness by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).
It’s not clear what evidence Luft was prepared to offer against Biden and his son Hunter, though New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, reporting about a videotaped statement from Luft, didn’t find much that was new. But still: Here was a potential witness against the government, facing criminal charges! Weaponization of the legal system … just like they’ve been doing to Donald Trump!
As you may by now be aware, this wasn’t actually the story. The Justice Department unsealed the charges this month, but the indictment had been handed down in November. Luft’s claims about Biden came to the attention of Comer and Devine, it seems, only after he’d been arrested on those charges earlier this year and began claiming that he was being targeted because of what he knew.
The argument from Comer and his allies was either misinformed or dishonest. But they appear not to have internalized any lessons from it.
On Sunday, Devine had a new report: In a letter, Devine said, the Justice Department was trying to imprison Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, before he could offer testimony to Comer’s committee on Monday.
“The DOJ is trying to arrest Devon Archer ahead of his bombshell testimony Monday about Joe Biden’s involvement in his son Hunter’s Ukraine business when he was VP,” Devine wrote on social media. The letter, she claimed, sought to send Archer “to jail immediately.”
Comer dutifully showed up on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday morning Fox News show, where the host asked him about the letter. (Bartiromo, like Devine, is often at the center of these discussions. It was to Bartiromo that Comer had in May admitted losing track of a witness — a witness who turned out to be Gal Luft and who had gone missing because he skipped bail on the charges that Comer earlier this month pretended were new.)
Well, there’s crazy from the heat and crazy just because that’s the Republican Party Schtick these days.
So, I’m just going to lay low this week. I’m not sure if I can take another summer like this one. Denver and Seattle are looking better every day. It’s too darn hot!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
My Bar buddy Temple agrees!
Temple and I listen to the Blues at BJ’s. Temple rates it five stars for the biscuits and pats. Oh, and the band was great!
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I haven’t been around much this week, because my Mother died last Sunday afternoon. She was 98. Even though her death was expected, the loss has hit me pretty hard. She was really my best friend for most of my life. We talked on the phone nearly every day; and after my father died in 2010, she asked me to check in with her more often. We often talked 3 or 4 times in a day. I loved talking politics with her!
For the last several years Mom was at home, I drove out to Indiana and stayed with her for extended times once or twice a year. I’m so glad I did that now, because we had opportunities to talk at length, and she share many memories with me.
My Mother was a very kind, caring, and strong woman. With my father, she raised 5 children. They were married for 63 years. When her children got older, she became very active in politics and community affairs. She was very involved in the League of Women Voters, and served as chapter president. In the 1970s, she was an Indiana delegate for the Equal Rights Amendment. She also volunteered for years in a local program devoted to alleviating poverty.
She was good Mom, and I will miss her terribly.
The latest on Trump’s legal problems
Everyone is waiting with bated breath for the next Trump indictment. When the January 6 grand jury meets on Tuesday, perhaps Trump will be indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and end American democracy. We can only hope that eventually this monster will be stopped. He cannot be permitted to become president again. In the meantime, we got the superseding indictment in the stolen documents case. Dakinikat wrote about it yesterday. Here’s the latest:
The Mar-a-Lago employee referenced in the superseding indictment adding major accusations against former President Donald Trump and a new co-defendant to the case has been identified by two people close to the investigation as Yuscil Taveras, an information technology worker.
Taveras oversaw the surveillance camera footage at the property….
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team had previously heard testimony about odd conversations between Taveras, Walt Nauta and the new co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager, regarding surveillance footage. The grand jury in Washington, before the case was fully relocated to southern Florida, had also heard testimony specifically regarding De Oliveira’s unusual behavior toward the footage, three people told CNN.
By Eva Fialka
Taveras is at the center of the new accusations added to the indictment, including an exchange he had with De Oliveira on June 27, 2022. In that conversation, De Oliveira asked to have a private discussion in an “audio closet” with Taveras, including questioning how long the footage from the security tapes lasted and whether it could be deleted.
When Taveras said “he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that,” De Oliveira said “the boss” wanted it deleted, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors for months now have circled around the questions of how much their actions day-by-day during the summer of 2022 were prompted by Trump’s direction, leading the criminal inquiry at times to look even into suspicious but still unexplained events like the draining of the pool at the Florida beach club, which caused flooding in an IT room, CNN previously reported.
De Oliveira was involved in the pool incident, two sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. It was not mentioned, however, in the new court filing. Thursday’s indictment signals that prosecutors now believe they have more direct evidence of Trump orchestrating his employees’ efforts to consider tampering with surveillance footage that captured them moving boxes of records the federal government sought.
Carlos De Oliveira on Thursday became the third person charged with federal felonies in relation to alleged efforts by former President Donald Trump to keep classified information after leaving office and impede an investigation. De Oliveira is identified in the indictment as the property manager at Mar-a-Lago and a former valet….
The indictment claims De Oliveira helped move boxes containing classified information for Trump, and requested an employee to delete Mar-a-Lago security camera footage to prevent it from being turned over to a federal grand jury….
The indictment claims that an attorney for Trump’s company received a grand jury subpoena requiring the production of surveillance records, videos and images, on June 24, 2022. Prosecutors claim that the next day, Nauta and De Oliveira went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors and “walked with a flashlight through a tunnel” to a storage room, pointing to surveillance cameras.
The indictment says days later, on June 27, De Oliveira took another Trump employee to a small room known as an “audio closet,” and asked the employee how many days the server retained security footage. The employee said he believed it was about 45 days.
The indictment does not identify the employee, who multiple sources tell CBS News is Mar-a-Lago I.T. department employee Yuscil Taveras.
De Oliveira allegedly told Taveras that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” according to the indictment. Taveras, the indictment says, responded that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the right to do that.
Vera and Lola, by Alberto Morrocco
De Oliveira is charged with lying to investigators about his actions.
Federal investigators spoke with De Oliveira at his home on Jan. 13 and asked him about the location and movement of the boxes stored at Mar-a-Lago, prosecutors said in the filing.
On Aug. 8, 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, seizing more than 100 classified documents. The indictment claims that on Aug. 26, Nauta called an unnamed employee and “said words to the effect of, ‘someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,'” referring to De Oliveira.
In response, the employee said “De Oliveira was loyal and that De Oliveira would not do anything to affect his relationship with Trump,” according to the indictment.
That same day, Trump called De Oliveira and told him he would get De Oliveira an attorney, according to the indictment.
When former president Donald Trump was first indicted by a federal grand jury in June, the world got its first peek at the strength of the evidence compiled by special counsel Jack Smith. It was, by all accounts, remarkable, detailing a number of alleged actions by Trump and his aide Walt Nauta that articulated an effort to both retain documents the government had demanded Trump turn over and to keep the government from knowing that’s what was happening….
The original indictment added new details to this series of events, including alleging that Trump had moved boxes out of view of his attorneys before they began their search for documents. After the material that was turned over in early June was collected, Trump also allegedly suggested that maybe any particularly “bad” documents be disposed of.
Prosecutors were aware of the movement of the boxes because they subpoenaed and received surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago. And it’s that subpoena and the response from Trump and his co-defendants that are the stars of the superseding indictment released on Thursday night.
The new indictment claims that Trump wanted Nauta and another employee Carlos De Olivera to delete the surveillance tapes that the government demanded.
As told in the indictment, the story begins on June 3, 2022. That’s the day on which a Justice Department official was handed a sealed folder containing material marked as classified, purportedly all such material that was at Mar-a-Lago. While there, the feds noticed surveillance cameras near the lower-level storage room where, in August, the FBI would find dozens of documents with classification markings. The government sought and obtained a search warrant for footage from the cameras.
Holding the Place, by Deborah Dewitt
A draft of the subpoena was sent to Trump’s attorneys on June 22 while Trump was in Bedminster, N.J., for the summer. (Everything in this timeline, we should note, is alleged in the indictment and, again, unproved.) The following day, Trump had a lengthy conversation with Carlos De Oliveira, a Mar-a-Lago employee who had also allegedly helped Nauta move a number of boxes back into the storage room after the attorney’s search for material responsive to the May subpoena.
On Friday, June 24, the formal subpoena was received by Trump’s team. At about 1:30 p.m., Trump’s attorney told Trump about it. At a quarter to 4 p.m., Nauta was informed that Trump wanted to see him. Later that evening, Nauta, who had been planning to join Trump on a trip to Illinois, suddenly changed his travel plans to head to Florida.
In text messages to others, he claimed that the change was a function of a family emergency. But, in the same time period that he was changing his travel plans, he also reached out to De Oliveira and the head of IT at Mar-a-Lago (whom the New York Times identifies as Yuscil Taveras) to see if they were going to be around over the weekend. After De Oliveira and Nauta spoke for a few minutes by phone, De Oliveira texted the IT staffer.
“Walter call me earl[ier] said it was trying to get in touch with you,” he wrote. “I guess he’s coming down tomorrow I guess needs you for something.” The IT staffer [now known to be Taveras] then texted Nauta to let him know he was available if needed.
Read the rest of this helpful timeline at the WaPo.
A federal judge late Friday dismissed Donald Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which the former president argued that the cable network’s statements about his false 2020 election fraud claims likened him to Adolf Hitler.
In the lawsuit, Trump’s team argued that CNN writers and television anchors’ use of the phrase the “Big Lie,” in five specific incidents, incited “readers and viewers to hate, contempt, distrust, ridicule, and even fear” him. But U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal, who Trump appointed in 2019, reasoned that because all of CNN’s statements were opinion, Trump could not legally sue the network for defamation.
“Being ‘Hitler-like’ is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim,” Singhal wrote in his dismissal. “CNN’s statements while repugnant, were not, as a matter of law, defamatory.”
The phrase “big lie” historically has referred to a propaganda technique so powerful that people who believe in its message could not believe that someone could have distorted it. It has popular origins in German from Adolf Hitler in his memoir, Mein Kampf.
Singhal dismissed his lawsuit with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot file another lawsuit under the same reasoning.
“The Court finds Nazi references in the political discourse (made by whichever ‘side’) to be odious and repugnant. But bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact.” Singhal wrote. “CNN’s use of the phrase ‘the Big Lie’ in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people. No reasonable viewer could (or should) plausibly make that reference.”
WHILE DONALD TRUMP was publicly whipping his supporters into a frenzy over claims that the 2020 election was “stolen,” he was privately mocking his own allies’ outlandish conspiracy theories as “crazy.”
It’s a contradiction that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office would like to know all about.
According to two sources with knowledge of the situation, federal investigators have questioned multiple witnesses, including some in recent months, about Trump privately suggesting, starting in November 2020, that certain conspiracy theories and “evidence” were nonsensical.
Among these witness accounts are moments of the then-president repeatedly calling Sidney Powell, one of the MAGA lawyers and die-hard Trumpists aiding his effort to stop the transfer of power, “crazy,” and dismissing many of her election-fraud arguments as patently absurd.
This included Powell’s assertions that several foreign nations had secretly helped rig the 2020 election in favor of Biden, manipulating Dominion voting technology in what would amount to one of the greatest international scandals in modern history. None of this was true, and even Trump — according to these witness accounts, and other sources who relayed similar experiences to Rolling Stone — initially sneered at the ridiculousness of it all.
However, that did not stop President Trump from publicly continuing to entertain and encourage Powell’s propaganda for weeks. This led to a now-infamous Dec. 18, 2020, gathering at the White House, where Powell, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and others used these conspiracy theories to try to persuade Trump to essentially declare martial law and federally impound voting equipment so that he could remain in power. (That White House meeting is itself part of a series of gatherings that the special counsel has been probing.)
While we were waiting for the big January 6th Indictment, a superseding indictment popped out of the Secret Documents Case. We can stop feeling sorry for the little guy now. It appears that Walt Nauta is the consigliere of the Mar-a-Lago branch of the Trump Family Crime Syndicate. The details drive coffin nails through every outrageous Trump attempt at a defense case tailor-made for the public. It also demonstrated, once again, that everything Trump accuses a political rival of, he’s already done in spades.
The attempts to remove all the videotapes of the goings on at the Trump’a Giant Douche Club in Florid’uh. Anyone who has seen an aerial photo of the place knows exactly what I mean. Here’s the headline from the Washington Post. “Trump charged with seeking to delete security footage in documents case Unsealed indictment charges second aide at Mar-a-Lago and brings new counts against the former president and longtime valet Walt Nauta.”
Prosecutors announced additional charges against Donald Trump on Thursday in his alleged hoarding and hiding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, accusing the former president and a newly indicted aide of trying to keep security camera footage from being reviewed by investigators and bringing the number of total federal charges against Trump to 40.
Trump already faced 31 counts of illegally retaining national defense information, but federal prosecutors led by special counsel Jack Smith have added a 32nd to the list. That count centers on a now-infamous conversation Trump allegedly had at his golf club and summer residence in Bedminster, N.J., in July 2021, focused on what has been described by others as a secret military document concerning Iran.
In that conversation, which was recorded, Trump said: “As president I could have declassified it. … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still secret.”
The new indictment also levels accusations of a broader effort by Trump and some of those around him to cover their tracks as the FBI sought to retrieve highly classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home and private club, long after his presidency ended. The indictment charges that Trump and two aides, Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, requested that another Trump employee “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.”
While Trump has publicly claimed he was happy to hand over the footage in response to a grand jury subpoena, others close to him have said he was upset about it, and the indictment suggests a scramble among his aides soon after they received the demand for the footage. Prosecutors say that Nauta, Trump’s longtime valet, changed plans to travel with Trump to Illinois around the time the subpoena was sent, instead traveling to Florida to talk to other Trump employees about the camera footage. He appeared to try to keep the reason for the trip to Mar-a-Lago under wraps, the indictment says, telling others he was going there for different reasons.
With reporters clustered at the DC federal courthouse awaiting a possible Trump indictment in the Jan. 6 case, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team dropped a new bombshell in Florida in the Mar-a-Lago case: a superseding indictment that adds new charges against Trump himself, co-defendant Walt Nauta, and a new third defendant.
Let’s run through the top points quickly:
The number of counts in the indictment swelled from 38 to 42.
Trump was hit with an additional charge of willful retention of national defense information (now 32 counts on that charge, up from 31) for the Iran war plan document he allegedly flaunted at Bedminster.
The new defendant, a MAL worker named Carlos De Oliviera, was added to the existing conspiracy to obstruct justice count, so now all three defendants are charged in this count. In addition, De Oliviera gets his own false statements count.
All three men were charged under a new count of altering, destroying, mutilating or concealing an object.
All three men were charged under a new count of corruptly altering, destroying, mutilating or concealing an object.
A sample of some of the allegations of Trump’s direct involvement in the security footage deletion scheme (these separate excerpts cover multiple days of communications and aren’t intended as a timeline):
76. On June 23, 2022, at 8:46 p.m., TRUMP called DE OLIVEIRA and they spoke for approximately 24 minutes.
78. … At 3:44 p.m., NAUTA received a text message from a co-worker, Trump Employee 3, indicating that TRUMP wanted to see NAUTA.
87. At 3:55 p.m., TRUMP called DE OLIVEIRA and they spoke for approximately three and a half minutes.
91. … That same day, TRUMP called DE OLIVEIRA and told DE OLIVEIRA that TRUMP would get DE OLIVEIRA an attorney.
114. … TRUMP, NAUTA, and DE OLIVEIRA requested that Trump Employee 4 delete security camera footage at The Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.
A Straight Up Mob Boss
Here’s more from The Guardian. “Ex-Trump lawyer says evidence against him ‘overwhelming’ in Mar-a-Lago case. Ty Cobb, who represented Trump in Mueller investigation, says classified documents case is ‘tight’ after new charges filed.”
A former Trump White House lawyer said the evidence against the former president over his handling of classified documents was now “overwhelming” and would “last an antiquity”, after new charges were filed in the case on Thursday.
“I think this original indictment was engineered to last a thousand years and now this superseding indictment will last an antiquity,” Ty Cobb told CNN. “This is such a tight case, the evidence is so overwhelming.”
…
Trump told Fredericks he will not end his campaign even if he is convicted and sentenced.
“They went after two fine employees yesterday, fine people,” Trump said. “They’re trying to intimidate people so that people go out and make up lies about me. Because I did nothing wrong.”
Cobb represented Trump during the investigation by another special counsel, Robert Mueller, into Russian election interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump and Moscow. The attorney later told the Atlantic he did not regret working for Trump, saying: “I believed then and now I worked for the country.”
On Thursday, he told CNN: “It’s very difficult to imagine how Trump said that his lawyers met with Jack Smith today to explain to him that he hadn’t done anything wrong [Trump’s claim in the election subversion case], on the same day that Jack Smith produces this evidence of overwhelming evidence of additional wrongdoing.
“So this is, I think, par for the course.”
Cobb also said he was sure Trump had been advised by his own lawyers “not to destroy, move [documents] or obstruct this grand jury subpoena in any way.
“So this is Trump going not just behind the back of the prosecutors, this is Trump going behind the back of his own lawyers and dealing with two people” – Nauta and De Oliveira – “who are extremely loyal”.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is seeking to tamp down speculation about his future and make clear that he’ll stay on the job after a health incident earlier this week.
“Leader McConnell appreciates the continued support of his colleagues, and plans to serve his full term in the job they overwhelmingly elected him to do,” a McConnell spokesperson said in a statement, which was first reported by Politico.
McConnell’s two-year term as Senate GOP leader ends in early January 2025, and beyond that it would be up to his colleagues to decide whether to re-elect him. He became the longest-serving Senate party leader in U.S. history earlier this year.
McConnell, 81, is not up for re-election to his Senate seat in Kentucky until 2026, as he won a six-year term in the 2020 election.
Concerns about McConnell’s health have intensified since Wednesday when he suddenly stopped speaking during a weekly Republican leadership news conference, appearing to freeze, and then went silent and was walked away.
A few minutes later, McConnell walked back to the news conference by himself. Asked about his health, he said he was fine. Asked whether he is fully able to do his job, he said: “Yeah.” His office said he felt lightheaded and stepped away briefly.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., appeared confused during a vote on a defense appropriations bill Thursday, prompting a fellow Democratic senator to step in.
During a Senate Appropriations Committee markup of bills Thursday morning, Feinstein seemed to stumble on a vote. Instead of saying the expected response of “aye” or “nay,” she began to deliver a speech expressing her support of the measure: “I would like to support a ‘yes’ vote on this. It provides $823 billion …”
About 15 seconds into Feinstein’s speech, an aide whispered in her ear. Committee chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., then told Feinstein: “Just say aye.”
“Aye,” Feinstein said.
Feinstein, 90, was later heard voting against another measure before she was corrected and switched to “yes.”
A Feinstein spokesperson said Thursday’s markup “was a little chaotic” as members work to wrap up government funding bills before they leave for a six-week break, with senators “constantly switching back and forth between statements, votes and debate and the order of bills.”
“The senator was preoccupied, didn’t realize debate had just ended and a vote was called,” the spokesperson continued. “She started to give a statement, was informed it was a vote and then cast her vote.”
As someone who just spent the week coming to terms with her old eyes and old brain at two doctor’s appointments, I can tell you that this year has me wondering if I should stay out of the classroom at this point. I’m hoping new glasses help with the grading that seems awkward these days. I’m still waiting on the bottom line of the MRI results from Wednesday. I’m relying on my Son-in-Law, the radiologist, to be both kind and brutally honest with me.
Both McConnell and Feinstein have served their country ably. That comes with the disclaimer that I think McConnell is not a person I could ever vote for or support. I remember Senator Byrd being wheeled in to vote for the Health Bill Cloture vote in 2009. Many of us remember Ol’ Strom from 1998. I’m not sure we can amend the Constitution quickly to remove members that are way past their prime, but at some point, a leader should know when it’s time to retire. Feinstein is not running for reelection and is an important vote with seniority in this Senate. It’s just difficult for me to watch her like this, knowing what a shero she’s been to me since her days as a San Francisco mayor. A while-timed exit just shows some class. Donald Trump is another one that’s been showing his dotage for years. Biden has his moments, too, but he is nowhere near these kinds of episodes. It’s just something to think about. I’m sure it will be something to talk about in 2024.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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It’s a race to the bottom for Republican Governors in the efforts to decimate Constitionally granted civil rights and liberties. We’ve heard a lot about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. However, his flop of a Presidential run has left him out of the state and speaking about his war on “woke” in rhetorical terms these days. He appears to have quit his asylum seeker kidnapping flights for the time being. Today, we must take a good hard look at what is happening in Texas.
For years, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton used his office to allegedly inappropriately help a campaign donor, a group of investigators working for a Texas House panel revealed Wednesday.
The panel’s report comes as part of a months-long investigation into Paxton’s settlement of a lawsuit brought by four whistleblowers who were fired in 2020 after making accusations about the Republican’s misdeeds.
“To be negligent is just one thing,” Donna Cameron, one of the House-hired investigators, told the House General Investigating Committee. “But malfeasance is when you are actively and intentionally doing things to the detriment of the office and to your oath and to the responsibility that you have to the state of Texas and the public.”
Cameron and three other investigators spent over three hours Wednesday morning detailing Paxton’s alleged illegal acts, most of them related to Austin real estate investor Nate Paul, who made a $25,000 contribution to Paxton’s campaign.
The investigation primarily centered on what the whistleblowers alleged and the $3.3 million settlement they were ultimately awarded. Payment on that settlement has not yet been funded by the Texas Legislature.
Investigators stated the evidence they uncovered shows multiple violations of the law and Paxton’s oath of office. They include: Gift to a public servant, abuse of official capacity, misuse of official information, and retaliation and official oppression. Some of the violations carry jail time.
Many of the allegations discussed by investigators were already known, but Wednesday’s House panel was the first time investigators spoke on them in a public forum. The level of detail was also unusual.
Paxton is currently under indictment for alleged securities fraud. He was indicted in 2015 and also faces a separate federal investigation over alleged abuse of office.
The committee hearing — which was previously scheduled — comes less than a day after Paxton accused House Speaker Dade Phelan of being intoxicated on the House floor and called for his resignation.
In a statement posted on Twitter, Paxton said Phelan was trying to “sabotage my work as Attorney General.”
“Every allegation is easily disproved, and I look forward to continuing my fight for conservative Texas values,” Paxton wrote.
According to investigators, Paxton asked his top deputies in 2019 for legal counsel on a disputed records request involving Paul, who wanted access to sealed information concerning a search warrant by federal agents against himself.
After Paxton’s staff searched Paul on the internet — finding Paul was under investigation from the FBI and had multiple bankruptcies — they advised Paxton not to release the documents.
Erin Epley, the lead attorney in the group of House investigators, said the decision “was the correct one under the law.”
Texas has become the epicenter of runaway state government. Rule of Law means nothing in Texas. Nowhere is this clearer with the current controversy surrounding Governor Abbott’s use of barrels wrapped in razor wire and denial of basic human aid to those coming to the Texas Border. The DOJ is now on the case. This is from Democracy Now! “DOJ Threatens to Sue Texas Gov. Abbott for Installing Barrels Wrapped in Razor Wire in Rio Grande.”
The U.S. Justice Department is threatening to sue the state of Texas after Republican Governor Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in the Rio Grande in an attempt to block migrants from crossing the river. This comes just after a whistleblower state trooper at the Texas Department of Public Safety recently protested the state’s inhumane policies in a letter to superiors. “What’s happening at the border in Texas right now is criminal,” says Democratic Texas Senator Roland Gutierrez. “There’s state crimes, there’s federal crimes, and there’s international crimes.”
AMYGOODMAN: The U.S. Department of Justice is threatening to sue Texas after Republican Governor Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in the Rio Grande in an attempt to block migrants from crossing the river and entering the United States. Texas has also placed large coils of razor wire in the river. The Justice Department has given Abbott until 2 p.m. today to begin removing the floating barriers and related structures. Humanitarian workers and local news outlets report numerous migrants, including children, have suffered from lacerations after being cut by the razor wire oftentimes they couldn’t see — it was underwater.
A whistleblower state trooper at the Texas Department of Public Safety recently decried the state’s inhumane policies. In a letter to superiors, Nicholas Wingate wrote, quote, “The wire and barrels in the river needs to be taken out as this is nothing but a in humane trap in high water and low visibility,” he wrote.
Last week, the U.S. Justice Department sent a letter to Texas stating, quote, “The State of Texas’s actions violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties,” unquote.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott responded by writing on social media, “Texas has the sovereign authority to defend our border, under the U.S. Constitution and the Texas Constitution.” Abbott went on to say, “We will see you in court, Mr. President.”
We’re joined right now by Democratic Texas state Senator Roland Gutierrez. He recently announced he’ll run against Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, state Senator, at least for now. It’s really important to have you with us on this critical day. Can you talk about these flesh-ripping razor wire barriers in the water and what you think needs to be done at this point?
SEN. ROLANDGUTIERREZ: Well, thank you, Amy, first off.
I mean, it’s obvious that what’s happening on the border is inhumane, as Trooper Wingate suggested, that these people are made in the eyes of God and that no one should have to go through this kind of torture. And it is torture, let’s be very clear. The wire that is in the water cannot be seen. It’s lacerated people. It’s caused problems. And worse yet, Trooper Wingate describes a situation where people have tried to get beyond the buoys and beyond the razor wire, sadly, in deeper parts of the river. He talks about a mom who lost her child underwater. Her and her other child succumbed at that point. They rescued the mom and the daughter, but they, sadly, died at the hospital.
And so, we have to understand that what’s happening at the border in Texas right now is criminal. There’s state crimes, there are federal crimes, and there’s international crimes. We have to understand that what’s happening right now is of such a degree that troopers are acting under the color of law, and that not only are taking people’s rights, but people are dying or being injured very seriously from this. Greg Abbott needs to stop this flippant attitude and understand that what he’s doing is harming people, and nothing he is doing has anything to do with any kind of immigration policy, because they have shown no metrics under Operation Lone Star. It has been stunt after stunt after stunt. And unfortunately, this one is leading into the deaths of migrants and migrant children.
AMYGOODMAN: There were a number of other incidents that were described in the email: the 4-year-old migrant girl and a pregnant woman having a miscarriage found with severe injuries as they crashed into the barbed wire barrels while crossing the river. The young girl had also passed out from heat exhaustion. Wingate also wrote that the migrant mother, as you described, and one of her children drowned. It looks like the other one is not found. A child being pushed back into the water by one of these Border Patrol?
SEN. ROLANDGUTIERREZ: Yes, Amy. I mean, all of those actions that you just described are absolute crimes that need to be prosecuted. I have talked to the local district attorney. As you know, I’ve asked the Justice Department to step in. They have suggested that they’re indeed doing that. They have asked the governor to remove the obstacles in the water.
The Department of Public Safety’s director, Steve McCraw, I spoke to him immediately as these reports came out, which was last Monday. And he suggested there’s going to be an audit. I don’t think he understands the severity of the situation. This is not about an audit. We need to have an investigation as to who gave what commands and when, how high from the Department of Public Safety did those commands come from, who knew about it. He claims, of course, that he didn’t know anything about it. But, you know, any kind of audit or investigation of any sort from this agency is — I just question, because this is the same agency that failed all of those kids in Uvalde, Texas, a year ago, over a year ago, and here yet, we have no accountability from this agency at all in the last year and a half on that incident.
I think that we have to take a very serious look at what’s considered immigration policy and what isn’t. The last two months, we have seen a success in the reimplementation of Title 8, cutting down crossings about down to half. The fact is, Greg Abbott doesn’t want to have that discussion. He simply wants to talk about the chaos that he’s created.
This latest bus included 44 migrants from Mexico, Colombia, China, Haiti, Honduras, Peru, and Venezuela — 14 of whom were children between the ages of two and 14 years old, according to a Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights’s spokesperson. Los Angeles received its last migrant bus a week ago.
According to Abbott’s office, over 160 migrants have been sent to Los Angeles since June 14. In total, over 27,000 migrants have been sent to Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and New York City. Abbot claimed he’s sent thousands of migrants because Texas towns on the border are “overwhelmed and overrun” with migrants.
“Los Angeles is a major city that migrants seek to go to, particularly now that its city leaders approved its self-declared sanctuary city status,” Abbott said in a statement at the time he sent the first bus. “Our border communities are on the front lines of President Biden’s border crisis, and Texas will continue providing this much-needed relief until he steps up to do his job and secure the border.”
Mayor Karen Bass said her office cooperated with “city departments, the county, and a coalition of nonprofit organizations, in addition to our faith partners” to engage in its plan that it has previously utilized toward the influx of migrants.
“Actions ordered by Texas Gov. Abbott against migrants and refugees are outrageous, if not criminal,” CHIRLA Executive Director Angelica Salas said in a statement to ABC News. “We condemn the dehumanization of migrants and refugees anywhere, and we remind Governor Abbott that every life is precious and protected under the United Nation’s Human Rights Charter.”
Texas installed a floating barrier of large buoys on the Rio Grande river near the border town of Eagle Pass earlier this month as part of Abbott’s multibillion-dollar effort to secure the U.S. border with Mexico.
The barrier, as well as the state’s use of razor wire to deter migrants, has prompted a warning from Joe Biden‘s administration. Abbott has said the measures are within his authority because of what he says is a state of emergency caused by migrants crossing illegally into Texas.
Critics have said using disaster declarations to implement tougher border policies isn’t legally sound.
“There are so many ways that what Texas is doing right now is just flagrantly illegal,” David Donatti, an attorney for the Texas American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told The Associated Press. Abbott’s office has been contacted for comment via email.
Jessie Fuentes, the owner of a Texas kayaking company, has sued Abbott and other state officials over the buoys, arguing that they have hurt his business and that border crossings aren’t covered by the Texas Disaster Act.
“The definition of disaster cannot be read so broadly to allow Governor Abbott to create his own border patrol agency to regulate the border and prevent immigrants from entering Texas by installing a buoy system in the Rio Grande,” the lawsuit states. An attorney for Fuentes has been contacted for comment via email.
One woman could barely get words out through her tears. Another ran to the restroom as soon as she was done, wordless, wretched sobs wracking her tiny body. A third threw up on the witness stand.
These are believed to be the first women in the country since 1973 to testify in court about the impacts of a state abortion ban on their pregnancies. They almost certainly won’t be the last.
Speaking to a packed Travis County courtroom Wednesday, three women detailed devastating pregnancy losses and said medically necessary care was delayed or denied due to their doctors’ confusion over Texas’ abortion laws.
They’re challenging a clause in the state’s abortion ban that says a doctor can perform an abortion only if they believe the patient has “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy” that puts the patient “at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
Doctors have reported delaying necessary pregnancy care for fear of violating the law, which allows doctors to be punished by up to 99 years in prison, a $100,000 fine and the loss of their medical license. The lawsuit, brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights, asks a judge to temporarily block the law from applying to medically necessary abortions and ultimately clarify when a medical emergency justifies an abortion.
The bill requires the state’s Library and Archives Commission to adopt standards that schools must follow when purchasing books, and a rating system that would be used to restrict or ban some material.
“What we’re talking about is sexually explicit material … that doesn’t belong in front of the eyes of kids,” said the bill sponsor, Sen. Angela Paxton, a Republican. “They shouldn’t be finding it in their school library.”
Abbott, a Republican, previously joined a former GOP lawmaker’s campaign to investigate the use of books in schools covering topics of race, gender identity and sexual orientation. That inquiry included a list of more than 800 books.
In April, leaders of a rural central Texas county considered closing their public library system rather than follow a federal judge’s order to return books to the shelves on themes ranging from teen sexuality and gender to bigotry and race.
Under the measure passed Tuesday night, book vendors would have to rate books based on depictions or references to sex. “Sexually relevant” material that describes or portrays sex but is part of the required school curriculum could be checked out with a parent’s permission.
A book would be rated “sexually explicit” if the material is deemed offensive and not part of the required curriculum. Those books would be removed from school bookshelves.
I will continue to cover the Red States and their White Christian Nationalists policies as this election year continues. I think it’s essential to emphasize that states set the tone for what goes on in courts and the District. Governor Abbott and Texas Republicans are definitely leading the attack on our Constitution and Rule of Law. The Late, Great Texas Governor Ann Richards would be appalled. Watch as these things make their way to the Supreme Court and the Sicko Six.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
“The problem with Irony is not everybody gets it.” Ray Wyllie Hubbard.
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Today I’m highlighting the work of Scottish artist Agnes Miller Parker. She is best known for her wood engravings of animals, often used as book illustrations. She was also a woman’s right activist. “The Uncivilized Cat” was an illustration for the book “Love’s Creation,” by Marie Stopes, published in 1928, the year women won the right to vote in the UK. The the image is filled with symbols of women’s liberation. Read about them at this link.
We are still waiting for the expected indictment of Donald Trump in the January 6 case. Special Counsel Jack Smith is till conducting grand jury interviews in the investigation, so maybe it won’t happen right away–or maybe it will come next week. Meanwhile, there is some Trump legal news.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents set a trial date on Friday for May 2024, taking a middle position between the government’s request to go to trial in December and Mr. Trump’s desire to push the proceeding until after the 2024 election.
In her order, Judge Aileen M. Cannon said the trial was to be held in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., a coastal city two and a half hours north of Miami that will draw its jury pool from several counties that Mr. Trump won handily in his two previous presidential campaigns.
Judge Cannon also laid out a calendar of hearings, throughout the remainder of this year and into next year, including those concerning the handling of the classified material at the heart of the case.
The scheduling order came after a contentious hearing on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce where prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, and lawyers for Mr. Trump sparred over when to hold the trial.
The timing of the proceeding is more important in this case than in most criminal matters because Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his legal obligations to be in court will intersect with his campaign schedule.
The date Judge Cannon chose to start the trial — May 20, 2024 — falls after the bulk of the primary contests. But it is less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July and the formal start of the general election season.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt that winning the presidency is how he hopes to beat the legal charges he is facing, and he has adopted a strategy of delaying the trial, which is expected to take several weeks, for as long as possible.
When the trial date for Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money case was set for March — during the GOP presidential primary schedule — the former president and leading 2024 Republican candidate shook his head.
The Republican Party as a whole might have that reaction to Trump’s latest trial date.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Friday set Trump’s Florida classified documents case to begin on May 20, 2024. Cannon wound up more or less splitting the difference between the government’s request to begin in December and Trump’s lawyers’ preference to begin after the 2024 election.
The date could still be pushed back, especially given that Cannon has labeled the case “complex.” But it means we’re currently looking at this for a schedule of Trump’s upcoming trials:
Oct. 2: New York civil fraud trial
Jan. 15: Second E. Jean Carroll civil defamation trial
March 25: Manhattan hush-money trial
May 20: Federal classified documents trial in Florida
That’s a lot of legal issues to face in the heart of a campaign, keeping Trump or at least his lawyers in court for a huge chunk of time he’s supposed to be on the trail. But Trump’s most serious bit of legal jeopardy — at least for now, with potential Jan. 6-related indictments looming federally and in Georgia — won’t fully play out until the end of the primary season.
Nomination contests are often effectively wrapped up by March or April at the latest, with the final contests held in June but generally not consequential to the outcome. Republican National Committee rules effectively require every state to hold its contest by May 31, meaning a two-week classified documents trial would place the meat of the proceedings beyond the window for any GOP voters making their decisions.
Donald Trump received some no good, extremely bad legal news on Friday, when The Guardianreported that Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney criminally investigating his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia has “developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month,” according to people familiar with the matter. Obviously, being charged with racketeering would be exactly as bad as it sounds—and yet somehow, that wasn’t even the worst news the ex-president received today.
Instead, it was likely the decision by Aileen Cannon—a federal judge Trump himself appointed—to set a trial date of May 20, 2024, for Trump to face off with the federal government in the classified-documents case, that had staffers and aides hiding in hallways and coat closets to avoid Trump’s ire (and whatever ketchup bottles he could get his hands on). While the spring date is several months later than prosecutors had requested, it is very much well before the postelection one Team Trump had been angling for in the hopes of putting it off until the ex-president could have won a second term and made all of his legal problems—on the federal level, that is—go away.
Of course, just because Cannon issued a ruling that Trump will undoubtedly be very unhappy about today does not mean she won’t, as many fear, blow up the case in his favor when the trial finally kicks off. (As The Washington Post notes, “In her role, Cannon can have a significant impact on the case, including by ruling on what evidence can be included and deciding on any potential motions challenging the charges.”) On the other hand, the government’s indictment against Trump is said to be extremely strong: After the charges were unveiled last month, former attorney general Bill Barropined: “I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly. If even half of it is true, he’s toast.” As one Fox News legal analyst noted, “All the government has to do is stick the landing on one count, and he could have a terminal sentence. We’re talking about crimes that have a 10- or 20-year period as a maximum.” (Trump, along with his alleged co-conspirator, has pleaded not guilty.)
The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.
In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.
Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.
The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.
The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.
For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.
The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has been contacted by the federal special counsel investigating former President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Kemp’s office confirmed Friday.
Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) was also contacted for the investigation, according to CNN reports.
Special Counsel Jack Smith is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and his actions related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. He served Trump a target letter on Sunday, informing the former president that he is the target of the probe.
By Agnes Miller Parker
The move shows overlap between Smith’s federal investigation and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into the same conduct in Georgia.
Smith’s probe in Arizona is questioning lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign against the state which alleged that the election was fraudulent. Smith subpoenaed the Arizona Secretary of State’s office earlier this month and subpoenaed state lawmakers in February.
Trump called Ducey multiple times to pressure him to overturn Arizona’s election results. President Biden won Arizona, the first time the state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.
Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.
In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote to a White House lawyer that his son, Atlanta-area attorney Blake Meadows, had been probing possible fraud and had found only a handful of possible votes cast in dead voters’ names, far short of what Trump was alleging. The lawyer teasingly responded that perhaps Meadows’s son could locate the thousands of votes Trump would need to win the election. The text was described by multiple people familiar with the exchange.
The jocular text message, which has not been previously reported, is one of many exchanges from the time in which Trump aides and other Republican officials expressed deep skepticism or even openly mocked the election claims being made publicly by Trump, according to people familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the criminal investigation.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading a Justice Department investigation of Trump’s activities in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has focused on exploring whether Trump and his closest advisers understood that claims of fraud in the election were baseless, even as they pressed state officials and others to overturn Biden’s victory and convinced Trump’s millions of supporters that the election had been stolen, people familiar with the probe have said.
The text message is a small part of a broader portrait of Meadows that Smith appears to be assembling as he weighs the actions of not just Trump but a number of his closest advisers, including Meadows.
After an overhaul to Florida’s African American history standards, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s firebrand governor campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, is facing a barrage of criticism this week from politicians, educators and historians, who called the state’s guidelines a sanitized version of history.
Siamese cats, Agnes Miller Parker
For instance, the standards say that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” — a portrayal that drew wide rebuke.
In a sign of the divisive battle around education that could infect the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris directed her staffers to immediately plan a trip to Florida to respond, according to one White House official.
“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris, the first African American and first Asian American to serve as vice president, said in a speech in Jacksonville on Friday afternoon.
Ahead of her speech, Mr. DeSantis released a statement accusing the Biden administration of mischaracterizing the new standards and being “obsessed with Florida.”
Florida’s new standards land in the middle of a national tug of war on how race and gender should be taught in schools. There have been local skirmishes over banning books, what can be said about race in classrooms and debates over renaming schools that have honored Confederate generals.
Vice President Harris, taking aim at Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke” on Friday in his home state, blasted Florida politicians for making changes to the public school curriculum that she said amounted to little more than a “purposeful and intentional policy to mislead our children,” especially when it comes to slavery.
Harris never mentioned DeSantis (R) by name, referring only to “extremists” and people who “want to be talked about as American leaders.” But her fiery speech in Jacksonville focused squarely on the policies of the Florida governor and presidential candidate, as well as on the state’s Board of Education and its Republican-controlled legislature.
Florida’s new standards on Black history lay out numerous benchmarks, but one has especially caught critics’ attention — a statement that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Since the guidelines were approved on Wednesday, many civil rights leaders have denounced the notion that slavery benefited its victims in some ways.
“Come on — adults know what slavery really involved,” Harris said. “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.”
By Agnes Miller Parker
She added, “How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
Since DeSantis announced his bid for the presidency in May, polls have cast him as former president Donald Trump’s top competition for the Republican nomination, at least for now. As DeSantis makes his pitch in early-voting primary states, he has blasted what he calls “woke indoctrination” in schools and said recent legislative changes in Florida could be a model for the rest of the nation.
Harris’s trip to the governor’s home state to rip into his policies could be a pivotal moment both for the Biden campaign, which has generally resisted going after the GOP presidential hopefuls, and for the vice president, who has sometimes seemed to cast about for a resonant issue.
Read more at The WaPo.
Bidenomics News
It’s difficult to understand why President Biden isn’t more popular. He has really delivered on his promises. What more do voters want? Are people really stupid enough to fall for GOP propaganda about the economy?
Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product.
Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote.
As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%.
“The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.
The analysts also doubled their original estimate for GDP growth in the fourth quarter, to 1.3% from 0.6%. Looking into next year, they raised their forecast for real GDP in 2024 by a tenth of a percent, to 1.4%.
“The narrative behind the numbers tells the story of industrial strength in the U.S,” Zentner wrote.
Morgan Stanley’s revision came at a pivotal time for the Biden White House. The president has spent the summer crisscrossing the country, touting his economic achievements. “Together we are transforming the country, not just through jobs, not just through manufacturing, but also by rebuilding our infrastructure,” Biden said Thursday during a visit to a Philadelphia shipyard.
Read more at CNBC.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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Here’s more from The Guardian
Mitch McConnell is vowing to stay in office despite that moment in his speech this week where he was unable to speak and displayed odd eye movements. 
Dianne Feinstein had a similar moment this week. This is also from NBC News.
As someone who just spent the week coming to terms with her old eyes and old brain at two doctor’s appointments, I can tell you that this year has me wondering if I should stay out of the classroom at this point. I’m hoping new glasses help with the grading that seems awkward these days. I’m still waiting on the bottom line of the MRI results from Wednesday. I’m relying on my Son-in-Law, the radiologist, to be both kind and brutally honest with me.
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Texas has become the epicenter of runaway state government. Rule of Law means nothing in Texas. Nowhere is this clearer with the current controversy surrounding Governor Abbott’s use of barrels wrapped in razor wire and denial of basic human aid to those coming to the Texas Border. The DOJ is now on the case. 
Yes. That’s the same agency that failed all of those kids in Uvalde, Texas. Let’s list just a few things this Republican Governor has been up to recently. 
There are, as there should be, a lot of questions about the legal basis of Abbott’s actions. This is from Newsweek. 
The lawsuit against the state by women who have been severely injured by the Texas Anti-Abortion law saw testimony starting July 19th. 
Also, Texas is leading the charge on Book Bans. This is from May 23rd. 
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