Wednesday Reads
Posted: January 10, 2024 Filed under: abortion rights, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: abortion, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, E. Jean Carroll, Glenn Kirschner, House Judiciary Committee, House Oversight Committee, Hunter Biden, John Sauer, Judge Florence Y. Pan, Judge Lewis Kaplan, Margery Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, post-Dobbs cruelty to pregnant women, Rep Jim Jordan, Rep. James Comer, Special Counsel James I. Pearce, Trump's presidential immunity appeal 9 CommentsGood Day!!
Peder Mørk Mønsted, Sunny winter landscape with a road, 1907
I was just about to get going on my post when I glanced at the TV screen (sound muted) and noticed a wild scene in the House Oversight Committee hearing. The Republicans scheduled the meeting today to hold Hunter Biden in contempt for ignoring their subpoena to appear for a secret deposition.
You’ll recall that Rep. James Comer originally said that Hunter could testify either in a public hearing or behind closed doors with committee staff. Hunter offered to testify publicly under oath but Comer freaked out and said it would have to be in a closed deposition. Obviously, they have no evidence of wrongdoing and Comer wanted to be able to lie about what happened in a closed hearing.
Anyway, Hunter showed up at the hearing today with two of his attorneys and sat in the audience. The media was all a-flutter.
Republicans were outraged. Nancy Mace yelled at Hunter and accused him of not having the “balls” to respond to the subpoena. After a long, idiotic rant by Mace, it was Margery Taylor Greene’s turn. Unfortunately for her, Hunter and his attorneys left the meeting as she began to speak, and all of the press followed them out the door, leaving Greene with no one to record whatever stupid things she planned to say.
Here’s the report from NBC News: Hunter Biden makes surprise appearance at House committee hearing to hold him in contempt.
The son of the president arrived on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning to attend in person congressional committee meetings called to hold him in contempt of Congress — setting up an unprecedented standoff on live television between Hunter Biden and House Republicans who have long sought his testimony as part of their impeachment inquiry into his father.
Hunter Biden was accompanied by his attorneys Abbe Lowell and Kevin Morris. He did not initially respond to questions.
House Republicans on the Oversight and Judiciary Committees are holding separate committee votes on Wednesday recommending that Hunter Biden be charged with contempt of Congress.
Hunter Biden is at odds with Republicans over their demand that he testify behind closed doors. The president’s son, who is facing two separate criminal indictments, has agreed to testify publicly, an offer Republicans have refused, continuing to insist that the testimony be given behind closed doors.
During the Oversight Committee’s markup Wednesday morning, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., called for Hunter Biden’s arrest on the spot for defying the congressional subpoena.
“Hunter Biden you are too afraid for a deposition, and I still think you are today,” she said.
“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” she added.
Outside the chamber, Lowell said committee Republicans were motived by “improper partisan motives.” He said he and his client had offered to work with Republicans on the committees on a half dozen occasions since February of last year to see “how relevant information to any legitimate inquiry could be provided,” but their first five offers were ignored. He called the subsequent GOP subpoena for a closed-door deposition “a tactic that the Republicans have repeatedly misused in their political crusade to selectively leak and mischaracterize what witnesses have said.”
Asked by NBC News shortly after leaving the Oversight hearing whether he would testify today if asked, Hunter Biden replied “yes.” He and his team left the building afterwards.
This is interesting. It appears that Chairman Comer has a hypocrisy issue as he accuses Joe and Hunter Biden of “corruption.” Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: Oversight Chairman James Comer’s ‘Legitimate’ Shell Company Was Shut Down—Twice.
As Rep. James Comer (R-KY) plows ahead with his sensationalized impeachment inquiry premised on Hunter Biden’s business dealings, the Oversight Chairman has alleged that Biden’s opaque financial operations merit investigation, and that people who own corporations have a “responsibility” to maintain proper “books and records.”
But a review of dozens of tax, real estate, and business filings in Kentucky and Tennessee indicate that Comer’s own personal “books and records” are opaque at best—and improper at worst.
Jef Bourgeau (American, b.1950), The Gloaming, 2024
Those records include the dealings of Comer’s shell company, Farm Team Properties LLC, which the state of Kentucky has dissolved twice for failure to file annual reports—first in 2020, then again in 2022.
Kentucky law states that an administratively dissolved business “continues its existence but shall not carry on any business except that necessary to wind up and liquidate its business and affairs.” An official with the Kentucky Department of Revenue told The Daily Beast that a company in administrative dissolution may not legally conduct business in the state—such as executing deals and leases, securing loans, or collecting rent as an LLC.
But in response to questions about the shell company last month, Comer told Fox Business that Farm Team Properties not only holds properties, it also “manages” them, “leases hunting on my 1,600 acres of farmland,” and generates “lots of revenue, legitimate revenue.” (The previous month, he denied having an LLC during a committee hearing.)
While Comer and his wife rectified the first dissolution within a few weeks, they allowed the October 2022 dissolution to languish for more than a year, only reinstating the entity last month, after The Daily Beast first reported on the company and flagged the dissolution on social media. It’s not clear from Comer’s filings whether Farm Team Properties ceased business activity for those 14 months.
The “books and records” questions also run to Comer’s real estate holdings, which directly contradict his recent public statements about his LLC. For one, Comer reports rental income from all of his farmland holdings, but it’s not clear whether that income derives from Farm Team’s alleged hunting leases. If so, experts told The Daily Beast, his records should reflect that, and they do not.
The opacity of Comer’s disclosures—along with his contradictory defenses of the shell company—mean the public still doesn’t have a clear picture of his finances. And Comer’s broadsides targeting Hunter Biden’s cloudy corporate entities would seem to invite parallel scrutiny into the similar haze that has settled over his own business dealings….
On personal financial disclosures starting from 2017—the year Comer’s wife created Farm Team Properties—and continuing through his most recent statement covering 2022, Comer has listed the income from the company as “none.” But after recent reports from The Daily Beast and the Associated Press raised questions about the shell company, Comer has called into question whether he’s really making no money from the entity.
House ethics rules state that members who “own an interest in a partnership or limited liability company established for the purpose of holding real estate,” must describe “each individual property held by the company.” Members also “must disclose each asset held by the company in which your interest (or that of your spouse or dependent child) had a period-end value of more than $1,000” or had recorded “more than $200 in income during the reporting period.”
Brendan Fischer, an ethics expert and deputy director of watchdog Documented, told The Daily Beast that it seems as if Comer should disclose more information.
“For a company created to hold investment properties—which sounds like Farm Team Properties, LLC—a Congressperson not only must disclose the company, they must also provide details about the properties it owns, and the amount of any income (such as rental income) from those properties,” Fischer said, noting that the rules apply “regardless of whether the entity is taxed as a partnership or corporation.”
Comer’s disclosures list his FTP ownership as a business interest, not as investment or real estate, despite the fact that it owns properties and is engaged in “real estate speculation.” This was true in 2017, when Farm Team Properties was created to hold property and obscure Comer’s co-ownership with a campaign donor, the Associated Press reported last month.
Sollenberger notes that Comer is a millionaire, because his father handed over two valuable properties for $10 apiece. Read much more about Comer’s shady dealings at The Daily Beast link.
The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jim Jordan (who refused to honor a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee) is also meeting today in order to decide whether to hold Hunter Biden in contempt.
Winter Trees, by Egon Schiele
CNN on the Judiciary Committee hearing:
In a different committee room, Jordan gaveled in the Judiciary panel’s meeting.
“Rather than come before us and answering questions about these and other concurring instances of the Biden family trading cash for influence, Hunter Biden held a press conference a few hundred yards from here, a press conference where he said I’m happy to answer questions in public but when he finished his statement he abruptly left, taking no questions from the press,” Jordan said.
“We have no choice but to hold Mr. Biden in contempt,” he added.
The pair of markups on Wednesday kick off a lengthy process and underscore that the Republican effort to obtain testimony from the president’s son will remain difficult. If the contempt resolution passes out of committee, it is referred to the full House for a contempt vote.
If an eventual House floor vote succeeds, the Department of Justice, which is already pursuing two criminal cases against the president’s son, would have to determine whether to prosecute the president’s son for evading a congressional subpoena.
Yesterday, Trump showed up in person for the hearing on his appeal of Judge Tanya Chutkan’s denial of his claim of “absolute presidential immunity” from criminal prosecution. The hearing didn’t go well for him. Joyce Vance wrote about it at Civil Discourse: Trump’s Bad Day in Court. The first of many to come.
Following Tuesday morning’s oral argument in the District of Columbia, Donald Trump made some predictable comments to the press from a Washington, D.C., hotel. As he finished, a reporter shouted out a request that he use the moment to tell his followers, “No violence.” The former president walked out of the room without responding.
The Judges came prepared for oral argument on Trump’s immunity motion. Let’s start with the key figures in the argument:
Judges: Bush appointee Karen LeCraft Henderson. Biden appointees Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs.
Lawyer for Trump: Former Missouri Solicitor General John Sauer.
Lawyer for the Special Counsel: James I. Pearce, a career federal prosecutor who has worked in both DOJ’s public integrity section, which Jack Smith previously led, and in the Criminal Division’s appellate section.
The top line from the argument: a broad consensus among observers that the panel didn’t buy Trump’s immunity argument. None of the Judges seemed to believe Trump should be immune from prosecution. But each Judge came at it from a different vantage point. While they may end up agreeing on a single rationale for their decision, it’s also possible we could have an opinion with concurrences by one or more of the Judges, using different reasoning.
Mr. Sauer argued first because Trump is the petitioner—he lost in the trial court and is asking the Court of Appeals to reverse Judge Chutkan’s decision. Mr. Pearce, who argued second, began by telling the court that no other president in history claimed his immunity from prosecution extended beyond his time in office. A president’s role is unique, Pearce said, “but not above the law.”
The most telling points in the oral argument centered on hypotheticals offered by Judge Pan. Judges frequently use hypotheticals to help them understand what a ruling would mean both for the case at hand and in future cases. Judge Pan posed three to Sauer, asking whether, under his view of immunity, a president could:
- order Seal Team 6 to execute a political rival, and get away with it
- accept a payment for issuing a pardon, and get away with it
- sell nuclear secrets to a foreign power, and get away with it
Landscape with Snow, Vincent Van Gogh
Sauer argued that presidents can only be prosecuted if they are first impeached and convicted by the Senate. He, of course, has to argue this because otherwise, his client Donald Trump is in trouble.
It’s an unappetizing position. Sauer ran into still more trouble as the hypothetical was played out with both lawyers in turn, exploring the ways a president could avoid being impeached and convicted. They ranged from a president who resigns to avoid conviction, succeeds in concealing criminal conduct until he leaves office so he is never impeached, or even one who orders the deaths of his opponents in the Senate to prevent conviction. Under Trump’s theory of immunity, no prosecution would be available in these cases.
You don’t have to be a high-end appellate lawyer to understand that this argument is a stone-cold loser. At least in a democracy.
Read the rest of Vance’s analysis at the link above.
HuffPost recaps an interview from last night’s Lawrence O’Donnell show on MSNBC: Ex-Prosecutor Surprised By ‘Jarring’ Aspect To Trump Court Appearance.
Former U.S. Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner on Tuesday said Donald Trump’s demeanor as he appeared before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — while his attorneys argued his “absolute immunity” for acts he committed during his presidency ― was “kind of jarring.”
The former president and Republican 2024 front-runner behaved “entirely like a defendant, not like a politician,” Kirschner told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.
It was in stark contrast to Trump’s usual bluster.
“I think I know what retail politics means,” said Kirschner. “He didn’t look anybody in the eye, he didn’t take an interest in anyone around, he kept his head down. He sort of lumbered forward to counsel table and plopped down.”
Trump “seemed like a defeated defendant who was kind of resigned to his fate,” he added.Kirschner later described the argument being put forward by Trump’s legal team as “harebrained.”
Former President Donald Trump’s attorney John Sauer failed catastrophically in selling an absolute immunity argument the appellate judges considering whether special counsel Jack Smith’s election conspiracy prosecution can move forward, argued former federal prosecutor Harry Litman on MSNBC Tuesday.
In particular, he said, it was over as soon as Sauer seemed to concede their position would imply Trump can assassinate his opponents with no recourse.
Edvard Munch, Winter Landscape
“He basically threatened some sort of unrest or bedlam if things didn’t go his way,” said anchor Chris Hayes. “He didn’t take any questions … and the headline comes from a hypothetical that appears in Jack Smith’s own briefs, which is to say the argument that Trump and his lawyers are making proves too much, obviously goes too far. It cannot be the case. Under the Constitution and under the rule of law, in a democracy and such as ours, it would allow it to be possible to order Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival and not face accountability but for some impeachment and conviction.”
“Cannot be, that is the headline, all three judges will reject that proposition,” agreed Litman. “Basically after Judge Pan asked that hypo about Seal Team Six, Sauer … was a dead man walking. He will lose. He should lose. Legally, historically, logically, et cetera. So in that sense there is the satisfaction that this vampire will have a stake in its heart.”
“But below the headline, Chris, there’s more drama, I would say, because this is one of the cases in which the three judges were kind of probing different theories, and one at one stage Judge Henderson said maybe we need to remand, to Judge Chutkan, this. They were probing different ideas, none of which was in lockstep with what Chutkan said. There are two reasons it matters. Depending on how they decide, even if they were unanimous, and you could see it concurring with Judge Henderson, if they were unanimous it could affect the prospects for a remand, and remand might entail a subsequent round of appeals under the remanded standard by Trump and a little bit more delay. And also could affect whether the Supreme Court takes review. So that lower level, there was some drama.”
George Conway wrote a long piece about yesterday’s hearing at The Atlantic: Trump’s Lawyer Walked Into a Trap. It’s pretty entertaining, if you can get through the paywall. They usually allow one free article, before they cut you off.
The second E. Jean Carroll case is also coming up soon. From Jose Pagliery at The Daily Beast: Judge Signals Trump Is Doomed in New E. Jean Carroll Trial.
With Donald Trump’s second rape defamation trial only one week away, a federal judge has rewarded the billionaire’s unceasing legal insolence and delusional defense strategy with a brutal order laying out just how punishing the court battle is going to be.
Until recently, the former president’s lawyers had been preparing for the upcoming defamation trial as if the first one never happened—seeing it as a chance to rewrite history and try to clear Trump’s name after a jury last year concluded he sexually assaulted the journalist E. Jean Carroll decades ago.
But on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan made it clear that Trump is not getting another go at whether he raped Carroll.
“In other words, the material facts concerning the alleged sexual assault already have been determined, and this trial will not be a ‘do over’ of the previous trial,” Kaplan wrote in an order.
In the 27-page order, the federal judge reiterated that the jury will merely be deciding how badly to reprimand Trump for dragging Carroll’s name through the mud while he was at the White House in 2019—when he denied a coercive sexual encounter that did, according to a jury last year, occur.
This new jury will see the most damning evidence of Trump’s misogyny, from the Access Hollywood tape in which he gloats about how he can “grab them by the pussy” to the videotaped deposition where he remarks that stars get away with sexual assault “unfortunately—or fortunately.”
The previous iteration of this case dealt with the defamatory denials Trump made after leaving office, a trial that cost him $5 million in damages (which he apparently paid).
The second defamation trial, which begins next week, deals with the denials Trump made as U.S. president, with all the additional attention and gravitas his former position of power bestowed upon him at the time he made those comments.
Kaplan’s order on Tuesday clarified that Trump will have the obligation—but not the right—to remain silent about nearly everything the billionaire intended to say in court.
“Mr. Trump and his counsel are precluded, in the presence of the jury, from claiming that Mr. Trump did not sexually abuse (“rape”) Ms. Carroll, that Mdid not make his… 2019 statements concerning Ms. Carroll with actual malice… or that Ms. Carroll fabricated her account,” he wrote.
In other (not new) news, Republican politicians are showing themselves to be sadistic psychopaths when it comes to women’s abilities to make choices about their bodies and health care. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: Republican Officials Openly Insult Women Nearly Killed by Abortion Bans.
For many years before S.B. 8 passed in Texas and was then swept into existence by the Supreme Court, and before Dobbs ushered in a more formal regime of forced childbirth six months later, the groups leading the charge against reproductive rights liked to claim that they loved pregnant women and only wanted them to be safe and cozy, stuffed chock-full of good advice and carted around through extra-wide hallways for safe, sterile procedures in operating rooms with only the best HVAC systems. Then Dobbs came down and within minutes it became manifestly clear that these advocates actually viewed pregnant people as the problem standing in the way of imaginary, healthy babies—and that states willing to privilege fetal life would go to any and all lengths to ensure that actual patients’ care, comfort, informed consent, and very survival would be subordinate.
We are only beginning to understand the extent to which pregnant women are dying and will continue to die due to denials of basic maternal health care, candid medical advice, and adequate treatment. The issue of emergency abortions, though, has already rocketed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed on Friday to decide whether federal law compels hospitals to terminate dangerous pregnancies regardless of state bans. No matter how SCOTUS rules, the fallout is already all around us. The stories of Kate Cox in Texas, devastated would-be mothers in Tennessee, and a horrifying prosecution of a mother who miscarried in Ohio all surface the brutal reality of the post-Dobbs zeitgeist: Any woman who seeks to terminate a pregnancy is wicked, any woman who miscarries is evil, and any woman who—for reasons of failing health, circumstance, or simple bad luck—does not prove to be an adequate incubator deserves whatever she gets. Every unborn fetus is the priority over the pregnant person carrying it and must be carried to term at all costs. So goes the moral calculus of the death-panel judges who now determine how to weigh the competing interests between real, existing human life and a state’s dogmatic fixation with a fetus that, by definition, must be seraphically innocent.
Frosted Evening, by Paul Evans
One need only look at red states’ scramble to defend their draconian abortion bans to witness this perverse moral hierarchy in action. In the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, the victims of these laws are no longer hypothetical: They are flesh-and-blood women, directly and viscerally injured by the denial of basic health care, and some of them have even had the gall to fight for their rights. Republican attorneys general have responded with furious indignation, openly demeaning these women as liars, wimps, partisans, and baby killers.
A recent filing by the office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan T. Skrmetti, a Republican, captures the dynamic all too well. Skrmetti has been fighting a lawsuit filed by a group of Tennessee women denied emergency abortions under the ultranarrow medical exception to that state’s ban. The women plaintiffs suffered an appalling range of trauma, including sepsis and hemorrhaging, because they could not terminate their pregnancies. The attorney general’s response to their complaint is a scathing, shockingly personal broadside against the victims of the ban. He accused them of attempting to draw “lines about which unborn lives are worth protecting” by imposing a medical exception “of their own liking.” He mocked them for asserting that ostensibly minor conditions like “sickle cell disease” might justify an abortion. And he insisted that the lead plaintiff, Nicole Blackmon, lacks standing, because she underwent sterilization after the state forced her to carry a nonviable pregnancy and deliver a stillborn baby. The attorney general viciously suggested that, if Blackmon really wanted to fight Tennessee’s ban, she could have tried for another doomed pregnancy.
Perhaps Skrmetti deserves half credit for candor, because he did not even pretend to treat these plaintiffs like compelling moral human beings. Instead, he wrote that Tennessee may allow different standards of care for pregnant and nonpregnant women. A pregnant woman, the attorney general averred, may be refused a treatment if it “has the potential to harm unborn lives—an issue not implicated” when treating nonpregnant women. “No equal-protection rule,” he concluded, “bars lawmakers from acting on that difference to protect unborn babies.” In other words, once a woman is pregnant, she becomes a vessel for “unborn babies,” giving the state authority to cut off her access to urgently necessary health care. Since nonpregnant women don’t immediately suffer the consequences of abortion bans, those bans don’t discriminate on the basis of sex.
There’s much more at the link.
One more story before I wrap this up. I’m sure you’ve heard that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was was treated for prostate cancer in December and was hospitalized with complications from surgery on Jan. 1. The problem is that President Biden and other top officials had no clue this was happening. From BBC News: President Joe Biden was only told that US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin was being treated for cancer on Tuesday, the White House has said.
Mr Austin, 70, was admitted to hospital on 1 January and then to the intensive care unit for complications following surgery in December.
He has faced criticism for not telling senior officials about it for days.
He has since apologised for not “ensuring the public was appropriately informed”.
The lag in notifying the White House raised potential national security concerns and issues of transparency within the Biden administration.
The defence secretary sits just below the president in the chain of command for the US military, and is one of the most important members of the president’s Cabinet.
The Pentagon confirmed Mr Austin remained hospitalised on Tuesday.
At a press briefing on Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that President Biden was only informed that day about the diagnosis of prostate cancer.
“Nobody at the White House knew that Secretary Austin had prostate cancer until this morning,” he said.
While he emphasised the president’s initial reaction was concern for the secretary’s health, Mr Kirby acknowledged the communications were “not optimal.”
“This is not the way it is supposed to go,” Mr Kirby said.
Mr Biden and Sec Austin have not spoken since their last interaction over the weekend, according to Mr Kirby.
Mr Austin’s deputy, Kathleen Hicks, was not informed of his hospital stay despite being asked to assume some of his responsibilities.
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Great post BB…
First:
It’s obvious Hunter has balls, as the Republicans showed his junk on the floor of congress.
And B
I’m glad the Judge is not allowing that orange terror to give closing arguments in his fraud trial.
I’m not turning this on but the coverage on threads and X are horrifying … mtg is showing those x rated pix again.
The paintings are beautiful! I need to see them because it got into the 30s, and I was so cold. I need to remind myself that I used to love winter because of the snow!