Posted: March 25, 2026 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: 82nd Airborne, Donald Trump, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Iran military spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaghari, Iran War, Iran war negotiations, Jack Smith, Jared Kushner, JD Vance, Pakistan, Paul Krugman, Steve Witkoff, Strait of Hormuz, TREASON |
Good Day!!
I’ve been scanning the headlines for awhile now, trying to make sense of what’s happening in Trump’s war with Iran. I’m still confused.
Trump keeps saying that he’s already won the war, but he’s sending thousands of troops to the region. He apparently sent a peace plan to Iran that they have already rejected, offering an alternative proposal.
CNN has a summary of the latest moves in the war: What to know on Day 26 of the Iran war: Tehran taunts Trump, US troop deployment.
Iran’s military has mocked the Trump administration’s efforts to strike a deal to end the war, saying the United States is only “negotiating with yourselves.”
Despite President Donald Trump’s optimism that a deal with Tehran is in sight, sources have told CNN that around 1,000 US soldiers with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division are expected to deploy to the Middle East in the coming days, suggesting the president is keeping his options open.
Ebrahim Zolfaghari
The latest on the talks:
- Iran taunts Trump: Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesman for Iran’s military, taunted the US leadership in a message broadcast Wednesday on state television. “Has the level of your internal conflicts reached the point where you are negotiating with yourselves?” he asked. Zolfaghari said the US’ “strategic power” had turned into a “strategic defeat.”
- Trump touts talks: That mocking message came after Trump expressed optimism over a deal to end the war, saying that Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others were leading negotiations.
- 15-point plan: The US has shared a 15-point list of expectations with Iran via Pakistan, with talks between the warring countries floated in Islamabad later this week, two regional sources told CNN. Those points include limits on Tehran’s defense capabilities, a cessation of support for proxies and an acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist, the sources said.
- Iran shuns Witkoff: Iranian representatives have let the Trump administration know that Tehran does not want to reenter negotiations with the US president’s favored diplomatic duo of Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, according to two regional sources, who said Tehran would rather deal with Vance.
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Iran willing to listen: An Iranian source told CNN on Tuesday that Washington had initiated “outreach” in recent days, “but nothing that has reached the level of full-on negotiations.” The source stressed that Iran “is not asking for a meeting or direct talks with the United States but is willing to listen if a plan for a sustainable deal comes within reach” that would preserve the regime’s interests. Initially, Tehran had denied any contact with Washington, saying that Trump’s claim of talks was a ruse to lower energy prices and buy time.
There’s much more on what’s happening at the CNN link.
More details from BBC News: Pakistan officials say Iran receives 15-point US plan – AP.
The Associated Press news agency reports that Iran has received a 15-point plan from the US for reaching a ceasefire in the US-Israel war with Iran, citing two Pakistani officials.
The Pakistani officials reportedly said the proposal broadly covers the following:
- Sanctions relief
- Civilian nuclear co-operation
- A rollback of Iran’s nuclear programme
- Monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency
- Missile limits, and access for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said earlier that the country was “ready” to host talks for a settlement of the conflict.
Israel’s Channel 12 has also reported on the plan. You can read a full breakdown of the reports in our earlier post.
There’s been no confirmation of the details from the White House. Iranian military has denied it’s negotiating with the US.
The Strait of Hormuz
Iran has rejected the U.S. plan and offered an alternative. AP: Iran rejects US ceasefire plan, issues its own demands as strikes land across the Mideast.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran on Wednesday dismissed an American plan to pause the war in the Middle East and launched more attacks on Israel and Gulf Arab countries, including an assault that sparked a huge fire at Kuwait International Airport.
Iran’s defiance came as Israel launched airstrikes on Tehran and as the United States deployed paratroopers and more Marines to the region.
Iranian state television’s English-language broadcaster quoted an anonymous official as saying Iran rejected America’s ceasefire proposal and has its own demands for an end to the fighting. “Iran will end the war when it decides to do so and when its own conditions are met,” the hardliner-controlled Press TV quoted the official as saying.
Earlier, two officials from Pakistan, which transmitted the U.S. plan to Iran, described the 15-point proposal broadly, saying it addressed sanctions relief, a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program, limits on missiles and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped.
An Egyptian official involved in the mediation efforts said the proposal also includes restrictions on Iran’s support for armed groups. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet released.
Some of those points were nonstarters in negotiations before the war: Iran has insisted it won’t discuss its ballistic missile program or its support of regional militias, which it views as key to its security. And its ability to control passage through the Strait of Hormuz represents one of its biggest strategic advantages….
Press TV cited an Iranian five-point plan for a ceasefire coming from the official who rejected the US proposal. That plan included a halt to killings of its officials, means to make sure no other war is waged against it, reparations for the war, the end of hostilities and Iran’s “exercise of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.”
Those measures, particularly reparations and its continued chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, likely will be unacceptable to the White House.
According to the above AP article, Trump is still claiming that Iran is negotiating with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, but according the BBC article above, Iran has said it won’t talk to them but would talk to J.D. Vance.
Barak Ravid and Marc Caputo at Axios: Iran suspects Trump’s peace talk push is another trick.
Iranian officials have told the countries trying to mediate peace talks with the U.S. that they have now been tricked twice by President Trump and “we don’t want to be fooled again,” according to a source with direct knowledge of those discussions.
The big picture: The U.S. is pushing for in-person peace talks as soon as Thursday in Islamabad, Pakistan. But during the two previous rounds of U.S.-Iran talks, Trump green lit crippling surprise attacks while still claiming to be seeking a deal.
Flashback: Israel attacked Iran with Trump’s backing last June, days before a planned round of nuclear talks.
- Then three weeks ago, the U.S. and Iran reached a tentative agreement in Geneva to continue talks the following week — two days before the U.S. and Israel attacked.
Behind the scenes: Iranian officials have told the mediators — Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey — that U.S. military movements and Trump’s decision to deploy major troop reinforcements have increased their suspicion that his proposal for peace talks is just a ruse.
- To the Trump administration, the massing of forces is a sign he’s serious about negotiating from gunboats, not that he’s negotiating in bad faith. “Trump has a hand open for a deal and the other is a fist, waiting to punch you in the f***ing face,” said a Trump adviser.
- The White House has sent messages to the Iranians that Trump is serious about the negotiations, and floated Vice President JD Vance’s possible involvement in the talks as proof.
- Two sources said Witkoff recommended Vance because of the stature of his office and because the Iranians don’t see him as a hawk.
Read more at Axios.
Trump is ordering troop movements. The Washington Post (gift link): Army paratroopers ordered to Middle East as U.S. weighs next move in Iran conflict.
The Pentagon on Tuesday ordered a couple thousand paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to deploy to the Middle East, U.S. officials said, as President Donald Trump weighs a significant escalation in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and declines to rule out putting U.S. troops on Iranian soil.
Army paratroopers assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, prepare to board an aircraft in 2020. (Hubert Delany III AP)
U.S. officials approved written orders for soldiers from the division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team and the 82nd’s headquarters at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, said two U.S. officials and a third person familiar with the move, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Verbal orders previously had been approved, two people said. It is not yet clear whether they will deploy to Iran itself, officials said.
Many of the soldiers are with the division’s Immediate Response Force, a unit that is trained to deploy on 18 hours’ notice for missions as varied as seizing airfields and other critical infrastructure, reinforcing U.S. embassies and enabling emergency evacuations. Immediate Response Force duties rotate among infantry units in the 82nd Airborne Division.
The orders follow weeks of speculation about whether the 82nd Airborne, commanded by Maj. Gen. Brandon Tegtmeier, would join the war, after its headquarters unit abruptly pulled out of a training exercise early this month at Fort Polk in Louisiana as Trump approved a sustained bombing campaign against Iran.
Last week, U.S. officials said the Pentagon was making plans to send soldiers from the 82nd Airborne to key areas in Iran, but it was not yet clear if the administration would approve the deployment to the region or, more specifically, onto Iranian soil.
The Army deployment comes as three warships carrying about 4,500 troops from the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group neared the Middle East. The group includes the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit based in Okinawa, Japan — a specialized Marine Corps unit that includes about 2,200 personnel, including an infantry battalion of about 800.
A similar unit, the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, recently deployed early from San Diego but is weeks away from arriving in the Middle East. The unit, embarked on warships that include the USS Boxer, could eventually replace or supplement the 31st MEU in the region, officials said.
Use the gift link to read more.
U.S. allies are confused about what Trump is doing. Victor Jack, Chris Lunday and Esther Webber at Politico: Trump’s ‘absurdly incoherent’ Iran pleas leave allies befuddled.
BRUSSELS — Donald Trump’s messaging on what he wants from American allies in his war against Iran is so confusing that any effort to help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz remains deadlocked, according to four European government officials.
Washington has not made any formal requests for equipment, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to speak freely on the sensitive talks, while allies are also reluctant to send military assets to the region over fears they would be attacked by Iran.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier
More than 30 nations, including a majority of NATO countries, have pledged “appropriate efforts” to restart shipping through the critical trade chokepoint after the U.S. president slammed allies as “COWARDS” for failing to volunteer their assistance.
But so far, discussions remain in their very early stages, according to government officials from seven European countries.
“One would wish for more predictability, more clarity and more strategic foresight — not only in this case,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told POLITICO on Tuesday, adding: “Let’s wait and see.”
The slow-moving talks reflect Trump’s conflicting messaging more than three weeks into his war against Iran — where he has threatened allies for failing to back his campaign, then said they weren’t needed, all while providing scant detail on how they could support the U.S.
The lack of enthusiasm about getting involved also underscores Europe’s growing self-confidence in dealing with Washington, as the continent increasingly shifts its approach from placating Trump to confronting him over a war allies were not consulted on.
“This war violates international law,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Tuesday. “There is little doubt that, in any case, the justification of an imminent attack on the U.S. does not hold water.”
Let’s face it: despite journalists’ efforts to make sense of what Trump is up to, it’s highly unlikely that he himself has any clue about what he is doing.
Katherine Doyle, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce at NBC News: Inside Trump’s daily video montage briefing on the Iran war.
Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.
The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”
The highlight reel of U.S. Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, the officials said.
But the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.
They said the videos are also driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current U.S. officials and the former U.S. official said.
That sounds about right for Trump’s childish comprehension level.
In non-war news, Trump’s theft of government documents after his first term is back in the headlines.
Carol Leonnig and Jacqueline Alemany at MSNOW: Trump appeared to have business motive for keeping classified documents, Jack Smith finds.
Special counsel Jack Smith gathered evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump took many top secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests, and investigators considered this a likely motive for Trump concealing them at his Florida club after he left the White House, according to newly released case records.
The special prosecutor also had evidence indicating that after leaving office Trump had shown a classified map to passengers on a private plane, including his future chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and took at least one document that was so secret that only six people had authority to review it, according to a memo reviewed by MS NOW and cited by the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
Trump’s stash of documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom
Trump’s reason for taking hundreds of pages of classified documents when he left office in January 2021 — and then concealing them when the Justice Department subpoenaed him for their return in May 2022 — has been one of the larger mysteries of the case. FBI agents conducting an unannounced search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 discovered hundreds more pages of top secret records that Trump and his lawyers had failed to return to the government after claiming they had fully returned all classified materials.
In a January 2023 “progress memo” reviewed by MS NOW, Smith’s office discussed the possible motive after the FBI discovered that Trump held on to many documents related to his businesses.
“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” according to the memo, which tracked progress in the documents and election-interference investigations. “We must have those documents.”
In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday, Raskin insisted that Trump’s Justice Department has sought to cover up the details of Trump’s “hoarding” of classified government secrets and storing them in his Mar-a-Lago club’s showers and closets — which put national security at risk — as well as the clues to Trump’s motives for doing so.
“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests,” Raskin wrote to Bondi.
“This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”
More from Jeremy Roebuck and Maegan Vazquez at The Washington Post: Trump showed classified map to passengers on his plane in 2022, memo says.
President Donald Trump showed a classified map he retained from his first term in office to passengers on a 2022 private plane flight and retained another record so sensitive that only six high-ranking government officials had access to it, according to a prosecution memo released to Congress this week.
The memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post, was penned as investigators moved toward indicting Trump on charges of illegally retaining sensitive government material after he left the White House. It offers a snapshot of an early moment in Smith’s investigation and adds new shading to the public understanding of Smith’s probes, even as a final report on his findings remains under court seal.
The memo, for instance, reveals that Smith’s team gathered at least some evidence to suggest that Trump had retained classified material pertinent to his personal business interests and that prosecutors were investigating whether his decision to hold on to those records was motivated by financial gain.
Ya think?
The eventual indictment — filed against Trump five months after the memo was written — did not mention Trump’s business interests as a possible motive. That could suggest prosecutors ultimately concluded they did not have sufficient evidence to prove that theory at trial. It is also not uncommon for prosecutors to leave some allegations out of their initial charging documents, even if they intend to prove them later at trial.
Jack Smith
The memo recounts an alleged incident in which Trump, on a June 2022 flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, allegedly shared a classified map with passengers. Among them, according to the memo, was Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Trump’s super PAC, who has since become Trump’s White House chief of staff. The memo did not detail what the map showed.
Smith’s 2023 indictment of Trump included a similar claim that Trump in 2021 had shown others a classified map tied to a military operation and boasted that he had access to a “plan of attack” that the Pentagon had prepared for him.
The Justice Department shared those findings, detailed in a January 2023 briefing document written by then-special counsel Jack Smith’s team, with lawmakers as they conduct a review of Smith’s now-abandoned efforts to prosecute Trump.
Has Trump shared these documents with Putin and his other world leader pals? I’d be surprised if he hasn’t. Remember, those documents were returned to Trump after the charges were dropped.
One more story before I wrap this up. Paul Krugman says that whoever is cashing in on Trump’s war announcements is committing treason.
From Heather Cox Richardson today: Letters from an American.
This morning, economist Paul Krugman came right out and said it: “People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets.” Another word for that, he said, is “treason.” The evidence for such a claim is the sudden and isolated jump in trading volume in S&P 500 and oil futures about 15 minutes before Trump suddenly announced that the U.S. and Iran were in negotiations to end the war—an announcement that turned out to be false.
The oil futures trade alone was worth about $580 million, the Financial Times estimated. As Krugman notes, exploiting confidential information for financial gain, otherwise known as “insider trading,” is illegal. But exploiting confidential information about national security for private financial gain is something else again. It puts profit-making above Americans’ safety.
“I’d very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning,” Krugman wrote. “Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?”
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
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Posted: September 4, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump | Tags: Afghanistan, Alvin Bragg, Arlington National Cemetery, Ginni Thomas, Jack Smith, January 6 case, Kamala Harris, misogyny, Section 60, Steven Cheung |
Good Day!!
This is getting ridiculous. On August 27, Trump staged a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery, supposedly to commemorate the deaths of 13 soldiers in a suicide bombing that took place during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was not an official event, even though Trump tried to pretend it was. He was apparently invited to the private ceremony by 2 of the deceased soldiers’ families.
As we all know by now, a woman representative of the cemetery tried to stop Trump’s people from filming and photographing in Arlington’s Section 60, because federal law forbids it. Two Trump staff members verbally abused the woman and roughly pushed her aside. Later they claimed that she was mentally ill.
A report was filed with police, but the woman declined to prosecute because she feared reprisals from Trump’s goons and thugs. There are still many questions about this incident, chief among them: why has no reporter or other witness revealed the names of the staffers who attacked the woman? And why has the army refused to provide any further information?
Arlington National Cemetery
Now, a week later, Trump himself is claiming the incident never happened. David Kurtz from TPM’s Morning Memo: Trump: ‘It Was A Made Up Story.’
Since we last touched base on Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery fiasco, none of the big six outstanding questions have been answered – but Trump may have given himself a new self-inflicted wound.
With the Army declaring the case “closed” after the cemetery staffer in fear of MAGA reprisals declined to press criminal charges over the alleged incident and with a holiday weekend allowing attention to drift away from the story, Trump took the curious step of reigniting the firestorm by publicly issuing a complete denial Tuesday that any kind of altercation took place.
Not only did it not happen but the story was “made up,” Trump claimed, by “Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad.” It was, in Trump’s telling, just a “BEAUTIFUL DAY OF HONOR” with “no fights or problems.”
Here’s what Trump posted, according to NPR:
Former President Donald Trump denied Tuesday there was a conflict or “fighting,” during his visit to Arlington National Cemetery last week, calling it a “made up story,” though Army officials said one of their employees “was abruptly pushed aside” by Trump campaign officials.
“It was a made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad,” Trump posted on his Truth Social website using the sobriquet he has coined for Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. “She made it all up to make up for the fact that she and Sleepy Joe have BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS for the INCOMPETENT AFGHANISTAN Withdrawal – THE MOST EMBARRASSING DAY IN U.S. HISTORY!!!”
Back to David Kurtz at TPM:
So now we have a situation where the Trump campaign disparaged the cemetery staffer has having a “mental health episode,” said she shouldn’t be in her job, suggested she suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome – and now Trump himself is claiming nothing even happened.
At the same time, the Army seems desperate to make this all go away.
The Army is currently sitting on the police report filed by the cemetery staffer recounting her version of the incident where she was reportedly verbally abused and shoved aside by two Trump campaign staffers when she tried to enforce cemetery rules against political activities.
As of late last week, Democratic staffers on the Senate Armed Services Committee “have been directly communicating with Army officials about the incident, and are in the process of seeking and receiving the information in the report and about what happened,” according to Greg Sargent.
At the at same time, House Democratic staffers attempting to looking into the matter are “frustrated” about resistance from the Army they’re running into, Sargent reports:
“Meanwhile, senior House Democrats are privately pushing Army officials to say more clearly what laws or regulations they think may have been broken and to reveal more details about what happened, another aide says, noting that Democratic staffers are encountering resistance, leaving them frustrated.”
With Trump issuing a blanket denial of any incident even occurring, is the Army going to release the police report and provide more details about the incident or leave the cemetery staffer twisting in the wind?
Apparently, even the U.S. Army is intimidated by Trump.
Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer: The ugly truth we’re missing on Trump, Arlington. [Hint: misogyny]
….[D]espite a week of headlines, there’s one critical aspect to this story I feel is being ignored, even though it is central to the very essence of Trump’s warped campaign.
The people closest to Trump allegedly shoved and verbally abused a woman — because that’s what they do.
And when the woman complained in a formal statement to the U.S. Army, Team Trump gaslit her by accusing her of being a psycho — seemingly part of an intimidation campaign which was meant to scare the accuser from pressing criminal charges.
Steven Cheung
This blatantly sexist bullying of the Arlington employee has worked — just as it’s worked so many times for Trump himself during his decades-long trail of sexual abuse and harassment allegations, and just as violence and gross mistreatment of women hasn’t thwarted the careers of Trump’s male-dominated inner circle.
We shouldn’t let the other unseemly aspects of Trump’s behavior at one of America’s most sacred places obscure the fact that rank misogyny is the lifeblood of this authoritarian crusade to retake the White House, and that contempt for women saturates everything they do. It runs the gamut from taking away reproductive rights and ridiculing any female who doesn’t become a “tradwife,” to the inner circle’s 100% tolerance policies toward sexual harassment, to the ultimate goal of creating doubts that any woman — first Hillary Clinton, now Kamala Harris — is fit to lead the United States.
In the Arlington affair, the circumstances and setting are different, but the Team Trump response carries powerful echoes of practically every time Trump or his subordinates have been accused of misconduct involving women. Consider the best-known case: that of Manhattan writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department-store dressing room in 1996 and has won civil court judgments over both the assault — which the judge characterized as a rape — and the campaign of defamation surrounding it.
In both the Carroll case and the physical attack at Arlington, Trump insisted the woman was making it all up. And you can hear the echoes of what Trump and his lawyers falsely said about Carroll — that she was a lying political operative — in spokesman Steven Cheung’s outrageous claim about the cemetery employee that she was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and in campaign chair Chris LaCivita branding her as “despicable.”
These aggressive deny-and-defame tactics have enabled a billionaire-turned-president to brush off more than two dozen credible allegations of sexual harassment or assault over his career, and — in a demoralizing moment of clarity about the brute force of misogyny in America — defeat the first major-party woman nominee in 2016, even after he was caught on tape bragging about his propensity for grabbing female private parts.
Of course J.D. Vance fits in with this gang of woman-haters, as Bunch goes on to discuss.
Gee, I wonder why Trump is doing poorly among women voters? Alexander Bolton at The Hill: Republicans fret over Trump’s free fall among women.
Republican pollster Whit Ayres says “it’s going to be a challenge” for Trump to chip away at Vice President Harris’s big lead among women.
“The real challenge right now for Republicans is whether they can perform sufficiently well among men to overcome the deficit among women. Given the prominence of abortion in this year’s race and Trump’s past statements about women, the traditional gender gap could become a gender chasm,” he warned.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Sunday showed Harris with a huge lead over Trump among women, 54 percent to 41 percent, while Trump enjoyed a more modest 51 percent to 46 percent lead over Harris among men.
Especially concerning for Republicans, the ABC/Ipsos poll showed Harris’s standing among women had jumped significantly compared to before the Democratic convention in Chicago, when she led Trump by only 6 points among women.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published Thursday also showed Harris with a 13-point lead among women, 49 percent to 36 percent, and Trump with a smaller lead among men voters.
Both polls showed Harris with a 4-percentage point overall lead nationwide.
Trump has tried to win over college-educated and suburban women by moderating his position on abortion and backing free in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.
But those proposals are meeting a backlash from anti-abortion conservatives, and GOP strategists are skeptical about how much they will influence women who have already moved away from Trump….
Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post Fact Checker also addressed the Arlington incident: Trump appears to have misled Gold Star families on troop deaths in Afghanistan.
“We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they took over that disaster.”
— Former president Donald Trump, in a video of him at Arlington National Cemetery speaking to the families of U.S. troops killed at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, posted on TikTok, Aug. 28
This TikTok of Trump’s controversial visit to Arlington, where he marked the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan overseen by President Joe Biden,has been viewed more than 11 million times. Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, but Trump’s entourage pushed past a cemetery employee who tried to prevent Trump’s aides from bringing cameras, according to the Army.
Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita
Those cameras appear to have recorded Trump saying these words to the Gold Star families. (The TikTok shows him talking to families as the words are spoken as a voice-over.) In his phrasing, it sounds as if no troops were killed in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of his presidency. That’s false, though as we will show, there was an 18-month gap with no fatalities across Trump’s and Biden’s combined presidencies.
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to queries about why Trump says there were no fatalities over 18 months. Using the Defense Casualty Analysis System, we first reviewed every 18-month period in Trump’s four years as president, looking only at deaths in hostile action in Afghanistan during Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, not accidental deaths such as in a vehicle or helicopter crash. There was no such period.
Then we focused on the last 18 months of his presidency — July 20, 2019, to Jan. 20, 2021. That makes the most sense since Trump referenced Biden’s taking over. The Defense Department database showed 12 deaths from hostile action in that period. We double-checked with the news releases issued by the Pentagon in that period and confirmed the 12 names.
The last two deaths occurred on Feb. 8, 2020. Javier Jaguar Gutierrez of San Antonio and Antonio Rey Rodriguez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, both 28, werefatally ambushed by a rogue Afghan policeman. Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence, flew to Dover Air Force Base when the bodies arrived in the United States.
Kessler also notes that Trump initially agreed with Biden’s withdrawal policy, and he (Trump) also bragged that he was the one who set up the process of withdrawal.
In March 2020, Trump approved an agreement with the Taliban (not the Afghan government at the time) for all U.S. forces to leave the country by May 1, 2021. He sealed the deal with a phone conversation with Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political office in Qatar. “We had a good long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence,” Trump told reporters at the time. “They’d like to cease violence also.”
Despite abandoning many of Trump’s policies, Biden honored this one, just stretching out the departure by a few months in 2021.
Trump even celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with the withdrawal. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,” he said in a written statement after Biden announced he would continue the departure set in motion by Trump.
At a political rally on June 26 that year, weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government, Trump bragged that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course. “I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process,” he said. “Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think? Twenty-one years. They [the Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”
Read the rest at the WaPo.
You might also be interested in this piece by Parker Malloy: How the Media Let Trump Off the Hook for His Arlington National Cemetery Stunt.
A couple of updates on Trump’s legal woes:
AP: Federal judge rejects Donald Trump’s request to intervene in wake of hush money conviction.
A federal judge on Tuesday swiftly rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, spurning the former president’s attempt at an end-run around the state court where he was convicted and is set to be sentenced in two weeks.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling — just hours after Trump’s lawyers asked him to weigh the move — upends the Republican presidential nominee’s plan to move the case to federal court so that he could seek to have his conviction overturned in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
Trump’s lawyers challenged the decision, filing a notice of appeal late Tuesday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump and his lawyers “will continue to fight to move this Hoax into federal court where it should be put out of its misery once and for all,” his campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said in a statement.Hellerstein, echoing his denial of Trump’s pretrial bid to move the case, said the defense failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution.
Shirin Ali at Slate: Trump’s Last-Ditch Effort to Delay His Sentencing.
Trump has been doing everything he can to avoid his upcoming sentencing in New York, with his attorneys filing a last-ditch motion last week to get the hush money case transferred to federal court. Meanwhile, special counsel Jack Smith filed a new superseding indictment that adjusts for the Supreme Court’s landmark presidential-immunity decision.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
A few days later, Trump’s attorneys responded by proposing a timeline for resolving the Jan. 6 federal case that extends well beyond the November election.Last week, the former president’s attorneys filed a removal notice that requested that his hush money case be transferred to federal court and out of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s hands, about two weeks before his scheduled sentencing on Sept. 18.
This is the second time Trump’s defense team has asked to transfer this case; a district-court judge denied its first attempt earlier this year. However, this time around, Trump’s team has the Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity decision to point to. In a 65-page notice, the lawyers argue that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case was “flawed” and that he used evidence that should not have been admissible because it’s related to “official acts” covered by presumptive immunity.
“Post-trial removal is necessary under these circumstances to afford President Trump an unbiased forum, free from local hostilities, where he can seek redress for these Constitutional violations,” write Trump’s attorneys.Just three weeks ago, his attorneys also requested that Merchan delay Trump’s Sept. 18 sentencing. Trump has repeatedly tried and failed to get the judge to recuse himself from the hush money trial as well. On Tuesday, Bragg’s office responded to Trump’s removal request, noting that proceedings in state court can continue even as the federal courts consider the request.
That case appears to be decided, but apparently Trump is trying to appeal once again. Back to the Slate article:
The Special Counsel Files a New Indictment
The Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity decision was considered a big win for Trump, but Jack Smith isn’t giving up yet. Last week, the special counsel filed a new superseding indictment in his federal election-interference case against the former president.
The indictment raises the same four counts against Trump as the original did, including for obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge that could be affected by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Fischer v. United States. That decision narrowed the scope of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act—it included a section that seemed to broadly outlaw any obstruction of an official proceeding, and the justices ruled that it should apply only to interference with official documents. Smith’s determination to keep the obstruction charges indicates he’s willing to risk litigating the issue further in court.
The superseding indictment also eliminated any mention of former Trump Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark and cut back significantly on how much it discusses former Vice President Mike Pence’s role. (Trump’s conversations with former DOJ officials and advisers are now considered “official” acts that are covered by absolute immunity and thus cannot be used as evidence, while his conversations with Pence appear to be covered by presumptive immunity.) [….]
Judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled a hearing Thursday to determine the next steps in this case. Her biggest priority will be to conclude what portions of Smith’s indictment fall under core official presidential acts and what do not. In order to make those decisions, she could find that evidentiary hearings are necessary and require that witnesses testify, though Smith has reportedly been hoping to avoid this kind of minitrial….
The special counsel and Trump’s attorneys filed a joint proposal late last week that laid out two very different timelines for Smith’s federal election-interference case. The former president also indicated that he plans to file a series of motions challenging Smith’s superseding indictment and his appointment to special counsel.
Trump’s attorneys suggested a timeline in which Chutkan considers a series of motions through the end of this year—stretching well past November’s presidential election. Their timeline would have Chutkan considering a motion to dismiss based on presidential immunity in mid-December and pretrial litigation continuing through spring and fall 2025. The defense also acknowledges Smith’s new superseding indictment, arguing that it “correspondingly requires time to review the new charging instrument as [Trump] determines what steps and procedures to undertake regarding, among other motions, his Presidential immunity defense.”
We are going to have to get Kamala Harris elected if we want any chance of Trump finally facing legal accountability.
Ginni Thomas
I’ll end with one more interesting story from ProPublica: Ginni Thomas Privately Praised Group Working Against Supreme Court Reform: “Thank You So, So, So Much.”
Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.
Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”
Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.
Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”
Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.
On the same call, Shackelford attacked Justice Elena Kagan as “treasonous” and “disloyal” after she endorsed an enforcement mechanism for the court’s newly adopted ethics code in a recent public appearance. He said that such an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.” (This past weekend, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she too was open to an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court.)
After the call, First Liberty sent a recording of the 45-minute conversation to some of its supporters. ProPublica and Documented obtained that recording.
Have a nice Wednesday, everyone!!
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Posted: August 10, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: childless cat ladies, Culinary union Nevada, Jack Smith, Judge Tanya Chutkan, McDonalds, Nate Holden, Project 2025 training videos, swing state polls, Tim Walz, Trump lies, Trump press conference, UAW, Willie Brown |
Happy Caturday!!
Last night, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz held their biggest rally yet in Glendale, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb. The crowd numbered around 15,000 people. Once again, the atmosphere was joyful and enthusiastic, with the crowd cheering lustily. Later last night, Trump spoke to a much smaller crowd, in a large venue with hundreds of empty seats. There was no joy at his sad rally.
The Guardian: Harris and Walz whip up crowd at packed Phoenix rally – but ‘we are the underdog.’
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rallied a packed arena outside Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday – drawing perhaps the largest Democratic crowd of the election cycle this year.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, her running mate and the local leaders who joined them on stage whipped up the crowd, discussing immigration, abortion rights and Indigenous sovereignty.
Noting the Indigenous leaders in the room, Harris also said: “I will always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination.” Indigenous voters are credited with helping deliver Arizona to Joe Biden in 2020; the state is home to 22 federally recognized tribes.
At one point during her speech, Harris was interrupted by protesters chanting “free, free Palestine” and other messages in support of Gaza. She stopped her speech to address the protesters.
“We’re here to fight for our democracy, which includes respecting the voices that I think we are hearing from. Let me just speak to that for a moment and then I’ll get back to the business at hand,” she said. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done. Now is the time. And the president and I are working around the clock every day to get that ceasefire deal done and bring the hostages home.” Her statement represented a noticeable change in tone from her approach to Gaza protesters in Detroit on Thursday.
Harris and Walz took the stage at the Desert Diamond Arena, a venue that can hold 20,000 people. Although official estimates are not yet available, the Harris campaign confirmed that more than 15,000 people attended the Phoenix rally. On stage, in front of attendees waving signs that read “Coach!”, Walz said the rally “might be the largest political gathering in the history of Arizona”.
“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” he added.
Other Harris campaign events this week that have drawn crowds of up to 15,000, invoking the ire of Donald Trump, who claims to have “spoken to the biggest crowds”.
The Harris-Walz rally represents a renewed push to put the Sun belt back on the map for Harris’s still young campaign. Before Friday night, the state appeared to be leaning red, with Trump leading Harris by single digits in recent polls. But by the evening of the rally, Harris and Trump appeared neck and neck in the state, with polling from FiveThirtyEight showing Harris’ 44.4% closely following Trump’s 44.8%.
Polls on Friday morning showed Harris narrowly leading Trump nationwide.
Harris also addressed immigration in her Arizona speech. AP: Kamala Harris makes an immigration pitch in Arizona as she fights to gain ground in the Sun Belt.
Vice President Kamala Harris drew on her prosecutorial background to make her first expansive pitch on immigration to border-state voters as she and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, attracted thousands to a campaign rally in Arizona during their tour of battleground states.
Harris, the former attorney general of California, reminded the crowd that she, as a law enforcement official, targeted transnational gangs, drug cartels and smugglers.
Trump won’t be happy with the latest polls of swing states. Also from The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said in front of a crowd of more than 15,000 in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix. “So I know what I’m talking about.”
Harris promoted a border security bill that a bipartisan group of senators negotiated earlier this year, which Republican lawmakers ultimately opposed en masse at Republican nominee Donald Trump’s behest.
“Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem,” Harris said. “Be clear about that: He has no interest or desire to actually fix the problem. He talks a big game about border security, but he does not walk the walk.”
Trump won’t be happy with the latest swing state polls.
The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
A major new poll puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in three key swing states, signaling a dramatic reversal in momentum for the Democratic party with three months to go until the election.
The vice-president leads the ex-president by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50% to 46%, among almost 2,000 likely voters in each state, according to new surveys by the New York Times and Siena College.
The polls were conducted between 5 and 9 August, in the week that Harris named midwesterner Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a former high school teacher, as her running mate for November’s Democratic ticket.
It provides the clearest indication from crucial battleground states since Joe Biden pulled out of the race and endorsed Harris amid mounting concerns about the 82-year-old’s cognitive wellbeing and fitness to govern for a second term. The results come after months of polling that showed Biden either tied with or slightly behind Trump.
Harris is viewed as more intelligent, more honest and more temperamentally fit to run the country than Trump, according to the registered voters polled.
The findings, published on Saturday by the Times, will boost the Democrats, as Harris and Walz continue crisscrossing the country on their first week on the campaign trail together, holding a slew of events in swing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election….
While only a snapshot, Democrats will probably be heartened to see that 60% of the surveyed independent voters, who always play a major role in deciding the outcome of the race, said they are satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 45% in May.
The swing appears to be largely driven by evolving voter perceptions of Harris, who has been praised for her positivity and future-focused stump speeches on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump by just more than 80,000 votes four years ago, her favorability rating has surged by 10 points since last month among registered voters, according to Times/Siena polling.
Harris will need to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – crucial battleground states that Biden clinched in 2020 – if the Democrats are to regain the White House.
There’s also good news out of Nevada. The Nevada Independent: New Nevada poll sees Harris with biggest lead over Trump yet.
A new poll of likely Nevada voters found Vice President Kamala Harris with a nearly 6 percentage point lead over former President Donald Trump — the largest lead for a Democrat in any presidential poll of Nevadans this cycle.
While Nevada polls have been relatively scarce since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, the vice president appears to have closed the gap that existed between Trump and Biden, who had not led Trump in a single public poll taken in the state since October 2023.
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll of Nevada in late July found Harris with a 2 percentage point lead in the head-to-head matchup — Democrats’ first leading poll of the cycle — and the Cook Political Report moved Nevada back into the “toss-up” category Thursday after previously categorizing it as “lean Republican.”
This latest poll, conducted by Decipher Ai’s David Wolfson, a pollster and Columbia University lecturer, sampled 991 likely voters across Nevada from Aug. 3-5 in a SMS/text-to-web poll on the presidential and House races. The statewide margin of error is 3 percentage points and between 6 percentage points and 7 percentage points for House races….
On the presidential ballot, Harris garnered 49.2 percent support while Trump received 43.6 percent. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received only 3.9 percent of the vote. Kennedy’s vote share is lower than the 8 percentage points to 10 percentage points he had been receiving, on average, when Biden was on the ballot. In an interview, Johnston said Kennedy’s polling fade reflects what typically happens to third-party candidates as the election nears.
Harris’ lead in this poll may be an outlier, but it mimics Biden’s position at this point in the cycle in 2020 when FiveThirtyEight polling averages showed he led in Nevada by about 6 percentage points. Biden ultimately won the state by about 2.4 percentage points.
Harris has received some major endorsements. From CNN:
Harris gains major endorsements: The nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), has endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket. It is the first time LULAC has endorsed a presidential. candidate in its almost 100-year history. Culinary and bartenders unions in Las Vegas also endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket Friday.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed Harris this week.
In her speech last night, Harris told the crowd that she worked at McDonalds one summer. The Independent: Kamala Harris could make history as the first president to work at McDonald’s.
More than 13 percent of Americans, or roughly 41 million people, have worked at a McDonald’s restaurant at some point in their lives. That includes Kamala Harris, who worked at a restaurant for a summer while she was in college.
Harris mentioned her brief stint on the fryer when she joined the picket line with fast food workers in Las Vegas in 2019 and during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. (Her order? “Quarter pounder with cheese and fries,” and barbecue sauce for dipping if she gets McNuggets).
Now, the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign is nodding to her summer job to highlight her upbringing and a platform to boost American workers that stands in stark contrast to her Republican rival Donald Trump, who “has no plan to help the middle class — just more tax cuts for billionaires,” according to a recent ad.
McDonald’s is all over influential Americans’ resumes (former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have also worked in McDonald’s restaurants), but service worker labor unions and fast food employees have been leading nationwide efforts to improve working conditions for lower-wage workers, including calls to boost the federal hourly minimum wage to at least $15.
They could soon have a powerful advocate in one of their former coworkers.
Harris — who has earned endorsements from several influential unions, including Service Employees International Union, which supported the nationwide Fight for $15 campaign — stood with striking McDonald’s workers and protesters as she was launching her first presidential campaign.
“If we want to talk about these golden arches being a symbol of the best of America, well, the arches are falling short,” she said from Las Vegas in June 2019. “We have got to recognize that working people deserve livable wages.”
“I did the french fries and I did the ice cream,” she told workers.
“There was not a family relying on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and keep the bills paid by the end of the month,” she added. “But the reality of McDonald’s is that a majority of the folk who are working there today are relying on that income to sustain a household and a family.”
Harris also made a point of stopping “lock him up” chants from the crowd. Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News: Harris shutting down ‘lock him up’ chants shields Trump’s federal Jan. 6 case from even more delays.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ efforts to shut down “lock him up” chants targeting Donald Trump at Harris-Walz rallies this week may be an effort to avoid engaging in the type of rhetoric seen at Trump rallies in 2016.
But there’s also a very practical reason for Harris to avoid showing any support for that type of language: Any comments or signs of approval she makes could further delay or complicate the pending federal criminal charges Trump is facing. That includes the Jan. 6 and 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
If Harris wins the election in November, Trump’s Jan. 6 case — though weakened by the Supreme Court — will continue to move toward trial. As sitting vice president in the administration that appointed the attorney general with oversight of the case, any comments Harris makes related to the trial could be fodder for the former president’s lawyers to argue in court that her comments interfered with Trump’s due process rights. That includes any suggestion that locking up Trump would be an explicit goal (as Trump repeatedly said about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign).
When a “lock him up” chant broke out at a Harris rally in Wisconsin this week, she said to supporters, “We’re gonna let the courts handle that,” and used a similar line when the same chant broke out at another rally. “Our job is to beat him in November,” she said.
Harris, a former prosecutor herself, has been cautious in her references to the array of civil and criminal cases that Trump has faced in recent years. Harris is aware of the impact she could have on Trump’s pending federal cases and has surrounded herself with Justice Department veterans — including her brother-in-law, Tony West, a former top DOJ official, and former Attorney General Eric Holder, who vetted her vice presidential candidates.
This is important, because Trump’s DC case on January 6 and election subversion is active again and back in the capable hands of Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Joyce Vance wrote yesterday at Civil Discourse: Jack Smith Asks for More Time.
Late today, lawyers in the Special Counsel’s office and lawyers for Donald Trump filed the joint status report that wasn’t due until tomorrow in the Trump election interference case in the District of Columbia. The Special Counsel advised the court that it “continues to assess the new precedent” laid down by the Supreme Court creating the doctrine of presidential immunity and went on to ask the court for an additional three weeks to file “an informed proposal regarding the schedule for pretrial proceedings moving forward.” Trump’s lawyers didn’t oppose Jack Smith’s request. Now the timeline is up to Judge Chutkan.
What does that mean, and why is the government asking for more delay in the case? Those are legitimate questions, but I would not be quick to criticize the Justice Department here.
Part of the answer comes in the pleading itself, where Smith relates that under the relevant portion of the special counsel regulations, he is required to consult with other components in DOJ before moving forward: “A Special Counsel shall comply with the rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies of the Department of Justice. He or she shall consult with appropriate offices within the Department for guidance with respect to established practices, policies and procedures of the Department, including ethics and security regulations and procedures. Should the Special Counsel conclude that the extraordinary circumstances of any particular decision would render compliance with required review and approval procedures by the designated Departmental component inappropriate, he or she may consult directly with the Attorney General.”
Here, the parties’ task is to provide the court with a schedule for moving forward, but it’s deciding what events belong on that schedule that is problematic. Smith has an indictment that consists of four counts, 45 pages of allegations, and a mountain of evidence.
Click the link to read the rest.
In Trump news, people are still talking about the former “president’s” so called “press conference.”
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference. His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny.
Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.
And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.
Consider Trump’s press conference yesterday in Florida. Trump has been lying low since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, at least in terms of public appearances. But Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press, and so Trump decided it was time to emerge from his sanctuary.
Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking.
Trump not only declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room—he’s been saying that for years—but added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states. (When asked how he would vote in Florida’s abortion referendum, he dodged the question, which suggests that maybe not everyone is happy.)
He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.
He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30 times hers at his rallies. Harris recently spoke to approximately 15,000 people in Detroit; 30 times that would be nearly half a million people, so Trump is now saying that he’s having rallies that are five times bigger than the average crowd at a Super Bowl—bigger, even, than Woodstock—and somehow fitting them all into arenas with seats to spare….
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. And then, referring to the crowd that gathered at his behest on January 6, he compared it to the 1963 March on Washington: “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours: same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”
The March on Washington drew a quarter million people, almost six times the number that showed up during the attack on the Capitol. Trump agreed that official estimates said his crowd was smaller than King’s. He pressed on anyway: “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd … we actually had more people.”
Nichols goes on to recount Trump’s story about going down in a helicopter with San Francisco’s Willie Brown (Brown says this never happened.) and also the media’s attempts to make sense of Trump’s rambling rants. He concludes:
The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.
Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.
Politico has finally located the man who actually was in that helicopter with Trump years ago: The other Black politician who says he was with Trump in that near-fatal chopper crash.
The man who almost crashed in a helicopter with Donald Trump told POLITICO Trump confused him with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — despite the former president’s repeated insistence it was Brown.
It was Nate Holden, a former city councilmember and state senator from Los Angeles, who said in an exclusive interview late Friday that he remembers the near-death experience well. He and others believe it happened sometime in 1990.
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Holden, who is 95 years old, was in touch with Trump and his team during the 1990s when the flamboyant Manhattan developer was trying to build on the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Holden represented the district at the time and supported the project.\
In the interview, Holden said he was watching Trump’s press conference on Thursday when the former president claimed that Brown was aboard during the white-knuckle helicopter ride.
In fact, Holden says he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they were going to tour the developer’s brand new Taj Mahal casino. In the lobby at Trump Tower, Holden says he was greeted by several people as “senator,” salutations that miffed the host.
“He said, ‘You know I own this building but nobody seems to know who I am,’” Holden remembered the mogul saying.
Finally, I want to highlight this piece in Propublica by Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey: Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.
Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.
In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”
“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.
In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”
Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”
Head over to ProPublica to read the whole thing.
That’s it for me. What’s on your mind today?
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Posted: January 17, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, court rulings, Donald Trump, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: DC Circuit Court, defamation case, E Jean Carroll, Federal agencies, Jack Smith, Joseph W. Fischer v. United States, Judge Aileen Cannon, Loper Bright case, Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court, Trump's Twitter feed |
Good Day Sky Dancers!!
Winter Moonlit Scene by Hendricks Hallett ( American, 1847-1921)
We finally got some snow here in the Boston area. It snowed overnight on Monday and for most of the day yesterday. It’s also quite cold, but our weather can’t compare to the deep freeze that has hit the South. Dakinikat’s house was only 54 degrees indoors this morning!
There’s another storm moving across the Midwest and it will dump more snow in the East over the weekend. I talked to my sister in Portland, OR last night, and they are also getting below normal temperatures. She said there was an ice storm happening when I called her.
In the news, there’s quite a bit about Trump’s legal messes. This post will focus on those as well as some SCOTUS news.
Yesterday was the first day of the second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial. Trump chose to show up, even though he doesn’t need to be there. He’s in court again today; I have to assume he is there trying to intimidate Carroll. Here’s the latest:
CNN: Takeaways from first day of Trump’s defamation trial.
Donald Trump attended the first day of his civil defamation trial, watching as a jury was selected to determine how much, if any, damages the former president must pay to E. Jean Carroll for his 2019 defamatory statements about Carroll’s sexual assault allegations….
Trump watched as prospective jurors were asked about their political donations to him and his political opponents, whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen and how they got their news. He left court before opening statements to travel to New Hampshire for a campaign event Tuesday evening with the primary one week away.
Trump may return to New York later this week for the rest of the trial, and his lawyers have suggested he could testify in the case, though the judge has ruled that Trump cannot try to contest a previous jury’s verdict that he sexually abused and defamed Carroll….
Trump left court Tuesday before opening statements began, where Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley told the jury that it had already been proven that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll in a high-end department store in the 1990s.
That jury’s finding stemmed from statements Trump made in 2022, while the current case is dealing with statements Trump made while he was president in 2019.
“Donald Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. He managed to get her alone in an empty department store one evening and sexually assaulted her. That’s a fact,” Crowley said. “That fact has been proven and a jury sitting in the exact seats where you’re sitting now found that it happened.”
Crowley said that Trump’s attacks on her while he was president “unleashed his followers” and caused her to receive threats. “Trump was president when he made those statements, and he used the world’s biggest microphone to attack Ms. Carroll to humiliate her and to destroy her reputation,” Crowley said.
The damages awarded to Carroll “should be significant, very significant,” her lawyer argued.
“You will also be asked to decide how much money Donald Trump should have to pay as punishment for what he’s done and to deter him and others from doing it again,” Crowley said, noting Trump continued to post about her on social media, even as the trial got underway on Tuesday.
Read more at CNN.
David Kurtz in the TPM Morning Memo: Trump Is Playing With Absolute Fire In The Carroll Case. Is Trump About To Get Rudy’d?
Carroll II, the second trial of Donald Trump for defaming E. Jean Carroll by lying about his sexual assault of her, got underway in Manhattan yesterday, and it’s shaping up to be a colossal financial threat to the former president.
Having lost in Carroll I, where a jury concluded he had raped Carroll, Trump is barred from contesting the fact of the rape in Carroll II. The only question is how big are her damages for his defamation.
Spiders from Mars, Phyllis Shafer (American, b.1958)
While jury verdicts are notoriously difficult to predict, this case has the potential to do to Trump what a DC federal jury did to Rudy Giuliani in the defamation case brought against him by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The Giuliani jury reached a verdict against him of $148 million, including punitive damages.
Like Giuliani, Trump has been defiant throughout the two Carroll trials, constantly repeating the defamatory statements with impunity, and persisting in attacking the plaintiff even while trial was underway.
Trump was in court Tuesday as jury selection got underway, but his social media operation launched what was clearly a pre-planned full-scale attack on Carroll, including repeating the defamation. (It was perhaps not a coincidence that a key Trump lawyer resigned the night before.)
Trump is risking a substantial punitive damages award by continuing to attack his accuser. It does appear to be a calculated risk, not merely shooting from the hip inadvisably. And that should only fuel the arguments Carroll can make to the jury about how severely it should punish Trump for his misconduct.
In opening statements, Carroll’s lawyers seized on the morning’s developments to urge the jury to make Trump pay until it hurt enough to get him to stop defaming Carroll:
CNBC on today’s fireworks: Judge snaps at Trump lawyer during E. Jean Carroll defamation trial: ‘I said sit down!’
A New York federal judge snapped at a lawyer for Donald Trump on Wednesday after she again asked for a delay in his sex assault defamation trial so that the former president could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral.
“I said sit down!” Judge Lewis Kaplan told Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba.
Habba replied, “I don’t like to be spoken [to] like that … I will not speak to you like that.”
Kaplan shot back, “It is denied. Sit down.”
The judge several times has rejected Habba’s request for a delay in the civil trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan so that Trump can attend the funeral of Melania Trump’s mother, Amalija Knavs, in Florida on Thursday without missing attending the trial that day.
The tense exchange, which Trump was in court to see, came shortly before the writer E. Jean Carroll was called to the witness stand to testify on the trial’s second day.
Sunset Lake Koocanusa, Patrick Markle, contemporary Canadian artist
From Twitter, NBC’s Kyle Griffin provided quotes from Carroll’s testimony:
“I’m here because I was assaulted by Donald Trump and when I wrote about it, he said it never happened. He lied. And he shattered my reputation.” [….]
E. Jean Carroll on the stand: “I’m 80 years old, so I spent 50 years building a reputation as a magazine and magazine journalist, both in articles and an advice column … People appreciated my articles because I stuck to the truth and used the facts.”
“Previously I was known simply as a journalist, and now I’m known as a liar, a fraud, and a whack job.”
“He has continued to lie. He lied last month. He lied on Sunday. He lied yesterday.” [….]
“To have the president of the United States, one of the most powerful persons on earth, call me a liar for three days and say it 26 times — I counted them. It ended the world I had been living in and I lived in a new world.” [….]
E. Jean Carroll says ever since she came forward with her claim of Trump sexually assaulting her, messages from people haven’t stopped — sometimes receiving hundreds per day. Carroll says the common themes are: accusing her of being a liar, hurting actual victims, and saying she’s ugly.
Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney at Politico on another Trump court case: Appeals court won’t revisit Twitter’s fight against Trump probe warrant. But conservative D.C. Circuit judges joined an opinion exalting executive privilege.
A federal appeals court won’t reconsider a ruling that allowed special counsel Jack Smith to access private communications from Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
But even as the court declined to revisit the issue on Tuesday, the court’s conservative judges united to scold their liberal colleagues and the lower-court judge who initially decided the case. Those prior rulings, the conservatives said, amounted to a significant, unjustified erosion of executive privilege.
“Judicial disregard of executive privilege undermines the Presidency, not just the former President being investigated in this case,” the judges wrote in an opinion authored by Trump appointee Neomi Rao.
All four Republican-appointed judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals extolled the virtues and importance of the president’s right to confidential communications and advice, even though they concluded that the underlying dispute over Smith’s access to Trump’s private Twitter messages was moot.
Ucluelet Sundown, Nicholas Bott (Dutch-Canadian, 1941-2021
Last February, as part of Smith’s investigation of Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election, prosecutors obtained a voluminous trove of Trump’s Twitter data after secret court proceedings. A district judge ordered the company, now known as X, to turn over the data without informing Trump, and a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit later upheld that decision.
That precedent, the D.C. Circuit’s Republican-appointed judges worried Tuesday, could lead federal and state prosecutors to invade a sitting president’s privileged materials — without advance notification — by simply accessing the materials via a third party like a social media or phone company.
The four conservatives ultimately agreed with seven Democratic-appointed judges on the court that the earlier decision of the three-judge panel — which upheld a $350,000 contempt fine against Twitter — should not be revisited by the full bench of the appeals court. Indeed, despite the lengthy exposition on the merits of executive privilege, no D.C. Circuit judge even called for a vote on rehearing the case by the full bench.
We can’t forget Aileen Cannon and her consistent efforts to help Trump in the stolen documents case.
This is from Dennis Aftergut and Lawrence Tribe at Slate: Judge Aileen Cannon Is Quietly Sabotaging the Trump Classified Documents Case.
On Friday, District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a new order in the Donald Trump classified documents case adding to the mountain of evidence that she is firmly in the former president’s pocket. Trump appointed Cannon in 2020 and the Senate confirmed her appointment in the days after he lost the 2020 election. It’s deeply offensive to the rule of law for judges to bend the law to benefit those who put them on the bench. Sadly, Cannon does just that.
Cannon’s new ruling rejected special counsel Jack Smith’s entirely standard request that she order Trump to state whether he intends to rely on an “advice of counsel” defense ahead of the trial, currently scheduled for May 20. Advance notice of the defense helps expedite a trial because defendants asserting it need to provide additional discovery to prosecutors—raising the defense means that defendants must disclose all communications with their attorneys, as the defense waives the attorney–client privilege.
Judge Cannon’s brief order asserted that Smith’s motion was “not amenable to proper consideration at this juncture, prior to at least partial resolution of pretrial motions” and further discovery.
Sound innocuous? It’s anything but. Instead, it’s part of a pattern we’ve already seen of Cannon laying the groundwork for delaying Trump’s trial—until it’s too late for a jury to be empaneled and the case tried to verdict before the election.
That is, of course, just what Trump has been angling for.
Back in November, Cannon issued an order slow-walking all pretrial motions in the case. As Politico reported, she “has postponed key pretrial deadlines, and she has added further slack into the schedule simply by taking her time to resolve some fairly straightforward matters.”
René Magritte, The Echo, 1944
As Brian Greer, a former Central Intelligence Agency attorney, told Politico, Cannon’s decision not to expedite pretrial motions “could be seen as a stealth attempt to delay the ultimate trial date without actually announcing that yet.”
New York University law professor Andrew Weissmann, the mild-mannered and knowledgeable former deputy to special counsel Robert S. Mueller, put it with uncharacteristic bluntness: “Judge Cannon’s bias is showing over and over again.” On Twitter he declared her to be “in the bag for Trump.”
By continuing to maintain the trial date while rendering the date virtually impossible to keep, Cannon evidently hopes to maintain plausible deniability from charges like Greer’s or Weissmann’s. At the same time, her pretense that the trial will commence on schedule prevents any attempt by Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis to seek to advance into May the scheduling of her prosecution of Trump for attempting to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 election.
And this is from Igor Derysh at Salon: “Completely out of bounds” Trump filing would delay docs case. Expert says expect a “harsh” response.
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team in a series of new filings on Tuesday signaled that they plan to argue that the intelligence community and the investigation into classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago was “politically motivated and biased.”
The lawyers in a filing to Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon accused special counsel Jack Smith of withholding records from Trump and flouting “basic discovery obligations,” according to The Messenger.
Trump attorneys Chris Kise and Todd Blanche alleged that Smith’s team is “seeking to avert its eyes from exculpatory, discoverable evidence in the hands of the senior officials at the White House, DOJ, and FBI who provided guidance and assistance as this lawless mission proceeded, and the agencies that supported the flawed investigation from its inception such as NARA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (‘ODNI’), and other politically-charged components of the Intelligence Community.”
The filing requested reams of additional materials from Smith’s team, arguing that the “prosecution team” is larger than the FBI and DOJ.
“The prosecution team includes the Intelligence Community agencies and components that participated in the investigation, such as during classification reviews and damage assessments,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “This includes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the agencies identified in…the Indictment as ‘equity’ holders of some of the documents at issue: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Energy, and the Statement [sic] Department.”
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC that the filing furthers the “fantastical narrative that Trump is the victim” of a politicized federal branch.
Vance said that while it may be “warranted” for Smith’s team to go back and talk to all of the FBI and DOJ personnel involved in the case, the other parts are “just completely out of bounds.”
“They want the special counsel to go and work with the entire intelligence community to turn over everything in the intelligence community’s possession that touches on anything to do with this,” said Vance. “So I think the safe thing to say is that we should wait for Jack Smith’s response, which will undoubtedly be pretty harsh, given what the defense is requesting here.”
Vance added that the filing also gives Judge Cannon, who has repeatedly delayed proceedings in the case, the “opportunity to delay things even further.”
At what point will it be time for DOJ to appeal to the 11th Circuit?
What’s happening in the Supreme Court? I’ll be brief:
The Supreme Court is about the hear a very scary case. Joyce Vance from Civil Discourse last night: Tomorrow at the Supreme Court.
Tomorrow, Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a pair of cases we’ve discussed in the past that could let conservatives achieve a long-term goal: Disassembling what they call the nanny state and what I think of as executive branch agencies that conduct the nation’s business day in and day out. The goal is to undo 40 years of administrative jurisprudence (so much for precedent!) and end the federal government’s ability to establish and administer rules that balance differing interests and make life better for all of us. Administrative agencies use their expertise to balance different interests and implement procedures on matters like health and safety concerns or consumer financial protection. Because that involves costs and limitations on businesses that can prevent them from being as profitable as they would like to be, some folks oppose leaving these decisions in the hands of career public servants. You will be able to listen to the oral argument here.
Sunset on Mugnone river, 1884, Ulvi Liège (Italian, 1859 – 1938)
Loper Bright is an effort to end or at least severely limit the reach of Chevron deference, a longstanding doctrine that determines when the courts are supposed to defer to an executive branch agency’s interpretation of a law. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that courts should defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation of laws when the statutory text is silent or ambiguous. That permits experts and career professionals to decide how to implement vague laws. This case is about whether the courts should substitute their judgment for those of experts on issues involving science, medicine, environmental protection, and so forth.
Conservatives have long sought to prevent federal agencies, like the EPA but also others, from regulating businesses. This case involves a sympathetic-looking small business, overwhelmed by an agency regulatory decision, to make the case that courts should be making the call, not “bureaucrats”. The cornerstone of these cases is the implication that the nanny state is making life impossible for the little guy.
The conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom described Loper Bright like this: “A National Marine Fisheries Service regulation requires that herring fishing boats allow an additional person on board their small boats to serve as a monitor, tracking compliance with federal regulations. The fishermen must also pay the monitor’s salary of around $700 per day. Overall, the regulation reduces fishing profits by about 20%. Loper Bright Enterprises, a fishing company in New England, and other fisheries sued to challenge this federal government rule, arguing that NMFS lacked statutory authority to force them to pay for these monitors.” Of course, this narrative ignores the importance of monitoring. And the point of the litigation isn’t really to provide relief for small businesses. It’s all about shifting decision-making about the regulation of big business out of the hands of agencies and into the courts, where conservatives believe they get a better reception. This has been the work of decades—ever since the Chevron case was decided.
Read more at Civil Discourse.
Neil Gorsuch is in the spotlight for this case. Three pieces to check out:
CNN: Neil Gorsuch has a grudge against federal agencies. He holds their fate in his hands.
The Guardian: Gorsuch urged to recuse himself from supreme court case over ties to oil baron.
The New Republic: Billionaire Poised to See Return on Investment in Neil Gorsuch.
Another Scotus case could affect Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump.
Raw Story: Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 Trump case could be torn apart by imminent SCOTUS decision: report.
As the Supreme Court gears up to decide if Donald Trump’s claims of immunity from prosecution are legitimate, another case in front of the court threatens to upend special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of him, Politico reported.
Incredible Winter Evening, by Paul Evans, 2023
The case, Joseph W. Fischer v. United States, has raised the issue of whether the Department of Justice has been improperly using a law originally aimed at curbing financial crimes to prosecute Jan. 6 defendant Joseph Fischer. As Politico points out, if the Court rules in Fischer’s favor, it would undermine Smith’s use of the law against Trump, as well as other Jan. 6 defendants.
Two of the four counts in Smith’s indictment are for obstruction of an official proceeding and for conspiracy to do so. According to Politico, those crimes “are part of a relatively recent criminal statute governing financial disclosures known as the Sarbanes-Oxley (or “SOX”) Act, which was enacted following the Enron corporate accounting scandal, and which makes it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding of the U.S. government.”
So far, the Justice Department has used the law to charge over 300 Jan. 6 defendants, and more than 150 have been convicted.
Fischer, as well as other defendants, argues that the “obstruction of an official proceeding” part of the law was only meant to apply narrowly to financial crimes — not the broad definition as relied on by the government.
“The impact of Fischer on the Jan. 6 trial against Trump might not be known until after the Supreme Court wraps up its term in June, at which point it could knock out half of Smith’s counts against Trump. And it could also disrupt the convictions of many Jan. 6 defendants already serving time for their role in the insurrection,” Politico’s report stated.
Read the full report over at Politico.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
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