Posted: June 20, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: Brett Baier, Fox News, Hunter Biden, Judge Aileen Cannon, stolen documents case |
Good Day Sky Dancers!!
Now that the long weekend is over, there is quite a bit of news breaking. These are the three biggest stories of the day so far: a tentative date has been set for Trump’s trial in the stolen documents case; yesterday, Trump gave an interview to Brett Baier of Fox News in which he confessed to multiple crimes; and today, Hunter Biden reached an agreement with the Feds.
Kyle Cheney at Politico: Judge sets tentative trial date for Trump documents case.
Donald Trump’s criminal trial for hoarding military secrets at Mar-a-Lago has a starting date — Aug. 14 — but don’t expect it to hold.
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon bookmarked the last two weeks in August for the historic trial, part of an omnibus order setting some early ground rules and deadlines for the case. That would represent a startlingly rapid pace for a case that is expected to be complicated and require lengthy pretrial wrangling over extraordinarily sensitive classified secrets.
But a review of Cannon’s criminal cases since she took the bench in late 2020 suggests this is standard practice for the Florida-based judge. She typically sets trial dates six to eight weeks from the start of a case, only to allow weeks- or months-long delays as issues arise and the parties demand more time to prepare. While her order on Tuesday starts the clock on a slew of important pretrial matters in the Trump case, it’s not likely to resemble anything close to the timeframe that will ultimately govern the case.
Also from Kyle Cheney at Politico: Trump judge’s thin criminal trial resume comes with a twist.
Aileen Cannon, the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s latest criminal case, has run just four, relatively routine criminal trials in her short tenure on the bench — a stark contrast to the historic and complex proceedings she’s about to undertake related to the former president.
A review of the Southern District of Florida dockets show Cannon’s criminal work has consisted almost entirely of a few categories of cases: distribution of a controlled substance, illegal reentry of people who had previously been deported, felons in possession of firearms and child pornography or trafficking. Nearly all have resulted in plea agreements, and the four that did not were handled in brief trials that lasted no more than three days apiece in court.
Those cases have featured few significant opinions or rulings of note on complex issues of law. And Cannon, 42, has almost always sided with prosecutors on routine challenges to evidence, motions to suppress evidence by defendants and efforts to dismiss various cases.
Cannon’s thin resume, combined with her surprisingly deferential rulings to Trump — who appointed her in November 2020 — in a civil lawsuit challenging the FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago estate last year, have raised questions about her readiness for the complexities of the first-ever federal prosecution of a former president. Prosecutors say he hoarded national military secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office and concealed them from government officials seeking to recover them.
There’s one exception, however, to Cannon’s judicial history that has largely escaped scrutiny. For nearly one-and-a-half years, she’s shepherded a complex, 10-defendant health care fraud case to the verge of trial, and in the course has litigated tangled and fraught issues of attorney-client privilege and motions to suppress — some of which could be precursors to battles in the upcoming Trump case.
Read more details at Politico.
If you are a Twitter denizen, you may have seen some clips from Trump’s weird interview with Fox News’s Brett Baier. I can just imagine how his defense attorneys reacted. But they already know he can’t be controlled–even when it’s for his own good. Here are some media and expert reactions.
https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1670958219932442624?s=20
The New York Times: Trump Says ‘Secret’ Document He Described on Tape Referred to News Clippings.
Former President Donald J. Trump claimed to a Fox News anchor in an interview on Monday that he did not have a classified document with him in a meeting with a book publisher even though he referred during that meeting to “secret” information in his possession.
The July 2021 meeting — at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J. — was recorded by at least two people in attendance, and a transcript describes the former president pointing to a pile of papers and then saying of Gen. Mark A. Milley, whom he had been criticizing: “Look. This was him. They presented me this — this is off the record, but — they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.”
On the recording, according to two people familiar with its contents, Mr. Trump can be heard flipping through papers as he talks to a publisher and writer working on a book by his final White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Mr. Trump and the people in the meeting do not explicitly say what document the former president is holding.
According to the transcript, Mr. Trump describes the document, which he claims shows General Milley’s desire to attack Iran, as “secret” and “like, highly confidential.” He also declares that “as president, I could have declassified it,” adding, “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
But in the interview on Monday, with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Mr. Trump denied that he had been referring to an actual document and claimed to have simply been referring to news clippings and magazine pieces.
“There was no document,” Mr. Trump insisted. “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”
Rolling Stone: Trump All But Confesses to Mishandling Classified Docs on Fox News.
A WEEK AFTER his second post-presidential arrest, this one for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House, Donald Trump turned to Fox News host Bret Baier on Monday to make the case for why he should lead the country again. But he ended up essentially confessing to the crime of which he’s accused: stealing and sharing top-secret government information.
Before that, however, Baier pressed Trump to explain why he kept the boxes of classified materials at Mar-a-Lago and refused to comply with government requests to return them, as described in his new felony indictment. In between dismissing the case as “the document hoax” or accusing other presidents of illegally hoarding their own sensitive documents, Trump offered the bizarre explanation that he couldn’t give up the boxes to authorities because they also contained… his clothes.
“Like every other president I take things out,” Trump said. “In my case, I took it out pretty much in a hurry. People packed it up and left. I had clothing in there, I had all sorts of personal items in there. Much, much stuff.” After a brief digression to call his former attorney general Bill Barr a “coward,” Trump reiterated, “I have got a lot of things in there. I will go through those boxes. I have to go through those boxes. I take out personal things.” Finally, he clarified what those items were: “These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things: golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes, there were many things,” he said.
That really isn’t a good excuse, since government documents are not supposed to be mixed with other papers, much less clothing. More from the RS piece:
Later on in the interview, Trump and Baier got into a debate on the results of the 2020 election, with the Fox anchor trying in vain to remind the former president that he lost while Trump rambled on about fake ballots. The rest of the conversation involved Trump bashing Biden’s international diplomacy, from Ukraine to the Middle East to China, and musing about how much better things were with him in office.
Afterward, Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume said that Trump’s answers regarding matters of the law were “on the verge on incoherent,” and specifically mentioned the bizarre detail of not returning the boxes of classified documents because they hadn’t been “separated from his golf shirts or whatever he was saying.” Overall, Hume said, it sounded as if Trump was making the argument that the papers were his to do with as he liked, “which I don’t think is going to hold up in court.”
Trump also claimed he was “too busy” to go through the documents and take out his personal stuff. He claimed that justifies his having one of his lawyers certify to the Feds that there were no more documents at Mar-a-Lago, ordering Walt Nauta to move the documents around to hide them from his lawyers, and refusing to obey a subpoena.
Here is one of the best parts of the Baier interview. It doesn’t have much of Trump in it, so it’s safe to watch.
https://twitter.com/KevinTober94/status/1670923018351067137?s=20
Finally, Hunter Biden has reached a deal with the Trump-appointed prosecutor investigating his case.
The Washington Post: Hunter Biden reaches deal to plead guilty in tax, gun case.
President Biden’s son Hunter has reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would likely keep him out of jail, according to court papers filed Tuesday.
Any proposed plea deal would have to be approved by a federal judge. Both the prosecutors and the defense counsel have requested a court hearing at which Hunter Biden, 53, can enter his plea.
The agreement caps an investigation that was opened in 2018 during the Trump administration, and has generated intense interest and criticism since 2020 from Republican politicians who accused the Biden administration of reluctance to pursue the case.The terms of the proposed deal — negotiated with Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a holdover from President Donald Trump’s administration — are likely to face similar scrutiny.
The court papers indicate the younger Biden has tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018. The combined tax liability is roughly $1.2 million over those years, according to people familiar with the plea deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe details of the agreement that are not yet public. Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of probation for those counts, these people said. Biden’s representatives have said he previously paid back the IRS what he owed.
It’s a busy news day. I’ll add a few more stories in the comment thread. Have a tremendous Tuesday everyone!
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Posted: June 17, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Cats, caturday, Crime, Criminal Justice System | Tags: Costa Mesa CA Planned Parenthood attack, history of slavery, Jim Jordan, Merrick Garland, Minneapolis police, Pittsburgh Tree of Life shooting, Robert Bowers, Rudy Giuliani, slave auctions, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump investigations |
Cat in frying pan
Happy Caturday!!
After all the excitement the last two weeks, today feels like a somewhat slow news day. It’s a long weekend, so that might have something to do with it. Anyway, I have found several interesting stories to share with you.
First up, this fascinating long read at ProPublica by Jennifer Berry Hawes: How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S.
Sitting at her bedroom desk, nursing a cup of coffee on a quiet Tuesday morning, Lauren Davila scoured digitized old newspapers for slave auction ads. A graduate history student at the College of Charleston, she logged them on a spreadsheet for an internship assignment. It was often tedious work.
She clicked on Feb. 24, 1835, another in a litany of days on which slave trading fueled her home city of Charleston, South Carolina. But on this day, buried in a sea of classified ads for sales of everything from fruit knives and candlesticks to enslaved human beings, Davila made a shocking discovery.
On page 3, fifth column over, 10th advertisement down, she read:
“This day, the 24th instant, and the day following, at the North Side of the Custom-House, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, a very valuable GANG OF NEGROES, accustomed to the culture of rice; consisting of SIX HUNDRED.”
She stared at the number: 600.
A sale of 600 people would mark a grim new record — by far.
Until Davila’s discovery, the largest known slave auction in the U.S. was one that was held over two days in 1859 just outside Savannah, Georgia, roughly 100 miles down the Atlantic coast from Davila’s home. At a racetrack just outside the city, an indebted plantation heir sold hundreds of enslaved people. The horrors of that auction have been chronicled in books and articles, including The New York Times’ 1619 Project and “The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History.” Davila grabbed her copy of the latter to double-check the number of people auctioned then.
It was 436, far fewer than the 600 in the ad glowing on her computer screen.
She fired off an email to a mentor, Bernard Powers, the city’s premier Black history expert. Now professor emeritus of history at the College of Charleston, he is founding director of its Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston and board member of the International African American Museum, which will open in Charleston on June 27.
If anyone would know about this sale, she figured, it was Powers.
Yet he too was shocked. He had never heard of it. He knew of no newspaper accounts, no letters written about it between the city’s white denizens.
“The silence of the archives is deafening on this,” he said. “What does that silence tell you? It reinforces how routine this was.”
Davila eventually approached ProPublica with her find. A reporter did further research, and eventually learned the source of the ad.
A ProPublica reporter found the original ad for the sale, which ran more than two weeks before the one Davila spotted. Published on Feb. 6, 1835, it revealed that the sale of 600 people was part of the estate auction for John Ball Jr., scion of a slave-owning planter regime. Ball had died the previous year, and now five of his plantations were listed for sale — along with the people enslaved on them.
The Ball family might not be a household name outside of South Carolina, but it is widely known within the state thanks to a descendant named Edward Ball who wrote a bestselling book in 1998 that bared the family’s skeletons — and, with them, those of other Southern slave owners.
“Slaves in the Family” drew considerable acclaim outside of Charleston, including a National Book Award. Black readers, North and South, praised it. But as Ball explained, “It was in white society that the book was controversial.” Among some white Southerners, the horrors of slavery had long gone minimized by a Lost Cause narrative of northern aggression and benevolent slave owners.
Based on his family’s records, Edward Ball described his ancestors as wealthy “rice landlords” who operated a “slave dynasty.” He estimated they enslaved about 4,000 people on their properties over 167 years, placing them among the “oldest and longest” plantation operators in the American South.
Read the rest at ProPublica, if you’re interested in this history.
Yesterday, a jury found Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh Tree of Life shooter guilty on all charges. CNN: Gunman in Pittsburgh synagogue shooting found guilty of all 63 federal charges.
Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, was convicted by a federal jury Friday on all 63 charges against him.
Bowers, 50, now faces the possibility of the death sentence at the hands of the same jury for the deadliest attack ever on Jewish people in the US.
Asked to individually confirm their verdicts, each juror answered “yes” without hesitation. Some were forceful in their replies. They deliberated for about five hours over two days.
Bowers was convicted of 11 capital counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death and 11 capital counts of use of a firearm to commit murder during and in relation to a crime of violence, among other charges.
Bowers was also convicted of 11 counts of hate crimes resulting in death.
The convictions mean the trial will move to a separate penalty phase, with the jury weighing further evidence to decide whether to sentence him to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The penalty phase is scheduled to begin June 26.
Steve Almasy at CNN: Jury in Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial will hear more distressing testimony when penalty phase begins.
For much of the past two-plus weeks, many of the federal government’s 60 witnesses described the horror when a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and killed 11 worshippers – the deadliest attack ever on Jewish people in the United States.
A federal jury convicted the gunman Friday on all 63 charges against him, including 22 capital charges. On June 26, the same jury will again hear horrible details of the massacre and what those losses mean to families, as it decides the fate of Robert Bowers….
Testimony from prosecution witnesses included a 911 operator who listened to a victim’s last words before she was fatally shot, a survivor who said one of the people who was killed fell inches from her, a police officer who had to step over bodies while rescuing a wounded SWAT member, and a wounded woman who refused to leave her mother as her mom died.
Other witnesses included medical, firearms and computer experts….
The president of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh said Friday that survivors have taken the witness stand to provide important testimony despite the immense difficulty of that task. They will continue to do so in the next phase of the trial, Brian Schreiber said.
“We look forward to hearing the direct victim-impact testimony. They will be able to tell, in their own words, what that loss feels like,” said Schreiber, who lost friends in the attack.
Schreiber did not take an official stance on a potential death sentence for the gunman.
“It’s going to be gut-wrenching,” said Jeff Finkelstein, president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. “It’s going to reopen wounds that keep getting reopened for us here in our Pittsburgh community – not just the Jewish community, but this greater Pittsburgh region. And I just encourage everyone to seek the support that they might need.”
The Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh has been providing support for those affected by the shooting through its 10.27 Healing Partnership program, which Schreiber said will continue to offer resources. The name of the program is a nod to the date, October 27, 2018, when the attack took place.
Also yesterday, Merrick Garland released the results of a federal investigation of the Minneapolis Police that was begun after the murder of George Floyd. The New York Times: Minneapolis Police: Scathing Report Exposes Racist and Unconstitutional Policing.
The Justice Department on Friday released a damning account of systemic abuses and discrimination by the police in Minneapolis, the result of a multiyear investigation that began after the murder of George Floyd in police custody ignited protests across the country.
In an 89-page report, investigators laid out repeated instances of the police engaging in unlawful discrimination against Black and Native American people, as well routinely failing to take arrestees’ health complaints seriously and violating the First Amendment rights of demonstrators and journalists at protests.
“The patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who ordered the investigation in April 2021.
The Justice Department found there was “reasonable cause to believe” that police officers engaged in a “pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law.”
Among many other examples of discrimination by officers, investigators outlined an episode in which an officer said his goal was to wipe the Black Lives Matter movement “off the face of the earth.” Mr. Garland added that officers often used some version of the line, “You can breathe, you’re talking right now,” when placing citizens in chokeholds.
The city has agreed to negotiate a court-enforced agreement that, if enacted, would require a sweeping overhaul of the city’s police force, which has faced an exodus of officers and a lack of community support since the death of Mr. Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, in May 2020.
Read details of the agreement and reactions to the report in Minneapolis at the NYT link.
A bit of Trump investigation news broke yesterday. CNN: Special counsel seeks court order to ensure Trump and his defense don’t share materials turned over in discovery.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team is asking the judge in the classified documents case against Donald Trump to bar the former president and his defense team from publicly disclosing some of the materials shared in the criminal case as part of the discovery process.
In a new filing on Friday, Smith’s team said that among the unclassified materials that prosecutors are set to turn over to the defense is “information pertaining to ongoing investigations, the disclosure of which could compromise those investigations and identify uncharged individuals.”
The filing, which includes a proposed protective order, is an expected, procedural step now that Trump has entered his not guilty plea and the proceedings are moving forward. Lawyers for Trump and his co-defendant Walt Nauta do not oppose the requested protective order, according to the filing.
US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, citing local court rules. Reinhart approved the search warrant the FBI executed at Mar-a-Lago last year.
Smith’s team said in the filing that the “government is ready to provide unclassified discovery to the defense.”
“The discovery materials include sensitive and confidential information,” including personal and financial data, information that reveals “sensitive” investigative techniques and information about potential witnesses, according to the filing. Some of that information could be in grand jury transcripts or recordings of witness interviews.
“The materials also include information pertaining to ongoing investigations, the disclosure of which could compromise those investigations and identify uncharged individuals,” the filing said.
[Emphasis added] That sounds interesting. From Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Evidence in Trump Documents Case Hints at ‘Ongoing Investigations,’ Filing Says.
The federal prosecutors overseeing the classified documents case against former President Donald J. Trump said in court papers on Friday that the evidence they are poised to give the defense as part of the normal process of discovery contained information about “ongoing investigations” that could “identify uncharged individuals.”
The court papers — a standard request to place a protective order on the discovery material — contained no explanation about what those other inquiries might be or whether they were related to the indictment detailing charges against Mr. Trump of illegally retaining dozens of national defense documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to get them back. The papers also did not identify who the uncharged people were.
Still, the reference to continuing investigations was the first overt suggestion — however vague — that other criminal cases could emerge from the work that the special counsel Jack Smith has done in bringing the Espionage Act and obstruction indictment against Mr. Trump in Miami last week.
Mr. Smith is also overseeing the parallel investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss in 2020 and the ensuing assault on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
Some witnesses close to Mr. Trump have been questioned by Mr. Smith’s team in connection with the both the documents and election interference inquiries.
Very interesting.
One more crime story, h/t Dakninikat. From Marisa Sarnoff at Law and Crime: ‘BOOM’: Marine arrested in 2022 firebomb attack on Planned Parenthood clinic.
An active duty U.S. Marine is in federal custody after being arrested for allegedly firebombing a [Costa Mesa, CA] Planned Parenthood clinic in 2022.
Chance Brannon, 23, a Marine corporal, and Tibet Ergul, 21, were arrested Wednesday in the April 2022 attack, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced in a press release. They are each charged with using an explosive or fire to cause property damage.
According to the criminal complaint, Brannon and Ergul attacked the clinic in the early morning hours of March 13, 2022. Prosecutors say they threw a Molotov cocktail — an incendiary device made up of a glass bottle containing a flammable substance, such as liquid gasoline, that is lit and then thrown, shattering on impact and igniting the liquid — at the clinic entrance. The fire damaged the building and, according to the Justice Department, caused the healthcare clinic to close the next day and cancel some 30 appointments.
Prosecutors say that a witness called in a tip to the FBI that Ergul had sent a text message describing the attack.
“BOOM [fire emoji],” the message from Ergul to the witness said in describing the impact of the Molotov cocktail on the building of the “Costa Mesa health center/Planned Parenthood clinic,” according to the complaint. Ergul allegedly told the witness that he wished he “could’ve recorded the combustion.”
The witness also identified Brannon to the FBI, in part through a picture Ergul sent the witness on March 14, 2022, appearing to depict the Molotov cocktail. The witness said the picture looked like it was taken inside Brannon’s car.
Both defendants are scheduled to be arraigned on July 24.
I’ll end with a little comic relief about the endless efforts of Republicans to prove that President Biden is corrupt.
The New Republic: Giuliani Says Key Biden Informant Is Dead.
There’s a new wrinkle in the Republicans’ totally legitimate investigation into Joe Biden: One of their informants is apparently dead, according to Rudy Giuliani.
Republicans have spent all week accusing the president of accepting a massive bribe from Ukraine (conveniently at the same time that Donald Trump was arrested for allegedly stealing and hiding classified documents), and have referred a number of times to a set of recordings that they claim prove his guilt. The GOP learned about these supposed recordings as part of the House Oversight Committee’s months-long investigation into the Biden family, which has yet to produce any actual evidence linking the president to wrongdoing.
House members were allowed last week to see a redacted version of an FD 10-23, a form the FBI uses to note unverified information from confidential sources. Several Republican lawmakers say that not only does the FBI form they saw last week mention this bribe but that a Burisma executive has audio recordings of Biden and Hunter Biden accepting the money. Both Anna Paulina Luna and Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the executive is Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.
But according to Rudy Giuliani, the executive is actually the wife of Burisma co-founder Mykola Lisin. Giuliani told Newsmax over the weekend that Lisin died under suspicious circumstances. He seemed to imply the businessman left the recordings to his wife, but she died before the FBI could interview her.
The FBI “followed up on none of the evidence I gave them,” Giuliani said. “I gave them one witness that any investigator would jump through hoops to go to. Gave them a witness who is a woman, who is the chief accountant at this crooked company Burisma.”
“She was the wife of the former owner, who died under suspicious circumstances. And she was willing to give up all of the offshore bank accounts, including the Bidens’!”
Oh my goodness me! How very incriminating. Except there is simply no evidence that any tapes involving Biden actually exist.
From Tommy Christopher at Mediaite: Jim Jordan Notes ‘We Don’t Know For Sure If These Tapes Exist’ When Asked About Impeaching Biden Over Probe.
Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan pointed out “we don’t know” if the tapes Republicans claim implicate President Joe Biden “exist” when he was asked about impeaching the president.
Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. James Comer (R-KY) are having a rough time with the media in their promotion of an FBI form they say details allegations against Biden and his son Hunter Biden — the latest wrinkle being the claim that an informant’s source claims to have over a dozen audiotapes implicating Biden.
Several Republicans have pumped the brakes by pointing out the tapes may not even exist, including Grassley, Comer, and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson.
On a recent edition of The Chris Salcedo Show, Jordan pointedly brought up the uncertainty in the context of impeaching Biden over the tapes, telling host Chris Salcedo that “we don’t know for sure if these tapes exist.” [….]
When reached for comment, White House counsel spokesman Ian Sams told Mediaite, “Everything in their so-called investigation seems to be mysteriously missing: informants, audio tapes, and most importantly of all – any credible evidence. Maybe it’s time for House Republicans to join the President to focus on real issues that matter to the American people like fighting inflation and creating jobs instead of these sad sideshow stunts.”
That’s it for me today. I hope you are all having a nice long weekend.
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Posted: June 15, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Donald Trump | Tags: Chris Kise, creepy dolls, Daniel Penny, Harvard Medical School morgue, Jordan Neely, Katrina MacLean, stolen body parts, Tom Fitton, Walt Nauta |
Good Afternoon!!
By now you may have heard about the weird crimes that go on here in Massachusetts. A man who used to manage the morgue at Harvard Medical School has been charged by the Feds with selling body parts.
This is from The New York Times: Harvard Medical School Morgue Manager Sold Body Parts, U.S. Says.
The manager of a morgue at Harvard Medical School has been charged with selling body parts from donated cadavers and allowing buyers to come to the morgue to choose which parts they wanted, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.
Prosecutors said that the manager, Cedric Lodge, 55, and his wife, Denise Lodge, 63, both of Goffstown, N.H., and three others had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania on charges of conspiracy and interstate transport of stolen goods.
Four grave robbers awaken a ghost, by Joseph Werner
A sixth person, Jeremy Pauley, 41, of Bloomsburg, Pa., was charged separately, prosecutors said. A seventh, Candace Chapman Scott, of Little Rock, Ark., was previously indicted in Arkansas, prosecutors said.
The defendants were all part of a nationwide network that bought and sold human remains stolen from Harvard Medical School and a mortuary in Little Rock where Ms. Scott worked, prosecutors said.
According to federal prosecutors, from 2018 to 2022, Mr. Lodge stole parts from cadavers that had been donated to the medical school and dissected — including heads, brains, skin and bones — before their scheduled cremations.
The Lodges then shipped remains to others, including Katrina Maclean, 44, of Salem, Mass., who owns a store called Kat’s Creepy Creations in Peabody, Mass., and Joshua Taylor, 46, of West Lawn, Pa., prosecutors said.
At times, Mr. Lodge allowed Ms. Maclean, Mr. Taylor and others into the morgue to choose which parts they wanted, prosecutors said. In October 2020, prosecutors said, Ms. Maclean agreed to buy two dissected faces from Mr. Lodge for $600.
More disgusting details about Maclean’s business, if you can handle them:
Prosecutors said that Ms. Maclean stored and sold remains at Kat’s Creepy Creations, which advertises “creepy dolls, oddities” and “bone art” on Instagram.
In June or July of 2021, she shipped human skin to Mr. Pauley and “engaged his services to tan the skin to create leather,” an indictment states.
From September 2018 to July 2021, Mr. Taylor transferred more than $37,000 in electronic payments to Ms. Lodge for body parts that had been stolen by Mr. Lodge, prosecutors said.
In one transaction, Mr. Taylor sent Ms. Lodge $1,000 with a memo that read “head number 7,” prosecutors said. As part of another payment, he sent Ms. Lodge $200 with a memo that read, “braiiiiiins,” prosecutors said.
I’m a horror movie fan, but I don’t want things like this to happen in real life.
From local news source MassLive: Salem artist accused of selling body parts posted about ‘real human skull’ on Instagram.
An artist from Salem who has been accused of buying and selling stolen body parts had posted on Instagram about having a “real human skull” and offering to sell human body parts to the public, in a picture with one of her creations from February 2020.
Katrina MacLean, the bone art, doll-creating and oddity-collecting artist behind Kat’s Creepy Creations, was named in an indictment against Cedric Lodge, who officials said supplied MacLean and others with the body parts, according to court documents….
MacLean was vocal about her artwork on social media and especially on Instagram, where she routinely sold the baby dolls she reworked, according to a comment she responded to on her account.
The Salem artist also sold her art at “oddities markets and expos,” she had said, and had “two cases at Witch City Consignment and Thrift” in the city. Additionally, she is the curator of Freaks Antiques Uniques, a pop-up dark art and oddities market located in Salem, according to her account.
One of MacLean’s creepy dolls
MacLean often posted before-and-after images depicting dolls repainted and dressed in various ways, including with dark coloring around their eyes, blood streaked on their bodies, those made to look dead, clown-style makeup and chilling expressions.
In a post on Feb. 9, 2020, during the time MacLean was believed by officials to be receiving and selling human body parts from Lodge, the Salem woman posted an image of a reworked, “killer clown”-style doll with a skull between its fingers.
The caption on her post read, “Throwback to the set of Hubie Halloween. This doll has been sold and yes that is a real human skull. If you’re in the market for human bones hit me up!”
Even after the FBI searched MacLean’s home in March, according to multiple reports, MacLean continued to post on her Instagram about her reworked dolls and bone art with no apparent signs of issues happening in her personal life. Her most recent post was May 28.
What a weirdo! At one point MacLean revealed more about herself to her readers:
From a March 23, 2020 post, MacLean said, “Meet the maker! I’m Kat, I like to turn regular porcelain dolls into nightmare fuel. I started painting horror dolls back in September of 2018 in an attempt to decorate the store windows @witchcitythrift.
“Everyone wanted to buy the dolls so I began selling them….. I have sold 239 dolls since then! I also make dark art, bone art, human bone jewelry and shadowboxes,” the post went on.
“I joke with my friends and say that my super power is ‘the ability to creepify’ Art and creating is my passion and my therapy. I am also the curator of Freaks Antiques and Uniques dark art and oddity market in Salem MA. Please give my page a follow @freaksantiquesuniques to check out our talented crafters, vendors, artists and creators,” MacLean said.
“Thanks for supporting my twisted creations and I look forward to meeting more of you at upcoming events! Thanks for reading, please share my page with your friends!” the post stated.
A couple of famous attorneys comments on the case:
In other news, Daniel Penny, the man who killed Jordan Neely in a New York subway car has been charged with manslaughter.
CNN: Grand jury votes to indict Marine veteran who held homeless man in fatal chokehold on NYC subway.
Penny, 24, was indicted on second-degree manslaughter charges. The Manhattan District Attorney is expected to formally announce the grand jury’s indictment, which is under seal, on Thursday.
Jordan Neely in 2009. (Andrew Savulich/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Penny surrendered to police last month to face a second-degree manslaughter charge. He has since been out on a $100,000 bond.
Penny held Neely, an unhoused Black man and street artist, in a chokehold on the subway train May 1 after Neely began shouting at passengers that he was hungry and thirsty and didn’t care whether he died. Penny forced 30-year-old Neely to the train floor and restrained him in a chokehold until he stopped breathing. A medical examiner ruled Neely’s death a homicide.
In May, Penny told the New York Post he was “deeply saddened by the loss of life,” amid what has become a contentious homicide case that has highlighted the city’s handling of unhoused people.
Neely was on a New York City Department of Homeless Services list of the city’s homeless with acute needs – sometimes referred to internally as the “Top 50” list – because people on the list tend to disappear, a source told CNN.
Some Trump investigation news:
The Washington Post: Trump rejected lawyers’ efforts to avoid classified documents indictment.
One of Donald Trump’s new attorneys proposed an idea in the fall of 2022: The former president’s team could try to arrange a settlement with the Justice Department.
The attorney, Christopher Kise, wanted to quietly approach Justice to see if he could negotiate a settlement that would preclude charges, hoping Attorney General Merrick Garland and the department would want an exit ramp to avoid prosecuting a former president. Kise would hopefully “take the temperature down,” he told others, by promising a professional approach and the return of all documents.
But Trump was not interested after listening to other lawyers who urged a more pugilistic approach, so Kise never approached prosecutors, three people briefed on the matter said. A special counsel was appointed months later.
Kise, a former solicitor general of Florida who was paid $3 million upfront to join Trump’s team last year, declined to comment.
That quiet entreaty last fall was one of many occasions when lawyers and advisers sought to get Trump to take a more cooperative stance in a bid to avoid what happened Friday. The Justice Department unsealed an indictment including more than three dozen criminal counts against Trump for allegedly keeping and hiding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.
Attorney Chris Kise
Instead of listening to his attorneys, Trump was seeking advice from Tom Fitton, head of the right wing organization Judicial Watch. Fitton is not a lawyer.
“It was a totally unforced error,” said one person close to Trump who has been part of dozens of discussions about the documents. “We didn’t have to be here.”
Trump time and again rejected the advice from lawyers and advisers who urged him to cooperate and instead took the advice of Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch, and a range of others who told him he could legally keep the documents and should fight the Justice Department, advisers said. Trump would often cite Fitton to others, and Fitton told some of Trump’s lawyers that Trump could keep the documents, even as they disagreed, the advisers said….
Fitton, who appeared before the grand jury and was questioned about his role in both the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, acknowledged he gave the advice to Trump but declined to discuss the details of their conversations. He added that he read the indictment and did not believe it laid out illegal or obstructive conduct. Multiple witnesses said they were asked about Fitton in front of a grand jury and the role he played in Trump’s decisions.
Also from The Washington Post: Will Walt Nauta flip? Trump keeps valet close as question hovers over the case.
The 40-year-old body man from Guam now faces 20 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charge against him. Sporting a wide scarlet tie a few shades deeper than his boss’s candy red one, Nauta, once a Navy sailor, made his first appearance in a Miami federal courthouse Tuesday to face charges that he obstructed justice, withheld and concealed a document from the government, and lied to FBI agents.
A key question hovering over the case now is whether Nauta will cooperate with prosecutors against Trump in hopes of a lesser sentence.
Nauta — who spent Tuesday bizarrely toggling between the roles of co-defendant, equal under the law to Trump, and dutiful “body man,” subservient to the former president — has showed no signs that his loyalty to Trump is waning.
Trump’s lawyers and advisers do not see Nauta as a threat to turn, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the criminal case.
Walt Nauta helping his ancient and frail boss
I have to believe that will change as Nauta begins to realize the jeopardy he is in. He’s a young man, and could end up spending many years in prison.
According to the indictment, Nauta helped bring boxes to Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago for his review before Trump returned 15 boxes of documents to the National Archives in January 2022. When interviewed by the FBI in May 2022, however, prosecutors allege Nauta falsely said he had no knowledge of the boxes being taken to Trump’s suite.
He then could be seen on surveillance video removing 64 boxes from the club’s ground floor storage room after Trump received a grand jury subpoena seeking classified records in May 2022. According to the indictment, he was spotted returning only 30 boxes to the room, just before a lawyer for Trump searched the room for documents to turn over to the government in response to the subpoena.
Trump and Nauta spoke repeatedly by phone before Nauta moved the boxes, the indictment alleges. The indictment does not detail what the two discussed. If Nauta chose to cooperate, he could presumably explain what Trump told him on those calls — and offer evidence about whether Trump instructed him to lie to the FBI.
People familiar with the case say that while Nauta spoke more than once with federal investigators, the conversations turned contentious last year when a senior Justice Department lawyer suggested the valet was in legal trouble for some of his statements. Nauta’s lawyers reacted angrily to that suggestion and the relationship never recovered.
CNN reporters figured out a clever way to get the news out of the Miami courthouse on Tuesday, even though electronics–even phones–were not allowed.
Oliver Darcy at CNN: How CNN broke the news from Trump’s arraignment despite a courtroom ban on electronics.
After surveying the courthouse on Monday, CNN’s team hatched a plan — one that ultimately led the news network to become the first to report that Trump was in custody and had entered a not guilty plea on 37 counts related to his alleged mishandling of classified intelligence documents.
It started with hiring a group of local high school students to work as production assistants for the day. Noah Gray, CNN’s senior coordinating producer for special events, had grown up in the Miami area and attended Palmetto Senior High School. He contacted his former teacher, who heads the school’s television production program, and said that CNN wanted to quickly hire some of her students to help with its reporting effort.
On Tuesday, several of the hired students were brought into the courthouse and seated in an overflow room with reporters Tierney Sneed and Hannah Rabinowitz. As the hearing unfolded and developments transpired, Sneed and Rabinowitz jotted down their reporting on notepads, tearing off sheets with urgent news, and handing it to one of the students. The students then ran the reporting to one of their classmates who was standing by at one of the courthouse’s only two pay phones.
But there was a twist: the pay phones at the courthouse could only dial local telephone numbers. To overcome the final obstacle, CNN’s staff devised a plan to have the production assistant dial his own personal cell phone, which was located in a nearby RV that the network was using as a mobile headquarters.
Brad Parks, a CNN regional newsgathering director stationed inside the RV, then picked up the phone, typed up the reporting and relayed the information to the outlet’s Washington, D.C. bureau. Once the reporting was cleared for air by senior leaders in Washington, it was then transmitted to the control room and the network at large. And, from there, it was finally communicated to CNN’s anchors, who delivered the news to viewers across the world.
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you all have a terrific Thursday!
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Posted: June 13, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, Donald Trump | Tags: classified information, DOJ, Jack Smith, Judge Aileen Cannon, top secret clearances, Trump arraignment in Miami, Trump attorneys |
Happy Arraignment Day!!
There will be lots of cable news talk today and tonight, but there probably won’t be much excitement at Trump’s arraignment. There are pro- and anti- Trump people demonstrating outside, but we’re unlikely to see another January 6.
Odette Yusef at NPR: Trump is calling for support for his court appearance. The far right may stay away.
When former President Donald Trump posted to his Truth Social platform on Friday, “SEE YOU IN MIAMI ON TUESDAY!!!,” the call eerily echoed the tweets with which he summoned his supporters to Washington, D.C., in the lead-up to Jan. 6, 2021. Then, Trump’s tweet helped to draw tens of thousands to the nation’s capital.
For some, it was interpreted as an invitation to plan and engage in collective violence. But extremism researchers say that this time around, they are not seeing signs of similar, large-scale and detailed planning around Trump’s expected courthouse appearance.
“One of the most striking things that stuck out about January 6 that we’re not seeing now are logistical and tactical maps of buildings, facilities, areas, exit routes,” said Benjamin Decker, CEO of Memetica, a threat intelligence group.
Decker said violent rhetoric on fringe platforms such as far-right Telegram channels, 4chan, Gab, Truth Social, Gettr and Patriots.win has spiked since Trump’s indictment last week. He said it has been particularly concerning to see some of this language targeting Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith. But he said the appetite to participate in a mass, in-person event is muted.
“There is a lot of paranoia among Trump supporters about getting arrested,” he said. “And the cost of arrest and potential jail time, that’s still going to deter people … who may be on the fence about being there to exercise their First Amendment rights or being there to participate in mob violence.”
On Monday, a rally in Miami organized by former Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer seemed to attract more reporters than participants.
Jared Holt, senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said a handful of other groups appeared to be organizing rallies for Tuesday at the courthouse. But he noted they were attracting skepticism from doubters who accuse the organizers of setting up a “false flag” or federal honeypot trap intended to arrest Trump supporters.
So if there is any violence this afternoon, it will probably be from lone wolves, not organized groups. Let’s hope things stay peaceful.
This is from David Kurtz’s Morning Memo at TPM.
I wonder who is televising the speech? I’m going to give that a miss and just look at the clips on Twitter.
Also from the Morning Memo, a discussion of how Trump is reacting to getting his comeuppance: fantasizing about revenge.
The organizing principle of Trump’s re-election campaign first became apparent back in March with his chilling “I am your retribution” speech at CPAC.
I keep coming back to this theme because it animates so much of his rhetoric and has been adopted in both obvious and subtle ways by his closest adherents, and because it poses perhaps the most dire threat to the rule of law if Trump is re-elected.
I bring it back up today because his revenge fantasy is ripening and deepening in alarming ways.
In the immediate aftermath of his indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, Trump has returned it to the forefront of his own rhetoric, and it’s being picked up again by his boosters. A few of the most egregious examples:
— Trump warned Monday that if re-elected he will name a special prosecutor to “go after” Joe Biden and his family.
“I WILL APPOINT A REAL SPECIAL “PROSECUTOR” TO GO AFTER THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE USA, JOE BIDEN, THE ENTIRE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY, & ALL OTHERS INVOLVED WITH THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR ELECTIONS, BORDERS, & COUNTRY ITSELF!”
— Trump has targeted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s wife, an echo of what he previously did to deputy FBI Director Andrew McCable’s wife….
By this point, I feel sure you know the many levels these attacks play at: They effectively cow investigators and prosecutors by raising the price and the pain of enforcing the law against him; they keep everyone involved in holding him accountable looking over their shoulders at what happens if Trump wins in 2024; they unleash the less stable and more deranged among us against Trump’s perceived enemies; they are the rallying cry not just for his supporters at election time but for his appointees and subordinates and acolytes throughout government at the local, state and federal level.
Trump’s revenge fantasy – his stated desire to abuse the powers of the office to inflict pain on those who oppose him – is now more toxic, pervasive, and sinister than at any point in his presidency. It is the rocket fuel to his quickening lurch toward fascism, not only because it appeals to his strongman tendencies, but because now as he faces criminal charges on multiple fronts it is inextricably a part of protecting and preserving his own liberty.
Trump is an increasingly desperate man, and he’s telling us exactly what he will do.
In other words, it’s going to get really ugly.
As Dakinikat posted yesterday, pro-Trump Judge Aileen “Loose” Cannon is still assigned to the trial, even though she’s not handling the arraignment. The New York Times’ Charlie Savage has a piece on how Cannon cold screw things up for the DOJ: How a Trump-Appointed Judge Could Influence His Documents Case.
Jack Smith, the special counsel handling the documents investigation into former President Donald J. Trump, vowed to seek “a speedy trial.” But that will be up to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who will wield considerable power over its calendar, evidence and jury.
Last year, Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, briefly disrupted the documents investigation by issuing rulings favorable to him when he challenged the F.B.I.’s search of his Florida club and estate, Mar-a-Lago, before a conservative appeals court ruled that she never had legal authority to intervene.
It remains to be seen how she will handle her second turn in the spotlight. The scope of her role before the trial also is unclear: She is not presiding over Mr. Trump’s initial hearing on Tuesday, and could refer some pretrial motions to a magistrate judge who works under her. But here is a closer look at how her decisions as the judge presiding over the trial — like on what can be included and excluded — could affect the case.
First, she could slow the case down by supporting Trump’s pointless motions. Another problem will be how she handles the classified documents:
Before the trial begins, there is almost certain to be extensive fights behind closed doors over the use of classified evidence, a matter governed by the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA. The law was intended to reduce the opportunities for so-called graymail in criminal cases involving national security, in which defendants threaten to expose sensitive secrets unless prosecutors drop charges against them.
One potential issue: whether the government has to publicly expose all 31 classified documents that are the basis of the 31 counts against Mr. Trump for illegally retaining national-security secrets. Their contents are key evidence for whether they qualify as the type of information protected by the Espionage Act.
CIPA establishes court procedures to sometimes shield sensitive information from the public, including by redacting some documents or substituting summaries. But defense lawyers can argue that they need to discuss their full contents in open court for the trial to be fair.
Read more about this aspect at the link. Another issue could be the attorney-client privilege decisions that have already been decided by a federal judge:
During the investigation, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the exception applied, forcing Mr. Trump’s lawyers to provide information to the grand jury. But Judge Cannon is not bound by Judge Howell’s decisions when it comes to what information should be presented to a jury.
During pretrial motions, if Mr. Trump’s lawyers ask Judge Cannon to suppress the evidence to protect attorney-client privilege and she does so, prosecutors could appeal — but that would further delay the case.
Other issues discussed in the article: Trump team claims of “prosecutorial misconduct,” jury selection decisions, ‘Rule 29’ Motions to Acquit, and the possibility of a hung jury. Read more details at the NYT link.
Judge Cannon could still recuse herself, but that’s probably unlikely. It will be interesting to see how the DOJ deals with her.
One serious problem for Trump is that he is having a hard time finding lawyers to defend him. Hugo Lowell at The Guardian: Trump finds no new lawyers for court appearance in Mar-a-Lago case.
Donald Trump is expected to be represented at his first court appearance to face federal criminal charges for retaining national security materials and obstruction of justice by two of his existing lawyers, despite trying to recruit a local Florida lawyer willing to join his legal defense team.
The lawyers making an appearance with Trump on Tuesday will be the top former federal prosecutor Todd Blanche and the former Florida solicitor general Chris Kise, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump’s co-defendant, his valet Walt Nauta, will be represented by Stanley Woodward.
Trump and his legal team spent the afternoon before his arraignment interviewing potential lawyers but the interviews did not result in any joining the team in time for Trump’s initial court appearance scheduled for 3pm ET on Tuesday after several attorneys declined to take him as a client.
Trump has also seemingly been unable to find a specialist national security lawyer, eligible to possess a security clearance, to help him navigate the Espionage Act charges….
After interviewing a slate of potential lawyers at his Trump Doral resort, the former president settled on having Kise appearing as the local counsel admitted to the southern district of Florida as a one-off, with Blanche being sponsored by him to appear pro hac vice, one of the people said.
Here are the attorneys who turned Trump down.
Among the Florida lawyers who turned down Trump was Howard Srebnick, who had expressed an interest in representing the former president at trial as early as last week in part due to the high fees involved, but ultimately was not allowed to after conferring with his law partners, the person said.
The other prominent lawyer who declined to work with Trump was David Markus, who recently defended the Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum against charges that he lied to the FBI and funnelled campaign contributions into his personal accounts, the person said.
Trump and his team have interviewed the corruption attorney Benedict Kuehne, who was indicted in 2008 for money laundering before the charges were dropped, the person said. But he has his own baggage as he faces disbarment for contempt of court in a recent civil suit he lost.
The other interviews are understood to have been with William Barzee, as well as Bruce Zimet, the former chief assistant US attorney in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
Hugo Lowell notes that lawyers are concerned about his reputation for being a nightmare client and their concerns that defending Trump could damage their own reputations. They also have to be aware that Trump has lied to and manipulated his attorneys.
Trump is said to still be searching for a lawyer in the mold of Roy Cohn, the ruthless New York fixer who defended and mentored him before he was later disbarred – and the fear of potentially being asked to take similar actions has been a persistent issue.
That fear has loomed large for numerous lawyers Trump’s advisers have contacted, the people said, in particular after Trump might have made Evan Corcoran, another former lawyer who withdrew from his defense in the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation, into a witness against him.
Marcy Wheeler has a post at Emptywheel about Trump’s need for a lawyer who has or would be able to obtain top secret clearance: Trump Needs Cleared Lawyers, Not Just Any Lawyers.
Trump needs cleared attorneys, and he should (finally) have the lawyers with Espionage Act experience that might have minimized some of the risk he currently faces.
When courts deal with classified documents like this one will, the judge does not need clearance. (This is a separation of powers issue; members of Congress similarly don’t need clearance.) But the lawyers do. At least one and preferably three of Trump’s lawyers will need to be cleared at the elevated levels the FBI Agents who did the search of Mar-a-Lago had to be read into to even conduct the search. As it was, Trusty was Trump’s only attorney with clearance, and he just split.
Not all lawyers want to go through the trouble of getting clearance. Some — possibly including Chris Kise, was a registered agent for Venezuela in recent years — may not be able to get cleared at that level.
Donald Trump’s trouble finding legal representation is no longer simply the comedy of self-destructiveness it has been for years. Starting today (or shortly thereafter), there will be new obligations and exposures for lawyers representing him.
Trump’s search for a lawyer is not just about finding people who are members of the bar in SDFL. He also needs to find lawyers who are willing to put their security clearance and their reputations at risk on a case where Trump has already been wildly misleading his attorneys.
In this post, Marcy also addresses in detail the ways in which he has lost lawyers by misleading and lying to them, as well as asking them to do illegal things. Read all about it at the link.
More interesting stories to check out
Sam Brodey at The Daily Beast: Dems Have a Trump Indictment Strategy: Shut Your Damn Mouth.
The New York Times: How Trump Plans to Beat His Indictment, Politically.
Barbara McQuade at MSNBC: New indictment proves Trump is a triple threat to national security.
Eric Levitz at New York Magazine: The DOJ Went Easy on Trump for Political Reasons.
Geraldine DeRuiter at The Washington Post: We need to talk about Trump’s bathroom chandelier.
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Posted: June 10, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: Civil War, DOJ, Indictments of Trump and Nauta, MAGA crazies, national security, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Walt Nauta |
Happy Caturday!!
Greek Kitties, by Timothy Adam Matthews
Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin today. What is happening in U.S. politics right now is beyond anything we have ever experienced as a country, with the exception of the Civil War.
A former president of the U.S. tried to overthrow his own government in order to prevent a transition to a new president after he lost an election. He incited an attempted coup; and when that failed, he tried to overthrow the results of presidential votes in several states.
Finally, when all that failed to keep him in office, he stole hundreds of government documents and stored them in his private club in locations in which all kinds of people could have access to them. He displayed some of the documents to people without clearance to see them and, for all we know, could have given classified information to other countries.
It’s simply breathtaking.
Now the former president has been indicted for serious crimes, and his political party is still supporting him and vowing revenge on our most important institutions. Could it get any worse? The answer is yes, of course it could. He could end up winning his party’s 2024 nomination and being elected president again, even if he is in prison by that time.
So that’s where we stand right now. I’ll share some reads, but there is no way I have the time or space to include everything that’s out there.
First, here is a pdf of the indictment, if you’d like to read it. And here is an annotated version by Charlie Savage at the New York Times: The Trump Classified Documents Indictment, Annotated.
I think this description of the situation we are in by Tom Nichols at The Atlantic is very good. I could only read it in my email, because I’m not a subscriber. The title: Trump’s Indictment Reveals a National-Security Nightmare.
The charges—38 of them—are a big deal. And before the GOP gaslighting reaches supernova levels, let’s also bear in mind that what Trump actually did is a big deal too. He claimed that he declassified, by fiat, boxes of classified information, and then appears to have left all of that material sitting in ballrooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms. To this day, he insists that he had every right to do whatever he wanted with America’s secrets. Fortunately, the court has unsealed the indictment, because Americans need to know, and care, about the magnitude of Trump’s alleged offenses.
To understand the severity of the charges against Trump, consider a thought experiment: Imagine that Vladimir Putin is one day driven from the Kremlin, perhaps in a coup or in the face of a popular revolt. He jumps into his limousine and heads for self-imposed exile in a remote dacha. His trunk is full of secret documents that he decided belong to him, including details of the Russian nuclear deterrent and Russia’s military weaknesses.
Now imagine how valuable those boxes would be to any intelligence organization in the world. I spent the early years of my career analyzing Soviet and Russian documents as an academic Sovietologist, and I would have loved to see such materials. Small, seemingly trivial details—something as innocuous as a desk calendar or a notepad—might not mean much to a layperson, but to a professional, they could be pure gold. To get even a peek at such Russian materials would be an intelligence triumph.
By Timothy Adams Matthews
But of course, I would never have been able to lay my hands on them, because a cache of such immense importance, if U.S. operatives spirited any of it out of Russia, would have been secured in a vault somewhere deep in the CIA. Trump, meanwhile, left highly sensitive American documents lying around at a golf resort like practice balls on the driving range. According to the indictment:
“The Mar-a-Lago Club was an active social club, which, between January 2021 and August 2022, hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests. After TRUMP’s presidency, The Mar-a-Lago Club was not an authorized location for the storage, possession, review, display, or discussion of classified documents. Nevertheless, TRUMP stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club—including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”
Actually, it might be harder to steal practice balls. “The Storage Room,” the indictment notes, “was near the liquor supply closet, linen room, lock shop, and various other rooms.” These are not exactly low-traffic areas. Worse yet, the indictment asserts that Trump had some of these documents at his club in New Jersey, where he showed files to people who had no business seeing them. (One of them, according to the indictment, was something Trump claimed was a plan of attack on a foreign country prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official.)
If you can access The Atlantic website, you can read more, but I think that is a good summary of the seriousness of what this country is facing.
Here are a some long reads that address various aspects of the Trump indictment and it’s possible effects on U.S. politics and national security.
For more details on the national security situation, read this piece at Just Security: National Security Implications of Trump’s Indictment: A Damage Assessment.
At The Washington Post, Rachael Weiner writes about the specific charges: Here are the 37 charges against Trump and what they mean.
One of my least favorite New York Times writers, Peter Baker, evaluates what the indictment means for President Biden and the U.S. justice system: Trump’s Case Puts the Justice System on Trial, in a Test of Public Credibility. Why am I not surprised that this is what Baker chose to write about? Still, it’s worth considering.
More helpful reads, with excerpts:
John Gerstein at Politico: The startling, damning details in the Trump indictment.
Classified documents found in a shower. A clumsy effort to move boxes and hide them from the FBI. A damaging admission, caught on tape. And Donald Trump’s own public statements, used against him.
Those are some of the details in the indictment charging Trump and a longtime aide with an extraordinary scheme to hoard national secrets that Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving the White House.
Here are some of the most notable revelations.
By Timothy Adam Matthews
Showing off military plans
On at least two occasions after leaving office, Trump displayed classified documents to others visiting him at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the indictment alleges. In July 2021, Trump showed a writer, a publisher and two staff members a “plan of attack” that he said had been prepared for him by the U.S. military, the charges say. The audio-recorded meeting reportedly involved a document that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley drafted about Iran.
Trump allegedly made a potentially damning admission at that session, saying he could have declassified the document while he was president but “now I can’t.”
A longtime aide turned co-conspirator
Trump isn’t the only person facing criminal charges over the classified documents fiasco: His longtime aide and “body man,” Walt Nauta, was also hit with six felony counts including obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. The indictment says Trump instructed Nauta to move boxes containing classified documents in order to conceal them from both Trump’s own lawyers and the FBI.
Prosecutors accused Nauta of lying months ago and pressured him to cooperate in the investigation, a source familiar with the situation told POLITICO, but the charges unsealed Friday indicate that he and prosecutors didn’t come to terms on a deal – at least not yet.
Classified docs in a bathroom
The indictment says that Mar-a-Lago was a particularly vulnerable location for the classified documents because it’s “an active social club [that] hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests” – a far cry from the closely guarded “sensitive compartmented information facility,” or SCIF, that is typically used to store the most sensitive national security secrets.
Trump has railed at the FBI for spreading classified documents across the floor of a closet during a search of Mar-a-Lago last August. But prosecutors say Trump’s own storage of the documents was just as sloppy. The indictment says some of the classified records at Mar-a-Lago were stored in “a ballroom, a bathroom and shower [and] his bedroom.”
Spilling secrets, literally
Other details from the indictment emphasize the haphazard nature with which sensitive government documents were strewn around the estate. The indictment alleges that, on at least one occasion in December 2021, boxes containing a mix of classified and unclassified records “spilled onto the floor” of a storage room. Helpfully for prosecutors, Nauta allegedly texted a photo of the scene to another Trump aide.
One of the documents, classified “Secret” and marked for release only to U.S. officials and close allies, discussed “military capabilities of a foreign country,” the indictment says.
More at the link
The Daily Beast: Photographic Proof: Feds Found Boxes of Classified Docs All Over Mar-a-Lago.
The 37-count indictment accusing Donald Trump of illegally hoarding classified documents used a wealth of surveillance footage, private conversations, employees’ text messages, audio-taped meetings, and witness statements to make a damning case.
But the 44-page document also included a half-dozen images of the documents themselves, stacked in boxes next to a toilet, spilling out onto the floor of a storage room, and piled up in rows on the stage of a ballroom at Trump’s resort in South Florida….
In one exchange outlined in the indictment and backed up with a photograph, Trump employees discussed moving some of Trump’s boxes of documents out of a Mar-a-Lago business center and into a bathroom instead so staff could use the business center as an office.
“Woah!! Ok so potus specifically asked Walt for those boxes to be in the business center because they are his ‘papers,’” one Trump employee texted to another, referencing Walt Nauta.
The two employees then went back and forth discussing what they could move to storage. “There is still a little room in the shower where his other stuff is,” one employee texted. “Is it only his papers he cares about? Theres some other stuff in there that are not papers. Could that go to storage? Or does he want everything in there on property.”
“Yes,” the second employee responds. “Anything that’s not the beautiful mind paper boxes can definitely go to storage.”
In another instance in May 2021, Trump told staff to move some of his boxes to a storage room, the indictment says. Images show the boxes stacked up in the storage room as well as a hallway leading to the room that prosecutors say could easily be reached from Mar-a-Lago’s pool patio. The storage room was right next to a liquor supply closet and a linen room.
In December 2021, Trump’s personal aide, Walt Nauta, found that some of those 80 boxes had fallen over and their contents spilled out on the floor.
Among the papers scattered around the storage room were, according to the indictment, a document marked “SECRET//REL TO USA//FVEY” which denoted information releasable only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
You might want to read what Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel has to say about the indictment: The Mar-a-Lago Indictment is a Tactical Nuke.
I’ve become convinced that what I will call the Mar-a-Lago indictment — because I doubt this will be the only stolen documents one — is a tactical nuke: A massive tool, but simply a tactical one.
As I’ve laid out, it charges 31 counts of Espionage Act violations, each carrying a 10-year sentence and most sure to get enhancements for how sensitive the stolen documents are, as well as seven obstruction-related charges, four of which carry 20-year sentences. The obstruction-related charges would group at sentencing (meaning they’d really carry 20 year sentence total), but Espionage Act charges often don’t and could draw consecutive sentences: meaning Trump could be facing a max sentence of 330 years. Walt Nauta is really facing 20 years max — though probably around three or four years.
New York Kitty, by Timothy Adam Matthews
Obviously, Trump won’t serve a 330 year sentence, not least because Trump is mortal, already 76, and has eaten far too many burgers in his life.
For his part, Nauta should look on the bright side! He has not, yet, been charged with 18 USC 793(g), conspiring with Trump to hoard all those classified documents, though the overt acts in count 32, the conspiracy to obstruct count, would certainly fulfill the elements of offense of a conspiracy to hoard classified documents. If Nauta were to be charged under 793(g), he too would be facing a veritable life sentence, all for helping his boss steal the nation’s secrets. And for Nauta, who is in his 40s and healthy enough to lug dozens of boxes around Trump’s beach resort, that life sentence would last a lot longer than it would for Trump.
And that’s something to help understand how this is tactical.
I first started thinking that might be true when I saw Jack Smith’s statement.
He emphasized:
- A grand jury in Florida voted out the indictment
- The gravity of the crimes
- The talent and ethics of his prosecutors
- That Trump and Walt Nauta are presumed innocent
- He will seek a Speedy Trial
- A Florida jury will hear this case
- The dedication of FBI Agents
He packed a lot in fewer than three minutes, but the thing that surprised me was his promise for a Speedy Trial. He effectively said he wants to try this case, charging 31 counts of the Espionage Act, within 70 days.
That means the trial would start around August 20, and last — per one of the filings in the docket — 21 days, through mid-September. While all the other GOP candidates were on a debate stage, Trump would be in South Florida, watching as his closest aides described how he venally refused to give boxes and boxes of the nation’s secrets back.
There’s not a chance in hell that will happen, certainly not for Trump. Even if Trump already had at least three cleared attorneys with experience defending Espionage Act cases, that wouldn’t happen, because the CIPA process for this case, the fight over what classified evidence would be available and how it would be presented at trial, would last at least six months. And as of yesterday, he has just one lawyer on this case, Todd Blanche, who is also defending Trump in the New York State case.
There’s much more to read and think about at the link. Her main point seems to be that Smith wants to convince Walt Nauta to testify against Trump.
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman: Who Is Walt Nauta, the Other Person Indicted Along With Trump?
Walt Nauta, the only other person indicted along with former President Donald J. Trump, has been serving as his personal aide after previously working for him in the White House.
A native of Guam, Mr. Nauta enlisted in the military at some point and was a military aide working as a White House valet while Mr. Trump was president.
The valets in the White House have unusual proximity to the commander in chief, encountering them at moments of vulnerability, including at meals and on foreign trips.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta forged a bond during the Trump administration, and when the term ended, Mr. Nauta retired and went to go work for Mr. Trump personally.
A Closer Look, by Timothy Adam Matthews
He was one of the very few members of Mr. Trump’s post-presidential office when Mr. Trump first returned to private life at his club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla. There, Mr. Nauta resumed the kind of personal chores that he had helped Mr. Trump with while he was president.
Mr. Nauta has been seen as deeply loyal to Mr. Trump by other aides.
But he attracted the attention of the government for his appearance on security camera footage from the club, which was subpoenaed by prosecutors, moving boxes in and out of a basement storage room after a grand jury subpoena.
In interviews with government officials, according to the indictment, he gave false testimony about whether he had moved boxes to Mr. Trump’s residence earlier in the year. In reality, according to the indictment, Mr. Nauta brought several boxes to Mr. Trump’s residence from the storage room at a time when National Archives officials were seeking the return of presidential material, but he told investigators he didn’t.
Read the rest at the NYT.
As I’m sure you know, Republicans in the House are vociferously defending Trump. For example:
Insider: Trump’s defenders have launched a plan months in the making that ignores the substance of the indictment while attacking the credibility of federal prosecutors.
Former President Donald Trump’s indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents is set to play out in a federal court in Florida. But hundreds of miles away, part of Trump’s defense is well underway in a different venue — the halls of Congress, where Republicans have been preparing for months to wage an aggressive counter-offensive against the Justice Department.
The federal indictment against Trump, unsealed Friday, includes 37 counts, including allegations that the former president intentionally possessed classified documents, showed them off to visitors, willfully defied Justice Department demands to return them and made false statements to federal authorities about them. The evidence details Trump’s own words and actions as recounted by lawyers, close aides and other witnesses.
The Republican campaign to discredit federal prosecutors skims over the substance of those charges, which were brought by a grand jury in Florida. GOP lawmakers are instead working, as they have for several years, to foster a broader argument that law enforcement — and President Joe Biden — are conspiring against the former president and possible Republican nominee for president in 2024.
“Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America,” tweeted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, soon after Trump said on his social media platform Thursday night that an indictment was coming. McCarthy blamed Biden, who has declined to comment on the case and said he is not at all involved in the Justice Department’s decisions.
Republicans “will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”
Republican lawmakers in the House have already laid extensive groundwork for the effort to defend Trump since taking the majority in January. A near constant string of hearings featuring former FBI agents, Twitter executives and federal officials have sought to paint the narrative of a corrupt government using its powers against Trump and the right. A GOP-led House subcommittee on the “weaponization” of government is probing the Justice Department and other government agencies, while at the same time Republicans are investigating Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
“It’s a sad day for America,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, a leading Trump defender and ally in the House, said in a statement on Thursday evening. “God bless President Trump.”
And of course, the MAGA crazies are calling for civil war.
Tim Dickenson at Rolling Stone: Trump Extremists Demand Civil War, Mass Murder After New Indictment.
EXTREME SUPPORTERS OF Donald Trump have met news of his federal indictment with visions of violence and retribution.
At The Donald, a forum for ultra-MAGA Trump supporters, users demanded public executions and other forms of lynching to avenge the federal prosecution of Trump, for the alleged mishandling of state secrets at Mar a Lago after he was no longer president.
By Timothy Adam Matthews
The calls for violence appeared in comment threads, responding to posts on the front page of the forum Thursday night, after news broke of Trump’s latest legal troubles. The most extreme comments were written in response to a fanciful post insisting “the only solution” to DOJ’s efforts to lock up Trump would be to vote him back into the presidency, so Trump could “pardon himself and begin arresting those guilty of insurrection and sedition.”
A user named “Belac186” offered a far deadlier fix: “The only way this country ever becomes anything like the Constitution says this country should be is if thousands of traitorous rats are publicly executed.” Commenter “DogFaceKilla” quickly chimed in to offer supplies: “I got some rope somewhere in the garage…” And “Heavy_Metal_Patriot” added: “Hans says we can borrow the flammenwerfer” — a reference to a battlefield flame thrower used to by German soldiers in World War II.
The proposal for mass killing struck user “BlackPilledMAGA” as going too far: “Doesn’t have to be thousands, just a few dozen would do. Shit would STOP immediately.” But user “Nerdrem1” insisted taking out a few elites wouldn’t make the difference, suggesting the number of dead required was on a genocidal scale: “Millions. The real problem is the people that vote for them, as long as they exist the problem can’t be solved.” A user named “Heavy_Metal_Patriot” concurred: “Correct.”
It might be tempting to dismiss these calls for mass murder as loose talk among angry MAGAdonians. Yet there is dark history here. In a previous iteration, The Donald was used to help plot and promote the violence at the Capitol in 2021, as detailed in the final report of the House Jan. 6 Committee, including by users who “openly discussed surrounding and occupying the U.S. Capitol.”
More insanity at the link.
Daniel Gilbert at Vice: ‘We Need to Start Killing’: Trump’s Far-Right Supporters Are Threatening Civil War.
In what is becoming a now all-too-familiar trend, former President Donald Trump’s far-right supporters have threatened civil war after news broke Thursday that the former president was indicted for allegedly taking classified documents from the White House without permission.
“We need to start killing these traitorous fuckstains,” wrote one Trump supporter on The Donald, a rabidly pro-Trump message board that played a key role in planning the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Another user added: “It’s not gonna stop until bodies start stacking up. We are not civilly represented anymore and they’ll come for us next. Some of us, they already have.” [….]
Trump supporters are making specific threats too. In one post on The Donald titled, “A little bit about Merrick Garland, his wife, his daughters,” a user shared a link to an article about the attorney general’s children.
Under the post, another user replied: “His children are fair game as far as I’m concerned.”
In a post about the special counsel conducting the probe, one user on The Donald wrote: “Jack Smith should be arrested the minute he steps foot in the red state of Florida.”
In addition to threats of violence against lawmakers and politicians, many were also calling for a civil war.
“Perhaps it’s time for that Civil War that the damn DemoKKKrats have been trying to start for years now,” a member of The Donald wrote. Another, referencing former President Barack Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said: “FACT: OUR FOREFATHERS WOULD HAVE HUNG THESE TWO FOR TREASON…”
More crazy at the link.
That’s just a sampling of what’s out there in the media today. What do you think? What stories have caught your attention?
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