It’s another big news day today. Here’s what’s happening.
Big media is focused on the missing submersible with billionaires on board and there’s breaking news at doesn’t sound good.
UPDATE: I just saw on CNN that the debris appears to be from the submersible.
BREAKING: The U.S. Coast Guard says it has located a debris field near the Titanic in the search for a missing submersible with five people aboard, a potential breakthrough. https://t.co/4d80aCKXpw
The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that an underwater vessel has located a debris field near the Titanic in the search for a missing submersible with five people aboard, a potential breakthrough in an increasingly urgent around-the-clock effort.
The Coast Guard’s post on Twitter gave no details, such as whether officials believe the debris is connected to the Titan, which was on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic. The search passed the critical 96-hour mark Thursday when breathable air could have run out.
The Titan was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic — but experts have emphasized that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air. And it’s not known if they survived since the sub’s disappearance.
Rescuers have rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said an undersea robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the sea floor, while a French research institute said a deep-diving robot with cameras, lights and arms also joined the operation.
It’s interesting to watch the national fascination with this story [the missing submersible], especially compared to, say, the attention paid to the sinking of another boat, this one full of desperate migrants in the Mediterranean last week; dozens were killed, and hundreds of men, women and children are still missing. Many migrants, mostly from Syria, Egypt and Pakistan, may be dead.
And the Greek Coast Guard, despite indications that the boat was in distress, did not intervene, blaming the smuggled migrants who they say didn’t want help. Widespread outrage and anguish for the hundreds of souls taking an extraordinary risk in search of a better life, and those who failed them along the way, seems much more justifiable than the frenzy over a small, lost group of hyper-niche tourists, tragic as both circumstances may turn out to be. And yet, while the migrant story is far from being ignored, it’s not receiving the same breathless moment-by-moment updates accorded the lost Titanic hunters.
But human interest, we know, does not at all run proportional to human suffering, and often has little to do with who or what is deserving of significant attention. And the story of a vessel occupied by wealthy curiosity-seekers, lost in the depths of the ocean in its search to find a vessel occupied by wealthy curiosity-seekers lost in the depths of the ocean, has all the component parts of an addictive story: irony, suspense, potential tragedy, potential glory, lifestyles of the rich, aspiration and hubris.
Read more at at the CNN link.
It’s now coming out that there were many safety issues with the submersible.
They learned that the viewport of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, even though the Titanic shipwreck lies nearly 4,000 meters below sea level.
Experts from within and outside OceanGate raised concerns about the safety of its Titan submersible as far back as 2018, years before it went missing during a deep-sea dive to the Titanic shipwreck site.
Several of those complaints have resurfaced this week, as the frantic search for the vessel — and its five passengers — continues.
“It hasn’t surprised us,” said Will Kohnen, the chair of the Marine Technology Society’s Submarine Committee (formerly the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee), about the Titan’s disappearance. “We’ve been aware of this project for some time and have had some concerns.”
In March 2018, after one of the international industry group’s annual conferences, Kohnen drafted a letter to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush — the pilot of the missing vessel — expressing “unanimous concern” on behalf of its members about the development of the Titan and its planned Titanic expeditions.
“Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry,” he wrote, according to a copy obtained by the New York Times….
Kohnen told Morning Edition‘s A Martínez on Wednesday that the group’s main concern was a lack of oversight and adherence to industry-accepted safety guidelines.
“Most of the companies in this industry that are building submersibles and deep submersibles follow a fairly well-established framework of certification and verification and oversight, through classification societies,” he said. “And that was at the root of OceanGate’s project, is that they were going to go solo, going without that type of official oversight, and that brought a lot of concerns.”
The director of marine operations at OceanGate, the company whose submersible went missing Sunday on an expedition to the Titanic in the North Atlantic, was fired after raising concerns about its first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull and other systems before its maiden voyage, according to a filing in a 2018 lawsuit first reported by Insider and New Republic.
David Lochridge was terminated in January 2018 after presenting a scathing quality control report on the vessel to OceanGate’s senior management, including founder and CEO Stockton Rush, who is on board the missing vessel.
According to a court filing by Lochridge, the preamble to his report read: “Now is the time to properly address items that may pose a safety risk to personnel. Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions, so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place.”
The report detailed “numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns,” according to the filing. These included Lochridge’s worry that “visible flaws” in the carbon fiber supplied to OceanGate raised the risk of small flaws expanding into larger tears during “pressure cycling.” These are the huge pressure changes that the submersible would experience as it made its way and from the deep ocean floor. He noted that a previously tested scale model of the hull had “prevalent flaws.”
More details at the link.
Samuel Alito has temporarily taken the pressure off Clarence Thomas.
A couple of days ago, ProPublica published a story about a luxury fishing trip to that Samuel Alito took with Leonard Leo. They were accompanied by billionaire Paul Singer, who flew both men on his private plane.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska with billionaire Paul Singer, whose hedge fund then had repeated business before SCOTUS over the years that followed.
Alito never disclosed the trip or recused himself from Singer's cases. (THREAD) pic.twitter.com/mVWEInOUfa
In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.
Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.
In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.
Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.
Experts said they could not identify an instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift paid for by one of the parties.
“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.
ProPublica sent a series of questions to Alito before publishing the story. Instead of answering them, Alito got his pals at the Wall Street Journal to publish a whiny defense–before the ProPublica article came out.
Justice Samuel Alito took the unusual step Tuesday of using the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal to defend his travel with a billionaire who often has cases before the Supreme Court, hours before ProPublica published a story detailing their ties. https://t.co/WuQpce4Q6K
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the unusual step late Tuesday of responding to questions about his travel with a billionaire who frequently has cases before the Supreme Court hours before an article detailing their ties had even been published.
In an extraordinary salvo in a favored forum, Justice Alito defended himself in a pre-emptive article in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal before the news organization ProPublica posted its account of a luxury fishing trip in 2008….
Justice Alito said he had spoken to Mr. [Paul] Singer [who flew Alito to Alaska on his private plane] only a handful of times, including on two occasions when Mr. Singer introduced the justice before speeches. “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially,” Justice Alito wrote.
He added that he did not know of Mr. Singer’s connection to the cases before the court, including one in which the court issued a 7-to-1 decision in favor of one of Mr. Singer’s businesses, with Justice Alito in the majority.
But Mr. Singer’s connection to the case, Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, was widely reported. A Forbes article covering the decision bore the headline “Supreme Court Hands Billionaire Paul Singer a Victory Over Argentina.” An article in The New York Times noted that the parties to the case included “NML Capital, an affiliate of Elliott Management, the hedge fund founded by Paul Singer.”
Alito’s justification for taking the free private plane flight was ludicrous and got him mocked all day long on Twitter.
Justice Alito said he was not required to disclose the trip on Mr. Singer’s private jet in “a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.”
A federal law requires disclosures of gifts over a certain value but makes exceptions for “personal hospitality of any individual” at “the personal residence of that individual or his family or on property or facilities owned by that individual or his family.” Justice Alito wrote that a jet is such a facility, quoting from dictionary definitions.
In March, the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts, issued new guidelines requiring disclosure of travel by private jet and stays in commercial properties like resorts.
This morning, CNN published another embarrassing story for Alito.
Alito in the hot seat over trips to Alaska and Rome he accepted from groups and individuals who lobby the Supreme Court – CNN Politics https://t.co/hq2PUABuiK
Last July, Alito was feted in Rome by Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative, which has in recent years joined the growing ranks of conservative legal activists who are finding new favor at the Supreme Court – and forging ties with the justices. The group’s legal clinic has filed a series of “friend-of-the-court” briefs in religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020.
After the high court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome to deliver a keynote address at a gala hosted at a palace in the heart of the city. It was his first known public appearance after the decision.
At the start of his speech, he thanked the group for the “warm hospitality” it provided to him and his wife, which, he later said, included a stay at a hotel that “looks out over the Roman Forum.”
During various parts of the address, he gleefully mocked critics of his ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion. What really “wounded” him, the conservative justice said, was when Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, “addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare ‘the decision whose name may not be spoken’ with the Russian attack on the Ukraine.”
Justices are often known for usually maintaining a low profile, and the court’s public information office in recent years has been less forthcoming about their public appearances. But the court’s ruling last year in the abortion case propelled the nine jurists and their rulings to new heights and fueled new questions about the justices’ behavior both on and off the bench.
Alito joined the majority in ruling in favor of the Religious Liberty Initiative’s position in several of the cases for which it submitted briefs, including the one that reversed Roe, which he authored, and a 2022 decision that said a high school football coach had the right to pray on the 50-yard line after games.
I wonder which right wing justice will be next? I hope some investigative journalist is looking into which billionaire(s) have given gifts to Brett Kavanaugh. It’s also notable that the introductions to the billionaire sugar daddies came from former Federalist Society head Leonard Leo. Check out this piece from Josh Marshall at TPM: Leonard Leo’s SCOTUS-FedSoc Sponsor Family Program.
There’s big news today on the Trump stolen documents case.
Last night, Jack Smith sent the first installment of discovery to Trump’s lawyers.
Special counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday court filing https://t.co/OdyBjcTGD8
Special counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday court filing that hints that investigators collected for the case multiple recordings of the former president – not just audio of an interview Trump gave at Bedminster for a forthcoming Mark Meadows memoir.
Prosecutors in the filing used the plural “interviews” to describe recordings of Trump – made with his consent – obtained by the special counsel that have now been turned over to his defense team. It is unclear what the additional recordings may be of or how relevant they will be to the Justice Department’s case against the former president, though the recordings include the Bedminster tape where Trump speaks about a secret military document to a writer and others, the prosecutors said in the filing.
he prosecutors’ update to the court on Wednesday night marks another swift move toward trial, which the Justice Department has said should happen quickly, and captures at least some of the extent of the evidence investigators secured to build their historic case against Trump.
The first batch of discovery production – made up of unclassified materials – includes transcripts of witness testimony in front of the grand juries in Washington, DC, and Florida that were probing the mishandling of government documents from Trump’s White House. It also includes materials collected via subpoenas and search warrants; memos detailing other witness interviews given through mid-May in the investigation; and copies of the surveillance footage investigators obtained in the probe.
The first batch of evidence, provided on Wednesday, “includes the grand jury testimony of witnesses who will testify for the government at the trial of this case,” the special counsel’s office wrote.
More from Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:
New: Justice Dept was examining evidence within weeks of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last year that he might have handled classified documents at his Bedminster club — and was adamant that Trump legal search there. @guardian exclusive https://t.co/arnBsLmo6V
Federal prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s retention of national security material were examining evidence within weeks of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last year that he might have handled classified documents at his Bedminster club in New Jersey, according to two people close to the matter.
The indications of classified documents at Bedminster so alarmed prosecutors that they focused part of the investigation on whether Trump might have transported the materials or disclosed their contents there in addition to refusing to return them to the government, the people said….
The suspicion that Trump travelled with classified documents between Mar-a-Lago, his winter residence, and Bedminster, his summer residence, started early in the criminal investigation that intensified after the FBI search and culminated in Trump being accused of violating the Espionage Act….
Within weeks of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, the justice department sought to act on the indications of classified documents at Bedminster when it told the Trump legal team that prosecutors believed the former president still possessed classified materials, the people said.
The message in the letter, which became a formal court motion filed under seal weeks later, was clear: arrange for new searches of all of the Trump properties because, as of that time, the only place that had been combed for classified documents was the Mar-a-Lago resort.
Whether to acquiesce with the request split the Trump legal team. Trump in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn and Trump lawyer Chris Kise were uneasy about being ordered around by the government, while the other Trump lawyers Tim Parlatore and Jim Trusty suggested a cooperative approach.
The legal team ultimately decided on working with the justice department and, in one exchange, asked prosecutors which Trump properties and where at the Trump properties they wanted them to search.
A few more details at the link.
Trump now knows who has testified in the grand jury and what secrets they have revealed. He must be throwing ketchup around at Bedminster. He has posted several insane messages on Truth Social. Here’s a sample:
Translation: He got his discovery yesterday, he knows who is testifying against him and mostly what they are going to say, he knows he’s screwed, so he’s panicking and begging Kevin McCarthy to save him somehow. pic.twitter.com/Dw6CHLZ12g
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.
I reviewed Cannon’s entire criminal case history, she has always set a super fast trial date, as a matter of practice, and then repeatedly continued it as trial matters arose. In every single case, big and small, save for a few quick plea deals. https://t.co/cDh4eLrl00
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.
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.
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.”
Donald Trump essentially confessed to the crime of which he’s accused: stealing and sharing top-secret government information.https://t.co/Dz48ud4mnt
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.
Finally, Hunter Biden has reached a deal with the Trump-appointed prosecutor investigating his case.
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. https://t.co/KZ4fsv8taw
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 20, 2023
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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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.
A former manager at the Harvard Medical School morgue, his wife and three other people have been indicted in the theft and sale of human body parts, federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania said. https://t.co/phkvUbhLQW
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.
Here’s Katrina Maclean leaving court today with a man who came to get her. He shoves our photographer, knocking him into me at the end of the video. @7Newspic.twitter.com/U8oqY5NqbD
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:
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.
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.
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.
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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Yes, it’s another rabbit hole. Yes, it’s rather scholarly and lawyerly. Yes, we all didn’t catch this back in February when the 5th Circuit made a decision that may impact more than just the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Bureau has been on every outrage list of right-wingers and the financial industry due to its oversight of how it snags borrowers and then proceeds to drain every last drop of money it can. You may remember this being set up by the Obama Administration under the leadership of Elizabeth Warren before her Senate run.
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to take up a major case involving funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was formed in response to the 2008 financial crisis. A federal appeals court ruled in October that the funding mechanism for the CFPB violates the Constitution, but the Biden administration, which had asked the justices to weigh in, says that allowing the lower court’s decision to stand could raise “grave concerns” for “the entire financial industry.”
The announcement came as part of a list of orders from the justices’ private conference last week.
The case involving the CFPB began as a challenge by the payday-lending industry to a 2017 rule that (as relevant here) barred lenders from making additional efforts to withdraw payments from borrowers’ bank accounts after two consecutive failed attempts due to a lack of funds.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected most of the groups’ challenges to the rule, but it ultimately struck down the rule based on the CFPB’s unique funding scheme, which operates outside the normal congressional appropriations process. Instead of receiving money allocated to it each year by Congress, the CFPB receives funding directly from the Federal Reserve, which collects fees from member banks. And that scheme, the court of appeals concluded, violates the Constitution’s appropriations clause, which directs that “[n]o Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” The appropriations clause, the court of appeals explained, “ensures Congress’s exclusive power over the federal purse,” which is in turn essential to ensure that other branches of government don’t overstep their authority. The court of appeals vacated the 2017 rule on the ground that the CFPB was receiving funding through that unconstitutional funding mechanism when it adopted the rule.
The CFPB came to the Supreme Court in November, asking the justices to take up the case and overrule what it characterized as the lower court’s “unprecedented and erroneous understanding of the Appropriations Clause.” The appropriations clause, the CFPB argued, means “simply that no money can be paid out of the Treasury unless it has been appropriated by an Act of Congress.” In the case of the CFPB, the government contends, “Congress enacted a statute explicitly authorizing the CFPB to use a specified amount of funds from a specified source for specified purposes. The Appropriations Clause requires nothing more.”
Let me explain why the court’s logic and the current makeup of SCOTUS worry me. Many quasi-agencies are funded the same way the CFPB is funded. If they let the logic of the 5th circuit stand, you would be surprised at what would likely be eliminated next. This is from Nina Totenburg’s All Things Considered on February 27.
The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up a case that could threaten the existence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and potentially the status of numerous other federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve.
A panel of three Trump appointees on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last fall that the agency’s funding is unconstitutional because the CFPB gets its money from the Federal Reserve, which in turn is funded by bank fees.
Although the agency reports regularly to Congress and is routinely audited, the Fifth Circuit ruled that is not enough. The CFPB’s money has to be appropriated annually by Congress or the agency, or else everything it does is unconstitutional, the lower courts said.
The CFPB is not the only agency funded this way. The Federal Reserve itself is funded not by Congress but by banking fees. The U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Mint, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which protects bank depositors, and more, are also not funded by annual congressional appropriations.
In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Biden administration noted that even programs like Social Security and Medicare are paid for by mandatory spending, not annual appropriations.
“This marks the first time in our nation’s history that any court has held that Congress violated the Appropriations Clause by enacting a law authorizing spending,” wrote the Biden administration’s Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.
Lydon Larouche, The John Birch Society, and now cryptocurrency maniacs, including Elon Musk, have been after all of these agencies for decades. Have they found the court and the basis that could do that? Tottenberg also notes this.
A conservative bête noire
Conservatives who have long opposed the modern administrative state have previously challenged laws that declared heads of agencies can only be fired for cause. In recent years, the Supreme Court has agreed and struck down many of those provisions. The court has held that administrative agencies are essentially creatures of the Executive Branch, so the president has to be able to fire at-will and not just for cause.
This is from the Consumer Finance Monitor. “SCOTUS agrees to decide whether CFPB’s funding is unconstitutional but will not hear case until next Term.” We’re going to have to watch this one.
The sole question presented by the CFPB’s petition is:
Whether the court of appeals erred in holding that the statute providing funding to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), 12 U.S.C. 5497, violates the Appropriations Clause, U.S. Const. Art. I, § 9, Cl. 7, and in vacating a regulation promulgated at a time when the CFPB was receiving such funding.
Thus, by denying CFSA’s cross-petition and also rejecting CFSA’s request to consider the alternative grounds as antecedent questions to the CFPB’s petition, the Supreme Court is poised to decide the Appropriations Clause issue.
While the Court’s decision not to hear the case this Term means the Fifth Circuit decision will continue to be a cloud over all CFPB actions and could slow the pace of enforcement activity (particularly in pending cases where defendants can be expected to assert the Appropriations Clause issue as a defense), we do not expect it to impact the CFPB’s ongoing supervisory activity in any material way or deter Director Chopra from continuing to pursue his aggressive regulatory agenda.
Just yesterday, I visited the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Organized by the Libertarian Party, the People’s Party, and the Schiller Institute (run by LaRouche’s widow, Helga Zepp), it was thick with leafleteers pushing LaRouche messaging and featured speeches by two dozen or so Putin-friendly speakers, including presidential candidates Jill Stein, Dennis Kucinich, Tulsi Gabbard, and Ron Paul.
One speaker led the crowd in a chant, “all wars are bankers’ wars,” bringing things full circle: the assertion being that it is only because we have departed from pure, good, and undefiled Austrian economics and the gold standard can (usually Jewish) bankers print the money required to fuel endless war. It seems no one at this anti-war rally had arrived at the most obvious solution: tell Vladimir Putin to withdraw his troops and go home.
Paul, the final live speaker of the day, predictably took the podium to chants of “End the Fed” with a phalanx of Russian flags behind him in the afternoon light. (Ironically, the Eccles Federal Reserve building, barely a block away, is undergoing renovations.)
The North-Paul strategy seems to be alive and well. The most obvious strategy to achieve it would be to crash the global economy by failing to raise the debt ceiling. Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly and explicitly stated his intent to pursue this, and the Washington Post recently reported that the strategy has been developed by former Trump budget director Russell Vought. But two things stand in his way.
JUST ANNOUNCED: President Joe Biden REMINDS the GOP they said they would protect Social Security and Medicare at the State of the Union!pic.twitter.com/CBOwqVhF8M
The Debt Ceiling Crisis looms eminently. This is from Sahil Kapur and NBC News. “The big problem with trying to cut spending in a debt ceiling bill. President Biden and congressional leaders have a major hurdle to overcome as negotiators meet privately to consider a way forward and prevent a self-inflicted economic calamity.”
Heading into an expected meeting between President Joe Biden and congressional leaders this week, Republican lawmakers say an agreement on “spending caps” is important in securing their support to avert a dangerous debt default.
The House-passed debt ceiling bill would slash federal spending to fiscal year 2022 levels, requiring appropriators charged with allocating government funding to cut $131 billion compared with what Congress is currently spending.
Meeting that target without cutting defense funding would require a steep 17% cut to nondefense discretionary spending.
“Democrats will not let nondefense take a disproportionate share of deep cuts. So Republicans will have to moderate their cut demands if they want to spare defense,” said Brian Riedl, a former Senate Republican policy aide who now works at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative public policy think tank.
Riedl said they may be able to avoid the dispute by freezing spending rather than making cuts, suggesting “a two-year freeze” on federal spending as one possible endgame.
The trick is that Republicans do not want to touch Defense Spending. We’re not at war anywhere anymore so that should be the item to look for any cuts. Spending on the Military generally is just about half of discretionary spending. No country spends the kinds of money we spend on its military budget.
We’re watching Turkey’s election go to run-offs while it appears Elon Musk is using Twitter in the interests of Erdogan and his business interests there.
"You can't crown yourself the grand poobah of free speech while also cravenly caving to the demands of foreign autocracies where you also, conveniently, happen to have other business interests." – @MehdiRHasan on Elon Musk bowing to Turkey's Twitter censorship demands. pic.twitter.com/cTtCkXpU3Z
— The Mehdi Hasan Show (@MehdiHasanShow) May 15, 2023
Erdogan is currently trending on Twitter, along with a lot of information on how Twitter has successfully fought off Erdogan’s attempt to censor its content.
“This is not victory for Erdogan… but this certainly is a win for the president,” says @JomanaCNN about the Turkish elections, as the country now heads into a presidential run-off. “For the opposition, this was a serious blow.” pic.twitter.com/LvkSuVWz25
So what does a Florida-based Dotard Ex-President have in common with a Massachusetts-based Computer Geeky Junior Airman? They both have a need to share Top-Secret Documents to impress their friends.
There’s other news too. Ron DeSantis quietly–and in the dead of night– signed a six-week ban on abortion in Florida. Florida used to have abortion access making the South a death zone for fertile women. Attorney General Garland has asked the Supreme Court to block the order by the Texas Grand Inquisitor on the status of mifepristone. Regulatory chaos is likely to result in the FDA and could spread to other agencies, given the implications of the judge’s lunatic rationale. It’s the one day you can be happy there is such a thing as Big Pharma. The manufacturer of the pill has also filed for an immediate stay. We’re on Supreme Court Watch now. If they do nothing, the chaos will start at midnight with this decision and the conflicting one from Washington State. All of these restrictions are highly unpopular with voters.
A conservative group is offering a new service that texts “Woke Alerts” straight to the phones of grocery shoppers who want to know which brands are accused of taking political positions that are offensive to the right.
So, you can see that we have so much to write about this week that we’re torn between leaving something uncovered or quoting so much we run up the word counts. And, of course, JJ shows us that the political cartoon crowd has a lot of fodder.
So, there are a lot of links up top. Let me just highlight a few things.
Here is more detail on the Supreme Court Watch for the ruling on mifepristone. This is from NBC News.” The Justice Department and the drugmaker are asking the Supreme Court to block the abortion pill ruling. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories want to freeze a court decision that curbs access to the abortion pill mifepristone.”
The Biden administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to block part of a court decision that prevents pregnant women from obtaining the key abortion drug mifepristone by mail.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Food and Drug Administration, urged the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to put on hold the entirety of a decision issued by Texas-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that handed a sweeping victory to abortion opponents.
“This application concerns unprecedented lower court orders countermanding FDA’s scientific judgment and unleashing regulatory chaos by suspending the existing FDA-approved conditions of use for mifepristone,” Prelogar wrote in court papers.
Danco Laboratories, which makes Mifeprex, the brand version of the pill, filed a similar request on Friday.
Danco said it would be “irreparably harmed” if the decision goes into effect because it “will be unable to both conduct its business nationwide and comply with its legal obligations.”
Federal investigators are asking witnesses whether former President Donald J. Trump showed off to aides and visitors a map he took with him when he left office that contains sensitive intelligence information, four people with knowledge of the matter said.
The map has been just one focus of the broad Justice Department investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he departed the White House.
The nature of the map and the information it contained is not clear. But investigators have questioned a number of witnesses about it, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, as the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s Trump-focused inquiries, Jack Smith, examines the former president’s handling of classified material after leaving office and weighs charges that could include obstruction of justice.
One person briefed on the matter said investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing the map while aboard a plane. Another said that, based on the questions they were asking, investigators appeared to believe that Mr. Trump showed the map to at least one adviser after leaving office.
A third person with knowledge of the investigation said the map might also have been shown to a journalist writing a book. The Washington Post has previously reported that investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing classified material, including maps, to political donors.
The question of whether Mr. Trump was displaying sensitive material in his possession after he lost the presidency and left office is crucial as investigators try to reconstruct what Mr. Trump was doing with boxes of documents that went with him to his Florida residence and private club, Mar-a-Lago.
Among the topics investigators have been focused on is precisely when Mr. Trump was at the club last year. In particular, they were interested in whether he remained at Mar-a-Lago to look at boxes of material that were still stored there before Justice Department counterintelligence officials seeking their return came to visit in early June, according to two people familiar with the questions.
The governor’s quiet embrace of the six-week ban reflects his team’s political calculations heading into 2024, as he gears up for a presidential primary where hard-line activists and voters wield influence. It underlines the continued pressure in the GOP for politicians to embrace tighter laws — even as numerous Republicans, including some DeSantis allies, worry that abortion bans have helped sink their candidates in critical general elections. And it highlights DeSantis’s longtime reluctance to make abortion a signature part of his public profile, though he has enacted major changes to laws on the procedure.
“The numbers show that Florida is a destination” for abortion, said Chad Davis, a candidate for the state House who worked for ex-state senator Kelli Stargel, the sponsor of the 15-week ban. “That’s an embarrassment to him.”
DeSantis has generally avoided talking about abortion, even as he tours the country touting other legislation he’s signed. Rather than roll out the six-week bill as a major agenda item, he gave vague endorsements: “I’m willing to sign great life legislation,” he told one reporter who put him on the spot. A six-week ban has proved divisive in his orbit, with some donors strongly opposed and other Republicans eager to simply move on.
President Biden has put out a statement on the arrest of the Leaker and his plans to review the classified documents processes. Not let’s see hin do something about getting White Christian Nationalists out of the Military.
I’ll leave you with this from the High Priestess of QAnon.
Hours after a 21-year-old airman was arrested and charged in connection with leaked military secrets, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia politicized the development and implied the Biden administration is "the real enemy."https://t.co/PmoD4sAvkC
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Let me explain why the court’s logic and the current makeup of SCOTUS worry me. Many quasi-agencies are funded the same way the CFPB is funded. If they let the logic of the 5th circuit stand, you would be surprised at what would likely be eliminated next. 
Lydon Larouche, The John Birch Society, and now cryptocurrency maniacs, including Elon Musk, have been after all of these agencies for decades. Have they found the court and the basis that could do that? Tottenberg also notes this.
Here’s an exciting read by Dave Troy, writing for The Washington Spectator, if you’d like to visit the crockpot of crazy folks wanting to tank our economy through debt default or any other possible way.
The Debt Ceiling Crisis looms eminently. 
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
So, you can see that we have so much to write about this week that we’re torn between leaving something uncovered or quoting so much we run up the word counts. And, of course, JJ shows us that the political cartoon crowd has a lot of fodder.
This is the latest set of witnesses to discuss Trump’s Classified Documents theft. This is from the New York Times. 
Hannah Knowles writes on 
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