Trump’s lawyer told the justices that the founders had “in a sense” written immunity into the Constitution because it’s a logical outgrowth of a broadly worded clause about presidential power. But that’s the sort of argument conservative justices have often scoffed at — most notably in the context of abortion rights.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: April 27, 2024 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, SCOTUS | Tags: Amy Coney Barrett, Autocracy, cruelty to animals, David Pecker, Idaho anti-abortion law, Kristi Noem, MAGA jusstices, Trump "presidential immunity" claim 7 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
Rose Freymouth-Frazier, Divine Intervention
I couldn’t sleep last night. I just can’t get past what went on in the Supreme Court on Wednesday and Thursday. Suddenly, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness no longer applies to women, and it appears at least four of the justices are willing to help Trump become a dictator. Amy Coney Barrett seemed to have some reservations on both issues.
On Wednesday, we had to listen to the MAGA justices argue about how many organs would have to shut down in a pregnant women’s body before she could qualify for emergency medical care. Then on Thursday, they considered whether a president ordering the military to assassinate his opponent would be an official act. Trump’s attorney argued that it could be and therefore he would be immune from prosecution for murder.
JJ addressed the abortion arguments on Thursday, and Daknikat posted about the Trump immunity case yesterday. But I want to share a few more articles on these issues.
First, CNN’s John Fritze on Amy Coney Barrett’s role in the abortion argument: How Justice Amy Coney Barrett drove the Supreme Court’s debate on abortion and Trump immunity.
Chief Justice John Roberts may emerge as the pivotal vote in two politically charged cases on abortion and presidential immunity the Supreme Court heard this week, but it was Justice Amy Coney Barrett who owned the arguments.
In a pair of high-profile hearings, the 52-year-old former law professor dug into a lawyer defending Idaho’s strict abortion ban – at one point exclaiming she was “shocked” by his explanation of how the law worked in practice. A day later, she nudged an attorney for former President Donald Trump into a series of potentially critical concessions.
Barrett, Trump’s third nominee, has been a reliable vote for the conservative bloc since arriving days before the 2020 presidential election. But on a 6-3 court that often splits along ideological lines in the most significant disputes, Barrett managed to shape the final arguments of the current term this week while also keeping her options open.
“Why are you here?” she demanded of Idaho’s lawyer at one point, questioning whether there was actually a live issue the court needed to rule on….
Her exchange in the abortion arguments on Wednesday was shared widely on social media, including by the Center for Reproductive Rights – a legal advocacy group Barrett is unlikely to often agree with. Two years ago, Barrett was one of five votes needed to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“We’ve seen a number of signs during oral arguments this term, especially in the last few sessions, that Justice Barrett is increasingly comfortable not just in her own skin, but in staking out territory, even in high-profile cases, that puts her at least somewhere between the more conservative and more progressive blocs on the court,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law….
As the second-least senior justice, Barrett sits at the far end of the Supreme Court’s mahogany bench. But she was at the center of some of the most important turning points of the nearly three-hour oral argument Thursday about Trump’s claims of sweeping immunity in special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion case.
Mewcifer, by Paul Koudounaris
Barrett was one of several justices to get Trump attorney John Sauer to agree that a president’s “private” actions – as opposed to his “official” actions – do not qualify for immunity. That was a notable break from earlier arguments Trump submitted that called for “absolute” immunity on a much wider scale of acts. In one key exchange, Barrett then walked Sauer through a series of hypothetical questions that closely mirrored the allegations in the special counsel’s indictment.
If those actions are considered private and not part of a president’s official duties, then Smith has argued he should be able to put them before a jury.
A party turns to a private attorney, Barrett hypothesized, “who was willing to spread knowingly false claims of election fraud” to spearhead his challenges to an election. That appeared to be a reference to former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, identified by CNN as “co-conspirator 1” in Smith’s indictment.
Maybe Barrett will turn out to be a swing vote. She could end up siding with the three liberal women on some cases, along with John Roberts.
There is still quite a bit of commentary on how the justices dealt with Trump’s “presidential immunity” claim.
Dennis Aftergut at Salon: SCOTUS majority abandons conservative principles to mount bizarre defense of Trump’s immunity claim.
Yesterday’s message from the rightwing justices of the Supreme Court, particularly the male justices, was shocking to any believer in true, conservative jurisprudence and the rule of law. Their questions at the oral argument in the Donald Trump immunity case signaled strongly that they really care more about enhancing presidential power than preserving democracy, and to that end, lean toward giving Trump the gift of even more delay.
Trump, the former president and Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting, is accused of trying to overturn an election in the weeks before January 6. He has said the “constitution should be terminated” and that he will be “a “dictator on Day One.”
In that context, Americans want to know before they vote if Trump is innocent or guilty of using unlawful means to interfere with the 2020 certification of President Biden’s election. We deserve that knowledge.
The Supreme Court, however, has no such care. In the stunning words of Trump appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “I’m not concerned about the here and now, I’m more concerned about the future.” Justice Samuel Alito said he didn’t want to talk about the “particular facts” but rather to talk “in the abstract.” To the same effect was the statement of Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch: “We’re writing a decision for the ages.”
Gorsuch, you may recall, is the occupant of the seat that Mitch McConnell stole from President Obama and his appointee, then-Judge Merrick Garland. Then, of course, there’s Justice Clarence Thomas, who declined to disqualify himself from hearing the case even though the emails of his wife, Ginni, show that she was an inside operative trying to help Trump get the election overturned four years ago.
On their ridiculous arguments:
Here’s why the statements from Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are offensive to those committed to honest, conservative jurisprudence. The Constitution limits federal courts to deciding the “Cases or Controversies” presented to them based on case-specific facts.
Princess Cheeto, by Hugo Martinez
Hence, federal jurists are duty-bound to focus their attention on what Kavanaugh said he didn’t care about: the facts of “the here and now.”
To be sure, the implications of any decision for future situations are always to be taken into account. But when the facts of a case are so exceptional, so confined, so clear, two things matter above everything else: First, that the case be disposed of purely on those facts; second, that courts are well practiced in how to limit their decisions’ future application.
Indeed, all the justices need to say, even repeat, is, “This case is unique in all of American history. The allegations of the indictment, which we must take as true for now, shock the conscience. We limit our holding today to its facts and only these facts.” As the Supreme Court’s own website states:
The Constitution limits the Court to dealing with “Cases” and “Controversies.” John Jay, the first Chief Justice, clarified this restraint early in the Court’s history by declining to advise President George Washington on the constitutional implications of a proposed foreign policy decision. The Court[’s] . . . function is limited only to deciding specific cases.
Indeed, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Chief Justice John Roberts chided the majority for going outside the boundaries of the case or controversy presented – a Mississippi statute permitting abortions up to 15 weeks after inception. But now we are faced with the prospect that the Court may send the case back to the lower courts to decide a controversy not presented, giving Trump the delay he wants by asking a lower court to analyze a bogus constitutional theory — that a president is criminally immune when he acts as president.
Read the rest at Salon.
Josh Gerstein at Politico:
The Supreme Court’s conservatives often accuse liberals of inventing provisions nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Now, the fingers are pointed in the other direction.
At the attention-grabbing arguments this week over Donald Trump’s claim of sweeping presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, the six-member conservative bloc seemed largely unconcerned by a key flaw in Trump’s theory: Nothing in the Constitution explicitly mentions the concept of presidential immunity.
Two years ago, conservatives relied on a strict interpretation of the Constitution’s text and original meaning to overturn the federal right to abortion. But on Thursday, as they debated whether Trump can be prosecuted for his bid to subvert the 2020 election, they seemed content to engage in a free-form balancing exercise where they weighed competing interests and practical consequences.
Some critics said the conservative justices — all of whom purport to adhere to an original understanding of the Constitution — appeared to be on the verge of fashioning a legal protection for former presidents based on the justices’ subjective assessment of what’s best for the country and not derived from the nation’s founding document.
Annie Montgomerie, Three Cats
And they seem to think that Donald Trump as a dictator would be “best for the country!”
“The legal approach they seemed to be gravitating toward has no basis in the Constitution, in precedent, or logic,” said Michael Waldman, president and CEO of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “It sure ain’t originalism.”
The two-hour, 40-minute argument session featured a boatload of scary hypotheticals about coups and assassinations, along with predictions about serial, tit-for-tat prosecutions of future presidents, but there was little discussion of the Constitution’s text.
That could come as a surprise to some. Justice Elena Kagan, one of the three liberals now on the court, famously declared in 2015 that conservatives had essentially won the decadeslong battle between those who favored a close fealty to text and original meaning and those who emphasized pragmatism or saw the Constitution as an evolving document.
“I think we are all textualists now,” Kagan told an audience at Harvard Law School then, as she delivered a lecture named for her then-colleague Justice Anontin Scalia, arguably the lead crusader for the text-based approach.
Kagan was perhaps the most insistent Thursday in highlighting the absence of any explicit immunity for presidents in the Constitution.
“The framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to. There were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They knew how to give legislative immunity. They didn’t provide immunity to the president,” said Kagan, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “And, you know, not so surprising. They were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law.”
More at the Politico link.
Brynn Tannehill at The New Republic: The Court Just Sealed Everyone’s Fate, Including Its Own. The justices seem to think that the power they apparently just handed Donald Trump can’t be used against them someday. Right.
This week, the Supreme Court managed to fail to meet the already extremely low expectations most sane people already had for it. First, during the Idaho EMTALA case on whether hospitals receiving federal funding can refuse to provide abortions to women who are actively dying as a result of a pregnancy, we heard debate over which, and how many, organs a woman had to lose before an abortion becomes legally acceptable. By all appearances, it looks as though the court is going to gut the already laughably weak “life of the mother” protections by a 5-4 vote.
It followed up this abysmal performance with hearing the Trump immunity case the next day, and the comportment of the same five male, conservative justices was even worse. When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Donald Trump’s lawyer, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?”, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that would well be an official act.”
Based on that one line of questioning, Trump’s argument should be going down in flames 9-0. A democracy cannot survive when its supreme leader can arbitrarily decide that it’s in the nation’s best interest to rub out his opponents, and then leave it to some future court to decide whether it was an official act, because he’ll get away with it as long as there aren’t 67 votes in the Senate to impeach. And given that it will have been established that the president can put out a contract on political foes, how many senators are going to vote to impeach?
contrary: At least five of the justices seemed to buy into the Trump team’s arguments that the power of the office of the president must be protected from malicious and politicized litigation. They were uninterested in the actual case at hand or its consequences. Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, perhaps captured my response to the Supreme Court’s arguments best: “I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S. Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”
At a minimum, it appears the court will send all of the federal cases back down to lower courts to reconsider whether Trump’s crimes were “official acts.” It’s also likely that their new definition of “official acts” is likely to be far broader than anyone should be comfortable with, or at least broad enough to give Trump a pass. This delay all but guarantees that Trump will not stand trial for anything besides the current hush-money case before the 2024 election.
Ice Cream Cat, by Jim McKenzie
This is catastrophic in so many ways. The first is that it increases the already high chances that the United States ends up with a dictator who will attempt to rapidly disassemble democracy in pursuit of becoming President for Life. It simultaneously increases the chances that yes, he will go ahead and violate the civil and human rights of political opponents and classes of people he calls Communists, Marxists, and fascists. People forget that the first German concentration camp (Dachau) was built in 1933 to hold members of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, and Trump has made it clear that he’s building enough camps to process a minimum of 11 million people (migrants, at least for starters).
The conservatives on the Supreme Court have also exposed their hubris, willful ignorance, and foolishness to the entire world in stark terms, and it will cost them and the nation dearly in the long run. They somehow presume that if Trump is elected and goes full dictator, that the power of the court, and their reputation, will save them. The truth is, Trump’s relationships with everyone he meets are completely transactional. If the court ever stops being useful to him, he will terminate it with prejudice if he thinks he can get away with it, and this court is doing everything it can to make him think he can get away with it.
These justices’ foolishness lies in their lack of foresight as to what happens if Trump wins in 2024. In the justice’s efforts to ensure that they are the most powerful branch of government, they are about to make it the weakest. They are creating a win-win situation for Trump, and a lose-lose for themselves. When Trump is president again, he is likely to believe that he has the option of “removing” any member of the Supreme Court who defies him. As long as the court doesn’t rule against him, they’re fine. From the justices’ perspective, they either end up neutered lap dogs of a despot, who do whatever they’re told out of fear, or they defy him and end up somewhere … unpleasant (at best). Taking a dirt nap at worst. After all, if Trump can rub out a political opponent, can’t he do the same to an uncooperative jurist?
Tannehill is absolutely right.
There’s an interesting piece on the hush money trial by Ewan Palmer at Newsweek: Donald Trump Refusing To Go After David Pecker Raises Questions.
Speculation has risen as to why Donald Trump has not risked violating his gag order to attack former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker following his damning testimony in the hush money trial.
Pecker, the former head of America Media, which owns the tabloid, was the first witness to take the stand in New York in the former president’s falsifying business records trial, during which he discussed setting up an arrangement to help stop negative stories about Trump from coming out ahead of the 2016 election.
While under oath, Pecker said he had concerns about the legality of performing a so-called “catch and kill” by paying Playboy model Karen McDougal $180,000 to keep a story about an alleged affair between her and the former president from coming out ahead of the 2016 election.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in relation to money he arranged for Michael Cohen to pay adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep an alleged affair she had with Trump secret in the run-up to the 2016 election. Prosecutors argue that Trump, Pecker, and Cohen “orchestrated a cover-up to interfere” with the 2016 presidential election by concealing negative information about the Republican from becoming public.
Trump is currently under a gag order which aims to prevent him from making public comments about witnesses in the trial. However, prosecutors have suggested that the former president has violated this order several times, including publicly attacking Cohen in interviews and on social media.
Speaking on the LegalAF podcast, trial lawyer Michael Popok noted that Trump has so far refused to make any damning statements about Pecker, despite frequently willing to risk a fine or even jail to violate his gag order to attack Cohen.
“Donald Trump went after Cohen, he went Cohen in the opening, on social media, but he’s silent. It’s almost like he’s endorsing Pecker and that’s terrible for him,” Popok said.
“He hasn’t done a darn thing to tear down Pecker,” he added. “Pecker is dumping willingly on Donald Trump and supporting the entire case.”
Former prosecutor Karen Friedman Agnifilo also made a similar point about Trump not discussing Pecker on the same podcast.
Maybe Trump didn’t hear that much of Pecker’s testimony, since he has been napping every day during the trial.
Antonio Tantardini, The Wounded Friend (Sculpture)
This is another story I just can’t stop thinking about. You’ve probably heard that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has a book coming out that contains a horrific confession.
Martin Pengelly at The Guardian: Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book.
In 2012, as the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney was pilloried for tying a dog, Seamus, to the roof of the family car for a cross-country trip.
But in 2024 Kristi Noem, a strong contender to be named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has managed to go one further – by admitting killing a dog of her own.
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant….
Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in the US next month. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Like other aspirants to be Trump’s second vice-president who have ventured into print, Noem offers readers a mixture of autobiography, policy prescriptions and political invective aimed at Democrats and other enemies, all of it raw material for speeches on the campaign stump.
She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.
By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.
I’m not going to post the description of Noem killing an innocent puppy and a goat that was getting on her nerves. Read it at the link, if you think you can handle it. After the two murders, Noem realizes that a construction crew as been watching as she shot the two animals and tossed their bodies in a “gravel pit.”
The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.
“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
Noam is a psychopath, along with Trump. She should have been prosecuted for animal cruelty–not to mention the effect on her child.
Noam was heavily criticized on social media all day yesterday. She tried to defend herself–unsuccessfully I would think.
Anjali Huynh at The New York Times:
Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota on Friday defended a story included in her forthcoming biography in which she describes killing a family dog on their farm, to her daughter’s distress — a grisly anecdote that instantly drew criticism from a number of political opponents.
Ms. Noem, a Republican who is widely seen as a contender to be former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, shared details about shooting the 14-month-old dog, a female wirehaired pointer named Cricket, and an unnamed goat, according to excerpts first reported by The Guardian….
The story drew condemnation on Friday from a swath of the political world, mainly to Ms. Noem’s left, including some anti-Trump Republicans and a number of Democrats. President Biden’s re-election campaign wrote on X that “Trump VP contender Kristi Noem brags about shooting her 14-month-old puppy to death.” And the Democratic National Committee issued a statement describing the passages as “disturbing and horrifying.”
Ms. Noem seized on The Guardian’s article to underscore her rural-America bona fides, promote her book and mock the news media. “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she wrote Friday on X, adding that her family recently had to “put down” three horses.
Are they in the gravel pit too?
She added that her book would contain “more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping.”
Noam is a monster. No wonder she was banned from tribal lands in her own state.
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you all are having a great weekend!
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: April 20, 2024 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: FISA bill, House Speaker Mike Johnson, January 6, Judge Chutkan, Letitia James, MAGA Republicans, Marjorie Taylor Green, Rep. Ken Buck, Rep. Tom Cole, Russia, Trump trials, Ukraine aid 5 Comments
Drawing by Laurel Burch
Happy Caturday!!
I have a mixed bag of reads for you this morning. Of course there’s news about Trump’s trials. The jury is all set in the hush money/election interference case, and the trial will begin on Monday with opening statements. The jury interviews were disturbing; many potential jurors were anxious and fearful about getting involved in the case, and some actually shed tears. In the NY fraud case, it looks like Trump’s $175 million bond might not be accepted.
House Speaker Mike Johnson finally decided to pass a bill with aid for Ukraine, and it looks like this could happen this weekend. How did that happen?
The Senate was finally able to pass the FISA bill, just in the nick of time.
Marjorie Taylor Greene emerges as Moscow’s handmaiden, and some Republicans are fed up with her and the other far right crazies.
Trump Trials
The Washington Post: Opening statements set for Monday in Trump’s New York hush money trial.
A jury is set to hear opening statements Monday on whether Donald Trump falsified bank records in connection with his effort to hide an alleged affair from voters in the 2016 election.
The historic trial began this week with a speedy but emotional jury selection. A few potential jurors cried as they considered whether they could handle the first-ever trial of a former president — one who is known for his tirades against the U.S. justice system and is also the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s presidential election.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan thanked participants for their bravery as several shared painful details of their pasts in front of scores of reporters during the jury screening process. He praised others for their honesty in saying that Trump’s rhetoric would make it hard for them to judge Trump fairly.
“I feel so overcome, nervous and anxious,” one potential juror told the judge Friday morning. “This is so much more stressful than I thought it was going to be.” A couple of hours later, a man who had been protesting outside the courthouse all week in opposition to both Trump and President Biden set himself on fire; he was hospitalized in critical condition.
Through questions designed to root out bias among the jury pool, both sides have started to signal their trial strategies.
Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass told prospective jurors that the government would prove not just bank fraud but an implicit conspiracy to “commit election fraud” and “pull the wool over the eyes of the American voters.” In prosecutors’ formulation, Trump skirted campaign finance laws by funneling a $130,000 payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels though Michael Cohen, his attorney and fixer, then falsely claiming the money used to repay Cohen was for legal work.
Defense attorney Susan Necheles laid the groundwork for impeaching the testimony of Cohen, a convicted perjurer, by asking potential jurors if they could “use your common sense” and “understand that if two witnesses … say two diametrically opposed things, someone is lying.”
She added that jurors should agree that “if somebody tells a story a number of different ways over time and changes the details, that might be a sign that they are lying.”
Unknown artist
Some things jurors said during their interviews:
One member of the jury pool said Friday that growing up in New Jersey, Trump was his image of big city success. He told himself that one day he would live in Trump Tower, the Fifth Avenue landmark Trump built in the early 1980s: “That was a powerful symbol for me.”
Now, the man said, he associated Trump with “harmful” and “divisive” politics. Worse, he said, he did not think Trump really believed the biased things he said — “I think he just pushes it to stay in power.”
The man was eliminated from the group after it came out that he had referred to Trump on social media as “the devil.” So was a woman who said Trump’s rise had “emboldened” homophobic, racist and sexist commentary at the gym where she used to box.
Others were excluded for reasons having nothing to do with the famous defendant. One woman was overwhelmed with emotion when she explained she could not serve on the jury because of a past felony conviction, the details of which she shared with the judge. A man teared up when he said he had been the victim of a crime.
Trump’s team has been scouring social media for evidence that jurors are biased against him. But many of those picked said they did not engage on such platforms or follow politics closely, preferring news about sports, technology and business. Along with the mainstream news publications the president routinely disparages, multiple prospective jurorssaid they read the conservative New York Post and watch Fox News. And many of the people screened said they would have no problem judging the former president.
He seems “selfish and self-serving,” said one woman.
The way he carries himself in public “leaves something to be desired,” said another.
His “negative rhetoric and bias,” said another man, is what is “most harmful.”
Over the past week, Donald Trump has been forced to sit inside a frigid New York courtroom and listen to a parade of potential jurors in his criminal hush money trial share their unvarnished assessments of him.
It’s been a dramatic departure for the former president and presumptive 2024 GOP nominee, who is accustomed to spending his days in a cocoon of cheering crowds and constant adulation. Now a criminal defendant, Trump will instead spend the next several weeks subjected to strict rules that strip him of control over everything from what he is permitted to say to the temperature of the room.
“He’s the object of derision. It’s his nightmare. He can’t control the script. He can’t control the cinematography. He can’t control what’s being said about him. And the outcome could go in a direction he really doesn’t want,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and critic.
Many days, Trump heads to his nearby golf course, where he is “swarmed by people wanting to shake his hand, take pictures of him, and tell him how amazing he is,” said Stephanie Grisham, a longtime aide who broke with Trump after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021….
Now, Trump faces a trial that could result in felony convictions and possible prison time. And he will have to listen to more critics, without being able to punch back verbally — something he revels in doing.
Artist unknown
NBC News: on the latest from the financial fraud case: New York AG Letitia James asks judge to void Trump’s bond in his civil fraud verdict.
New York Attorney General Letitia James on Friday asked that a judge void former President Donald Trump’s bond in his civil fraud case, questioning whether the company that issued it has the funds to back it up.
In a 26-page filing ahead of a pre-scheduled hearing on Monday, James expressed concern about whether Knight Specialty Insurance Company could secure the $175 million bond. She also argued that the collateral put up by the former president should be under the full control of the company.
One of James’ concerns about KSIC is that the insurer “is not authorized to write business in New York and thus not regulated by the state’s insurance department.” She added that the company “had never before written a surety bond in New York or in the prior two years in any other jurisdiction, and has a total policyholder surplus of just $138 million.”
James also criticized Trump’s team’s apparent hold on the collateral put up to back the bond.
“KSIC does not now have an exclusive right to control the account and will not obtain such control unless and until it exercises a right to do so on two days’ notice,” she wrote….
The new filing comes after James filed a notice earlier this month seeking more information about the former president’s bond. In that filing, she asked that Trump’s lawyers or the insurance company “file a motion to justify the surety bond” or provide additional information about the collateral put up by Trump within 10 days.
The hearing will compete for attention with the beginning of Trump’s trial in the hush money/election interference case.
Some January 6 case news at Politico: ‘It can happen again’: Judge set to preside over Trump trial delivers her toughest Jan. 6 sentence to date.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has handed down her harshest Jan. 6 sentence to date — five-and-a-half years — to Scott Miller, a Maryland man and former Proud Boys leader who assaulted multiple officers in a violent attempt to breach the Capitol.
Chutkan based her sentence, delivered on Friday, in part on Miller’s “aggressive” actions at the Capitol but also on his private writings that called for racial and religious violence against minorities and Jews. She said the evidence of his “violent ideology” — his embrace of Nazism and his purported belief that Washington, D.C., residents should be executed — troubled her despite Miller’s insistence that he had disavowed those beliefs soon after Jan. 6.
Chutkan’s 66-month sentence narrowly edges two 63-month sentences she handed down to Robert Palmer and Mark Ponder, who similarly joined some of the most egregious violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6: the brutal hand-to-hand combat at the mouth of the building’s Lower West Terrace tunnel.
Chutkan, who is in line to preside over the criminal trial of Donald Trump for his bid to subvert the 2020 election, emphasized her belief that the Jan. 6 mob attack was “close to as serious a crisis as this nation has ever faced.” She lauded officers who, though outnumbered and ill-equipped, fought to protect the building.
“They faced horrendous circumstances. They were assaulted, spat on, beaten, kicked, gassed,” Chutkan said. “They are patriots.”
Chutkan also worried that the conditions that caused Jan. 6 still exist.
“It can happen again,” the Obama-appointed judge said. “Extremism is alive and well in this country. Threats of violence continue unabated.”
I can’t wait until Chutkan sits in judgement on Trump.
Mike Johnson’s turnaround on Ukraine
BBC News: Ukraine Russia war: US Congress close to passing long-awaited aid.
After months of delay, the House of Representatives is due to vote on tens of billions of dollars in US military aid for Ukraine and Israel.
The Guardians, Jerzy Marek
Both measures have vocal opponents in Congress, and their hopes of passage have hinged on a fragile bipartisan coalition to overcome legislative hurdles.
A key procedural vote on Friday gave a strong indication the votes will pass.
A debate is under way and voting is expected later on Saturday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson says he wants to push the measures through, even if it jeopardises his position.
The Ukraine vote will be closely watched in Kyiv, which has warned of an urgent need for fresh support from its allies as Russia makes steady gains on the battlefield.
If the House passes the bills, the Senate may approve the package as soon as this weekend. President Joe Biden has pledged to sign it into law.
Read details on the bills at the BBC link.
ABC News: House Democrats help Johnson avoid defeat on foreign aid bills, despite GOP defections.
The House on Friday cleared a key procedural hurdle in passing foreign aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, despite dozens of Republican defections, with Democrats helping Speaker Mike Johnson avoid a stinging defeat.
Soon after, a third Republican said he would join a threatened move to oust him.
The chamber voted 316-94 to advance the bills, setting up Saturday votes on final passage of $95 billion in foreign assistance that has been held up in a political fight in Washington for several months.
Procedural votes such as Friday’s are typically passed by the House majority alone, but Democrats stepped in to help push the legislation forward after Republican hard-liners collectively opposed the measure. More Democrats voted to advance the bills than Republicans.
“Democrats, once again, will be the adults in the room,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., during debate ahead of the vote.
Leaving the House floor after the vote, Johnson said the four foreign aid bills are “the best possible product” under the circumstances. “We look forward to final passage on the bill tomorrow.”
The individual bills provide roughly $26 billion for Israel, $61 billion for Ukraine and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific. The measures are similar to legislation passed by a bipartisan group in the Senate back in February, which tied all aid together into one measure.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Mike Johnson’s Shockingly Pro-Ukraine Speech Really Sticks It to MAGA.
It was a remarkable moment: After introducing a package of bills that includes military aid to Ukraine, Mike Johnson flatly told reporters on Wednesday that enabling Ukraine to defend itself is in the best interests of America and the world. This surprised a lot of people who had wrongly assumed the House speaker was effectively functioning as a stooge for Vladimir Putin—and Donald Trump—and would thus slow-walk Ukraine aid to death before ever allowing a vote on it.
By Найди кота
Johnson’s new stance has attracted a good deal of positive attention. But I want to highlight an aspect of it that’s been overlooked because it’s an important tell about the true state of MAGA ideology and what it’s demanding of Republicans these days.
“I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten,” Johnson said, in a moment that became a mini-speech. “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland, or one of our NATO allies.” If so, he added, we might find ourselves sending troops to defend allies from Putin later.
Did we really hear the speaker say that he believes what our intelligence services have told him about the long-term consequences of cutting off aid to Ukraine?
This is a direct challenge to the MAGA worldview in multiple ways. Johnson is treating Putin as the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and acknowledging his broader imperialist designs, which is heresy to some MAGA Republicans. But he’s also flatly declaring that on these matters, the deep state is very much to be believed.
A big MAGA conceit is the idea that a nefarious deep-state network of senior federal bureaucrats, nongovernmental experts, and technocratic and managerial elites lurks behind the push to fund Ukraine—and that it’s making up lies about Russia’s war to create a pretext to fulfill a broader set of sinister globalist aims.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene recently tweeted this:
The Ukraine scam is up.
If our Republican majority in Congress funds Joe Biden’s war against Russia on behalf of Ukraine (because he’s a puppet on strings) then Republicans are tools of the foreign war loving deep state.
This is probably MAGA’s most elaborate exercise in up-is-down totalitarian-style propaganda of all: Biden is being manipulated by a deep-state “scam”—i.e., the idea that Ukraine is worth defending—to carry out a war against Russia, which has been magically transformed from aggressor to victim.
Read the rest at TNR.
It really appears that Biden worked his charms on Johnson over a period of weeks. Politico: How Johnson and Biden locked arms on Ukraine.
Speaker Mike Johnson’s sudden bid to deliver aid to Ukraine came days after fresh intelligence described the U.S. ally at a true make-or-break moment in its war with Russia.
It was exactly the kind of dire assessment that President Joe Biden and the White House had spent months privately warning Johnson was inevitable.
The House GOP leader is embracing $60.8 billion in assistance to Ukraine in a push to prevent deep losses on the battlefield, amid warnings that Ukrainians are badly outgunned and losing faith in the U.S. following months of delay in providing new funds.
The intelligence, shown to lawmakers last week and described by two members who have seen it, built on weeks of reports that have alarmed members of Congress and Biden administration officials. On Thursday, CIA Director William Burns warned that, barring more U.S. aid, Ukraine “could lose on the battlefield by the end of 2024.”
It heightened the sense of urgency surrounding a White House effort to convince Johnson to hold a public vote on Ukraine aid that has dragged on behind the scenes since the day he became speaker. Johnson had resisted for months in the face of growing threats to his speakership if he sided with Biden and allowed the vote.
Since the last time Congress approved aid to Ukraine in late 2022, conservative skepticism of sending U.S. weapons and dollars to the country has grown, threatening Johnson’s speakership as well as Biden’s foreign policy agenda.
But he has now effectively locked arms with the president: Johnson’s alignment with Biden this week has extended at times even to deploying similar talking points in favor of funding Ukraine, and comes in defiance of efforts by conservatives like Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to rally a rebellion….
Johnson’s support for the aid bill, part of a package that could pass the House as soon as this weekend, would grant Biden a major foreign policy victory that has eluded him for a year. It would stabilize a Ukrainian defense running low on munitions and bracing for a renewed Russian offensive in early summer.
It’s also validation, Biden aides and allies said, of a White House strategy focused on slowly courting Johnson behind the scenes while letting him find his own path to a solution — even if it meant weathering frequent setbacks and building frustration within its own party.
Biden’s years of experience in the Senate and as Vice President are serving him (and us) in good stead.
Senate passes the FISA bill
Charlie Savage and Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Senate Passes Two-Year Extension of Surveillance Law Just After It Expired.
The Senate early on Saturday approved an extension of a warrantless surveillance law, moving to renew it shortly after it had expired and sending President Biden legislation that national security officials say is crucial to fighting terrorism but that privacy advocates decry as a threat to Americans’ rights.
The law, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, had appeared all but certain to lapse over the weekend, with senators unable for most of Friday to reach a deal on whether to consider changes opposed by national security officials and hawks.
By Chuck Berk
But after hours of negotiation, the Senate abruptly reconvened late on Friday for a flurry of votes in which those proposed revisions were rejected, one by one, and early on Saturday the bill, which extends Section 702 for two years, won approval, 60 to 34.
“We have good news for America’s national security,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, said as he stood during the late-night session to announce the agreement to complete work on the bill. “Allowing FISA to expire would have been dangerous.”
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland praised the bill’s passage, calling Section 702 “indispensable to the Justice Department’s work to protect the American people from terrorist, nation-state, cyber and other threats.” [….]
While the program has legal authority to continue operating until April 2025 regardless of whether Congress extended the law, the White House sent a statement to senators on Friday warning them that a “major provider has indicated it intends to cease collection on Monday” and that another said it was considering stopping collection. The statement did not identify them, and the Justice Department declined to say more.
The statement also said that the administration was confident that the FISA court would order any such companies to resume complying with the program, but that there could be gaps in collection in the meantime — and if a rash of providers challenged the program, the “situation could turn very bad and dangerous very quickly.” It urged senators to pass the House bill without any amendments before the midnight deadline.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Crazy Caucus
Julia Davis at The Daily Beast: Whiplash as Russia Toasts Derided Marjorie Taylor Greene as Their Top New Hero.
In recent years, clips from Tucker Carlson’s shows were prominently featured on many Russian state TV shows, with hosts and guests clinging to his every word and even surmising he might be the only American they don’t want to kill.
After Carlson’s flat-footed interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by caustic comments from both the host and the subject, the bloom was off the rose.
Similarly, Mike Johnson’s arrival as the 56th Speaker of the House was cheered on state TV with the anticipation that—at Trump’s request—he would block U.S. aid to Ukraine. For months, Johnson did just that, prompting state TV host Olga Skabeeva to describe him as “our Johnson.” His recent reversal of this stance prompted Russian propagandists to debate whether he was “bought” or simply “bent over” by the Democrats.
Now, Russia’s former favorites have been edged out by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—the new darling of the Kremlin-controlled state television. In the past, Greene was routinely mocked for her uneducated statements and used as a prime example of how stupid all Americans are, which is a popular refrain in Russian media. After laughing at Greene for confusing gazpacho with the Nazi Gestapo and claiming that California wildfires have been caused by “Jewish space lasers,” leading propagandists described her antics as evidence of the “mental debilitation” of Western politicians.
By Malysheva Nastenka
But the mood changed once Greene started to say things that the Russian propaganda apparatus found extremely useful. Her Tweets that labeled NATO as a useless organization and demanded the U.S. withdraw from the alliance it is currently leading were featured on state TV and described as “sensational.” Greene’s rhetoric has been interpreted by state TV host Evgeny Popov to mean that “She believes that Americans should help Putin win. Yes, you heard that right. To help him win in Ukraine.”
Greene’s baseless claims that the U.S. is “supporting Nazis in Ukraine” were likewise lauded by state TV propagandists and showcased on multiple channels. Previous mockery did not deter the state-controlled media from gladly using Greene’s misleading statements to their advantage. The U.S. congresswoman was starting to become a long-distance darling for the Moscow crowd, prominently featured on state television and adored to the point that the Kremlin’s favorite propagandist Vladimir Solovyov proclaimed, “Thank goodness she exists.”
The importance of influential Westerners repeating the Russian talking points is constantly underscored by the head of RT, Margarita Simonyan—who admits that her state-controlled network is running covert operations in the United States and other countries. She described RT’s efforts as the “empire of covert projects that is working with public opinion.”
Greene is now routinely showcased on the most popular programs as a prime example that the cracks in the GOP support for Ukraine are “good signals from Washington.” Solovyov and the guests on his show even touted Marjorie as a possible replacement for Russia’s perennial favorite, Donald Trump, as the next U.S. president—while acknowledging that the congresswoman is “somewhat funny.”
The Hill: Buck takes swing at ‘Moscow Marjorie’: She is just ‘mouthing the Russian propaganda.’
Former Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) went after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for her anti-Ukraine position in an interview on CNN Friday.
“Moscow Marjorie has reached a new low,” Buck said in an interview on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” with anchor Erica Hill. “You know, during the Russian Revolution, [Bolshevik Revolution leader Vladimir] Lenin talked about American journalists who were writing glowing reports about Russia at the time as ‘useful idiots.’”
“And I don’t even think that Marjorie reaches that level of being a useful idiot here,” Buck continued. “She is just mouthing the Russian propaganda, and really hurting American foreign policy in the process.”
During a House Oversight Committee meeting Wednesday, Greene noted news stories and displayed photos she said showed neo-Nazis in Ukraine. She brought up her concern over how it is seen as misinformation to discuss “the Nazis in Ukraine and their recruitment efforts that go all around the world.”
Greene, who also filed a motion in late March to vacate against current House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), argued against foreign aid during an appearance on former White House aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast Thursday, saying she wants “an ‘America First’ economy” and that “we are going to demand it from our Republican leaders.” [….]
It’s not the first time Buck has referred to Greene as “Moscow Marjorie”. The Colorado Republican coined the nickname earlier this month when disagreeing with former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) assessment of Taylor Greene as a “very serious legislator”.
“My experience with Marjorie is, people have talked to her about not filing articles of impeachment on President Biden before he was sworn into office, on not filing articles of impeachment that were groundless made on other individuals in the Biden administration,” he told Erin Burnett in a separate CNN interview.
“And she was never moved by that. She was always focused on her social media account,” Buck continued. “And Moscow Marjorie is focused now on this Ukraine issue and getting her talking points from the Kremlin and making sure that she is popular and she is getting a lot of coverage.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma) has been in the House of Representatives for more than 20 years. In a recent interview with Politico, he unleashed on newer members of the House Republican Conference over behavior he views as counterproductive.
Cole was particularly candid about his feelings for the House majority’s far-right fringe. He lamented that a small handful of extremists among his conference has so far been able to oust a sitting House speaker and assert their will over the rest of the party despite not holding any leadership positions.
The Oklahoma Republican, who chairs the House Rules Committee, specifically referred to the hijacking of the rules process — in which the majority shapes legislation in a way that gives it the best chance of passage before it’s actually brought to the floor — as a primary concern. He noted that while members of the majority voting down rules to make a political point was done sparingly when Reps. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) were speaker, “we just finally saw the dam break” after former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) was forced out.
“I would argue it’s a lack of respect for the institution and the wisdom of the institution. These things have evolved over not decades, but centuries. This is a 234-year-old institution,” Cole said. “So it’s, you know, you’ve got to grow up.”
Cole was especially sore about the eight Republicans who sided with all Democrats to oust McCarthy last fall. He noted that even though the motion to vacate McCarthy came about after he worked with Democrats to keep the U.S. current on its debt service obligations, House Democrats were eager to use the opportunity to strip McCarthy of the speaker’s gavel.
“I think it’s on both sides of the aisle. They see the turmoil. I think Democrats kind of enjoyed it in McCarthy’s case because they weren’t particularly fond of him. He was our most effective political player, largest fundraiser, best candidate recruiter, best strategist, so I get why they wanted to take our Tom Brady off the field,” Cole said. “He kept the government open on a Saturday, and he was fired on Tuesday.”
Currently, House rules allow for just one member to bring a motion to vacate a sitting speaker to the floor. Cole told Politico he thought that threshold should be raised in order to avoid the chaos that engulfed the House of Representatives for nearly a month in 2023 while the majority bickered among itself about who should become the next speaker.
“Frankly, I think you should have a majority of your own caucus that wants to do this. We had eight people that put ourselves at the mercy of the Democratic minority leader — and there wasn’t any mercy in that case,” Cole said. “And quite frankly, they had no alternative candidate. They had no exit strategy. It was just, ‘I’m mad and I have the ability to do it.'”
Republicans in disarray.
Those are the top stories today, as I see it. What other stories have caught your interest?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: April 6, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: 2024 campaign fund raising, Don Hankey, iran, israel, Judge Arthur Engoron, Letitia James, Nancy Pelosi, Trump's incoherent speeches, Trump's NY fraud case, Trump's role in January 6 insurrection, Trump's wealthy financial backers, Ukraine war 4 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
Painting by Artush, 2013
I’ve been trying to understand what is going on with the bond Trump tried to post in order to appeal his fraud conviction in New York. He supposedly posted a bond of $175 million, but then problems arose. Here’s what I’ve found so far.
Ben Protess and Matthew Haag at The New York Times: New York Attorney General Questions Trump’s $175 Million Bond Deal.
The New York attorney general’s office on Thursday took exception to a $175 million bond that Donald J. Trump recently posted in his civil fraud case, questioning the qualifications of the California company that provided it.
The dispute stems from a $454 million judgment Mr. Trump is facing in the case, which the attorney general’s office brought against the former president and his family business. The attorney general, Letitia James, accused Mr. Trump of fraudulently inflating his net worth, leading to a monthslong trial last year that ended with a judge imposing the huge penalty.
Mr. Trump had to obtain the bond as a financial guarantee while he appeals the penalty — or else open himself up to the possibility that Ms. James would collect. Without a bond in place, she could have frozen his bank accounts and begun the complicated process of trying to seize some of his New York properties.
Mr. Trump appeared to stave off this calamity on Monday when he posted the $175 million bond from the California firm, Knight Specialty Insurance Company. Although he was originally required to secure a guarantee for the full $454 million judgment, an appeals court recently granted him a break, allowing him to post the smaller bond.
By providing the bond — which is a legal document, not an actual transfer of money — Knight essentially promises New York’s court system that it will cover $175 million of the judgment against Mr. Trump if he loses his appeal and fails to pay. In return, Mr. Trump pays a fee to Knight, and pledges it a significant amount of cash as collateral.
So what happened?
Now, however, Ms. James is raising questions that could imperil the deal with Knight, which is owned by Don Hankey, a billionaire who made his fortune with subprime loans. And the judge in the case, Arthur F. Engoron, has tentatively scheduled a hearing for April 22 to discuss the bond.
In a court filing on Thursday, Ms. James noted that Knight was not registered to issue appeal bonds in New York, and so she demanded that the company or Mr. Trump’s lawyers file paperwork to “justify” the bond within 10 days. Ms. James is seeking to clarify whether Knight, which had never posted a similar court bond before aiding Mr. Trump, is financially capable of fulfilling its obligation to pay the $175 million if Mr. Trump defaults.
Even if Knight lacks the funds itself, the company should be able to tap the collateral Mr. Trump pledged.
In an interview this week, Mr. Hankey said that Mr. Trump pledged $175 million in cash as collateral that was being handled by a brokerage firm. Mr. Trump, in the meantime, is able to earn interest on the money.
So I guess we’ll all have to wait a couple of weeks until this gets addressed in court on April 22.
By Alison Friend
From Kaitlin Lewis at Newsweek: Donald Trump Bond Rejected Due to Low Fee, Insurer Suggests.
The billionaire behind the surety company that posted Donald Trump‘s civil fraud bond said that insurers “probably didn’t charge” the former president enough when covering the pledge.
Trump posted a $175 million bond on Monday as he appeals a ruling by New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who found the former president and others associated with The Trump Organization liable of misleading insurers and lenders to obtain stronger financial terms.
But the bond was rejected by the court’s filing system later that same day due to missing paperwork, including a “current financial statement.” New York Attorney General Letitia James later raised questions about the “sufficiency” of the bond.
Don Hankey, chairman of the Los-Angeles based Hankey Group and owner of the Knight Specialty Insurance Company that posted Trump’s bond, told Reuters in an interview published Friday that his firm charged the former president a low fee when agreeing to put up the $175 million bond. The businessman reportedly declined to disclose the fee, but said that Knight picked a lower amount because it did not believe there was much risk involved.
According to online agency Insureon, which handles small-business insurance, a surety bond’s fee can range from 1 percent to 15 percent of the total bond amount.
Hankey added during the interview that his company had “been getting a lot of emails” and phone calls since backing Trump’s bond, adding, “Maybe that’s part of the reason he had trouble with other insurance companies.” The former president’s lawyers had pleaded with a New York appeals court to lower the bond amount from Trump’s original $454 million order in damages, arguing that it was a “practical impossibility” to meet the penalty.
Hankey also said that he was shocked that James had questioned the bond, telling Reuters that he was “surprised they’re coming down harder on our bond or looking for reasons to cause issues with our instrument.”
I don’t completely understand that. Maybe Daknikat can make more sense of it than I can.
ProPublica has a scoop on Trump’s efforts to mislead the appeals court that ended up lowering his bond amount: Trump’s Lawyers Told the Court That No One Would Give Him a Bond. Then He Got a Lifeline, but They Didn’t Tell the Judges.
Former President Donald Trump scored a victory last week when a New York court slashed the amount he had to put up while appealing his civil fraud case to $175 million.
His lawyers had told the appellate court it was a “practical impossibility” to get a bond for the full amount of the lower court’s judgment, $464 million. All of the 30 or so firms Trump had approached balked, either refusing to take the risk or not wanting to accept real estate as collateral, they said. That made raising the full amount “an impossible bond requirement.”
But before the judges ruled, the impossible became possible: A billionaire lender approached Trump about providing a bond for the full amount.
The lawyers never filed paperwork alerting the appeals court. That failure may have violated ethics rules, legal experts say.
In an interview with ProPublica, billionaire California financier Don Hankey said he reached out to Trump’s camp several days before the bond was lowered, expressing willingness to offer the full amount and to use real estate as collateral.
“I saw that they were rejected by everyone and I said, ‘Gee, that doesn’t seem like a difficult bond to post,’” Hankey said.
As negotiations between Hankey and Trump’s representatives were underway, the appellate court ruled in Trump’s favor, lowering the bond to $175 million. The court did not give an explanation for its ruling.
Hankey ended up giving Trump a bond for the lowered amount.
It appears Trump’s attorneys could get in trouble over this. According to the article, even if the lawyers didn’t know about the new offer until after the appeals court decision, they were required to inform the court about the new offer after the fact. Read more details at ProPublica.
Brandi Buchman has an important legal story at Law and Crime: The Trump Docket: A window into Trump’s ‘private’ acts on Jan. 6 may soon be opened by a federal judge.
Very soon, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., is expected to issue a ruling that could expose key pieces of discovery that some lawyers say prove Donald Trump acted in his “private” capacity on Jan. 6, 2021 — not in his official role — when whipping up a mob of his supporters at the Ellipse and urging them to descend on the Capitol where lawmakers were meeting to certify the 2020 election.
This is a key distinction for a group of former and current U.S. lawmakers and police suing Trump for violations of the Ku Klux Klan Act, as Law&Crime previously reported. Just this week, the former president filed a motion to stay that civil litigation indefinitely, invoking his brewing immunity question before the Supreme Court.
Law&Crime spoke to Joseph Sellers, an attorney representing the lawmaker plaintiffs. The parties met this week to finish briefing the requests for discovery before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.
Trump argues the overlap between the civil claim and his criminal indictment prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith is too great and that going to trial, or even beginning pretrial proceedings like discovery, would threaten his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
While there may be some overlap in the details of the respective cases, Sellers said Trump’s wait-and-see approach by invoking the immunity question doesn’t hold up.
“The criminal case that’s before the Supreme Court on the question of immunity is framed entirely differently in this respect and it’s quite important. In our civil case, the question is whether his conduct was primarily of an official or private nature. That’s pivotal,” he said.
When the Supreme Court set arguments on Trump’s immunity question, they framed the question in a way that assumes Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 was official and as a result, the question was whether he was immune from criminal prosecution.
The private-versus-official distinction isn’t presented there, Sellers said.
Because of this, the lawmakers say that no matter what the high court does, it should have no impact on the availability of immunity in the civil case. Invoking Trump’s criminal Jan. 6 trial, which is currently in purgatory itself, is a “grossly overbroad request,” the attorney said.
Head over to Law and Crime to read the rest.
By Heidi Taillefer
The Guardian has an interesting article on Trump’s insane, rambling public rants at The Guardian by Rachael Leingang: Trump’s bizarre, vindictive incoherence has to be heard in full to be believe.
He’s on the campaign trail less these days than he was in previous cycles – and less than you’d expect from a guy with dedicated superfans who brags about the size of his crowds every chance he gets. But when he has held rallies, he speaks in dark, dehumanizing terms about migrants, promising to vanquish people crossing the border. He rails about the legal battles he faces and how they’re a sign he’s winning, actually. He tells lies and invents fictions. He calls his opponent a threat to democracy and claims this election could be the last one.
Trump’s tone, as many have noted, is decidedly more vengeful this time around, as he seeks to reclaim the White House after a bruising loss that he insists was a steal. This alone is a cause for concern, foreshadowing what the Trump presidency redux could look like. But he’s also, quite frequently, rambling and incoherent, running off on tangents that would grab headlines for their oddness should any other candidate say them.
Journalists rightly chose not to broadcast Trump’s entire speeches after 2016, believing that the free coverage helped boost the former president and spread lies unchecked. But now there’s the possibility that stories about his speeches often make his ideas appear more cogent than they are – making the case that, this time around, people should hear the full speeches to understand how Trump would govern again.
Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories.
Leingang provides many examples of Trump’s incoherence. Here’s just one long quoted section:
Some of these bizarre asides are best seen in full, like this one about Biden at the beach in Trump’s Georgia response to the State of the Union:
“Somebody said he looks great in a bathing suit, right? And you know, when he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know sand is heavy, they figured three solid ounces per foot, but sand is a little heavy, and he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have, I won’t say names, because I don’t need enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was, like – Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Cary Grant.’ Well, we don’t have that any more, but Cary Grant at 81 or 82, going on 100. This guy, he’s 81, going on 100. Cary Grant wouldn’t look too good in a bathing suit, either. And he was pretty good-looking, right?”
This is a long piece, so if you’re interested, head over to the Guardian and read the whole thing.
The fund-raising race in the presidential campaign is the focus of a number of stories today.
Politico: Biden campaign announces pulling in $90M in March.
President Joe Biden’s campaign said it raised $90 million in March, a sum that’s likely to grow the president’s significant financial edge over former President Donald Trump.
The Biden campaign said it had $192 million in cash on hand, a total that includes funds from the campaign, the Democratic National Committee and related joint fundraising committees. It’s the largest war chest amassed by any Democratic presidential candidate at this point in the cycle, according to a Biden campaign memo announcing the totals on Saturday. Aides released the total ahead of the monthly Federal Elections Commission filing deadline later this month.
Biden’s monthly totals come on the same day as Trump is holding his own major fundraiser. The former president’s campaign said they expect to raise more than $43 million at a one-night event in Palm Beach, Florida. Saturday’s Trump fundraiser aims to top the “three presidents” extravaganza in New York City last week, when Biden, joined by former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, hauled in more than $26 million on a star-studded night.
Biden’s financial edge has remained a bright spot for the president, who continues to struggle with stubbornly low approval ratings and trails Trump narrowly in national polling averages.
Biden and the DNC ended February with more than double the cash-on-hand that Trump and the RNC had. Trump has failed to match his 2020 fundraising totals, and he’s also diverted millions of dollars to help pay his legal fees.
Former President Donald Trump has secured commitments totaling $50 million for a Saturday fundraiser in Palm Beach, Florida, according to four sources familiar with an effort that could bring in double what three Democratic presidents raised last week for President Joe Biden’s re-election push.
Hosted by hedge-fund billionaire John Paulson, the event will benefit Trump’s campaign, his Save America PAC, the Republican National Committee and state chapters of the GOP under a joint-fundraising agreement.
“Saturday’s event signifies the GOP’s finance team is all back home,” said one of the sources, who plans to attend the fundraiser. “Should produce a record haul.”
Trump also held a call with donors and fundraisers on Friday, in which he said he expected to double the amount Democrats raised at the recent Democratic event, according to one of the other sources, who was on the call.
It was not immediately clear whether all of the committed money would be collected by Saturday night.
This is from The Hill: Biden campaign hits Trump over guests at upcoming Palm Beach high-dollar fundraiser.
President Biden’s reelection campaign hit former President Trump on Friday over the guest list for his high-dollar fundraiser in Palm Beach, Fla., this weekend….
In a statement first sent to The Hill, the Biden campaign focused on the expected attendees to hit Trump on his fundraising strategy of looking to billionaires who have targeted programs such as Social Security.
Taking Inventory, by Erica Oller
“If you want to know who Donald Trump will fight for in a second term, just look at who he is having over for dinner Saturday night – tax cheats, scammers, racists, and extremists,” Biden campaign senior spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said.
“Make no mistake, Donald Trump will do the bidding of his billionaires buddies instead of what is best for the American people. He’ll take their checks and cut their taxes, and leave hard working Americans behind, shipping their jobs overseas, gutting Social Security and Medicare, ripping away health care protections, and banning abortion,” she added.
The Biden campaign pointed to Paulson, whom Trump has reportedly considered for Treasury Secretary if he wins, and who said during a 2018 New York University panel that Social Security could be switched to “to defined contribution from defined benefit.”
It called out Jeff Yass, a billionaire businessman and major investor in TikTok, as an expected attendee who floated privatizing Social Security accounts in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in 2019….
Additionally, the campaign pointed to Michael Hodges, founder of a payday lender, as an attendee. He reportedly told other payday lenders in 2019 that contributions to Trump’s 2020 campaign could mean access to the then-administration, according to The Washington Post. It also pointed out that members of the Mercer family are Trump donors and that hedge fund manager Robert Mercer has argued that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, citing The New Yorker.
The Biden campaign also pointed to John Catsimatidis, who is expected at the dinner. Catsimatidis, a billionaire who ran for New York City mayor in 2013, compared former President Obama’s plans in 2013 to raise taxes on the wealthy to how “Hitler punished the Jews,” according to Newsweek.
IMO, it’s great that Biden’s campaign is pointing out the creepy rich guys who are supporting Trump.
Some foreign policy stories:
CNN: US preparing for significant Iran attack on US or Israeli assets in the region as soon as next week.
The US is on high alert and actively preparing for a “significant” attack that could come as soon as within the next week by Iran targeting Israeli or American assets in the region in response to Monday’s Israeli strike in Damascus that killed top Iranian commanders, a senior administration official tells CNN.
Senior US officials currently believe that an attack by Iran is “inevitable” – a view shared by their Israeli counterparts, that official said. The two governments are furiously working to get in position ahead of what is to come, as they anticipate that Iran’s attack could unfold in a number of different ways – and that both US and Israeli assets and personnel are at risk of being targeted.
A forthcoming Iranian attack was a major topic of discussion on President Joe Biden’s phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday.
As of Friday, the two governments did not know when or how Iran planned to strike back, the official said.
By Christina Bernazzani
A direct strike on Israel by Iran is one of the worst-case scenarios that the Biden administration is bracing for, as it would guarantee rapid escalation of an already tumultuous situation in the Middle East. Such a strike could lead to the Israel-Hamas war broadening into a wider, regional conflict – something Biden has long sought to avoid.
It has been two months since Iranian proxies attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria, a period of relative stability after months of drone, rocket and missile launches targeting US facilities. The lone exception came on Tuesday, when US forces shot down a drone near al-Tanf garrison in Syria. The drone attack, which the Defense Department said was carried out by Iranian proxies, came after the Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
“We asses that al-Tanf was not the target of the drone,” a defense official said Tuesday. “Since we were unable to immediately determine the target and out of safety for US and coalition partners, the drone was shot down.”
The incident came after the Israeli airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus on Monday, though an Israel Defense Forces spokesman told CNN that their intelligence showed the building was not a consulate and is instead “a military building of Quds forces disguised as a civilian building.”
More at the CNN link.
Axios: Pelosi joins call to halt U.S. weapons transfers to Israel.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signed onto a call by progressive members of Congress for the U.S. to stop transferring weapons to Israel over a strike that killed seven aid workers in Gaza.
Why it matters: It’s a significant break with Israel by a long-standing supporter that underscores growing fissures between Democrats and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Driving the news: The letter, led by Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), was released on Friday with 37 signatures from 37 other Democrats, including Pelosi.
“In light of the recent strike against aid workers and the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis, we believe it is unjustifiable to approve these weapons transfers,” the lawmakers wrote to President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Isabelle Khurshudyan at The Washington Post: With no way out of a worsening war, Zelensky’s options look bad or worse.
KYIV — As Russia steps up airstrikes and once again advances on the battlefield in Ukraine more than two years into its bloody invasion, there is no end to the fighting in sight. And President Volodymyr Zelensky’s options for what to do next — much less how to win the war — range from bad to worse.
Zelensky has said Ukraine will accept nothing less than the return of all its territory, including land that Russia has controlled since 2014. But with the battle lines changing little in the last year, militarily retaking the swaths of east and south Ukraine that Russia now occupies — about 20 percent of the country — appears increasingly unlikely.
Negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war — something Zelensky has rejected as long as Russian troops remain on Ukrainian land — is politically toxic. The Ukrainian public is hugely opposed to surrendering territory, and Putin shown no willingness to accept anything short of Ukraine’s capitulation to his demands.
The status quo is awful. With the fight now a grinding stalemate, Ukrainians are dying on the battlefield daily. But a cease-fire is also a nonstarter, Ukrainians say, because it would just give the Russians time to replenish their forces.
Ukrainian and Western officials view Zelensky as largely stuck. Aid from the United States, Ukraine’s most important military backer, has been stalled for months by Republicans in Congress. Previously approved modern fighter jets — the U.S.-made F-16 — are expected to enter combat later this year — but in limited quantity, meaning they will not be a game changer. NATO countries are still exercising restraint in their assistance, evidenced by the recent uproar after French President Emmanuel Macron said European nations should not rule out sending troops.
“How will Zelensky get out of this situation? I have no idea,” said a Ukrainian lawmaker who, like other officials and diplomats interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about the highly sensitive politics. “And of course it concerns me.”
The responsibility for this nightmare belongs solely to House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is loyalties are to Trump and Putin, and not his country.
That’s it for me today. What do you think? What other stories are you following?
Lazy Caturday Reads: Something Has to be Done about Trump’s Violent Threats.
Posted: March 30, 2024 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, Judge Reggie Walton, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, Judge Thomas F. HOgan, judges speak out, Rule of Law, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Secret Service, Trump's violent threats 6 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
By Erica Oller
For the past couple of days, social media has been focused on a shocking video that Trump posted on Truth Social, in which President Biden was depicted in the back of a pickup truck with his hands and feet bound as if he had been kidnapped.
This is nothing new for Trump. He routinely threatens judges and their families, immigrants, Democrats, even fellow Republicans who dare to cross him. This man is out on bail in four separate cases. Why is he permitted to keep issuing threats against anyone he perceives as an enemy?
Imagine if you were a witness in one the cases against him. How would you feel about testifying when you know that Trump can and will get his followers to threaten you and perhaps even hurt or kill you? After all, he instigated an attack on the U.S. Capitol during which police officers were killed and badly injured.
Joyce Vance says it better than I can. From Civil Discourse: We Need to Talk About This.
Today’s widely discussed Trump post on Truth Social isn’t just another instance of bad behavior. It’s not just a shrug of the shoulders and a resigned sigh of, “What are you going to do?” Far too often, people resignedly accept Trump’s behavior because they believe there’s no alternative. The zeitgeist is: We can’t make him stop, can we?
Here’s Trump’s Truth Social post. It’s a video, and although I hate to send you to Truth Social, you can watch the whole thing here. Or read on for my description. What you need to know is that this is unprecedented and out of bounds. If you or I did this, the Secret Service would be on our doorstep within hours.
Donald Trump, by the way, is out on bond ahead of trial in four separate criminal cases. Today, he threatened the President of the United States. It’s time for the people with authority to do so to deal with him. Sure, he’s the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, but they won’t reign him in. And someone is going to get hurt if he isn’t….
I know from experience as a prosecutor how seriously the Secret Service takes every single threat, or anything close to a threat, made against the President of the United States. They take it seriously even when it looks like the person making it lacks any capacity to carry it out. They always check. They always have the talk.
Donald Trump is different from the person who makes a bad joke or an evil suggestion they don’t have the power to follow through on. We know, and more importantly, he knows, how his followers react when he suggests violence. It’s unthinkable, unconscionable for a former president to even intimate that violence against the current president is acceptable. I cannot imagine George W. Bush even joking about something like this when Barack Obama was in the White House, or Obama suggesting Trump should be kidnapped and trussed up in the back of a truck.
Trump is totally, and uniquely among our former presidents, out of bounds. It’s time to stop letting him break the rules. We’re entitled to more, not less, accountability from our presidents than from average citizens.
No one is saying Trump can’t campaign or that he can’t criticize Biden. What he can’t do is suggest he should be kidnapped, knocked out, and bound in the back of a pickup truck. I can’t believe that I have to write that out—there is no universe in which that’s acceptable.
As Vance writes, the justice system has ways to deal with this kind of behavior, so why is Trump still free to threaten his “enemies?” He should be in jail right now.
By Leny_art at Deviant Art
The Washington Post published a somewhat mealy-mouthed piece about this by Azi Paybarah that includes Trump’s excuses: Donald Trump shares image of Joe Biden with hands and feet tied.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, sent a lengthy statement distancing the campaign from the image, and accusing Democrats of using violent rhetoric against Trump.
“That picture was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway,” Cheung said in the statement. “Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”
The message remained live on Trump’s feed late Friday night.
Among the examples Cheung cited in his statement were Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) saying in 2017 “What we’ve got to do is fight in Congress, fight in the courts, fight in the streets, fight online, fight at the ballot box …” Cheung also cited Biden’s 2018 comment, when he said, “If we were in high school, I’d take him [Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”
Paybarah also includes other examples of Trump attacking Biden and others with violent imagery:
In October, Trump shared a doctored video of him hitting a golf ball that hits Biden and knocks him down. (It was similar to a doctored video he shared in 2017, hitting a golf ball into the back of Hillary Clinton, who falls down as a result.) In April 2023, a judge issued a warning to Trump after an image of him holding a bat next to an image of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) was shared from one of the former president’s verified accounts.
In July 2017, Trump shared a video of himself at a professional wrestling match, beating up a man whose face is covered with the CNN logo. The verified account for CNN’s communication team responded to the video with a quote from Trump’s White House spokeswoman at the time, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, falsely claiming Trump “in no way form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence.”
Earlier this month, Trump told supporters in Ohio that some immigrants who are accused of crimes are “not people,” and warned it will be a “bloodbath for the country” if he is not elected.
The latest episode has coincided with Trump’s increasing use of violent and hostile rhetoric as he seeks to return to the White House. In December, he told people in New Hampshire that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that immigrant groups and civil rights advocates condemned and said was reminiscent of Hitler telling Germans, in his book “Mein Kampf,” to “care for the purity of their own blood” by eliminating Jews.
On Thursday night, Reggie Walton, a sitting federal judge, appeared on CNN to denounce Trump’s violent threats. Shania Shelton and Rachard Rose at CNN: Federal judge warns of Trump’s attacks in extraordinary rebuke.
US District Judge Reggie Walton spoke with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” in the wake of Trump’s attacks on Judge Juan Merchan, which helped prompt the New York judge to issue a gag order on the former president earlier this week. It is unusual for federal judges to speak publicly, especially about specific political or legal situations.
By Adrie Martens
“It’s very disconcerting to have someone making comments about a judge, and it’s particularly problematic when those comments are in the form of a threat, especially if they’re directed at one’s family,” said Walton, who has also faced threats, as has his daughter. “We do these jobs because we’re committed to the rule of law and we believe in the rule of law, and the rule of law can only function effectively when we have judges who are prepared to carry out their duties without the threat of potential physical harm.”
“I think it’s important in order to preserve our democracy that we maintain the rule of law,” Walton said in the interview. “And the rule of law can only be maintained if we have independent judicial officers who are able to do their job and ensure that the laws are, in fact, enforced and that the laws are applied equally to everybody who appears in our courthouse.”
“I think it’s important that, as judges, we speak out and say things in reference to things that conceivably are going to impact on the process, because if we don’t have a viable court system that’s able to function efficiently, then we have tyranny. And I don’t think that would be good for the future of our country, and the future of democracy in our country,” he continued.
This is by Spencer S. Hsu at The Washington Post: Republican-appointed judges raise alarm over Trump attacks on law.
A Republican-appointed judge denounced Donald Trump’s social media attacks against the judge presiding over the former president’s hush money trial in Manhattan and his daughter, calling them assaults on the rule of law that could lead to violence and tyranny.
Wake up people. This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.
Something has to be done.
I’m going to end there. What do you think about all this? What other stories have captured your interest?
Extra Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: March 23, 2024 Filed under: cat art, caturday, just because | Tags: 2025 Project, Fox News, ISIS, Ken Buck, Leonard Leo, Mike Gallagher, Mike Johnson, Moscow terror attack, MSNBC, NBC, Vladimir Putin 5 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
Ted Gordon, born Louisville, KY 1924
The images in today’s post are from the Smithsonian collection of cat art.
On to today’s news:
Are NBC and MSNBC trying to compete with Fox News? Are they preparing for a Trump victory in November? The networks recently hired Ronna [Romney] McDaniel, recently deposed Chair of the Republican National Committee and proven liar and insurrectionist, as a commentator. To say this is an unpopular move with viewers is an understatement. There are reports that other networks competed to hire McDaniel, and NBC/MSNBC “won.” BTW, there have been no comments on this hire by Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes or Lawrence O’Donnell. Do they plan to have her on their shows?
John Knefel at Media Matters: NBC News hires Ronna McDaniel, who played a key role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to NBC News.
NBC News has hired former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel to serve as an on-air commentator, meaning that NBC News just hired a key figure in former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to NBC News.
McDaniel left the RNC after losing Trump’s favor, only to be welcomed into the warmer waters of television punditry. NBC News’ Carrie Budoff Brown announced the hiring of the former RNC chair to the network, writing in a memo to staff, “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team.”
What, exactly, are NBC News and MSNBC getting with “a voice like Ronna’s?” Let’s turn to the network’s own coverage for answers.
On June 21, 2022, NBC News published a story under the headline “Trump team orchestrated ‘fake electors’ to try to overturn election, Jan. 6 committee details.” The piece described the then-latest findings of the House January 6 committee and spelled out McDaniel’s role in the scheme. As NBC News reported, Trump called McDaniel and connected her with John Eastman, one of the architects of the subversion plot.
“Essentially he turned the call over to Mr. Eastman who then proceeded to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors in case any of the legal challenges that were ongoing changed the result of any of the states,” McDaniel said, according to NBC News.
CNBC reported on another of McDaniel’s statements to the committee, acknowledging her and the RNC’s direct participation in the fake elector plot. McDaniel said that the RNC’s role was “helping them reach out and helping them assemble them, but my understanding is the campaign did take the lead and we just were helping them in that role.”
Or, in the words of MSNBC’s Steve Benen: “Ronna McDaniel acknowledged that the Republican National Committee helped put the slates of fake electors together.”
Click the link to read the rest.
Oliver Darcy at CNN: NBC hires former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who has demonized the press and refused to acknowledge Biden was fairly elected.
NBC News on Friday announced that it had hired Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican National Committee chair who has repeatedly attacked the network and its journalists, assailed the news media as “fake news” and promoted false claims around the 2020 vote, as an on-air commentator ahead of the 2024 presidential election….
Benson B. Moore, born Washington, DC 1882-died Stuart, FL 1974
During her time as chair, McDaniel repeatedly attacked the press, which has become increasingly popular in Republican circles over the last several years as Donald Trump demonizes journalists and news institutions.
McDaniel echoed many such attacks, labeling the press as “fake news” and calling the media “corrupt.” At times, she even targeted NBC News and MSNBC with dishonest attacks.
In 2019, for instance, McDaniel accused Richard Engel, NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent, of “actively cheering for an economic downturn.”
“How can NBC let him keep his job when he’s made his bias so clear?” McDaniel asked.
McDaniel has a lengthier history attacking the progressive cable news channel MSNBC, which she will appear on in her new role. In recent years, she has repeatedly attacked the channel for “spreading lies” and blasted those she described as the network’s “primetime propagandists.”
One more commentary from Tim Murphy at Mother Jones: What a Coup! NBC News Just Hired Ronna McDaniel.
While ex-strategists or party chairs ending up with TV deals is hardly unprecedented, Trump’s attacks on the media don’t have a parallel in modern US politics. He has called the press the “enemy of the people” and accused them of “treason.” A close ally has already signaled that Trump would use the powers of his office to crack down on critical outlets, if he wins a second term. Spending seven years running interference for a fascistic fraudster who holds the First Amendment in roughly the same terminal contempt with which he regards women and low-flow toilets is not the kind of thing that should qualify you for a new career in journalism.
But McDaniel did more than shill for the president. She played an important role in public and behind the scenes in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—and with it, two and a half centuries of constitutional governance. That should be a clear red line for employers in the truth-telling business. In November 2020 story in Politico, just a few months before the Capitol insurrection, Tim Alberta offered a glimpse of how McDaniel abetted Trump’s lies about the election and allowed her party organization to amplify them in even more absurd ways:
McDaniel told multiple confidants that she doubted there was any scalable voter fraud in Michigan. Nevertheless, McDaniel told friends and fellow Republicans that she needed to stay the course with Trump and his legal team. This wasn’t about indulging him, she said, but rather about demonstrating a willingness to fight—even when the fight couldn’t be won.
This is why McDaniel has sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods in the weeks since Election Day. It’s why the RNC, on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump “won in a landslide” (when he lost by more than 6 million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.
Mom and Dad, by William H. Johnson, born Florence, SC 1901-died Central Islip, NY 1970
McDaniel pushed to delay the certification of the presidential results in Michigan, and helped the Trump campaign assemble fake electors, a key part of its plot to throw the Electoral College certification into chaos. This is not standard-issue party-chair stuff. This was a historically dishonest conspiracy. And it is hardly a secret to anyone: As Media Matters noted on Friday, you can read about a lot of this at NBC News itself.
And that’s sort of the larger point here. NBC News is filled with professional journalists doing good work. Many of them have documented in exhausting (or actually quite lively and entertaining) detail the ways in which Trump and his helpers have corroded American democracy. McDaniel, on the other hand, was a major player in a political project that’s antithetical to that mission. Trump’s GOP was and is built on delegitimizing the people and institutions that might otherwise check it—Congress; the judiciary; the electorates of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. Foremost among the institutions Trump wants to blow up is legacy political media, and its critical, fact-checked information stream. The goal is to erode trust in the press. I’m not sure why the suits at NBC News think it’s in anyone’s best interest to hire someone to do that work for Trump.
How important is it to keep MSNBC from becoming Fox News? At The New York Times, Ruth Ingielnik reports: Republicans Who Do Not Regularly Watch Fox Are Less Likely to Back Trump.
Republicans who get their news from nonconservative mainstream media outlets are less likely to support Donald J. Trump than those who follow conservative outlets. And sizable numbers from the first group say they think Mr. Trump acted criminally, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll.
This division could affect his standing among Republicans in the general electorate — a decidedly different group from G.O.P. primary voters. That is in line with research that shows that changing the media habits of Fox News consumers may actually change their views.
One hundred percent of the Republicans in our poll who said they got their news from Fox News or other conservative sources said they intended to support Mr. Trump in the general election. This stands in contrast to Republicans whose main media sources are outlets like CNN and major news organizations: Seventy-nine percent of them plan to vote for Mr. Trump, and 13 percent said they planned to vote for President Biden.
And across many measures, mainstream media Republicans are less supportive of Mr. Trump. They are 20 percentage points less likely than conservative media Republicans to say they are enthusiastic about Mr. Trump as the party’s nominee and more than 30 percentage points less likely to say Mr. Trump’s policies have helped them personally.
Despite the perception that most Republicans watch Fox News, the share of Republicans who said they got their news from sources like CNN and major newspapers was similar to the share who said they primarily consumed conservative media — roughly 30 percent in each case.
These Republicans differ from consumers of conservative media primarily in terms of their ideology: They were much more likely to describe themselves as politically moderate. Nikki Haley had about 30 percent support among these Republicans and 4 percent among conservative media consumers (the poll was taken before Ms. Haley dropped out of the race).
If they watch NBC/MSNBC, they will now hear from insurrectionist and propagandist Ronna McDaniel.
by Neil Leifer, born 1942
In other news, there was a massive terrorist attack in Moscow. The U.S. tried to warn Russia it was coming, but Putin ignored it.
The New York Times: Gunmen Kill at Least 60 at Moscow Concert Hall, Russian Officials Say.
Several camouflage-clad gunmen opened fire at a popular concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow on Friday night, killing about 60 people and wounding more than 100, Russian authorities said, making it the deadliest attack in the capital region in more than a decade.
Hours after the mayhem began, the Russian national guard said its officers were still looking for the attackers. State media agencies reported that there had been up to five perpetrators….
For many Russians, the massacre at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow on Friday night brought to mind shootings and bombings across the country in recent decades, events that the authorities often described as terrorism.
The authorities linked many of those attacks to Russia’s wars against Chechen separatists in the 1990s and 2000s. Those conflicts helped enable the rise of Vladimir V. Putin, who over his two decades in power has sought to project an image of being tough on terrorism.
New York Times: U.S. Warned About Possible Moscow Attack Before Concert Hall Shooting.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued a security alert on March 7, warning that its personnel were “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts.” The statement warned Americans that an attack could take place in the next 48 hours.
The warning was related to the attack on Friday, according to people briefed on the matter. But it was not related to possible Ukrainian sabotage, American officials said, adding that the State Department would not have used the word “extremists” to warn about actions ordered from Kyiv.
Pro-Kremlin voices immediately seized on the U.S. Embassy’s warning to paint America as trying to scare Russians.
America officials are worried that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could seek to falsely blame Ukraine for the attack, putting pressure on Western governments to identify who they think may be responsible. Mr. Putin frequently twists events, even tragic ones, to fit his public narrative. And he has been quick to accuse Ukraine of acts of terrorism to justify his invasion of the country.
U.S. officials said Mr. Putin could do that again after Friday’s attack, seeking to use the loss of life to undermine support for Ukraine both domestically and around the world.
On March 19, the Russian leader called the U.S. Embassy statement “obvious blackmail” made with “the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.” But he had yet to comment directly on the attack Friday.
And that is exactly what Putin did, according to The Guardian: Moscow concert hall attack: Putin tells Russians Ukraine linked to attack which killed 133, claims denied by Kyiv officials – live updates.
But CNN reports that: ISIS claims responsibility for attack at Moscow-area concert venue that left at least 60 dead.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for an attack at a popular concert hall complex near Moscow Friday after assailants stormed the venue with guns and incendiary devices, killing at least 60 people and injuring 145.
Still Life with Cat, by Franklin C. Watkins, born New York City 1894-died Bologna, Italy 1972an from color transparency
The terror group took responsibility for the attack in a short statement published by ISIS-affiliated news agency Amaq on Telegram on Friday. It did not provide evidence to support the claim.
Video footage from the Crocus City Hall shows the vast complex, which is home to both the music hall and a shopping center, on fire with smoke billowing into the air. State-run RIA Novosti reported the armed individuals “opened fire with automatic weapons” and “threw a grenade or an incendiary bomb, which started a fire.” They then “allegedly fled in a white Renault car,” the news agency said.
State media Russia 24 reported the roof of the venue has partially collapsed.
The fire had been brought largely under control more than six hours later. “There are still some pockets of fire, but the fire has been mostly eliminated,” Moscow governor Andrey Vorobyov said on Telegram.
The deadliest terror attack on Moscow in decades, Friday’s assault came less than a week after President Vladimir Putin won a stage-managed election by an overwhelming majority to secure another term in office, tightening his grip on the country he has ruled since the turn of the century.
With attention focused on the country’s war with neighboring Ukraine, Putin had trumpeted a message of national security before Russians went to the polls.
Back in the USA, there are a couple of interesting stories involving Leonard Leo, former head of the Federalist society and staunch supporter of Donald Trump and the 2025 Project.
Huge funding from influential conservative donor networks is flowing into groups affiliated with a conservative venture aimed at creating a Republican “government-in-waiting,” including over $55 million from groups linked to conservative activist Leonard Leo and the Koch network, according to an Accountable.US review shared exclusively with NBC News.
Launched by the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, Project 2025 is a two-pronged initiative to develop staunch conservative policy recommendations and grow a roster of thousands of right-wing personnel ready to fill the next Republican administration. With former President Donald Trump now the GOP’s presumptive 2024 nominee, the effort is essentially laying the groundwork for a potential Trump transition if he wins the election in November.
With contributions from former high-level Trump administration appointees and an advisory board that has grown to over 100 conservative organizations, proponents describe Project 2025 as the most sophisticated transition effort that has existed for conservatives. The initiative includes a manifesto devising a policy agenda for every department, numerous agencies and scores of offices throughout the federal government.
Since 2021, Leo’s network and groups that have gotten funding from it have funneled over $50.7 million to the groups advising the 2025 Presidential Transition Project as part of its “Project 2025 advisory board,” according to tax documents reviewed as part of the analysis by Accountable.US, a progressive advocacy group. That sum includes donations from The 85 Fund, a donor-advised nonprofit group that funnels money from wealthy financiers to other groups, and the Concord Fund, a public-facing organization, which are part of Leo’s network of organizations that seek to influence policy.
According to its 2022 annual return, the 85 Fund gave more than $2.55 million collectively to seven organizations advising Project 2025, including the Heritage Foundation, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Independent Women’s Forum.
In 2021, the 85 Fund gave $2.1 million to the same organizations, less the Heritage Foundation, while the Concord Fund collectively gave $4.32 million to nonprofit groups including Susan B. Anthony List, Independent Women’s Voice and Heritage Action for America.
Read the rest at NBC News.
This is from top notch reporter Heidi Przybyla at Politico: What happens when an AG dares to investigate Leonard Leo’s network.
Allies of Leonard Leo have mounted a monthslong offensive against the man investigating the judicial activist’s network: Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb.
Since news of the probe broke last August, the GOP chairs of powerful congressional committees launched their own investigation of Schwalb’s investigation; conservative media wrote articles criticizing Schwalb on unrelated crime issues — based on a social media post from a top Leo lieutenant; and a group of his Republican law enforcement peers sent letters warning Schwalb to stand down.
Mary Elizabeth Francis, by John F. Francis, born Philadelphia, PA 1808-died Jeffersonville, PA 1886
Leo is the Federalist Society co-chair who has been called former President Donald Trump’s “court whisperer” for helping to choose and advocate for his Supreme Court nominees. His aligned network of tax-exempt nonprofits is also a major contributor to Project 2025, an initiative seeking to create a “government in waiting” for another Trump term.
The white-hot pressure campaign targeting Schwalb attests to the growing range of Leo’s influence. Beyond its work in promoting the conservative legal movement, his billion-dollar network of nonprofits has funded conservative media, Republican attorneys general and the campaign funds of leading congressional figures….
Schwalb has been probing Leo since he received a complaint about whether Leo-aligned groups violated tax laws governing nonprofit organizations, as POLITICO reported last August. Tax-exempt groups in Leo’s network have spent millions of dollars on his for-profit consulting business, CRC Advisors.
But since news of the probe became public, its legal basis has been challenged by 12 GOP attorneys general who are current or former members of the Republican Attorneys General Association. The Concord Fund, one of the Leo network’s primary nonprofits, and its predecessor, the Judicial Crisis Network, have long been RAGA’s biggest funder, directing $20 million to it since 2014, according to annual tax filings.
Meanwhile, GOP Reps. James Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and James Comer, who heads the House Oversight Committee, on Oct. 30 announced a probe of Schwalb’s Leo investigation, saying it was politically motivated. According to a federal disclosure form dated Oct. 20, the Concord Fund had hired a Virginia lobbying firm to handle issues related to “oversight” and “law enforcement,” matters over which Jordan and Comer have jurisdiction.
Read the rest at Politico.
Things aren’t going that well for far right members of the House, however. Politico: Johnson’s margin drops to one vote as Gallagher heads for early exit.
Speaker Mike Johnson is about to drop to a one-vote majority, as retiring Rep. Mike Gallagher has decided he will exit the House as soon as next month, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
In a statement shortly after this story published, Gallagher said he planned to leave April 19.
“I’ve worked closely with House Republican leadership on this timeline and look forward to seeing Speaker Mike Johnson appoint a new chair to carry out the important mission of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.
Wisconsin law dictates that Gallagher’s seat — in a solidly red district — will stay empty for the rest of his term. Departing before April 9 would have triggered a special election.
The Wisconsin Republican announced earlier this year that he would not seek reelection, after he received blowback for voting against impeaching Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. His allies, however, say he was long jaded by the antics of the House following the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
It’s bad timing for Johnson, who is now potentially facing a vote on his ouster in the coming weeks. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed the so-called motion to vacate on Friday, over Johnson working with Democrats to pass a massive spending bill, but it’s unclear when she’ll try to force the vote on the floor. At the moment, no other Republicans have said they support her motion.
Gallagher’s decision to not finish out the term also further fuels conference concerns over its trajectory headed into the November election.
“It’s tough, but it’s tough with a five-seat majority, it’s tough with a two-seat majority, one is going to be the same. We all have to work together. We’re all going to have to unite if we’re going get some things done,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said shortly after Gallagher announced his early exit.
When Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado announced his early exit, he said he knew of three more House members who were on the verge of quitting. If that happens, control of the House could switch to the Democrats.
That’s all I have for you today. What do you think? What other stories are you following?
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