Paris Through the Window, Marc Chagall
There’s some big news in the stolen documents case today. Special prosecutor Jack Smith has asked Judge Aileen Cannon for a gag order to stop Trump from claiming that the FBI planned to assassinate him when they searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents that he stole from the government. This is significant, because if Cannon refuses, Smith could appeal to the 11th Circuit court and request that she be removed from the case.
Here are the basics, from Katelyn Polantz at CNN: Special counsel asks judge for gag order in Trump classified documents case.
Special counsel’s office prosecutors on Friday asked a federal judge in Florida to place a gag order on Donald Trump that would limit his ability to comment about law enforcement that searched his Mar-a-Lago resort.
The request – a first in the classified documents mishandling case – comes after the former president has repeatedly and misleadingly criticized the FBI for having a policy in place around the use of deadly force during the search and seizure of government records at his resort in August 2022.
While Trump has told his supporters he could have been in danger because of the policy, the policy is standard protocol for FBI searches and limits how agents may use force in search operations. The same standard FBI policy was used in the searches of President Joe Biden’s homes and offices in a separate classified documents investigation.
Polanz is minimizing what Trump has said. He actually accused the FBI of trying to kill him and claimed President Biden ordered them to do it.
Prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith wrote to Judge Aileen Cannon in a filing Friday night that the conditions that allow Trump not to be in jail awaiting trial should be updated.
The request will force Cannon into the center of an intensely charged and politicized battle, grappling with Trump’s ongoing presidential campaign and the First Amendment at the same time prosecutors are escalating their concerns to her about proceedings she oversees. The judge so far has moved slowly to resolve disputes in Trump’s criminal mishandling and obstruction of justice case before her, and no trial date is set.
“Trump‘s repeated mischaracterization as an attempt to kill him, his family, and Secret Service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceedings,” prosecutors wrote.
His recent comments, they added, “invite the sort of threats and harassment that have occurred when other participants in legal proceedings against Trump have been targeted by his invective.”
The use of deadly force policy is included among several pages of paperwork governing FBI search protocol and policies when they went to Mar-a-Lago, which was made public in Trump’s case in federal court this week. The paperwork also lays out that agents would wear unmarked, business casual attire, and specifies that if Trump were to arrive at Mar-a-Lago during the search, leadership on site would speak to him and his Secret Service detail.
Alan Feuer writes at The New York Times: Prosecutors Seek to Bar Trump From Attacking F.B.I. Agents in Documents Case.
Federal prosecutors on Friday night asked the judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case to bar him from making any statements that might endanger law enforcement agents involved in the proceedings.
Prosecutors tendered the request after Mr. Trump made what they described as “grossly misleading” assertions about the F.B.I.’s August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. This week, the former president falsely suggested that the F.B.I. had been authorized to shoot him when agents discovered more than 100 classified documents while executing a court-approved search warrant there.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that President Biden “authorized the FBI to use deadly (lethal) force” during the search.
Mr. Trump’s post came in reaction to an F.B.I. operational plan for the Mar-a-Lago search that was unsealed on Tuesday as part of a legal motion filed by Mr. Trump’s lawyers. The plan contained a boilerplate reference to lethal force being authorized in cases of emergency, which prosecutors said that Mr. Trump badly distorted.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi Cat in a window
“As Trump is well aware, the F.B.I. took extraordinary care to execute the search warrant unobtrusively and without needless confrontation,” prosecutors wrote in a motion to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the classified documents case.
“They scheduled the search of Mar-a-Lago for a time when he and his family would be away,” the prosecutors added. “They planned to coordinate with Trump’s attorney, Secret Service agents and Mar-a-Lago staff before and during the execution of the warrant; and they planned for contingencies — which, in fact, never came to pass — about with whom to communicate if Trump were to arrive on the scene.” [….]
Prosecutors did not seek to impose a gag order on Mr. Trump in the classified documents case, but instead asked Judge Cannon to revise his conditions of release to forbid him to make any public comments “that pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation.”
Still, if Judge Cannon agrees to the request, it would mean that Mr. Trump could be placed in custody were he to violate the revised conditions.
You might also want to read Marcy Wheeler’s post: Jack Smith Invites Aileen Cannon to Protect the Country Rather than Just Donald Trump. I’m not going to excerpt from it, because it’s mostly long quotes from the filing.
This is from Andrew Weissmann on Twitter (I refuse to use that other stupid name):
Smart move by Smith as Judge Cannon won’t be likely to grant the gag order, will show her patent bias, and Smith can then appeal to the 11th Circuit.
Asha Rangappa asked him:
Can she just avoid ruling on it, like she has everything else?
Weissmann:
in theory yes, but I don’t think if she tries that ploy that Smith won’t mandamus her, and her lack of action one way or the other will look really bad on appeal.
I’ll be waiting anxiously to see what Loose Cannon does or doesn’t do.
Some analysis of Trump’s victimization strategy by Juliette Kayem at The Atlantic: Trump’s Assassination Fantasy Has a Darker Purpose.
When Donald Trump insinuated this week that his successor and the FBI were out to kill him, he showed how central violence has become to his conception of political leadership. The former president declared Tuesday on Truth Social, his social-media platform, that he “was shown reports Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL FORCE).” [….]
The genesis of the former president’s complaint is that, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 to obtain classified documents that were at the center of an investigation, agents were explicitly authorized to use force. This was not remotely unusual: FBI agents are routinely armed. The “reports” that Trump saw misinterpreted the parameters of the search, which—as the security analysts Asha Rangappa and Tom Joscelyn explained in Just Security—was guided by elaborate restrictions on when weapons could be used. The FBI subsequently said it followed a “standard policy statement limiting the use of force.” Attorney General Merrick Garland noted today that similar conditions were used in a search related to classified documents at Biden’s home in Delaware.
Victor Lukyanov, Summer Rain
The FBI had also carefully arranged to enter Trump’s property when he would be out of state—an odd way of carrying out an assassination. Still, the idea that Trump had been at physical risk rocketed across Truth Social. The X account of the House Judiciary Committee Republicans reposted—with the addition of siren emojis—a thread insinuating that FBI agents were acting like the “Gestapo” and had “risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests.” Trump’s campaign upped the hysteria with a fundraising email declaring that “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” and that “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.” By evening, the longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon was asserting that “this was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him.” [….]
The claim that Biden and the FBI were looking to kill Trump is easy to dismiss as the typical hyperbolic ranting of the ex-president and his fans, and it competes in the news with other disturbing things he says and does. The assassination claim initially seemed to have come and gone in the news cycle. But the story was still out there, to be absorbed by Trump’s audience.
Since the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Trump has become more and more apocalyptic in his language. This week, he sent another dangerous signal to his supporters: FBI agents are an armed enemy, ready to assassinate the former president. Unless, of course, Trump and his mob get to them first.
On Thursday, Trump held a rally in the Bronx, and, as usual, created some controversy that the mainstream media pretty much ignored.
Edith Olmstead at The Daily Beast: Trumpworld Claims 25,000 People Attended His Rally. Aerial Shots Show Otherwise.
Trumpworld is once again splintering from reality. This time, the diversion relates to counting—specifically, how many people attended Donald Trump’s rally in the Bronx on Thursday.
Trump, who has long obsessed over the size of crowds at his events, shared an article from Right Side Broadcasting Network to his Truth Social account that quoted the Trump campaign as saying 25,000 people attended the “electrifying” event. The New York Times reported that Trump’s team had acquired a permit for an event for 3,500 people.
“The sheer numbers show the great enthusiasm that President Trump has gained among voters in even the bluest areas of the United States,” the Right-Side Broadcasting Network article crowed.
That number later appeared on Fox News, was shared across various MAGA social media accounts, and also popped up on the official X account of the Republican Party.
But aerial footage of the event, and The Daily Beast’s reporter on the ground, told a different story. ABC7’s coverage of the event showed a much smaller crowd located in an amphitheater at Crotona Park.
While law enforcement told the New York Post that the crowd was between 8,000 and 10,000 people, The Daily Beast had a reporter in attendance, who estimated about 1,000 people were there.
You can see photos at the Daily Beast link.
Oscar, by Annie Troe
At the rally, Trump invited some local criminals to share the stage with him. Talia Jane at The New Republic: Trump Proudly Accepts Endorsements From Rappers Charged With Murder.
Criminals of a feather flocked together on Thursday as Trump hosted two Brooklyn rappers out on bail for murder conspiracy during a campaign rally in the Bronx.
Rappers Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow were indicted in 2023, alongside some 30 other people, as part of a massive investigation into two rival Brooklyn gangs. Sheff G—real name Michael Williams—allegedly used his accomplishments to help fund widespread violence. According to the New York Daily News, Williams was released on a $150,000 cash or $1 million bond in April after being charged with conspiracy, multiple murder counts, criminal possession of a weapon, assault with a weapon, and 12 shootings. Williams’s lackey Sleepy Hallow—real name Tegan Chambers—was released with a $200,000 cash or $150,000 bond bail for conspiracy charges.
Trump proudly brought the rappers on stage with him to give remarks to the red behatted crowd on Thursday. Williams told the crowd, “They’re always going to whisper the accomplishments and shout your failures. Trump gonna shout the wins for all of us.”
Chambers kept it even more brief and simply shouted, “Make America Great Again.”
Justin Jouvenal and Ann E. Marimow at The Washington Post: Wife of Justice Alito called upside-down flag ‘signal of distress.’
The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a Washington Post reporter in January 2021 that an upside-down American flag recently flown on their flagpole was “an international signal of distress” and indicated that it had been raised in response to a neighborhood dispute.
So if the NYT hadn’t reported on this, the WaPo would have stayed silent?
The Post subsequently reported on May 17 that residents said the flag was raised following a heated confrontation between Martha-Ann Alito and a neighbor over political yard signs, one of which carried a profane anti-Trump message and another that carried a message along the lines of “you are complicit.” One resident, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy in a sensitive situation, said the flag flew for between two and five days.
Samuel Alito told Fox News last week that the signs attacked his wife directly. Martha-Ann Alito has not publicly commented on the recent reports.
Now the Post tells us what really happened in 2021:
On Jan. 20, 2021 — the day of Biden’s inauguration, which the Alitos did not attend — Barnes went to their home to follow up on the tip about the flag. He encountered the couple coming out of the house. Martha-Ann Alito was visibly upset by his presence, demanding that he “get off my property.”
As he described the information he was seeking, she yelled, “It’s an international signal of distress!”
Alito intervened and directed his wife into a car parked in their driveway, where they had been headed on their way out of the neighborhood. The justice denied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had raised it.
Martha-Ann Alito then got out of the car and shouted in apparent reference to the neighbors: “Ask them what they did!” She said yard signs about the couple had been placed in the neighborhood. After getting back in the car, she exited again and then brought out from their residence a novelty flag, the type that would typically decorate a garden. She hoisted it up the flagpole. “There! Is that better?” she yelled.
Wow. She sounds kind of unhinged.
Abbie VanSickle at The New York Times: Justice Sotomayor Describes Frustration With Being a Liberal on the Supreme Court.
Some days, after Justice Sonia Sotomayor listens to the Supreme Court announce its decisions, she goes into her chambers, shuts the door and weeps.
“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” Justice Sotomayor told a crowd on Friday at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she was being honored. “There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”
The comments about the challenges of being a liberal on a court dominated by conservatives came at the tail end of a public conversation with her friend and law school classmate, Martha Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School and human rights scholar.
Kyohei Inukai, Cat resting on a window sill
The justice set a tone of optimism even as she voiced frustration with some of the court’s rulings, a possible signal that the end of the term, when the most high-profile decisions typically land, could bring more conservative victories. She urged a long-term view of pushing for the values she views as guiding principles — equality, diversity and justice.
“There are moments when I’m deeply, deeply sad,” she said, without citing any specific cases. “There are moments when, yes, even I feel desperation. We all do. But you have to own it, you have to accept it, you have to shed the tears and then you have to wipe them and get up.”
Decisions in dozens of cases are still pending, including on abortion, guns, the free speech rights of social media companies, the regulatory power of government agencies and whether former President Donald J. Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
Today Trump will speak at the Libertarian Convention and it may not go well for him.
NBC News: Libertarian convention crowd appears hostile to Trump ahead of Saturday speech.
Trump is set to deliver a speech Saturday at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention, and if Friday night’s program is any indication, he could be facing a hostile crowd.
Former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who quickly endorsed Trump after dropping out, was booed during his convention remarks Friday night when he mentioned Trump.
“I’m speaking to you as a libertarian at my own core. I have gotten to know Donald Trump over the course of the last several years and the last several months,” Ramaswamy said as many in the crowd booed in response.
Ramaswamy continued, urging the audience of about 100 to ask themselves if they wanted to influence the next administration.
Separately, as Libertarian party members reviewed procedures and motions, a person at a microphone proposed that “we go tell Donald Trump to go f— himself.”
The audience cheered and roared with applause.
“That was my motion too!” another man yelled. “We are a Libertarian convention looking to nominate Libertarians. We do not need to give that time to non-Libertarians.”
Behind the two men, a third chanted, “F— Donald Trump.”
Politico: Libertarian convention devolves into fighting, obscenities on eve of Trump’s visit.
Donald Trump won’t be speaking to his usual self-selected crowd of adoring red-hatted MAGA fans when he addresses the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday.
As delegates gathered at the Washington Hilton on the eve of his speech, the party’s decision to host the former president, which had split the organization, erupted Friday into open revolt. Fuming delegates at the convention said they plan to protest Trump’s speech, and one group sought unsuccessfully to remove the former president along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from the agenda — a move that resulted in thrown punches and obscenities between supporters and opponents of the move.
“I would like to propose that we go tell Donald Trump to go fuck himself!” Kaelan Dreyer, a Libertarian from New Mexico, yelled into a microphone, winning cheers from the crowd. After shouting vulgarities at the convention’s chair and fending off punches, he was led out of the convention hall.
Ralph Hedley, Blinking in the sun
The raucous opening to the convention reflects the pockets of hostility that Trump faces as he appeals to the Libertarians to help him box out a growing, third-party threat from Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign.
“The vast majority of Libertarian Party members are not happy with this invitation,” said Bill Redpath, a 40-year veteran of the Libertarian Party and a former national party chair who’s helped organize their presidential ballot access for decades. “There are some people who call Trump the most Libertarian president of our lifetimes. That’s utterly ridiculous.”
Suburban Philadelphia options trader Jeff Yass, a libertarian and one of the GOP’s biggest donors, who was not in attendance at the convention, said it was “unclear” whether Trump could make inroads with libertarian voters. Yass, who bankrolled an effort to stop Trump from winning the Republican nomination and financed several of his primary opponents, has said he doesn’t plan to contribute to Trump, but will vote for him.
“He has some libertarian instincts for sure. Anti-war is big,” said Yass, who has also praised Trump for his support for education reform policies, which the two have spoken about. “But anti-immigrant, anti-free trade are not good.”
I guess he’s not bothered by Trump’s fascist tendencies.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn on the current state of the presidential polls: A Polling Risk for Trump. His advantage may not be as stable as it looks.
The polls have shown Donald Trump with an edge for eight straight months, but there’s a sign his advantage might not be quite as stable as it looks: His lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.
Disengaged voters on the periphery of the electorate are driving the polling results — and the story line — about the election.
President Biden has actually led the last three New York Times/Siena national polls among those who voted in the 2020 election, even as he has trailed among registered voters overall. And looking back over the last few years, almost all of Trump’s gains came from these less engaged voters.
Importantly, these low-turnout voters are often from Democratic constituencies. Many back Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate. But in our polling, Biden wins just three-quarters of Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t vote in the last cycle, even as almost all high-turnout Democratic-leaners continue to support him.
This trend illustrates the disconnect between Trump’s lead in the polls and Democratic victories in lower-turnout special elections. And it helps explain Trump’s gains among young and nonwhite voters, who tend to be among the least engaged.
Trump’s dependence on these voters could make the race more volatile soon. As voters tune in over the next six months, there’s a chance that disengaged but traditionally Democratic voters could revert to their usual partisan leanings. Alternately, they might stay home, which could also help Biden.
Read more at the NYT.
I guess that’s enough politics news for today. Have a nice Memorial Day weekend.
Edvard Munch painted this portrait of his brother at age 12
We’re living in upside-down world–or something. This morning before reporting for his trial, Trump claimed that people are being “mugged and killed outside” the courthouse. Based on reports from people who have attended the trial, it has been quiet there, with very few protesters from either side. This man is clinically insane. He belongs in a psychiatric hospital. And yet, he is supposedly leading Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race.
What is going on in this country? Check out the results of the latest Harris poll. Lauren Aratani at The Guardian: Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden.
Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.
The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
Many Americans put the blame on Biden for the state of the economy, with 58% of those polled saying the economy is worsening due to mismanagement from the presidential administration.
The poll underscored people’s complicated emotions around inflation. The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing. In reality, the rate of inflation has fallen sharply from its post-Covid peak of 9.1% and has been fluctuating between 3% and 4% a year.
In April, the inflation rate went down from 3.5% to 3.4% – far from inflation’s 40-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 – triggering a stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones index to a record high.
A recession is generally defined by a decrease in economic activity, typically measured as gross domestic product (GDP), over two successive quarters, although in the US the National Bureau of Economic Research (NEBR) has the final say. US GDP has been rising over the last few years, barring a brief contraction in 2022, which the NEBR did not deem a recession….
The only recent recession was in 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the US economy has grown considerably. Unemployment has also hit historic lows, wages have been going up and consumer spending has been strong.
Painting by Edward Hopper, age 9
And this from Jason Lange at Reuters: Biden’s approval rating falls to lowest level in nearly two years-Reuters/Ipsos poll.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s public approval rating this month fell to its lowest level in almost two years, tying the lowest reading of his presidency in a warning sign for his reelection effort, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
The four-day poll, which closed on Monday, showed just 36% of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance as president, down from 38% in April. It was a return to the lowest approval rating of his presidency, last seen in July 2022. While this month’s drop was within the poll’s 3 percentage point margin of error, it could bode poorly for Biden as he faces off with Republican Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Biden, a Democrat, has been largely tied with Trump in national polls asking voters how they will vote. But Trump has had slight leads over Biden in many polls in the states seen as most likely to determine the winner in the U.S. Electoral College.
The poll laid out Biden’s weaknesses as well as a few strengths. The state of the economy was seen as the top issue, picked by 23% of respondents as the most important problem facing the country. Some 21% saw political extremism as the top issue and 13% picked immigration.
Some 40% of respondents in the poll said Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, had better policies for the U.S. economy, compared to 30% who picked Biden, while the rest said they didn’t know or didn’t answer the question.
Who are these people, and what is wrong with them? Apparently lots of them don’t even follow the news or politics at all. This is from Will Bunch’s email newsletter (I don’t have an on-line link, unfortunately): “The voters Biden is losing don’t read the New York Times. Many don’t read anything.”
The constantly simmering fire on social media about how the mainstream news media covers — or doesn’t cover — President Joe Biden had a 55-gallon barrel of gasoline tossed onto it this weekend. It started on Friday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the very first time — the latest in an apparent economic winning streak for the 46th president — and it barely garnered a peep in either the New York Times or Washington Post.
Biden’s most online fans were still seething about that slight two days later when some were shocked to see the Post put a U.S. economy story at the top of the Sunday paper, with the headline: “Buying slows as gloom spreads.” So with the lowest unemployment since the 1960s, the record stock market, real growth in wages and in sectors like manufacturing, that’s what the paper went with? Gloom?
Veteran journalist Kevin Drum instantly pulled up a slew of data that contradict the Post’s glum but mostly anecdotal analysis and asked “why does the Post publish a jumble of misleading or outright incorrect economic statistics instead of just looking them up first?” That kind of question — asking why these elite newsrooms or cable news outlets like MSNBC and CNN are quick to play up Biden’s age or stylistic stumbles while ignoring his accomplishments, as he remains in a dead heat with four-times-indicted Donald Trump — epitomizes the deeply held thought that Biden’s struggles are perhaps largely due to the myriad failings of the mainstream media.
Critics are absolutely right to be furious. But at the same time, I don’t think the New York Times is the reason Biden isn’t clobbering an opponent who’s stuck in a Manhattan courtroom facing 34 felony charges. I think his real problem is the millions of Americans who wouldn’t open the New York Times if you dropped it on their lap with a slice of pizza tucked inside.
Painting by Michaelangelo, age 13
There are basically three clumps of voters in America. There are — praise the Lord — millions of diligent, civic-minded Americans who watch debates or read news, somewhere, to better understand the candidates. But there is also a large pool of what I would call the disinformed, who also pursue information but get it from propaganda sites like Fox News that twist reality, or worse. Many of them liked Trump in 2016 and like him even more now.
The group where Biden used to do OK but is now struggling is a third bloc I’d call the uninformed. Either by choice or by the realities of working multiple jobs or going to school or raising kids, millions of Americans get no news other than the snippets that pop up on TikTok or somehow interrupt the football game. These folks don’t know the New York Times, but also no one at the New York Times knows these folks — until their odd views show up in the polls and everyone is shocked.
For all the deserved carping about negative portrayals of Biden and overly positive coverage of Trump in print, a recent NBC News poll found that among the dwindling number of Americans who identify newspapers as their primary news source, the incumbent Democrat is winning by landslide proportions, 70% to 21%. NBC also found Biden leading with the millions who still watch nightly news on the traditional networks. These viewers, like newspaper readers, tend to be older — and, yes, Biden leads among senior citizens. Maybe because they are better informed?
Conversely, I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that when ranked by news consumption, Trump’s biggest lead is with voters who say they don’t follow the news at all. In the NBC poll, one in seven reported they don’t follow politics — and they are supporting Trump by a solid 53-27% margin. This category is also the most likely to pick a third-party candidate like Robert F.Kennedy Jr., or Cornel West, or Jill Stein, and also most likely not to vote at all.
So basically, we’re fucked unless some of these no-nothings figure out that we’re headed for a dictatorship and decide maybe they’d like to keep some of their rights. Unfortunately, some of these no-nothings appear to be Supreme Court justices.
Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Alito’s “defense” of flying the J6 flag is transparent BS.
Everyone is waiting to see what the United States Supreme Court will do with Donald Trump’s outlandish claim he should be given absolute immunity from prosecution for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Oral arguments indicated that even the conservative justices have some concerns about that stance, but we’ve now learned that Justice Samuel Alito seems pretty on board with Trump’s coup attempt.
It’s yet another ethics scandal for the Court, and it’s a reminder that the right-wing justices operate in a realm of complete unaccountability.
Last week, the New York Times broke news that on January 17, 2021 — 11 days after Trump exhorted his supporters to storm the Capitol and three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration — an upside-down American flag hung outside the Alito home in Alexandria, Virginia. Hanging the flag upside down is literally prohibited by the flag code, save for “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” There’s a long tradition of upside-down flags being flown by protesters on the left and the right, but by January 17, 2021, it was widely known as a symbol used by “Stop the Steal” supporters.
How long the upside-down flag hung at the Alito home isn’t clear. The Times reviewed a January 18, 2021, email from a neighbor that said that it had been upside down for a number of days by that point. Several neighbors spoke to the Times about it but requested to remain anonymous, in part because they feared reprisal. Alito made a brief email statement to the Times, and while the statement succeeded in throwing his wife under the bus, it didn’t do much else. Alito said he “had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag” as it was “briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on lawn signs.”
Even if one takes this statement at face value, it falls far short of an explanation. Several days after an attempted insurrection, a Supreme Court justice let his wife hang a well-known symbol of that attempted insurrection because she got into a spat with the neighbors? Even if the lawn signs were “personally insulting” to the Alitos in some way, how is flying an upside-down flag a legitimate response?
Painting by Salvador Dali, age 4 or 6
Alito was more expansive with conservative Fox News correspondent Shannon Bream, but even in that friendly atmosphere, he couldn’t come up with a convincing explanation. He told Bream a neighbor had put up a sign that said “Fuck Trump,” and it was 50 feet from a children’s bus stop. Mrs. Alito decided to talk with those neighbors, but according to Alito, the conversation didn’t go well, and then those neighbors put up a sign that attacked his wife and blamed her for January 6.
Then, when the Alitos were taking a neighborhood stroll, Mrs. Alito got into an argument with one of the residents of that property, who called her “the c-word.” After that, she was distraught and decided to make what Fox News characterized euphemistically as “some sort of statement” by hanging the flag upside down. Notably, when the Washington Post spoke with a neighbor who described the content of the offending signs, they said they did not even mention the justice directly.
None of these additional details makes Alito or his wife look any better. The most charitable reading is that after a neighbor accused Mrs. Alito of being an insurrection enthusiast, she reacted by hoisting a symbol of support for insurrection. A Supreme Court justice’s wife is busy acting out the Matt Bors comic where a MAGA type reacts to hearing someone say Trump fans are racist by going full Nazi.
Needham goes on to explain why nothing will be done about this. I recommend reading the whole thing.
More insanity from Trump:
You probably heard that Judge Aileen Cannon unsealed some more DOJ documents yesterday, and the MAGA crowd discovered that when the FBI executes a search warrant, they are routinely authorized to use force if necessary. Now Trump is claiming that Joe Biden wanted the FBI to assassinate him when they searched Mar-a-Lago. Never mind that Trump was in New Jersey at the time and everyone–including the FBI–knew that.
David Kurtz in TPM’s Morning Memo: Aileen Cannon Gifts Trump Bogus New Fodder For His Disinformation Campaign.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has screwed up the Mar-a-Lago case in so many ways it defies easy categorization. Her slow rolling of the trial is obviously her single gravest sin. But there’s another layer of malfeasance going on here that came more clearly into view yesterday.
Over the objection of Special Counsel Jack Smith, Cannon ordered the unsealing of previous filings in the case. In some of those filings, it’s becoming apparent, Trump has tucked in information about the case that he wants to seed in the public imagination and use as fodder for his presidential campaign and for fighting the criminal charges outside of court.
Cannon has given him a green light to do so, and the results became apparent yesterday.
In one of the filings, Trump drew attention to the FBI’s deadly force policy, which was in effect during the search of Mar-a-Lago, as it is in every FBI field operation. As soon as the filing was unsealed, right-wing news outlets seized on it and accused Biden of being responsible for gunning for Trump.
Trump himself later in the day amplified these bogus attacks on social media:
Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE—25TH AMENDMENT!
It became a campaign fundraising email, too: “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!”
Of course none of this is true. The same deadly force policy that is in effect for every FBI operation was in effect for the Mar-a-Lago search. The FBI doesn’t need special authority to use deadly force; it has standing authority to use deadly force when circumstances warrant it. This is a standard operating policy, and Biden had nothing to do with its promulgation in general or its application in the Mar-a-Lago search in particular.
But you can see the dynamic plainly from what I just had to do to explain this to you: Trump wants to use the criminal justice process to generate more disinformation, Cannon facilitates him doing so with her rulings, right-wing media go apeshit, Trump gooses the reaction some more, and then a day later I come along and try to unpack it all for you, including the underlying falsity, with a put-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube futility. The FBI issued an unusual statement in similarly futile fashion.
This is all bad enough, but there’s another even darker layer here: It feeds the right-wing animosity toward federal law enforcement that has already led to two attacks on FBI field offices in the past two years.
And Trump is fund-raising off of this nonsense. The Washington Post actually deigned to cover this story. The author is Hannah Knowles: Trump email falsely says Biden was ‘locked & loaded’ to ‘take me out’ in Mar-a-Lago search.
Donald Trump on Tuesday falsely claimed in a campaign fundraising email that President Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” during a 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents, an extraordinary distortion of a standard FBI policy on the use of deadly force during such operations.
Painting by Pablo Picasso, age 8
Trump appeared to be referring to a law enforcement document, released Tuesday in court filings in the classified documents case, that describes the FBI’s plans for a court-authorized search on Aug. 8, 2022, at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club. FBI agents recovered classified material from Trump’s time in the White House — which the former president is now charged with illegally retaining. One page in the document includes a “policy statement” on the use of deadly force, which says officers may resort to lethal force only when the subject of such force poses an “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury” to an officer or another person.
Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, and some of his allies suggested Tuesday that this was evidence that Biden’s Justice Department was prepared to fatally shoot him. In fact, Trump was not at his Florida property the day of the search. FBI agents specifically sought to avoid a confrontation with Trump, choosing a day when Trump would not be at the property and giving the Secret Service a heads-up, The Washington Post previously reported.
A former president falsely accusing his successor and rival of posing a threat to his life is without precedent in modern U.S. history. The comments marked a sharp escalation of Trump’s baseless attacks on Biden, as the former president faces 88 criminal charges across fo perur indictments in federal and state courts. Trump has frequently accused Biden of weaponizing the legal system against him in coordination with the Justice Department and local prosecutors. There is no evidence of such coordination.
A Tuesday evening fundraising email from the Trump campaign that was signed in the candidate’s name arrived with the subject line, “They were authorized to shoot me!” and said of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
Trump also wrote Tuesday on his social media site, Truth Social, that “Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”
The horrifying thing is that at least 30 percent of people probably believe this.
Speaking of Judge Cannon, yesterday, the New York Times ran a guest essay by Brian Greer, a “lawyer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of General Counsel from 2010 to 2018.”: It Is Inexcusable How Judge Cannon Is Delaying the Trump Documents Case.
The task before Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the classified documents case of Donald Trump, is not easy. She must protect Mr. Trump’s constitutional rights while also ensuring the prompt and fair administration of justice.
Still, it is inexcusable that she is utterly failing to keep the case moving along in a fair but timely manner. And unfortunately, there isn’t much that the special counsel in the case, Jack Smith, can do about it.
While working as an attorney in the C.I.A.’s Office of General Counsel, I developed an expertise in Espionage Act prosecutions similar to the one pending against Mr. Trump, who is accused of illegally taking classified state documents from the White House after he left office and then obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them. I know firsthand that cases like this can be quite complicated and lengthy.
Self-Portrait by Albrecht Dürer, age 13
But outside of the unique issues raised by Mr. Trump’s status as a former president (for example, immunity and the Presidential Records Act), the prosecution against him is actually not particularly complex. The volume of classified records subject to discovery is not outside the norm, and if the defendant were not Donald Trump, this would be a relatively routine Espionage Act prosecution for unlawful retention of classified records.
With a competent and determined judge, Mr. Trump’s due process rights could have been well protected and the trial could have reasonably been set for this summer. However, this is not the first time Judge Cannon — a Trump appointee — has granted delay after delay, and thanks to a recent scheduling order, it’s now all but certain that the case will not go to trial until after Election Day.
If Mr. Trump wins the election, the case will be effectively over. The Trump Justice Department would almost certainly dismiss the indictment at his behest when the clock strikes noon on Jan. 20, 2025.
Informed voters know all this, of course, but the uniformed people who respond to polls may not even know that Trump stole hundreds of highly classified documents and stored them in a bathroom and on a stage in large hall at his private club.
One way of taking a measure of how Judge Cannon has failed is by looking at the progress of pretrial litigation, which started soon after Mr. Trump was indicted in June 2023. In a criminal trial, the purpose of pretrial litigation is threefold: to ensure the defense gets access to all discoverable material; to resolve “dispositive” motions that could result in dismissal of the case if granted, like Mr. Trump’s presidential immunity assertion; and to determine what the trial will look like. The latter is an especially important task here given that Mr. Trump is charged with illegally mishandling some of our most closely guarded secrets, which could be further compromised depending on how they are used at a public trial.
Measured against these goals, Judge Cannon has made almost no progress over the past 11 months. That is shocking and indefensible.
On the scope of discovery, Judge Cannon has failed to rule on Mr. Trump’s motion — filed four months ago — to compel additional discovery from the government. Under her new schedule, she may not rule on it until July. A ruling granting Mr. Trump’s motion could result in months of additional delays.
The discovery and use of classified information is one of the thornier issues in cases of this nature. Here, too, the judge has made almost no progress, and her inexperience is showing. She has ruled on just one substantive motion with respect to Mr. Trump, which was filed by the government in December and applied to only a sliver of the classified information at issue in the case. Under her new scheduling order, the next phase of litigation involving classified information won’t begin until mid-June. Judge Cannon won’t even begin to address the difficult questions about how classified information will be used and disclosed at trial until August at the earliest, even though Mr. Trump’s team has had access to over 90 percent of the classified discovery since last fall.
On efforts to dismiss the case, in February, Mr. Trump made seven such motions, and so far Judge Cannon has ruled on only two. Some of them are plainly frivolous, but she has insisted on extensive hearings for each one, some of which have not been held yet.
I feel sick just reading this. There’s more at the link.
That’s about all I can take today; I’m going to have to take some deep breaths and do something other than read or watch the news for awhile. Before I go, here are some links to interesting stories:
Alex Patterson at Media Matters: On social media, news outlets give more attention to Kamala Harris using an expletive than Trump’s corrupt promise to oil executives.
Radley Balko at The Watch: Trump’s deportation army.
Ian Ward at Politico: The right’s fascism problem.
Andy Kroll at ProPublica: Scenes From a MAGA Meltdown: Inside the “America First” Movement’s War Over Democracy.
Marc Caputo at The Bulwark: Meet Trump’s ‘Human Printer.’ Her name is Natalie Harp. She’s 32. And she has unbelievable access to the man who might be president again.
The Atlantic: New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity.
NOTE: The art works in this post are from a Twitter thread by James Lucas.
Take care, Sky Dancers!!
Zhou Wenjiu, Woman with Cat, between the 10th century and the 11th century,
Yesterday, Dakinikat posted in a comment about Justice Samuel Alito’s latest scandal–an upside down American flag flew outside his house for several days after the January 6 insurrection.
The upside down flag was used by MAGA gangsters to represent “stop the steal.” A number of insurrectionists carried it during the attacks on the Capitol.
I’m going to provide more detail and reactions to this story in this post. This is a huge story and I think it shows that Alito and his wife Martha Ann are as bad or worse than Clarence and Ginni Thomas. I hope the Chinese cat art will help you stay calm.
First, the New York Times story from yesterday by Jodi Kantor: At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.
After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.
One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.
The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times. Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there said in interviews.
While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one.
Alito reacted to the story by throwing his wife under the bus.
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.
The mere impression of political opinion can be a problem, the ethics experts said. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.
Interviews show that the justice’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, had been in a dispute with another family on the block over an anti-Trump sign on their lawn, but given the timing and the starkness of the symbol, neighbors interpreted the inverted flag as a political statement by the couple.
By Qi Baishi, 1864-1957
Neighbors said that the flag had been flying for several days before the photograph was taken. That’s not a brief time in my book.
The longstanding ethics code for the lower courts, as well as the recent one adopted by the Supreme Court, stresses the need for judges to remain independent and avoid political statements or opinions on matters that could come before them.
“You always want to be proactive about the appearance of impartiality,” Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge and the director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, said in an interview. “The best practice would be to make sure that nothing like that is in front of your house.”
The court has also repeatedly warned its own employees against public displays of partisan views, according to guidelines circulated to the staff and reviewed by The Times. Displaying signs or bumper stickers is not permitted, according to the court’s internal rule book and a 2022 memo reiterating the ban on political activity.
Read the rest at the NYT.
Some commentary from John Fritze at CNN: New York Times: Upside-down US flag flew at home of Justice Samuel Alito after 2020 election.
The revelation is almost certain to prompt calls for Alito, a member of the court’s conservative wing, to recuse himself from several high-profile cases pending before the court this year involving the election and subsequent attack on the US Capitol, including the blockbuster question of whether Trump may claim immunity from federal election subversion charges….
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in an emailed statement to the Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
The upside-down flag became a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement in the weeks and months following the election, in which Trump’s supporters falsely claimed that Biden’s win was illegitimate due to widespread fraud. The inverted flag was widely seen during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol….
The story will heap further scrutiny on the high court at a time when it is already facing considerable blowback. Justice Clarence Thomas has been the subject of significant criticism and calls for recusal in election-related cases after his wife, conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, acknowledged she attended Trump’s rally before the Capitol attack and supported White House efforts to discredit the election results.
By Xu Beihong, 1952
Last fall, in response to a series of revelations about travel accepted by Thomas and Alito, the Supreme Court adopted a code of conduct for the first time. That code guides the justices to “refrain from political activity.”
“Two scenarios are plausible and neither one of them is attractive: Either the gesture was trivial pettiness and ought to be beneath the dignity of the court or it is was intended as meaningful symbolism in which case it is a real problem,” said James Sample, a Hofstra Law School professor who has studied judicial ethics.
Combined with the earlier Thomas revelations, Sample said, “The scenarios amplify the need for Congress to impose meaningful ethics enforcement on a court that steadfastly refuses to police itself.”
This is interesting. Yesterday, a number of people posted on Twitter about remarks that Sydney Powell made about the role Alito was expected to play in the efforts to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2001.
This article is from Newsweek, September 27, 2021: Sidney Powell Drags Justice Samuel Alito and Supreme Court into January 6 Mess.
Attorney Sidney Powell said the January 6 riot at the Capitol could have caused a delay which would have allowed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification of Joe Biden‘s election victory—but that chance was lost when Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress to complete the process.
Powell, an attorney who has filed numerous lawsuits in a failed bid to overturn former President Donald Trump‘s 2020 election loss, made the comments during an appearance on the conservative Stew Peters Show on Friday.
She said that as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol that day, her team was seeking an emergency injunction to prevent the certification of Biden’s win.
“We were filing a 12th Amendment constitutional challenge to the process that the Congress was about to use under the Electoral Act provisions that simply don’t jive with the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution,” she said. “And Justice Alito was our circuit justice for that.”
She added: “Louie Gohmert was the plaintiff in our lawsuit, and we were suing the vice president to follow the 12th Amendment as opposed to the Electoral College Act.”
I’d love to know what Alito would say about this.
More commentary from Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: The Smallest Justice Who Ever Lived. Samuel Alito’s explanations for his wife’s upside-down American flag make the story even worse.
We have known for some time now that the current Supreme Court is not comprised of “conservatives” and “liberals,” or even “jurists” and “reactionaries.” It has split into those who care about the future of the court and the country, and those who do not.
Because the group that cares is much larger than the one that doesn’t, its members could have at any time done many things to signal to the latter group —and we can go ahead and name them, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—that accepting lavish, undisclosed gifts and vacations from billionaire donors who have interests before the court was a rolling, public-confidence-and-democracy-threatening disaster. They said nothing, even as this sordid conduct degraded the nation’s highest court, for many of the reasons powerful individuals often say nothing: To protect the institution at large; to preserve the long-tarnished myth of a collegial court; and because, when there is nothing to be done about it anyhow, what’s the point?
In a sense, then, nobody should be all that surprised by Jodi Kantor’s bombshell reporting on Thursday night about the upside-down flag that hung outside the Alitos’ home in suburban Virginia in the days after the Jan. 6 insurrection. The symbol of support for the attempted coup flew during a time when the court was considering cases seeking to set aside the election results. Alito has confirmed that this flag display happened. Multiple neighbors and Supreme Court employees have corroborated the reporting.
Su Hanchen, Children Playing on a Winter Day, 12th century, National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
We can certainly quibble (and Alito’s defenders surely will) about whether an upside-down flag really represents “Stop the Steal,” as Kantor’s experts affirm, or some other message of peace and goodwill. We can and will debate over Alito’s claim that his wife hoisted the flag because one of the neighbors hurt their feelings (so, #feminism). But the saddest and most arresting part of this endless downward spiral for the seven jurists who should know better, and the two who do not, is not that they don’t care about what they are doing to the court—it’s how pitifully, shabbily small these ride-or-die political battles really are.
Every one of the Supreme Court’s nine justices is well aware of the recusal statute that binds federal judges and the ethics code that, even in 2021, they purported to consult and follow. Even then, before SCOTUS produced its own totally voluntary, never-say-never ethical guidelines in 2023, internal policy and external law required them to refrain from acting like thin-skinned partisan nuts, and to recuse themselves from relevant cases when they failed to adhere to this standard.
This is a low bar to clear. And yet, in statements to the New York Timesand Fox News’ Shannon Bream, Alito implied that he and his wife, Martha-Ann, simply had no choice but to disrespect the stars and stripes by vulgarly violating the U.S. Flag Code because it was necessary to own a liberal neighbor. The justice told Bream that this neighbor put up a “Fuck Trump” sign—where children might see it!—and then another sign “personally” blaming Martha-Ann for Jan. 6. Finally, “a male in the home” called Martha-Ann “the c-word” while she was on a walk with her husband. All this led her to join countless “Stop the Steal” enthusiasts in hanging her American flag upside down.
On Alito’s ridiculous excuse:
None of the Alitos’ explanations so far even attempt to explain why Martha-Ann landed on this gesture, out of all the possibilities, to further upset and provoke her progressive neighbors. Readers are also left to guess at the true origin of the conflict; are we really supposed to think that the neighbors picked this fight unprovoked, and the Alitos are completely blameless? The justice’s defenders are scrambling to muddy the waters with some alternate explanation, but the truth is crystal clear, and unrefuted by the Alitos themselves: That flag was hung upside down to piss off some libs. At best, Martha-Ann Alito was trolling her neighbor by professing a militant belief that Biden stole the election; at worst, she held that belief sincerely.
Let’s be clear that everything these neighbors stand accused of doing is obviously protected speech under the First Amendment. There is no allegation of genuine harassment or true threats; these people just wanted to express displeasure toward a very public figure and his somewhat public wife. And though Alito seems to believe that he and his wife were within their rights to fight back against an irritating neighbor, the staff who work under Alito at SCOTUS would have no such luxury. The Times piece lays out the strictures on court employees that ban political signs and bumper stickers, “partisan political activity,” and even “nonpartisan political activity” that “could reflect adversely on the dignity or impartiality of the court.” [….]
Xu Beihong, Cat, 1941
So when Alito throws his wife under the bus—the flag was “briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs”—he’s issuing another justification: He gets to break the rules because she was in a fight with the neighbors. He gets to break the rules because the seat on the plane was otherwise unoccupied. He gets to break the rules because the rules are always trying to trip him up and catch him out.
The justice’s perpetual victimhood mentality, which shines through in his opinions and interviews and myriad grievance-laden speeches, has now literally reached his own front yard. The Alitos are not here fighting some vitally important civic-minded battle about the nature of freedom or democracy. No. This is, as Alito concedes, just payback because of a lawn sign and a bad word. Presumably, fourth-period detention and a note home to the neighbors’ parents were not an option.
Alito should be impeached, along with Thomas.
One more from Marina Villeneuve at Salon: “Out of control”: Legal experts say Justice Alito’s “Stop the Steal” symbol is a huge red flag.
Legal experts are lamenting the lack of an enforceable judicial ethics code, with some calling for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s recusal, following a New York Times report that a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement to reject the 2020 election was flown outside Alito’s home in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Ten leading legal experts told Salon Friday that the conduct — the flying of an upside-down flag, a known symbol of the movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, at a justice’s home — appears to violate the Supreme Court’s own ethics code, adopted last last year, by creating an appearance of bias.
Those experts said it’s far past time for the nine justices who enjoy lifetime appointments to hold themselves to the highest ethical standards. But, they noted, the Supreme Court has shown itself reluctant to do so.
“The situation is out of control,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush who worked with Justice Alito on his 2006 Senate confirmation, told Salon. “This is after the insurrection, so it’s really him weighing in, getting involved publicly in a dispute over the insurrection.”
The U.S. Flag Code says the flag should only be displayed upside-down as a “signal of distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” Movements including the Tea Party and “Stop the Steal” have used upside-down flags as a symbol of protest and despair….
“I don’t know why we have a Supreme Court justice flying a flag upside down, weighing in on an election, why his wife would be doing that,” Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, said. “His wife is well aware of the impartiality obligations of a federal judge.”
Painter said he was not convinced by Alito attributing the up-side down flag to his wife, particularly when it was flown on their joint property. “When the house is used this way, I’d be shocked that she would do that without talking about it with him first.”
By Xu Beihong, 1952
Alito should recuse himself from January 6-related cases.
Painter, who has called for an inspector general for the Supreme Court, said the Times report also raises “serious questions about whether he can impartially adjudicate any case related to Jan. 6.” He also suggested that special counsel Jack Smith should file a motion for Alito’s recusal in the pending Trump v. United States case, in which the Supreme Court will weigh in on presidential immunity from criminal prosecution….
“A more blatant revelation of bias in a pending case is hard to imagine,” Washington & Lee University School of Law professor Jim Moliterno told Salon. “It was literally waving a banner that said, ‘I favor election-deniers.’”
“Who can possibly think he will decide this case in a neutral manner?” Professor Leslie Levin, a University of Connecticut School of Law professor, told Salon. “Of course, Justice Alito’s political leanings were already well-known. But the flag flying incident indicates he has strong views about the facts underlying this case. His decision seems pre-ordained.”
There’s much more from legal exports at the Salon link.
More stories to check out today:
Time Magazine: Biden Likens MAGA Movement to Segregationists in Speech to NAACP.
NBC News: No more games’: Biden campaign rejects additional debates against Trump.
The New Republic: AOC Reveals Darker Intentions Behind MTG Hearing Chaos.
The Daily Beast: GOP, Dems Round on MTG After Outburst: ‘Her Brand Is Chaos.’
Axios: Rudy Giuliani served Arizona indictment same day as his 80th birthday party.
CNN: John Eastman, former Trump lawyer, pleads not guilty in Arizona election interference case.
AP: Man gets 30 years in prison for attacking ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer.
Axios: Scoop: U.S., Iran held indirect talks this week on avoiding more attacks.
Have a great weekend, Eveyone!!
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.
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.
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!
By Gabriele Münter
Yesterday was the second day of Trump’s Manhattan trial for a plot to interfere with the 2016 election by covering up payoffs to extramarital sexual partners and planting fake stories in the National Enquirer.
It was also the second day of testimony by David Pecker, former CEO of American Media, which owned the Enquirer and many other publications. Pecker, Trump, and his lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen orchestrated the fake news operation.
Before the trial resumed, Judge Juan Merchan held a hearing about whether Trump had already violated the terms of his gag order.
A wrap-up of yesterday’s court business at The Washington Post: A secret pact at Trump Tower helped kill bad stories in 2016.
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was repeatedly aided by the National Enquirer, which squelched potentially damaging stories about him and pumped out articles pummeling his rivals, the former boss of the supermarket tabloid testified Tuesday during the ex-president’s trial on charges of falsifying business records.
Yesterday, Trump claimed that thousands of his supporters who wanted to protest his trial outside the courthouse were turned away by police. That just didn’t happen, and he’s frustrated about it.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Trump keeps begging for a “rally behind MAGA” — but his supporters aren’t showing up to court.
Donald Trump can’t decide how he wants his supporters to feel about the scene outside of the Manhattan courtroom where he’s being tried on 34 felony indictments for election interference and business fraud. He repeatedly argues that the city he travels through in a daily motorcade to his trial is a war zone. “Violent criminals that are murdering people, killing people” are free to “do whatever they want,” he’s falsely claimed, blasting District Attorney Alvin Bragg as “lazy on violent crime” because he’s supposedly too focused on prosecuting Trump.
By Gary Kim
It’s all a lie — crime is way down from the pandemic-related spikes — but it’s one Trump repeats ad nauseam. And it’s constantly reinforced by Fox News, which pushes out a series of misleading stories and images meant to scare their elderly suburbanite audiences into believing that going into the nation’s largest city results in instant murder. Nonetheless, Trump keeps pleading with his followers to run through what they’ve been told is a “bloodbath” in order to, you know, persuade Bragg and presiding Judge Juan Merchan to just give up on this whole trial nonsense.
On Monday, Trump begged his followers on Truth Social to “RALLY BEHIND MAGA” at courthouses, unsubtly suggesting that they model themselves after the mostly imaginary leftist rioters who “scream, shout, sit, block traffic, enter buildings, not get permits, and basically do whatever they want.” When the MAGA hats failed to show, Trump tried to inspire them with a post complaining that it’s “SO UNFAIR!!!” that he doesn’t get throngs of people like the kind seen at the antiwar protest a few miles north at Columbia University. Other than a few scattered people with pro-Trump signs, the mob he longed for never showed. So he took his pleas to the cameras outside the courthouse Tuesday morning:
WordPress won’t let me post the video, but you can see it at the Salon link.
What’s especially funny about all this is that Trump can’t quite admit that his people just aren’t showing up, and keeps on blaming the barricades and the cops. His lies got to the level of childish make-believe on Tuesday afternoon, as he falsely claimed on Truth Social that “Thousands of people were turned away from the Courthouse” while denying that he was “disappointed by the crowds.” Of course, by fantasizing about a massive caravan rallied to his defense, he proved he is not satisfied with reality.
As the New York Times reported, “A day after Trump issued a call for more supporters to gather outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, the number reached its nadir. The number of identifiable Trump fans across the street in Collect Pond Park on Tuesday sank to the mid-single digits, after hovering at about a dozen for a week”
How can this childish man actually have a chance to be POTUS again?
One more article on the Manhattan trial–an opinion piece by Jed Handelsman Shugerman at The New York Times: I Thought the Bragg Case Against Trump Was a Legal Embarrassment. Now I Think It’s a Historic Mistake.
About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal problems would and should lead to long delays in federal courts.
After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the Manhattan D.A. has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud.
To recap: Mr. Trump is accused in the case of falsifying business records. Those are misdemeanor charges. To elevate it to a criminal case, Mr. Bragg and his team have pointed to potential violations of federal election law and state tax fraud. They also cite state election law, but state statutory definitions of “public office” seem to limit those statutes to state and local races.
Both the misdemeanor and felony charges require that the defendant made the false record with “intent to defraud.” A year ago, I wondered how entirely internal business records (the daily ledger, pay stubs and invoices) could be the basis of any fraud if they are not shared with anyone outside the business. I suggested that the real fraud was Mr. Trump’s filing an (allegedly) false report to the Federal Election Commission, and only federal prosecutors had jurisdiction over that filing.
A recent conversation with Jeffrey Cohen, a friend, Boston College law professor and former prosecutor, made me think that the case could turn out to be more legitimate than I had originally thought. The reason has to do with those allegedly falsified business records: Most of them were entered in early 2017, generally before Mr. Trump filed his Federal Election Commission report that summer. Mr. Trump may have foreseen an investigation into his campaign, leading to its financial records. Mr. Trump may have falsely recorded these internal records before the F.E.C. filing as consciously part of the same fraud: to create a consistent paper trail and to hide intent to violate federal election laws, or defraud the F.E.C.
In short: It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up.
Looking at the case in this way might address concerns about state jurisdiction. In this scenario, Mr. Trump arguably intended to deceive state investigators, too. State investigators could find these inconsistencies and alert federal agencies. Prosecutors could argue that New York State agencies have an interest in detecting conspiracies to defraud federal entities; they might also have a plausible answer to significant questions about whether New York State has jurisdiction or whether this stretch of a state business filing law is pre-empted by federal law.
Shugerman didn’t address the fake news operation with the Enquirer.
Henry Woods, El velo de la primera comunión (1893)
In other news, the Senate passed the bill with aid to Ukraine, and Biden will sign it today.
The New York Times: Biden to Sign Aid Package for Ukraine and Israel.
President Biden was set to sign a $95.3 billion package of aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan on Wednesday, reaffirming U.S. support for Kyiv in the fight against Russia’s military assault after months of congressional gridlock put the centerpiece of the White House’s foreign policy in jeopardy.
The Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve the package on Tuesday night, a sign of bipartisan support after increasingly divisive politics raised questions on Capitol Hill and among U.S. allies over whether the United States would continue to back Kyiv. The 79-to-18 vote provided Mr. Biden another legislative accomplishment to point to, even in the face of an obstructionist House.
“Congress has passed my legislation to strengthen our national security and send a message to the world about the power of American leadership: We stand resolutely for democracy and freedom, and against tyranny and oppression,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday evening, just minutes after the Senate vote.
He said he would sign the bill into law and address the American people on Wednesday “so we can begin sending weapons and equipment to Ukraine this week.”
The White House first sent a request for the security package in October, and officials have bluntly acknowledged that the six-month delay put Ukraine at a disadvantage in its fight against Russia.
“The Russians have slowly but successfully taken more ground from the Ukrainians and pushed them back against their first, second and, in some places, their third line of defense,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s National Security Council, said on Tuesday on Air Force One. “The short answer is: Yes, there absolutely has been damage in the last several months.”
Arlette Saenz at CNN: How the White House convinced Mike Johnson to back Ukraine aid.
The Senate’s vote on Tuesday to approve new aid for Ukraine capped off six months of public pressure and private overtures by the White House to build support, including the not-insignificant task of winning over House Speaker Mike Johnson.
For months, President Joe Biden and his team pressed the case for additional aid both publicly and privately, leaning into courting Johnson – whose young speakership was under pressure from his right flank – behind the scenes through White House meetings, phone calls and detailed briefings on the battlefield impacts, administration officials said.
Grappling with the leadership dynamics in a House GOP conference increasingly resistant to more aid, Biden directed his team to use every opportunity possible to lay out the consequences of inaction directly to Johnson. That included warnings of what it would mean not just for Ukraine, but also Europe and the US, if Russian President Vladimir Putin were to succeed, administration officials said.
The president specifically urged his team to lean into providing a full intelligence picture of Ukraine’s battlefield situation in their conversations with the speaker and his staff as well as discussing the national security implications for the US, officials said. That push played out over the next six months – starting with a Situation Room briefing one day after Johnson became speaker.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young briefed the speaker and other key lawmakers on how aid for Ukraine was running out, putting the country’s efforts to fight off Russia in jeopardy. Biden stopped by the meeting and met with Johnson on the side to convey a similar message. Sullivan followed up four days later with a call to Johnson to highlight the measures in place to track aid in Ukraine.
But Johnson quickly made clear aid for Ukraine and Israel would need to be separated – an approach the White House opposed and one that would be tested time and time again in the coming months.
The ordeal ended on Tuesday when the Senate passed the $95 billion foreign aid package, with nearly $61 billion for Ukraine, marking a long-sought foreign policy win for Biden, who has spent the past two years rallying Western support for the war-torn country in its fight against Russia. At the same time, the president has been grappling with his own battle back home to get more aid approved amid resistance from some Republicans. The White House has said he will sign that legislation – which also provides over $26 billion for Israel and humanitarian assistance and more than $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan – as soon as possible.
Read more details at CNN.
While Trump has been dozing off in court in New York, President Biden has been campaigning, most recently in Florida.
HuffPost: Biden To Florida Voters: Six-Week Abortion Ban Is Trump’s Fault.
President Joe Biden swooped into Florida Tuesday, hoping to parlay the state’s new restrictive abortion law — as well as a ballot initiative that could undo it — into a campaign issue that could give him the state’s trove of electoral votes come November, effectively locking up his reelection.
“There’s one person responsible for this nightmare, and he acknowledges it and he brags about it: Donald Trump,” Biden told a boisterous crowd in a gym at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa.
He attacked Florida’s six-week abortion ban — approved in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and ending a national right to abortion — and reminded voters that it was the coup-attempting former president’s three appointees to the high court that paved the way.
“It was Donald Trump who ripped away the rights and freedom of women in America,” he said. “We’ll teach Donald Trump and extreme MAGA Republicans a valuable lesson: Don’t mess with the women of America.”
Political consultants from both parties, while skeptical that Biden will actually win Florida, agree that forcing Trump on the defensive in a state he cannot afford to lose and which he only won by three percentage points in 2020 is a smart move.
“I don’t think he’d be in Tampa today if they didn’t see it as good place to make a contrast,” said Steve Schale, who ran former President Barack Obama’s successful Florida campaign operation in both 2008 and 2012. “There’s nothing more valuable, particularly for an incumbent, than a candidate’s time.”
David Hockney, NIchols Canyon, Hollywood HIlls
Just one more story–an op-ed by Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissmann in The New York Times on the Supreme Court’s upcoming hearing on Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity.”
The Supreme Court Has Already Botched the Trump Immunity Case.
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear oral arguments in Donald Trump’s immunity-appeal case on Thursday may appear to advance the rule of law. After all, few, if anyone, thinks that a majority of the court will conclude that a former president is completely immune from federal criminal liability.
But the court’s decision to review the immunity case actually undermines core democratic values.
The Supreme Court often has an institutional interest in cases of presidential power. But the court’s insistence on putting its own stamp on this case — despite the widespread assumption that it will not change the application of immunity to this case and the sluggish pace chosen to hear it — means that it will have needlessly delayed legal accountability for no justifiable reason. Even if the Supreme Court eventually does affirm that no person, not even a president, is above the law and immune from criminal liability, its actions will not amount to a victory for the rule of law and may be corrosive to the democratic values for which the United States should be known.
That is because the court’s delay may have stripped citizens of the criminal justice system’s most effective mechanism for determining disputed facts: a trial before a judge and a jury, where the law and the facts can be weighed and resolved.
It is this forum — and the resolution it provides — that Mr. Trump seeks, at all costs, to avoid. It is not surprising that he loudly proclaims his innocence in the court of public opinion. What is surprising is that the nation’s highest court has interjected itself in a way that facilitates his efforts to avoid a legal reckoning.
Looking at the experience of other countries is instructive. In Brazil, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, after baselessly claiming fraud before an election, was successfully prosecuted in a court and barred from running for office for years. In France, the former president Jacques Chirac was successfully prosecuted for illegal diversion of public funds during his time as mayor of Paris. Likewise, Argentina, Italy, Japan and South Korea have relied on the courts to hold corrupt leaders to account for their misconduct….
Consider India, Bolivia, Hungary and Venezuela, where the erosion of judicial independence of the courts has been accompanied by a rise in all-consuming power for an individual leader.
Within our constitutional system, the U.S. Supreme Court can still act effectively and quickly to preserve the judiciary’s role in a constitutional democracy. If the court is truly concerned about the rule of law and ensuring that these disputed facts are resolved in a trial, it could issue a ruling quickly after the oral argument.
It would then fall to the special counsel Jack Smith and Judge Chutkan to ensure that this case gets to a jury. Obviously, fidelity to due process and careful attention to the rights of the accused are critical. To get to a trial and avoid any further potential delay, Mr. Smith may decide to limit the government’s case to its bare essentials — what is often called the “slim to win” strategy. And Judge Chutkan has already warned Mr. Trump that his pretrial unruly statements with respect to witnesses and others may result in her moving up the start of the trial to protect the judicial process.
Read the rest at the NYT.
That’s it for me today. What do you think? Are there other stories that interest you?
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