Posted: June 8, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: Autocracy, Monuments to famous cats, Trump campaign's unconstitutional plans, Trump fantasies of violence, Trump's narcissism and selfishness |
Good Afternoon!!
This monument is located in Kyiv, Ukraine. The statue depicts a cat named Panteleimon, who was famous for his habit of sitting near a pharmacy in the city during the 19th century.
During his trial in Manhattan, Trump repeatedly claimed that he was being prevented from campaigning, even though he chose not to do so during his off days. Then, after his conviction, he spent a week golfing. But he has returned to the campaign trail now, and we’re learning more about his violent fantasies, his extreme narcissism and selfishness, and, worst of all, his authoritarian ambitions.
He gave two revealing interviews to Sean Hannity and Dr. Phil McGraw. Some reactions:
David McAfee at Raw Story: Trump accused of ‘making a threat’ against Merrick Garland in latest Fox interview.
Donald Trump Friday was accused of making a threat against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in a Fox News interview.
In the interview with Trump, the conservative network asks the former president what he thinks of Garland. Garland was first chosen by then-President Barack Obama to be a Supreme Court justice, but was made A.G. by President Joe Biden after Republicans tanked his judicial nomination during the election.
“What do you say about Merrick Garland?” the host asked.
“I’m disappointed in him,” Trump said, adding that Garland is known as being “very liberal.”
“But I always looked upon him as being a very legitimate person,” Trump then added. “And I’m very disappointed that he’s allowed this all to happen. A raid of Mar-a-Lago. They could have had whatever they wanted!”
Responding to that clip, former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski said, “Make no mistake, this is a threat.”
Dem strategist Adam Parkhomenko echoed those comments.
“Trump pretends he would’ve supported Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court while, as [Filipkowski] points out, making a threat,” he wrote on Friday.
It’s not explicit, but Trump knows he doesn’t have to do much to get his rabid followers to start harassing people he designates as enemies.
Mediaite: Trump Says ‘Sometimes Revenge Can Be Justified’ During Interview With Dr. Phil: ‘I Have to be Honest.’
Former President Donald Trump told Dr. Phil McGraw on Thursday that “sometimes revenge can be justified” after the television host suggested Trump wouldn’t “have time to get even” with his enemies in a second term in the White House.
“I think you have so much to do, you don’t have time to get even. You only have time to get right,” said McGraw during an interview with Trump on Dr. Phil Primetime.
“Well revenge does take time, I will say that,” replied Trump. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”
Phil questioned, “But is the country better or worse for going after you?”
“I think the country is really worse for what they’ve done and I think you see that when you look at the poll numbers,” said Trump. “When you see that almost $400 million has poured in since this horrible decision [in the New York hush money trial] was made, that was a few days ago. Numbers that nobody’s ever heard of in politics before. It’s a great honor.”
After Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents, the former president suggested on Fox News’ Hannity this week that he could get revenge on President Joe Biden if he wins a second term in November.
“Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them, and it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden,” he said.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Bizarre Moments With Dr. Phil and Hannity Should Alarm Us All.
During just this week, two of Donald Trump’s friendliest interviewers handed him big prime-time opportunities to unequivocally renounce any intention to retaliate against Democrats for his criminal conviction by a jury of his peers in Manhattan. Both times, Trump demurred.
“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump told Dr. Phil McGraw, after he suggested that seeking retribution for Trump’s criminal charges would harm the country. Though Trump graciously said he was “open” to showing forbearance toward Democrats, he suggested revenge would be tempting, given “what I’ve been through.”
Miss Chippy, tribute to the feline companion of Sir Ernest Shackleton, a renowned Antarctic explorer.
Trump voiced similar sentiments to Sean Hannity after the Fox News host practically begged him to deny he’d pursue his opponents. “I would have every right to go after them,” Trump said. Though Trump nodded along with Hannity’s suggestion that “weaponizing” law enforcement is bad, Trump added, “I don’t want to look naïve,” seemingly meaning that if he doesn’t seek revenge, he’ll have been victimized without acting to set things right.
These moments have been widely mocked as a sign that even Trump’s media pals can’t help him disguise his true second-term intentions. That’s true, but there’s another point to be made here: The exchanges should awaken us to what a monstrous scam it is when Trump and his allies talk about unleashing prosecutions of foes as “revenge” and “retribution.”
We have to stop letting Trump get away with this. It’s actually spin, and we should all say so….
In the media, this story tends to be framed as follows: Will Trump seek “revenge” for his legal travails, or won’t he? But that framing unwittingly lets Trump set the terms of this debate. It implies that he is vowing to do to Democrats what was done to him.
But that’s not what Trump is actually threatening. Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.
You might think this distinction is obvious—one most voters will grasp instinctually. But why would they grasp this? It’s not uncommon to encounter news stories about Trump’s threats—see here, here, or here—that don’t explain those basic contours of the situation. Such stories often don’t take the elementary step of explaining the fundamental difference between bringing prosecutions in keeping with what evidence and the rule of law dictate and bringing them as purported “retaliation.” Why would casual readers simply infer that prosecutions against Trump are legally predicated while those he is threatening are not?
Read the rest at TNR.
Hugh Lowell at The Guardian on Trump’s violent fantasies: Trump to escalate blame on trial judge Juan Merchan if sentenced to prison.
Donald Trump is determined to avoid jail, but if he does get handed a prison sentence after his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York last week, the former president’s inner circle is certain he will lay the blame squarely at the judge’s feet, sources familiar with the matter said.
The precise way Trump might blame the judge, Juan Merchan, remains unclear because Trump has been avoidant of the issue and the matter was not resolved when he huddled with his top advisers at a Trump Tower meeting immediately after the verdict on Thursday, the sources said.
But Trump is likely to double down on his attacks against Merchan, directing his supporters at rallies and in Truth Social posts to take up their grievances with the judge, one of the sources added.
The consequences of Trump’s likely rhetoric are difficult to predict. Trump has been railing against Merchan for months as being unfair and in conspiracy cahoots with the Biden administration to prevent him from campaigning – and nothing concrete has happened.
Still, Trump’s supporters have a history of making threats against judges Trump has assailed, including death threats to Tanya Chutkan, the US district judge who is presiding in his federal 2020 election interference case, and to the chambers of the New York judge who oversaw his civil fraud trial.
Trump believes – correctly – that the ultimate decision with sentencing rests with Merchan, who has wide discretion to sentence him to fines or probation on the low end, to a carceral sentence on the high end, regardless of what prosecutors might request.
That reasoning would be the basis for Trump to hold the judge responsible for any fallout, in the event he hands down a jail term days before the Republican national convention – even if the sentence would almost certainly be stayed pending appeal.
Trump has already spent weeks railing against Merchan, taking advantage of the fact that the judge himself is not protected by the gag order. Both before and during the trial, Trump slammed the judge’s rulings as unfair and biased, and falsely suggested he was trying to stop him campaigning.
Read more at The Guardian.
As for his obvious narcissism and selfishness, look what happened at a rally in Arizona, and what could happen again tomorrow at his afternoon rally in Las Vegas.
BBC News: Extreme heat sends 11 to hospital at Arizona Trump rally.
Extreme heat in Arizona sent 11 people to hospital as thousands waited to enter a campaign rally with former President Donald Trump.
As Trump took the stage just after 17:00 EDT (22:00 GMT) at a mega-church in Phoenix, the temperature was 111F (44C).
Hamish McHamish was a beloved ginger cat that became a local celebrity in the town of St. Andrews, Scotland.
It was his first rally since his criminal conviction in a New York hush-money case, which found him guilty of falsifying business records in relation to a payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
Trump used the campaign event to repeat accusations that the case against him was politically motivated and called for the conviction to be overturned.
“I just went through a rigged trial in New York,” he insisted. “It was made-up, fabricated stuff.” [….]
Fans started lining up early outside the massive Phoenix Dream City Church to see him speak, and strict security measures meant it took time for everyone to get in.
As supporters waited outside the campaign rally, BBC News saw several people being treated for heat-related issues and two were taken to hospital.
On Thursday – two weeks before summer even officially starts – the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast record-breaking temperatures in interior California, and parts of Nevada and Arizona.
Temperatures were expected to reach 121F (49C) in California’s scorching Death Valley during the heatwave.
In Phoenix, an excessive heat warning is in place on Friday, with people being asked to limit time outdoors and stay hydrated.
Why would the campaign schedule a rally in the afternoon in Phoenix? Because Trump had date with big donors at a fundraiser on Thursday night in San Francisco.
Talia Jane at The New Republic: Team Trump Brags About Letting Supporters Pass Out From Heat Stroke.
Team Trump boasted about people “braving” extreme heat in Arizona while waiting to watch Trump ramble incoherently at a campaign rally for over an hour on Thursday, making no mention that at least 11 people collapsed and were hospitalized for heat exhaustion.
“That’s an enthusiasm that Joe Biden will never see,” Trump’s newsletter proclaimed of the crowds stuck roasting on unshaded concrete. “That’s the enthusiasm Americans have to Make America Great Again!”
The intense loyalty to Trump from his supporters—largely elderly and more prone to heat stroke—is a disturbing example of how far his extremist base is willing to suffer just for a glimpse of their dear leader. Their queasy dedication speaks to the religious fervor cultivated by Trump who touts himself as a messiah who has come to save the masses from the satanic swamp, a Jesus preaching gobbledygook from the mountaintop of Dream City megachurch in Phoenix. On Friday, Trump boasted about a song that refers to him as “the chosen one”—words he has explicitly said in the past.
That Team Trump apparently took no measures to meet its base’s most basic human needs amid an anticipated high of 108 degrees on Thursday—neither handing out water nor setting up cooling tents in anticipation of the heat—and instead touted their suffering as “enthusiasm” speaks to the level of appreciation Trump has for those who support him, which is to say obviously none.
Michael Gold at The New York Times: As Trump Rallies in the Southwest, Extreme Heat Threatens MAGA Faithful.
This week, with former President Donald J. Trump holding campaign events in the Southwest, his team is grappling with an extreme heat wave that has threatened the health of some of his most ardent fans.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump went to Phoenix for a campaign event at a megachurch, where hopeful attendees waited for hours to enter as the temperature climbed above 110 degrees. The heat was so scorching that some of those waiting collapsed, and 11 people were taken to hospitals to be treated for heat exhaustion.
Tombili the Cat was a beloved street cat from Istanbul, known for his relaxed and laid-back posture while sitting on a step.
The Trump campaign is taking steps to avoid similar circumstances on Sunday, when Mr. Trump is scheduled to speak at an outdoor rally at noon at a park in Las Vegas. Forecasts expect the temperature to be around 105 degrees.
Much of the western United States has been contending with a heat wave all week. Both Phoenix and Las Vegas have been under an excessive heat warning for days, with afternoon temperatures hovering in the triple digits.
And the temperatures have been historic: Phoenix peaked at 113 degrees on Thursday, and Las Vegas at 111, both daily records for those cities….
The Weather Service’s excessive heat warning in Las Vegas is set to expire at 9 p.m. on Saturday, the night before Mr. Trump’s rally. But temperatures are currently expected to hit a high of 104 on Sunday with little cloud cover.
Supporters eager to attend a Trump event will generally arrive hours before the candidate does, standing in long, slow-moving lines to get through security screenings and secure a good vantage point. The wait can be trying in normal circumstances.
This time the campaign says they will have bottled water available along with tents to provide some relief from the sun. It still seems inhumane to schedule and event like this in the afternoon in a hot climate.
This is what MAGA expert Ron Filipkowski posted on Twitter:
Why is Trump holding his rally in the middle of the afternoon outside in Las Vegas tomorrow after dozens of people went to the hospital a few days ago at his AZ rally from the heat? And AZ was inside – those people went down in line just waiting to get through the magnetometers.
On the threat of autocracy if Trump is elected again:
The Washington Post: Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending.
Donald Trump is vowing to wrest key spending powers from Congress if elected this November, promising to assert more control over the federal budget than any president in U.S. history.
The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.
The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.
During his first term, Trump was impeached after refusing to spend money for Ukraine approved by Congress, as he pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to provide incriminating evidence about the Biden family. At the time, Trump’s aides defended his actions as legal but largely did not dispute that the president is bound to adhere to budgetary law.
Since then, however, Trump and his advisers have prepared an attack on the limits on presidential spending authority. On his campaign website, Trump has said he will push Congress to repeal parts of the 1974 law that restricts the president’s authority to spend federal dollars without congressional approval. Trump has also said he will unilaterally challenge that law by cutting off funding for certain programs, promising on his first day in office to order every agency to identify “large chunks” of their budgets that would be halted by presidential edict.
“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings,” Trump said in a plan posted last year. “This will be in the form of tax reductions for you. This will help quickly to stop inflation and slash the deficit.”
That pledge could provoke a dramatic constitutional showdown, with vast consequences for how the government operates. If he returns to office, these efforts are likely to turn typically arcane debates over “impoundment” authority — or the president’s right to stop certain spending programs — into a major political flash point, as he seeks to accomplish via edict what he cannot pass through Congress.
More details at the WaPo link.
Also from The Washington Post, by Beth Reinhard: Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-constitutional’ vision for second term.
A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”
Hehas helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations — and that’s just on Trump’s first day backin office.
Trim the Cat was the beloved ship’s cat of Matthew Flinders, an English navigator and cartographer who circumnavigated Australia in the early 19th century.
Vought, 48, ispoised to steer this agenda from an influential perch in the White House, potentially as Trump’s chief of staff, according to some people involved in discussions about a second term who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Since Trump left office, Vought has led the Center for Renewing America, part of a network of conservative advocacy groups staffed by former and potentially future Trump administration officials.Vought’s rise is a reminder that if Trump is reelected, he has saidhe will surround himself with loyalists eager to carry out his wishes, even if they violate traditional norms against executive overreach.
“What the Trump team is saying is alarming, unusual and really beyond the pale of anything we’ve seen,” said Eloise Pasachoff, a budget and appropriations law expert at Georgetown Law School.
The Trump campaign defended its proposal, saying Washington must cut spending to reduce the national debt, which has surpassed $30 trillion and is set to keep growing over the next decade. But the Trump campaign has ruled out cuts to the Defense Department, as well as to Social Security and Medicare, programs for the elderly that are the main drivers of the nation’s rising spending. The debt grew by more than $7 trillion during Trump’s administration.
“As many legal and constitutional scholars have argued, executive impoundment authority is an important tool that American presidents used throughout history to rein in unnecessary and wasteful spending,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement. “President Trump agrees with the experts that this power has been wrongly curtailed in recent decades. As he works to curb Joe Biden’s colossal spending binge that triggered uncontrolled inflation, President Trump will seek to reassert impoundment authority to cut waste and restore the proper balance to spending negotiations with Congress.”
Again, read more at the WaPo.
Finally, at The New York Times, Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman have an article that summarizes the campaign’s plans for the country: “If Trump Wins.”
It’s a pretty bare-bones summary in the following catgories:
Crack down on illegal immigration to an extreme degree.
Use the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries
Increase presidential power
Aggressively expand his first-term efforts to upend America’s trade policies
Retreat from military engagement with Europe
Use military force in Mexico and on American soil
That’s it for me today. Trump is back campaigning, and the press is focusing on him.
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Posted: June 6, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, SCOTUS | Tags: Alito law clerk Susan Sullivan, Clarence Thomas, D-Day 80th anniversary, Dick Durbin, Hunter Biden trial, Judge Aileen Cannon, Justice Samuel Alito, Normandy, right to contraception, Senate vote on birth control, Todd Blanche, Trump courthouse lunches |
Good Morning!!
“The eyes of the world are upon you,” Eisenhower speaking to troops before Normandy invasion.
Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and President Biden is in France to mark the occasion. Some reports:
CBS News: Biden lauds WWII veterans on D-Day 80th anniversary, vows NATO solidarity in face of new threat to democracy.
President Biden and key U.S. allies were in Normandy Thursday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.S.-led allied forces’ D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The brazen air and sea invasion would mark the beginning of the end of World War II, leading to the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German forces in Europe less than a year later.
Mr. Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were together to mark the most significant victory of the Western allies in the war, as well as the largest seaborne invasion in history. Mr. Biden is in France through the weekend for D-Day anniversary commemorations and plans to meet with leaders of key allies during his visit.
“Seventy-three-thousand brave Americans landed at Utah and Omaha beaches in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the president will greet American veterans and their family members while in France to honor their sacrifice,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in announcing the president’s trip.
Mr. Biden and first lady Jill Biden met WWII veterans one by one ahead of a memorial ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery on Thursday, presenting each one with coins made to commemorate the D-Day anniversary. He chatted and joked with some of the men, asking about their hometowns, thanking them for their service and calling them the greatest generation ever.
The president delivered remarks later Thursday at a commemoration ceremony that was also attended by members of Congress from both parties, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi.
The Independent: D-Day – latest: Biden warns world ‘will not surrender to bullies’ as he commemorates 80th anniversary.
President Joe Biden has vowed to not “surrender to the bullies” as he praised D-Day veterans for their bravery at a commemorative event.
The US President addressed the crowd in Ver-sur-Mer, France, on the 80th anniversary of the landings as he promised the 50 countries standing with Ukraine “will not walk away”.
“Make no mistake the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine. To see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked,” he said.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable.”
He added: “History tells us freedom is not free. You want to know the price of freedom come here to Normandy to look.”
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden greet a World War II veteran during ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. AP
Yahoo News: D-Day latest: Biden brands Putin ‘tyrant and bully’ in Normandy speech.
US President Joe Biden referred to Vladimir Putin as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘bully’ in his D-Day commemoration speech, after hailing the ‘resolute’ Second World War troops who fought in Normandy 80 years ago today.
President Biden was among the speakers at an international gathering in northern France to commemorate the June 1944 conflict. Biden recognised the bravery of troops who stormed the beaches in Normandy, before going on to speak about the Ukraine war and how ‘the struggle between dictatorship and freedom is unending’.
Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had given France’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, to a number of US veterans, while the Danish prime minister said it is our generation’s “responsibility” to stand up to Vladimir Putin.
The New York Times’ Roger Cohen has a special report on D-Day with photos by Laetitia Vancon: D-Day at 80: Veterans of the pivotal battle of World War II are disappearing. Europe, facing new conflict, recalls what their comrades died for.
They were ordinary. The young men from afar who clambered ashore on June 6, 1944, into a hail of Nazi gunfire from the Normandy bluffs did not think of themselves as heroes.
No, said Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa, the allied soldiers “in this great battle were ordinary,” youths who “rose to this challenge with courage and a tremendous will to win, for freedom.”
In front of the general, during a ceremony this week at Deauville on the Normandy coast, were 48 American survivors of that day, the youngest of them 98, most of them 100 years old or more. The veterans sat in wheelchairs. They saluted, briskly enough. Eight decades have gone by, many of them passed in silence because memories of the war were too terrible to relate.
When the 90th anniversary of D-Day comes around in 2034, there may be no more vets. Living memory of the beaches of their sacrifice will be no more.
“Dark clouds of war in Europe are forming,” General Williams said, as he alluded to allied determination to defend Ukraine against Russian attack. This 80th anniversary of the landings is a celebration, but a somber one. Europe is troubled and apprehensive, extremism eating at its liberal democracies.
For more than 27 months now, there has been a war on the continent that has taken hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian lives. Russia was not invited to the commemoration even though the role of the Soviet Red Army in the defeat of Hitler was critical. A decade ago, President Vladimir V. Putin attended. Now he speaks of nuclear war. It is a time of fissuring and uncertainty.
Remembering the fight against Hitler in WWII is so important today, when a criminal and conman has apparently hypnotizes a large portion of the U.S. population. We can’t allow him to end our democracy and turn Europe over to Putin.
Back in the USA, Senate Republicans showed their true colors yesterday in a vote to protect the right to contraception.
CNN: Senate GOP blocks bill to guarantee access to contraception.
Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to block a bill put forward by Democrats that would guarantee access to contraception nationwide, as Democrats seek to highlight the issue in the run up to November’s elections.
The bill – the Right to Contraception Act – would enshrine into federal law a right for individuals to buy and use contraceptives, as well as for health care providers to provide them. It would apply to birth control pills, the plan B pill, condoms and other forms of contraception.
The legislation failed to advance in a procedural vote by a tally of 51 to 39. Most Republicans dismissed the effort as a political messaging vote that is unnecessary and overly broad.
GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins crossed over to vote with Democrats in favor of advancing the bill. Schumer switched his vote to a no at the last minute in a procedural move that will allow Democrats to bring the bill back up in the future if they want.
“This is a show vote. It’s not serious,” GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said. “Plus, it’s a huge overreach. It doesn’t make any exceptions for conscience. … It’s a phony vote because contraception, to my knowledge, is not illegal. It’s not unavailable.”
The vote is part of a larger push by Senate Democrats to draw attention to how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has affected all aspects of reproductive health – not just abortion – as the election draws closer. Democrats are highlighting the issue this month, which marks the two-year anniversary of the high court’s ruling.
“In the coming weeks, Senate Democrats will put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said ahead of the vote.
Democratic senators have also introduced a legislative package to establish a nationwide right to in-vitro fertilization, which is expected to come up for a vote as soon as next week.
The Daily Beast: Biden Campaign Names and Shames Republicans Who Voted to Block Contraception Bill.
The Biden campaign posted a video on Wednesday night showing the faces of the 39 senators who voted against the legislation. (Seven Republican senators were not present for the vote.)
“These are the Trump-aligned Republicans who just blocked a bill to protect a woman’s right to contraception,” the campaign tweeted on X….
Ahead of the vote, Schumer said that Senate Democrats would “put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” according to the Associated Press.
Polling has consistently shown that there is broad bipartisan support among American voters for contraception, with 92 percent of respondents telling Gallup in 2022 that birth control was “morally acceptable.”
Republicans argued that legislation to enshrine the right to contraception is unnecessary, as it remains freely accessible and available across the country….
But Schumer said in a post-vote speech that “we are kidding ourselves if we think the hard-right is satisfied with overturning Roe,” warning that birth control could be next as reproductive rights continue to be threatened.
“So, make one thing clear: today was not a ‘show vote’ – this was a show-us-who-you-are vote,” he said. “And Senate Republicans showed the American people exactly who they are.”
Recall that after the Dobbs decision, Clarence Thomas stated his desire to overturn the decisions that made contraception, same sex marriage, and sex between same sex partners basic rights–all based on the right to privacy.
Speaking of the right wing SCOTUS justices, last night a former clerk of Samuel Alito appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show.
HuffPost: Former Alito Law Clerk ‘Aghast’ After Seeing Jan. 6 Flag Outside His Home, Calls For Recusal.
A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said Wednesday she was shocked after learning two flags affiliated with rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were flown outside his homes, saying she believed he should recuse himself from several cases before the court.
Susan Sullivan, who worked as a clerk while Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, spoke to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell amid the controversy surrounding the flags.
“I was aghast when I saw those photographs because I’ve never known Justice Alito to be anything other than an honorable man, to be a man of integrity,” Sullivan, now a professor at Temple University, told O’Donnell. “It is irrelevant if Mrs. Alito flew it or not. The fact is that flag was there.”
“This is not an insignificant symbol,” she went on. “Irrespective of why it is there, who put it there, it shouldn’t have been there. The problem is that flag is incendiary and it cannot do anything other than raise a reasonable inference of bias.”
Alito has rejected the calls for him to recuse from January 6 related cases.
“I am confident that a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that the events … do not meet the applicable standard for recusal,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers last month. “I am therefore required to reject your request.”
Sullivan rejected that claim in the Wednesday interview and an earlier opinion piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying recusal was warranted especially because of the decision before the court.
“[It is] the symbol of these people who attacked the capitol. They support Trump unconditionally,” she said. “So if you have cases before the court that directly relates not just to the former president but to criminal cases that involve that election process…”
“The stakes have never been higher and recusal is, to me, it just defies logic that one would not recuse themselves from a case like this,” Sullivan added. “The stakes are too high.”
Why isn’t Senator Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee doing anything to rein in Alito?
Noah Berlansky at Public Notice: Dick Durbin needs to step up and do his damn job.
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held a lengthy oversight hearing to badger Attorney General Merrick Garland and push the GOP’s false narrative about President Biden weaponizing the DOJ against Donald Trump.
Even though the hearing was conducted in obvious bad faith, it was in some ways successful, at least in the limited sense that Republicans grabbed a lot of headlines and forced Garland to spend a day on the defensive. Virtually every major news outlet it extensive coverage, ranging from the New York Times to MSNBC to Newsmax….
Congressional oversight hearings give Congress a chance to focus the national conversation on what members want to talk about. It gives them a chance to pressure executive branch officials to adopt congressional priorities, or to explain and potentially embarrass themselves.
In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves.
Republicans like Jim Jordan are ignorant about a lot of things. But they understand that the gavel is power, and they are not afraid to use it. Senate Democrats need to get over their qualms and, in this instance, behave more like their rivals across the aisle….
Hearings drive narratives. But they can do more than that. Congress has real power to pressure government officials, and hearings are a way to demonstrate and exercise that power.
Read more at Public Notice.
More odds and ends:
The Daily Beast: Hunter Biden Prosecutors Might’ve Already Lost the Jury.
The Hunter Biden trial starting in Wilmington, Delaware, is a poster-child case for potential jury nullification.
Biden, the only surviving son of President Joe Biden, is being tried for possessing a firearm while being a user of illegal drugs or drug addict and for lying about the same on a purchase form when he bought a gun. On the surface, the prosecution—a culmination of more than a half-decade of investigation by Special Counsel David Weiss—would appear to have a slam dunk case because there is no real dispute he bought the gun, or that he had a drug addiction around the time he bought the gun.
The strict definition of jury nullification is when a jury has determined that a defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—but either rejects the evidence or refuses to apply the law because the jury “wants to send a message about some social issue that is larger than the case itself, or because the result dictated by law is contrary to the jury’s sense of justice, morality, or fairness.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hunter Biden
Let’s be clear. Juries are not supposed to do that. They are supposed to convict if the evidence proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and acquit if it doesn’t.
But while the definition of nullification conjures up images of a jury making a social justice-inspired speech in refusing to convict, the reality is quite different because the jury does not need to make such a blatant statement. Rather, the sense that jurors may have of unfairness can be evidenced in an acquittal—despite strong evidence of guilt. (There’s also, of course, the possibility of a hung jury.)
What that means is skilled defense counsel can bring out the factors of unfairness without having to specifically ask a jury to ignore evidence or the law, while skilled prosecutors need to guard against the kind of evidence and testimony that may lead to nullification.
Thus far, the trial is revealing an outmatched prosecution, which has already blundered into a couple of minefields. Defense counsel Abbe Lowell is a seasoned high-profile defense counsel who has defended Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and got former presidential candidate John Edwards acquitted on campaign finance charges (brought by then-DOJ lawyer Jack Smith).
In the opening by the Biden defense team, Lowell focused on the requirement that the false statements on the gun ownership form had to be “knowing”—a term that Lowell claimed the prosecution tried to avoid in its opening. The utility of this defense is that it works synergistically with the effects of Biden’s admitted drug addiction affecting his decision-making abilities, as well as necessitating a deep dive into the details of his addiction and the specific timeline of when he was using crack cocaine and his efforts to get clean.
The defense appears to be setting up a defense theory that, on the specific date Biden bought the gun, he genuinely believed he was not an addict because he had just finished an 11-day rehabilitation program.
More at the link.
Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Judge Reshuffles Hearings in Trump Documents Case.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case abruptly changed the proceeding’s schedule on Wednesday, reshuffling the timing for hearings on an array of important legal issues.
The move by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was unlikely to have much impact on the overall trajectory of the case, but it reflected the substantial number of unresolved legal motions she is juggling. Last month, Judge Cannon scrapped the case’s trial date, saying she could not yet pick a new one because of what she described at the time as “the myriad and interconnected” questions she had still not managed to consider.
Judge Cannon kept in place a hearing she had set for June 21 to discuss a motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel named to oversee the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, was illegally appointed to his job.
Similar motions have been rejected in cases involving other special counsels, including Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, and David C. Weiss, who has brought two criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
The most important change Judge Cannon made to the schedule in a brief order was arguably the cancellation of a three-day hearing that had been set to take place starting June 24 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.
The hearing was originally meant to consider whether Mr. Trump’s lawyers should be permitted access to communications between prosecutors working for Mr. Smith and officials at the National Archives and several national security agencies.
Giddy up
The lawyers want those communications to bolster their claims that Mr. Smith worked hand in glove with the Biden administration and members of the so-called deep state to bring the documents case against Mr. Trump.
Prosecutors had objected to holding the proceeding at all, telling Judge Cannon in March that no similar hearings had ever been held in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits. In her order on Wednesday, she said she would place the hearing back on her calendar at some point in the future.
Instead of that hearing, Judge Cannon said there would now be a shorter one, on June 24 and 25, to consider different topics, including any lingering discussion about Mr. Smith’s appointment.
Judge Cannon also told the defense and the prosecution to be ready to debate Mr. Trump’s motion to exclude from the case any evidence — including more than 100 classified documents — that the F.B.I. discovered in August 2022 when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
The two sides will argue as well over Mr. Trump’s attempt to suppress the private audio notes that prosecutors obtained from one of his lawyers through a process that pierced the normal protections of attorney-client privilege. The notes by the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, were central to the government’s allegations that Mr. Trump had obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the classified materials he took to Mar-a-Lago.
Finally, the parties are expected to discuss Mr. Smith’s request to Judge Cannon to alter Mr. Trump’s conditions of release by barring him from making public statements that could endanger F.B.I. agents working on the case.
Aileen Cannon is an expert at causing unnecessary delays without triggering an appeal to the 11th Circuit. If she rules that Jack Smith was illegally appointed, that would be cause for immediate appeal, so she will probably find some way to just waste more time.
Jose Pagliery at The Daily Beast: Trial Lawyer Lost 8 Lbs Skipping Trump’s McDonald’s Courthouse Lunches.
Donald Trump’s lead lawyer says the former president’s seven-week criminal trial in New York took a physical toll—but he still managed to lose weight by skipping Trump’s notoriously unhealthy meals.
Todd Blanche appeared on a podcast, For The Defense, hosted by the attorney David Oscar Markus.
“Was it McDonald’s for lunch every single day, or did you get something else?” Markus asked.
“Oh, no-no-no,” Blanche said. “Well, first of all, I didn’t have lunch one day. I ate in the morning and at night.”
Delivery of McDonalds order for Trump’s courthouse lunch
“Look, President Trump’s team takes care of everybody. Like, everybody gets food. You know, there’s a lot of food. It’s not always McDonald’s. There’s a lot of… variety. There’s pizza, and there’s other non-healthy alternatives to McDonald’s.”
Blanche smiled, turning away from the camera and raising his eyebrows.
“Look, I loved it, because, you know, you come in from lunch, and as you know when you’re on trial, you’re trying to figure out what the heck you’re gonna stuff in your belly with the hour that you have. And we would walk in, and there would just be this, just, plethora of just food everywhere,” he said, gesturing with his hands.
The public got a peek last Thursday, when Donald Trump Jr. posted a TikTok video from what legal teams sometimes call the “war room,” where defendants strategize during breaks. The clip showed Trump Sr. sitting before a half-finished 20-ounce Diet Coca-Cola, an opened bag of Lay’s potato chips, a box of Milk Duds, a Milky Way bar, a theater-sized box of Whoppers malted milk balls, and what appeared to be four Hostess SnoBalls….
Trump’s go-to McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake—was first described by close ally Corey R. Lewandowski in a 2017 book, Let Trump Be Trump.
How is it possible that Trump hasn’t had a heart attack by now?
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.
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Posted: June 1, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: Justice Samuel Alito, Russian reaction to Trump conviction, Ted Kennedy, Threats from Trump supporters, Trump is a felon |
Happy Caturday!!
If he were a normal former president, the fact that Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by a jury of his peers would be much more shocking. But he is also charged with more serious crimes against the United States–fomenting an insurrection and stealing top secret classified documents and hoarding them in his resort property. And of course, he is charged with trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. We probably won’t know the outcome of those three cases until after the 2024 election, but we can begin to assess the results of the jury verdicts in Manhattan.
From Jason Lange at Reuters: Exclusive: One in 10 Republicans less likely to vote for Trump after guilty verdict, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.
Ten percent of Republican registered voters say they are less likely to vote for Donald Trump following his felony conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Friday.
The two-day poll, conducted in the hours after the Republican presidential candidate’s conviction by a Manhattan jury on Thursday, also found that 56% of Republican registered voters said the case would have no effect on their vote and 35% said they were more likely to support Trump, who has claimed the charges against him are politically motivated and has vowed to appeal.
The potential loss of a tenth of his party’s voters is more significant for Trump than the stronger backing of more than a third of Republicans, since many of the latter would be likely to vote for him regardless of the conviction.
Among independent registered voters, 25% said Trump’s conviction made them less likely to support him in November, compared to 18% who said they were more likely and 56% who said the conviction would have no impact on their decision.
The verdict could shake up the race between Trump, who was U.S. president from 2017-2021, and Democratic President Joe Biden ahead of the Nov. 5 election. U.S. presidential elections are typically decided by thin margins in a handful of competitive swing states, meaning that even small numbers of voters defecting from their candidates can have a big impact.
Biden and Trump remain locked in a tight race, with 41% of voters saying they would vote for Biden if the election were held today and 39% saying they would pick Trump, according to the poll, which surveyed 2,556 U.S. adults nationwide.
At the Bulwark, Nicholas Grossman writes: Trump’s Conviction Clarifies Things. In November, voters will know exactly what’s at stake.
IT IS NOW A LEGAL FACT that Donald Trump criminally falsified business records 34 times to cover up his attempt to hide an extramarital sexual affair. He is a convicted felon.
On its own, this would be one of the biggest scandals in presidential history. Public revelation of an affair with no connection to a crime ended Gary Hart’s presidential campaign in 1987. President Bill Clinton got impeached in 1998 and subsequently disbarred for committing the crime of perjury to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Trump’s hush-money fraud scandal is at least on par with that, and arguably worse, since his crimes occurred during a presidential campaign, rather than in the middle of a re-elected president’s second term. And that’s before noting that Trump has also been found liable for sexual abuse (and repeated defamation) in separate court proceedings involving a different woman, E. Jean Carroll, also on its own one of the biggest presidential scandals ever.
Woody in the garden, by Celia Pike
These scandals look trivial only in comparison to Trump’s even bigger crimes: conspiring to defraud the United States out of its presidential election results in 2020; and stealing, retaining, and exposing high-level national security secrets after leaving office. Trump faces federal charges for both of those, as well as additional state charges in Georgia relating to his post-defeat actions, but none of these cases will conclude, or perhaps even start, before this November’s election.
That’s why his Manhattan conviction is such a big deal. Trump is running for president to put himself above the law, and if he wins, it will cause democratic backsliding in the United States like that in Turkey, Hungary, India, and elsewhere. With only accusations and indictments against Trump, less invested voters could chalk it up to the he-said/she-said mudslinging of politics, but a jury conviction makes the stakes clearer. And the news is big enough to penetrate information bubbles, so the sort of voters who pay little attention to politics but end up deciding elections will hear about it….
There is no indication so far that this criminal conviction will get anyone to vote for Trump who wasn’t already planning to.
Grossman notes that we haven’t seen any big protests or political violence from right wingers following the verdict so far. But of course Trump and his gang are already lying about what happened.
AS SOON AS THE JURY ANNOUNCED its verdict, Trump, Republicans, and right-wing media began to lie about the trial—of course. They’ve engaged in the absurd doublethink of claiming Trump couldn’t possibly get a fair look from a jury of New Yorkers because everyone there hates him, just a few days after claiming Trump is so loved in New York that his rally in the Bronx had over 25,000 attendees (it was probably a tenth of that). They have attacked the judge, prosecutors, and the judicial system itself. If they can find out their names, they’ll probably attack members of the jury—hopefully just with words.
But the fact of the conviction is too big to deny. In that way, it’s like COVID and the 2020 election. Trump could distort public understanding of what was happening, but his early-2020 lies that COVID was nothing to worry about couldn’t overcome the medical reality. Since leaving office, he’s gotten the Republican party on board with his big election lie—but no matter how many Republicans falsely claim Trump was unfairly cheated, no matter how much fan fiction QAnon conspiracy theorists create, Joe Biden is now president and Donald Trump is not.
Still, Trump will presumably appeal his Manhattan conviction, and there’s almost no chance the legal process will end before the election. Even with the conviction, Trump can legally run for president and Americans can vote for him if they want.
There have been threats, of course. At NBC, Ryan J. Reilly reports on Trump fans’ efforts to attack members of the Manhattan jury: Trump supporters try to doxx jurors and post violent threats after his conviction.
The 34 felony guilty verdicts returned Thursday against former President Donald Trump spurred a wave of violent rhetoric aimed at the prosecutors who secured his conviction, the judge who oversaw the case and the ordinary jurors who unanimously agreed there was no reasonable doubt that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee falsified business records related to hush money payments to a porn star to benefit his 2016 campaign.
Advance Democracy, a non-profit that conducts public interest research, said there has been a high volume of social media posts containing violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, including a post with Bragg’s purported home address. The group also found posts of the purported addresses of jurors on a fringe internet message board known for pro-Trump content and harassing and violent posts, although it is unclear if any actual jurors had been correctly identified.
The posts, which have been reviewed by NBC News, appear on manyof the same websites used by Trump supporters to organize for violence ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. These forums were hotbeds of threats inspired by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, which he lost, and that the voting system was “rigged” against him. They now feature new threats echoing Trump’s rhetoric and false claims about the hush money trial, including that the judicial system is now “rigged” against him.
“Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,” one user wrote after Trump’s conviction on a website formerly known as “The Donald,” which was popular among participants in the Capitol attack. (That post appears to have been quickly removed by moderators.)
“We need to identify each juror. Then make them miserable. Maybe even suicidal,” wrote another user on the same forum. “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to washington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution,” wrote another user. “This s— is out of control.”
“I hope every juror is doxxed and they pay for what they have done,” another user wrote on Trump’s Truth Social platform Thursday. “May God strike them dead. We will on November 5th and they will pay!”
“War,” read a Telegram post from one chapter of the Proud Boys, the far-right group whose former chair and three other members were convicted of seditious conspiracy because of their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, just a few months after Trump infamously told the group to “stand back and stand by“ during a 2020 debate.
“Now you understand. To save your nation, you must fight. The time to respond is now. Franco Friday has begun,” another Proud Boys chapter wrote, apparently referring to fascist dictator Francisco Franco of Spain.
One Jan. 6 defendant who already served time in prison for his role in the Capitol attack also weighed in on X, posting a photo of Bragg and a photo of a noose. “January 20, 2025 traitors Get The Rope,” he wrote, referring to the date of the next presidential inauguration.
At The Daily Beast, Kremlin watcher Julia Davis reports that “Putin Pals” are upset about the verdict: Visibly Distressed Putin Pals Shaken Up by Trump Verdict.
Russian state-controlled media apparatus closely followed the legal troubles of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump, spicing up most of their coverage with pro-Trump clips from Fox News and Tucker Carlson. Russian propagandists were openly hoping for a hung jury and were visibly disappointed when Trump became a convicted felon on all 34 charges he was facing.
On Friday morning, Dmitry Kulikov, host of Solovyov Live, the self-described “most patriotic channel” in Russia, said on-air, “They wronged our Donald Trump!” Malek Dudakov, a political scientist who specializes in America, said that the hope for a miracle—meaning a hung jury—was extinguished. He said, with Russia’s affectionate middle name usage, “The miracle did not happen. Our Donald Fredovych was found guilty on all 34 counts.” For that, Dudakov blamed the judge and the jury and baselessly claimed that all of them were prejudiced against Trump. “Now, he is a felon,” he surmised, while also noting that the former president’s incarceration as a result of this conviction is unlikely.
Dudakov expressed hope that despite his legal troubles, Trump would still win in the upcoming presidential election. Kulikov and Dudakov jointly echoed Tucker Carlson’s assertions that their preferred candidate will prevail, “unless desperately panicked Democrats will organize an assassination of Donald Fredovych.” They expressed hope that Biden—not Trump—would die before the elections.
Similar reactions reverberated across Russian media outlets. Appearing on a state TV show 60 Minutes Friday morning, State Duma member Aleksei Zhuravlyov opted to discuss Trump’s conviction before addressing other bad news Russia is facing, with Western governments broadly signing off on Ukraine’s right to defend itself by striking Russia on its own turf. Zhuravlyov said he would address this “escalation” later and started with his rant against America for turning Trump into a felon.
Mischaracterizing the prosecution by describing it as “a lawsuit brought by Stormy Daniels,” host Olga Skabeeva chimed in and described Trump as “a former and potentially future U.S. president.” She surmised that the situation is too ridiculous for words and keeps escalating on every front. Skabeeva complained that earlier predictions of a hung jury did not come true, bitterly adding in perfect English, “Shit happens.”
At The New York Times, Reid J. Epstein and Nicholas Nehamas report on the Biden campaign’s reaction to the guilty verdicts: Hopeful Yet Cautious, Biden’s Team Aims to Exploit Trump’s Conviction.
For more than a year, President Biden has sought to cast the 2024 election not as a referendum on his four years in office but on whether voters want to return Donald J. Trump to office after a first term in which he undermined abortion rights, democracy and the rule of law.
Now, Mr. Trump’s guilty verdict on all 34 counts in his hush-money trial on Thursday has given Mr. Biden’s campaign a fresh way to frame the race: a stark choice between someone who is a convicted felon and someone who is not.
Mr. Trump’s conviction could well shake up U.S. politics, serving as a convening moment that cuts through a fragmented news media ecosystem even if it does not change pessimism about inflation and the cost of living. Mr. Trump has led many polls, with voters holding dim views of Mr. Biden’s stewardship of the economy, the southern border and foreign wars.
The Manhattan jury’s verdict is likely to focus attention on Mr. Trump in a way that Mr. Biden’s supporters have long hoped it would. Even if Mr. Biden does not directly affix the title “felon” to his rival, scores of his allies are planning to do so in their communications about Mr. Trump through the end of the campaign.
“Donald Trump is a racist, a homophobe, a grifter and a threat to this country,” said Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a top Biden surrogate and an influential billionaire donor for Democratic causes. “He can now add one more title to his list — a felon.”
Mr. Biden has to this point said virtually nothing about the New York case against Mr. Trump or any of the other three criminal indictments he faces, trying to stay above the fray as his rival baselessly claims that Mr. Biden orchestrated the charges. And the White House demurred after the verdict: “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office.
The Biden campaign was less circumspect. Its aides tried to tie the verdict to the choice voters will face in November.
“Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain,” said Michael Tyler, the campaign’s communications director. “Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
At CNN, Daniel Dale fact-checked Trump’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness post-conviction “news conference”: Fact check: Trump’s post-conviction monologue was filled with false claims.
Former President Donald Trump said he was going to hold a “press conference” on Friday in the wake of his Thursday conviction in Manhattan on felony charges of falsifying business records.
Instead, Trump delivered a rambling monologue that was filled with false claims on subjects ranging from the Manhattan trial to immigration to tax policy.
Here is a fact check of some of the inaccurate or unsubstantiated claims he made.
Some excerpts:
Crime in NYC:
Trump repeated his familiar claim that, while Manhattan prosecutors have been focusing on him, New York City has been experiencing record-high violent crime. He said this time that “you have violent crime all over this city at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is not even close to true. Violent crime in New York City – and violent crime in Manhattan in particular – has plummeted since the early 1990s and is today nowhere near record levels.
New York City recorded 391 murders in 2023, down about 83% from the 2,262 in 1990; 1,455 rapes in 2023, down about 53% from the 3,126 in 1990; and 16,910 robberies in 2023, down about 83% from the 100,280 in 1990.
Criticizing key prosecution witness Michael Cohen, Trump repeated a claim he made during the trial in April. He asserted that Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, “got into trouble not because of me” but because of “outside deals” and “something to do with taxicabs and medallions, and he borrowed money, and that’s why he went.” He added that Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations to try to get himself a lighter penalty.
Trump continued: “He got in trouble for a very simple reason: because he was involved with borrowing a lot of money and he did something with the banks – I don’t know, defrauded the banks, but something happened.”
Black cat in Klimt’s garden
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Cohen got into trouble simply because of his non-Trump-related activities, such as those related to taxis and loans, is not true. First, Cohen’s case was referred to federal prosecutors in New York by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who was appointed to investigate any connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Second, Cohen’s three-year prison sentence in 2018 was for multiple crimes, some of which were directly related to Trump.
Most notably, Cohen was sentenced for campaign finance offenses connected to a hush money scheme during the 2016 presidential campaign to conceal Trump’s alleged extramarital relationships – the same hush money scheme that was central to this prosecution against Trump. Cohen was also sentenced to two months in prison, to run concurrently with the three-year sentence, for lying to Congress in 2017 in relation to previous talks about the possibility of building a Trump Tower in Moscow, Russia, including about the extent of Trump’s involvement in the aborted Moscow initiative and about when in 2016 the discussions ended. (The discussions continued into June 2016, the month after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and did not conclude in January 2016 before the first votes were cast, as Cohen had claimed.)
There’s much more at the CNN link.
I’ve been posting quite a bit about Samuel Alito’s flag scandal. I have a couple of follow-ups to share on that.
Andrew Gumbel at The Guardian: Neighbors say Alitos used security detail car to intimidate them after sign dispute.
Neighbors of Samuel Alito and his wife described how a disagreement over political lawn signs put up in the wake of the 2020 presidential election quickly devolved into “unhinged behavior towards a complete stranger” by the supreme court justice’s wife.
Emily Baden says she never intended to get into a fight with Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, her powerful neighbors who live on the same suburban cul-de-sac as her mother outside Washington DC.
Then a large black car, part of the Alitos’ security detail, started parking in front of her mother’s house instead of theirs, and Baden understood the perils of being an ordinary citizen going up against one of the most powerful men in the country.
The two sides do not agree on much, but Baden, a staunch liberal, and Martha-Ann Alito, a staunch conservative, concur that they began exchanging words in late 2020, almost two months after Joe Biden’s election victory over Donald Trump. Soon after, according to Baden, the Alitos’ security detail began parking a car directly in front of her mother’s house – several houses down from its usual spots either directly in front of the Alitos or across the street from them.
“This happened a handful of times,” Baden now recalls. “I took that as directly threatening.”
Baden and her husband both say that the security detail’s car showed up in front of her mother’s house again two weeks ago, after the New York Times broke the story about an upside-down American flag hanging on the Alitos’ flagpole in the days before Biden’s inauguration – a symbol associated with the January 6 insurrection that sought to prevent Biden from taking office at all.
Baden was no longer living with her mother by that point – she is now a mother herself and living on the west coast. Neither she nor her mother were mentioned by name in the initial Times story. Still, she found the message that this sent disturbing.
“I couldn’t say who was in the car because of the tinted glass, and nobody ever said anything. I took it as a general threat,” she said. “The message was, we could do terrible things to you, and nobody would be able to do anything about it. When it comes to justices at the supreme court, they make the laws, but the laws don’t apply to them.”
Creepy.
David Masciotra at The New Republic: Ted Kennedy Warned Us About Samuel Alito. He Was Ignored.
Alito’s hard-right ideology, and his shameless lack of ethics, were obvious when he was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005. A few Democratic senators sounded the siren, but the mainstream media, even its so-called “liberal” mainstays, largely ignored the warnings, unwittingly cooperating with an elite, right-wing operation to install a dishonest, partisan extremist on the highest court of the country.
Cats in the garden, by Anne Parker
As The New York Times reported on the eve of Alito’s confirmation in 2006, his placement on the court was the “culmination” of an effort that began during the Reagan administration to staff the judiciary with ideologues of the religious right. Conservatives also deployed an adroit media strategy to temper, silence, and even disparage any attempt to criticize Alito during the nomination hearings. Public relations specialists and legal experts, coordinating on behalf of the Federalist Society, Christian organizations like Focus on the Family, and Republican senators, helped to sell Alito to the Senate, the media, and the public—even before his nomination. “We boxed them in,” one lawyer who participated in the meetings told the newspaper, presumably referring to the Senate and the mainstream media.
Early in the Alito nomination fight, Democrats uncovered a memo the judge wrote while he was working for the Reagan administration in 1985 that articulated his opposition to legal abortion. He advised against waging a “frontal assault on Roe” only because such a maneuver would prove politically unpopular, and instead advocated for a steady demolition of access to reproductive health care at the state level. Until the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe, the Alito playbook is exactly what many Southern and heartland states followed to make abortion all but impossible within their borders.
The memo did not stop Alito from lying to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, whose diary revealed that, while meeting privately in Kennedy’s office, Alito assured him that he would never vote to overturn Roe. Unlike Republican Senator Susan Collins, who believed the same lie from Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, Kennedy was not gullible enough to vote in favor of Alito’s confirmation.
The P.R. firm handling the Alito nomination insisted that Republicans counter with the claim that, as a lawyer for the Reagan administration, Alito was only reflecting the views of his client. Planned Parenthood warned that Alito would “gut Roe” if he had the opportunity, but the media soon dropped stories on the memo.
Similarly nauseating events transpired when Democrats learned that Alito belonged to Concerned Alumni of Princeton, an organization that opposed measures to increase admission of women and racial minorities. The group wasn’t merely against affirmative action but also contemptuous of co-education and supportive of quotas that favored men.
Alito insisted that his participation in the group was ancient history. (He had listed his membership on a job application as a 35-year-old applying to work for the federal government.) The mainstream media reacted not with questions about Alito’s biases on race and gender but with vilification of Democrats.
Read more at the TNR link.
That’s all I have for you today. Have a great summer weekend!
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Posted: May 29, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Donald Trump | Tags: Emily Baden, hung jury, Judge Aileen Cannon, Judge Juan Merchan, Judge Samuel Alito, Mar-a-Lago documents case, Martha-Ann Alito, Trump Corruption, Trump Hush Money Case |
Good Morning!!
Today Judge Juan Merchan will give instructions to the jury in the Trump hush money case and then they will begin deliberations. Some experts are predicting there will be a verdict today. I kind of doubt that, but what do know? A decision could certainly come this week.
At The New York Times, William K. Rashbaum and Jonah E. Bromwich write: Judge’s Instructions Will Be a Road Map for Jury Weighing Trump’s Fate.
Justice Merchan will describe the legal meaning of the word “intent” and the concept of the presumption of innocence. He will remind the jurors that they pledged to set any biases aside against the former president before they were sworn in, and that Mr. Trump’s decision not to testify cannot be held against him.
Then, according to a person with knowledge of the instructions that Justice Merchan plans to deliver, he will explain the 34 charges of falsifying business records that Mr. Trump faces. It will likely be the most important guidance that the judge offers during the trial. And it is no simple task.
Judge Merchan
In New York, falsifying records is a misdemeanor, unless the documents were faked to hide another crime. The other crime, prosecutors say, was Mr. Trump’s 2016 violation of state election law that prohibited conspiring to aid a political campaign using “unlawful means.”
Those means, prosecutors argue, could include any of a menu of other crimes. And so each individual false-records charge that Mr. Trump faces contains within it multiple possible crimes that jurors must strive to understand.
The moment that the jurors begin to deliberate will mark the first time that the complicated case will be assessed not by judges or a parade of commentators, but by everyday New Yorkers. The group may be aided by the two jurors who are also lawyers — though neither appears to have criminal experience, and one said during jury selection that he knew “virtually nothing about criminal law.”
Marc F. Scholl, who served nearly 40 years in the district attorney’s office, noted that jury instructions are often difficult to follow, particularly given that, in New York, jurors are barred from keeping a copy of the guidance as they deliberate. And he said that defendants are often charged with several different crimes, requiring even more elaborate instructions.
Still, Mr. Scholl said, one point of complexity stood out: “Usually you don’t have this layering of these other crimes,” he said.
Justice Merchan, according to the person with knowledge of his legal instructions, will proceed through each of the 34 charges count by count, explaining to jurors what each requires prosecutors to have proved.
The knotty legal instructions were the product of intense argument between the prosecution and the defense, culminating in a hearing last week in which each side sought to persuade the judge to make minor edits that could have had a major impact.
Read more details about those arguments at the NYT link.
People who have been covering the trial inside the courtroom, eg, Harry Litman, have expressed concerns about one juror who appears to be sympathetic to the defense. This is from Marc Caputo at The Bulwark: Trump Legal Team Pins Hopes on Hung Jury.
AS THE JURORS FILED into the Manhattan courtroom, day after day, almost none of them would look at Donald Trump. It’s one of those unsettling signs for defendants and their lawyers who worry about a guilty verdict.
Those worries have only grown in Trump’s orbit as allies have all but abandoned hope of acquittal. Even Trump, though he railed Monday on social media about the judge and the case, has privately sounded a note of resignation.
Trump sleeping in court
“Whatever happens happens,” Trump told one person recently. “I have no control.”
But there is one clear hope MAGAville clings to: a hung jury that results in a mistrial.
If that happens, Trump allies suspect that it will be chiefly due to the one juror who has made friendly eye contact with Trump from time to time as the jury enters the room and walks right past the defense table.
“There are eight people on that jury who definitely hate Trump. If there’s one person who doesn’t, it’s [this] juror,” said one court attendee who, like others for this story, relayed their observations on condition of anonymity to The Bulwark, which is also protecting the privacy and safety of the juror in question by not disclosing identifying details.
As the trial has progressed since April 15, these sources relate, this juror has appeared to nod along in seeming accordance with the defense at times. On other occasions, the juror has seemingly reacted favorably to and made eye contact with Trump’s congressional surrogates who began joining him in court in recent weeks.
I hope they’re mistaken. All we need it to have this end in a mistrial.
You might also be interested in this piece by Liz Dye at Public Notice. She provides an explanatory primer for people who haven’t followed the day-to-day action in the trial: What you need to know about Trump’s trial before the verdict.
From Charles R. Davis at Salon, a little schadenfreude: “Full panic mode”: Experts say Trump mad he’s “finally being treated like any other defendant.”
Donald Trump is not behaving like someone who expects to be found “not guilty.” In a series of posts over the Memorial Day weekend, the former president deviated from the norm of honoring soldiers who fought and died for the United States by instead posting on his website, Truth Social, about how unfair it is that standard courtroom procedures are not being bent in his favor.
Posting in all caps, Trump – facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush payment to an adult film star – on Monday raged against the order in which closing arguments will be made in his Manhattan trial. It is a “big advantage,” he said, and “very unfair” that the prosecution gets to go second. “Why can’t the defense go last?”
Whether he knows this and is just riling up gullible followers or if he simply never retained the information his defense counsel could surely provide, Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted that Trump is here complaining about a fact of life “in virtually every criminal court.” Per Cheney, “Prosecutors typically get a rebuttal during closings because [the] burden or proof lies with them, not [the] defense.”
Trump prosecutor Joshua Steinglass gives final arguments
Trump, then, is complaining about an order that exists because of the far higher standard that prosecutors must meet. The defense only needs to sow doubt about the government’s case, and it really only needs one juror to entertain the former president’s argument that the case is a “witch hunt”; the prosecution must show that its case is not just probable, but prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Trump is finally being treated like every other defendant,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney who has been following his hush money trial. “[R]eally,” she argued, “that’s what he objects to.”
In another weekend rant about the case, Trump again opined that it was wrong to bring a case against him while he’s running for president. If there was evidence of a crime, he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “it should have been brought seven years ago, not in the middle of his Campaign for President.” [….]
Since Trump is no longer president, and can no longer pick those charged with enforcing the law, he is now just another man who must stand before and be judged by it. For a man who has long enjoyed impunity, it is intolerable. And while he may be able to evade financial penalties, at least for a time, in this case his actual liberty is at stake: it is not inconceivable that, when closing arguments conclude this week, jurors return a guilty verdict and Judge Juan Merchan decides that this particular defendant deserves some time behind bars.
George Conway, a conservative attorney turned harsh critic of the former president, believes Trump is reacting to his loss of control. “The defendant,” he posted on Threads, “is clearly in full panic mode.”
A couple of articles about the stalled Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case:
David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: Aileen Cannon Threatens To Sanction MAL Prosecutors.
In the up-is-down world of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, prosecutors attempted to stanch Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks on federal law enforcement – the kind of thing criminal defendants would not typically be allowed to engage in while on pre-trial release – and wound up themselves threatened with sanctions by the judge.
As Morning Memo recounted yesterday, the move by prosecutors to modify the terms of Trump’s pre-trial release came late Friday before the Memorial Day weekend and prompted a heated response from Trump.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon weighed in Monday, denying the prosecution motion, chastising them for playing loose with the local court rules, and threatening to impose sanctions on them in the future. On small bright spot, if you can call it that, is that she didn’t accede to Trump’s request to sanction the prosecution team immediately. Cannon’s denial was without prejudice, meaning prosecutors can refile their motion:
Cannon insisted that prosecutors had not sufficiently conferred with the defense team before filing and ordered that all future filings contain a statement of no more than 200 words by the opposing side of its position.
In a normal case, I’d applaud a judge keeping a tight leash on the prosecution team. But we’re in such uncharted territory here that you can’t attribute this to i-dotting or t-crossing by Cannon. Given any chance to chide the prosecution, she takes it. Given deplorable behavior by Trump that would normally never fly, she finds herself mute again and again.
The judge’s routine has become so predictable that even the analysis by legal observers bakes in a certain Cannon quotient: Anything that DOJ does that even arguably deviates from the rules leaves an opening that Cannon will take. So DOJ ends up graded on a weird Cannon curve while the Trump’s dangerous and unprecedented conduct gets set to the side.
One pattern emerging with Cannon is that when prosecutors implore her to assert herself and take more control over the case like so many judges do, she retreats to treating everything as an adversarial contest that she merely referees. But when it’s a matter of importance to Trump, she regularly asserts herself, going so far as to raise issues on her own. It’s another way in her handling of the case is imbalanced to Trump’s advantage.
At The New York Times, Alan Feuer has an piece about Judge Cannon: Emerging Portrait of Judge in Trump Documents Case: Prepared, Prickly and Slow.
…[A]t seven public hearings over more than 10 months, Judge Cannon has left an increasingly detailed record of her decision-making skills and judicial temperament.
The portrait that has emerged so far is that of an industrious but inexperienced and often insecure judge whose reluctance to rule decisively even on minor matters has permitted one of the country’s most important criminal cases to become bogged down in a logjam of unresolved issues.
She rarely issues rulings that explain her thinking in a way that might reveal her legal influences or any guiding philosophy. And that has made the hearings, which have taken place in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., all the more important in assessing her management of the case.
Aileen Cannon in court in stolen documents case
Regardless of her motives, Judge Cannon has effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is facing.
She has largely accomplished this by granting a serious hearing to almost every issue — no matter how far-fetched — that Mr. Trump’s lawyers have raised, playing directly into the former president’s strategy of delaying the case from reaching trial.
It appears increasingly likely that the documents case will not go to a jury before Election Day, and that the only trial that Mr. Trump will face this year will be the one now ending in Manhattan, where jurors are expected to begin deliberating on Wednesday over whether he falsified business records in connection with hush money payments to a porn star.
Still, the next few weeks will bring Judge Cannon’s handling of the case in Florida into even sharper focus.
She may soon rule on a request by Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the two federal prosecutions of the former president, to bar Mr. Trump from making public statements that could endanger federal agents working on the documents case. That move, which the judge denied this week on procedural grounds, came in response to the former president’s baseless assertion that the F.B.I. was authorized to use deadly force against him during the search two years ago of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.
After a hearing in June, Judge Cannon will also have to make a significant decision on whether to give Mr. Trump’s lawyers access to communications between Mr. Smith’s team and top national security officials. The lawyers made that request hoping to bolster their contention that the so-called deep state colluded with the Biden administration to bring the charges.
Read the rest at the NYT.
Yesterday, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor had another update on the strange story of the Alitos and their protest flags: The Alitos, the Neighborhood Clash and the Upside-Down Flag.
The police in Fairfax County, Va., received an unusual phone call on Feb. 15, 2021. A young couple claimed they were being harassed by the wife of a Supreme Court justice.
“Somebody in a position of authority needs to talk to her and make her stop,” said the 36-year-old man making the complaint, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times. The officer on the line responded that there was little the police could do: Yelling was not a crime.
The couple placed the call after a series of encounters with Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., that had gone from uneasy to ugly. That day, Emily Baden, whose boyfriend (now husband) contacted the police, had traded accusations with Mrs. Alito, who lived down the street. In a recent interview, Ms. Baden admitted to calling her a lewd epithet.
The clash between the wife of a conservative Supreme Court justice and the couple, who were in their 30s, liberal and proud of it, played out over months on a bucolic block in Alexandria. It was the kind of shouting match among private citizens, at the height of tensions over the 2020 election, that might have happened in any mixed political community in America. But three years later, that neighborhood spat — which both sides said began over an anti-Trump sign — has taken on far greater proportions.
Interview with Ms. Baden:
Amid the controversy, Ms. Baden said she was surprised to find herself playing a central role in Justice Alito’s account about a war of words, political signsand a flag. “I never saw the upside-down flag, never heard about it,” she said.
The Alitos
To better understand the clash, The Times interviewed Ms. Baden, her mother and her husband, as well as other neighbors, and reviewed the texts that Ms. Baden and her husband sent to friends after the episodes. Justice Alito, who did not respond to questions for this article,has in recent weeks given his own explanation of what happened.
There are some differences: For instance, the justice told Fox News that his wife hoisted the flag in response to Ms. Baden’s vulgar insult. A text message and the police call — corroborated by Fairfax County authorities — indicate, however, that the name-calling took place on Feb. 15, weeks after the inverted flag was taken down….
The justice later elaborated in an interview with Fox News, saying that in January 2021 a neighbor on the block displayed a vulgar anti-Trump sign, near where children wait for the school bus. Mrs. Alito complained to the neighbor. “Things escalated and the neighbor put up a sign personally addressing Mrs. Alito and blaming her for the Jan 6th attacks,” tweeted the Fox News reporter who interviewed the justice.
While the Alitos were on a neighborhood walk, “there were words between Mrs. Alito and a male at the home with the sign,” the network reported. The justice said the man used “vulgar language, ‘including the C-word,’” After that exchange, “Mrs. Alito was distraught and hung the flag upside-down,” the Fox reporter relayed.
But in the Baden family’s version, the justice’s wife initiated the conflict. “Aside from putting up a sign, we did not begin or instigate any of these confrontations,” Ms. Baden said later.
During the Covid crisis, Baden moved in with Baden’s mother Barbara, who lives in the Alito’s neighborhood. Her boyfriend, who grew up in the area also moved back home.
The couple participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, propped up Biden-Harris signs, and on the Saturday in November when the election was called, whooped and danced in the streets of the nation’s capital. When they got home, they displayed a political sign they had made from torn-up Amazon boxes, saying “BYE DON” on one side and “Fuck Trump” on the other….
Shortly after Christmas, as Emily Baden was with her dog in her front yard, an older woman approached and thanked her for taking down the sign, which had merely blown down. Ms. Baden realized that the woman was Martha-Ann Alito. The sign was offensive, Mrs. Alito said, according to both the justice’s account and a text message from Ms. Baden to her boyfriend.
Martha-Ann Alito and Emily Baden
Ms. Baden told her the sign would stay up, she recalled in the interview. The family was taken aback: Though the Badens and the Alitos lived just a short distance apart, Barbara Baden couldn’t recall ever communicating with the justice’s wife beyond a neighborly wave. In the interview, Emily Baden could not remember whether she put the signs up again.
Then came Jan. 6. Rocked by the violence and threat to democracy, the couple soon put up new signs in their yard, saying “Trump Is a Fascist” and “You Are Complicit.” Emily Baden said in interviews that the second sign was not directed at the Alitos, but at Republicans generally, especially those who weren’t condemning the Capitol attack.
Soon afterward, her mother took them down, out of safety concerns. “Look what these people can do,” she said in an interview, recalling her fears at the time about the mob that had stormed the Capitol. “I do not want to mark my house.”
It’s not clear whether Mrs. Alito saw those signs, but the day after the Capitol riot, as the couple parked in front of their home, she pulled up in her car, they said. She lingered there, glaring, for a long moment, recalled the couple, who texted their friends about the encounter.
In another incident, the young couple drove by the Alito’s house.
Mrs. Alito happened to be standing outside. According to interviews with Ms. Baden and her husband, as well as messages they sent to friends at the time, Mrs. Alito ran toward their car and yelled something they did not understand. The couple continued driving, they said, and as they passed the Alito home again to exit the cul-de-sac, Mrs. Alito appeared to spit toward the vehicle.
The couple, still shaken by the Capitol riot, said the encounter left them feeling uneasy and outmatched by the wife of someone so powerful.
Mrs. Alito seems a bit unhinged.
One more from Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post: Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour.
When Donald Trump met some of the country’s top donors at a luxurious New York hotel earlier this month, he told the group that a businessman had recently offered $1 million to his presidential effort and wanted to have lunch.
“I’m not having lunch,” Trump said he responded, according to donors who attended. “You’ve got to make it $25 million.”
Another businessman, he said, had traditionally given $2 million to $3 million to Republicans. Instead, he said he told the donor that he wanted a $25 million or $50 million contribution or he would not be “very happy.”
As he closed his pitch at the Pierre Hotel, Trump explained to the group why it was in their interest to cut large checks. If he was not put back in office, taxes would go up for them under President Biden, who vows to let Trump-era tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations expire at the end of 2025.
“The tax cuts all expire for wealthy and poor and middle-income and everything else, but they expire in another seven months and he’s not going to renew them, which means taxes are going to go up by four times,” Trump said, exaggerating the size of the cuts. “You’re going to have the biggest tax increase in history.”
Seconds after promising the tax cuts, Trump made his pitch explicit. “So whatever you guys can do, I appreciate it,” he said.
The remarks are just one example of a series of audacious requests by Trump for big-money contributions in recent months, according to 11 donors, advisers and others close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe his fundraising. The pleas for millions in donations come as the presumptive Republican nominee seeks to close a cash gap with Biden and to pay for costly legal bills in his four criminal indictments.
Trump is completely corrupt. So what else is new? Read the whole thing at the WaPo.
That’s it for me today. I hope I’ve given you something worth reading while we wait for the verdict.
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Posted: May 25, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: FBI, Judge Aileen Cannon, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Libertarian convention, Martha-Ann Alito, presidential polls, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump Bronx rally, Trump lies, Trump stolen documents case |
Happy Caturday!!
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.
Trump’s Bronx Rally
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.”
Update on the Alito Flag Controversy
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.
Martha-Ann Alito made the comments when the reporter went to the couple’s Fairfax County, Va., home to follow up on a tip about the flag, which was no longer flying when he arrived.
The incident documented by reporter Robert Barnes, who covered the Supreme Court for The Post for 17 years and retired last year, offers fresh details about the raising of the flag and the first account of comments about it by the justice’s wife.
So why didn’t we hear about this in 2021??
The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.
Maria Karalyos, Black cat in the window
Oh really? Does the Post really think Martha-Ann would or could do this without him noticing?
The upside-down flag has long been a sign of distress for the military and protest by various political factions. In the fraught weeks before and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, it had also been adopted by supporters of the “Stop the Steal” movement, which embraced Donald Trump’s false claims that Joe Biden stole the election from him. Some of the rioters who participated in the attack had carried upside-down American flags with them.
The display of the politically charged symbol outside the Alitos’ home became a public controversy last week after the New York Times reported on it, raising new ethics questions for the Supreme Court as it prepares to issue pivotal rulings in two cases related to efforts by Trump and his supporters to block Biden’s 2020 election victory.
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.
Justice Sotomayor Speaks Out
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.
Libertarians in Disarray
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.
“Polling Risk for Trump?”
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.
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