Posted: March 30, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, Judge Reggie Walton, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, Judge Thomas F. HOgan, judges speak out, Rule of Law, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Secret Service, Trump's violent threats |
Good Afternoon!!
By Erica Oller
For the past couple of days, social media has been focused on a shocking video that Trump posted on Truth Social, in which President Biden was depicted in the back of a pickup truck with his hands and feet bound as if he had been kidnapped.
This is nothing new for Trump. He routinely threatens judges and their families, immigrants, Democrats, even fellow Republicans who dare to cross him. This man is out on bail in four separate cases. Why is he permitted to keep issuing threats against anyone he perceives as an enemy?
Imagine if you were a witness in one the cases against him. How would you feel about testifying when you know that Trump can and will get his followers to threaten you and perhaps even hurt or kill you? After all, he instigated an attack on the U.S. Capitol during which police officers were killed and badly injured.
Joyce Vance says it better than I can. From Civil Discourse: We Need to Talk About This.
Today’s widely discussed Trump post on Truth Social isn’t just another instance of bad behavior. It’s not just a shrug of the shoulders and a resigned sigh of, “What are you going to do?” Far too often, people resignedly accept Trump’s behavior because they believe there’s no alternative. The zeitgeist is: We can’t make him stop, can we?
Here’s Trump’s Truth Social post. It’s a video, and although I hate to send you to Truth Social, you can watch the whole thing here. Or read on for my description. What you need to know is that this is unprecedented and out of bounds. If you or I did this, the Secret Service would be on our doorstep within hours.
Donald Trump, by the way, is out on bond ahead of trial in four separate criminal cases. Today, he threatened the President of the United States. It’s time for the people with authority to do so to deal with him. Sure, he’s the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, but they won’t reign him in. And someone is going to get hurt if he isn’t….
I know from experience as a prosecutor how seriously the Secret Service takes every single threat, or anything close to a threat, made against the President of the United States. They take it seriously even when it looks like the person making it lacks any capacity to carry it out. They always check. They always have the talk.
Donald Trump is different from the person who makes a bad joke or an evil suggestion they don’t have the power to follow through on. We know, and more importantly, he knows, how his followers react when he suggests violence. It’s unthinkable, unconscionable for a former president to even intimate that violence against the current president is acceptable. I cannot imagine George W. Bush even joking about something like this when Barack Obama was in the White House, or Obama suggesting Trump should be kidnapped and trussed up in the back of a truck.
Trump is totally, and uniquely among our former presidents, out of bounds. It’s time to stop letting him break the rules. We’re entitled to more, not less, accountability from our presidents than from average citizens.
No one is saying Trump can’t campaign or that he can’t criticize Biden. What he can’t do is suggest he should be kidnapped, knocked out, and bound in the back of a pickup truck. I can’t believe that I have to write that out—there is no universe in which that’s acceptable.
As Vance writes, the justice system has ways to deal with this kind of behavior, so why is Trump still free to threaten his “enemies?” He should be in jail right now.
By Leny_art at Deviant Art
The Washington Post published a somewhat mealy-mouthed piece about this by Azi Paybarah that includes Trump’s excuses: Donald Trump shares image of Joe Biden with hands and feet tied.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, sent a lengthy statement distancing the campaign from the image, and accusing Democrats of using violent rhetoric against Trump.
“That picture was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway,” Cheung said in the statement. “Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”
The message remained live on Trump’s feed late Friday night.
Among the examples Cheung cited in his statement were Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) saying in 2017 “What we’ve got to do is fight in Congress, fight in the courts, fight in the streets, fight online, fight at the ballot box …” Cheung also cited Biden’s 2018 comment, when he said, “If we were in high school, I’d take him [Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”
Paybarah also includes other examples of Trump attacking Biden and others with violent imagery:
In October, Trump shared a doctored video of him hitting a golf ball that hits Biden and knocks him down. (It was similar to a doctored video he shared in 2017, hitting a golf ball into the back of Hillary Clinton, who falls down as a result.) In April 2023, a judge issued a warning to Trump after an image of him holding a bat next to an image of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) was shared from one of the former president’s verified accounts.
In July 2017, Trump shared a video of himself at a professional wrestling match, beating up a man whose face is covered with the CNN logo. The verified account for CNN’s communication team responded to the video with a quote from Trump’s White House spokeswoman at the time, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, falsely claiming Trump “in no way form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence.”
Earlier this month, Trump told supporters in Ohio that some immigrants who are accused of crimes are “not people,” and warned it will be a “bloodbath for the country” if he is not elected.
The latest episode has coincided with Trump’s increasing use of violent and hostile rhetoric as he seeks to return to the White House. In December, he told people in New Hampshire that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that immigrant groups and civil rights advocates condemned and said was reminiscent of Hitler telling Germans, in his book “Mein Kampf,” to “care for the purity of their own blood” by eliminating Jews.
On Thursday night, Reggie Walton, a sitting federal judge, appeared on CNN to denounce Trump’s violent threats. Shania Shelton and Rachard Rose at CNN: Federal judge warns of Trump’s attacks in extraordinary rebuke.
US District Judge Reggie Walton spoke with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” in the wake of Trump’s attacks on Judge Juan Merchan, which helped prompt the New York judge to issue a gag order on the former president earlier this week. It is unusual for federal judges to speak publicly, especially about specific political or legal situations.
By Adrie Martens
“It’s very disconcerting to have someone making comments about a judge, and it’s particularly problematic when those comments are in the form of a threat, especially if they’re directed at one’s family,” said Walton, who has also faced threats, as has his daughter. “We do these jobs because we’re committed to the rule of law and we believe in the rule of law, and the rule of law can only function effectively when we have judges who are prepared to carry out their duties without the threat of potential physical harm.”
“I think it’s important in order to preserve our democracy that we maintain the rule of law,” Walton said in the interview. “And the rule of law can only be maintained if we have independent judicial officers who are able to do their job and ensure that the laws are, in fact, enforced and that the laws are applied equally to everybody who appears in our courthouse.”
“I think it’s important that, as judges, we speak out and say things in reference to things that conceivably are going to impact on the process, because if we don’t have a viable court system that’s able to function efficiently, then we have tyranny. And I don’t think that would be good for the future of our country, and the future of democracy in our country,” he continued.
This is by Spencer S. Hsu at The Washington Post: Republican-appointed judges raise alarm over Trump attacks on law.
A Republican-appointed judge denounced Donald Trump’s social media attacks against the judge presiding over the former president’s hush money trial in Manhattan and his daughter, calling them assaults on the rule of law that could lead to violence and tyranny.
“When judges are threatened, and particularly when their family is threatened, it’s something that’s wrong and should not happen,” U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in a live interview Thursday. He added, “It is very troubling because I think it is an attack on the rule of law.”
The unusual media statement by a sitting federal judge came after Trump blasted New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan and his daughter, Loren Merchan, criticizing her affiliation with a digital marketing company that works with Democratic candidates and erroneously attributing to her a social media post showing Trump behind bars.
Walton, who was appointed by presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to courts in Washington in 1981 and 1991, said “any reasonable, thinking person” would appreciate the impact of Trump’s rhetoric on some followers, intentional or not. The judge recalled how a disgruntled litigant killed the son and wounded the husband of New Jersey federal Judge Esther Salas at her home in a 2020 shooting.
By Rita Cardelli
Since late 2020, as Trump began escalating his attacks on the judiciary, serious investigated threats against federal judges have more than doubled, from 224 in 2021 to 457 in 2023, according to the U.S. Marshals Service, as first reported by Reuters. Federal judges in Washington say at least half of trial judges handling cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have received a surge in threats and harassment, including death threats to their homes, with Trump’s election obstruction trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, placed under 24-hour protection.
“The rule of rule of law can only be maintained if we have independent judicial officers who are able to do their job and ensure that the laws are in fact enforced and that the laws are applied equally to everybody who appears in our courthouse,” Walton told CNN. He was prompted to speak out of concern for the “future of our country and the future of democracy in our country,” Walton said, “because if we don’t have a viable court system that’s able to function efficiently, then we have tyranny.”
Other judges have also spoken out.
Walton’s remarks came as several federal judges in Washington appointed by Republican presidents have spoken with increasing urgency about Trump’s disregard for historical facts and alarmed at his increasingly graphic and at times violent description of defendants prosecuted in the Jan. 6 riot as “political prisoners” and “hostages” who did nothing wrong….
“In my 37 years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream,” U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in a January sentencing. “I have been dismayed to see distortions and outright falsehoods seep into the public consciousness.”
U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan similarly told a group of Georgetown Law School students in January that false claims that riot defendants were acting like tourists or patriots were destructive rewriting of reality. “There’s a danger that is embedded now in our communities across the country,” Hogan said.
“And we have to wonder where this is going to end up if that’s part of our history, this fraudulent story” by Trump that the 2020 election was stolen. Hogan spoke shortly after his retirement after completing 40 years on the bench and sentencing 26 Jan. 6 riot defendants.
Hogan and Lamberth were both appointed by Reagan, and both served as chief judges of the U.S. District Court in Washington, where judges have presided over more than 1,350 prosecutions for the riot that resulted after Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol where Congress was certifying the results of the 2020 election.
From HuffPost: Ex-Federal Judge Blasts Judiciary And Entire Nation For Not Calling Out Trump More.
Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig on Friday blasted former President Donald Trump for his repeated attacks on the nation’s judicial system, calling on leaders in both the state and federal courts — alongside all Americans — to do more about it.
By Irina Babichenko
“Never in American history has any person, let alone a President of the United States, leveled such threatening attacks against the federal and state courts and federal and state judicial officers of the kind the former president has leveled continually now for years,” Luttig said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“But suffice it to say, never in history has any person leveled such attacks and been met with such passivity, acquiescence, and submissiveness by the nation,” he continued.
Luttig, a Republican, was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, and he served until 2006, when he left for a higher-paid position with Boeing. He currently works for Coca-Cola.
He said in the post that it is the Supreme Court’s “responsibility” to “protect the federal courts, the federal judges, and all participants in the justice system,” adding that the same was true for the state courts.
Luttig praised U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton for going to CNN with his concerns this week. Walton, whose court is in the District of Columbia, criticized Trump in an interview Thursday. Sitting judges typically do not grant interviews to the media.
Trump’s attacks, Luttig said, amounted to a “reprehensible spectacle.”
“Ultimately, however, it is the responsibility of the entire nation to protect its courts and judges, its Constitution, its Rule of Law, and America’s Democracy from vicious attack, threat, undermine, and deliberate delegitimization at the hands of anyone so determined,” he concluded.
This from a tweet by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarian leaders and author of the book, “Strongmen.”
Wake up people. This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.
Something has to be done.
I’m going to end there. What do you think about all this? What other stories have captured your interest?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Posted: March 27, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: Biden campaign strategy, Francis Scott Key Bridge accident, Judge Juan Merchan, NBC, Ronna McDaniel, Trump bible |
Good Day!!
I hardly know where to begin these days. Every day I’m aware of the specter of Trump as dictator hanging over our heads. If only we could know what is going to happen. But we can’t. We can only hang in there until November to learn whether our country will remain a democracy or begin turning into a fascist state.
It seems so obvious that a man like Trump should not be permitted to run for any office, much less president. But somehow he’s doing it, and the media often treat him as a credible candidate. It’s mind-boggling to me. And we are learning that the courts and the “justice” system are not going to save us. Judges just keep giving Trump special treatment. And the Supreme Court is working to take away our individual rights and freedom. What will happen? We can’t know.
Collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge and cargo ship
Today’s top news story is about the terrible disaster in Baltimore–the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Here’s the latest from the CNN live blog: More than 24 hours after the Key Bridge collapse, recovery operations continue. Here’s what we know.
More than a day after the Dali cargo ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, authorities are still searching for the six people missing in the crash. Cold water temperatures and choppy waters are affecting divers’ attempts to find the bodies of those missing, who are presumed dead.
Here’s the latest:
- The investigation: A team from with the National Transportation Safety Board went aboard the ship late Tuesday night to gather evidence for their investigation, agency Chair Jennifer Homendy told CNN on Wednesday. There, they obtained the ship’s data recorder, or black box.
- No timeline for channel reopening: There is no specific timeline for when ships may be able to move in and out of the channel into the Port of Baltimore, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore says, but he reiterated that it is a priority to get it reopened.
- “Long road to recovery”: US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg predicted the restoration effort for the city and port won’t be quick. He also warned of supply chain disruptions, saying, “The impact of this incident is going to be felt throughout the region and really throughout our supply chains.”
- Coast Guard assessing hazmat threat: The US Coast Guard is examining damaged shipping containers, some containing potentially hazardous materials, from the crashed vessel, according to a US government document obtained by CNN and a US official familiar with the matter.
- Overnight search deemed unsafe: Search and recovery operations were halted overnight due to dangerous conditions, including “very unstable” sections of the steel bridge and shipping containers hanging from the cargo ship, Baltimore City Fire Chief James Wallace told CNN.
- Details emerge on those missing: Local authorities have yet to confirm the identities of those missing but have said they include construction workers who were on the bridge at the time of the collapse. Here’s what we know about the six people presumed dead.
- Ship blacked out before crash: Just minutes before impact, there was a “total blackout” of engine and electrical power on the ship, according to Clay Diamond, executive director of the American Pilots Association.
- City remains in state of emergency: As the search operations continue for the missing, Baltimore remains in a state of emergency, Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN. He says he expects it to remain in place for the “foreseeable future.”
Read more of the key details about the crash here.
Yahoo News: NTSB recovers ship’s ‘black box,’ 6 presumed dead after Francis Scott Key Bridge collapses in Baltimore: Here’s what we know.
The National Transportation Safety Board chair told CNN Wednesday morning that the cargo ship’s data recorder, or black box, was recovered by investigators overnight after they were able to board the ship. More information will reportedly be shared with the public today….
Shortly before 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, the Dali, a massive cargo ship under a Singaporean flag that was bound from Baltimore to Sri Lanka, apparently lost power shortly before crashing into a pillar that helped stabilize the 1.6-mile-long bridge. The crew sent out a Mayday signal that allowed officials to stop traffic before more cars entered the bridge.
“We’re thankful that between the Mayday and collapse that we had officials who were able to begin to stop the flow of traffic so more cars were not up on the bridge,” Gov. Wes Moore said at a news conference Tuesday.
A view of the Dali cargo vessel which crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge causing it to collapse in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., March 26, 2024. REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson
The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore said in a statement that the ship, which is as long as three football fields, lost propulsion prior to the crash, and followed emergency protocols by dropping anchor. The National Transportation Safety Board said it was investigating those claims.
The loss of power, however, came as the Dali was traveling at a speed of 8 knots, roughly 9 mph, and left the ship “unable to maintain the desired heading,” the statement read.
“What I do know is that the force of this ship is almost unimaginable,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told ABC’s Good Morning America. “This is a vessel that was about 100,000 tons carrying its load. So 200 million pounds went into this bridge all at once, which is why you had that almost-instant catastrophic result.”
Roberto Leon, a Virginia Tech engineering professor, told the Associated Press that the bridge could not “absorb anywhere near the energy that this humongous ship is bringing. So it’s going to break.”
The Dali was also involved in a 2016 crash at a Belgium port, according to Business Insider.
Thanks to JJ for sending this Guardian article on the victims of the bridge collapse: Details emerge on likely Baltimore bridge collapse victims: ‘They were wonderful family people.’
The six likely victims of the Baltimore bridge collapse on Tuesday all appeared to be construction workers from Latin American countries, according to reports, including a father of three, Miguel Luna, from El Salvador, as authorities said they had recovered the black box recorder from the ship.
Since the container ship Dali crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge after losing power early on Tuesday morning, six members of a construction crew filling potholes on the major bridge are now presumed to be dead, according to state officials.
The immigrant services non-profit We Are Casa confirmed that Luna, 49, had lived in Maryland for at least 19 years.
“He is a husband, a father of three, and has called Maryland his home for over 19 years,” its executive director, Gustavo Torres, said in a statement. Luna’s son Marvin told the Washington Post he knew his father was on the bridge but he had not heard of the tragedy until friends called him.
The foreign affairs ministry of Guatemala confirmed that two of the workers were nationals, though it did not name them. It said the Guatemalan consul general had spoken with family members.
The Associated Press also reported one of the men, Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, was from Honduras.
A correspondent for Reforma reported that a Mexican embassy spokesperson in Washington said one of the victims was a Mexican national and that two others were from Guatemala and El Salvador.
Jesús Campos, a construction worker, said he knew the missing crew members and that they were all from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico. “It’s a difficult situation,” he said, speaking through a translator. “My friends were working on that bridge.”
Campos said the men all worked for the construction company, Brawner Builders, where he himself had worked for eight months – including on the overnight shift, until he was transferred to daytime hours one month ago.
He said the workers were low-income immigrants who used their wages to support family members in the US and abroad.
All “low-income immigrants” repairing potholes in the middle of the night. Heartbreaking.
In other news, NBC was forced by in-house and public outrage to fire Ronna McDaniel after only a few days of employment.
Jeremy Barr at The Washington Post: NBC reverses decision to hire Ronna McDaniel after on-air backlash.
Amid a chorus of on-air protest from some of the network’s biggest stars, NBC announced Tuesday night that former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel will no longer be joining the network as a paid contributor.
In a memo, NBCUniversal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde told staff that he had listened to “the legitimate concerns” of many network employees. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” he wrote. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”
Ronna McDaniel
The network had only just announced four days earlier that they were bringing McDaniel on board to provide “expert insight and analysis” on politics. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” one NBC News executive told staff at the time.
But the company’s on-air personalities — especially those on NBC’s liberal-leaning cable affiliate MSNBC — disagreed vehemently, saying that McDaniel’s promotion of former president Donald Trump’s media-bashing and false election-fraud claims disqualified her from a role in their news divisions.
And one by one, they took to the airwaves to deliver that message to their bosses in front of their live audiences Monday.
“Take a minute, acknowledge that maybe it wasn’t the right call,” MSNBC’s top-rated star Rachel Maddow said on her show that night. “It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to acknowledge when you are wrong.”
NBC delivered the news of its course correction to its employees before informing McDaniel, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve confidence.
Maybe the bosses should have consulted with their employees before hiring a proven liar and insurrectionist.
Jim Rutenberg and Alexandra Berzon at The New York Times: How Ronna McDaniel Backed Trump’s Early Bid to Hold Power.
By the second week of December 2020, the presidential election was decided and heading to a formal vote at the Electoral College. Like President Trump, the Republican Party chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, wasn’t ready to concede.
“Every illegal vote is stealing from a valid vote, and every state that conducted their election fraudulently is stealing from states that conducted their elections fairly,” Ms. McDaniel told Sean Hannity of Fox News on Dec. 8.
At the time, key campaign aides had already told Mr. Trump that he had lost. Advisers had found no credible evidence of fraud or irregularities that could have reversed the outcome. The Electoral College would confirm Joseph R. Biden was the winner six days later.
Yet, Ms. McDaniel’s appearance on Mr. Hannity’s program was part of her concerted efforts to help Mr. Trump dispute his election loss….
Ms. McDaniel had recently tried to downplay her role. But a review of her record shows she was, at times, closely involved in and supportive of Mr. Trump’s legal and political maneuvering ahead of the violent attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6.
Ms. McDaniel was not the most aggressive or outlandish member of Mr. Trump’s team. Indeed, she fell short of Mr. Trump’s demands and expectations, former aides said, and faced calls from his allies and grass-roots activists to be far more aggressive. And her involvement appears to have fallen off substantially — at least publicly — in the days before Jan. 6, when the R.N.C. focused its efforts on the then-upcoming Senate runoff election in Georgia.
Later, after courts, Republican election officials and state investigations all dismissed Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud, Ms. McDaniel was viewed as insufficiently dedicated to the cause of overturning the election, particularly by the Trump supporters who still considered Mr. Trump the rightful winner.
But before then, Ms. McDaniel, who through intermediaries declined to comment for this article, had done more to dispute a legitimate election result than any other chair of a major American political party in modern history.
Ronna McDaniel with Trump
The authors break down McDaniel’s actions in detail. Some examples:
The party set up hotlines, collected accounts of supposed suspicious activities and held meetings at the White House with Mr. Trump’s legal team, Ms. McDaniel later testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
At a news conference in Michigan on Nov. 6, the day before news outlets declared Mr. Biden the winner, she announced that the R.N.C. was deploying legal teams in four states to investigate “irregularities.” She listed allegations in Michigan that she claimed were evidence of potential, widespread problems, including supposedly suspect election machine software. The allegations were disputed by election officials and later debunked.
Speaking on Fox on Nov. 10, Ms. McDaniel repeated unsubstantiated and soon-to-be debunked claims of “deceased voters” and “batches of votes that were invalidated,” declaring, “that is stealing.”
And on social media, Ms. McDaniel questioned “irregularities” about the election, posted fund-raising solicitations and promoted hearings in states where Mr. Trump’s allies presented bogus evidence of election malfeasance. She vowed that the R.N.C. would “pursue this process to the very end.”
After Mr. Trump switched his legal team, bringing in outside lawyers led by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the R.N.C. also shifted away from the legal involvement with the Trump team. Of the 65 lawsuits that Mr. Trump and his allies filed after the 2020 election, the R.N.C. attached its name only to four, according to Democracy Docket, which tracks the cases.
Still, on Nov. 19, Ms. McDaniel allowed Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell to hold a press briefing at R.N.C. headquarters. With dark liquid dripping down his face, Mr. Giuliani promoted wild theories about Dominion voting machines and the deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez….
After that news conference, party lawyers told Ms. McDaniel not to repeat the conspiracy theories about election machines, and urged R.N.C. aides to be careful when speaking about the election, suggesting they use phrases like “voting irregularities” rather than “voter fraud,” according to House committee testimony….
On Nov. 17, two Republican members of the canvassing board in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, initially voted against certifying the county’s results, deadlocking the board until they reversed themselves amid angry protest.
Immediately afterward, the Republican board members, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, received a phone call from Mr. Trump; Ms. McDaniel was also on the line.
Believe it or not, there are many more examples of McDaniel’s dishonest actions in the NYT story.
Trump has now taken over the Republican National Committee and is hiring staff who will support his big lie without question. Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post: Was the 2020 election stolen? Job interviews at RNC take an unusual turn.
Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.
In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the prospective future employees are based in key swing states.
“Was the 2020 election stolen?” one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.
The question about the 2020 election has startled some of the potential employees, who viewed it as questioning their loyalty to Trump and as an unusual job interview question, according to the people familiar with the interviews. A group of senior Trump advisers have been in the RNC building in recent days conducting the interviews.
“But if you say the election wasn’t stolen, do you really think you’re going to get hired?” one former RNC employee asked.
Read more about the Trump RNC hiring process at the link.
More Trump news:
AP: Judge issues gag order barring Donald Trump from commenting on witnesses, others in hush money case.
A New York judge Tuesday issued a gag order barring Donald Trump from commenting publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors in his upcoming hush-money criminal trial, citing the former president’s history of “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” remarks about people involved in his legal cases.
Judge Juan Merchan
Judge Juan M. Merchan’s decision, echoing a gag order in Trump’s Washington, D.C., election interference criminal case, came a day after he rejected the defense’s push to delay the Manhattan trial until summer and ordered it to begin April 15. If the date holds, it will be the first criminal trial of a former president.
“Given that the eve of trial is upon us, it is without question that the imminency of the risk of harm is now paramount,” Merchan wrote in a four-page decision granting the prosecution’s request for what it deemed a “narrowly tailored” gag order.
The judge said the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s statements have induced fear and necessitated added security measures to protect his targets and investigate threats.
Trump’s lawyers fought a gag order, warning it would amount to unconstitutional and unlawful prior restraint on his free speech rights. Merchan, who had long resisted imposing a gag order, said his obligation to ensuring the integrity of the trial outweighed First Amendment concerns.
You’ve probably heard that Trump has been hawking $60 Bibles. It turns out that he’s actually just endorsing a Bible that singer Lee Greenwood has been selling for years. But Trump must be getting a cut of the profits. I can’t imagine him doing this for nothing.
Margaret Hartmann at New York Magazine: Trump Sells $59.99 Bible That Isn’t Even Gold.
It turns out Donald Trump’s Monday morning Truth Social post comparing himself to Jesus Christ (once again) wasn’t just inherently sacrilegious; in a way, it was also promotional content.
Trump launched a new career as a Bible salesman on Tuesday afternoon, posting a video to Truth Social in which he urged supporters to buy the “God Bless the USA Bible.”
Trump with Lee Greenwood
“I’m proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible,” Trump says in the three-minute ad. “We must Make America Pray Again.”
Trump added: “All Americans need a Bible in their home and I have many. It’s my favorite book. It’s a lot of people’s favorite book.”
Many people find the idea of any presidential candidate selling religious texts to their supporters totally appalling. And the Donald Trump of it all makes matters even worse. The former president famously named the Bible as his favorite book on the 2016 campaign trail, but was unable to name his favorite verse. During his administration he cited “Two Corinthians” (not Second Corinthians) and had peaceful protesters forcibly removed from a park near the White House so he could stand in front of a church and brandish a Bible. Plus, Trump is hawking the Good Book as he finds himself in huge financial trouble due to his multiple criminal trials, one of which involves hush-money payments to a porn star.
These are all valid concerns. But as a connoisseur of ridiculous Trump money-making schemes, my main issue is that this isn’t a clever scam or an original product: He’s just endorsing a Bible the singer Lee Greenwood released about three years ago.
The Lee Greenwood Bible was controversial even before it came out, as Slate explained back in 2021:
The $60 Bible, which was originally set to ship early this month to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11, was “inspired by” the country musician Lee Greenwood’s 1980s patriotic anthem “God Bless the USA” and packages Scripture with the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the handwritten chorus to Greenwood’s song. The ensuing uproar shows the challenges facing publishers in the lucrative Bible-printing business and the growing discomfort with Christian nationalism, the ideology that asserts the United States should be an explicitly Christian country.
The only difference the the Bible Trump is selling is that there is a note in the FAQ saying that Donald Trump has endorsed the book.
AP: Trump slow to invest in states that could decide election as some in GOP fear ‘skeleton’ campaign.
In his bid to retake the White House, few states hold as much promise for Donald Trump as Michigan.
The former president has already won the state once and President Joe Biden, who reclaimed it for Democrats in 2020, is confronting vulnerabilities there as he seeks reelection. Trump’s campaign promises an aggressive play for Michigan as part of a robust swing-state strategy.
But, at least for now, those promises appear to be mostly talk. The Trump campaign and its partners at the Republican National Committee haven’t yet made significant general election investments in the state, according to Michigan Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra. The national committee, he said, hasn’t transferred any money to the state party to help bolster its operations heading into the general election. There are no specific programs in place to court voters of color. And there’s no general election field staff in place.
“We’ve got the skeleton right now,” Hoekstra said. “We’re going to have to put more meat on it.”
It’s much the same in presidential battleground states across the country, according to Republican operatives and party officials involved in campaign planning elsewhere.
Widely praised for its professionalism and effectiveness throughout the primary phase of the 2024 election, Trump’s political operation has been slow to pivot toward the general election in the weeks after executing a hostile takeover of the Republican Party’s national political machinery. In fact, the former president’s team has rolled back plans under previous leaders to add hundreds of staff and dozens of new minority-outreach centers in key states without offering a clear alternative.
Read the rest at the AP.
At The Daily Beast, Jake Lahut writes about Joe Biden’s developing plans for Trump: The Biden Campaign Is Quietly Preparing a Trump Ambush.
The president began the election year with his approval rating at historic lows. He was trailing Donald Trump in almost all of the key battleground states, as well as in national polling averages. Influential liberals were so concerned that the octogenarian incumbent did not have another campaign in him that some were openly calling for him to be replaced as the nominee.
As the general election kicks off this spring, however, those calls have quieted—because Biden’s resurgence is coming into focus. While the president still faces serious obstacles to a second term, several important data points are lining up to demonstrate he is picking up badly needed momentum.
For the first time in a long time, there’s good news for Biden on the polling front. Gradual improvements in the battleground states along with an uptick in his approval rating led one Democratic strategist, Simon Rosenberg, to declare “the Biden bump.”
The boost is at the very least correlated with Biden’s fiery State of the Union address on March 7, when he repeatedly went after his “predecessor” and made sure to mix it up with Republicans in the chamber on a few occasions.
Since then, Biden’s team has continued the punchy, combative tone on display that night, using press releases to cheekily slam their legally challenged opponent as “Broke Don.”
On top of that, the Biden campaign has continued to flex what has always been its core strength: fundraising.
With a $53 million haul in February, the Biden campaign built on their already impressive financial advantage over Trump, who brought in only $20 million over the same period. The Biden campaign has $71 million in cash on hand, compared to just $33.5 million for Trump.
The tide is turning, a Biden adviser argued to The Daily Beast, and although they aren’t putting too much stock into any recent polling upticks, the president’s team is ready to seize upon April and May as a crucial time to ambush a wounded Trump campaign.
I really like the way Biden’s campaign has been making fun of Trump on social media. One of the things Trump fears most is people laughing at him.
I know I should be writing about the Supreme Court today, but it’s just too painful. I do want to recommend an excellent article by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate (h/t Daknikat): The Current Attack on Abortion Pills Will Fail. The Next One Will Be So Much Worse.
Another good article to check out is this interview with former Justice Stephen Breyer at Politico Magazine: A Supreme Court Justice Sounds a Warning. In Breyer’s new book, he writes that his former colleagues are in danger of having “a Constitution no one wants.”
What are your thoughts on all this? What other stories are you following?
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Posted: March 16, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: "absolute immunity", Alvin Bragg, Benjamin Netanyahu, Chuck Schumer, E. Jean Carroll, Elon Musk, Fani Willis, Gaza, israel, Jared Kushner, Judge Scott McAfee, Letitia James, Mike Pence, SpaceX, Stormy Daniels, Supreme Court, Tommy Tuberville |
Good Afternoon!!
Walter Chandoha plays with one of his subjects at his home studio in 1955.
Today I’m featuring cat photos by Walter Chandoha. Chandoha was a famous photographer of animals–mostly cats. You can read about him and see more photos in this 2019 New York Times obituary by Richard Sandomir: Walter Chandoha, Photographer Whose Specialty Was Cats, Dies at 98.
Taking pictures of cats soon began to look like a more fulfilling career path than the one in advertising that Mr. Chandoha had planned while attending New York University, after serving in World War II. So, after graduating, he turned to freelance photography for a living — and, by the mid-1950s, he had begun a long period as the dominant commercial cat photographer of his era.
“Walter Chandoha’s cat models, shown on this page, must be alert, graceful and beautiful,” read a newspaper ad in 1956 for a cat food brand that featured his photos. “To keep them that way, Mr. Chandoha feeds them Puss ‘n Boots because Puss ‘n Boots is good nutrition.”
On a winter’s evening in 1949, Walter Chandoha was walking to his three-room apartment in Astoria, Queens, when he spotted an abandoned gray kitten shivering in the snow. He put it in a pocket of his Army coat and brought it home to his wife, Maria.
The kitten’s antics — racing through the apartment each night as if possessed, shadowboxing with his image in a mirror — inspired the couple to name him Loco. Mr. Chandoha (pronounced shan-DOE-uh) was moved to photograph Loco and quickly sold the pictures to newspapers and magazines around the world.
By the time he died, on Jan. 11, Mr. Chandoha had taken some 90,000 cat photos, nearly all before cats had become viral darlings of social media. He was 98.
Now, on to the day’s news:
It’s becoming very clear that the courts are not going to protect us from a possible Trump dictatorship. Thank goodness for E. Jean Carroll and NY AG Letitia James. At least two New York courts have hit Trump where it hurts–his finances. But the two federal cases seem stalled and the Georgia case just took a bit hit. Those three prosecutions of Trump are unlikely to take place before the election now. We are going to have to defeat him at the ballot box.
At The New Republic, Michael Tomasky writes: We Have to Beat Donald Trump. Clearly, the Broken Legal System Won’t.
Judge Scott McAfee has ruled that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can stay on the case against Donald Trump in that jurisdiction, provided that Nathan Wade, the prosecutor on the case with whom she had a relationship, withdraws. I guess we count that a win, although to be honest, Willis has so damaged herself by her colossally terrible judgment that it probably would have been better if she were out of the picture.
Cats play together in 1962.
The other problem with Willis’s scandal is how it slowed the case down, giving Trump’s lawyers a chance to make this not about the defendant but about her—and another chance to delay, delay, delay.
Meanwhile, Thursday, down in Florida, we saw Trumpy Judge Aileen Cannon issue yet another ruling in the classified documents case that helps Trump. She didn’t support Trump’s lawyers’ motion to dismiss the case, but she kicked the can down the road in a way that’s very helpful to Trump. MSNBC analyst Andrew Weissmann even called it the “worst possible outcome” for the government. “If the judge had simply said, ‘I agree with Donald Trump, and I find that this is vague, and I’m dismissing it,’ the government could have appealed it to the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, as they have done twice before and won twice before,” Weissmann said. “But she also did not want to rule in favor of the government. So what she did is said, ‘Why don’t you bring this up later? I think there’s some real issues here.’”
Also this week, in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg shocked us all by asking for a 30-day delay in the trial, which was scheduled to start March 25. Trump’s lawyers had requested a 90-day delay. Bragg conceded that some delay was appropriate.
Why? It looks like it’s the fault of federal prosecutors. Bragg’s office requested certain documents a while ago from the Southern District of New York, and it shared them with Trump’s lawyers during the discovery process. Trump’s lawyers suspected there was more, especially relating to Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, so they subpoenaed the SDNY. That happened in January. It was only earlier this month that the Southern District turned over all the documents….
It’s more than fair to ask: Why did the Southern District take so long to produce these documents? And we must also ask this: Did Merrick Garland know his prosecutors were taking so long to hand over documents, and thus playing into Trump’s hands? And if he knew, did he do anything about it?
And then there’s the most significant case of all–the one about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Finally, let’s recall the status of the fourth criminal case against Trump, the biggest one, at least to my mind—the January 6 insurrection case. On that one, we’re basically waiting on the Supreme Court, which announced on February 28 that it would hear arguments in Trump’s claim of complete immunity but set the argument date for April 25. The high court could easily take another month—or even two—to hand down its decision after that, meaning that this crucial trial, about whether a sitting president initiated an insurrection against the government of the United States, may not happen before Election Day.
How in the world did all this happen? A few weeks ago, it looked like the wheels of justice were finally turning, catching up on a man who has flouted and broken laws not only during his presidency but for his entire adult life,
going back to when he and his father wouldn’t rent apartments to Black people in Queens. There was the judgment in the E. Jean Carroll case. And then the whopping penalty in the New York attorney general’s case against the Trump Organization.
But this week, it looks like everything is falling apart.
An American shorthair in 1966.
We can’t count on the courts. They move slowly and they favor the rich and powerful. We can’t count on the media either. They seem to favor another Trump presidency because the bosses believe the insanity and chaos would be good for their bottom line.
CNN on the Fani Willis case:
Another problem comes from MAGA threats. MSBNC’s Kyle Griffin wrote on Twitter that
“Judge Scott McAfee had written his order on Willis and Wade early last week, according to NBC News, but because he had been receiving threats, he waited until today to make it public in order to allow for proper security to be in place for him and his family.”
At NBC, Rebecca Shabad, Adam Reiss and Tom Winter write about the status of the Stormy Daniels election interference case: Trump hush money trial postponed until mid-April, judge rules.
The trial in the New York hush money case against former President Donald Trump has been delayed until the middle of April, Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday.
Merchan said the trial — originally scheduled to begin March 25 — would be pushed back 30 days from Friday.
He also scheduled a hearing for the trial’s initial start date, to discuss a motion filed by Trump’s attorneys regarding document production in the case.
Merchan said he will set a new trial date “if necessary” when he rules on that motion, meaning it’s possible the trial proceedings could be delayed beyond the middle of next month.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had previously said he would support the trial being delayed at least 30 days, into late April. Trump’s legal team requested that it be postponed 90 days.
Bragg said Thursday that Trump’s request to delay the trial was the result of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan providing over 100,000 pages of discovery, which Bragg said were “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office provided an additional 15,000 pages of discovery on Friday, which Bragg’s office said were also “likely to be unrelated to the subject matter of this case.”
The documents relate to Michael Cohen’s guilty plea in 2018 to numerous criminal charges, including making secret payments to women who claimed they had affairs with Trump, lying to Congress about Trump’s business dealings with Russia and failing to report millions of dollars in income.
Echoing MIchael Tomasky, WTF is going on with the Southern District and the DOJ. Are there MAGA people still in place that are helping Trump delay justice?
This 1955 photo is one of Walter Chandoha’s most famous shots. “My daughter Paula and the kitten both ‘smiled’ for the camera at the same time. … But the cat’s not smiling, he’s meowing.”
Speaking of the rich and powerful, why is Elon Musk still getting federal contracts after his support for Nazis and white supremacists and his support for Russia’s war against Ukraine?
Joey Roulette and Marisa Taylor at Reuters: Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say.
SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s space company and national security agencies.
The network is being built by SpaceX’s Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said.
The plans show the extent of SpaceX’s involvement in U.S. intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces.
If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the U.S. government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe.
The contract signals growing trust by the intelligence establishment of a company whose owner has clashed with the Biden administration and sparked controversy, opens new tab over the use of Starlink satellite connectivity in the Ukraine war, the sources said.
The Wall Street Journal reported, opens new tab in February the existence of a $1.8 billion classified Starshield contract with an unknown intelligence agency without detailing the purposes of the program.
Reuters reporting discloses for the first time that the SpaceX contract is for a powerful new spy system with hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits, and that the spy agency that Musk’s company is working with is the NRO.
Will Musk have access to this program, as he does with Starlink? How do we know he won’t share information with Russia? Am I an idiot to ask that?
Chandoha’s backlighting technique dramatizes the defensive posture of a kitten seeing a dog in 1957.
Another tale of the rich and powerful from Eric Lipton, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman at The New York Times: Kushner Developing Deals Overseas Even as His Father-in-Law Runs for President.
Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald J. Trump, confirmed on Friday that he was closing in on major real estate deals in Albania and Serbia, the latest example of the former president’s family doing business abroad even as Mr. Trump seeks to return to the White House.
Mr. Kushner’s plans in the Balkans appear to have come about in part through relationships built while Mr. Trump was in office. Mr. Kushner, who was a senior White House official, said he had been working on the deals with Richard Grenell, who served briefly as acting director of national intelligence under Mr. Trump and also as ambassador to Germany and special envoy to the Balkans.
One of the proposed projects would be the development of an island off the coast of Albania into a luxury tourist destination.
A second — with a planned luxury hotel and 1,500 residential units and a museum — is in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, at the site of the long-vacant former headquarters of the Yugoslav Army destroyed in 1999 by the NATO bombings, according to a member of Parliament in Serbia and Mr. Kushner’s company.
These first two projects both involve land now controlled by the governments, meaning a deal would have to be finalized with foreign governments.
A third project, also in Albania, would be built on the Zvërnec peninsula, a 1,000-acre coastal area in the south of Albania that is part of the resort community known as Vlorë, where several hotels and hundreds of villas would be built, according to the plan.
Mr. Kushner’s participation would be through his investment firm, Affinity Partners, which has $2 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, among other foreign investors. In a statement, an official with Affinity Partners said it had not been determined whether the Saudi funds might be a part of any project Mr. Kushner is considering in the Balkans.
How does Kushner get away with this? Why aren’t Congressional Democrats investigating him, even if the DOJ is too busy or corrupt? I don’t get it.
Commentary from Carl Gibson at Raw Story: ‘Corrupt’: Jared Kushner’s overseas business deals under fire as Trump runs for president.
Former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner (who was also a senior adviser in his White House) has been ramping up his overseas business dealings undeterred by the optics of doing so in the midst of his father-in-law’s presidential campaign.
A Friday report in the New York Times scrutinized Kushner’s real estate deals in Balkan countries of Albania and Serbia, in which he stands to reap significant financial benefits once they’re completed. The Times reported that Kushner has been working with Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence who also served as German ambassador and a special envoy to the Balkans.
An American shorthair squeezes into a glass in 1960.
Notably, two of the three projects Kushner is aiming to finalize this year involve the transfer of land currently owned by Albania and Serbia, meaning a member of the president’s immediate family (Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka) stands to receive money directly from foreign governments. According to the Times, the first project involves redeveloping an island off the Albanian coast into a high-end luxury resort, and the second would be a 1,500-unit apartment building, museum and luxury hotel in the Serbian capital city of Belgrade. The third — which doesn’t involve a direct land acquisition from a foreign government — is a planned resort development in coastal southern Albania.
Kushner has been capitalizing on his foreign connections since leaving the White House. After Kushner’s departure became official, he launched his investment firm, Affinity Partners, which received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as well as from other foreign business interests in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
The former president’s son-in-law worked closely with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman while he was in the White House, as Trump frequently put him in the driver’s seat in negotiations with Middle Eastern countries. In 2018, bin-Salman was accused of playing a direct role in the dismemberment and murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi (President Joe Biden made it clear in 2022 that the Saudi crown prince was immune from any legal action in relation to Khashoggi’s assassination)….
Meanwhile, Republicans continue to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter, for his own foreign business deals even as Kushner plows ahead in the Balkans. House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) and House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) both maintain that the president improperly influenced foreign governments in his son’s favor, though their respective investigations have yet to yield any smoking gun evidence.
In Israel-Hamas war news, Senator Chuck Schumer spoke out this week about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Jonathan Weisman at The New York Times: A Watershed Moment for the Politics of Israel, Courtesy of Chuck Schumer.
Over 44 painstakingly scripted minutes on the floor of the Senate on Thursday, the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, spoke of his Jewish identity, his love for the State of Israel, his horror at the wanton slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7 and his views on the apportionment of blame for the carnage in Gaza, saying that it first and foremost lay with the terrorists of Hamas.
Then Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat and the highest-ranking elected Jew in American history, said Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an impediment to peace, and called for new elections in the world’s only Jewish state.
The opposition was not nearly so painstaking.
Within minutes, the House Republican leadership demanded an apology. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, declared: “Make no mistake — the Democratic Party doesn’t have an anti-Bibi problem. It has an anti-Israel problem.” And the Republican Jewish Coalition proclaimed that “the most powerful Democrat in Congress knifed the Jewish state in the back.”
Walter Chandoha, 1962
The months that have followed the slaughter of Oct. 7 and the ensuing, calamitously deadly war in Gaza have been excruciating for American Jews, caught between a tradition of liberalism that has dominated much of Jewish politics and an anti-Israel response from the political left that has left many feeling isolated and, at times, persecuted.
But Mr. Schumer’s speech was potentially a watershed moment in a much longer political process, pursued initially by Republicans but joined recently by left-wing Democrats — to turn Israel into a partisan issue. Republicans, as they see it, would be the party of Israeli supporters. Democrats, as the rising left would have it, would be the party of Palestine
At the root of that divide is a fundamental question: Is support for the Jewish State separable from the support of Israel’s democratically elected government? For years, Republicans have said no. Increasingly, the Democratic left agrees but from a different perspective: Israel is bad, regardless of who governs it.
“The pressure — electoral, social, cultural — on American Jews right now to declare themselves” on the justice of the war in Gaza and on the legitimacy of the Israeli prime minister has been “unrelenting, unforgiving and sometimes downright vicious,” said David Wolpe, a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles and a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School.
Mr. Schumer’s speech and the ensuing partisan response have made that pressure even more intense.
“It’s impossible to understate the seismic event this was,” said Matthew Brooks, the longtime chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who made it clear that the group would use the speech to drive Jewish voters to the G.O.P.
Read more at the NYT.
A couple more stories of note:
This should be shocking news, but the NYT didn’t even run a story on it. CNN: Pence says he ‘cannot in good conscience’ endorse Trump.
Former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday said he “cannot in good conscience” endorse presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, a stunning repudiation of his former running mate and the president he served with.
“Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda that we governed on during our four years. That’s why I cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump in this campaign,” Pence said on Fox News.
A cat cozies up to a dog, 1968
The former vice president, after ending his own presidential bid in October, withheld an endorsement in the 2024 Republican primary, but he previously vowed to back the eventual GOP nominee. Trump had said after Pence dropped out that his former vice president should endorse him, saying, “I chose him, made him vice president. But … people in politics can be very disloyal.”
While he said he is “incredibly proud” of the record of the Trump-Pence administration, Pence argued that the former president has walked away from conservative issues, pointing to Trump’s stance on abortion and US national debt and his reversal on TikTok.
“During my presidential campaign, I made it clear there were profound differences between me and President Trump on a range of issues. And not just our difference on my constitutional duties that I exercised January 6th,” Pence said on “The Story with Martha MacCallum.”
“As I have watched his candidacy unfold, I’ve seen him walking away from our commitment to confronting the national debt. I’ve seen him starting to shy away from a commitment to the sanctity of human life. And this last week, his reversal on getting tough on China and supporting our administration’s efforts to force a sale of ByteDance’s TikTok,” he added.
Many other former members of Trump’s administration have also said they won’t vote for him. Yesterday Ron Filipkowski posted this list on Twitter:
The Republican 43rd President won’t endorse Trump.
His VP won’t endorse Trump.
The 2012 Republican nominee won’t endorse Trump.
His running mate won’t endorse Trump.
Trump’s own VP won’t endorse him.
His last AG won’t.
His last Sec Defense won’t.
Wake up, America!
One more from Brian Schott at The Salt Lake Tribune: ‘We are losing our kids to a satanic cult,’ Sen. Tommy Tuberville warns during Utah campaign stop.
Alabama Republican U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville had a stark warning for the approximately 100 Utah GOP delegates who crowded into a Bluffdale warehouse to hear him speak on Friday afternoon: Malevolent supernatural forces are working to undermine America.
“I’ve traveled all over the country — all 50 states — I’ve been in good places and bad places. The one thing I saw, we are losing our kids to a satanic cult,” Tuberville, who traveled to Utah to campaign for GOP U.S. Senate candidate Trent Staggs, warned.
The former college football coach and ardent Donald Trump supporter gave his full endorsement to Staggs, one of 11 Republicans vying for the GOP nomination to succeed Sen. Mitt Romney in Washington.
Brandishing an upside-down pocket Constitution, Tuberville said the 2024 election wasn’t Republican vs. Democrat but “anti-American vs. American.”
“We’ve lost our moral values across the country. We’ve got to get back to the Constitution, and we have got to get back to the Bible. We’ve got to get God back in our country,” Tuberville said. “There’s not one Democrat that can tell you they stand up for God.”
What exactly is he talking about? Is he saying the Democratic Party is a satanic cult or is he referring to the Mormon Church? Probably the former, I know.
Republican delegates ate it up as he careened from anti-transgender statements to discussion of immigration and chaos at the border to a prediction left-wing mobs are set to wreak chaos across the country this summer to help Joe Biden win reelection.
Tuberville even went so far as to claim the federal government has been corrupted to go after conservatives instead of criminals, which was seemingly an indirect reference to the hundreds of Trump supporters who were charged after attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We’ve lost our Department of Justice. In most of the country, we don’t have a criminal justice system anymore. Nobody goes to jail, unless you’re an innocent person that really loves this country, then they’ll put you in jail,” Tuberville said. “We have never overcome a cult like we’re dealing with right now.”
The loudest boos from the GOP delegates on hand came when Tuberville and Staggs took swipes at Sen. Mitt Romney, who was the party’s presidential nominee just a dozen years ago.
What a wacko.
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you all are having a nice weekend!
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Posted: March 13, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, just because | Tags: Adam Schiff, Bill Barr, classified documents, cognitive decline, Eric Swalwell, House Judiciary Committee, James Comey, memory issues, President Joe Biden, Special Counsel Robert Hur |
Good Day!!
The self-satisfied Mr. Robert Hur
Yesterday Robert Hur testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Before his appearance, Hur resigned from the Department of Justice and reportedly worked with Republicans in preparing his testimony. Hur and his Republican pals made every effort to make Biden look bad, but Democrats were well prepared to counter those efforts. And, unfortunately for Hur, the transcript of his interviews with Biden was also released yesterday.
You probably recall that Hur’s final report included gratuitous claims about President Biden’s age and cognitive abilities. Some observers have compared Hur’s behavior with that of James Comey’s attack on Hillary Clinton just before the 2016 election. Fortunately, we are months away from the 2024 vote.
Molly Jong-Fast at MSNBC: Robert Hur took a page from the James Comey playbook — and made it worse.
I remember where I was on Oct. 28, 2016, the day James Comey released his letter. I was at a health food restaurant with a Republican friend of mine. “This is going to lose her the election,” I told my friend. I felt like I was going to throw up. I knew what a Donald Trump presidency would mean for women, for all of us.
“Don’t be silly,” said my friend, who I suspect later voted for Trump. The New York Times had the story on the front page: “Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign.” On Nov. 8, 2016, Clinton lost the election to Trump 304 to 227. The Comey letter had created just enough muddiness to make it seem like both candidates were ethically challenged. It was the false equivalence that Trump was able to ride to the White House. Data guru Nate Silver wrote that the Comey letter “was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.” Not only did Comey make Trump president but then he wrote numerous very tedious books. He became a resistance hero, riding his regret all the way to the bank.
Fast-forward to Feb. 8, 2024, when Republican special counsel Robert Hur released his 345-page report. The report is being seen by some as an exoneration, saying that no criminal charges are warranted in the classified documents case against President Joe Biden. But Hur, who used to work for the Trump administration, couldn’t let Biden off the hook entirely, especially 269 days before an election. Hur, a member of a Republican Party that now largely works as a campaign arm for the former president, delivered the goods for his party. Sure, he found no legal basis to charge Biden, but but but… Hur proceeded to editorialize ad nauseam about Biden’s mental acuity, delivering right-wing talking points up on a platter. He wrote, “[At] trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Saying you don’t remember stuff in a deposition is pretty much standard. For example, Dr. Anthony Fauci said “I don’t recall” 174 times during a deposition about alleged collusion between the Biden administration and social media platforms — but because there isn’t a narrative about Fauci’s age crafted by Trump World, no one thought this had anything to do with his mental acuity….
Lies, by Edel Rodriguez
Hur’s report was a partisan hit job, but it didn’t matter, as former Obama chief of staff Jim Messina tweeted: “Let’s be clear — the special counsel isn’t a dummy and we should be very careful not to take the bait after Comey pulled this in 2016. Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn’t have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically.”
Joe Scarborough put it even more succinctly: “He couldn’t indict Biden legally, so he tried to indict Biden politically.” Yet again, a Republican special counsel had put his finger on the scale, just like Comey did in 2016. Hur isn’t a neurologist; he has no idea what Biden’s mental acuity is. Former attorney general Eric Holder condemned the report: “Special Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions,” he posted on X, adding: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.” Shame on Attorney General Merrick Garland for letting this partisan hit job be released.
Some background information on Hur from AP (written before yesterday’s testimony): Who is Robert Hur? A look at the special counsel due to testify on Biden classified documents case.
The special counsel who impugned the president’s age and competence in his report on how Joe Biden handled classified documents will himself be up for questioning this week.
Robert Hur is scheduled to testify before a congressional committee on Tuesday as House Republicans try to keep the spotlight on unflattering assessments of Biden.
Some Biden aides and allies have suggested that Hur, a Republican appointed to his role as U.S. attorney by Donald Trump, is a political partisan. Hur’s defenders say he has shown throughout his career that his work is guided by only facts and the law — not politics.
A review of Hur’s professional life shows he’s no stranger to politically charged investigations. He prosecuted former elected officials as Maryland’s chief federal law enforcement officer. And as a Justice Department official, he helped monitor special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election….
The Naked Truth and the Masked Lies, by Rosita Allinckx
Hur held one of the most powerful jobs in the Justice Department during a tumultuous time in the Trump administration, serving as the top aide to [Rod] Rosenstein, the department’s second-in-command.
As the principal associate deputy attorney general, Hur helped run day-to-day operations of the department in 2017 and early 2018. He also helped Rosenstein stay on top of Mueller’s progress in the Russia investigation. Hur held bi-weekly meetings with the special counsel’s team and reported back to Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general said in an interview.
Rosenstein said he hired Hur because he knew he would maintain a calm and steady demeanor and “approach cases in a nonpartisan way.”
Um . . . Sure, Jan. Read more background at the link.
Why did Hur resign from the DOJ before testifying? Doesn’t that seem suspicious?
Igor Deyrsh at Yahoo News: Biden special counsel Robert Hur’s resignation from DOJ makes his testimony “even more problematic.”
Hur, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who was tapped to lead the Biden probe by Attorney General Merrick Garland, formally stepped down one day before his Tuesday appearance at the request of Republicans led by Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. He drew criticism from Biden and the Democrats for criticizing the president’s memory in the report even as he declined to charge him.
Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann explained that the Justice Department “cannot give instructions” to a former employee about what he “can and cannot testify to.”
“That makes it even more problematic from our perspective … if he was still a federal employee, DOJ would have to approve his testimony and they’d be involved in his appearance tomorrow,” a Democratic Judiciary Committee source told The Independent.
“It’s hard not to anticipate some real ugliness with Robert Hur’s testimony,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. “He already showed his partisan colors in the inappropriate parts of his report. And he and the [Republicans] obviously contemplate he can vilify Biden now that he’s testifying as a ‘private citizen.’”
So it appears Hur’s motivation was to have the freedom to attack Biden without any DOJ influence on what he would say. Before I get to the testimony, here are some stories about Hur’s final report:
Adam Serwer at The Atlantic: How Hur Misled the Country on Biden’s Memory.
“First impressions stick,” writes Serwer. No matter that clarifications follow–it’s what people hear first that stays with them.
Five years ago, a partisan political operative with the credibility of a long career in government service misled the public about official documents in order to get Donald Trump the positive spin he wanted in the press. The play worked so well that a special counsel appointed to examine President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, ran it again.
In 2019, then–Attorney General Bill Barr—who would later resign amid Trump’s attempts to suborn the Justice Department into backing his effort to seize power after losing reelection—announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to indict Trump on allegations that he had assisted in a Russian effort to sway the 2016 election and had obstructed an investigation into that effort. Mueller’s investigation led to indictments of several Trump associates, but he later testified that Justice Department policy barred prosecuting a sitting president, and so indicting Trump was not an option. Barr’s summary—which suggested that Trump had been absolved of any crimes—was so misleading that it drew a rebuke not only from Mueller himself but from a federal judge in a public-records lawsuit over material related to the investigation. That judge, Reggie Walton, wrote in 2020 that the discrepancies “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary.”
Truth and Lies, by Louise Fletcher
As my colleague David Graham wrote at the time, the ploy worked. Trump claimed “total exoneration,” and mainstream outlets blared his innocence in towering headlines. Only later did the public learn that Mueller’s report had found “no criminal conspiracy but considerable links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, and strongly suggested that Trump had obstructed justice.”
Now this same pattern has emerged once again, only instead of working in the president’s favor, it has undermined him. Hur, a former U.S. attorney in the Trump administration, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden for potential criminal wrongdoing after classified documents were found at his home. (Trump has been indicted on charges that he deliberately mishandled classified documents after storing such documents at his home in Florida and deliberately showing them off to visitors as “highly confidential” and “secret information.”)
In Hur’s own summary of his investigation, he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” even absent DOJ policy barring prosecution of a sitting president. But that part was not what caught the media’s attention. Rather it was Hur’s characterization of Biden as having memory problems, validating conservative attacks on the president as too old to do the job. The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, released yesterday by House Democrats, suggest that characterization—politically convenient for Republicans and the Trump campaign—was misleading.
Read the rest at the Atlantic.
And how did Hur mislead?
Andrew Prokop at Vox: Robert Hur’s report exaggerated Biden’s memory issues.
When special counsel Robert Hur released his report last month explaining why he wouldn’t charge President Joe Biden with mishandling classified documents, his claim that Biden displayed a “poor memory” and “diminished faculties” in their interview received enormous attention.
But now, the full transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden have been released — and they make Hur’s claims about Biden’s memory appear cherry-picked and exaggerated.
Biden sat for more than five hours with Hur’s team over two days. In that time, he said he did not recall specifics about how particular boxes ended up in his residences or offices after his vice presidency. But he engaged at length about his process for handling classified information and many other topics.
Hur’s claim that Biden had demonstrated some sort of general “poor memory” hangs almost entirely on mix-ups by Biden about in what specific year several years-old events occurred. The transcript makes clear Biden remembers all those events. But it seems Biden just doesn’t pay a lot of attention to which specific year stuff happened in.
So why did Hur hype this up so much?
His report and his House testimony Tuesday suggest one reason. Hur proposed a theory, outlined in the report, about Biden’s deliberate wrongdoing — that Biden kept classified documents about Afghanistan policy deliberations to help burnish his reputation and legacy.
However, Hur couldn’t prove this theory, in part because Biden said he couldn’t recall why these documents were in his garage. Hence, the special counsel bashed Biden for his “poor memory” — knowing full well how that would play when the report became public.
Truth Hidden Between the Lies, by Jeff Klena
This is a good article, and it also deals with Hur’s testimony and how Democrats’ countered his claims. After breaking down problems with Hur’s report, Prokop quotes Adam Schiff:
Hur’s report looks less like a smoking gun proving Biden’s supposed age-related decline, and more like dirty pool, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) argued.
“You know this, I know this, there is nothing more common with a witness of any age, when asked about events that are years old, than to say ‘I do not recall.’ Indeed, they’re instructed by their attorney to do that, if they have any question about it,” Schiff said.
Hur argued back that his consideration of Biden’s memory was relevant to his charging decisions, and that he was perfectly willing, indeed required, to explain his thinking on that topic in his report to the attorney general.
Schiff disputed this. “What is in the rules is, you don’t gratuitously do things to prejudice the subject of an investigation when you’re declining to prosecute. You don’t gratuitously add language that you know will be useful in a political campaign.”
“You were not born yesterday,” Schiff added. “You understood exactly what you were doing. It was a choice.”
Why on earth did Merrick Garland appoint this guy?
Chris Megerian at AP: Hur said Biden couldn’t recall when his son died. The interview transcript is more complicated.
The White House knew it had a political problem on its hands when a special counsel report questioned President Joe Biden’s memory last month, but Biden saw a much more personal affront as well.
Robert Hur, who had been appointed to investigate whether Biden mishandled classified documents, wrote that the president couldn’t recall in an interview with prosecutors the date when his adult son, Beau, died of cancer. It was a shocking contention about a keystone event in Biden’s life, and it fed into questions about whether the 81-year-old president is fit to serve another term….
Hur didn’t ask the president about his son’s death; Biden brought it up himself during a discussion about how he stored documents at a rental home in Virginia after leaving the vice president’s office in 2017.
And Biden recalled the specific date that Beau died, although he briefly wondered aloud about the year as the conversation toggled between various events.
“What month did Beau die?” Biden mused. “Oh, God, May 30th.”
A White House lawyer interjected by saying, “2015.”
“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden asked. When someone responded affirmatively, the president added, “It was 2015.” [….]
Hur, in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, said his report’s discussion of Biden’s memory was “necessary and accurate and fair” because his state of mind was an important part of evaluating whether he committed a crime.
“I did not sanitize my explanation nor did I disparage the president unfairly,” he said.
What an asshole! As Adam Serwer wrote, Hur made sure that the first impression he gave of Biden’s interviews was on of a doddering old man with cognitive issues.
Fraud, by Carl Bowlby
Yesterday, Eric Swalwell got Hur to admit that during one of the interviews he characterized Biden as having a “photographic memory!” From HuffPost, via Yahoo News: Robert Hur Admits Telling Biden He Seemed To Have ‘Photographic Recall.’
Although special counsel Robert Hur impugned Joe Biden’s memory in his investigation over whether the president mishandled classified documents, he actually told Biden that he appeared “to have a photographic understanding and recall.”
The comment, which appears in transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, did not make it into Hur’s final report. Hur concluded in the report that Biden should not be charged over the documents, but made sure to mention his doubts about the president’s memory.
But Hur admitted he made those comments during an exchange with Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) during his Tuesday meeting with the House Judiciary Committee.
The California Democrat asked Hur about a comment that appears on “Day 1, Page 47” of the transcript.
“You said to President Biden, ‘You appear to have a photographic understanding and recall of the House,’” Swalwell said. “Did you say that to President Biden?”
Hur conceded that “those words do appear on Page 47 of the transcript.”
Swalwell pressed further.
“‘Photographic’ is what you said, is that right?” he asked.
“That word does appear on Page 47 of the transcript,” Hur responded.
“Never appeared in your report, though. Is that correct? The word ‘photographic’?” Swalwell asked.
“It does not appear in my report,” Hur said.
Interesting that he chose to leave that out.
Andrew Weissman and Ryan Goodman at Just Security: The Real “Robert Hur Report” (Versus What You Read in the News).
The Special Counsel Robert Hur report has been grossly mischaracterized by the press. The report finds that the evidence of a knowing, willful violation of the criminal laws is wanting. Indeed, the report, on page 6, notes that there are “innocent explanations” that Hur “cannot refute.” That is but one of myriad examples we outline in great detail below of the report repeatedly finding a lack of proof. And those findings mean, in DOJ-speak, there is simply no case. Unrefuted innocent explanations is the sine qua non of not just a case that does not meet the standard for criminal prosecution – it means innocence. Or as former Attorney General Bill Barr and his former boss would have put it, a total vindication (but here, for real).
But even without the prompting of a misleading “summary” by Barr, the press has gotten the lede wrong. This may be because of a poorly worded (we’re being charitable) thesis sentence on page 1 of Hur’s executive summary. Hur writes at the outset: “Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” You have to wait for the later statements that what the report actually says is there is insufficient evidence of criminality, innocent explanations for the conduct, and affirmative evidence that Biden did not willfully withhold classified documents. Put another way, that same sentence about “our investigation uncovered evidence” could equally apply to Mike Pence, who had classified documents at his home, which is similarly some “evidence” of a crime, but also plainly insufficient to remotely establish criminality.
The press incorrectly and repeatedly blast out that the Hur report found Biden willfully retained classified documents, in other words, that Biden committed a felony; with some in the news media further trumpeting that the Special Counsel decided only as a matter of discretion not to recommend charges.
Read a details analysis of the report at the link.
Charlie Savage has a very detailed comparison of Robert Hur’s claims about Biden’s memory and the transcript of the interviews: How the Special Counsel’s Portrayal of Biden’s Memory Compares With the Transcript. It’s too long and detailed to excerpt, but it’s worth a read if you’re interested.
One more article that addresses yesterday’s testimony:
Jeremy Herb and Marshall Cohen at CNN: Takeaways from Robert Hur’s testimony on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
Former special counsel Robert Hur appeared before Congress on Tuesday to explain his investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents – which led to no charges against the president but plenty of consternation among Democrats when Hur described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in his report.
While Hur came ready to defend his investigation, outlining a specific, legal case — or lack thereof – the members of the House Judiciary Committee were fighting a battle over the much more subjective political consequences to Hur’s report just months before the 2024 presidential election.
Truth Lies at the Bottom of the Well, by Frances MacDonald
Republicans attacked Biden as they pressed Hur on his decision not to prosecute the president, while Democrats criticized Hur for his comments about Biden’s memory – while also focusing much of their attention on former President Donald Trump and the differences in the former president’s classified documents case, which led to an indictment last year.
Hur tried his best to stick to what was in his report, even as he was pushed to go further either to criticize Biden – or to declare his innocence.
Hur was clear on Tuesday that he did not want to play ball with Republicans on whether Biden is “senile,” given the former special counsel’s decision to describe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” in his investigative report.
“Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘senile’ as exhibiting a decline of cognitive ability, such as memory, associated with old age,” Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin said. “Mr. Hur, based on your report, did you find that the president was senile?”
“I did not. That conclusion does not appear in my report,” Hur replied emphatically.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat, tussled with Hur over his conclusions, claiming Hur “exonerated” Biden. But Hur immediately took issue with the term during a tense exchange in which they both repeatedly cut each other off.
“This lengthy, expensive an independent investigation resulted in a complete exoneration of President Joe Biden for every document you discussed in your report, you found insufficient evidence that the president violated any laws about possession or retention of classified materials,” Jayapal said.
“I need to go back and make sure that I take note of a word that you used, ‘exoneration,’” Hur said. “That is not a word that is used in my report and that is not a part of my task as a prosecutor.”
“You exonerated him,” Jayapal retorted.
“I did not exonerate him,” Hur said. “That word does not appear in the report.”
Okay then. But he didn’t charge him either. What can I say. Hur is just an asshole. Also, please note that Hur was question about whether he would accept a role in a second Trump administration, and he refused to answer. We can only hope that this controversy will be forgotten by the time we get to November.
More stories to check out today:
Lisa Needham at Public Notice: “Trump Employee 5” details Trump’s mob-like management style.
AP: Judge dismisses some charges against Trump in the Georgia 2020 election interference case.
CNN: Georgia judge says he’s on track to rule this week on whether to remove DA Fani Willis from Trump election case.
Allison Quinn at The Daily Beast: Putin Recalls Trump Acting Like Jealous GF in Private.
HuffPost: Donald Trump Flips Out At Democrats’ Mocking Montages With Massive Self-Own.
David Graham at The Atlantic: Trump Repeats Obama’s Mistake. Political parties suffer when their focus narrows to the presidency.
Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: ‘Make the RNC White Again’: GOP Ends Minority Outreach. Program.
Martin Pengelly at The Guardian: Brett Kavanaugh knows truth of alleged sexual assault, Christine Blasey Ford says in book.
That’s it for me. What other stories have caught your interest today?
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