Posted: July 3, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: Heritage Foundation, John Harwood, John Roberts, Kevin Roberts, ProPublica interview with Biden, Seal Team 6 scenario, Supreme Court |
Laid down woman sleeping, by Felix Valloton
Good Morning!!
I don’t know how much I can post today. I’m exhausted and overwhelmed by the events of the past week or so. How much worse can things get in this country? As Democrats, we are dealing with assaults from the corrupt Supreme Court as well as MAGA Republicans, the media pundit class, and cowardly members of our own party. Biden had a bad debate, yes; but so did Trump. He did nothing but spew lies. He didn’t address one policy issue, because he is too stupid and lazy to even understand policy. But all we hear from the DC pundits is that Biden should step down.
Folks, the way we choose presidents since 1972 is through primaries, and Joe Biden won all the primaries. He holds most of the delegates. His campaign has collected millions in donations that can’t be transferred to another candidate. It’s possible the money could go to Kamala Harris, but the DC/NY pundits don’t want her.
Biden is on the ballot in many states; if another candidate runs in his place, voters would have to write in his/her name. With four months left before the election, there just isn’t time for a new candidate to raise money, hire staff, set up campaign offices around the country, and become known to low information voters. That candidate would also have to deal with the anger and resentment of people who voted for Biden/Harris–especially the African American and women voters who are essential to Democrats winning elections.
Finally, an open convention–which some pundits are calling for–would be an insane shit show that would tear the party apart. Push for this if you really want King Trump in the White House–this time with no guardrails from so-called adults in the room.
If you want more details on why replacing our nominee would be a horrible idea, here is a long Twitter thread by Dana Houle that spells out the challenges that would be faced by a candidate who replaced Biden. WordPress won’t let me post the tweets, but I’ll copy some of them here.
1/ Democrats cannot nominate anyone except Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. It’s impossible. If the Biden candidacy ends, so does the Biden campaign. It’s not transferable. Anyone else other than possibly Kamala Harris would have to start from nothing. That’s can’t be done.
2/It’s possible I’m missing something, but I don’t think so. Here’s why the Democrats can nominate Joe Biden, or possibly Kamala Harris, but nobody else. There’s only one candidate with a 2024 presidential campaign committee registered with the Federal Election Commission.
3/Some of the “stuff” of the Biden campaign can probably be transferred to the DNC (and maybe state parties), but most of it can’t. Another candidate can’t just take over Biden’s campaign. So, think about it. A new nominee would not have a campaign. Like, not a tax ID…
4/Not a bank account, not a website or address. There would be nothing. They would start out largely paralyzed for weeks. First and most obviously, there would be no staff. And there would be no HR process for hiring staff, no payroll process. So a new campaign trying to…
5/…rapidly expand would have to focus on staffing. They could probably hire people from the Biden campaign, but not all would want to work for the new candidate. Among the first people needed would be compliance and legal staff, because a new campaign would be immediately…
6/…challenged on ballot access and all kinds of other stuff. Compliance would be needed to deal with the massive influx of immediate cash and to be sure everything meets FEC rules. But to get cash they’d need banking/accounting as well. So that needs to be set up…
7/And since most of the money would come in online, they’d need to immediately set up a web operation robust enough to handle to load, and secure enough to handle the obvious cyberattacks that would happen. So they’d need contracts for servers, support staff, etc…
8/This new campaign would also be immediately inundated with calls and emails from press, potential volunteers and donors, other campaigns/party orgs, orgs inviting the candidate to events, etc.. So they would immediately need staff for press, scheduling, political, etc
9/Some of these people could probably slide over from the DNC or state parties. But that leaves holes at the DNC and state parties. But let’s say they could immediately staff up. Where does everyone work? Office leases prob can’t be automatically transferred to the…
10/…new campaign, so all of those would need to be renegotiated, and some may not be available to the new campaign. They’d also have to deal with utilities. Then, how does everyone communicate? As we know from 2016, security breeches can be fatal. So it’s not something…
11/…that can be tossed together in a day or so. But let’s say all the staff and infrastructure can be conjured from the ether. What about the data? Some could probably be transferred, but some of the lists would probably need to be purchased at fair market value from…
12/…Biden/Harris 2024. The new campaign would be starting out with no email lists, no volunteer lists, no fundraising lists, etc. They’d also be starting with no contracts with vendors. All those contracts would have to be negotiated
There is much more to this thread. I recommend reading it if you’re thinking Biden should step down or you want to inform other people who think that.
From Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The pundit class needs to get a grip.
After President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week, the punditocracy has gone both apeshit and feral.
The New York Times editorial board and seemingly every columnist at the paper called on Biden to withdraw from the race in pieces with headlines like, “President Biden, I’ve seen enough.” So did the Chicago Tribune editorial board and New Yorker editor David Remnick. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, co-host of Biden’s favorite morning show, urged the president to at last consider stepping aside. And Pod Save America’s response to the debate was so apoplectic that it prompted the Biden campaign to take a shot at “self-important Podcasters.”
The Sea, by Frederick Childe Hassam
The feeding frenzy/panic is to some extent understandable and inevitable. Biden wanted the debate early in order to put to rest fears about his age and to end the conversation about whether he would drop off the ticket. Instead, he sounded confused, and his lifelong stutter was more prominent than it ever has been in his decades-long career. Media figures licking their chops about the incendiary conflicts and clicks of a contested convention started to salivate a river. Democrats nervous about Biden’s ability to wage a forceful campaign became outright fearful.
But amidst all the tearing of garments and vultures circling, the fact is that we’re still pretty much where we were pre-debate. There are two questions: Is Biden fit to serve? And, would Democrats benefit by forcing him off the ticket? The answers remain “he is” and “probably not.”
The Chicago Tribune, for example, argued Biden “should announce that he will be a single-term president who now has seen the light when it comes to his own capabilities in the face of the singular demands of being the president of the United States.” They added, “Everyone sees that now.”
But you can’t actually just “see” whether someone is in cognitive decline. Yes, people are often convinced that signs of physical illness or hesitation reflect mental hesitation; that’s why there’s so much prejudice against stutterers. But editorial boards and people with a public platform have a responsibility to inform readers, not just mirror popular prejudices.
What we know about aging, and about Biden, has not changed since the debate. In May, the Washington Post consulted with experts about the aging process and how likely aging is to affect the decision-making abilities of Biden and Republican challenger Donald Trump, who’s no spring chicken himself.
Those experts uniformly “rejected any suggestion that there should be an upper age limit for the presidency.” They also argued that there were many advantages to older candidates, who were likely to have better judgement and more emotional stability. According to Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, “Knowledge and experience count for a lot, and that can more than make up for slight losses of memory as a result of aging.”
Experts also pointed out that articulation problems, mixing up words, or using the wrong word were common problems as people aged, but none of them indicate cognitive decline overall. Stutters can also worsen and improve sporadically over a lifetime, but that doesn’t mean someone is impaired.
Also, again, experts insist that you can’t diagnose cognitive decline by watching TV clips, or even by watching a debate.
Read the rest at Public Notice.
Yesterday, ProPublica released a transcript and video of their unscripted interview with Biden from less than a year ago. The interviewer was John Harwood: We’re Releasing Our Full, Unedited Interview With Joe Biden From September.
Following Biden’s poor debate performance against Donald Trump, we’re releasing the full and unedited 21-minute interview we conducted with President Joe Biden nine days before his interview with Special Counsel Robert K. Hur.
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters.
Woman in red relaxing on sofa, Goutami Mishra
Impressions from Special Counsel Robert K. Hur about his five hours of interviews with the president on Oct. 8 and 9 drove months of coverage. The prosecutor said Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age” and called him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden angrily dismissed these assertions, which Vice President Kamala Harris called “politically motivated.”
House Republicans on Monday sued Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for audio recordings of the interview as the White House asserts executive privilege to deny their release.
ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on Sept. 29, nine days before the Hur interviews began. We released the video, which was assembled from footage shot by five cameras, on Oct. 1. We edited out less than a minute of crosstalk and exchanges with the camera people, as is customary in such interviews.
Today, we are releasing the full, 21-minute interview, unedited as seen from the view of the single camera focused on Biden. We understand that this video captures a moment in time nine months ago and that it will not settle the ongoing arguments about the president’s acuity today. Still, we believe it is worth giving the public another chance to see one of Biden’s infrequent conversations with a reporter.
Conducting the interview was veteran journalist and former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood, who requested it and then worked with ProPublica to film and produce it.
He did not send questions to the White House ahead of time, nor did he get approval for the topics to be discussed during the interview.
Recording began as soon as Biden was miked and sitting in the chair that Friday at 2:50 p.m. Earlier that day, Biden’s press staff had said the president would have only 10 minutes for the interview, instead of the previously agreed upon 20 minutes. We requested that the interview go the full 20 minutes. You can hear during the unedited interview a couple of moments when White House staff interrupted to signal that the interview should come to a close. Biden seemed eager to continue talking.
Read and watch the interview at ProPublica.
What’s truly amazing to me is that the media is focused on getting rid of Biden instead of the recent decision by the corrupt Supreme Court that granted king-like powers to Trump if he is elected. The media is doing to Biden what they did to Hillary Clinton and Al Gore–focusing on minutia and in doing so, supporting a dangerous candidate who will do untold damage to the country. George W. Bush was bad enough; a Trump presidency would mean the end of our democracy. He would pull us out of NATO and ally the U.S. with Russia, China, Hungary, Turkey, and North Korea. He has announced his plan to deport millions of immigrants, who will be put in camps until he can figure out how to get rid of them. Is that what we want? I know I don’t.
Here are a few articles to check out today.
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate: Don’t Be Hysterical, Ladies. Daddy Chief Justice Knows Best.
Last week, finding himself furious at the court’s per curiamdecision to hold off on deciding a big abortion case about the kinds of miscarriage care states may withhold from pregnant women in emergency rooms, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated his colleagues for punting. In his view, as he put it—in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—the court’s “about-face” on taking, then running away from, the EMTALA abortion case was “baffling” because “nothing legally relevant has occurred” since the court granted an emergency stay in January and plonked itself into a dispute before it went through the appeals process. It was an easy case, he sniffed. Many amicus briefs had been filed, he huffed. Why had the court balked at the last minute? Thinking. Thinking. Then: “Apparently,” he hypothesized, “the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”
That’s right. The majority of the court (and all of its females) found the issue too “emotional” to do the hard work of denying women in acute medical emergencies abortion care.
Fairfield Porter, On the Porch, 1961
Had he given his word choice 10 seconds’ further thought (or even conferred with his wife, who is by all accounts “fond of flags”), Alito might have taken out that “emotional” crack before attacking Amy Coney Barrett’s defection in this matter, in the time between the accidental release of the draft decision and its final publication the next day. He did not.
It’s gross, but not unexpected, that often when the court fractures along gender lines, as it has frequently this term, you will hear a whole lot of the jovial “Calm down, little missy” talk that you might recall from 1950s sitcoms.
Last week, finding himself furious at the court’s per curiamdecision to hold off on deciding a big abortion case about the kinds of miscarriage care states may withhold from pregnant women in emergency rooms, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated his colleagues for punting. In his view, as he put it—in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—the court’s “about-face” on taking, then running away from, the EMTALA abortion case was “baffling” because “nothing legally relevant has occurred” since the court granted an emergency stay in January and plonked itself into a dispute before it went through the appeals process. It was an easy case, he sniffed. Many amicus briefs had been filed, he huffed. Why had the court balked at the last minute? Thinking. Thinking. Then: “Apparently,” he hypothesized, “the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”minal law.’ ”
“Our dissenting colleagues exude an impressive infallibility,” writes Roberts, like a girls soccer coach. “While their confidence may be inspiring, the Court adheres to time-tested practices instead—deciding what is required to dispose of this case.” Hate the player, change the game.
In brushing past the district court opinion written by Judge Tanya Chutkan and the thorough, 57-page appellate opinion joined by Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson, Florence Pan, and J. Michelle Childs, the chief justice manages to malign their work product too: “Despite the unprecedented nature of this case, and the very significant constitutional questions that it raises, the lower courts rendered their decisions on a highly expedited basis.” Shorter Roberts? Really hard to find good help these days.
On CNN, Donald Trump’s former White House counsel Ty Cobb coughed up the same critique of Sotomayor. “Her dissent was a little hysterical, and it really offered no analysis,” he said. “A lot of screaming, no analysis. And I think that was unfortunate.”
Screaming. Insubstantial. Hysterical. What men call banshees, women call prophecy. And of course if there are any sitting justices on the Roberts court whose entire jurisprudence can be reduced to a soggy skein of hurt feelings and self-pity, they are not females.
We women thought we had made progress, but it’s not looking that way these days. There’s quite a bit more to read at Slate. Lithwick has reached the end of her patience. Here’s what she wrote on Twitter on Monday evening:
As an official representative of the legal commentariat I want to suggest that tonight’s a good news cycle to talk to the fascism and authoritarianism experts. This is their inning now…
Akhil Reed Amar at The Atlantic: Something Has Gone Deeply Wrong at the Supreme Court.
Forget Donald Trump. Forget Joe Biden. Think instead about the Constitution. What does this document, the supreme law of our land, actually say about lawsuits against ex-presidents?
Nothing remotely resembling what Chief Justice John Roberts and five associate justices declared in yesterday’s disappointing Trump v. United States decision. The Court’s curious and convoluted majority opinion turns the Constitution’s text and structure inside out and upside down, saying things that are flatly contradicted by the document’s unambiguous letter and obvious spirit.
Imagine a simple hypothetical designed to highlight the key constitutional clauses that should have been the Court’s starting point: In the year 2050, when Trump and Biden are presumably long gone, David Dealer commits serious drug crimes and then bribes President Jane Jones to pardon him.
Is Jones acting as president, in her official capacity, when she pardons Dealer? Of course. She is pardoning qua president. No one else can issue such a pardon. The Constitution expressly vests this power in the president: “The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.”
Wind from the Sea, by Andrew Wyeth
But the Constitution also contains express language that a president who takes a bribe can be impeached for bribery and then booted from office: “The President … shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” And once our hypothetical President Jones has been thus removed and is now ex-President Jones, the Constitution’s plain text says that she is subject to ordinary criminal prosecution, just like anyone else: “In cases of Impeachment … the Party convicted shall … be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”
Obviously, in Jones’s impeachment trial in the Senate, all sorts of evidence is admissible to prove not just that she issued the pardon but also why she did this—to prove that she had an unconstitutional motive, to prove that she pardoned Dealer because she was bribed to do so. Just as obviously, in the ensuing criminal case, all of this evidence surely must be allowed to come in.
But the Trump majority opinion, written by Roberts, says otherwise, proclaiming that “courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” In a later footnote all about bribery, the Roberts opinion says that criminal-trial courts are not allowed to “admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety.”
But such an inspection is exactly what the Constitution itself plainly calls for. An impeachment court and, later, a criminal court would have to determine whether Jones pardoned Dealer because she thought he was innocent, or because she thought he had already suffered enough, or because he put money in her pocket for the very purpose of procuring the pardon. The smoking gun may well be in Jones’s diary—her “private records”—or in a recorded Oval Office conversation with Jones’s “advisers,” as was the case in the Watergate scandal. Essentially, the Court in Trump v. United States is declaring the Constitution itself unconstitutional. Instead of properly starting with the Constitution’s text and structure, the Court has ended up repealing them.
There’s more at the link, but I’ve given you the gist.
Kelsey Griffin, Erica Orden, and Lara Seligman at Politico: The terrifying SEAL Team 6 scenario lurking in the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
In her dissent to Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor painted a grim portrait of a commander-in-chief now “immune, immune, immune” from criminal liability and free to exploit official presidential power against political opponents.
“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?” she wrote. “Immune.”
As extraordinary as that prospect might sound, constitutional law experts say she’s right: The court’s decision in Trump v. United States really does appear to immunize a hypothetical president who directed the military to commit murder, though a president might be hard-pressed to find someone to carry out such an order
Young woman relaxing, by Francesco Masriera
The crux of the issue, legal scholars said, is that the decision granted total immunity for any actions a president takes using the “core powers” that the Constitution bestows on the office. One such power is the authority to command the military.
“The language of the Supreme Court’s decision seems to suggest that because this is a core function of the president, that there is absolute immunity from criminal prosecution,” said Cheryl Bader, a criminal law professor at Fordham Law School and a former federal prosecutor. “If Trump, as commander in chief, ordered his troops to assassinate somebody or stage a coup, that would seem to fall within the absolute immunity provision of the court’s decision.”
The hypothetical about a president deploying the Navy SEALs to assassinate a political opponent has come up before — including during a lower-court hearing on Trump’s immunity litigation and during the Supreme Court’s own oral arguments in the case. It was raised as an absurdity to illustrate that the most sweeping version of Trump’s immunity theory could not possibly be right. In fact, when Justice Samuel Alito broached the scenario during oral arguments, he drew laughter in the courtroom.
So the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion on Monday did not attempt to directly carve out such extreme examples immediately raised alarm among some experts. Roberts’ opinion appeared to address the matter only obliquely.
Is it possible that Roberts doesn’t understand that Trump wants to use violence? I have no doubt that is if he is elected, he will order the military to fire live rounds at protesters.
Media Matters: Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court immunity decision: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution”
KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION PRESIDENT): In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience should be despairing.
No one should be discouraged. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.
Number two, to the point of the clips and, of course, your preview of the fact that I am an early American historian and love the Constitution. That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons. But I would go to Federalist No. 70.
If people in the audience are looking for something to read over Independence Day weekend, in addition to rereading the Declaration of Independence, read Hamilton’s No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, in some other essays, he talks about the importance of a vigorous executive.
You know, former congressman, the importance of Congress doing its job, but we also know the importance of the executive being able to do his job. And can you imagine, Dave Brat, any president, put politics off to the side, any president having to second guess, triple guess every decision they’re making in their official capacity, you couldn’t have the republic that you just described.
But number three, let me speak about the radical left. You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.
And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
That’s all I have for you today. I’ve included some relaxing paintings to counteract the horror.
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Posted: June 26, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, just because | Tags: Biden-Trump debate 2024, Biden-Trump debates 2020, FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Judge Aileen Cannon, Murthy v Missouri, No Biden won't be on drugs, Snyder v United States, stolen documents case, Supreme Court, Trump attacks on FBI agents, Trump storage methods |
Good Day!!
Studio Scene, by Kayoon Anderson
Today, the press and cable TV are mostly focused on tomorrow’s debate and how Biden can deal with Trump’s insanity and incoherence. I don’t find the discussions about this very interesting. I think Biden knows how to bait Trump, and no one really knows what crazy nonsense Trump will unleash. I hope Biden will mock Trump’s fear of sharks and electric boats; his claims that there’s not enough water in shower heads and dishwashers; and his claim that he got his vast knowledge about “nuclear” by osmosis from his uncle the MIT professor. Trump has absolutely no interest or knowledge about policy and Biden can demonstrate that too.
It is concerning that Trump is claiming Biden will be “jacked up” on drugs, because low information voters appear to be incredibly stupid and will likely believe it. Of course, Trump is the one who could be using drugs as a crutch.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post: No, Biden won’t be on performance-enhancing drugs for the debate.
Allies of Donald Trump have painted themselves into a cognitive corner. President Biden is unfit for office, they argue, because he is so old, and his mental abilities have deteriorated markedly. But then Biden will, say, deliver a State of the Union address in which he is energetic and pointed for more than an hour.
So they modify their claim: Biden is addled and wandering, except when he is given some sort of medication, perhaps a stimulant, that reverses that effect. And here we are, with Trump and those seeking his reelection to the White House demanding that Biden submit to some sort of drug test before this week’s first presidential debate, purportedly in effort to sniff out this theoretical drug.
Experts who spoke with The Washington Post, though, confirm that no such medicine exists.
At the outset, we should recognize that this claim is generally not offered seriously. It is, instead, an effort to escape the aforementioned contradiction, a way to hold both that Biden is incapable of serving as president and yet, unquestionably at times, not demonstrating any such impairment. What’s more, the demand that Biden undergo a drug test is itself not serious. It is, instead, meant to create a condition that allows Trump and his allies to continue to claim that any strong performance from Biden is a function of medication. The result is win-win for Trump, who can blame any loss on this wonder drug.
The wackos at Fox “News” are busy speculating about what drugs Biden could be using.
Host Maria Bartiromo — no stranger to conspiratorial argumentation — hosted Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) where she offered an observation made by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.).
“Jackson says Biden will have been at Camp David for a full week before the debate,” Bartiromo said, “and that they’re probably experimenting with getting doses right. Giving him medicine ahead of the debate.”
Burlison agreed that this was possible, though he offered that it might be more innocuous than medication. Perhaps, he said, Biden’s team is “jack[ing] him up on Mountain Dew.”
“Nothing like that exists,” Thomas Wisniewski, director of the NYU Langone Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, told The Washington Post by phone. “There are no medications or stimulants that can reverse a dementing process transiently.”
but quite often that can just exacerbate their confusion, as well,” he added. “They can be more stimulated, but they are not going to be behaving in a more cogent or normal fashion as a result of being stimulated by anything. Very often it’s the reverse.”
Adam Brickman, associate professor of neuropsychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, concurred with that assessment.
“I’m not aware of any medications that would reverse or mask cognitive decline,” Brickman said. What’s more, he noted that “the association between energy and cognition is a very weak one. In other words, someone could have low energy but totally intact cognition and vice versa.”
Of course the goal of these drug claims is to prepare the idiots who support Trump for the likelihood that Biden will wipe the floor with Trump during tomorrow’s debate.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Trump’s claim that Biden is “jacked up” on drugs is more than projection — it’s cult conditioning.
Donald Trump has been thinking a lot about cocaine lately, even though drug-running is one of the few felony charges he’s not been indicted or convicted for. He has been routinely accusing President Joe Biden of using drugs, with the usual vivid details Trump injects into all his weird fantasies. “So a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the a—,” Trump told rallygoers in Philadelphia Saturday. “I say he’ll come out all jacked up,” he added, before going off on a diatribe accusing Biden of being the owner of a bag of cocaine found in a White House visitors’ closet last year.
La Lecture, 1877, by Henri Fanton-Latour
Since there’s no flight of Trump’s fancy too bizarre for right-wing media, this obsession of Trump’s is getting echoed by Republican politicians and MAGA talking heads. Fox News hosts, Republican politicians, MAGA media influencers, and every right-wing troll on Twitter have been playing their part as well-trained parrots, repeating the lie. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is even putting the lie in paid advertising.
Everyone knows that Trump’s favorite rhetorical tactic is psychological projection. You’d think Republicans would be a little more worried this would raise questions about what Trump has been ingesting. But no: The campaign tapped disgraced former White House doctor Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Tex. to be a major Trump surrogate pushing this lie. Jackson’s been hitting both TV and podcasts to toss around drug names like “Adderall” and “Provigil.” This only reinforces suspicions that this accusation is a confession, however. When Jackson was Trump’s White House doctor, he earned the nickname “Dr. Feelgood” for relentlessly pushing these drugs on people who do not need them. Jackson’s behavior was so egregious that the Navy stripped him of his rank.
What’s telling about this lie is, as with many MAGA falsehoods, it seems few, if any, of the people repeating it actually believe it. Trump and his allies have accused Biden not just of being a little tired at times, but of having dementia. As Mona Charen pointed out on the “Daily Blast” podcast, if Adderall could restore a demented person’s brain, they’d be mass distributing it to the millions of people who are suffering from this disease. As for the cocaine accusation, even the most naive person in the country knows cocaine makes people less coherent, not sharper. It causes people to ramble on about nonsense, which is closer to describing your average Trump speech, not anything Biden has been up to.
Trump is using his second favorite trick, besides projection: Tricking his followers into believing they’re in on his con.
Trump isn’t trying to convince anyone of this lie. He’s convincing them that, by repeating the obvious lie, they can share in what they believe is his mastery over reality itself. The lie is not a thing the MAGA person sincerely believes. It’s a weapon Trump has provided them. When he loses the debate, which they clearly expect he will, the lie gives them a way to participate in the post-debate spin. But it’s also the stupidity of the lie that makes it so fun. Saying something deliberately dumb is a reliable way to drive the liberals mad. Angering liberals is the emotional core of the MAGA base….
As I’ve written about before, this strategy is the oldest technique in the con artist’s book. The best way for a grifter to gain a mark’s trust is to make him feel like he’s in on the con. Cult leaders operate the same way, by creating this sense of intimacy with their victims. Once the mark feels he’s part of the conspiracy, it’s that much easier to victimize him. The mark feels like the predator and not the prey, and so he lets his guard down around the actual villain picking his pocket. Trump does this to his followers over and over again, and they always fall for it. Even the Capitol insurrection is a good example. Trump convinced the rioters that they were his partners in the attempted coup. In reality, they were his patsies, set up to take the fall while he hid away in the White House.
Read the whole piece at Salon. It’s good.
NPR has an interesting article on the Biden and Trump “debates” in 2020: COVID tests and crosstalk: What happened the last time Trump and Biden debated.
With Trump and Biden now near even in the latest polls, and many Americans unenthused — and still undecided — about voting for either of them, Thursday’s debate offers both candidates an opportunity. But it’s not without risks.
It’s likely to be a memorable night if 2020 is any indication. Here’s a look at what happened last time Trump and Biden took the stage together….
Albert Edelfelt, Portrait of the artist’s sister Bertha Edelfelt, 1881
The first round, in September 2020, was by many accounts a disaster. NPR’s Domenico Montanaro called it “maybe the worst presidential debate in American history.”
Trump arrived on the debate stage trailing in the polls and, apparently, jonesing for drama. He interrupted Biden constantly, peppering him with questions and personal slights despite moderator Chris Wallace’s pleas for order.
At one point, while Biden was talking about his late son Beau’s military service, Trump jumped in to attack his other son, Hunter, for his drug use (which Biden managed to seize as a sympathetic moment).
Biden tried in vain to ignore Trump talking over him throughout — but called the then-president a “clown” more than once. At one point he had clearly had enough.
“Will you shut up, man?” he said exasperatedly, as Trump continued accusing him of wanting to pack the Supreme Court. “This is so unpresidential.”
Trump even bulldozed over Wallace, prompting the then-Fox News anchor to declare, “Mr. President, I am the moderator of this debate and I would like you to let me ask my question and then you can answer.”
A bit more on the first “debate”:
Still, a few substantive moments stood out amidst the chaos and crosstalk.
One was when Wallace asked if Trump was willing to condemn white supremacists and tell them to “stand down.”
Trump blamed the “left-wing” instead, but said he was prepared to do so. At that point, both Wallace and Biden urged him to go ahead. Trump asked for a name, and Biden suggested the Proud Boys.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said, in what sounded more like a call to action, and quickly became part of the far-right extremist group’s new social media logo.
Trump also repeatedly made baseless claims about the upcoming election being rigged, saying “This is going to be fraud like you’ve never heard.”
When Wallace asked if he would urge his supporters to stay calm during a potentially prolonged period of counting ballots, Trump demurred. He said instead that he was “urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
“If it’s a fair election, I am 100% on board,” he said. “But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”
Read the rest at NPR.
The Supreme Court is still releasing decisions. Once again, they have held back the one on Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity.” They announced two decisions today.
The Guardian: US supreme court allows government to request removal of misinformation on social media.
The US supreme court has struck down a lower court ruling in the case of Murthy v Missouri, finding that the government’s communications with social media platforms about Covid-19 misinformation did not violate the first amendment. The court’s decision permits the government to call on tech companies to remove falsehoods and establishes boundaries around free speech online.
The court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs had no standing to bring the case against the Biden administration, with conservative justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissenting.
The ruling is a blow to a longstanding Republican-backed effort to equate content moderation with censorship. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which included the founder of a far-right conspiracy website, argued that the government and federal agencies were coercing tech companies into silencing conservatives through demands to take down misinformation about the pandemic.
Bloomberg Law: Supreme Court Further Weakens Public Corruption Prosecutions.
The US Supreme Court again pared back a public corruption law, this time saying that state and local officials who accept “gratuities” aren’t covered by a federal bribery statute.
The 6-3 ruling by Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday was the latest in a string of cases cutting the reach of federal corruption laws and prosecutorial discretion to bring charges against government officials.
Woman reading in garden. Ignacio Díaz Olano
In the latest case, Snyder v. United States, the justices said a law which makes it a crime for certain state or local officials to “corruptly” accept anything of value over $5,000 doesn’t reach gratuities paid in recognition of past actions.
The ruling undoes the conviction of former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder for receiving $13,000 from a trucking company after it was awarded city contracts.
A contrary ruling had the potential to criminalize “commonplace gratuities” like a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card, Chipotle dinner, or tickets to a Hoosiers game, the court said.
The ruling split the justices along ideological lines. Writing for the liberal justices in dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said “Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love.”
The justices’ concern over prosecutorial overreach could have implications for a number of criminal cases over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The justices in Fischer v. United States are considering whether federal prosecutors went too far in charging some defendants with an Enron-era statute prohibiting obstruction of an official proceeding.
Judge Aileen Cannon held another hearing yesterday in her efforts to waste as much time as possible and prevent the stolen documents case from going to trial. Here’s some of what happened:
Adam Klasfeld at Just Security: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Search Challenge Flounders: Judge Signals Warrant Passed Muster.
Nearly two years after the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s effort to suppress the evidence that agents found inside his personal residence and social club appeared to fall flat on Tuesday.
Trump’s attorney, Emil Bove, argued that the search warrant was not detailed enough to survive Fourth Amendment scrutiny.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon pointedly disagreed: “It seems like it is, based on the caselaw that’s been submitted,” she said, minutes before court adjourned.
Though Cannon did not immediately issue a ruling, Trump’s challenge hinges on the “particularity” of the warrant, and her remarks throughout the proceedings left little doubt as to her leanings.
“It’s clearly delineated there to search for documents with classification markings,” she remarked toward the start of the hearing.
Click the link to read more about the hearing.
At Public Notice, Liz Dye wrote about Trump’s claims that he should be able to attack anyone involved in the legal cases against him: Trump asserts constitutional right to harass FBI agents.
In the stolen documents case in Florida, Trump called the special counsel’s motion to stop him from spreading vicious lies about the FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago a “naked effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of incarceration, in a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s arguments to the American people about the outrageous nature of this investigation and prosecution.” [….]
In Florida, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to bar Trump from accusing the FBI agents who executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago of trying to assassinate him.
The backstory is that on May 21, Trump claimed to have been “shown Reports” that President Biden “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” back in August 2022 when it raided the private club where he was storing stolen government documents.
Sleeping Woman with a Book, by Ferdinand Max Bredt
In fact, the “Report” was boilerplate language from the FBI’s operations order for the warrant, attached as an exhibit to his own motion to suppress the evidence kicked up on that raid. The FBI took great care to execute the warrant at a time when the club was shuttered for the season and there was no prospect that the former president and his family would be there. Nevertheless, Trump and his MAGA henchmen spent several news cycles claiming that President Biden had sent in agents “locked and loaded” ready to shoot him.
Those agents will necessarily be witnesses at the trial (should it ever happen), and yet Trump is falsely accusing them of attempted murder. Two of them were already publicly outed back in 2022 when someone gave the unredacted warrant to Breitbart and a former Trump aide, both of whom published it with the agents’ signatures visible.
After the agents were doxxed, they and their families were threatened and harassed, which influenced Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart’s decision to keep under seal parts of the affidavit in support of the warrant.
“Given the public notoriety and controversy about this search, it is likely that even witnesses who are not expressly named in the Affidavit would be quickly and broadly identified over social media and other communication channels, which could lead to them being harassed and intimidated,” he wrote.
Judge Cannon doesn’t seem to think this is a big deal.
Trump insists that his lies about the FBI are “core political speech” protected by the First Amendment. He also deliberately distorts the “heckler’s veto,” as he has done many times before, claiming that he cannot be silenced to prevent foreseeable, violent acts by his supporters. But as the DC Circuit wrote in its order upholding the gag order in the election interference case, “That doctrine prohibits restraining speech on the grounds that it ‘might offend a hostile mob’ hearing the message.” [….]
The DC Circuit judges noted that the trial judge need not find that the defendant’s statements had led to violent attacks in this case, they could infer the danger from attacks on everyone from Atlanta poll workers, to grand jurors in Fulton County, to the jury foreperson doxxed in the Roger Stone case. Applying the standard set out by the Supreme Court in Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, the judges blessed the gag order based on a finding that Trump’s attacks on witnesses, jurors, and court staff posed a “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing” the proceedings.
But that may not matter to Judge Aileen Cannon, who showed marked hostility to this (and every other) prosecutorial motion at a hearing Monday in Fort Pierce, where she waved away the ample record of Trump endangering witnesses and law enforcement, as well as an exhibit showing threats to FBI agents by a man who was killed in an attempted attack on an FBI building in Cincinnati just days after the warrant on Mar-a-Lago was executed.
“There still needs to be a factual connection between A and B,” the judge said, rebuffing Assistant US Attorney David Harbach’s efforts to make the government’s case.
“Mr. Harbach, I don’t appreciate your tone,” she fumed in response to the complaint that she wasn’t letting the government articulate its position, according to Just Security’s Adam Klasfeld, who was in the courtroom. “I expect decorum in this courtroom at all times. If you cannot do that, I’m sure one of your colleagues can take up this motion.” [….]
It seems highly unlikely that Cannon will do anything to curb Trump’s speech, until someone else gets hurt — and, if and when that happens, she will blame the government for failing to properly argue in favor of the gag order.
One more on the stolen documents case from Justin Rohrlich at The Daily Beast: New Pics Show Nuclear Secrets Stashed Beside the Diet Cokes at Mar-a-Lago.
On Monday night, following Trump’s latest disingenuous contention—that the FBI agents who seized and reviewed the contents of boxes upon boxes of sensitive materials stored at Mar-a-Lago “failed to maintain” the exact order of the documents within, which Trump now claims could somehow exonerate him—government lawyers filed a scathing response letting the air out of Trump’s contentions.
Nikolai Bekker Portrait of Countess Maria Hilarionovna Worontsov-Dachkova (1919).
Far from a neatly ordered system under which Trump, a notorious pack rat, maintained a precise inventory of important documents, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, along with prosecutors Jay Bratt and David Harbach, noted the “cluttered collection of keepsakes,” which “traveled from one readily accessible location to another” around the Palm Beach, Florida club.
“[T]his is not a case where reams of identically-sized documents were stacked neatly in file folders or redwelds, arrayed perfectly within a box,” the filing states. “To anyone other than Trump, the boxes had no apparent organization whatsoever.”
Trump kept highly guarded secrets in boxes with “personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency—newspapers, thank you notes, Christmas ornaments, magazines, clothing, and photographs of himself and others,” the government’s filing goes on.
“After they landed in stacks in the storage room, several boxes fell and splayed their contents on the floor; and boxes were moved to Trump’s residence on more than one occasion so he could review and pick through them,” the filing continues. “Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes, he now claims that the precise order of the items within the boxes when they left the White House was critical to his defense, and, what’s more, that FBI agents executing the search warrant in August 2022 should have known that.”
Smith, Bratt, and Harbach included a slew of exhibits to back up their position, with numerous previously unseen pictures of Trump’s decidedly chaotic storage methods. One shows assorted wadded-up golf shirts side-by-side with a folder marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” Another shows extremely sensitive defense-related documents carelessly stacked up on the floor beside cases of Diet Coke, a Hermes tie box, and a “Save America” cap, several toppled boxes with papers, binders, and folders spilling out, and a box containing a Christmas pillow and a random length of bubble wrap, beneath which, as national security analyst and writer Marcy Wheeler pointed out, at least one document prosecutors say was related to America’s nuclear weapons program.
In one exhibit, Smith & Co. provide a new photo of a storage closet at Mar-a-Lago where the contents of at least five upturned bankers boxes can be seen spilling out onto the floor. Several suit jackets in plastic dry cleaning bags hang from a rack above them, a Gibson guitar case leans against the wall, and what appears to be a piece of rococo plaster molding teeters atop a cardboard box nearby. According to the indictment, one of the boxes seen here contained a 2019 document marked “SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY,” which denotes the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.
Read more and see photos at the Daily Beast link.
This post is getting really long, so I’m going going to end there. I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. Have a great day, everyone!!
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Posted: May 22, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Corruption and Criminal Insanity, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, just because | Tags: Early works by famous artists, Judge Aileen Cannon, Mar-a-Lago search, media malpractice, no-nothing voters, political polls, Samuel Alito |
Good Day!!
Edvard Munch painted this portrait of his brother at age 12
We’re living in upside-down world–or something. This morning before reporting for his trial, Trump claimed that people are being “mugged and killed outside” the courthouse. Based on reports from people who have attended the trial, it has been quiet there, with very few protesters from either side. This man is clinically insane. He belongs in a psychiatric hospital. And yet, he is supposedly leading Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race.
What is going on in this country? Check out the results of the latest Harris poll. Lauren Aratani at The Guardian: Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden.
Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.
The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
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55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
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49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
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49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
Many Americans put the blame on Biden for the state of the economy, with 58% of those polled saying the economy is worsening due to mismanagement from the presidential administration.
The poll underscored people’s complicated emotions around inflation. The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing. In reality, the rate of inflation has fallen sharply from its post-Covid peak of 9.1% and has been fluctuating between 3% and 4% a year.
In April, the inflation rate went down from 3.5% to 3.4% – far from inflation’s 40-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 – triggering a stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones index to a record high.
A recession is generally defined by a decrease in economic activity, typically measured as gross domestic product (GDP), over two successive quarters, although in the US the National Bureau of Economic Research (NEBR) has the final say. US GDP has been rising over the last few years, barring a brief contraction in 2022, which the NEBR did not deem a recession….
The only recent recession was in 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the US economy has grown considerably. Unemployment has also hit historic lows, wages have been going up and consumer spending has been strong.
Painting by Edward Hopper, age 9
And this from Jason Lange at Reuters: Biden’s approval rating falls to lowest level in nearly two years-Reuters/Ipsos poll.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s public approval rating this month fell to its lowest level in almost two years, tying the lowest reading of his presidency in a warning sign for his reelection effort, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
The four-day poll, which closed on Monday, showed just 36% of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance as president, down from 38% in April. It was a return to the lowest approval rating of his presidency, last seen in July 2022. While this month’s drop was within the poll’s 3 percentage point margin of error, it could bode poorly for Biden as he faces off with Republican Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Biden, a Democrat, has been largely tied with Trump in national polls asking voters how they will vote. But Trump has had slight leads over Biden in many polls in the states seen as most likely to determine the winner in the U.S. Electoral College.
The poll laid out Biden’s weaknesses as well as a few strengths. The state of the economy was seen as the top issue, picked by 23% of respondents as the most important problem facing the country. Some 21% saw political extremism as the top issue and 13% picked immigration.
Some 40% of respondents in the poll said Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, had better policies for the U.S. economy, compared to 30% who picked Biden, while the rest said they didn’t know or didn’t answer the question.
Who are these people, and what is wrong with them? Apparently lots of them don’t even follow the news or politics at all. This is from Will Bunch’s email newsletter (I don’t have an on-line link, unfortunately): “The voters Biden is losing don’t read the New York Times. Many don’t read anything.”
The constantly simmering fire on social media about how the mainstream news media covers — or doesn’t cover — President Joe Biden had a 55-gallon barrel of gasoline tossed onto it this weekend. It started on Friday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the very first time — the latest in an apparent economic winning streak for the 46th president — and it barely garnered a peep in either the New York Times or Washington Post.
Biden’s most online fans were still seething about that slight two days later when some were shocked to see the Post put a U.S. economy story at the top of the Sunday paper, with the headline: “Buying slows as gloom spreads.” So with the lowest unemployment since the 1960s, the record stock market, real growth in wages and in sectors like manufacturing, that’s what the paper went with? Gloom?
Veteran journalist Kevin Drum instantly pulled up a slew of data that contradict the Post’s glum but mostly anecdotal analysis and asked “why does the Post publish a jumble of misleading or outright incorrect economic statistics instead of just looking them up first?” That kind of question — asking why these elite newsrooms or cable news outlets like MSNBC and CNN are quick to play up Biden’s age or stylistic stumbles while ignoring his accomplishments, as he remains in a dead heat with four-times-indicted Donald Trump — epitomizes the deeply held thought that Biden’s struggles are perhaps largely due to the myriad failings of the mainstream media.
Critics are absolutely right to be furious. But at the same time, I don’t think the New York Times is the reason Biden isn’t clobbering an opponent who’s stuck in a Manhattan courtroom facing 34 felony charges. I think his real problem is the millions of Americans who wouldn’t open the New York Times if you dropped it on their lap with a slice of pizza tucked inside.
Painting by Michaelangelo, age 13
There are basically three clumps of voters in America. There are — praise the Lord — millions of diligent, civic-minded Americans who watch debates or read news, somewhere, to better understand the candidates. But there is also a large pool of what I would call the disinformed, who also pursue information but get it from propaganda sites like Fox News that twist reality, or worse. Many of them liked Trump in 2016 and like him even more now.
The group where Biden used to do OK but is now struggling is a third bloc I’d call the uninformed. Either by choice or by the realities of working multiple jobs or going to school or raising kids, millions of Americans get no news other than the snippets that pop up on TikTok or somehow interrupt the football game. These folks don’t know the New York Times, but also no one at the New York Times knows these folks — until their odd views show up in the polls and everyone is shocked.
For all the deserved carping about negative portrayals of Biden and overly positive coverage of Trump in print, a recent NBC News poll found that among the dwindling number of Americans who identify newspapers as their primary news source, the incumbent Democrat is winning by landslide proportions, 70% to 21%. NBC also found Biden leading with the millions who still watch nightly news on the traditional networks. These viewers, like newspaper readers, tend to be older — and, yes, Biden leads among senior citizens. Maybe because they are better informed?
Conversely, I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that when ranked by news consumption, Trump’s biggest lead is with voters who say they don’t follow the news at all. In the NBC poll, one in seven reported they don’t follow politics — and they are supporting Trump by a solid 53-27% margin. This category is also the most likely to pick a third-party candidate like Robert F.Kennedy Jr., or Cornel West, or Jill Stein, and also most likely not to vote at all.
So basically, we’re fucked unless some of these no-nothings figure out that we’re headed for a dictatorship and decide maybe they’d like to keep some of their rights. Unfortunately, some of these no-nothings appear to be Supreme Court justices.
Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Alito’s “defense” of flying the J6 flag is transparent BS.
Everyone is waiting to see what the United States Supreme Court will do with Donald Trump’s outlandish claim he should be given absolute immunity from prosecution for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Oral arguments indicated that even the conservative justices have some concerns about that stance, but we’ve now learned that Justice Samuel Alito seems pretty on board with Trump’s coup attempt.
It’s yet another ethics scandal for the Court, and it’s a reminder that the right-wing justices operate in a realm of complete unaccountability.
Last week, the New York Times broke news that on January 17, 2021 — 11 days after Trump exhorted his supporters to storm the Capitol and three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration — an upside-down American flag hung outside the Alito home in Alexandria, Virginia. Hanging the flag upside down is literally prohibited by the flag code, save for “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” There’s a long tradition of upside-down flags being flown by protesters on the left and the right, but by January 17, 2021, it was widely known as a symbol used by “Stop the Steal” supporters.
How long the upside-down flag hung at the Alito home isn’t clear. The Times reviewed a January 18, 2021, email from a neighbor that said that it had been upside down for a number of days by that point. Several neighbors spoke to the Times about it but requested to remain anonymous, in part because they feared reprisal. Alito made a brief email statement to the Times, and while the statement succeeded in throwing his wife under the bus, it didn’t do much else. Alito said he “had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag” as it was “briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on lawn signs.”
Even if one takes this statement at face value, it falls far short of an explanation. Several days after an attempted insurrection, a Supreme Court justice let his wife hang a well-known symbol of that attempted insurrection because she got into a spat with the neighbors? Even if the lawn signs were “personally insulting” to the Alitos in some way, how is flying an upside-down flag a legitimate response?
Painting by Salvador Dali, age 4 or 6
Alito was more expansive with conservative Fox News correspondent Shannon Bream, but even in that friendly atmosphere, he couldn’t come up with a convincing explanation. He told Bream a neighbor had put up a sign that said “Fuck Trump,” and it was 50 feet from a children’s bus stop. Mrs. Alito decided to talk with those neighbors, but according to Alito, the conversation didn’t go well, and then those neighbors put up a sign that attacked his wife and blamed her for January 6.
Then, when the Alitos were taking a neighborhood stroll, Mrs. Alito got into an argument with one of the residents of that property, who called her “the c-word.” After that, she was distraught and decided to make what Fox News characterized euphemistically as “some sort of statement” by hanging the flag upside down. Notably, when the Washington Post spoke with a neighbor who described the content of the offending signs, they said they did not even mention the justice directly.
None of these additional details makes Alito or his wife look any better. The most charitable reading is that after a neighbor accused Mrs. Alito of being an insurrection enthusiast, she reacted by hoisting a symbol of support for insurrection. A Supreme Court justice’s wife is busy acting out the Matt Bors comic where a MAGA type reacts to hearing someone say Trump fans are racist by going full Nazi.
Needham goes on to explain why nothing will be done about this. I recommend reading the whole thing.
More insanity from Trump:
You probably heard that Judge Aileen Cannon unsealed some more DOJ documents yesterday, and the MAGA crowd discovered that when the FBI executes a search warrant, they are routinely authorized to use force if necessary. Now Trump is claiming that Joe Biden wanted the FBI to assassinate him when they searched Mar-a-Lago. Never mind that Trump was in New Jersey at the time and everyone–including the FBI–knew that.
David Kurtz in TPM’s Morning Memo: Aileen Cannon Gifts Trump Bogus New Fodder For His Disinformation Campaign.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has screwed up the Mar-a-Lago case in so many ways it defies easy categorization. Her slow rolling of the trial is obviously her single gravest sin. But there’s another layer of malfeasance going on here that came more clearly into view yesterday.
Over the objection of Special Counsel Jack Smith, Cannon ordered the unsealing of previous filings in the case. In some of those filings, it’s becoming apparent, Trump has tucked in information about the case that he wants to seed in the public imagination and use as fodder for his presidential campaign and for fighting the criminal charges outside of court.
Cannon has given him a green light to do so, and the results became apparent yesterday.
In one of the filings, Trump drew attention to the FBI’s deadly force policy, which was in effect during the search of Mar-a-Lago, as it is in every FBI field operation. As soon as the filing was unsealed, right-wing news outlets seized on it and accused Biden of being responsible for gunning for Trump.
Trump himself later in the day amplified these bogus attacks on social media:
Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE—25TH AMENDMENT!
It became a campaign fundraising email, too: “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!”
Of course none of this is true. The same deadly force policy that is in effect for every FBI operation was in effect for the Mar-a-Lago search. The FBI doesn’t need special authority to use deadly force; it has standing authority to use deadly force when circumstances warrant it. This is a standard operating policy, and Biden had nothing to do with its promulgation in general or its application in the Mar-a-Lago search in particular.
But you can see the dynamic plainly from what I just had to do to explain this to you: Trump wants to use the criminal justice process to generate more disinformation, Cannon facilitates him doing so with her rulings, right-wing media go apeshit, Trump gooses the reaction some more, and then a day later I come along and try to unpack it all for you, including the underlying falsity, with a put-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube futility. The FBI issued an unusual statement in similarly futile fashion.
This is all bad enough, but there’s another even darker layer here: It feeds the right-wing animosity toward federal law enforcement that has already led to two attacks on FBI field offices in the past two years.
And Trump is fund-raising off of this nonsense. The Washington Post actually deigned to cover this story. The author is Hannah Knowles: Trump email falsely says Biden was ‘locked & loaded’ to ‘take me out’ in Mar-a-Lago search.
Donald Trump on Tuesday falsely claimed in a campaign fundraising email that President Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” during a 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents, an extraordinary distortion of a standard FBI policy on the use of deadly force during such operations.
Painting by Pablo Picasso, age 8
Trump appeared to be referring to a law enforcement document, released Tuesday in court filings in the classified documents case, that describes the FBI’s plans for a court-authorized search on Aug. 8, 2022, at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club. FBI agents recovered classified material from Trump’s time in the White House — which the former president is now charged with illegally retaining. One page in the document includes a “policy statement” on the use of deadly force, which says officers may resort to lethal force only when the subject of such force poses an “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury” to an officer or another person.
Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, and some of his allies suggested Tuesday that this was evidence that Biden’s Justice Department was prepared to fatally shoot him. In fact, Trump was not at his Florida property the day of the search. FBI agents specifically sought to avoid a confrontation with Trump, choosing a day when Trump would not be at the property and giving the Secret Service a heads-up, The Washington Post previously reported.
A former president falsely accusing his successor and rival of posing a threat to his life is without precedent in modern U.S. history. The comments marked a sharp escalation of Trump’s baseless attacks on Biden, as the former president faces 88 criminal charges across fo perur indictments in federal and state courts. Trump has frequently accused Biden of weaponizing the legal system against him in coordination with the Justice Department and local prosecutors. There is no evidence of such coordination.
A Tuesday evening fundraising email from the Trump campaign that was signed in the candidate’s name arrived with the subject line, “They were authorized to shoot me!” and said of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
Trump also wrote Tuesday on his social media site, Truth Social, that “Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”
The horrifying thing is that at least 30 percent of people probably believe this.
Speaking of Judge Cannon, yesterday, the New York Times ran a guest essay by Brian Greer, a “lawyer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of General Counsel from 2010 to 2018.”: It Is Inexcusable How Judge Cannon Is Delaying the Trump Documents Case.
The task before Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the classified documents case of Donald Trump, is not easy. She must protect Mr. Trump’s constitutional rights while also ensuring the prompt and fair administration of justice.
Still, it is inexcusable that she is utterly failing to keep the case moving along in a fair but timely manner. And unfortunately, there isn’t much that the special counsel in the case, Jack Smith, can do about it.
While working as an attorney in the C.I.A.’s Office of General Counsel, I developed an expertise in Espionage Act prosecutions similar to the one pending against Mr. Trump, who is accused of illegally taking classified state documents from the White House after he left office and then obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them. I know firsthand that cases like this can be quite complicated and lengthy.
Self-Portrait by Albrecht Dürer, age 13
But outside of the unique issues raised by Mr. Trump’s status as a former president (for example, immunity and the Presidential Records Act), the prosecution against him is actually not particularly complex. The volume of classified records subject to discovery is not outside the norm, and if the defendant were not Donald Trump, this would be a relatively routine Espionage Act prosecution for unlawful retention of classified records.
With a competent and determined judge, Mr. Trump’s due process rights could have been well protected and the trial could have reasonably been set for this summer. However, this is not the first time Judge Cannon — a Trump appointee — has granted delay after delay, and thanks to a recent scheduling order, it’s now all but certain that the case will not go to trial until after Election Day.
If Mr. Trump wins the election, the case will be effectively over. The Trump Justice Department would almost certainly dismiss the indictment at his behest when the clock strikes noon on Jan. 20, 2025.
Informed voters know all this, of course, but the uniformed people who respond to polls may not even know that Trump stole hundreds of highly classified documents and stored them in a bathroom and on a stage in large hall at his private club.
One way of taking a measure of how Judge Cannon has failed is by looking at the progress of pretrial litigation, which started soon after Mr. Trump was indicted in June 2023. In a criminal trial, the purpose of pretrial litigation is threefold: to ensure the defense gets access to all discoverable material; to resolve “dispositive” motions that could result in dismissal of the case if granted, like Mr. Trump’s presidential immunity assertion; and to determine what the trial will look like. The latter is an especially important task here given that Mr. Trump is charged with illegally mishandling some of our most closely guarded secrets, which could be further compromised depending on how they are used at a public trial.
Measured against these goals, Judge Cannon has made almost no progress over the past 11 months. That is shocking and indefensible.
On the scope of discovery, Judge Cannon has failed to rule on Mr. Trump’s motion — filed four months ago — to compel additional discovery from the government. Under her new schedule, she may not rule on it until July. A ruling granting Mr. Trump’s motion could result in months of additional delays.
The discovery and use of classified information is one of the thornier issues in cases of this nature. Here, too, the judge has made almost no progress, and her inexperience is showing. She has ruled on just one substantive motion with respect to Mr. Trump, which was filed by the government in December and applied to only a sliver of the classified information at issue in the case. Under her new scheduling order, the next phase of litigation involving classified information won’t begin until mid-June. Judge Cannon won’t even begin to address the difficult questions about how classified information will be used and disclosed at trial until August at the earliest, even though Mr. Trump’s team has had access to over 90 percent of the classified discovery since last fall.
On efforts to dismiss the case, in February, Mr. Trump made seven such motions, and so far Judge Cannon has ruled on only two. Some of them are plainly frivolous, but she has insisted on extensive hearings for each one, some of which have not been held yet.
I feel sick just reading this. There’s more at the link.
That’s about all I can take today; I’m going to have to take some deep breaths and do something other than read or watch the news for awhile. Before I go, here are some links to interesting stories:
Alex Patterson at Media Matters: On social media, news outlets give more attention to Kamala Harris using an expletive than Trump’s corrupt promise to oil executives.
Radley Balko at The Watch: Trump’s deportation army.
Ian Ward at Politico: The right’s fascism problem.
Andy Kroll at ProPublica: Scenes From a MAGA Meltdown: Inside the “America First” Movement’s War Over Democracy.
Marc Caputo at The Bulwark: Meet Trump’s ‘Human Printer.’ Her name is Natalie Harp. She’s 32. And she has unbelievable access to the man who might be president again.
The Atlantic: New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity.
NOTE: The art works in this post are from a Twitter thread by James Lucas.
Take care, Sky Dancers!!
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Posted: May 18, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2020 Elections, 2021 Insurrection, cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: American flag, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito, Stop the Steal, Upside down American flag |
Happy Caturday!!
Zhou Wenjiu, Woman with Cat, between the 10th century and the 11th century,
Yesterday, Dakinikat posted in a comment about Justice Samuel Alito’s latest scandal–an upside down American flag flew outside his house for several days after the January 6 insurrection.
The upside down flag was used by MAGA gangsters to represent “stop the steal.” A number of insurrectionists carried it during the attacks on the Capitol.
I’m going to provide more detail and reactions to this story in this post. This is a huge story and I think it shows that Alito and his wife Martha Ann are as bad or worse than Clarence and Ginni Thomas. I hope the Chinese cat art will help you stay calm.
First, the New York Times story from yesterday by Jodi Kantor: At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.
After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.
One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.
The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times. Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there said in interviews.
While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one.
Alito reacted to the story by throwing his wife under the bus.
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.
The mere impression of political opinion can be a problem, the ethics experts said. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.
Interviews show that the justice’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, had been in a dispute with another family on the block over an anti-Trump sign on their lawn, but given the timing and the starkness of the symbol, neighbors interpreted the inverted flag as a political statement by the couple.
By Qi Baishi, 1864-1957
Neighbors said that the flag had been flying for several days before the photograph was taken. That’s not a brief time in my book.
The longstanding ethics code for the lower courts, as well as the recent one adopted by the Supreme Court, stresses the need for judges to remain independent and avoid political statements or opinions on matters that could come before them.
“You always want to be proactive about the appearance of impartiality,” Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge and the director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, said in an interview. “The best practice would be to make sure that nothing like that is in front of your house.”
The court has also repeatedly warned its own employees against public displays of partisan views, according to guidelines circulated to the staff and reviewed by The Times. Displaying signs or bumper stickers is not permitted, according to the court’s internal rule book and a 2022 memo reiterating the ban on political activity.
Read the rest at the NYT.
Some commentary from John Fritze at CNN: New York Times: Upside-down US flag flew at home of Justice Samuel Alito after 2020 election.
The revelation is almost certain to prompt calls for Alito, a member of the court’s conservative wing, to recuse himself from several high-profile cases pending before the court this year involving the election and subsequent attack on the US Capitol, including the blockbuster question of whether Trump may claim immunity from federal election subversion charges….
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in an emailed statement to the Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
The upside-down flag became a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement in the weeks and months following the election, in which Trump’s supporters falsely claimed that Biden’s win was illegitimate due to widespread fraud. The inverted flag was widely seen during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol….
The story will heap further scrutiny on the high court at a time when it is already facing considerable blowback. Justice Clarence Thomas has been the subject of significant criticism and calls for recusal in election-related cases after his wife, conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, acknowledged she attended Trump’s rally before the Capitol attack and supported White House efforts to discredit the election results.
By Xu Beihong, 1952
Last fall, in response to a series of revelations about travel accepted by Thomas and Alito, the Supreme Court adopted a code of conduct for the first time. That code guides the justices to “refrain from political activity.”
“Two scenarios are plausible and neither one of them is attractive: Either the gesture was trivial pettiness and ought to be beneath the dignity of the court or it is was intended as meaningful symbolism in which case it is a real problem,” said James Sample, a Hofstra Law School professor who has studied judicial ethics.
Combined with the earlier Thomas revelations, Sample said, “The scenarios amplify the need for Congress to impose meaningful ethics enforcement on a court that steadfastly refuses to police itself.”
This is interesting. Yesterday, a number of people posted on Twitter about remarks that Sydney Powell made about the role Alito was expected to play in the efforts to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2001.
This article is from Newsweek, September 27, 2021: Sidney Powell Drags Justice Samuel Alito and Supreme Court into January 6 Mess.
Attorney Sidney Powell said the January 6 riot at the Capitol could have caused a delay which would have allowed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification of Joe Biden‘s election victory—but that chance was lost when Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress to complete the process.
Powell, an attorney who has filed numerous lawsuits in a failed bid to overturn former President Donald Trump‘s 2020 election loss, made the comments during an appearance on the conservative Stew Peters Show on Friday.
She said that as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol that day, her team was seeking an emergency injunction to prevent the certification of Biden’s win.
“We were filing a 12th Amendment constitutional challenge to the process that the Congress was about to use under the Electoral Act provisions that simply don’t jive with the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution,” she said. “And Justice Alito was our circuit justice for that.”
She added: “Louie Gohmert was the plaintiff in our lawsuit, and we were suing the vice president to follow the 12th Amendment as opposed to the Electoral College Act.”
I’d love to know what Alito would say about this.
More commentary from Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: The Smallest Justice Who Ever Lived. Samuel Alito’s explanations for his wife’s upside-down American flag make the story even worse.
We have known for some time now that the current Supreme Court is not comprised of “conservatives” and “liberals,” or even “jurists” and “reactionaries.” It has split into those who care about the future of the court and the country, and those who do not.
Because the group that cares is much larger than the one that doesn’t, its members could have at any time done many things to signal to the latter group —and we can go ahead and name them, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—that accepting lavish, undisclosed gifts and vacations from billionaire donors who have interests before the court was a rolling, public-confidence-and-democracy-threatening disaster. They said nothing, even as this sordid conduct degraded the nation’s highest court, for many of the reasons powerful individuals often say nothing: To protect the institution at large; to preserve the long-tarnished myth of a collegial court; and because, when there is nothing to be done about it anyhow, what’s the point?
In a sense, then, nobody should be all that surprised by Jodi Kantor’s bombshell reporting on Thursday night about the upside-down flag that hung outside the Alitos’ home in suburban Virginia in the days after the Jan. 6 insurrection. The symbol of support for the attempted coup flew during a time when the court was considering cases seeking to set aside the election results. Alito has confirmed that this flag display happened. Multiple neighbors and Supreme Court employees have corroborated the reporting.
Su Hanchen, Children Playing on a Winter Day, 12th century, National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
We can certainly quibble (and Alito’s defenders surely will) about whether an upside-down flag really represents “Stop the Steal,” as Kantor’s experts affirm, or some other message of peace and goodwill. We can and will debate over Alito’s claim that his wife hoisted the flag because one of the neighbors hurt their feelings (so, #feminism). But the saddest and most arresting part of this endless downward spiral for the seven jurists who should know better, and the two who do not, is not that they don’t care about what they are doing to the court—it’s how pitifully, shabbily small these ride-or-die political battles really are.
Every one of the Supreme Court’s nine justices is well aware of the recusal statute that binds federal judges and the ethics code that, even in 2021, they purported to consult and follow. Even then, before SCOTUS produced its own totally voluntary, never-say-never ethical guidelines in 2023, internal policy and external law required them to refrain from acting like thin-skinned partisan nuts, and to recuse themselves from relevant cases when they failed to adhere to this standard.
This is a low bar to clear. And yet, in statements to the New York Timesand Fox News’ Shannon Bream, Alito implied that he and his wife, Martha-Ann, simply had no choice but to disrespect the stars and stripes by vulgarly violating the U.S. Flag Code because it was necessary to own a liberal neighbor. The justice told Bream that this neighbor put up a “Fuck Trump” sign—where children might see it!—and then another sign “personally” blaming Martha-Ann for Jan. 6. Finally, “a male in the home” called Martha-Ann “the c-word” while she was on a walk with her husband. All this led her to join countless “Stop the Steal” enthusiasts in hanging her American flag upside down.
On Alito’s ridiculous excuse:
None of the Alitos’ explanations so far even attempt to explain why Martha-Ann landed on this gesture, out of all the possibilities, to further upset and provoke her progressive neighbors. Readers are also left to guess at the true origin of the conflict; are we really supposed to think that the neighbors picked this fight unprovoked, and the Alitos are completely blameless? The justice’s defenders are scrambling to muddy the waters with some alternate explanation, but the truth is crystal clear, and unrefuted by the Alitos themselves: That flag was hung upside down to piss off some libs. At best, Martha-Ann Alito was trolling her neighbor by professing a militant belief that Biden stole the election; at worst, she held that belief sincerely.
Let’s be clear that everything these neighbors stand accused of doing is obviously protected speech under the First Amendment. There is no allegation of genuine harassment or true threats; these people just wanted to express displeasure toward a very public figure and his somewhat public wife. And though Alito seems to believe that he and his wife were within their rights to fight back against an irritating neighbor, the staff who work under Alito at SCOTUS would have no such luxury. The Times piece lays out the strictures on court employees that ban political signs and bumper stickers, “partisan political activity,” and even “nonpartisan political activity” that “could reflect adversely on the dignity or impartiality of the court.” [….]
Xu Beihong, Cat, 1941
So when Alito throws his wife under the bus—the flag was “briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs”—he’s issuing another justification: He gets to break the rules because she was in a fight with the neighbors. He gets to break the rules because the seat on the plane was otherwise unoccupied. He gets to break the rules because the rules are always trying to trip him up and catch him out.
The justice’s perpetual victimhood mentality, which shines through in his opinions and interviews and myriad grievance-laden speeches, has now literally reached his own front yard. The Alitos are not here fighting some vitally important civic-minded battle about the nature of freedom or democracy. No. This is, as Alito concedes, just payback because of a lawn sign and a bad word. Presumably, fourth-period detention and a note home to the neighbors’ parents were not an option.
Alito should be impeached, along with Thomas.
One more from Marina Villeneuve at Salon: “Out of control”: Legal experts say Justice Alito’s “Stop the Steal” symbol is a huge red flag.
Legal experts are lamenting the lack of an enforceable judicial ethics code, with some calling for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s recusal, following a New York Times report that a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement to reject the 2020 election was flown outside Alito’s home in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Ten leading legal experts told Salon Friday that the conduct — the flying of an upside-down flag, a known symbol of the movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, at a justice’s home — appears to violate the Supreme Court’s own ethics code, adopted last last year, by creating an appearance of bias.
Those experts said it’s far past time for the nine justices who enjoy lifetime appointments to hold themselves to the highest ethical standards. But, they noted, the Supreme Court has shown itself reluctant to do so.
“The situation is out of control,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush who worked with Justice Alito on his 2006 Senate confirmation, told Salon. “This is after the insurrection, so it’s really him weighing in, getting involved publicly in a dispute over the insurrection.”
The U.S. Flag Code says the flag should only be displayed upside-down as a “signal of distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” Movements including the Tea Party and “Stop the Steal” have used upside-down flags as a symbol of protest and despair….
“I don’t know why we have a Supreme Court justice flying a flag upside down, weighing in on an election, why his wife would be doing that,” Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, said. “His wife is well aware of the impartiality obligations of a federal judge.”
Painter said he was not convinced by Alito attributing the up-side down flag to his wife, particularly when it was flown on their joint property. “When the house is used this way, I’d be shocked that she would do that without talking about it with him first.”
By Xu Beihong, 1952
Alito should recuse himself from January 6-related cases.
Painter, who has called for an inspector general for the Supreme Court, said the Times report also raises “serious questions about whether he can impartially adjudicate any case related to Jan. 6.” He also suggested that special counsel Jack Smith should file a motion for Alito’s recusal in the pending Trump v. United States case, in which the Supreme Court will weigh in on presidential immunity from criminal prosecution….
“A more blatant revelation of bias in a pending case is hard to imagine,” Washington & Lee University School of Law professor Jim Moliterno told Salon. “It was literally waving a banner that said, ‘I favor election-deniers.’”
“Who can possibly think he will decide this case in a neutral manner?” Professor Leslie Levin, a University of Connecticut School of Law professor, told Salon. “Of course, Justice Alito’s political leanings were already well-known. But the flag flying incident indicates he has strong views about the facts underlying this case. His decision seems pre-ordained.”
There’s much more from legal exports at the Salon link.
More stories to check out today:
Time Magazine: Biden Likens MAGA Movement to Segregationists in Speech to NAACP.
NBC News: No more games’: Biden campaign rejects additional debates against Trump.
The New Republic: AOC Reveals Darker Intentions Behind MTG Hearing Chaos.
The Daily Beast: GOP, Dems Round on MTG After Outburst: ‘Her Brand Is Chaos.’
Axios: Rudy Giuliani served Arizona indictment same day as his 80th birthday party.
CNN: John Eastman, former Trump lawyer, pleads not guilty in Arizona election interference case.
AP: Man gets 30 years in prison for attacking ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer.
Axios: Scoop: U.S., Iran held indirect talks this week on avoiding more attacks.
Have a great weekend, Eveyone!!
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Posted: May 15, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Good Day!!
Before I get going on today’s political news, I want to share this story that caught my eye while I was surfing around.
Associated Press: Sun shoots out biggest solar flare in almost 2 decades, but Earth should be out of the way this time.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The sun produced its biggest flare in nearly two decades Tuesday, just days after severe solar storms pummeled Earth and created dazzling northern lights in unaccustomed places.
“Not done yet!” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in an update.
It’s the biggest flare of this 11-year solar cycle, which is approaching its peak, according to NOAA. The good news is that Earth should be out of the line of fire this time because the flare erupted on a part of the sun rotating away from Earth.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the bright flash of the X-ray flare. It was the strongest since 2005, rated on the scale for these flares as X8.7.
Bryan Brasher at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado said it may turn out to have been even stronger when scientists gather data from other sources.
It follows nearly a week of flares and mass ejections of coronal plasma that threatened to disrupt power and communications on Earth and in orbit. An ejection associated with Tuesday’s flare appeared to have been directed away from our planet, although analysis is ongoing, Brasher noted.
I’m glad it’s not going to affect us, because last time my cell phone malfunctioned and I spent hours texting with tech support trying to get it working again.
Trump Biden debate in 2020
The big news this morning is that President Biden challenged Trump to two debates and Trump accepted. The first debate is now scheduled for June 27. The second one is planned for some time in September, if Trump doesn’t chicken out. The debates will not be under the control of the debate commission, and Biden’s preference is for no live audience.
The Washington Post: Biden and Trump agree to CNN debate in June, another faceoff in September.
President Biden and former president Donald Trump agreed Wednesday to a June 27 debate on CNN, hours after Biden announced he would bypass the decades-old tradition of three fall meetings organized by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.
After Biden publicly embraced a CNN proposal in a social media post, a Trump adviser, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the presumptive Republican nominee would accept that event. CNN also announced plans for the event.
“I am Ready and Willing to Debate Crooked Joe at the two proposed times in June and September,” Trump wrote earlier Wednesday on Truth Social. “I would strongly recommend more than two debates and, for excitement purposes, a very large venue, although Biden is supposedly afraid of crowds.”
“Just tell me when, I’ll be there,” he continued, before referencing a tag line from professional boxing. “’Let’s get ready to Rumble!!!”
The publicagreement follows private back-channel discussions about possible meetings. The officials with the Biden and Trump campaigns have had informal conversations on debates in recent weeks, focused on meetings that would not involve the commission, according to two people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private events.
The Biden proposal, outlined in a video message and letter to the commission, called for direct negotiations between the Trump and Biden campaigns over the rules, moderators and network hosts for the one-on-one encounters. He proposed a separate vice-presidential debate in July, after the Republican nominating convention and before the Democratic nominating convention.
“Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020, and since then he hasn’t shown up for a debate. Now he is acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal. I’ll even do it twice,” Biden said in the video released Wednesday that referenced the weekly break in Trump’s New York criminal trial. “So let’s pick the dates, Donald. I hear you’re free on Wednesdays.” [….]
On the proposed ground rules:
Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon cited the commission’s proposed schedule and past struggles to keep candidates from violating the debate rules in the letter explaining the decision.
Trump and Biden in 2020
“The Commission’s model of building huge spectacles with large audiences at great expense simply isn’t necessary or conducive to good debates,” she wrote. “The debates should be conducted for the benefit of the American voters, watching on television and at home — not as entertainment for an in-person audience with raucous or disruptive partisans and donors, who consume valuable debate time with noisy spectacles of approval or jeering.” [….]
The Biden proposal will be the subject of extensive negotiations between the two camps over the coming weeks, with Biden advisers now expecting proposals to come in from networks. Biden’s team has requested that only broadcast networks that hosted Republican primary debates in 2016 and Democratic primary debates in 2020 be eligible to host the first debate. Only four networks — CNN, ABC News, Telemundo and CBS News — hosted debates for both parties during those cycles.
Biden proposed that the moderator should be selected by the broadcast host from its “regular personnel,” with firm time limits for answers, equal speaking time, alternative turns to speak and microphones that are active only during each candidate’s turn. The first debate would take place after the June 15 conclusion of the Group of Seven summit in Italy and the conclusion of Trump’s criminal trial in New York. The September debate would take place before the start of early voting.
Yesterday, Michael Cohen finished his direct testimony in the hush money case, and the defense began cross examining him.
Politico: Trump’s lawyer confronted Michael Cohen with a bang (and an expletive). Then things fizzled.
NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s criminal trial finally progressed Tuesday to a confrontation that has been brewing for weeks: the face-off between the former president’s defense team and his former fixer, Michael Cohen.
But after a few initial crackles, it lacked the pop that many had expected.
Todd Blanche with Trump in court
Cohen is the prosecution’s star witness, and during a day-and-a-half of direct examination, he provided critical details about Trump’s knowledge of the cover-up at the heart of the case. So when Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche, stood up after lunch to begin cross-examining him, everyone was waiting to see the Trump team’s strategy for depicting Cohen as a liar with a vendetta.
Blanche’s first question — in which he quoted an off-color insult from Cohen — got the courtroom’s attention. But over several hours, Cohen largely maintained his cool while Blanche attempted to provoke him. And in questions ranging from Cohen’s book profits to what Cohen said during the Robert Mueller investigation, it wasn’t clear if Blanche managed to dent Cohen’s credibility in the hush money case.
Even Trump himself appeared to doze off while his own lawyer was questioning his nemesis.
The cross-examination will continue Thursday (after a scheduled day off on Wednesday), but for now, Cohen seems mostly unscathed.
More on Blanche’s questioning of Cohen:
He began by making it personal: “On April 23, you went on TikTok and called me a ‘crying little shit,’ didn’t you?” Blanche asked Cohen, raising his voice to deliver “shit.”
Prosecutors objected — but not before Cohen blurted out: “That sounds like something I would say.”
Blanche wasn’t done. Moments later, he confronted Cohen with more of his expletive-laden TikTok commentary, including calling Trump a “dictator douchebag” and saying Trump leaves the courtroom to go to “right into that little cage, which is where he belongs, in a fucking cage, like an animal.”
“I recall saying that,” Cohen replied.
But if Blanche’s strategy was to rankle Cohen into displaying some of the ire and petulance he has broadcast on social media and on his podcast, it didn’t work. Cohen maintained a largely placid demeanor, calling Blanche “sir,” and declining to offer colorful descriptions of the events Blanche questioned him about.
When Blanche tried to depict Cohen as a blabbermouth who has frustrated the Manhattan district attorney’s office by repeatedly going on TV to talk about the case against Trump, Cohen said he didn’t recall many requests by prosecutors to keep quiet and insisted they had only occasionally asked him, “please don’t talk about the case.”
“That’s it? They just call you and say that?” Blanche said incredulously.
“Actually, they call my attorney,” Cohen replied.
Trump has been inviting MAGA politicians like Tommy Tuberville and JD Vance to accompany him to court this week. Then they hold press conferences outside the courthouse and attack the judge and prosecution. Yesterday, Trump brought the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. This man is second in line for the presidency and he’s being led around by nose by Trump. How humiliating.
The Guardian: Mike Johnson skips vital US House session to support Trump in New York.
The US House was in session on Tuesday with vital business to complete but its speaker, Mike Johnson, was 200 miles north, attending another day in the criminal trial of Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee charged over hush-money payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair.
“President Trump is innocent of these charges,” Johnson said outside court in Manhattan, where Trump faces the first 34 of 88 criminal counts….
Mike Johnson holding forth outside the courthouse in Manhattan
Trump has used his trial as a loyalty test for supporters and vice-presidential hopefuls, both at the courthouse and on social media and TV. On Tuesday, Johnson was joined by the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, the Florida representatives Byron Donalds and Cory Mills, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who ran for the Republican presidential nomination.
Before proceedings began, as Johnson and other supporters stood behind him, Trump spoke to reporters.
“I do have a lot of surrogates and they are speaking very beautifully,” he said. “They come from all over Washington, and they’re highly respected and they think this is the biggest scam they’ve ever seen.”
Regarding such surrogates’ ability to comment on the trial unencumbered by a gag order over which Trump has been fined and threatened with incarceration, Trump told reporters: “You ask me questions that I’m not allowed to answer.” [….]
One of Johnson’s former Republican colleagues, the anti-Trump conservative Liz Cheney, jibed: “Have to admit I’m surprised that Speaker Johnson wants to be in the ‘I cheated on my wife with a porn star’ club. I guess he’s not that concerned with teaching morality to our young people after all.” [….]
Back on Capitol Hill, the House was due to consider final passage of the Federal Aviation Authority Reauthorization Act. House Democrats were also set to face a series of messaging bills, proposed legislation designed not to pass but to ensnare the other party in difficult political choices.
[Emphasis added]
The Independent: Mike Johnson acts as proxy for ‘friend’ Trump as he bashes judge’s daughter and ‘sham trial’ outside court.
Mr Johnson said he was speaking out in defence of his “friend,” the former president, and decried the “sham” trial.
“I wanted to be here myself, to call out what is a travesty of justice,” Mr Johnson told reporters. “President Trump is a friend and I wanted to be here to support him.” [….]
Mike Johnson speaking outside Trump’s trial
Despite his reputation as a devout Christian, Mr Johnson has formed a strong bond with the former president who once appeared on the cover of Playboy. Mr Trump came out in support of Mr Johnson and opposed pro-Trump Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s efforts to oust Mr Johnson last week.
Mr Johnson criticized the charge that Mr Trump falsified his business records.
“I think everybody knows he is not the bookkeeper for his company,” he said. “President Trump is innocent of these charges, and again, anyone with common sense can understand what is happening here.”
Mr Johnson is just the latest Republican-elected official to head to New York to show their support for the former president. Senators Rick Scott of Florida, JD Vance of Ohio and Senator Tommy Tuberville are among the many who have made the pilgrimage to the Manhattan courthouse.
The Democratic National Committee mocked the showing.
“Trump’s pathetic band of MAGA extremists seemingly have nothing better to do than echo Trump’s lies and nod approvingly in the background – because they certainly aren’t doing their day jobs of serving their constituents or running a functional political operation,” spokesman Alex Floyd said. “If deploying this motley crew of cranks and conspiracy theorists was the Trump campaign’s ham-handed attempt to divert attention from their candidate’s disappearance from the campaign trail, they’re in for a stormy six months ahead.”
Jed Legum at Popular Information: Is Trump orchestrating a new criminal conspiracy?
In recent days, several high-profile Republican political figures have traveled to the Manhattan Criminal Court, where Donald Trump is on trial. Outside the courthouse, they addressed the media and attacked key witnesses, the jury, and even the judge’s daughter.
The comments by Trump’s Republican allies are nearly identical to attacks that Trump has made previously in interviews and social media posts. But Judge Juan Merchan has ruled that, in so doing, Trump violated the gag order he imposed to preserve the integrity of the trial. Merchan has already fined Trump for violating the gag order 10 times and has warned that future violations could result in incarceration.
Tommy Tuberville holds forth in Manhattan
Merchan’s order prohibits Trump from “directing others to make public statements about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses.” The order also prohibits Trump from directing others to attack the jury, the court staff, or family members.
Asked on Tuesday if he directed the Republicans to speak about the trial on his behalf, Trump described them as his “surrogates” and praised them for “speaking very beautifully.” Trump has also entered the courthouse flanked by his surrogates, effectively giving them his imprimatur. If Trump directed his surrogates to speak, their comments could constitute criminal contempt of the gag order by Trump….
On Monday, Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), and Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) addressed the media in front of the courthouse. On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (R), Congressman Byron Donalds (R-FL), former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (R), and Congressman Cory Mills (R-FL) did the same. Tuesday’s group, in an apparent show of solidarity, wore Trump’s signature blue suit and red tie.
Many of Trump’s surrogates appear to be speaking from a common script.
Read more at the link above. I’m not sure the judge can do anything about this. Trump is slime.
One more on the MAGA efforts to defend Trump.
Reuters: Trump blasts his trial judges. Then his fans call for violence.
On a recent Tuesday morning, a visibly frustrated Donald Trump sat through a tense hearing in the first-ever criminal trial of a former American president. During a break, he let rip on his social media platform.
New York Justice Juan Merchan, Trump declared on Truth Social, is a “highly conflicted” overseer of a “kangaroo court.” Trump supporters swiftly replied to his post with a blitz of attacks on Merchan. The comments soon turned ugly. Some called for Merchan and other judges hearing cases against Trump to be killed.
“Treason is a hangable offense,” one wrote.
“They should all be executed,” added another.
The April 23 post by Trump and the menacing responses from his followers illustrate the incendiary impact of his angry and incessant broadsides against the judges handling the criminal and civil suits against him. As his presidential campaign intensifies, Trump has baselessly cast the judges and prosecutors in his trials as corrupt puppets of the Biden administration, bent on torpedoing his White House bid.
The rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence. In a review of commenters’ posts on three pro-Trump websites, including the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Reuters documented more than 150 posts since March 1 that called for physical violence against the judges handling three of his highest-profile cases – two state judges in Manhattan and one in Georgia overseeing a criminal case in which Trump is accused of illegally seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Those posts were part of a larger pool of hundreds identified by Reuters that used hostile, menacing and, in some cases, racist or sexualized language to attack the judges, but stopped short of explicitly calling for violence against them.
Experts on extremism say the constant repetition of threatening or menacing language can normalize the idea of violence – and increase the risk of someone carrying it out. Mitch Silber, a former New York City Police Department director of intelligence analysis, compared the Trump supporters now calling for violence against judges to the U.S. Capitol rioters who believed they were following Trump’s “marching orders” on Jan. 6, 2021.
“This is just the 2023-2024 iteration of that phenomenon,” Silber said. “Articulating these ideas is the first step along the pathway of mobilizing to violence.”
Read more at the Reuters link.
A tidbit from the hush money trial from HuffPost: Lawyer: Stormy Daniels Wore A Bulletproof Vest To Court For Trump Trial Testimony.
Stormy Daniels took major precautions to protect herself while testifying in Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial, according to her lawyer.
Stormy Daniels leaving the Trump trial wearing bulletproof vest
Attorney Clark Brewster appeared on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” on Monday, where he revealed how the adult film star wore a bulletproof vest underneath her clothes “every day” until she got to the Manhattan courthouse where the trial is taking place.
“She was concerned about the security coming into New York,” Brewster told host Anderson Cooper and the show’s panelists.
Offering some insight into Daniels’ headspace during the trial, Brewster said, “I can tell you that before she came on Sunday, I mean, she cried herself to sleep.”
“She was paralyzed with fear, not of taking the stand or telling her story, but what some nut might do to her,” he continued. “And I’m genuinely concerned about it as well.”
I don’t blame her.
One more on the Trump trials from Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Trump’s run-out-the-clock legal strategy worked.
No matter what happens with Donald Trump’s other criminal cases, we’ll always have New York, where he’s been walloped with two sets of civil penalties and is currently sleeping through his hush-money/election interference criminal trial.
Unfortunately, despite four indictments, it looks like New York is the only trial that will take place before the 2024 election. With more than a little help from his friends, Trump’s delay tactics have been remarkably successful, and he probably won’t see the inside of another criminal courtroom any time soon.
Last week, Trump appointee Judge Aileen Cannon issued a bizarre order that indefinitely delayed Trump’s trial for his mishandling of classified national security documents. It’s the culmination of months of foot-dragging on Cannon’s part, and it’s one that legal experts agree looks equal parts deliberate and incompetent.
Cannon’s May 7 order set 14 pretrial deadlines, vacated the May 20, 2024, trial date that had been tentatively set, and just didn’t bother to set a new one. Her reasoning? Setting a trial date would be “imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA [Classified Information Procedures Act] issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury.”
That sounds plausible until you remember that Cannon herself is solely responsible for delays in addressing pretrial issues. It’s the judicial equivalent of running around in a hot dog costume declaring that “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this.” Her behavior is so obviously favorable to the former president that one Republican close to Trump told Rolling Stone Cannon is his “favorite member of the Trump campaign,” while another Trump adviser called her “a godsend.”
On the January 6th case:
In addition to Cannon, Trump is getting help from the US Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his absurd immunity claim in the January 6 election interference case — one that Trump’s own lawyer admitted would allow a president to order assassinations of political opponents.
In December 2023, special prosecutor Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to take the question on an expedited basis but they declined. This meant that the DC Circuit Court of Appeals had to hear the appeal first.
The DC Circuit ruled against Trump on February 6, 2024, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on February 22. Apparently, the Supreme Court didn’t see the issue as particularly pressing and set oral arguments for April 25. During oral arguments, the Court’s conservative wing signaled they didn’t necessarily buy the entirety of Trump’s immunity argument but, as Liz Dye wrote, they “seemed to think the question of whether the president has to obey the laws of this land is a major head scratcher.”
The Georgia case is also “on hold indefinitely”:
The calendar also doesn’t favor the prosecution in the Georgia case, where Trump is charged with racketeering, false statements, forgery, witness tampering, and election fraud. However, where the classified documents and January 6 cases have dragged on with the assistance of Trump appointees, the roadblocks in the Georgia case are mainly the fault of the prosecutor, Fani Willis.
Willis hired her boyfriend, Nathan Wade, as a special prosecutor on the case, and when one of Trump’s co-defendants found out, he moved to dismiss the indictment and disqualify Willis. After a hearing in February, the presiding judge ruled the following month that Willis would not be disqualified. But Trump and eight of his co-defendants asked the Georgia Court of Appeals to allow them to appeal the decision, and last week, the appellate court agreed to hear the case.
No dates for briefing or oral argument have been set. The appellate court has roughly six months to hear and decide the case, which means a decision could come as late as November. Also, the trial court judge will probably refrain from setting a trial date until this is decided.
Unless the Georgia appellate courts move with unusual swiftness, Willis’s misstep here handed Trump the considerable gift of delaying the trial past the election.
At least it does appear that we’ll get a verdict in the New York case, but all this is very dispiriting.
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you find something of interest here.
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