“The court’s order hamstrings that investigation and places the FBI and Department of Justice … under a Damoclean threat of contempt,” DOJ lawyers said in their 29-page filing, adding, “It also irreparably harms the government by enjoining critical steps of an ongoing criminal investigation and needlessly compelling disclosure of highly sensitive records, including to [Trump’s] counsel.”
Mostly Monday Reads: Republican Culture Wars and Greed threaten democracy
Posted: June 5, 2023 Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: Abortion bans, Abortion horror stories, Casey DeSantis, Elon Musk, Idiot Club, Insider Trading, Jack Dorsey, Nikki Haley, RFK Jr 19 Comments
@Repeat1968 has high expectations for the Foghorn/Leghorn performance artist in the Senate from the Gret State of Lousyana. Oh, wait!
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Wow! The Monday news streams show just how out of whack things have gotten. Corruption and Theocratic Fascism are just out-of-control at all levels of government. Today’s corruption story goes right to the heart of my expertise and that of my youngest daughter, who works the derivatives market daily for an investment company. Not many knew that an obscure pipeline in Virginia was at the heart of the recent Budget/Debt negotiations. It came out of the blue for just about everyone but insiders to the deal itself.
On Wall Street, analysts had mostly expected vague promises on energy permits to be included in a bill to raise the US debt ceiling. Yet, options trading suggests something bigger may have been in the offing.
On May 24 — several days before an agreement was announced — a huge bullish bet was made on Equitrans Midstream Corp., data compiled by Bloomberg show. The company is deeply involved in the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline. The wager involved snapping up 100,000 call options on the firm’s stock.
It proved prescient and wildly profitable within just a few days.
On May 27, White House and Republican lawmakers reached a deal that would give the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline the final approvals needed to complete the project.
Throughout April and much of May, negotiators from the White House and Congress went back and forth on broad-stroke parameters of an agreement. Almost until the very end, the details were closely held and in flux. Doubts lingered over whether a deal would be reached before the US was scheduled to run out of money in early June.
The legislation, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden on Saturday, forced action on permits for the project. On paper, the bet appears to have earned $7.5 million through Friday. It has some asking whether more than skill and luck played a role.
“My questions are: Who’s the trader? How sophisticated are they? And what are their connections to the government?” said Donald Sherman, chief counsel at the ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. He added the bet raises the specter of whether the parameters of the debt deal had somehow leaked out ahead of time.
Digging into whether a trade is improperly based on confidential information is notoriously difficult, especially when it involves market-moving news from inside the government. The rules are also rife with gray areas and ambiguities.
Officials, including members of Congress, are barred from trading on confidential information they learned in their position. But if, for example, someone overhears a Congressional staffer loudly mention a piece of information on the train, they’re likely in the clear.
There’s just so much weirdness going on in Republican-led legislation that really interferes with the civil liberties of the entire country that it’s hard to know where to start. This shocking article is from Tessa Stuart, writing for The Rolling Stone. “The Real Reason Republicans Want to Give Tax Breaks for Embryos. “Wisconsin lawmakers are trying to “clarify” the state’s 1849 abortion ban in a bid to make the wildly unpopular and anachronistic law palatable to modern voters.” What about all the frozen embryos stored in deep freeze?
REPUBLICANS IN THE Wisconsin legislature introduced a package of bills this week to “clarify” the state’s abortion ban, 174 years after it became law. The 1849 ban, which criminalizes abortion in every circumstance, except to save the pregnant person’s life, went back into effect last June after 50 years of obsolescence.
It’s a deeply unpopular law: By margins of 2 to 1, voters said it should be repealed in every single county where the question was on the ballot this April. (In a statewide judicial election held the same day, the pro-choice candidate — who, it is widely assumed, will vote to strike the ban down when it is challenged at the state Supreme Court next term — won by 11 points.)
But Republicans in Wisconsin can’t seem to grasp this obvious truth. Rather than repeal the 1849 ban, as Democrats have proposed, a group of GOP lawmakers — led by 32-year old Sen. Romaine Quinn — touted a total of four bills they hope will make the pre-Civil War law more palatable to modern Wisconsinites. Included in the package is an offer that has become trendy among antiabortion ideologues: tax breaks for embryos.
LRB-2486 would allow parents to claim an exemption on their tax returns for “unborn children for whom a fetal heartbeat has been detected.” Co-sponsor Rep. Donna Rozar made the proposal’s intent crystal clear: The bill, she said, “recognizes an unborn child as a distinct human being prior to birth by allowing the child to be claimed as a dependent.” The point isn’t to support Wisconsin families — the point is to change the definition of when life begins as part of an effort to enshrine in Wisconsin law the dangerous and dehumanizing concept of “fetal personhood.”
It’s all part of an effort to extend Constitutional rights to fertilized eggs — a legal theory that simultaneously revokes the rights of the individuals carrying those pregnancies.
Wisconsin Republicans aren’t the first to try this: Georgia’s Department of Revenue announced in August “any unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat” could be claimed as a dependent on state tax returns. The representative behind Georgia’s LIFE Act, which created the tax break, later admitted in a leaked video that the credit was all part of a gambit to get the Supreme Court to recognize fetal personhood: “We’re going to take this to the highest court in the land.”
The consequences of a ruling recognizing fetal personhood are difficult to overstate: The moment that an embryo is recognized as a person with rights, virtually any behavior that poses any kind of risk to a pregnancy can be criminalized or litigated. In one infamous case, an Alabama woman was charged with manslaughter for losing her pregnancy after she was shot in the stomach by another person. (That case was dismissed after a public outcry.) In another instance, a court allowed a woman who was hit by a car while seven months pregnant to be sued by her future child for negligence because she failed to use “a designated crosswalk.”
Wisconsin Republicans apparently think bodily autonomy comes pretty cheap: the credit they’re offering is $1,000. That’s one-third of the tax break you can get in Georgia, in case you’re comparison shopping dystopian hellscapes.
Also included in the package of bills is $1 million in funding for crisis pregnancy centers, $5 million in funding to support state adoption programs, and language to clarify that the 1849 ban does not apply to “a medical procedure or treatment designed or intended to prevent the death of a pregnant woman.” Dr. Kristin Lyerly, an OB-GYN who stopped practicing in Wisconsin when the ban went into effect and a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the law, says the new language would do little to alleviate the burden on healthcare providers.
“Imagine if you had chest pain, and you went to the emergency department, and your doctors said, ‘Yes, I know exactly what to do to take care of you, but the Wisconsin legislature has enacted some laws that could potentially put me in jail for doing the things that I know to be medically correct, let me call a lawyer before I take care of you,’” Lyerly says. “Now replace ‘chest pain’ with ‘vaginal bleeding.’ It is exactly the same thing. Our legislature is preventing doctors from taking care of Wisconsinites, from providing evidence-based, appropriate, standard-of-care medicine, and threatening to throw us in jail.”
It remains unclear if the new proposal has sufficient support to advance through both houses of the Wisconsin legislature. A previous proposal, floated in March, that would have added exceptions for rape and incest to the 1849 law failed to advance to a vote on the Senate floor. (“Discussion on this specific proposal is unnecessary,” Republican Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said at the time.) But there is reason to believe this proposal might be viewed differently: The most prominent anti abortion groups in the state — Wisconsin Family Action, Pro-Life Wisconsin, Wisconsin Right to Life and the Catholic Conference — all of whom opposed the rape and incest exceptions, have announced support for the package.
If Republicans in Wisconsin truly wanted to support mothers, there is an existing proposal they could throw their weight behind: a bill that would expand Medicaid coverage for new mothers for up to one year. Today, Wisconsin is one of only a handful of states that kicks new moms off of public health care coverage just 60 days after giving birth. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has repeatedly pushed for a 12-month extension — a proposal that was rejected by Republicans in the legislature twice before. But expansion is particularly critical in Wisconsin now that the 1849 law is back in effect: Multiple studies have shown that the rate of maternal mortality spikes in states with abortion bans.
“More moms die in the postpartum period than when they’re pregnant or during the time of delivery. The postpartum period is a really important time for moms to be able to get medical care,” Lyerly says. Republican lawmakers, Lyerly says, “are not making logical decisions. All of the decisions that they are making are so political and so divisive — and not in the best interests of Wisconsinites and Wisconsin families.”
Ron DeSantis is so unlikeable and failing with the press so badly, that his wife, Casey, is stepping in to make him more human. We should have a vote-off. Who is more lizard-like Ted Cruz or Ron? Rumor has it that Casey sees herself as Jackie O. I wish I could stop right there, but it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t jump down that rabbit hole. This is from The Daily Beast as opined by Katie Baker. “Casey DeSantis Is the Walmart Melania. She’d better hope that pleather is pudding-proof.”
The First Lady of Florida showed up on the campaign trail in Iowa this weekend wearing a ghastly black leather jacket—American flag on front, an alligator and the silhouette of her state on the back, with the sneering words, “Where Woke Goes to Die”—that brought to mind nothing so much as the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99.
To be fair, Casey DeSantis wore the bomber to a charity biker rally and I’m sure the campaign intended it to be a viral moment, like Melania Trump’s infamous “I Really Don’t Care” coat that the former First Lady donned to check out the border crisis.
The message on Melania’s coat, like the one-time model herself, was sphinxlike. Was it a sign to the outside that Melania dreamed of escaping her boorish husband, the stuff of a thousand Resistance Twitter fever memes? Was it the physical manifestation of the Trumps’ casual cruelty? After all, Melania was flying down to where the administration locked up little kids in cages and tore them from the arms of their desperate parents. Did it mean nothing at all, like her spox insisted—maybe like Melania herself, a cipher whose eyes seem to betray an inner emptiness, like the infinite refraction of mirrored light off of all those gold-plated Trump Tower bathroom fixtures?
By contrast, Casey DeSantis’ coat is just like her husband Ron DeSantis’ campaign: Crude. Grasping. Saying the ugly part out loud. Whereas Trump would wink-wink at the fascists—who can forget his dog whistle to the “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville—DeSantis wants to peel off Trump’s base by being even more explicit about who he intends to target. You can see it right there on his wife’s jacket: DeSantis’ Florida is where the woke go to die—and a lot of other people die as well.
Florida under DeSantis has had one of the highest COVID death rates in the nation, even as he’s exulted in his anti-mask policies. And as the governor whips up anti-LGBT sentiment and bans books on race, Casey’s jacket and its message of death also bring to mind the horrific Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, not to mention the state’s shameful history of Jim Crow-era lynch mobs and the Rosewood massacre. But of course, DeSantis and his cronies want to prevent kids from learning about any of that by censoring their library books and AP curricula.
The jacket, then, is a warning: Watch out, America.
It’s hard to say one is reading too much into a coat that’s so explicit—and anyways, as The New York Timesnoted in a fawning profile, Casey DeSantis is definitely trying to make a political statement with what she wears, with her aspirations of “Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago.” But while Casey may be trying to position herself after Jackie Kennedy (good luck) and even Melania, if this weekend is any indication, she’s falling far short. It doesn’t matter how many times she wears that ice-blue Badgley Mischka cape-dress. The DeSantis’ will never be Camelot. Jackie and JFK symbolized the opposite of vulgar pettiness—they embodied youth, energy, a commitment to moral progress in the struggle for Civil Rights, a country fresh with idealism. Not an America that was obsessed with banning books about male seahorses and rainbows, or nuking the latest Disney movie.
We could also poll to see which media outlet wreaks bothersiderism all over its pages and the screen. It’s a tie between Jack Tapper’s fact-free zone interview with Nikki Haley and the New York Times’s surreal coverage. Both will give you the icks. Mark Jacobs, former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times characterized it thusly.
The New York Times gives Nikki Haley an embarrassing smooch today for her “reasoned manner”even though Haley blamed trans athletes for causing teen girls’ suicidal thoughts, an outrageous and fact-free accusation. 1/3 nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/
Suicide rates of teen girls and bi and gay children are high beyond the pale and should not be minimized or used for political fodder. This is from a February article in the New York Times discussing the real statistics. “Teen Girls Report Record Levels of Sadness, C.D.C. Finds. Adolescent girls reported high rates of sadness, suicidal thoughts, and sexual violence, as did teenagers who identified as gay or bisexual.”
Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide, according to data released on Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found.
The rates of sadness are the highest reported in a decade, reflecting a long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic.
“I think there’s really no question what this data is telling us,” said Dr. Kathleen Ethier, head of the C.D.C.’s adolescent and school health program. “Young people are telling us that they are in crisis.”
…
But about 57 percent of girls and 69 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual teenagers reported feeling sadness every day for at least two weeks during the previous year. And 14 percent of girls, up from 12 percent in 2011, said they had been forced to have sex at some point in their lives, as did 20 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual adolescents.
“When we’re looking at experiences of violence, girls are experiencing almost every type of violence more than boys,” said Dr. Ethier of the C.D.C. Researchers should be studying not only the increase in reports of violence, she said, but its causes: “We need to talk about what’s happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.”
The researchers also analyzed the data by race and ethnicity, finding that Black and Hispanic students were more likely to report skipping school because of concerns about violence. White students, however, were more likely to report experiencing sexual violence.
And this is the last sentence in this article. “The 2021 survey asked about students’ sexual orientation but did not ask about their gender identity, so data on risk factors for transgender students is not available.”
Haley also weasel-worded her way through drastic abortion restrictions. This observation is from Digby.
I want to emphasize what my Ob/Gyn Dr. Daughter repeatedly tells me. There is no such thing as abortion after the point of viability. It’s a delivery. Successful or unsuccessful delivery depends on all kinds of factors. Haley obviously should be fact-checked, and I find none of this even slightly reasonable. So, I’ll just give the Bronx Cheer to Jack Tapper for not ‘veering into fact check-in’ and the New York Times’s Trip Gabriel for finding anything she said ‘reasonable’.
The Tennesee anti-choice law took the fertility of one woman last week. “Tennessee mother forced to undergo emergency hysterectomy after being denied life-saving abortion. Mayron Hollis was desperate to have a life-saving abortion. But due to Tennessee’s abortion laws, doctors feared they would end up in prison if they carried out the procedure” This is from The Guardian.
A Tennessee woman has been left infertile after being forced to undergo an emergency hysterectomy when doctors refused her an abortion.
Mayron Hollis, 32, learned she was pregnant soon after giving birth to her first daughter Zoe in February last year.
But her excitement at becoming a mother again soon turned into a battle for survival when she said she was denied a medically necessary abortion by doctors in the state after Roe vs Wade was overturned.
According to ProPublica, obsetricians at Vanderbilt University Medical Center grew concerned last August when she was eleven weeks pregnant after the embryo became implanted in scar tissue from the birth of her first child by caesarean section.
They feared that the ectopic pregnancy could rupture her uterus at any moment, which could lead to excessive bleeding and even death, according to the National Institute of Health.
But on the day of her treatment, 24 August last year, Tennessee was hours away from enacting one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, which would see any doctor who terminated a pregnancy imprisoned for up to 15 years.
The trigger ban automatically went into effect after women’s federally protected abortion rights were overturned by the Supreme Court last June.
Ms Hollis told ABC News that doctors did not explain to her prior to 24 August that she only had a narrow window to receive the life-saving abortion.
A lack of clarity from the state lawmakers who passed the bill meant that doctors, institutions and even criminal attorneys were unsure if the abortion might end up in a prosecution, ProPublica reported.
We’ve found a lot of Democratic candidates that don’t seem to fit their party affiliation recently. They generally get a lot of attention from Republicans, and that’s your first warning. Tech Weirdos Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk have jumped on the RFK jr campaign bus. Seems they all love Bitcoin and hate vaccines. It’s a weird news day when I keep having to quote from Fortune. Here’s one from The Daily Beast too.
Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has endorsed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president, posting video of a Fox News segment with anchor Harris Faulkner from last week in which the 2024 candidate said he could beat the top contenders in the race. The videoshows Kennedy claiming that internal polling reveals that he is “stronger against both the Republican candidates than Joe Biden.” It was reposted on Twitter by Dorsey with the comment: “He can and will.” When questioned by a Twitter user if Dorsey was endorsing or simply predicting the Democrat’s win, Dorsey replied, “Both.” He claimed RFK Jr.’s voice—Kennedy has a lifelong neurological disorder called spasmodic dysphonia that affects the voice and speech—was his “super power and set him apart.” Dorsey agreed with another Twitter user that the Democratic National Committee “would never allow” RFK Jr. to win the nomination but argued: “True but they seem to be more irrelevant by the day,” while adding “all the more reason” to back him as candidate. Kennedy is set to appear in a Twitter Spaces chat Monday with Elon Musk. Dorsey replied at the time of Musk’s invitation: “This would be great.”
I’m not sure how much I can take of this. But this is some expected news. No profit-seeking corporation wants to be associated with the trash Elon Musk keeps bringing to the Twitter Party. Again, from the New York Times. “Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue .”
Twitter’s ad sales staff is concerned that advertisers may be spooked by a rise in hate speech and pornography on the social network, as well as more ads featuring online gambling and marijuana products, the people said. The company has forecast that its U.S. ad revenue this month will be down at least 56 percent each week compared with a year ago, according to one internal document.
I just find it extremely hard to use now. It also freezes continually. It’s basically gone back to AOL 1990s style.
Well, today, I will celebrate Pride Month with virtual Mike Pence. I’ll also spend time wondering how I managed to fit both my daughters into one blog post. I will mention I worry seriously about the U.S.A. my two granddaughters will inherit from us.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: Trump-Ish
Posted: June 2, 2023 Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: 2024 Bottomless Republican Primary 7 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
There are a lot of headlines today on all the Trump Crime Sprees. Today’s news focuses on the insurrection, the stolen secret documents, and the racketeering law that will likely hold the Gang that Can’t Shit Straight’s election interference.
The most challenging question today is where to start. Let’s go with the Insurrection. “Former FBI agent from Bend indicted on felony charges stemming from Jan. 6 riot.” Wait just a minute! I thought all FBI agents were woke!
A federal grand jury indicted a former FBI agent from Bend Thursday on felony charges stemming from his alleged involvement with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The Washington, D.C., grand jury accused Jared Wise, 49, of civil disorder and assaulting, resisting and impeding officers, both of which are felonies, according to a Thursday press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Wise allegedly called on rioters to kill police officers as they fought back against the mob that attempted to disrupt a joint session of Congress certifying President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, the justice department said.
Federal prosecutors say that police body camera footage shows Wise — who moved to Bend in June 2022 — shouting expletives as law enforcement was being knocked to the ground in front of him and that he said: “Yeah, kill ‘em!”
This one is from The Washington Post. “Georgia probe of Trump broadens to activities in other states.”
An Atlanta-area investigation of alleged election interference by former president Donald Trump and his allies has broadened to include activities in Washington, D.C., and several other states, according to two people with knowledge of the probe — a fresh sign that prosecutors may be building a sprawling case under Georgia’s racketeering laws.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) launched an investigation more than two years ago to examine efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his narrow 2020 defeat in Georgia. Along the way, she has signaled publicly that she may use Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute to allege that these efforts amounted to a far-reaching criminal scheme.
In recent days, Willis has sought information related to the Trump campaign hiring two firms to find voter fraud across the United States and then burying their findings when they did not find it, allegations that reach beyond Georgia’s borders, said the two individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the investigation. At least one of the firms has been subpoenaed by Fulton County investigators.
Willis’s investigation is separate from the one at the Department of Justice being led by special counsel Jack Smith, but the two probes have covered some of the same ground. Willis has said she plans to make a charging decision this summer, and she has indicated that such an announcement could come in early August. She has faced stiff criticism from Republicans for investigating the former president, and the ever-widening scope suggests just how ambitious her plans may be.
The state’s RICO statute is among the most expansive in the nation, allowing prosecutors to build racketeering cases around violations of both state and federal laws — and even activities in other states. If Willis does allege a multistate racketeering scheme with Trump at its center, the case could test the bounds of the controversial law and make history in the process. The statute calls for penalties of up to 20 years in prison.
“Georgia’s RICO statute is basically two specified criminal acts that have to be part of a pattern of behavior done with the same intent or to achieve a common result or that have distinguishing characteristics,” said John Malcolm, a former Atlanta-based federal prosecutor who is now a constitutional scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That’s it. It’s very broad. That doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to charge a former president, but that also doesn’t mean she can’t do it or won’t do it.”
This is from CNN. “Exclusive: Trump attorneys haven’t found classified document former president referred to on tape following subpoena.”
Attorneys for Donald Trump turned over material in mid-March in response to a federal subpoena related to a classified US military document described by the former president on tape in 2021 but were unable to find the document itself, two sources tell CNN.
Prosecutors issued the subpoena shortly after asking a Trump aide before a federal grand jury about the audio recording of a July 2021 meeting at Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. On the recording, Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran.
Prosecutors sought “any and all” documents and materials related to Mark Milley, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Iran, including maps or invasion plans, the sources say. A similar subpoena was sent to at least one other attendee of the meeting, another source tells CNN.
The sources say prosecutors made clear to Trump’s attorneys after issuing the subpoena that they specifically wanted the Iran document he talked about on tape as well as any material referencing classified information – like meeting notes, audio recordings or copies of the document – that may still be Trump’s possession.
The fact that Trump’s team was unable to produce the document underscores the challenges the government has faced in trying to recover classified material that Trump took when he left the White House and in understanding the movement of government records that Trump kept.
Over the course of the Justice Department’s investigation, prosecutors have expressed skepticism that all classified documents had been returned. The federal government recovered dozens of documents with classified markings from Trump at various points throughout 2022.
The sources say prosecutors made clear to Trump’s attorneys after issuing the subpoena that they specifically wanted the Iran document he talked about on tape as well as any material referencing classified information – like meeting notes, audio recordings or copies of the document – that may still be Trump’s possession.
The fact that Trump’s team was unable to produce the document underscores the challenges the government has faced in trying to recover classified material that Trump took when he left the White House and in understanding the movement of government records that Trump kept.
Over the course of the Justice Department’s investigation, prosecutors have expressed skepticism that all classified documents had been returned. The federal government recovered dozens of documents with classified markings from Trump at various points throughout 2022.
Most of these folks are headed to Iowa right now, but more interesting is this from HuffPost. “RNC Debate Rule May Prevent Rubio-Slayer Chris Christie From Doing The Same To Trump.”
The man who famously disassembled Sen. Marco Rubio on a Republican presidential debate stage in 2016 may be prevented from doing the same to coup-attempting former President Donald Trump under rules being considered by the Republican National Committee for its 2024 primary debates.
Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and loyal Trump supporter who broke from him over his words and deeds after the 2020 election, is expected to announce his presidential campaign next week. He has openly said he plans to confront Trump about his “stolen” election lies and his actions leading up to and during the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, even as other candidates have shied away from criticizing Trump at all.
“If it takes a bully to beat a bully?” said one Christie adviser on condition of anonymity, acknowledging the criticisms of his brash personality. “At least Chris believes in the system. He’s read the Constitution.”
But such a showdown may not come to pass because of a proposed requirement that candidates must have at least 40,000 unique donors to make the first scheduled debate in August ― a threshold Christie, who had difficulty raising small-dollar donations when he ran in 2016, may not be able to meet in just two months.
“I definitely think the RNC rules were built to help Trump,” said Tim Miller, a former RNC communications director.
“In 2020, the RNC canceled 22 primaries and caucuses to protect their king,” said Joe Walsh, the former Republican congressman who ran against Trump in the 2020 primary. “This time around they can’t cancel primaries and caucuses, but they’ll still do all they can do to protect their king, like making it as hard as possible for challengers to debate him. Yes, the RNC will do all they can to keep Christie and any other Trump-critical candidate off that stage.”
Ron DeSantis is not catching up to Trump in Polls. This is from Yahoo News. “Poll: No bump for DeSantis from 2024 launch as Trump continues to climb .”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was surely hoping for abump from his presidential campaign launch last week. But a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows no sign of improvement.
In fact, the survey of 1,520 U.S. adults, which was conducted from May 25-30, suggests that DeSantis may have actually lostgroundagainst frontrunner and former President Donald Trump since officially entering the race for the 2024 GOP nomination during a glitchy Twitter Spaces event with the platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk.
Among potential Republican primary voters — registered voters who identify as Republicans or GOP-leaning independents — Trump now leads the full field of seven declared candidates with 53%. That’s up from 48% in early May, before DeSantis threw his hat in the ring. And DeSantis now lags further behind than he did just a few weeks ago; his 25% is down from 28% in early May.
Put another way, DeSantis trailed Trump by 20 points in the previous Yahoo News/YouGov poll. Today, he trails by 28 points.
None of the remaining candidates — former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (3%), Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (1%), South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott (3%), tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (3%) or radio host Larry Elder (1%) — clear the 5% threshold.
A hypothetical two-way matchup, meanwhile, is no better for DeSantis, with Trump leading 55% to 31% (up from 50% to 36% in early May).
Iowa was the site of Trump’s town hall. Seven people showed up to see Hannity play softball.
It’s going to be a long campaign season. I’m waiting for the start of Lock Him Up Season to start personally,
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Totally Tuesday Reads: Mounting Trump Troubles
Posted: May 23, 2023 Filed under: Republican politics, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: Clementine Hunter, Reproductive Health Care, stolen documents, Trump Foreign Business Dealings 24 Comments
Saturday Night Clementine Hunter (1886/87–1988) Melrose Plantation, Natchitoches, Louisiana c. 1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m still trying to recover and finish up with the usual end-of-term things. I took some time last night to catch up with some of the headlines. I thought I’d share the work of Black American Folk Artist Clementine Hunter with you since the Juneteenth holiday is approaching. It’s always a good time to remind Republicans that Black Americans have made unique contributions to our country.
The Stolen Documents Case is heating up for Donald Trump. We learned last night that “Prosecutors Sought Records on Trump’s Foreign Business Deals Since 2017. The special counsel scrutinizing the former president’s handling of classified documents issued a subpoena to the Trump Organization seeking records related to seven countries.” Is that the sounds of chickens coming home to roost I hear? It’s just the feral roosters wandering the canal behind my house crowing their little beaks off, but it seems like an appropriate sound effect. This is reported by the New York Times.
Federal prosecutors overseeing the investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of classified documents have issued a subpoena for information about Mr. Trump’s business dealings in foreign countries since he took office, according to two people familiar with the matter.
It remains unclear precisely what the prosecutors were hoping to find by sending the subpoena to Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, or when it was issued. But the subpoena suggests that investigators have cast a wider net than previously understood as they scrutinize whether he broke the law in taking sensitive government materials with him upon leaving the White House and then not fully complying with demands for their return.
The subpoena — drafted by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith — sought details on the Trump Organization’s real estate licensing and development dealings in seven countries: China, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, according to the people familiar with the matter. The subpoena sought the records for deals reached since 2017, when Mr. Trump was sworn in as president.
The Trump Organization swore off any foreign deals while he was in the White House, and the only such deal Mr. Trump is known to have made since then was with a Saudi-based real estate company to license its name to a housing, hotel and golf complex that will be built in Oman. He struck that deal last fall just before announcing his third presidential campaign.
The push by Mr. Smith’s prosecutors to gain insight into the former president’s foreign business was part of a subpoena — previously reported by The New York Times — that was sent to the Trump Organization and sought records related to Mr. Trump’s dealings with a Saudi-backed golf venture known as LIV Golf, which is holding tournaments at some of his golf clubs. (Mr. Trump’s arrangement with LIV Golf was reached well after he removed documents from the White House.)
Clementine Hunter Mural. In 1955, at the age of 68, Hunter painted the top floor of the African House (an outbuilding of Melrose Plantation) during a three-month period. The painting consisted of nine large panels and several small connecting panels which encircled the room and depicted the story of the Cane River country.
Yes. Indeed! That’s the sound of Donald’s Karma ripening. Here’s more. This is from CNBC. “Trump faces $10 million defamation claim by E. Jean Carroll after CNN town hall remarks.” The power of narcissism compels him!
E. Jean Carroll filed court papers Monday seeking “very substantial” monetary damages from Donald Trump for making scathing remarks about her at a CNN town hall a day after the former president lost a $5 million lawsuit to the writer.
Carroll now is seeking no less than $10 million from Trump in damages in her original lawsuit in light of what he said May 10 on CNN.
The move came as her lawyers asked a Manhattan federal court judge for permission to amend that first defamation lawsuit, which she lodged against Trump in 2019, to reflect his new statements on CNN about her, which they say also are defamatory.
“Trump’s defamatory statements post-verdict show the depth of his malice toward Carroll since it is hard to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill will, or spite,” the proposed amended complaint said.
“This conduct supports a very substantial punitive damages award in Carroll’s favor both to punish Trump, to deter him from engaging in further defamation, and to deter others from doing the same,” the complaint said.
Carroll’s second lawsuit, filed in late 2022 and alleging rape and defamation, ended with a jury in that court after less than three hours of deliberations finding Trump liable for sexually abusing her and for defaming her last fall when he denied her allegations.
Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday, filed a notice of appeal of that verdict.
While we’re on the topic of that CNN “town hall” and Karma, let’s look at this headline! This is from Justin Baragona, writing for The Daily Beast: “Here’s How Bad CNN’s Post-Trump Town Hall Ratings Have Been.”
More than a week after CNN’s disastrous town hall with former President Donald Trump, the negative impact the fiasco had on the network’s ratings is coming into clearer focus. Last week, the cable news pioneer suffered its lowest-rated week since June 2015, averaging just 429,000 total daily viewers from Monday-Friday. CNN was also down double digits compared to the same week last year in both total viewership and in the key advertising demographic of viewers ages 25-54. MSNBC more than doubled CNN’s daily audience, drawing 976,000 total viewers, while Fox News averaged 1.4 million. Fox News was down 41 percent in the key demo year-to-year and 24 percent in total viewers, having seen its ratings plummet as angry right-wingers flee after Tucker Carlson’s shock firing. In fact, Fox’s post-Tucker weekday demo audience is the lowest its been since the first week of September 2001. Ratings data shows that primetime is where both Fox and CNN are suffering the most. Since the town hall, CNN has seen several of its weeknight hours—including Anderson Cooper—fall behind Newsmax, the fringe-right channel that has surged since Carlson’s ouster. And on Friday night, the channel’s much-hyped interview show hosted by Chris Wallace averaged only 224,000 total viewers at 10 p.m., drawing 60,000 fewer viewers than Newsmax’s offering. While Fox News still led in both total and demo viewership in weeknight primetime last week, the conservative cable giant’s overall audience was down 38 percent and the demo viewership dropped an eye-popping 60 percent. MSNBC, on the other hand, saw its demo audience shoot up 44 percent.
Clementine Hunter “Playing Cards, circa 1970.
Way to divide the country even more, you idiots! The fallout from the overturn of Roe v. Wade continues. This is from NPR. It’s written by Julie Rovner. “Abortion bans drive off doctors and close clinics, putting other health care at risk.” This doesn’t sound “pro-life” at all to me.
The rush in conservative states to ban abortion after the overturn of Roe v. Wade is resulting in a startling consequence that abortion opponents may not have considered: fewer medical services available for all women living in those states.
Doctors are showing — through their words and actions — that they are reluctant to practice in places where making the best decision for a patient could result in huge fines or even a prison sentence. And when clinics that provide abortions close their doors, all the other services offered there also shut down, including regular exams, breast cancer screenings, and contraception.
The concern about repercussions for women’s health is being raised not just by abortion rights advocates. One recent warning comes from Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general in the Trump administration and is now working on health equity issues at Purdue University in Indiana.
In a recent tweet thread, Adams wrote that “the tradeoff of a restricted access (and criminalizing doctors) only approach to decreasing abortions could end up being that you actually make pregnancy less safe for everyone, and increase infant and maternal mortality.”
Untitled (Miss Cammie with Ducks) by Clementine Hunter, ca. 1965
Thank goodness my daughter’s practice in Seattle, Washington, is safe from this nonsense. Still, it is certainly creating horrid problems in my state and the surrounding states where Republicans have hurried to end access to reproductive care. Michelle Goldberg writes this Op-Ed for the New York Times today about the lives of 13 women in Texas. “You Cannot Hear These 13 Women’s Stories and Believe the Anti-Abortion Narrative.”
It’s increasingly clear that it’s not safe to be pregnant in states with total abortion bans. Since the end of Roe v. Wade, there have been a barrage of gutting stories about women in prohibition states denied care for miscarriages or forced to continue nonviable pregnancies. Though some in the anti-abortion movement publicly justify this sort of treatment, others have responded with a combination of denial, deflection and conspiracy theorizing.
Some activists have blamed the pro-choice movement for spooking doctors into not intervening when pregnancies go horribly wrong. “Abortion advocates are spreading the dangerous lie that lifesaving care is not or may not be permitted in these states, leading to provider confusion and poor outcomes for women,” said a report by the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute.
Others have suggested that doctors are deliberately refusing miscarriage treatment, apparently to make anti-abortion laws look bad. “What we’re seeing, I fear, is doctors with an agenda saying, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do’ when, in fact, they do,” the president of Ohio Right to Life said last year.
A new filing in a Texas lawsuit demolishes these arguments. In March, five women represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights sued Texas after enduring medical nightmares when they were refused abortions for pregnancies that had gone awry. Since then, the Center for Reproductive Rights says it has heard from dozens of women in Texas with similar accounts. And this week, eight more women, each with her own harrowing story, joined the suit, which asks a state district court to clarify the scope of emergency medical exceptions to Texas’ abortion ban.
Other Republican Culture War Craziness continues throughout the country. Texas and Florida continue to lead the insanity. “Miami-Dade K-8 bars elementary students from 4 library titles following parent complaint.”
A K-8 school in Miami-Dade County last month issued restrictions for elementary-aged students on three books and one poem after a parent objected to five titles, claiming they included topics that were inappropriate for students and should be removed “from the total environment.” The move — which allows for middle school students at the school to access the titles — is the latest example of districts and schools across the state restricting or removing books from libraries in recent months. For Stephana Ferrell, the director of research and insight at Florida Freedom to Read Project, it underscores a growing trend to redefine what is considered age appropriate, “especially regarding books that address ethnicities, marginalized communities, racism or our history of racism.”
“Books written for students grades K-5 are being pushed to middle school [libraries and] out of reach for the students they were intended for,” she said. The books aren’t being banned from the district, she argued, “but they’re banned for the students they were intended for.” In March, Daily Salinas, a parent of two students at at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes, challenged The ABCs of Black History, Cuban Kids, Countries in the News Cuba, the poem The Hills We Climb, which was recited by poet Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, and Love to Langston for what she said included references of critical race theory, “indirect hate messages,” gender ideology and indoctrination, according to records obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project and shared with the Miami Herald. In an interview with the Herald on Monday, Salinas said she “is not for eliminating or censoring any books.” Instead, she wants materials to be appropriate and for students “to know the truth” about Cuba, she said in Spanish. Get unlimited digital access.
This brings questions. How illiterate do they want our children to be? How disenfranchised do they want them to feel? Can they actually read?
As recently as 2020, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was one of the most frequently challenged books nationwide, largely because of its use of racial slurs, according to the American Library Association.
Today, members of the same political coalition that once mocked progressives for demanding “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” wish to shield children from the potential trauma of reading “Heather Has Two Mommies.” Those who once admonished students for being snowflakes now apparently believe children are too fragile to mount a musical with a gay character — or access reference books on puberty.
Butamid debates about how children will process texts invoking racism or sexual identity, a much more basic question plagues our educational system: whether children can process texts, period.
Parents around the country generally think their children have recovered from disruptions to schooling during the pandemic, surveys show. They haven’t. As of last spring, students were on average half a year behind in math and one-third of a year behind in reading, according to research from a team at Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins and the testing company NWEA.
Not that the U.S. educational system was so impressive relative to thosein our peer countries pre-covid, either.
In Oklahoma, which ranks 49th in education nationwide, the state’s top school official is devoting energy to banning use of the word “diverse” in computer science curriculums because it is too “woke.” In a telling Florida incident, a science teacher was investigated this month for showing her students a Disney film. Her transgression, apparently, was featuring a movie with a gay character — not, as you might imagine, screening a fictional film as an ecology lesson. (I speak as a product of the Florida school system, where my seventh-grade physics unit revolved around a screening of “Flubber.”)
It is dishearteningthat the culture wars have come for not just lesson plans but librarians, too. Librarians are instrumental in promoting literacy. They guide students toward texts that will absorb and engage them. They nudge kids toward books, films, periodicals and online resources that will answer burning, sometimes embarrassing questions.
Window Shade by Clementine Hunter, 1950s
So, what motivates a 19-year-old Asian-American from Missouri to do this? “19-year-old arrested on multiple charges after crashing into barriers near the White House. The suspect, identified as Sai Varshith Kandula, made threatening statements about the White House at the scene of Monday night’s incident, a law enforcement official told NBC News. A Nazi flag was seized by authorities at the scene.”
A 19-year-old Missouri man, accused of driving a truck into barriers near the White House, made incriminating statements that have led investigators to believe he was seeking to harm the president, officials said Tuesday.
The driver was Sai Varshith Kandula of Chesterfield, U.S. Park Police said Tuesday morning.
The charges against Kandula for allegedly “threatening to kill, kidnap, inflict harm on a president, vice president, or family member,” stem from statements he made to multiple law enforcement agencies, according to a Secret Service representative.
The suspect was interviewed by Secret Service investigators Monday night, the agency representative said, during the ongoing probe that also involves United States Park Police, the FBI and U.S. Capitol Police.
Kandula was further charged with assault with a dangerous weapon, reckless operation of a motor vehicle and trespassing.
My next question is, why this guy identifies with NAZIs? That’s an Indian surname. This hate stuff is just freaking confusing.
I think I need a nap and food or both. Have a great week!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: September 17, 2022 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Criminal Justice System, Donald Trump, U.S. Politics | Tags: Department of Justice, Jeffrey Clark, Judge Aileen Cannon, Mark Meadows, Patrick Philbin 15 Comments
Cats by a fishbowl, Horatio Henry Couldery
Happy Caturday!!
Late last night the Department of Justice appealed Judge Loose Cannon’s ruling in the battle over the classified documents that Trump stole on his way out of the White House.
Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News: Justice Department asks appeals court to block Trump judge’s Mar-a-Lago ruling.
The Department of Justice is asking a federal appeals court to temporarily block a Trump-appointed judge’s ruling that prevents it from accessing hundreds of pages of classified records seized amid the thousands of pages of government documents taken from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home.
“The district court has entered an unprecedented order enjoining the Executive Branch’s use of its own highly classified records in a criminal investigation with direct implications for national security,” the Justice Department wrote in its motion Friday.
The Justice Department hadpreviously argued that any delay in its investigation into Donald Trump’s handling and retention of government records, including classified records, could result in “irreparable harm” to the government and the public….
The Justice Department on Friday argued that any considerations of claims for return of property or attorney-client and executive privilege were “categorically inapplicable to the records bearing classification markings.”
“Plaintiff has no claim for the return of those records, which belong to the government and were seized in a court-authorized search,” the Justice Department wrote.
Although Trump previously suggested he had declassified or designated documents seized from his home as “personal,” the Justice Department said he “has never represented that he in fact took either of those steps — much less supported such a representation with competent evidence. The court erred in granting extraordinary relief based on unsubstantiated possibilities.”
The Justice Department also argued that its request for a limited stay wouldn’t disrupt the special master’s review of other materials and “irreparably harms the government by enjoining critical steps of an ongoing criminal investigation and needlessly compelling disclosure of highly sensitive records, including to Plaintiff’s counsel.”
Cat in the Summer Meadow, by Bruno Liljefors
More from Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney at Politico: Justice Dept. asks appeals court to restore access to Trump raid documents.
In a filing with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta Friday night, prosecutors said the government is facing irreparable harm as a result of U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling putting the potentially classified records off-limits to the investigative team until an outside expert conducts a review of them and considers Trump’s objections to their seizure.
The Justice Department’s widely expected escalation of the legal fight came one day after the Trump-appointed judge rebuffed prosecutors’ request for a stay that would essentially carve out the national security-related records — some bearing markings such as “Top Secret/SCI” — from the outside oversight Trump’s legal team requested.
The filing was an unsparing rejection of Cannon’s handling of the entire matter, saying it has jeopardized national security, is based on flimsy or baseless interpretations of executive privilege and could enable further obstruction of efforts to recover additional missing documents.
“The government’s need to proceed apace is heightened where, as here, it has reason to believe that obstructive acts may impede its investigation,” prosecutors wrote….
The inability of federal prosecutors to advance their criminal probe has complicated separate efforts by the intelligence community to assess the harm that may have been caused by their improper storage in Trump’s unsecured storage room, prosecutors say, contending that the criminal investigation is inextricably tied to the national security review.
And prosecutors suggested that the restrictions on the FBI’s criminal work would prevent investigators from determining what may have once resided in dozens of empty folders, also bearing classification marks, found among Trump’s belongings.
“The injunction also appears to bar the FBI and DOJ from further reviewing the records to discern any patterns in the types of records that were retained, which could lead to identification of other records still missing,” prosecutors indicated in the filing.
This is from a column by Harry Litman at The Los Angeles Times: The Mar-a-Lago judge’s latest opinion is as atrocious as legal experts say it is.
The opinion’s essential flaws go well beyond straining the law and stretching facts in favor of Donald Trump. The ruling rests on the most basic dereliction of judicial responsibility, and it represents a complete departure from the bedrock principle of separation of powers.
Cannon was actually handed a graceful way back from her also broadly pilloried opinion last week, in which she had determined that a special master was required to review the government documents seized at Mar-a-Lago.
The Justice Department asked for a modest stay extending to only 100 pages of classified material found at the beach resort. It is beyond controversy that such documents are off-limits to a private citizen like the former president.
Trump’s lawyers did not try to contest that principle. Rather they argued, bizarrely, that just because the government said the documents were classified, it wasn’t necessarily so.
That, of course, is spectacular gibberish. The very meaning of classified documents is that the executive branch has made a determination about their content and marked them classified.
But Cannon adopted Trump’s Alice-in-Wonderland approach. She concluded that it would not be “appropriate” — the closest thing to legal reasoning in her opinion — “to accept the government’s conclusion on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third-party,” that is, a special master.
Cannon, in essence, is redefining the classification process to be simply a provisional executive branch judgment subject to overruling by individual judges such as herself. Apart from its legal bankruptcy, such a process would wreak bedlam in matters of national intelligence, which turn on the very designations that Cannon set aside.
More crazy from Judge Loose Cannon:
The Trump team’s next gambit, which the judge also adopted, was even more logically and legally threadbare. The former president has argued repeatedly in public that he declassified the documents. But his attorneys have studiously avoided saying that in court papers, where lies are subject to professional and criminal penalties. The Trump filings indicate only that he perhaps had declassified the documents.
The appropriate response for a judge in these circumstances is to put Trump on the stand and ask him, “Did you or didn’t you?” Failing that, “perhaps” means the matter is not established and the argument loses.
But Cannon either does not know or does not care what judges do in such a situation. It is important to emphasize that she isn’t simply leaning in Trump’s direction, she’s falling all over him.
Judges sit to resolve disputes, on the basis of evidence. Trump’s team offered none for his positions, relying instead on only the most speculative arguments. It is elementary to the adversary system of justice that evidence and the law, not speculation, determine outcomes. Nothing in the Trump team’s filings justifies freezing a criminal justice investigation and national intelligence review in their tracks.
The DOJ has appealed and now we’ll have to wait and see what the 11th Circuit judges have to say.
There were a couple of new revelations yesterday about people close to Trump and the stolen government documents.
The Washington Post: Trump team claimed boxes at Mar-a-Lago were only news clippings.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: September 13, 2022 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Donald Trump, U.S. Politics | Tags: Adam Kinzinger, Boris Epshteyn, Cassidy Hutchinson, Department of Justice, Dick Durbin, Geoffrey Berman, House January 6 Committee, House Oversight Committee, Mike Roman, National Archives, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Russia, Senate Judiciary Committee, Tony Ornato, Ukraine 15 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Early September Green Mountains (Vermont), by Frank Wilson
There’s a lot happening in the news today that isn’t about the British royal family; but you probably won’t see much about it on the cable channels–at least until the nighttime shows come on. Among other things, Ukraine is still winning the battle to get Russia to stop destroying their country; the Department of Justice is running multiple investigations of Trump and the January 6 conspiracies; the House January 6 Committee is getting up to speed for more hearings; and other Congressional investigations are cropping up.
Ukraine War
The Washington Post: ‘The Russians are in trouble,’ U.S. official says of latest war analysis.
A Ukrainian counteroffensive that has sent Russian forces into a hasty retreat could mark a turning point in the war and raise pressure on Moscow to call up additional forces if it hopes to prevent further Ukrainian advances, U.S. and Western officials said Monday.
Whether the gains are permanent depends on Russia’s next moves, especially whether President Vladimir Putin implements a military draft or orders reinforcements from elsewhere to offset heavy losses in Ukraine, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share recent intelligence analyses.
In mere days, Ukrainian military forces have retaken nearly all of the Kharkiv region that Russian forces occupied since the opening of the war. The rapidity of the pullback appears to have stunned Russian military troops and commanders, officials said.
“The Russians are in trouble,” one U.S. official said bluntly. “The question will be how the Russians will react, but their weaknesses have been exposed and they don’t have great manpower reserves or equipment reserves.”
Ukrainian forces appeared to be moving ahead carefully and consolidating their gains, another official said, noting that Russian forces seem to have recognized that they lacked the weapons and manpower to hold newly liberated towns and villages in the northeast of the country. Some Russian forces abandoned tanks, armored vehicles and ammunition as they fled.
Read more at the WaPo.
The New York Times: The Critical Moment Behind Ukraine’s Rapid Advance.
The strategy behind Ukraine’s rapid military gains in recent days began to take shape months ago during a series of intense conversations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials about the way forward in the war against Russia, according to American officials.
The Apple Gatherers, Frederick Morgan
The counteroffensive — revised this summer from its original form after urgent discussions between senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials — has succeeded beyond most predictions. Ukrainian forces have devastated Russian command and control, and appear poised to capitalize on their advances in the northeast of the country and in another campaign in the south.
The work began soon after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told his generals he wanted to make a dramatic move to demonstrate that his country could push back on the Russian invasion. Under his orders, the Ukrainian military devised a plan to launch a broad assault across the south to reclaim Kherson and cut off Mariupol from the Russian force in the east.
The Ukrainian generals and American officials believed that such a large-scale attack would incur immense casualties and fail to quickly retake large amounts of territory. The Ukrainians were already suffering hundreds of casualties a day in what had become a grinding conflict. The Russian forces were experiencing similar losses but were still inching forward, laying waste to Ukrainian towns in the eastern region of Donbas.
Long reluctant to share details of their plans, the Ukrainian commanders started opening up more to American and British intelligence officials and seeking advice.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Andriy Yermak, a top adviser to Mr. Zelensky, spoke multiple times about the planning for the counteroffensive, according to a senior administration official. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior Ukrainian military leaders regularly discussed intelligence and military support.
The gist is that Americans helped the Ukrainians plan a strategy, and the Ukrainian army succeeded in carrying it out–beyond all expectations. Read more details at the NYT.
David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast: What Happens to Russia After It Loses?
With reports of Russian troops fleeing like “Olympic sprinters,” leaving behind weapons, crashing their tanks into trees, and turning over more than 3,000 square kilometers of previously held territory to Ukraine, it is only natural to ask: How bad can it get for Russia?
Experts with whom I spoke all agreed that the war will have long-lasting implications for Russia and, as a consequence, for geopolitics. At the very least it puts to rest for the foreseeable future Putin’s notion that he will oversee the rebirth of Russian greatness, of a new Russian empire. At worst, it means that Russia’s decades-long slide that led to its Cold War collapse (and its struggles ever since) will be accelerated, and the country will be consigned by its floundering dictator to a period of greatly diminished global influence.
At the Market, 1985, by Felix Valloton
Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder described the stakes trenchantly: “Russia ceased being a great power a long time ago. It never really recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, itself the product of a decaying ideology and system.” Daalder said Putin came to power when “Russia was in a state of deep dysfunction” and that he subsequently “set out to build a deeply kleptocratic system that benefited him and his cronies at the expense of the entire society.” This, according to Daalder, has manifested itself with “a military that is unable to engage in modern warfare of maneuver, which after six months still hasn’t established air superiority.” [….]
Stephen Sestanovich, who served during the Clinton administration as ambassador at large for the newly independent states of the former USSR and is currently a professor at Columbia University, offered a different analogy to a second-tier European state, “Russia’s claim to be a great power has long been tenuous, resting on nukes, land mass, and a UN veto. The revival of economic growth in Putin’s first decade helped restore a little luster to the claim. But he’s been largely on the ropes since 2014, and this absurd campaign to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine has put his entire effort at risk. He wanted to make himself an equal of Catherine and Peter. Now it’s going to take quite a comeback to be more than [former Serbian President Slobodan] Milošević with missiles.”
Angela Stent, a Putin biographer and senior adviser at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service’s Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, echoed that analysis, “After the war is over, Russia will still be the largest country in the world (assuming it does not disintegrate) and it will still have nukes, oil, and gas. But it is deglobalizing and returning to greater autarky.” Stent says that despite maintaining strong ties with many countries in the global south, “its relations with the collective West, which represents the lion’s share of global GDP, have largely collapsed.” Stent adds: “Putin came to power wanting to restore Russia’s role as a great power and have a seat on the global board of directors. He has now lost that. Russia will emerge from this demodernized and diminished in global stature.”
There’s still more expert opinion reported at the Daily Beast link.
Department of Justice Investigations
The New York Times: Justice Dept. Issues 40 Subpoenas in a Week, Expanding Its Jan. 6 Inquiry.
Justice Department officials have seized the phones of two top advisers to former President Donald J. Trump and blanketed his aides with about 40 subpoenas in a substantial escalation of the investigation into his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, people familiar with the inquiry said on Monday.
The seizure of the phones, coupled with a widening effort to obtain information from those around Mr. Trump after the 2020 election, represent some of the most aggressive steps the department has taken thus far in its criminal investigation into the actions that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
The extent of the investigation has come into focus in recent days, even though it has often been overshadowed by the government’s legal clash with Mr. Trump and his lawyers over a separate inquiry into the handling of presidential records, including highly classified materials, the former president kept at his residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.
Federal agents with court-authorized search warrants took phones last week from at least two people: Boris Epshteyn, an in-house counsel who helps coordinate Mr. Trump’s legal efforts, and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020, people familiar with the investigation said.
Mr. Epshteyn and Mr. Roman have been linked to a critical element of Mr. Trump’s bid to hold onto power: the effort to name slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump from swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 as part of a plan to block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory.
On others who got subpoenas:
The names of those receiving the latest round of subpoenas in the investigation related to Jan. 6 have dribbled out gradually, with investigators casting a wide net on a range of issues, including Mr. Trump’s postelection fund-raising and the so-called fake electors scheme.
Indigo Dreams, Adrian Paul Allinson
One of the recipients, people familiar with the case said, was Dan Scavino, Mr. Trump’s former social media director who rose from working at a Trump-owned golf course to become one of his most loyal West Wing aides, and has remained an adviser since Mr. Trump left office. Stanley Woodward, one of Mr. Scavino’s lawyers, declined to comment.
Another was Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner. Mr. Kerik, who promoted claims of voter fraud alongside his friend Rudolph W. Giuliani, was issued a subpoena by prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, his lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said on Monday. Mr. Parlatore said his client had initially offered to grant an interview voluntarily.
The subpoenas seek information in connection with the fake electors plan.
For months, associates of Mr. Trump have received subpoenas related to other aspects of the investigations into his efforts to cling to power. But in a new line of inquiry, some of the latest subpoenas focus on the activities of the Save America political action committee, the main political fund-raising conduit for Mr. Trump since he left office.
The fact that the Justice Department is now seeking information related to fund-raising comes as the House committee examining the Jan. 6 attack has raised questions about money Mr. Trump solicited under the premise of fighting election fraud.
The January 6 Committee Investigation
As the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack nears its final chapter, members plan to meet in person on Tuesday and one of the most pressing questions they’ll address is whether the committee should formally request that former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence appear before them.
Such appearances are exceedingly rare in US history. According to multiple sources, the committee does not expect either man to testify, but some members and staff believe the invitations should be extended for the record.
“How do you create a historic record without including formal requests for the two top witnesses,” said one source familiar to the committee’s work.
Members of the committee, including Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, have consistently said they’d like to hear from Pence and would welcome Trump’s testimony should he offer it on their terms but internal discussions about formally reaching out to both men has intensified in recent weeks now that the panel’s investigation will soon come to an end, the sources said….
A source close to Pence’s team told CNN that there have been intermittent conversations between the committee and legal counsel for Pence, but nothing has changed, meaning it’s unlikely he would testify.
Whether the panel decides to call Trump or Pence could prove to be an important data point should the committee ultimately opt to submit a criminal referral for Trump – something members of the panel say they expect to seriously consider, while such a move would be largely symbolic in nature.
Red Sun, Arthur C. Dove
Members of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot believe former Secret Service agent Tony Ornato was personally involved in efforts to discredit former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, according to a report from CNN.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republican members of Congress on the committee, told the outlet this week that representatives on the panel think Ornato led the charge in contradicting parts of Hutchinson’s public testimony earlier this year while he was still at the agency and additional, unnamed agents then backed his claims.
The longtime Secret Service agent who ran former President Donald Trump’s security detail left the agency last month, saying in a statement that he retired in order to pursue a career in the private sector.
Ornato emerged as a key figure in Hutchinson’s bombshell testimony before the committee in June.
Hutchinson testified that Ornato told her Trump had tried to grab the steering wheel of the vehicle he was traveling in and lunged at a Secret Service agent while demanding to be taken to the Capitol during the chaos of January 6, 2021, as he said, “I’m the effing president!”
In the aftermath of Hutchinson’s testimony, anonymous sources began to reject her version of events in the press. Several media outlets reported that Secret Service agents were willing to testify that Trump did not try to lunge at them or take control of the vehicle on January 6 — though none have done so publicly.
Now, Kinzinger is accusing Ornato of being one of the anonymous culprits behind the backlash.
Other Congressional Investigations
The New York Times: Archives Is Unsure Whether Trump Surrendered All Records, Panel Says.
The National Archives has informed congressional aides that it is still unsure whether former President Donald J. Trump has surrendered all the presidential records he removed from the White House, even after months of negotiations, a subpoena and a search of his Florida property, according to the House Oversight Committee.
The archives staff “recently informed the committee that the agency is not certain whether all presidential records are in its custody,” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the committee, wrote in a letter on Tuesday to Debra Steidel Wall, the acting national archivist.
Ms. Maloney said the archives staff had informed the committee staff during a call in late August of its uncertainty about the status of the material, which Mr. Trump was required by law to return.
Autumn on the Seine at Argenteuil, by Claude Monet
In her letter, Ms. Maloney requested a formal assessment from the archives of what presidential records, if any, removed from the White House by Mr. Trump remained unaccounted for and whether the archives believed they were potentially still in his possession.
The committee is requesting that the agency “conduct an urgent review of presidential records from the Trump administration to identify any presidential records or categories of presidential records, whether textual or electronic, that NARA has reason to believe may still be outside of the agency’s custody and control,” Ms. Maloney wrote, referring to the National Archives and Records Administration. “Please also assess any other limitations on the completeness, accuracy and accessibility of presidential records provided to NARA by the Trump administration.”
The letter asked the archives to complete an initial assessment and provide its findings to the committee by Sept. 27.
Ms. Maloney also requested that the archives “seek a personal certification from Donald Trump that he has surrendered all presidential records that he illegally removed from the White House after leaving office.”
The New York Times: Senate to Investigate Charge That Trump Meddled in Prosecutor’s Office.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will investigate allegations that the Justice Department under President Donald J. Trump sought to use the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to support Mr. Trump politically and pursue his critics, the committee’s chairman said on Monday.
The allegations are in a new book by Geoffrey S. Berman, who was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2018 through June 2020, when he was fired by Mr. Trump.
The chairman, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, made the announcement in a letter sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland, which cited a New York Times report on Thursday detailing the book’s allegations.
Mr. Berman’s book portrays Trump Justice Department officials as motivated by partisan concerns as they tried to initiate criminal investigations or block them, The Times reported.
The book, “Holding the Line,” was obtained by The Times in advance of its scheduled publication on Tuesday.
Mr. Durbin said in his letter, “These reported claims indicate astonishing and unacceptable deviations from the department’s mission to pursue impartial justice, which requires that its prosecutorial decisions be free from political influence.”
He added that the allegations “also compound the already serious concerns” raised by then-Attorney General William P. Barr’s efforts in 2020 “to replace Mr. Berman with a Trump loyalist.”
Wow! This post got really long, so take what you want and leave the rest. I hope you all have a terrific Tuesday!!
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