This monument is located in Kyiv, Ukraine. The statue depicts a cat named Panteleimon, who was famous for his habit of sitting near a pharmacy in the city during the 19th century.
During his trial in Manhattan, Trump repeatedly claimed that he was being prevented from campaigning, even though he chose not to do so during his off days. Then, after his conviction, he spent a week golfing. But he has returned to the campaign trail now, and we’re learning more about his violent fantasies, his extreme narcissism and selfishness, and, worst of all, his authoritarian ambitions.
He gave two revealing interviews to Sean Hannity and Dr. Phil McGraw. Some reactions:
Donald Trump Friday was accused of making a threat against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in a Fox News interview.
In the interview with Trump, the conservative network asks the former president what he thinks of Garland. Garland was first chosen by then-President Barack Obama to be a Supreme Court justice, but was made A.G. by President Joe Biden after Republicans tanked his judicial nomination during the election.
“What do you say about Merrick Garland?” the host asked.
“I’m disappointed in him,” Trump said, adding that Garland is known as being “very liberal.”
“But I always looked upon him as being a very legitimate person,” Trump then added. “And I’m very disappointed that he’s allowed this all to happen. A raid of Mar-a-Lago. They could have had whatever they wanted!”
Responding to that clip, former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski said, “Make no mistake, this is a threat.”
Dem strategist Adam Parkhomenko echoed those comments.
“Trump pretends he would’ve supported Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court while, as [Filipkowski] points out, making a threat,” he wrote on Friday.
It’s not explicit, but Trump knows he doesn’t have to do much to get his rabid followers to start harassing people he designates as enemies.
Former President Donald Trump told Dr. Phil McGraw on Thursday that “sometimes revenge can be justified” after the television host suggested Trump wouldn’t “have time to get even” with his enemies in a second term in the White House.
“I think you have so much to do, you don’t have time to get even. You only have time to get right,” said McGraw during an interview with Trump on Dr. Phil Primetime.
“Well revenge does take time, I will say that,” replied Trump. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”
Phil questioned, “But is the country better or worse for going after you?”
“I think the country is really worse for what they’ve done and I think you see that when you look at the poll numbers,” said Trump. “When you see that almost $400 million has poured in since this horrible decision [in the New York hush money trial] was made, that was a few days ago. Numbers that nobody’s ever heard of in politics before. It’s a great honor.”
After Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents, the former president suggested on Fox News’ Hannity this week that he could get revenge on President Joe Biden if he wins a second term in November.
“Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them, and it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden,” he said.
During just this week, two of Donald Trump’s friendliest interviewers handed him big prime-time opportunities to unequivocally renounce any intention to retaliate against Democrats for his criminal conviction by a jury of his peers in Manhattan. Both times, Trump demurred.
“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump told Dr. Phil McGraw, after he suggested that seeking retribution for Trump’s criminal charges would harm the country. Though Trump graciously said he was “open” to showing forbearance toward Democrats, he suggested revenge would be tempting, given “what I’ve been through.”
Miss Chippy, tribute to the feline companion of Sir Ernest Shackleton, a renowned Antarctic explorer.
Trump voiced similar sentiments to Sean Hannity after the Fox News host practically begged him to deny he’d pursue his opponents. “I would have every right to go after them,” Trump said. Though Trump nodded along with Hannity’s suggestion that “weaponizing” law enforcement is bad, Trump added, “I don’t want to look naïve,” seemingly meaning that if he doesn’t seek revenge, he’ll have been victimized without acting to set things right.
These moments have been widely mocked as a sign that even Trump’s media pals can’t help him disguise his true second-term intentions. That’s true, but there’s another point to be made here: The exchanges should awaken us to what a monstrous scam it is when Trump and his allies talk about unleashing prosecutions of foes as “revenge” and “retribution.”
We have to stop letting Trump get away with this. It’s actually spin, and we should all say so….
In the media, this story tends to be framed as follows: Will Trump seek “revenge” for his legal travails, or won’t he? But that framing unwittingly lets Trump set the terms of this debate. It implies that he is vowing to do to Democrats what was done to him.
But that’s not what Trump is actually threatening. Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.
You might think this distinction is obvious—one most voters will grasp instinctually. But why would they grasp this? It’s not uncommon to encounter news stories about Trump’s threats—see here, here, or here—that don’t explain those basic contours of the situation. Such stories often don’t take the elementary step of explaining the fundamental difference between bringing prosecutions in keeping with what evidence and the rule of law dictate and bringing them as purported “retaliation.” Why would casual readers simply infer that prosecutions against Trump are legally predicated while those he is threatening are not?
Donald Trump is determined to avoid jail, but if he does get handed a prison sentence after his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York last week, the former president’s inner circle is certain he will lay the blame squarely at the judge’s feet, sources familiar with the matter said.
The precise way Trump might blame the judge, Juan Merchan, remains unclear because Trump has been avoidant of the issue and the matter was not resolved when he huddled with his top advisers at a Trump Tower meeting immediately after the verdict on Thursday, the sources said.
But Trump is likely to double down on his attacks against Merchan, directing his supporters at rallies and in Truth Social posts to take up their grievances with the judge, one of the sources added.
The consequences of Trump’s likely rhetoric are difficult to predict. Trump has been railing against Merchan for months as being unfair and in conspiracy cahoots with the Biden administration to prevent him from campaigning – and nothing concrete has happened.
Still, Trump’s supporters have a history of making threats against judges Trump has assailed, including death threats to Tanya Chutkan, the US district judge who is presiding in his federal 2020 election interference case, and to the chambers of the New York judge who oversaw his civil fraud trial.
Trump believes – correctly – that the ultimate decision with sentencing rests with Merchan, who has wide discretion to sentence him to fines or probation on the low end, to a carceral sentence on the high end, regardless of what prosecutors might request.
That reasoning would be the basis for Trump to hold the judge responsible for any fallout, in the event he hands down a jail term days before the Republican national convention – even if the sentence would almost certainly be stayed pending appeal.
Trump has already spent weeks railing against Merchan, taking advantage of the fact that the judge himself is not protected by the gag order. Both before and during the trial, Trump slammed the judge’s rulings as unfair and biased, and falsely suggested he was trying to stop him campaigning.
Read more at The Guardian.
As for his obvious narcissism and selfishness, look what happened at a rally in Arizona, and what could happen again tomorrow at his afternoon rally in Las Vegas.
Extreme heat in Arizona sent 11 people to hospital as thousands waited to enter a campaign rally with former President Donald Trump.
As Trump took the stage just after 17:00 EDT (22:00 GMT) at a mega-church in Phoenix, the temperature was 111F (44C).
Hamish McHamish was a beloved ginger cat that became a local celebrity in the town of St. Andrews, Scotland.
It was his first rally since his criminal conviction in a New York hush-money case, which found him guilty of falsifying business records in relation to a payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
Trump used the campaign event to repeat accusations that the case against him was politically motivated and called for the conviction to be overturned.
“I just went through a rigged trial in New York,” he insisted. “It was made-up, fabricated stuff.” [….]
Fans started lining up early outside the massive Phoenix Dream City Church to see him speak, and strict security measures meant it took time for everyone to get in.
As supporters waited outside the campaign rally, BBC News saw several people being treated for heat-related issues and two were taken to hospital.
On Thursday – two weeks before summer even officially starts – the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast record-breaking temperatures in interior California, and parts of Nevada and Arizona.
Temperatures were expected to reach 121F (49C) in California’s scorching Death Valley during the heatwave.
In Phoenix, an excessive heat warning is in place on Friday, with people being asked to limit time outdoors and stay hydrated.
Why would the campaign schedule a rally in the afternoon in Phoenix? Because Trump had date with big donors at a fundraiser on Thursday night in San Francisco.
Team Trump boasted about people “braving” extreme heat in Arizona while waiting to watch Trump ramble incoherently at a campaign rally for over an hour on Thursday, making no mention that at least 11 people collapsed and were hospitalized for heat exhaustion.
“That’s an enthusiasm that Joe Biden will never see,” Trump’s newsletter proclaimed of the crowds stuck roasting on unshaded concrete. “That’s the enthusiasm Americans have to Make America Great Again!”
The intense loyalty to Trump from his supporters—largely elderly and more prone to heat stroke—is a disturbing example of how far his extremist base is willing to suffer just for a glimpse of their dear leader. Their queasy dedication speaks to the religious fervor cultivated by Trump who touts himself as a messiah who has come to save the masses from the satanic swamp, a Jesus preaching gobbledygook from the mountaintop of Dream City megachurch in Phoenix. On Friday, Trump boasted about a song that refers to him as “the chosen one”—words he has explicitly said in the past.
That Team Trump apparently took no measures to meet its base’s most basic human needs amid an anticipated high of 108 degrees on Thursday—neither handing out water nor setting up cooling tents in anticipation of the heat—and instead touted their suffering as “enthusiasm” speaks to the level of appreciation Trump has for those who support him, which is to say obviously none.
Michael Gold at The New York Times: As Trump Rallies in the Southwest, Extreme Heat Threatens MAGA Faithful.
This week, with former President Donald J. Trump holding campaign events in the Southwest, his team is grappling with an extreme heat wave that has threatened the health of some of his most ardent fans.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump went to Phoenix for a campaign event at a megachurch, where hopeful attendees waited for hours to enter as the temperature climbed above 110 degrees. The heat was so scorching that some of those waiting collapsed, and 11 people were taken to hospitals to be treated for heat exhaustion.
Tombili the Cat was a beloved street cat from Istanbul, known for his relaxed and laid-back posture while sitting on a step.
The Trump campaign is taking steps to avoid similar circumstances on Sunday, when Mr. Trump is scheduled to speak at an outdoor rally at noon at a park in Las Vegas. Forecasts expect the temperature to be around 105 degrees.
Much of the western United States has been contending with a heat wave all week. Both Phoenix and Las Vegas have been under an excessive heat warning for days, with afternoon temperatures hovering in the triple digits.
And the temperatures have been historic: Phoenix peaked at 113 degrees on Thursday, and Las Vegas at 111, both daily records for those cities….
The Weather Service’s excessive heat warning in Las Vegas is set to expire at 9 p.m. on Saturday, the night before Mr. Trump’s rally. But temperatures are currently expected to hit a high of 104 on Sunday with little cloud cover.
Supporters eager to attend a Trump event will generally arrive hours before the candidate does, standing in long, slow-moving lines to get through security screenings and secure a good vantage point. The wait can be trying in normal circumstances.
This time the campaign says they will have bottled water available along with tents to provide some relief from the sun. It still seems inhumane to schedule and event like this in the afternoon in a hot climate.
This is what MAGA expert Ron Filipkowski posted on Twitter:
Why is Trump holding his rally in the middle of the afternoon outside in LasVegas tomorrow after dozens of people went to the hospital a few days ago at his AZ rally from the heat? And AZ was inside – those people went down in line just waiting to get through the magnetometers.
On the threat of autocracy if Trump is elected again:
Donald Trump is vowing to wrest key spending powers from Congress if elected this November, promising to assert more control over the federal budget than any president in U.S. history.
The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.
The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.
During his first term, Trump was impeached after refusing to spend money for Ukraine approved by Congress, as he pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to provide incriminating evidence about the Biden family. At the time, Trump’s aides defended his actions as legal but largely did not dispute that the president is bound to adhere to budgetary law.
Since then, however, Trump and his advisers have prepared an attack on the limits on presidential spending authority. On his campaign website, Trump has said he will push Congress to repeal parts of the 1974 law that restricts the president’s authority to spend federal dollars without congressional approval. Trump has also said he will unilaterally challenge that law by cutting off funding for certain programs, promising on his first day in office to order every agency to identify “large chunks” of their budgets that would be halted by presidential edict.
“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings,” Trump said in a plan posted last year. “This will be in the form of tax reductions for you. This will help quickly to stop inflation and slash the deficit.”
That pledge could provoke a dramatic constitutional showdown, with vast consequences for how the government operates. If he returns to office, these efforts are likely to turn typically arcane debates over “impoundment” authority — or the president’s right to stop certain spending programs — into a major political flash point, as he seeks to accomplish via edict what he cannot pass through Congress.
A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’sbudget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”
Hehas helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations — and that’s just on Trump’s first day backin office.
Trim the Cat was the beloved ship’s cat of Matthew Flinders, an English navigator and cartographer who circumnavigated Australia in the early 19th century.
Vought, 48, ispoised to steer this agenda from an influential perch in the White House, potentially as Trump’s chief of staff, according to some people involved in discussions about a second term who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Since Trump left office, Vought has led the Center for Renewing America, part of a network of conservative advocacy groups staffed by former and potentially future Trump administration officials.Vought’s rise is a reminder that if Trump is reelected, he has saidhe will surround himself with loyalists eager to carry out his wishes, even if they violate traditional norms against executive overreach.
“What the Trump team is saying is alarming, unusual and really beyond the pale of anything we’ve seen,” said Eloise Pasachoff, a budget and appropriations law expert at Georgetown Law School.
The Trump campaign defended its proposal, saying Washington must cut spending to reduce the national debt, which has surpassed $30 trillion and is set to keep growing over the next decade. But the Trump campaign has ruled out cuts to the Defense Department, as well as to Social Security and Medicare, programs for the elderly that are the main drivers of the nation’s rising spending. The debt grew by more than $7 trillion during Trump’s administration.
“As many legal and constitutional scholars have argued, executive impoundment authority is an important tool that American presidents used throughout history to rein in unnecessary and wasteful spending,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement. “President Trump agrees with the experts that this power has been wrongly curtailed in recent decades. As he works to curb Joe Biden’s colossal spending binge that triggered uncontrolled inflation, President Trump will seek to reassert impoundment authority to cut waste and restore the proper balance to spending negotiations with Congress.”
Again, read more at the WaPo.
Finally, at The New York Times, Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman have an article that summarizes the campaign’s plans for the country: “If Trump Wins.”
It’s a pretty bare-bones summary in the following catgories:
Crack down on illegal immigration to an extreme degree.
Use the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries
Increase presidential power
Aggressively expand his first-term efforts to upend America’s trade policies
Retreat from military engagement with Europe
Use military force in Mexico and on American soil
That’s it for me today. Trump is back campaigning, and the press is focusing on him.
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Filling a void while living the dream. John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Back in 1982, I was finishing up my first Masters in 1982, taking a much-needed vacation to Europe to celebrate the event, trying to save the Savings and Loan Industry after the rug was pulled out of fixed rate assets with 30-year obligations, yet Congress decided in 1980 to let their liabilities be “open to the market” which was running amok with double-digit inflation. I also was pregnant with my oldest. I had a modest two-story, two-bedroom townhouse with a 30-year loan fixed at 16.7% but mercifully put to 12% because I worked at the Lender. I also could do nothing to stop them from heading to bankruptcy. I’d worked at a small commercial bank where the problem was having to pay interest now on checking accounts. This upset of the status quo left over from the Depression Days basically threatened homeownership and business. Repricing their liabilities more to market was a killer but considered necessary because savings funds were going to money market accounts. I also spent some time trying to explain these things to Congress. The only good advice I got there was never to get in an elevator with Strom Thurmond. The eighties economy was a mess, but you’d never know if you had read anything besides economic studies in journals. It didn’t really get better until we got what we call a regime change.
I planned on attending law school, taking the exams while noticeably pregnant with my oldest daughter, getting accepted to several, etc. I visited the University of Chicago as an undergrad. All I could think was there were too many damn lawyers around the country. So, I became a Financial Economist with eyes on my doctorate. I missed this seminal event in American History where a group of people worked to undermine the Justice System to benefit the wealthy. The Federalist Society, nicknamed FedSoc, was founded that same year. I don’t often rely on Wikipedia, but when I do, I make sure they’ve got citations.
The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by a group of students from Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and The University of Chicago Law School with the aim of challenging liberal or left-wing ideology within elite American law schools and universities. The organization’s stated objectives are “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning”,[1] and it plays a central role in networking and mentoring young conservative lawyers.[5] According to Amanda Hollis-Brusky, the Federalist Society “has evolved into the de facto gatekeeper for right-of-center lawyers aspiring to government jobs and federal judgeships under Republican presidents.”[8] It vetted President Donald Trump‘s list of potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees; in March 2020, 43 out of 51 of Trump’s appellate court nominees were current or former members of the society.[10]
In 2018, Politico Magazine wrote that “it is no exaggeration to suggest that it was perhaps the most effective student conference ever—a blueprint, in retrospect, for how to marry youthful enthusiasm with intellectual oomph to achieve far-reaching results.”[13] The society states that it “is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.”[2]
The society looks to Federalist Paper Number 78 for an articulation of the virtue of judicial restraint, as written by Alexander Hamilton: “It can be of no weight to say that the courts, on the pretense of a repugnancy, may substitute their own pleasure to the constitutional intentions of the legislature … The courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body.”
“Trump is an expert in lawfare, and his life has revolved around manipulating the judicial system. He’s out on bail while facing 54 more criminal charges and awaiting sentencing for conviction of 34 felonies. It is entertaining listening to MAGA whine about the corrupt DOJ while the corruption is all Trump.” John Buss @repeat1968
That sounds almost mundane, doesn’t it? The virtue of judicial restraint? Protecting individual liberty? However, we now have judges so far off the rails of restraint that it’s not even funny. Some of them are now vehemently anti-MAGA and Donald, but they’re still very much at the root of the problem. I found this ironic when I read it last year at WAPO. “Conservative Case Emerges to Disqualify Trump for Role on Jan. 6. Two law professors active in the Federalist Society wrote that the original meaning of the 14th Amendment makes Donald Trump ineligible to hold government office.”
Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.
The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
“When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”
He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”
Yet, this is the same group that vetted all of Trump’s appointments. But it didn’t start there, and it doesn’t end there. This is from The New Republic. “Clarence Thomas Is Hiding Even More Money Than We Knew. The justice has received millions of dollars worth of gifts, far more than his colleagues, but only reported a fraction of it.” These judges are not only activists whose findings are not based on anything in the Constitution or precedent, but they take cash for their positions. The news on Clarence Thomas is so bad that I cannot believe Dick Durbin won’t open an investigation or call him and his enablers to a hearing.
Crime doesn’t pay, but it seems that Justice can get you millions.
A new report from Fix the Court, a judicial watchdog and advocacy group, found that justices on the U.S. Supreme Court received close to a total of $3 million in gifts, at least, over the last 20 years—with more than $2.4 million of those gifts being directed solely to Justice Clarence Thomas.
Thomas has repeatedly been the focus of ethical scrutiny over reports that he received exorbitant gifts and vacations from Republican billionaires, never paid back a loan for his beloved R.V., and cavorted with the Koch brothers, while failing to adequately disclose many of the perks he’s received. All of this has been reported on extensively by publications such as ProPublica. Now, Fix the Court has worked to add it all up.
Fix the Court was able to identify 103 gifts that Thomas received between 2004 and 2024, totaling a value of $2,402,310. Overall, it found 193 when counting some gifts that were received before that period. These gifts could be a number of things: often meals or lodging, with a free flight counting as one gift and a round-trip journey counting as two.
The court’s gift-reporting threshold has slowly risen over the course of 20 years. In 2004, it was $285, and in 2023, it was $480. Of those 193 gifts, Thomas only disclosed receiving 27.
Fix the Court was also able to identify 101 “likely gifts”—mostly trips to exclusive clubs Bohemian Grove and Topridge—Thomas received during those 20 years, which added an additional value of $1,787,684. Including those “likely gifts,” Thomas has reportedly received $4,189,994 worth of perks.
For context, in January 2001, an associate Supreme Court justice like Thomas would’ve made $194,300, a sum that has since risen to $285,400, according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Through gifts, Thomas has roughly doubled his official published income from the last 20 years, which would sit at approximately $4,747,700. To Thomas, being bought and paid for appears to be a second job altogether. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
When counting “likely gifts” furnished to Thomas, justices seated on the U.S. Supreme Court received an astounding 445 gifts valued at $4,780,720. Without those “likely gifts,” the justices’ tallies still hit 344, worth $2,993,036.
Here’s the report from Fix the Court, which details the massivCourtunts of grift. Of course, it’s the darlings of FedSoc that run amok with the bribes.
The tally captures the value of Thomas’ yacht trips to Russia, the Greek Isles and Indonesia, as well as some new information on the Thomas flights Tony Novelly paid for and the Scalia and Alito fishing trips Robin Arkley paid for that’s included in the congressionalrecord. The value of the gifts Scalia received on his ill-fated trip to Marfa, Tex., in 2016 are also included.FTC estimated the value of most of the medals, plaques and trophies the justices received over the years and didn’t list on their disclosures — and there were several dozen, including 62 accepted by O’Connor — at $200, i.e., under the gift-reporting threshold. Several similar awards were accepted by Ginsburg, many of which have been auctionedoff by the Potomack Company to benefit various charities. That said, in some instances — namely for three of Ginsburg’s recent awards, two of which appear to be above the reporting threshold — FTC reached out to the gift-givers to inquire about value and is waiting to hear back.
Other awards unearthed by FTC include a blanket and gift basket Minnesota Law gave to Chief Justice Roberts; personalized Louisville Slugger bats given to Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett by the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center; silver julep cups given to Gorsuch by UK’s Heyburn Initiative; and football “gear” (likely a sweatshirt) and a skybox ticket given to Justice Kagan by the University of Wisconsin. Vague gifts from FTC’s open records requests — a photograph UF Law sent to Thomas, an “engraved gift” URI sent to Sotomayor and a something UW sent to Kagan — are also included.
FTC notes that several entities Thomas listed on his 2000 and 2002 disclosures as “reimbursing” him for “private plane” travel did not, in all likelihood, own private planes at the time (e.g., high schools, small colleges, civic organization, etc.). Those flight-legs were then gifts, 20 in total.
A fairly significant portion of several justices’ gift haul came in the form of honorary memberships at various golf, tennis and social clubs. These types of free memberships were largely outlawed by a law Congress passed in 2008, which is why they mostly drop off the tally after that year.
The reason FTC is focusing on the last 20 years is two-fold: first, it was 20 years ago that the L.A. Times filed its oft-referred to report on the justices’ gifts, and second, the record of the justices’ disclosures gets a bit fuzzy before 2004, since throughout the 1980s and 1990s and into the early 2000s, the justices’ disclosures were typically only available for inspection at the Supreme Court and were only later distributed by the judiciary on paper, in a thumb drive or on a database.
In terms of crunching the numbers, the tally counts “meals” and “lodging” as two separate gifts, and FTC counted each leg of a round-trip flight as one gift, so it’s two gifts per round-trip. Unless otherwise stated, FTC assigned the cost per hour of a flight on a private plane to be $10,000 (can range from $5,000 to $25,000-plus, depending on plane size and other circumstances). Awards accepted by retired justices were not included.
Newsweek has three charts that give you an idea of who was a crook and who took their job more conventionally.
According to Fix the Court’s analysis, Justice Clarence Thomas received the largest portion of gifts, identifying 193 for the George H.W. Bush appointee who has served since 1991.
Second was the late Sandra Day O’Connor with 73, who died last year. O’Connor was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, by then President Ronald Reagan, and served from 1981 to 2006.
The late Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were third and fourth with 67 and 61 identified gifts respectively. Scalia served 29 years on the court, and Ginsburg 27.
David Souter, who spent 18 years on the court before he retired in 2009, and Brett Kavanaugh received just one gift, according to the findings.
Thomas led here as well, with likely gifts totaling $4,042,286.
Justice Samuel Alito is alleged in the findings to have received just over $170,000 worth of gifts.
The Supreme Court justices with the lowest total value of gifts were Kavanaugh, Souter and Amy Coney Barrett, with $100, $349, and $500 respectively.
More importantly, the Newsweek report shows the split between disclosed and undisclosed gifts.
According to Fix the Court, Thomas was the worst offender on this front. The watchdog believed he openly disclosed just 8.5 percent of all gifts he received.
Kavanaugh and Barret disclosed none of their gifts, however, the report estimates the pair only received $600 worth of gifts between them.
Souter and the late John Paul Stevens were the only two SCOTUS justices to disclose 100 percent of their gifts.
Thomas filed his disclosure report last week. Here’s the coverage from the Washington Post. “Justice Thomas discloses two 2019 trips paid for by Harlan Crow. 2023 financial disclosure reports for Supreme Court justices also show six-figure book payments for Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Jackson.”
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has disclosed for the first time trips to Bali and to a private club in California in 2019 paid for by his friend and benefactor, Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, according to financial disclosures released Friday for eight of the nine justices.
Jackson also accepted four tickets worth nearly $4,000 from Beyoncé to one of her concerts,and two pieces of art worth $12,500 to display in her chambers.
“Justice Jackson is Crazy in Love with Beyoncé’s music. Who isn’t?” said court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor reported a star turn as a cartoon character on the PBS children’s show “Alma’s Way,” an animated series about a Puerto Rican girl and her family from the Bronx. The justice was paid about $1,900 for voice work on one episode in which she played herself.
The reports show several justices earning additional income from teaching at law schools and accepting free travel to speak at events at universities and legal organizations.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was granted an extensionto file his report, as he has received in past years.
Since Trump was first indicted a year ago, Cannon has dragged out the proceedings in ways that have flummoxed legal scholars and put a trial initially scheduled to begin last month on hold indefinitely.
Several attorneys who have practiced in front of Cannon – and who spoke to CNN for this story – pointed to her isolation as one explanation for her conduct. Cannon’s solitary post in the Fort Pierce courthouse, one that rarely sees high-profile action, deprives her of the informal, day-to-day interactions with more seasoned judges who sit at the other courthouses and could offer her advice, the lawyers told CNN.
They also said Cannon’s lack of trial experience, both as a lawyer and a judge, is apparent. In her seven years as a Justice Department attorney, Cannon participated on the trial teams of just four criminal cases. And on the bench, she’s only presided over a handful of criminal trials – and Huck took over one of them.
For this account of Cannon’s judicial demeanor, CNN spoke to ten attorneys who have had cases – both criminal and civil – before her. The lawyers spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity because of the professional and ethical risks of speaking to press about a sitting federal judge in front of whom they practice.
To corroborate their characterizations of Cannon’s approach, CNN reviewed the public dockets of scores of cases that have traveled through her courtroom.
The attorneys described Cannon as extremely diligent and well prepared, a tough questioner who accepts nothing at face value, and thoughtful in her rulings. But they also said that some of her habits that have raised eyebrows in Trump’s case have plagued her approach from the bench more generally.
Those tendencies include a penchant for letting irrelevant legal questions distract from core issues, a zero-tolerance approach to any technical defects in filings, and a struggle with docket management that allows the type of pretrial disputes that other judges would decide in weeks go unresolved for months.
“She is not efficient,” said one attorney who practices in south Florida. “She is very form over substance.”
Another attorney described her as “indecisive.”
A third attorney who’s had cases before Cannon said, “She just seems overwhelmed by the process.”
The Senate needs to take its review of judges much more seriously. This has been going on since Thomas sat on the court, and it’s the one thing I can never forgive Biden for, along with his coziness with Southern Senators on the busing issue, which also bothered me. We’ll lose more personal liberties if we don’t do something now. One more interesting article which outlines the results of a study. This is from PsyPost. “Why do Republicans stick with Trump? New study explores the role of white nationalism.”
A new study explores why many Americans, particularly Republican voters, continue to support former President Donald Trump despite serious charges against him. Researchers found that white nationalism and political views play crucial roles in shaping public attitudes towards these charges. The study, published in The British Journal of Criminology, sheds light on the interplay between racial attitudes and political allegiances in contemporary America.
The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by Trump supporters resulted in significant consequences, including fatalities, injuries, extensive property damage, numerous arrests, and psychological trauma. The subsequent investigation by the United States House Select Committee aimed to determine the role of Trump in inciting this attack and whether criminal charges were warranted.
Despite the evidence against Trump, polls indicated that a significant portion of Republican voters continued to support him. The study aimed to understand why this segment of the population remained loyal to Trump despite the serious allegations.
This introduction is followed by a thorough list of their control variables. Here are some of the specific findings.
The results demonstrated a clear interaction between participants’ racial and political views and their support for the Select Committee’s recommendations. White nationalists and individuals with conservative political views showed strong support for the Committee when it found no evidence against Trump and recommended no charges. However, their support drastically declined when the Committee recommended criminal charges based on incriminating evidence.
On the other hand, individuals who did not hold white nationalist views and those with liberal political views were overwhelmingly supportive of the Committee’s recommendations when charges were proposed but showed little support when no charges were recommended.
For example, 82% of white nationalists supported the Committee if it found no evidence against Trump, but only 35% to 39% supported the Committee when charges were recommended. In contrast, 76% to 80% of participants without white nationalist views supported the Committee when it recommended charges, but only 34% supported it when no charges were recommended.
The researchers found that right-wing political views mediated the relationship between white nationalism and support for the Committee. White nationalist attitudes were strongly associated with right-wing political views, which in turn influenced reactions to the Committee’s findings. This suggests that individuals with white nationalist beliefs are more likely to align themselves with conservative politics, and this political alignment significantly shapes their responses to the Committee’s recommendations.
“Our experiment suggests that for a non-trivial number of Americans, the desire to keep the United States a ‘white nation’ appears to be stronger than their desire to ensure that the country is led by a law-abiding president,” the researchers concluded.
John Buss has been a roll, and I’m using it! Lucky John graduated with Ginnie Thomas from our high school. I only had to put up with it for about a year. But wow, she was a hot mess then. She didn’t rebel against her Bircher parents, that’s for sure. What should be done with her and Alito’s wife? Ginnie’s help with the insurrection should be investigated. I have a feeling that a few of those leaks from the SCOTUS came from Martha Bombthrower.
Anyhow, have a great weekend, and see you on Monday!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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President Biden and key U.S. allies were in Normandy Thursday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.S.-led allied forces’ D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The brazen air and sea invasion would mark the beginning of the end of World War II, leading to the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German forces in Europe less than a year later.
Mr. Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were together to mark the most significant victory of the Western allies in the war, as well as the largest seaborne invasion in history. Mr. Biden is in France through the weekend for D-Day anniversary commemorations and plans to meet with leaders of key allies during his visit.
“Seventy-three-thousand brave Americans landed at Utah and Omaha beaches in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the president will greet American veterans and their family members while in France to honor their sacrifice,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in announcing the president’s trip.
Mr. Biden and first lady Jill Biden met WWII veterans one by one ahead of a memorial ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery on Thursday, presenting each one with coins made to commemorate the D-Day anniversary. He chatted and joked with some of the men, asking about their hometowns, thanking them for their service and calling them the greatest generation ever.
The president delivered remarks later Thursday at a commemoration ceremony that was also attended by members of Congress from both parties, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi.
President Joe Biden has vowed to not “surrender to the bullies” as he praised D-Day veterans for their bravery at a commemorative event.
The US President addressed the crowd in Ver-sur-Mer, France, on the 80th anniversary of the landings as he promised the 50 countries standing with Ukraine “will not walk away”.
“Make no mistake the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine. To see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked,” he said.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable.”
He added: “History tells us freedom is not free. You want to know the price of freedom come here to Normandy to look.”
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden greet a World War II veteran during ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. AP
US President Joe Biden referred to Vladimir Putin as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘bully’ in his D-Day commemoration speech, after hailing the ‘resolute’ Second World War troops who fought in Normandy 80 years ago today.
President Biden was among the speakers at an international gathering in northern France to commemorate the June 1944 conflict. Biden recognised the bravery of troops who stormed the beaches in Normandy, before going on to speak about the Ukraine war and how ‘the struggle between dictatorship and freedom is unending’.
Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had given France’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, to a number of US veterans, while the Danish prime minister said it is our generation’s “responsibility” to stand up to Vladimir Putin.
They were ordinary. The young men from afar who clambered ashore on June 6, 1944, into a hail of Nazi gunfire from the Normandy bluffs did not think of themselves as heroes.
No, said Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa, the allied soldiers “in this great battle were ordinary,” youths who “rose to this challenge with courage and a tremendous will to win, for freedom.”
In front of the general, during a ceremony this week at Deauville on the Normandy coast, were 48 American survivors of that day, the youngest of them 98, most of them 100 years old or more. The veterans sat in wheelchairs. They saluted, briskly enough. Eight decades have gone by, many of them passed in silence because memories of the war were too terrible to relate.
When the 90th anniversary of D-Day comes around in 2034, there may be no more vets. Living memory of the beaches of their sacrifice will be no more.
“Dark clouds of war in Europe are forming,” General Williams said, as he alluded to allied determination to defend Ukraine against Russian attack. This 80th anniversary of the landings is a celebration, but a somber one. Europe is troubled and apprehensive, extremism eating at its liberal democracies.
For more than 27 months now, there has been a war on the continent that has taken hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian lives. Russia was not invited to the commemoration even though the role of the Soviet Red Army in the defeat of Hitler was critical. A decade ago, President Vladimir V. Putin attended. Now he speaks of nuclear war. It is a time of fissuring and uncertainty.
Remembering the fight against Hitler in WWII is so important today, when a criminal and conman has apparently hypnotizes a large portion of the U.S. population. We can’t allow him to end our democracy and turn Europe over to Putin.
Back in the USA, Senate Republicans showed their true colors yesterday in a vote to protect the right to contraception.
Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to block a bill put forward by Democrats that would guarantee access to contraception nationwide, as Democrats seek to highlight the issue in the run up to November’s elections.
The bill – the Right to Contraception Act – would enshrine into federal law a right for individuals to buy and use contraceptives, as well as for health care providers to provide them. It would apply to birth control pills, the plan B pill, condoms and other forms of contraception.
The legislation failed to advance in a procedural vote by a tally of 51 to 39. Most Republicans dismissed the effort as a political messaging vote that is unnecessary and overly broad.
GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins crossed over to vote with Democrats in favor of advancing the bill. Schumer switched his vote to a no at the last minute in a procedural move that will allow Democrats to bring the bill back up in the future if they want.
“This is a show vote. It’s not serious,” GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said. “Plus, it’s a huge overreach. It doesn’t make any exceptions for conscience. … It’s a phony vote because contraception, to my knowledge, is not illegal. It’s not unavailable.”
The vote is part of a larger push by Senate Democrats to draw attention to how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has affected all aspects of reproductive health – not just abortion – as the election draws closer. Democrats are highlighting the issue this month, which marks the two-year anniversary of the high court’s ruling.
“In the coming weeks, Senate Democrats will put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said ahead of the vote.
Democratic senators have also introduced a legislative package to establish a nationwide right to in-vitro fertilization, which is expected to come up for a vote as soon as next week.
The Biden campaign posted a video on Wednesday night showing the faces of the 39 senators who voted against the legislation. (Seven Republican senators were not present for the vote.)
“These are the Trump-aligned Republicans who just blocked a bill to protect a woman’s right to contraception,” the campaign tweeted on X….
Ahead of the vote, Schumer said that Senate Democrats would “put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” according to the Associated Press.
Polling has consistently shown that there is broad bipartisan support among American voters for contraception, with 92 percent of respondents telling Gallup in 2022 that birth control was “morally acceptable.”
Republicans argued that legislation to enshrine the right to contraception is unnecessary, as it remains freely accessible and available across the country….
But Schumer said in a post-vote speech that “we are kidding ourselves if we think the hard-right is satisfied with overturning Roe,” warning that birth control could be next as reproductive rights continue to be threatened.
“So, make one thing clear: today was not a ‘show vote’ – this was a show-us-who-you-are vote,” he said. “And Senate Republicans showed the American people exactly who they are.”
Recall that after the Dobbs decision, Clarence Thomas stated his desire to overturn the decisions that made contraception, same sex marriage, and sex between same sex partners basic rights–all based on the right to privacy.
Speaking of the right wing SCOTUS justices, last night a former clerk of Samuel Alito appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show.
A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said Wednesday she was shocked after learning two flags affiliated with rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were flown outside his homes, saying she believed he should recuse himself from several cases before the court.
Susan Sullivan, who worked as a clerk while Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, spoke to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell amid the controversy surrounding the flags.
“I was aghast when I saw those photographs because I’ve never known Justice Alito to be anything other than an honorable man, to be a man of integrity,” Sullivan, now a professor at Temple University, told O’Donnell. “It is irrelevant if Mrs. Alito flew it or not. The fact is that flag was there.”
“This is not an insignificant symbol,” she went on. “Irrespective of why it is there, who put it there, it shouldn’t have been there. The problem is that flag is incendiary and it cannot do anything other than raise a reasonable inference of bias.”
Alito has rejected the calls for him to recuse from January 6 related cases.
“I am confident that a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that the events … do not meet the applicable standard for recusal,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers last month. “I am therefore required to reject your request.”
Sullivan rejected that claim in the Wednesday interview and an earlier opinion piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying recusal was warranted especially because of the decision before the court.
“[It is] the symbol of these people who attacked the capitol. They support Trump unconditionally,” she said. “So if you have cases before the court that directly relates not just to the former president but to criminal cases that involve that election process…”
“The stakes have never been higher and recusal is, to me, it just defies logic that one would not recuse themselves from a case like this,” Sullivan added. “The stakes are too high.”
Why isn’t Senator Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee doing anything to rein in Alito?
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held a lengthy oversight hearing to badger Attorney General Merrick Garland and push the GOP’s false narrative about President Biden weaponizing the DOJ against Donald Trump.
Even though the hearing was conducted in obvious bad faith, it was in some ways successful, at least in the limited sense that Republicans grabbed a lot of headlines and forced Garland to spend a day on the defensive. Virtually every major news outlet it extensive coverage, ranging from the New York Times to MSNBC to Newsmax….
Congressional oversight hearings give Congress a chance to focus the national conversation on what members want to talk about. It gives them a chance to pressure executive branch officials to adopt congressional priorities, or to explain and potentially embarrass themselves.
In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves.
Republicans like Jim Jordan are ignorant about a lot of things. But they understand that the gavel is power, and they are not afraid to use it. Senate Democrats need to get over their qualms and, in this instance, behave more like their rivals across the aisle….
Hearings drive narratives. But they can do more than that. Congress has real power to pressure government officials, and hearings are a way to demonstrate and exercise that power.
The Hunter Bidentrial starting in Wilmington, Delaware, is a poster-child case for potential jury nullification.
Biden, the only surviving son of President Joe Biden, is being tried for possessing a firearm while being a user of illegal drugs or drug addict and for lying about the same on a purchase form when he bought a gun. On the surface, the prosecution—a culmination of more than a half-decade of investigation by Special Counsel David Weiss—would appear to have a slam dunk case because there is no real dispute he bought the gun, or that he had a drug addiction around the time he bought the gun.
The strict definition of jury nullification is when a jury has determined that a defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—but either rejects the evidence or refuses to apply the law because the jury “wants to send a message about some social issue that is larger than the case itself, or because the result dictated by law is contrary to the jury’s sense of justice, morality, or fairness.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hunter Biden
Let’s be clear. Juries are not supposed to do that. They are supposed to convict if the evidence proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and acquit if it doesn’t.
But while the definition of nullification conjures up images of a jury making a social justice-inspired speech in refusing to convict, the reality is quite different because the jury does not need to make such a blatant statement. Rather, the sense that jurors may have of unfairness can be evidenced in an acquittal—despite strong evidence of guilt. (There’s also, of course, the possibility of a hung jury.)
What that means is skilled defense counsel can bring out the factors of unfairness without having to specifically ask a jury to ignore evidence or the law, while skilled prosecutors need to guard against the kind of evidence and testimony that may lead to nullification.
Thus far, the trial is revealing an outmatched prosecution, which has already blundered into a couple of minefields. Defense counsel Abbe Lowell is a seasoned high-profile defense counsel who has defended Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and got former presidential candidate John Edwards acquitted on campaign finance charges (brought by then-DOJ lawyer Jack Smith).
In the opening by the Biden defense team, Lowell focused on the requirement that the false statements on the gun ownership form had to be “knowing”—a term that Lowell claimed the prosecution tried to avoid in its opening. The utility of this defense is that it works synergistically with the effects of Biden’s admitted drug addiction affecting his decision-making abilities, as well as necessitating a deep dive into the details of his addiction and the specific timeline of when he was using crack cocaine and his efforts to get clean.
The defense appears to be setting up a defense theory that, on the specific date Biden bought the gun, he genuinely believed he was not an addict because he had just finished an 11-day rehabilitation program.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case abruptly changed the proceeding’s schedule on Wednesday, reshuffling the timing for hearings on an array of important legal issues.
The move by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was unlikely to have much impact on the overall trajectory of the case, but it reflected the substantial number of unresolved legal motions she is juggling. Last month, Judge Cannon scrapped the case’s trial date, saying she could not yet pick a new one because of what she described at the time as “the myriad and interconnected” questions she had still not managed to consider.
Judge Cannon kept in place a hearing she had set for June 21 to discuss a motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel named to oversee the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, was illegally appointed to his job.
Similar motions have been rejected in cases involving other special counsels, including Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, and David C. Weiss, who has brought two criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
The most important change Judge Cannon made to the schedule in a brief order was arguably the cancellation of a three-day hearing that had been set to take place starting June 24 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.
The hearing was originally meant to consider whether Mr. Trump’s lawyers should be permitted access to communications between prosecutors working for Mr. Smith and officials at the National Archives and several national security agencies.
Giddy up
The lawyers want those communications to bolster their claims that Mr. Smith worked hand in glove with the Biden administration and members of the so-called deep state to bring the documents case against Mr. Trump.
Prosecutors had objected to holding the proceeding at all, telling Judge Cannon in March that no similar hearings had ever been held in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits. In her order on Wednesday, she said she would place the hearing back on her calendar at some point in the future.
Instead of that hearing, Judge Cannon said there would now be a shorter one, on June 24 and 25, to consider different topics, including any lingering discussion about Mr. Smith’s appointment.
Judge Cannon also told the defense and the prosecution to be ready to debate Mr. Trump’s motion to exclude from the case any evidence — including more than 100 classified documents — that the F.B.I. discovered in August 2022 when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
The two sides will argue as well over Mr. Trump’s attempt to suppress the private audio notes that prosecutors obtained from one of his lawyers through a process that pierced the normal protections of attorney-client privilege. The notes by the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, were central to the government’s allegations that Mr. Trump had obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the classified materials he took to Mar-a-Lago.
Aileen Cannon is an expert at causing unnecessary delays without triggering an appeal to the 11th Circuit. If she rules that Jack Smith was illegally appointed, that would be cause for immediate appeal, so she will probably find some way to just waste more time.
Donald Trump’s lead lawyer says the former president’s seven-week criminal trial in New York took a physical toll—but he still managed to lose weight by skipping Trump’s notoriously unhealthy meals.
Todd Blanche appeared on a podcast, For The Defense, hosted by the attorney David Oscar Markus.
“Was it McDonald’s for lunch every single day, or did you get something else?” Markus asked.
“Oh, no-no-no,” Blanche said. “Well, first of all, I didn’t have lunch one day. I ate in the morning and at night.”
Delivery of McDonalds order for Trump’s courthouse lunch
“Look, President Trump’s team takes care of everybody. Like, everybody gets food. You know, there’s a lot of food. It’s not always McDonald’s. There’s a lot of… variety. There’s pizza, and there’s other non-healthy alternatives to McDonald’s.”
Blanche smiled, turning away from the camera and raising his eyebrows.
“Look, I loved it, because, you know, you come in from lunch, and as you know when you’re on trial, you’re trying to figure out what the heck you’re gonna stuff in your belly with the hour that you have. And we would walk in, and there would just be this, just, plethora of just food everywhere,” he said, gesturing with his hands.
The public got a peek last Thursday, when Donald Trump Jr. posted a TikTok video from what legal teams sometimes call the “war room,” where defendants strategize during breaks. The clip showed Trump Sr. sitting before a half-finished 20-ounce Diet Coca-Cola, an opened bag of Lay’s potato chips, a box of Milk Duds, a Milky Way bar, a theater-sized box of Whoppers malted milk balls, and what appeared to be four Hostess SnoBalls….
Trump’s go-to McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake—was first described by close ally Corey R. Lewandowski in a 2017 book, Let Trump Be Trump.
How is it possible that Trump hasn’t had a heart attack by now?
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.
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“Felonious trump is angry, the deep state wouldn’t let him use his golf cart..” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
For the first time since moving here, I’ve got a bout of agita that’s gone to my stomach. I’m thankful for my meditation training from doctors, sangha, and teachers. It really helps. However, surfing Samsara has gotten more difficult these days. You may need to sit on a mat after reading some of the things I will share today. I’m going to go dig in the soil once I finish this. There are a lot of weeds to pull. I can visualize who represents which weed.
It was a given, of course, that Trump backers would spring to his defense following his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Trump’s supporters are trying to dox the jurors, a sheriff is saying that it’s time we put a felon in the White House, and a bunch of MAGAs are flying the American flag upside down (though we have no update from the Alitos on the status of their flagpole). One of Trump’s lawyers and his legal spokesperson have both gone on Fox News and called on the Supreme Court to get their client off the hook. (More on that later.)
But one statement stands out in all this sound and furor: GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson’s call for SCOTUS to “step in.”
The morning after the conviction, Johnson went on Fox & Friends to reassure Trump supporters that he has the ear of the justices.
“I think that the justices on the court — I know many of them personally — I think they’re deeply concerned about [Trump’s conviction], as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight, but it’s going to take awhile.”
Johnson went on to say “this will be overturned, guys, there’s no question about it. It’s just going to take some time to do it.” (Watch below.)
This remarkable statement highlights how Republicans have come to — correctly — count on the federal courts to ensure they stay in power.
The Supreme Court already overturned Colorado’s decision to remove Trump from the ballot and agreed to hear his outrageous absolute immunity claim in the January 6 case after refusing to hear it on an expedited basis when asked by prosecutor Jack Smith. That foot-dragging resulted in the March 4 date for Trump’s DC trial being removed from the calendar, and it’s exceedingly unlikely there will be a new trial date before the election.
So why wouldn’t Johnson look to the conservatives on the Supreme Court to save Trump this time around?
Too bad David McCullough passed recently. We’ll need a narrator for this version of Ken Burns’ Civil War. Burns gave the commencement speech for undergraduates at Brandeis University. It’s worth a listen or read. Burns has documented a lot of our recent history and knows us well.
Another voice, Mercy Otis Warren, a philosopher and historian during our revolution put it this way, “The study of the human character at once opens a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of people, but when the checks of conscience are thrown aside, humanity is obscured.” I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of “us” and also “we” and “our” and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it’s that there’s only us. There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there’s a them, run away. Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment, which brings me to a moment I’ve dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality.
There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route. When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say, “The checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, “a bigger delusion”, James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.
The lies are more evident than ever, but they’re directed at an audience with no interest in the truth. Here’s another one from Senator Tim Scott via Axios. And yes, I’m quoting William Kristol again.
Sen. Tim Scott wants you to know: 2024 is not an abortion-policy election.
“The Supreme Court has already ruled that this is a states’ issue. President Trump and Speaker Johnson have both said that this will remain a states’ issue,” Scott said yesterday on Fox News Sunday. “That is a settled issue for our party, and frankly, it is one that takes that issue off the table for the Democrats, who have the most extreme position on abortion
Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.
The benefits have flowed from Trump’s businesses and campaign committees, according to a ProPublica analysis of public disclosures, court records and securities filings. One campaign aide had his average monthly pay double, from $26,000 to $53,500. Another employee got a $2 million severance package barring him from voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement. And one of the campaign’s top officials had her daughter hired onto the campaign staff, where she is now the fourth-highest-paid employee.
These pay increases and other benefits often came at delicate moments in the legal proceedings against Trump. One aide who was given a plum position on the board of Trump’s social media company, for example, got the seat after he was subpoenaed but before he testified.
Significant changes to a staffer’s work situation, such as bonuses, pay raises, firings or promotions, can be evidence of a crime if they come outside the normal course of business. To prove witness tampering, prosecutors would need to show that perks or punishments were intended to influence testimony.
A pair of Texas professors figured out that their female students have sex and, boy, they do not like it. So now the philosophy professor and finance professor are suing for the right to punish their students who, outside of class, have abortions.
“Pregnancy is not a disease, and elective abortions are not ‘health care,'” University of Texas at Austin professor Daniel Bonevac sneers in a federal court filing with professor John Hatfield. Instead, Bonevac writes, because pregnancy is the result of “voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse,” students should not be allowed time off to get abortions. If the students disobey and miss class for abortion care, the filing continues, the professors should be allowed to flunk students. Additionally, Bonevac asserts that he has a right to refuse to employ a teaching assistant who has had an abortion, calling such women “criminals.”
The sexual hang-ups of abortion opponents are rarely far from the surface, but even by those low standards, the unjustified male grievance on display in this new Texas lawsuit is a doozy. At issue are federal regulations, called Title IX, first signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972. They currently bar publicly funded schools from discriminating on the basis of sex or gender. This means that schools cannot penalize students for health care based on sex. As a male student would be granted leave if he had to travel for surgery, so must a female student, the federal statute requires. The two men argue that granting students an excused absence in such cases violates their First Amendment rights.
Even though the plaintiffs suing for the right to flunk female students for abortion include boilerplate arguments in which they feign concern that abortion is “killing,” the legal filing makes it clear that what really outrages Bonevac and Hatfield is that Title IX prevents them from controlling the private lives of students. Along with their anger about abortion, they grouse about not being allowed to punish students “for being homosexual or transgender.” They also argue they should be able to penalize teaching assistants for “cross-dressing,” by which they appear to mean allowing trans women to wear skirts.
It’s really difficult to describe these angry Christian white nationalists with any label but utter shitgibbons. If they can’t quote the Beatitudes, then they’re not really dealing with the historical Jesus. A shake-up at the Washington Post may make me finally cancel my subscription. This is the summary of the state of affairs by Politicotoday. “Playbook: The Trump Verdict Lands on the Hill.”
WAPO SHOCKER —SALLY BUZBEE is out as the Washington Post’s executive editor after a three-year run, to be immediately replaced by former WSJ editor in chief MATT MURRAY and, after the election, by the Telegraph’s ROBERT WINNETT. Both have previously worked under WaPo Publisher and CEO WILL LEWIS.
The announcement came in an 8:38 p.m. news release and landed as a thunderbolt to the Posties we spoke to, who were uniformly shocked by the sudden timing of Buzbee’s departure, if not necessarily by the fact of it. It was an unusually abrupt transition for the Post, where top leadership transitions are typically announced months in advance. (The newsroom did not immediately have a story ready to publish and, adding insult to injury, the NYT managed to get theirs up first.)
The buried lede: After Winnett takes over the “core” newsroom in November, Murray will lead a “third newsroom … comprised of service and social media journalism and run separately from the core news operation. The aim is to give the millions of Americans — who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed — compelling, exciting and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.”
It’s all about the clicks these days. Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an Op-Ed from one of Alito’s former clerks. “I was a law clerk for Justice Alito. He must recuse himself from hearing cases involving Donald Trump. Flying the U.S. flag upside down, once a signal of distress, has become a symbol of those who reject the results of the 2020 presidential election. When Alito did so, it was indeed a distress call.” These are the thoughts of Susan Sullivan.
As a former law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., I often admired him as a person for his integrity and honesty. As a progressive liberal, however, I vehemently disagreed with the approach he takes to reading the Constitution, the narrow interpretation he adopts, and his reverence for the framers’restrictive intent.
Over the years, I became increasingly distressed with the results of his decisions. And then came Dobbs.
By striking down the rights of women to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy, the decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which he wrote, eviscerated women’s fundamental right to self-determination. Dobbs is not just about abortion; it is about setting the clock back and undermining the core protections enshrined within the Constitution of liberty, equality, and access to justice.
And then came the flag.
Flying the American flag upside down, formerly a signal of distress, is now understood to unequivocally telegraph support for those who have co-opted and corrupted its original intent. It has become the symbol of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol in a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, who challenged — and continue to deny — the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. It is the emblem for the “Stop the Steal” Trump factions, the symbol now held hostage by those who attacked our democracy at its very core.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that Justice Alito flew an upside-down flag at his home in Fairfax, Va., and another controversial flag at his beach house on Long Beach Island — acts that are widely accepted as an abhorrent affront to anyone who respects our constitutional democracy. So, when that flag is flown upside down by a member of the nation’s highest court, it is indeed a distress call.
If the Supreme Court decides that he has blanket immunity — a decision expected any day now — these criminal charges, and any others, disappear. This means a president could commit serious crimes while in office, having nothing to do with the legitimate function of government, without facing any consequences. A president could theoretically hire an assassin to kill a competitor with impunity.
Justice Alito must recuse himself from having any role in the decision of these cases.
You may continue to read her rationale at the link. Meanwhile, this is an interesting read at The Guardian. “The reich stuff – what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? Comparisons between the ex-president and the 20th-century Nazi leader are controversial but a new book says they resemble each other as political performance artists.”
WhenDonald Trump shared a video that dreamed of a “unified reich” if he wins the US presidential election, and took nearly a full day to remove it, the most shocking thing was how unshocking it was.
Trump has reportedly said before that Adolf Hitler did “some good things”, echoed the Nazi dictator by calling his political opponents “vermin” and saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, and responded to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville by claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides”.
The Hitler-Trump analogy is controversial. “Some of Trump’s critics – including Biden’s campaign – argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison,” the Politico website observed recently. “Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders – and even some of his more historically-minded critics – argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.”
The former camp now includes Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain. The Dutchman, whose previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.
In it, De Berg compares and contrasts Hitler and Trump as political performance artists and how they connect with their respective audiences. He examines the two men’s work ethic, management style and narcissism, as well as quirks such as Hitler’s toothbrush moustache and Trump’s implausible blond hair.
In a Zoom interview from his office at the university campus, De Berg quotes the American comedian and actor George Burns: “The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” He adds: “The most important thing in populism is authenticity. The moment you’re able to fake that, you’re in.”
De Berg, 60, happened to be renewing his study of National Socialism, and rereading Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, just as Trump was first running for the White House in 2015. “Obviously, there are massive differences,” he acknowledges. “Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died.
“But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?
Well, it’s another Monday in this version of the United States.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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If he were a normal former president, the fact that Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by a jury of his peers would be much more shocking. But he is also charged with more serious crimes against the United States–fomenting an insurrection and stealing top secret classified documents and hoarding them in his resort property. And of course, he is charged with trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. We probably won’t know the outcome of those three cases until after the 2024 election, but we can begin to assess the results of the jury verdicts in Manhattan.
Ten percent of Republican registered voters say they are less likely to vote for Donald Trump following his felony conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Friday.
The two-day poll, conducted in the hours after the Republican presidential candidate’s conviction by a Manhattan jury on Thursday, also found that 56% of Republican registered voters said the case would have no effect on their vote and 35% said they were more likely to support Trump, who has claimed the charges against him are politically motivated and has vowed to appeal.
The potential loss of a tenth of his party’s voters is more significant for Trump than the stronger backing of more than a third of Republicans, since many of the latter would be likely to vote for him regardless of the conviction.
Among independent registered voters, 25% said Trump’s conviction made them less likely to support him in November, compared to 18% who said they were more likely and 56% who said the conviction would have no impact on their decision.
The verdict could shake up the race between Trump, who was U.S. president from 2017-2021, and Democratic President Joe Biden ahead of the Nov. 5 election. U.S. presidential elections are typically decided by thin margins in a handful of competitive swing states, meaning that even small numbers of voters defecting from their candidates can have a big impact.
Biden and Trump remain locked in a tight race, with 41% of voters saying they would vote for Biden if the election were held today and 39% saying they would pick Trump, according to the poll, which surveyed 2,556 U.S. adults nationwide.
IT IS NOW A LEGAL FACT that Donald Trump criminally falsified business records 34 times to cover up his attempt to hide an extramarital sexual affair. He is a convicted felon.
On its own, this would be one of the biggest scandals in presidential history. Public revelation of an affair with no connection to a crime ended Gary Hart’s presidential campaign in 1987. President Bill Clinton got impeached in 1998 and subsequently disbarred for committing the crime of perjury to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Trump’s hush-money fraud scandal is at least on par with that, and arguably worse, since his crimes occurred during a presidential campaign, rather than in the middle of a re-elected president’s second term. And that’s before noting that Trump has also been found liable for sexual abuse (and repeated defamation) in separate court proceedings involving a different woman, E. Jean Carroll, also on its own one of the biggest presidential scandals ever.
Woody in the garden, by Celia Pike
These scandals look trivial only in comparison to Trump’s even bigger crimes: conspiring to defraud the United States out of its presidential election results in 2020; and stealing, retaining, and exposing high-level national security secrets after leaving office. Trump faces federal charges for both of those, as well as additional state charges in Georgia relating to his post-defeat actions, but none of these cases will conclude, or perhaps even start, before this November’s election.
That’s why his Manhattan conviction is such a big deal. Trump is running for president to put himself above the law, and if he wins, it will cause democratic backsliding in the United States like that in Turkey, Hungary, India, and elsewhere. With only accusations and indictments against Trump, less invested voters could chalk it up to the he-said/she-said mudslinging of politics, but a jury conviction makes the stakes clearer. And the news is big enough to penetrate information bubbles, so the sort of voters who pay little attention to politics but end up deciding elections will hear about it….
There is no indication so far that this criminal conviction will get anyone to vote for Trump who wasn’t already planning to.
Grossman notes that we haven’t seen any big protests or political violence from right wingers following the verdict so far. But of course Trump and his gang are already lying about what happened.
AS SOON AS THE JURY ANNOUNCED its verdict, Trump, Republicans, and right-wing media began to lie about the trial—of course. They’ve engaged in the absurd doublethink of claiming Trump couldn’t possibly get a fair look from a jury of New Yorkers because everyone there hates him, just a few days after claiming Trump is so loved in New York that his rally in the Bronx had over 25,000 attendees (it was probably a tenth of that). They have attacked the judge, prosecutors, and the judicial system itself. If they can find out their names, they’ll probably attack members of the jury—hopefully just with words.
But the fact of the conviction is too big to deny. In that way, it’s like COVID and the 2020 election. Trump could distort public understanding of what was happening, but his early-2020 lies that COVID was nothing to worry about couldn’t overcome the medical reality. Since leaving office, he’s gotten the Republican party on board with his big election lie—but no matter how many Republicans falsely claim Trump was unfairly cheated, no matter how much fan fiction QAnon conspiracy theorists create, Joe Biden is now president and Donald Trump is not.
Still, Trump will presumably appeal his Manhattan conviction, and there’s almost no chance the legal process will end before the election. Even with the conviction, Trump can legally run for president and Americans can vote for him if they want.
The 34 felony guilty verdicts returned Thursday against former President Donald Trump spurred a wave of violent rhetoric aimed at the prosecutors who secured his conviction, the judge who oversaw the case and the ordinary jurors who unanimously agreed there was no reasonable doubt that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee falsified business records related to hush money payments to a porn star to benefit his 2016 campaign.
Advance Democracy, a non-profit that conducts public interest research, said there has been a high volume of social media posts containing violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, including a post with Bragg’s purported home address. The group also found posts of the purported addresses of jurors on a fringe internet message board known for pro-Trump content and harassing and violent posts, although it is unclear if any actual jurors had been correctly identified.
The posts, which have been reviewed by NBC News, appear on manyof the same websites used by Trump supporters to organize for violence ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. These forums were hotbeds of threats inspired by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, which he lost, and that the voting system was “rigged” against him. They now feature new threats echoing Trump’s rhetoric and false claims about the hush money trial, including that the judicial system is now “rigged” against him.
“Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,” one user wrote after Trump’s conviction on a website formerly known as “The Donald,” which was popular among participants in the Capitol attack. (That post appears to have been quickly removed by moderators.)
“We need to identify each juror. Then make them miserable. Maybe even suicidal,” wrote another user on the same forum. “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to washington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution,” wrote another user. “This s— is out of control.”
“I hope every juror is doxxed and they pay for what they have done,” another user wrote on Trump’s Truth Social platform Thursday. “May God strike them dead. We will on November 5th and they will pay!”
“Now you understand. To save your nation, you must fight. The time to respond is now. Franco Friday has begun,” another Proud Boys chapter wrote, apparently referring to fascist dictator Francisco Franco of Spain.
One Jan. 6 defendant who already served time in prison for his role in the Capitol attack also weighed in on X, posting a photo of Bragg and a photo of a noose. “January 20, 2025 traitors Get The Rope,” he wrote, referring to the date of the next presidential inauguration.
Russian state-controlled media apparatus closely followed the legal troubles of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump, spicing up most of their coverage with pro-Trump clips from Fox News and Tucker Carlson. Russian propagandists were openly hoping for a hung jury and were visibly disappointed when Trump became a convicted felon on all 34 charges he was facing.
On Friday morning, Dmitry Kulikov, host of Solovyov Live, the self-described “most patriotic channel” in Russia, said on-air, “They wronged our Donald Trump!” Malek Dudakov, a political scientist who specializes in America, said that the hope for a miracle—meaning a hung jury—was extinguished. He said, with Russia’s affectionate middle name usage, “The miracle did not happen. Our Donald Fredovych was found guilty on all 34 counts.” For that, Dudakov blamed the judge and the jury and baselessly claimed that all of them were prejudiced against Trump. “Now, he is a felon,” he surmised, while also noting that the former president’s incarceration as a result of this conviction is unlikely.
Dudakov expressed hope that despite his legal troubles, Trump would still win in the upcoming presidential election. Kulikov and Dudakov jointly echoed Tucker Carlson’s assertions that their preferred candidate will prevail, “unless desperately panicked Democrats will organize an assassination of Donald Fredovych.” They expressed hope that Biden—not Trump—would die before the elections.
Similar reactions reverberated across Russian media outlets. Appearing on a state TV show 60 Minutes Friday morning, State Duma member Aleksei Zhuravlyov opted to discuss Trump’s conviction before addressing other bad news Russia is facing, with Western governments broadly signing off on Ukraine’s right to defend itself by striking Russia on its own turf. Zhuravlyov said he would address this “escalation” later and started with his rant against America for turning Trump into a felon.
Mischaracterizing the prosecution by describing it as “a lawsuit brought by Stormy Daniels,” host Olga Skabeeva chimed in and described Trump as “a former and potentially future U.S. president.” She surmised that the situation is too ridiculous for words and keeps escalating on every front. Skabeeva complained that earlier predictions of a hung jury did not come true, bitterly adding in perfect English, “Shit happens.”
For more than a year, President Biden has sought to cast the 2024 election not as a referendum on his four years in office but on whether voters want to return Donald J. Trump to office after a first term in which he undermined abortion rights, democracy and the rule of law.
Now, Mr. Trump’s guilty verdict on all 34 counts in his hush-money trial on Thursday has given Mr. Biden’s campaign a fresh way to frame the race: a stark choice between someone who is a convicted felon and someone who is not.
Mr. Trump’s conviction could well shake up U.S. politics, serving as a convening moment that cuts through a fragmented news media ecosystem even if it does not change pessimism about inflation and the cost of living. Mr. Trump has led many polls, with voters holding dim views of Mr. Biden’s stewardship of the economy, the southern border and foreign wars.
The Manhattan jury’s verdict is likely to focus attention on Mr. Trump in a way that Mr. Biden’s supporters have long hoped it would. Even if Mr. Biden does not directly affix the title “felon” to his rival, scores of his allies are planning to do so in their communications about Mr. Trump through the end of the campaign.
“Donald Trump is a racist, a homophobe, a grifter and a threat to this country,” said Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a top Biden surrogate and an influential billionaire donor for Democratic causes. “He can now add one more title to his list — a felon.”
Mr. Biden has to this point said virtually nothing about the New York case against Mr. Trump or any of the other three criminal indictments he faces, trying to stay above the fray as his rival baselessly claims that Mr. Biden orchestrated the charges. And the White House demurred after the verdict: “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office.
The Biden campaign was less circumspect. Its aides tried to tie the verdict to the choice voters will face in November.
“Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain,” said Michael Tyler, the campaign’s communications director. “Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
Former President Donald Trump said he was going to hold a “press conference” on Friday in the wake of his Thursday conviction in Manhattan on felony charges of falsifying business records.
Instead, Trump delivered a rambling monologue that was filled with false claims on subjects ranging from the Manhattan trial to immigration to tax policy.
Here is a fact check of some of the inaccurate or unsubstantiated claims he made.
Some excerpts:
Crime in NYC:
Trump repeated his familiar claim that, while Manhattan prosecutors have been focusing on him, New York City has been experiencing record-high violent crime. He said this time that “you have violent crime all over this city at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is not even close to true. Violent crime in New York City – and violent crime inManhattan in particular – has plummeted since the early 1990s and is today nowhere near record levels.
New York City recorded 391 murders in 2023, down about 83% from the 2,262 in 1990; 1,455 rapes in 2023, down about 53% from the 3,126 in 1990; and 16,910 robberies in 2023, down about 83% from the 100,280 in 1990.
Michael Cohen’s crimes
Criticizing key prosecution witness Michael Cohen, Trump repeated a claim he made during the trial in April. He asserted that Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, “got into trouble not because of me” but because of “outside deals” and “something to do with taxicabs and medallions, and he borrowed money, and that’s why he went.” He added that Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations to try to get himself a lighter penalty.
Trump continued: “He got in trouble for a very simple reason: because he was involved with borrowing a lot of money and he did something with the banks – I don’t know, defrauded the banks, but something happened.”
Black cat in Klimt’s garden
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Cohen got into trouble simply because of his non-Trump-related activities, such as those related to taxis and loans, is not true. First, Cohen’s case was referred to federal prosecutors in New York by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who was appointed to investigate any connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Second, Cohen’s three-year prison sentence in 2018 was for multiple crimes, some of which were directly related to Trump.
Neighbors of Samuel Alito and his wife described how a disagreement over political lawn signs put up in the wake of the 2020 presidential election quickly devolved into “unhinged behavior towards a complete stranger” by the supreme court justice’s wife.
Emily Baden says she never intended to get into a fight with Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, her powerful neighbors who live on the same suburban cul-de-sac as her mother outside Washington DC.
Then a large black car, part of the Alitos’ security detail, started parking in front of her mother’s house instead of theirs, and Baden understood the perils of being an ordinary citizen going up against one of the most powerful men in the country.
The two sides do not agree on much, but Baden, a staunch liberal, and Martha-Ann Alito, a staunch conservative, concur that they began exchanging words in late 2020, almost two months after Joe Biden’s election victory over Donald Trump. Soon after, according to Baden, the Alitos’ security detail began parking a car directly in front of her mother’s house – several houses down from its usual spots either directly in front of the Alitos or across the street from them.
“This happened a handful of times,” Baden now recalls. “I took that as directly threatening.”
Baden and her husband both say that the security detail’s car showed up in front of her mother’s house again two weeks ago, after the New York Times broke the story about an upside-down American flag hanging on the Alitos’ flagpole in the days before Biden’s inauguration – a symbol associated with the January 6 insurrection that sought to prevent Biden from taking office at all.
Baden was no longer living with her mother by that point – she is now a mother herself and living on the west coast. Neither she nor her mother were mentioned by name in the initial Times story. Still, she found the message that this sent disturbing.
“I couldn’t say who was in the car because of the tinted glass, and nobody ever said anything. I took it as a general threat,” she said. “The message was, we could do terrible things to you, and nobody would be able to do anything about it. When it comes to justices at the supreme court, they make the laws, but the laws don’t apply to them.”
Alito’s hard-right ideology, and his shameless lack of ethics, were obvious when he was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005. A few Democratic senators sounded the siren, but the mainstream media, even its so-called “liberal” mainstays, largely ignored the warnings, unwittingly cooperating with an elite, right-wing operation to install a dishonest, partisan extremist on the highest court of the country.
Cats in the garden, by Anne Parker
As TheNew York Times reported on the eve of Alito’s confirmation in 2006, his placement on the court was the “culmination” of an effort that began during the Reagan administration to staff the judiciary with ideologues of the religious right. Conservatives also deployed an adroit media strategy to temper, silence, and even disparage any attempt to criticize Alito during the nomination hearings. Public relations specialists and legal experts, coordinating on behalf of the Federalist Society, Christian organizations like Focus on the Family, and Republican senators, helped to sell Alito to the Senate, the media, and the public—even before his nomination. “We boxed them in,” one lawyer who participated in the meetings told the newspaper, presumably referring to the Senate and the mainstream media.
Early in the Alito nomination fight, Democrats uncovered a memo the judge wrote while he was working for the Reagan administration in 1985 that articulated his opposition to legal abortion. He advised against waging a “frontal assault on Roe” only because such a maneuver would prove politically unpopular, and instead advocated for a steady demolition of access to reproductive health care at the state level. Until the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe, the Alito playbook is exactly what many Southern and heartland states followed to make abortion all but impossible within their borders.
The memo did not stop Alito from lying to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, whose diary revealed that, while meeting privately in Kennedy’s office, Alito assured him that he would never vote to overturn Roe. Unlike Republican Senator Susan Collins, who believed the same lie from Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, Kennedy was not gullible enough to vote in favor of Alito’s confirmation.
The P.R. firm handling the Alito nomination insisted that Republicans counter with the claim that, as a lawyer for the Reagan administration, Alito was only reflecting the views of his client. Planned Parenthood warned that Alito would “gut Roe” if he had the opportunity, but the media soon dropped stories on the memo.
Similarly nauseating events transpired when Democrats learned that Alito belonged to Concerned Alumni of Princeton, an organization that opposed measures to increase admission of women and racial minorities. The group wasn’t merely against affirmative action but also contemptuous of co-education and supportive of quotas that favored men.
Alito insisted that his participation in the group was ancient history. (He had listed his membership on a job application as a 35-year-old applying to work for the federal government.) The mainstream media reacted not with questions about Alito’s biases on race and gender but with vilification of Democrats.
Read more at the TNR link.
That’s all I have for you today. Have a great summer weekend!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
I planned on attending law school, taking the exams while noticeably pregnant with my oldest daughter, getting accepted to several, etc. I visited the University of Chicago as an undergrad. All I could think was there were too many damn lawyers around the country. So, I became a Financial Economist with eyes on my doctorate. I missed this seminal event in American History where a group of people worked to undermine the Justice System to benefit the wealthy. 
Yet, this is the same group that vetted all of Trump’s appointments. But it didn’t start there, and it doesn’t end there. 
Here’s the report
Newsweek has three charts that give you an idea of who was a crook and who took their job more conventionally.
Thomas filed his disclosure report last week. 
Many Judges and Justices take their jobs seriously and do not go in with a political agenda. As BostonBoomer has reported, Judge Loose Cannon is one of those Judges who seems devious and incompetent simultaneously. 
The Senate needs to take its review of judges much more seriously. This has been going on since Thomas sat on the court, and it’s the one thing I can never forgive Biden for, along with his coziness with Southern Senators on the busing issue, which also bothered me. We’ll lose more personal liberties if we don’t do something now. One more interesting article which outlines the results of a study. 
This introduction is followed by a thorough list of their control variables. Here are some of the specific findings.
The bill – the Right to Contraception Act – would enshrine into federal law a right for individuals to buy and use contraceptives, as well as for health care providers to provide them. It would apply to birth control pills, the plan B pill, condoms and other forms of contraception.
Susan Sullivan, who worked as a clerk while Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, 
In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves.
The lies are more evident than ever, but they’re directed at an audience with no interest in the truth. Here’s another one from Senator Tim Scott via 
Here’s one from Amanda Marcotte–writing for Salon–that will once again show how far the fetus fetishists will go to control women and deny them bodily autonomy. 
It’s really difficult to describe these angry Christian white nationalists with any label but utter shitgibbons. If they can’t quote the Beatitudes, then they’re not really dealing with the historical Jesus. A shake-up at the Washington Post may make me finally cancel my subscription. This is the summary of the state of affairs by 
It’s all about the clicks these days. 
You may continue to read her rationale at the link. Meanwhile, this is an interesting read at 
If he were a normal former president, the fact that Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by a jury of his peers would be much more shocking. But he is also charged with more serious crimes against the United States–fomenting an insurrection and stealing top secret classified documents and hoarding them in his resort property. And of course, he is charged with trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. We probably won’t know the outcome of those three cases until after the 2024 election, but we can begin to assess the results of the jury verdicts in Manhattan.
“We need to identify each juror. Then make them miserable. Maybe even suicidal,” wrote another user on the same forum. “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to washington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution,” wrote another user. “This s— is out of control.”
The Manhattan jury’s verdict is likely to focus attention on Mr. Trump in a way that Mr. Biden’s supporters have long hoped it would. Even if Mr. Biden does not directly affix the title “felon” to his rival, scores of his allies are planning to do so in their communications about Mr. Trump through the end of the campaign.
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