Wednesday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

It’s spring, but here in New England, we are awaiting a winter storm–a Nor’easter with high winds, torrential rains, and even snow in some areas. The storm is expected to last from this afternoon into Friday. It’s supposed to get stormy later this afternoon, but I can see outside my window that it is already raining. It’s a good day to read book and maybe take a nap.

The world news is awful. Benjamin Netanyhu is a monster. Yesterday, we learned that 7 workers for José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen were killed in 3 Israeli strikes in Gaza that sound targeted. The charity said they had coordinated with the IDF and had large signs on the roofs of their vehicles identifying them as aid workers.

David Graham at The Atlantic: A Deadly Strike in Gaza.

Seven people working for a humanitarian aid group led by the chef José Andrés were killed in an Israeli air strike in the central Gaza Strip today. The strike is a black mark for the Israel Defense Forces, and likely to turn world opinion further against the Gaza campaign. But more than its geopolitical significance, the strike is a horrifying moment on a human level. Innocent people, doing good work to feed a starving population, have died for no reason at all.

The group, World Central Kitchen, has been engaged for months in efforts to feed severely malnourished Palestinians in Gaza. WCK said the workers were “traveling in a deconflicted zone in two armored cars branded with the WCK logo and a soft skin vehicle,” and that the strike happened despite the group coordinating its movements with the Israel Defense Forces. Footage shows a puncture directly through the WCK emblem prominently displayed atop a vehicle.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged the strike, which he described as an accident. “Unfortunately, there was a tragic incident in which our forces unintentionally hit innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” he said. “As it happens in war, we are investigating the matter fully, we are in contact with the governments, and we will do everything possible to prevent this from happening again.”

When Netanyau made this statement, there was an obvious smirk on his face.

Back to the Atlantic:

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the trucks were traveling along a route approved by the IDF when they were struck by an Israeli drone. Security forces believed that there was an armed Hamas member in the convoy, but the target was not actually traveling in any of the vehicles at the time of the strike. After each of the first two vehicles was struck, the passengers moved the wounded to a third, before another strike hit that one, killing the seven people. A Haaretz source inside the defense establishment blamed units in the field for acting rashly.

Writing on X, Andrés mourned the deaths: “The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon. No more innocent lives lost. Peace starts with our shared humanity. It needs to start now.” [….]

The deaths are the latest senseless act of violence in a cycle that began with Hamas’s October 7 attacks, which killed more than 1,000 Israelis. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have died in Israel’s campaign in Gaza since. Netanyahu says the operation will destroy Hamas, though many commentators inside and outside of Israel find that goal unrealistic. The IDF has blamed civilian casualties on Hamas, which has intertwined its operations with noncombatants. Many aid workers have died, as well as nearly 100 members of the media, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The New York Times: José Andrés: Let People Eat.

In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.

The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.

People gather around the carcass of a car used by US-based aid group World Central Kitchen, that was hit by an Israeli strike the previous day in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on April 2, 2024. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.

These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.

Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.

All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.

That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.

The World Central Kitchen has pulled out of Gaza for now, and without them Palestinians will starve.

Reuters: Biden ‘outraged’ by Israeli airstrike that killed aid workers in Gaza.

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he was “outraged and heartbroken” by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza that killed seven people working for World Central Kitchen (WCK) and he called on Israel to do more to protect aid workers.

Israel’s investigation of the incident “must be swift, it must bring accountability, and its findings must be made public,” Biden said in a statement.

“Even more tragically, this is not a stand-alone incident,” he said. “This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed.” [….]

Biden said Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers or civilians in Gaza.

“The United States has repeatedly urged Israel to deconflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations, in order to avoid civilian casualties,” he said.

Biden also spoke to Chef Andres by phone. Read about it at Axios. That’s a start, but Biden needs to do more. I think he should cut off military aid to Israel.

As usual, there is lots of Trump news.

First, late last night Special Prosecutor Jack Smith filed a response to Judge Aileen Cannon’s order that both sides submit jury instructions based on her faulty interpretation of the Presidential Records Act.

Hannah Rabinowitz and Tierney Sneed at CNN: Special counsel blasts judge’s jury instruction request in Trump documents case.

In perhaps prosecutors’ strongest rebuke yet to how Judge Aileen Cannon has handled the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, special counsel Jack Smith said in court filings late Tuesday evening that the judge had ordered briefings based on a “fundamentally flawed” understanding of the case that has “no basis in law or fact.”

Smith’s team harshly critiqued Cannon’s request for jury instructions that embraced Trump’s claims that he had broad authority to take classified government documents and said it would seek an appeals court review if she accepted the former president’s arguments about his record-retention powers.

In an unusual order last month, Cannon asked attorneys on the classified documents case to submit briefs on potential jury instructions defining terms of the Espionage Act, under which Trump is charged over mishandling 32 classified records. Specifically, Cannon asked the special counsel and defense attorneys to write two versions of proposed jury instructions.

The first scenario would instruct a jury to assess whether each of the records that Trump is accused of retaining fell into the categories of “personal” or “presidential” as laid out by the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate law that governs how White House records belonging to the government are to be handled at the end of a presidency.

The second version Cannon asked for assumes that as president, Trump had complete authority to take records he wanted from the White House, which would make it nearly impossible for prosecutors to secure a conviction. If she were to institute this sort of instruction, Smith’s team said, “the Government must be provided with an opportunity to seek prompt appellate review.”

“Both scenarios rest on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise — namely, that the Presidential Records Act and in particular its distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘Presidential’ records, determines whether a former President is ‘authorized,’ under the Espionage Act, to possess highly classified documents and store them in an unsecure facility,” the special counsel’s team wrote.

If allowed to be presented to a jury, prosecutors said, “that premise would distort the trial.” [….]

Prosecutors have repeatedly said that PRA is not relevant to the charges against Trump, as the conduct he is accused of happened after his term as president ended. Trump’s claim that he deemed the records personal are “pure fiction,” invented once the National Archives had retrieved boxes with classified information from Mar-a-Lago two years after he left office, they wrote Tuesday.

Their new filing sheds light on some of the evidence that investigators have collected about Trump’s record-keeping habits during his presidency. According to the prosecutors’ account, there is no evidence that Trump designated the relevant classified records as personal when he left the White House, and the prosecutors said he got the idea that he did have such power many months later, from the leader of a conservative legal organization.

That leader is Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch. Fitton is not an attorney.

Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Frustrated Prosecutors Ask Trump Documents Judge to Act on Key Claim.

In an open display of frustration, federal prosecutors on Tuesday night told the judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case that a “fundamentally flawed” order she had issued was causing delays and asked her to quickly resolve a critical dispute about one of Mr. Trump’s defenses — leaving them time to appeal if needed.

The unusual and risky move by the prosecutors, contained in a 24-page filing, signaled their mounting impatience with the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who has allowed the case to become bogged down in a logjam of unresolved issues and curious procedural requests. It was the most directly prosecutors have confronted Judge Cannon’s legal reasoning and unhurried pace, which have called into question whether a trial will take place before the election in November even though both sides say they could be ready for one by summer.

In their filing, prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, all but begged Judge Cannon to move the case along and make a binding decision about one of Mr. Trump’s most brazen claims: that he cannot be prosecuted for having taken home a trove of national security documents after leaving office because he transformed them into his own personal property under a law known as the Presidential Records Act.

The prosecutors derided that assertion as one “not based on any facts,” adding that it was a “justification that was concocted more than a year after” Mr. Trump left the White House.

“It would be pure fiction,” the prosecutors wrote, “to suggest that highly classified documents created by members of the intelligence community and military and presented to the president of the United States during his term in office were ‘purely private.’” [….]

Mr. Smith’s prosecutors told Judge Cannon in their filing on Tuesday that the Presidential Records Act had nothing to do with the case and that the entire notion of submitting jury instructions based on it rested on a “fundamentally flawed legal premise.”

Instead, they asked her to decide the validity of the Presidential Records Act defense in a different way: by rejecting Mr. Trump’s motion to dismiss the case based on the same argument. That motion has been sitting on her desk for almost six weeks.

The prosecutors want Judge Cannon to take that course of action, because any decision she makes on the motion to dismiss can be challenged in an appeals court. But if the case is allowed to reach the jury, any ruling she might make acquitting Mr. Trump cannot be appealed.

Read the rest at the NYT.

Marcy Wheeler puts it in plain language: Jack Smith to Aileen Cannon: Treating Non-Lawyer Tom Fitton’s Theories as Law Will Lead to Mandamus.

Both Trump and Jack Smith have responded to Aileen Cannon’s whack order to write proposed jury instructions as if the Presidential Records Act says something it doesn’t. Neither are all that happy about it.

Trump used his response to claim that having the jury assess whether Trump really did make these documents personal records rather than simply steal them would put them in the role that, he’s arguing, only a (former) President can be in.

Smith — as many predicted — spent much of the filing arguing that Cannon cannot leave this issue until jury instructions because it must have an opportunity to seek mandamus for such a clear legal error; they cite the 11th Circuit slapdown of Cannon’s last attempt to entertain this fantasy in support.

Along the way, though, Smith also did something I had hoped he would do: explain where, and when, Trump’s own whack theory came from in the first place.

It came from Tom Fitton’s Xitter propaganda in response to the public report, in February 2022, that Trump had returned documents, including classified ones. But even after Fitton first intervened, Trump’s handlers continued to treat any remaining classified documents as presidential records for months.

Read about Fitton’s half-baked “theory” at the link. As I understand it, madamus means that Smith would ask the appeals court to remove Cannon from the case and replace her.

Earlier yesterday, the Judge Juan Merchan, who is in charge of the New York criminal case against Trump for interfering in the 2016 election by paying off women he was sexually involved with, added family members to his gag order. The Guardian: Trump faces an expanded gag order. It won’t stop the death threats.

When Judge Juan Merchan issued a gag order last week to bar former president Donald Trump from attacking potential witnesses and others involved in his pending hush-money trial in New York, he left open a loophole that Trump jumped to exploit.

The former president immediately went on the attack against Merchan’s own daughter, falsely accusing her of posting social media content that called for Trump to be jailed.

Merchan’s original gag order had covered potential trial witnesses, jurors, district attorney Alvin Bragg’s staff and Merchan’s staff while excluding the prosecutor and the judge – but hadn’t explicitly included Merchan’s and Bragg’s family members.

Merchan responded by expanding the gag order on Monday to cover their families, writing that Trump’s attacks on his daughter were part of a broader pattern of attacking family members of the judges and attorneys involved in his cases that “serves no legitimate purpose. It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game’ for Defendant’s vitriol.”

Judge Juan Merchan

That pattern has played out in case after case – and if the past is prologue, his supporters will take it one step further. When Trump attacks those involved in his cases, death threats soon follow.

Bragg, whom Trump has called an “animal” and “degenerate psychopath”, and Merchan, who he’s claimed “HATES ME”, have received death threats ever since the case began.

Read more at The Guardian.

Erica Orden and Meredith McGraw at Politico: ‘It’s clearly strategic’: Why Trump kept attacking judges’ families.

Every time prosecutors and judges tried to muzzle Donald Trump, he lashed out at their families.

In three different court cases over the past six months, judges imposed gag orders that restrained the former president from vilifying witnesses, court employees and others involved in the proceedings against him. In each case, Trump responded by verbally attacking not only the prosecutors and judges themselves, but also their family members.

“It’s clearly strategic,” said Ty Cobb, who served as a White House lawyer under Trump but has become a frequent critic of the former president.

“His attacks are designed around his traditional approach to delegitimizing the proceedings.” [….]

After Trump spent several days denigrating the adult daughter of Justice Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing Trump’s Manhattan criminal case, Merchan issued an expanded gag order barring Trump from attacking the judge’s own family. Merchan also expanded the gag to cover the family of the lead prosecutor, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

“The average observer, must now, after hearing Defendant’s recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well,” Merchan wrote. “Such concerns will undoubtedly interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitutes a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself.”

It’s not just the rule of law that’s under threat. Outside the courtroom, Trump’s judges have faced persistent threats to their personal safety, including “swatting” calls directed at their homes and a racist voicemail threatening murder.

In his latest fusillade on social media, unleashed within days of Merchan’s original gag order, Trump called Merchan’s daughter a “Rabid Trump Hater” due to her work at a digital marketing agency that has Democratic clients. And he claimed that she had used an image of Trump behind bars as a profile picture for a social media account, although a court official said she had abandoned and deleted that account, and that it had been taken over by someone else.

How can this horrible person actually have been president? And how can he be permitted to run again? And if he is elected in November the plan is for him to run again in 2028 (if we still have election then).

Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Project 2025 reveals its goal: Trump as president for life.

Project 2025, the Republican plan to functionally annihilate not just the federal government but democracy as well if Trump wins in November, is an unceasing parade of horrors.

Kristen Eichamer holds a Project 2025 fan in the group’s tent at the Iowa State Fair, Aug. 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa….AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Banning the abortion pill nationwide? Check. Rolling back protections for LGBTQ people? Check. Deporting literally millions of undocumented immigrants? Check. But amid each objectively horrible aim is an even more more insidious one: abolishing the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms. It’s an unvarnished, right-out-in-the-open plan to keep Trump in office well past 2028.

It’s not as if this is genuinely unexpected. By July 2019, Trump had “joked” at least six times about being president for life. Floating that as a possibility, as Peter Tonguette did last week over at The American Conservative, is a great opportunity to show fealty to a candidate who values loyalty over all else.

The American Conservative is a “partner” of Project 2025, along with such luminaries as Stephen Miller’s America First Legal law firm (currently suing everyone over the mildest of diversity efforts) and the Claremont Institute, which gave us Christopher Rufo and Moms for Liberty.

As Media Matters notes, the reasoning in Tonguette’s piece is dubious at best, but that doesn’t really matter. Project 2025 doesn’t rest on solid law, respect for democracy, or an understanding of history. It rests only on the notion that Trump should be allowed to exhibit raw, vicious, and unchecked power.

Read the rest at the link.

At least one family pushed back on Trump’s lies yesterday. In a speech in Michigan yesterday, Trump talked about Ruby Garcia, a woman who was murdered allegedly by an undocumented immigrant.

The Washington Post: Trump said he spoke to murder victim’s family. The victim’s sister said it never happened.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Donald Trump used his campaign event in Michigan on Tuesday to denounce what he called “Biden’s border bloodbath,” zeroing in on the case of a young woman killed by someone immigration officials say had entered the country illegally.

“She lit up that room, and I’ve heard that from so many people,” Trump said at a news conference in the hometown of the 25-year-old victim, Ruby Garcia. “I spoke to some of her family.”

But Garcia’s sister, acting as a family spokeswoman, said Tuesday that Trump and his campaign have not contacted her or other immediate relatives — and rebuked the GOP presidential nominee’s effort to make the case part of his calls for a border crackdown.

“It’s always been about illegal immigrants,” the victim’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told local news station Target 8. “Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”

The Trump campaign did not comment Tuesday, andTrump did not mention speaking with Garcia’s family at a Wisconsin rally later Tuesday. Mavi Garcia confirmed to The Washington Post that Trump and his campaign never spoke with the family.