The big news this morning is that the Fox News/Dominion lawsuit is going forward! Numerous media sites, including NBC News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times are providing live updates, and reporters are live tweeting.
AP News: Jury seated to hear case about Fox’s false election claims.
A jury was seated Tuesday to hear a voting machine company’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News in a trial that will test First Amendment protections and expose the network’s role in spreading the lie of a stolen 2020 presidential election.
Jury selection came a day after the judge granted a one-day delay that offered time to see if the two sides could work out a settlement.
Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems aims to hold Fox accountable for airing false allegations of election fraud that continue to roil U.S. politics.
Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis gave no explanation for the brief delay. But he suggested the companies try to mediate their dispute, according to a person close to Fox who was not authorized to speak publicly about the lawsuit’s status and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The case will put under scrutiny the libel standard that has guided U.S. media outlets for nearly six decades, reveal behind-the-scenes activity at Fox News in the weeks after the 2020 election and shed light on the flow of misinformation that turned into a tidal wave after the election, which then-President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.
Fox News stars such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, as well as company founder Rupert Murdoch, are expected to testify during the six-week trial, but it’s unclear whether any witnesses would be called Tuesday.
Dominion claims New York-based Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp., essentially bulldozed the voting company’s business and subjected employees to threats by falsely implicating it in a bogus conspiracy to rig the election against Trump.
n the weeks after Election Day, prominent Fox News hosts brought on Trump allies who falsely claimed that Dominion’s machines were programmed to snatch votes away from the Republican incumbent and pad the Democratic challenger’s total.
Many of Fox’s hosts and executives didn’t believe the claims but allowed them to be aired nevertheless.
The Wall Street Journal on the risks of going to trial rather than settling out of court: Fox News, Dominion Each Face Risks if Defamation Case Goes to Trial.
Both Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News face legal risks if their heavyweight defamation battle goes to trial beginning Tuesday, but any last-minute settlement talks would need to overcome two years of intense legal hostilities that so far have put an agreement out of reach.
Both sides gained an extra day Monday to consider their positions as Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis delayed the start of the trial until Tuesday….
University of Georgia law professor Sonja West said both sides will have to weigh how much of a risk they are willing to take in going to trial.
“Even when a party believes it has a persuasive case, juries can be unpredictable,” Ms. West said. “There’s always an element of rolling the dice. Both Fox and Dominion have a lot on the line.”
Fox and Dominion each face potential strengths and weaknesses in their cases.
Dominion comes to court armed with reams of internal Fox communications indicating that hosts, producers and executives were deeply skeptical—and in some cases disdainful—of the election-fraud claims, yet they continued to broadcast them. That could help Dominion establish its claims that Fox acted with actual malice, the legal standard for defamation. Under that standard, Dominion has to prove that Fox knowingly published false material or proceeded with reckless disregard for the truth.
The public release of Fox’s internal discussions has painted the network in an unflattering light, and the spotlight on its operations could grow brighter during live testimony. A trial could require high-profile Fox figures to take the witness stand, including Fox Corp FOX -0.32%decrease; red down pointing triangle. Chair Rupert Murdoch and Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson.
“The reputational damage has already been suffered,” said Jonathan Wald, a former senior executive at MSNBC and CNN. “Settling is a way to cut that off and move forward.”
Fox lawyers previously sought to keep Mr. Murdoch from having to appear in person, but Judge Davis has said he would require him to appear as a witness if Dominion formally requested his testimony at trial.
Complicating matters for Fox, buying litigation peace with Dominion wouldn’t end its legal exposure stemming from its postelection broadcasts. The network is separately facing another defamation lawsuit from a different voting-machine company, Smartmatic USA Corp., which is seeking $2.7 billion in damages.
Read more at the WSJ. I didn’t encounter a paywall when I clicked a link at Memeorandum.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote a great post on the decline and fall of the Republican Party in the post-Trump era. Today, the news is again full of Republican pratfalls that prove the party as we once knew it is dying. Bumbling Kevin McCarthy keeps trying to engage President Biden over the debt ceiling, but he can’t even get his own caucus to go along with his ideas.
David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo evaluates Kevin McCarthy’s hapless efforts to get Biden to negotiate with him over raising the debt ceiling: This Is The Dumbest Debt Ceiling Fight Ever. McCarthy Lacks A Plan And The Votes.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has such a tenuous grip on his own conference that the debt-ceiling hostage-taking he is attempting to pull off has all the hallmarks of the bumbling kidnapping capers you see in the movies:
- The House GOP can’t agree amongst themselves what to ask for as ransom.
- They can’t get the White House to take them seriously enough as a ragtag band of kidnappers to engage in negotiations.
- They keep threatening dire consequences for not taking them seriously but are repeatedly hobbled by their own lack of consensus.
At this point, McCarthy wants the House to vote by the end of the month on a package that combines the debt ceiling with draconian spending cuts, but he clearly doesn’t have (i) internal agreement on those cuts or on how much to raise the debt ceiling by; or (ii) the votes to push a package through as early as next week.
McCarthy is preparing to bypass the House committees altogether and cobble together a package on the floor himself, Punchbowl reports. If wishing and hoping were a plan …
One word of warning: Political reporters are doing McCarthy a favor by calling what he’s presenting publicly, including in his speech yesterday to the NYSE, a “plan.” It’s not a plan yet. It skews the coverage to pretend it is a plan. McCarthy is taking advantage of this journalistic failure to try to leverage pressure on the White House. The White House ain’t stupid and isn’t biting.
McCarthy doesn’t have a plan or the votes. Until that changes, that’s really all you need to know.
Andy Sullivan at Reuters on the McCarthy “plan”: Republican states could be hit hardest by McCarthy’s proposed spending cuts.
The spending-cut proposals unveiled by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday could fall hardest on people in Republican-leaning states, a Reuters analysis of federal spending data found.
McCarthy’s plan, which he presented as a condition for raising the United States’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, calls for cutting some agency budgets by 7% this year and capping their growth by 1% annually after that.
It also would impose stiffer work requirements on some benefit programs, which could reduce the number of people who receive them.
McCarthy only laid out broad contours on Monday, rather than unveiling finished legislation, which makes it difficult to determine the proposed cuts’ precise toll.
But a Reuters analysis of federal spending data indicates that his proposed domestic-spending caps could be felt most acutely in the states that backed Republican President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Those 25 states received roughly $172 billion in the last fiscal year for highway construction, housing, public health and other purposes, amounting to $1,196 per person.
The 25 states plus the District of Columbia that backed Democrat Joe Biden received $205 billion, or $1,079 per person.
From NBC News: Oklahoma county leaders caught on audio talking about killing reporters, complaining they can no longer lynch Black people.
The governor of Oklahoma has called for the resignations of the sheriff and other top officials in a rural county after they were recorded talking about “beating, killing and burying” a father/son team of local reporters — and lamenting that they could no longer hang Black people with a “damned rope.”
Gov. Kevin Stitt called for McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy, county Commissioner Mark Jennings, sheriff’s investigator Alicia Manning, and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix to step down after the McCurtain County Gazette-News published an article over the weekend about what was captured on the recording.
“I am both appalled and disheartened to hear of the horrid comments made by officials in McCurtain County,” Stitt said in a statement released Sunday. “There is simply no place for such hateful rhetoric in the state of Oklahoma, especially by those that serve to represent the community through their respective office.”
Stitt, a Republican, said he has ordered the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation to “initiate an investigation to determine whether any illegal conduct has occurred.”
Bruce Willingham, who works for his family-owned newspaper, has turned the full audio over to the FBI and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office, his lawyers said.
Meanwhile, dozens of county residents angered by the officials’ comments picketed Monday outside the headquarters of the McCurtain County Commissioners in the town of Idabel, which is about 200 miles southeast of Oklahoma City, NBC affiliate KFOR of Oklahoma City reported.
You know how MAGA Republicans are always accusing Democrats of pedophilia? Check out this story about Ali Alexander, the guy who organized Trump’s Stop the Steal Rally on January 6, 2021 that led to the insurrection.
A key figure in the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” campaign has apologized after being accused of asking teenage boys for sexual pictures.
Ali Alexander has become one of the most ubiquitous figures in the MAGA movement. Trump himself reportedly requested that Alexander speak at his rally before the riot, with his appearance only quashed by a last-minute intervention from Trump’s aides. But this week, Alexander stands at the center of a scandal that raises questions about how powerful men in the far-right treat their younger acolytes.
“This is too gay,” Alexander said in a statement issued Friday night that addressed the allegations in broad terms.
Alexander, who has described himself as bisexual in the past, added that he was “battling with same-sex attraction.”
The budding online scandal has also roiled the pro-Trump and white supremacist “America First” movement, just months after it reached new levels of notoriety after its leader, Nick Fuentes, dined with Donald Trump and rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago. Now Fuentes is facing backlash from his own supporters over whether he ignored warnings that Alexander, his friend and ally, was allegedly soliciting nude pictures from young men within Fuentes’s movement.
On Friday night, Alexander—who was questioned by the House Jan. 6 Committee about his role organizing a canceled rally dubbed the “Wild Protest” outside the Capitol, which drew crowds to the building right before the riot began—issued a statement Friday offering a general apology.
“I apologize for any inappropriate messages sent over the years,” Alexander wrote, adding later, “When I’ve flirted or others have flirted with me, I’ve flexed my credentials or dropped corny pick up lines. Other times, I’ve been careless and should’ve qualified those coming up to me’s (sic) identities during flirtatious banter at the start.”
And then there is Ron De Santis, who is in a pitched battle with Disney over the company’s support for LGBT rights.
The New York Times: DeSantis, in Latest Volley Against Disney, Suggests Punitive Steps.
In what has taken on the trappings of a grudge match, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida punched Disney anew on Monday, announcing new legislation that would override the company’s recent effort to sidestep state oversight of its theme parks.
Mr. DeSantis also suggested a variety of potential punitive actions against Disney — the state’s largest private employer and corporate taxpayer — including reappraising the value of Walt Disney World for property tax levies and developing land near the entrances to the resort.
“Maybe create a state park, maybe try to do more amusement parks — someone even said, like, maybe you need another state prison,” Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference near Disney World.
Two weeks ago, Mr. DeSantis — a leading Republican presidential contender although he has not officially declared that he is running — floated the idea of raising taxes on Disney hotels and imposing tolls on roads that lead to its theme parks. He has also requested an investigation by Florida’s chief inspector general into Disney’s efforts to circumvent his authority….
Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, previously characterized Mr. DeSantis as “anti-business” and “anti-Florida” for his actions. Mr. Iger has also signaled that future investment in Disney World could be at risk if the governor continued to use Disney as a political punching bag; the company has earmarked more than $17 billion in spending at the resort over the next decade, growth that would create an estimated 13,000 jobs at the company.
Disney has to be bringing in plenty of money for Florida by attracting visitors from around the world, but De Santis seems to be willing to drive them out of the state because they are friendly to LGBT people who have money to spend.
The New York Times: 84-Year-Old Is Charged in Shooting of Black Teenager Who Went to Wrong House.
Ralph [Yarl], a Black 16-year-old in Kansas City, Mo., had been sent to pick up his younger twin brothers at a friend’s house on Thursday evening, his family said. But he mixed up the address, finding himself in front of a house on Northeast 115 Street, instead of Northeast 115th Terrace.
The white man who answered the door there shot him in the head and again in the arm after he fell, according to prosecutors. Somehow, Ralph made his way, bleeding, to another nearby house. There, he was told to lie on the ground while someone called for help, his family said.
The homeowner who shot him, Andrew D. Lester, 84, was taken into custody by the police for 24 hours, then released without charges on Friday. Over the weekend, anger began to spread in the community. Protesters marched on Mr. Lester’s home on Sunday, while the Kansas City police chief, Stacey Graves, acknowledged the public frustration at a news conference. The teenager was released from the hospital on Sunday evening, his father said.
As pressure mounted on Monday afternoon, the Police Department said in a statement that it had submitted the case file to the Clay County prosecuting attorney’s office. The prosecutor, Zachary Thompson, publicly identified Mr. Lester a few hours later and announced that he had been charged, saying what many already believed: “There was a racial component to the case.”
Mr. Thompson said Mr. Lester had been charged with assault in the first degree, a class-A felony, and could face life in prison if convicted. He also was charged with armed criminal action, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison, Mr. Thompson said.
It was not clear if the teenager had knocked on Mr. Lester’s door or if he rang the doorbell, but he did not “cross the threshold” into the man’s home, Mr. Thompson said. The shots from a .32-caliber handgun were fired through a glass door, the prosecutor said, adding that there was no indication that “any words were exchanged.”
Fortunately, Yarl survived and has been released from the hospital, although he will have a long recovery. Twenty year-old Kaylin Gillis was not so fortunate.
CNN: A 20-year-old woman was shot and killed after her friend turned into the wrong.
A 20-year-old woman was shot and killed Saturday after she and three others accidentally turned into the wrong driveway while looking for a friend’s house in rural upstate New York, authorities said.
The woman, identified as Kaylin Gillis, was a passenger in a vehicle when a man fired two shots from his front porch, one of which hit the vehicle, Washington County Sheriff Jeffrey Murphy said in a news conference Monday. Gillis was struck by the gunfire and later died, the sheriff said.
The man, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan, has been charged with second-degree murder in connection with her death, Murphy said Monday. It is unclear whether Monahan has retained an attorney yet.
“It’s a very rural area with dirt roads. It’s easy to get lost. They drove up this driveway for a very short time, realized their mistake and were leaving, when Mr. Monahan came out and fired two shots,” Murphy said, adding that the area has poor cell phone service….
After the shots were fired, Gillis and the rest of the group drove away from the house in the town of Hebron looking for cell phone service, and then called 911.
They were found around 5 miles away from the home in the nearby town of Salem. First responders began administering CPR but Gillis was ultimately pronounced dead at the scene, Murphy said.
Police officers later responded to the home from which shots were fired and found Monahan to be uncooperative, Murphy said, adding he “refused to exit his residence to speak with police.”
He was taken into custody hours later with help from the New York State Police Special Operations Response Team, according to a press release from the Washington County Sheriff’s office.
No one is believed to have exited the car and there was no interaction between Monahan and anyone in the vehicle before shots were fired, Murphy said.
I have to believe that Republican fear-mongering played a role in both of these tragic cases.
That’s it for me today. Have a great Tuesday!!
John (repeat1968) Buss
John Buss nailed his cartoon today. Poor, poor pitiful Orange Caligula has taken the Airing of The Grievances to new heights. So, I borrowed it bigly. Thanks, John, for the daily smile! Poor me will write about it, I needed that smile! It also gave me a reason to think of my late ninth-ward neighbor, Fats Domino. I loved every moment of watching him play at every place possible here! Plus, he made great hog’s head cheese!
Take a breath. It’s the airing of the Grievances at the Donnie Dotard Club!
I’ve read a lot of American History in my day, and I’ve now lived a portion of it enough to say I don’t recall any Presidential Campaign being a Revenge Tour. But then, we’ve never had a President–and hopefully, never again–like Trump. That appears to be what today’s Republicans want, according to Sarah Longwell, writing today at The Bulwark. “You Have to Think of Trump’s Election as Year Zero. Because Republican voters say they don’t want any part of a Republican party that looks anything like it did before 2016.”
THERE ARE EVENTS SO EPOCHAL that they create clear periods of before and after: Hiroshima; the fall of the Berlin Wall; 9/11. Eight years after he declared his intention to run for president, it’s now clear that we should consider Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign not as part of America’s political continuum but as one of these temporal dividing lines.
In American politics, there were conventions and candidates that existed in 2015 Republican politics as the before times. 2015 BT. Before Trump.
Before the escalator and “grab ’em by the p***y.” Before Muslim bans and a wall Mexico would never pay for. Before we’d heard of Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Lauren Boebert, or the QAnon shaman. Before an American president sided with Vladimir Putin over his own government’s intelligence network. Before Donald Trump became the first president to turn his back on the peaceful transfer of power.
This period has existed outside of nearly all established norms, yet many Americans seem to believe that it is an interregnum. An aberration. An accident of history that will undo itself—soon—as norms and the old equilibrium return.
I think this view misunderstands the true nature of what has happened to the Republican party because it does not see what has happened to Republican voters.
I’ve sat through hundreds of focus groups with GOP voters over the last four years and one thing is perfectly clear: The Republican party has been irretrievably altered and, as one GOP voter put it succinctly, “We’re never going back.”
IT’S EASY TO IDENTIFY people who don’t realize the transformation undergone by GOP voters. Many of them, in fact, have been talking about running for president. Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Asa Hutchinson, Mike Pompeo—these are Before Trump (BT) politicians who don’t quite realize they’re living in an After Trump (AT) world.
Rock ‘n’ roll legend Fats Domino’s two-home compound at Caffin Avenue and Marais Street has been a landmark of the Lower 9th Ward since 1960.
Polls show that the Republican base is still solidly in Trump, but that doesn’t transfer to a recapture of the White House in 2024. This McClatchy report of a GOP firm Public Opinion Strategies’ poll indicates DeSantis might win against Trump. Either result would be pretty depressing in my book.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis narrowly leads President Joe Biden in the battleground states of Arizona and Pennsylvania, according to a poll of a hypothetical matchup between the two men in the 2024 presidential race. The same survey, however, finds Biden leading former President Donald Trump in the two swing states, albeit by tight margins. The poll, conducted from April 11 through April 13 by GOP firm Public Opinion Strategies and obtained by McClatchyDC, should bolster the argument from many DeSantis supporters that the Florida Republican is more electable than the former president. Trump lost reelection in 2020 and has continued alienating some moderate voters with his ongoing false claims that the race was stolen from him
Given the legislative actions down here, I wonder why I stay in the South. I think I may have to retire to a nice mountain retreat in Nepal if Average Joe doesn’t win again. Here’s the latest from Lousyana as proof life is certainly getting more terrible post-Trump. This is from Business Insider. “Republican state officials in Louisiana ask lawmakers to ban the study of racism at universities, citing divisive ‘inglorious aspects’ of US history.” We’re not quite Floridoh or Texass but give these nitwits a chance, and we’ll be a theocratical fascist state too.
The Louisiana GOP wants to prohibit the study of racism at state colleges and universities.
A GOP resolution, seen by NOLA.com, claimed the “inglorious aspects” of American history were too divisive.
It comes amid a nationwide GOP effort to scrub race issues from public schools and public life.
Republican officials in Louisiana are proposing a ban on teaching about racism at the state’s higher education institutions — the latest move amid a wave of legislation across the country aimed at legislating curriculum in the nation’s classrooms.
GOP Party officials in the state want Louisiana lawmakers to prohibit the study of racism at colleges and universities, claiming the “inglorious aspects” of American history are too divisive, according to NOLA.com, which cites a GOP resolution on the matter.
The state GOP leadership also wants to nix diversity, equity, and inclusion departments at colleges and universities, claiming without evidence that such agencies stir political tensions on campuses and have overgenerous budgets, NOLA.com reported. A third of Louisiana residents are Black, according to the US Census Bureau.
Remind me who the snowflakes are again? Here’s another indicator from MediaITE that grievances and hurt feelings rule the policy agenda in the party. It’s why Donnie Dotard is so well-suited for them. “Former president Donald Trump offered some unconventional legal advice to Fox Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch on the eve of the Fox News-Dominion Voting Systems trial.”
In an all-caps post on Truth Social, Trump urged Murdoch to “EXPOSE THE TRUTH ON CHEATING IN THE 2020 ELECTION.” Fox is the defendant in a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion, which says that Fox knowingly amplified false claims about the company in order to promote Trump’s disproven theories about how the election was stolen from him and handed to Joe Biden. According to Trump, Fox’s acknowledgement that the election was not stolen from him represents a legal liability.
“FOX NEWS IS IN BIG TROUBLE IF THEY DO NOT EXPOSE THE TRUTH ON CHEATING IN THE 2020 ELECTION. THEY SHOULD DO WHAT’S RIGHT FOR AMERICA. WHEN RUPERT MURDOCH SAYS THAT THERE WAS NO CHEATING IN LIGHT OF THE MASSIVE PROOF THAT WAS THERE, IT IS RIDICULOUS AND VERY HARMFUL TO THE FOX CASE,” argued Trump, before addressing Murdoch directly. “RUPERT, JUST TELL THE TRUTH AND GOOD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. THE ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLLEN…YOU KNOW IT, & SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE!”
Trump’s mid-morning missive on Monday followed a 2:39 AM post in which he submitted that “IF FOX WOULD FINALLY ADMIT THAT THERE WAS LARGE SCALE CHEATING & IRREGULARITIES IN THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, WHICH WOULD BE A GOOD THING FOR THEM, & FOR AMERICA, THE CASE AGAINST THEM, WHICH SHOULD NOT HAVE EXISTED AT ALL, WOULD BE GREATLY WEAKENED.”
“BACK UP THOSE PATRIOTS AT FOX INSTEAD OF THROWING THEM UNDER THE BUS,” continued the former president. While various reporters and anchors — including Bret Baier and Jacqui Heinrich — have taken care to debunk Trump’s claims of widespread fraud, others, including star opinion host Tucker Carlson, have doubled down on them.
Why does the Saint of Grievances always use ALL CAPS? Certainly, the Faux New Network All-Stars know better.
Well, this makes for interesting reading.
In a statement, the company said that “the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution” and protected by legal precedent. It added, “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”
But if a jury looks at the messages from Fox hosts, guests and executives and concludes that people inside the network knew what they were putting on the air was false, it could find Fox liable and reward Dominion with substantial financial damages.
On Nov. 7, 2020, Mr. Carlson told Mr. Pfeiffer that claims about manipulated software were “absurd.” Mr. Pfeiffer replied later that there was not enough evidence of fraud to swing the election.
A graphic of a text exchange between Pfeiffer and Carlson.Said privately on Nov. 7, 2020Nov. 8, 2020
Donny Dotard does have some reason to sing the blues. Things are going badly for him on all the court trials front. This is from NBC News. “Judge denies Trump’s bid to delay civil rape trial. A lawyer for Trump had argued that the former president should be allowed a “cooling off” period following his recent historic indictment by a Manhattan grand jury. ” There’s ketchup on the walls at the Donnie Dotard Clubhouse today! It’s Monday! Monday is Ketchup on the Wall Day there!
A federal judge on Monday denied former President Donald Trump’s bid for a four-week delay in the civil rape and defamation trial against him.
Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina asked U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in a letter last week to postpone the trial in the lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, scheduled to start April 25, until the end of May. Carroll’s lawsuit alleges that Trump raped her at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s, which Trump has repeatedly denied.
Tacopina argued that his client should be allowed a “cooling off” period following his recent historic indictment by a Manhattan grand jury in a case involving hush money payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign, which drew a surge of media coverage.
In a 10-page opinion denying Trump’s request on Monday, Kaplan wrote that “there is no justification for an adjournment.”
“This case is entirely unrelated to the state prosecution,” Kaplan wrote. “The suggestion that the recent media coverage of the New York indictment — coverage significantly (though certainly not entirely) invited or provoked by Mr. Trump’s own actions — would preclude selection of a fair and impartial jury on April 25 is pure speculation. So too is his suggestion that a month’s delay of the start of this trial would ‘cool off’ anything, even if any ‘cooling off’ were necessary.”
Kaplan also rejected the notion that delaying the trial would decrease the possibility of “negative publicity” before the trial. In the request to delay the trial, Tacopina argued that the influx of media coverage of Trump’s indictment and arraignment could taint the jury pool.
Kaplan wrote, “It is quite important to remember [also] that postponements in circumstances such as this are not necessarily unmixed blessings from the standpoint of a defendant who is hoping for the dissipation of what he regards, or says he regards, as negative publicity. Events happen during postponements. Sometimes they can make matters worse.”
Kaplan also noted that “at least some portion” of recent media coverage of Trump’s indictment “was of his own doing” and that the alleged sexual conduct at the heart of the Manhattan district attorney’s case, which involves adult film star Stormy Daniels’ allegations that she had an affair with Trump — accusations that Trump denies — and was paid to keep quiet, is “dramatically different” from Carroll’s allegations of rape by the former president.
Nowhere is the front line for Trump revival duty failing more than at this debacle’s New York City location. It’s the Dotardteers on tour! “House GOP escalates defense of Trump with New York field hearing seeking to discredit Manhattan DA” via CNN. Place all your liquids in cups on the table before reading this. Spew Warning!
House Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are exemplifying the lengths they are willing to go to discredit Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal case against former President Donald Trump with a Monday New York field hearing on Bragg’s home turf.
House Republicans are seeking to make the case that Bragg is more focused on going after Trump for political reasons than addressing crime in New York City, a claim Bragg vehemently denies.
Democrats are pushing back, arguing that Republicans are acting as an extension of Trump’s defense team and saying they should focus instead on public safety issues like gun violence. A spokesperson for the Manhattan DA’s office said in a statement ahead of the hearing that the event is a “political stunt.”
The hearing, billed as focusing on crime in New York, comes as the legal drama between Bragg and House Republicans has intensified in recent days. Bragg sued House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and sought to block him from taking certain investigative steps, arguing that Congress doesn’t have oversight authority over state-level criminal prosecutions.
t serves as the latest example of how Trump continues to wield enormous power on Capitol Hill as House Republicans seek to curry favor with the former president, coming to his defense through their investigations and routinely updating him and his closest advisers on their progress. In the wake of his indictment, Trump called up members of House GOP leadership and key committee members to shore up support on Capitol Hill, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan opened Monday’s hearing by going after Bragg for being “soft on crime.”
“Here in Manhattan, the scales of justice are weighed down by politics. For the District Attorney, justice isn’t blind. It’s about looking for opportunities to advance a political agenda, a radical political agenda rather than enforcing the law,” Jordan said in his opening remarks.
Maybe Jordan suffers damage from multiple piledrivers?
So, this has been a bit of a weird post, but then, we live in weird times. Thankfully, my therapeutic shoe therapy shopping results arrived at the door today!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
The Favourite Chair, by Leon Charles Huber
Yesterday I told Dakinikat that I wished I had a feel good story for today’s post. I was asleep when she called last night and left a message about a New York Times article that was discussed on Stephanie Ruhl’s MSNBC show. It was about Ukrainian mothers who traveled thousands of miles to recover their children who had been kidnapped and taken to Russian-controlled territory. Of course it’s a heartbreaking story, but it’s also a heartwarming story of the power of a mother’s love. It also includes powerful photos of the women and their children. I hope you’ll go read it. Here’s just a bit of it.
The Russians Took Their Children. These Mothers Went and Got Them Back, bCarlotta Gall and
For weeks after Russian troops forcibly removed Natalya Zhornyk’s teenage son from his school last fall, she had no idea where he was or what had happened to him.
Then came a phone call.
“Mom, come and get me,” said her son, Artem, 15. He had remembered his mother’s phone number and borrowed the school director’s cellphone.
Ms. Zhornyk made him a promise: “When the fighting calms down, I will come.”
Artem and a dozen schoolmates had been loaded up by Russian troops and transferred to a school farther inside Russian-occupied Ukraine.
While Ms. Zhornyk was relieved to know where he was being held, reaching him would not be easy. They were now on different sides of the front line of a full-blown war, and border crossings from Ukraine into Russian-occupied territory were closed.
But months later, when a neighbor brought back one of her son’s schoolmates, she learned about a charity that was helping mothers bring their children home.
Since it is illegal for men of military age to leave Ukraine now, in March Ms. Zhornyk and a group of women assisted by Save Ukraine completed a nerve-wracking, 3,000-mile journey through Poland, Belarus and Russia to gain entry to Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine and Crimea to retrieve Artem and 15 other children.
Then they had to take another circuitous journey back. “Come on, come on,” urged Ms. Zhornyk, as a cluster of children, laden with bags and suitcases, emerged hesitantly through the barriers at a border crossing from Belarus into Ukraine. She had crossed with her son just hours earlier and pushed forward impatiently to embrace the next group.
“There are no words for all the emotions,” Ms. Zhornyk, 31, said, describing her reunion with Artem. “I was full of emotion, and nervous, nervous.”
Cat on a chair, by Theophile Alexandre Steinlen
There are more details about what happened to the children in the article. Some background:
In the 13 months since the invasion, thousands of Ukrainian children have been displaced, moved or forcibly transferred to camps or institutions in Russia or Russian-controlled territory, in what Ukraine and rights advocates have condemned as war crimes.
The fate of those children has become a desperate tug of war between Ukraine and Russia, and formed the basis of an arrest warrant issued last month by the International Criminal Court accusing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children’s rights, of illegally transferring them.
Once under Russian control, the children are subject to re-education, fostering and adoption by Russian families — practices that have touched a particular nerve even amid the carnage that has killed and displaced so many Ukrainians….
No one knows the full number of Ukrainian children who have been transferred to Russia or Russian-occupied Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has identified more than 19,000 children that it says have been forcibly transferred or deported, but those working on the issue say the real number is closer to 150,000.
Again, there is much more at the NYT link.
I hope you’ll forgive me for highlighting a local Boston story today. This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The marathon will take place on Monday. Although only three people were killed in the explosions, there were hundreds of horrific injuries–limbs blown off, terrible burns, traumatic brain injuries.
From Boston.com: Mark the 10-year anniversary of the Marathon bombings in Boston One Boston Day is Saturday, April 15.
It has been 10 years since the Boston Marathon bombings killed three people and injured hundreds more during the 2013 Boston Marathon, and the city is hosting several events in remembrance of the day.
The city of Boston and the Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.) will host remembrance events on Saturday, April 15 — One Boston Day. The events will honor the victims, survivors, and first responders of the 2013 Boston Marathon.
The city will host an early-morning private gathering and wreath laying at the memorial sites for the families who lost loved ones. Honor guards — including the Boston Fire Department, Boston Police Department, Boston Emergency Medical Services, and Suffolk County Sheriff Department — will be present at the memorial sites throughout the day.
At 8 a.m.,the BAA 5K, featuring 10,000 participants, will begin and end in Boston Common. After the B.A.A. 5K race, the city will open Boylston Street between Dartmouth and Fairfield streets so that members of the public can visit the sites.
At 2:30 p.m., the public is invited to a dedication of a new commemorative Boston Marathon finish line, the ringing of bells, and the unveiling of a One Boston Day marker on Boylston Street along with Gov. Maura Healey, Mayor Michelle Wu, B.A.A. leadership, members of the One Fund community, members of the 2013 Red Sox team, first responders, hospital leaders, and local running groups.
“Every year we come together on One Boston Day to remember the courage, strength, and resilience shown by our city’s people in 2013,” Wu said in a statement. “As we mark 10 years, we will gather together in community on April 15 to remember the lives that were lost, the many injured, and the spirit of humanity displayed that day. As we honor those forever impacted, people in all corners of our City will be giving back in a number of ways, and I encourage everyone to get involved.”
There will also be many local and neighborhood events; and of course, the Red Sox will mark the day at their traditional Marathon Day game and will be wearing their bright yellow home uniforms.
The Red Sox will mark the 10 year milestone by partnering with JetBlue to distribute more than 40,000 blue and yellow Red Sox City Connect hats to students and staff at Boston Public Schools on Friday, April 14. Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez will assist with the distribution. The team will then wear blue and yellow City Connect jerseys during Friday night’s game in Fenway Park agains the Angels.
Painting by Chen Pei Yi
As previously mentioned, the 2013 Red Sox team will join city and state officials and first responders on Saturday, April 15 for the ringing of the bells and the unveiling of the One Boston Day marker. At Saturday’s game, there will be a pre-game ceremony commemorating One Boston Day and the 76th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier. Fans should be in their seats by 3:30 p.m.
On Sunday, April 16, a reunion of members of the 2013 Red Sox World Series Championship team will take place during pregame ceremonies. Fans should be in their seats by 1 p.m.
On Patriots Day, Monday, April 17, Hall of Famer David Ortiz will serve as the Grand Marshal for the 127th Boston Marathon. Players will wear home jerseys that say “Boston” on the front, as they did for the first time during the Marathon tribute at Fenway Park on April 20, 2013. Fans are asked to be in their seats by 10:45 a.m. for the ceremony. All fans will receive a Boston Strong t-shirt.
The FBI is also marking the anniversary. From FBI News: Marathon Bombing Anniversary. FBI Boston marks 10-year-anniversary by honoring victims, recalling responders’ heroic efforts.
Leading up to the 10-year anniversary of the bombing at the Boston Marathon—and the ensuing manhunt and investigation that was the FBI’s largest terrorism case since 9/11—the special agent in charge of FBI Boston asked his entire office to pause and reflect on the crucible of that massive investigation as they prepared for this year’s 127th running.
Leading up to the 10-year anniversary of the bombing at the Boston Marathon—and the ensuing manhunt and investigation that was the FBI’s largest terrorism case since 9/11—the special agent in charge of FBI Boston asked his entire office to pause and reflect on the crucible of that massive investigation as they prepared for this year’s 127th running.
Three people were killed on April 15, 2013, when two pressure-cooker bombs detonated 11 seconds apart on Boylston Street near the finish line of the iconic 26-mile race. More than 500 people were physically injured, including 17 who suffered amputations. The bombers also took the life of Sean Collier, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police officer who was executed while on patrol.
Large images of the victims were arrayed in a conference room last month at the Boston Field Office, along with a whiteboard agents used to sketch out their plans and the wanted posters that helped identify the suspects, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. A moment of silence preceded the remembrance ceremony….
…[H]e also wanted to enlighten the office’s large cadre of young agents, analysts, and professionals—many not around 10 years ago—who may not fully appreciate the all-hands-on-deck response required in major cases like this.
“Internally, I wanted to give my personnel a real good idea, with some granularity, about what it means when a critical incident occurs,” he said, “what is expected of all of us to step up, and how we work toward a common goal.”
The article reviews the positive steps that made the investigation a model for the future.
Two survivors stories:
Ten years after the explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line that forced doctors to amputate part of Heather Abbott’s leg, she says the biggest change in her life is her work with the foundation she built to help other amputees. “If someone had told me that I would be doing this ten years ago, I never would have believed them,” Abbott said. “But it’s been an unexpected blessing, I think, for me.”
Cat sleeping on a chair, by George Atsametakis
The creation of the Heather Abbott Foundation is also a blessing for its beneficiaries. The foundation helps amputees pay for prosthetics that insurance won’t cover-which includes almost anything beyond the most basic option. Running blades, swim legs, high heels-these are all vital to helping people live full lives. But insurance companies don’t consider them “medically necessary.” (Prosthetics typically have to be replaced every three to five years.)
Heather delights in sharing the news with beneficiaries that they have been chosen to receive a special prosthesis. “Not only is it incredibly rewarding to hear somebody on the other end of the phone when you tell them that you’re going to give them this prosthetic device,” Abbott said. “But then to hear about the things they’re able to do with it and how it’s changed their life provides me a huge sense of joy.”
People Magazine: Boston Marathon Bombing Survivor Will Race on the 10th Anniversary: ‘I’m Ready to Move On’ (Exclusive).
Marc Fucarile was supporting a friend at the 2013 Boston Marathon when the second bomb went off and instantly amputated his right leg. Now, ten years later, he’ll return to the marathon to thank the city and the people who have supported him.
“You never want to be on the receiving end of generosity because that means something bad happened, but it’s emotional knowing that complete strangers care about you,” Fucarile tells PEOPLE.
Before the 2013 tragedy, Fucarile was an athlete. “I played football, track, and hockey, and it was my first time at a marathon in 35 years,” he says. “The second bomb was right next to me.”
The bomb blew out Fucarile’s ear drums, burned the majority of his lower body, and forced him to undergo years of surgeries. “I did the remainder of 2013 in and out of hospitals with smaller, different surgeries, monitoring scrap metal that lodged in my heart, that took a ride up to the artery and lodged in my right atrium area.”
Fucarile has “skin grafts all over” the lower half of his body and in his hands from “taking off my belt when I was still on fire,” he explains.
Because he sustained a traumatic brain injury, Fucarile says his tolerance for noise and stimulating environments is low, which has affected his relationship with his 15-year-old son….
On the tenth anniversary, he’ll be riding in honor of the community that supported him through the 2013 tragedy. “I’m riding to show my thanks for all the support we received as survivors of such a horrific event,” he says. “The community outpour of support was amazing.”
When he participates in the marathon on Monday, Fucarile says he’ll be representing more than just his own resilience. “I’m riding in the hand cycle to show people, and to show my son, that you can really accomplish anything you put your mind to,” he explains.
A handcyle is a kind of tricycle that is powered by hands rather than your feet.
In politics news, Clarence Thomas has finally been caught breaking an actual law–as opposed to ethics rules, which he has completely ignored–when he sold property to Harlan Crow and failed to report the transaction. He needs to be called to account and forced off the Supreme Court.
Citizens for Ethics.org: CREW files civil and criminal co,mplaint against Clarence Thomas.
The Department of Justice and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court should investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for failing to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from and property sales to billionaire donor Harlan Crow, according to a complaint sent today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to the Department of Justice and Chief Justice John Roberts.
According to reporting by ProPublica, Thomas and his wife have accepted luxury travel and vacations for 20 years from “real estate magnate and Republican megadonor” Crow, who befriended Thomas after he joined the Supreme Court, without disclosing them as gifts or travel reimbursements on his financial disclosures filed under the Ethics in Government Act. Thomas also reportedly sold his and other family members’ properties to Crow in 2014 for more than $100,000 without reporting the sales on his financial disclosure reports.
“Justice Thomas’s acceptance of and failure to disclose these repeated, lavish gifts and shocking real estate sales not only undermines public trust in his ability to serve impartially on the Court, it undermines confidence in the Supreme Court as an institution,” CREW President Noah Bookbinder said.
Under the Ethics in Government Act, Thomas is required to disclose travel and other gifts, with the source and a brief description, including the value. The Guide to Judiciary Policy for Financial Disclosure in effect at the time the trips were taken makes it clear that these trips were covered by the reporting requirements. While Thomas claims a hospitality exemption, that exemption would not apply to a private plane or yacht. Under the EIGA and Guide to Judiciary Policy for Financial Transaction, Thomas was required to report the sale of the properties to Crow and could not claim a personal residence exemption on disclosing them, as they were always referred to as rental properties on his disclosures and never lost their investment nature even when the houses on two of the properties were later torn down.
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern: Quid Pro Crow. Clarence Thomas’ position toward disclosure is actually clarified by his jurisprudence.
When news broke last week, by way of dogged reporting in ProPublica, that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted decades’ worth of hospitality from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, that this same donor had funded his wife’s legal and political activities and in fact helped pay her salary, and that Thomas had disclosed none of this, our suggestion that the justice had clearly broken the law was dismissed as left-wing “smear.” ProPublica’s new reporting, dropped on Thursday, showed that the same billionaire donor, Harlan Crow, spent $133,363 purchasing several properties co-owned by Thomas, and that these sales were never disclosed. As our colleagues at Slate confirmed this week, Thomas’ mother actually still lives in the property owned by Crow, to which he has made valuable improvements (in addition to buying the house next door and dispensing with previously troublesome neighbors). Unlike the rules around the undisclosed luxury travel reported last week, ProPublica could not find a single ethics expert willing to squint and hop on one foot in a way that would make the failure to report the real estate transaction seem arguably lawful. The court has not responded in any way to the latest revelations. Defenders of Justice Thomas somehow continue to urge that this is a smear campaign by liberals.
Painting by Suzanne Valadon
In a way, the fact that money went from Harlan Crow’s pocket to Thomas’ mom’s house seems less horrifying than last week’s superyachts and half-million-dollar luxury air travel. Who among us wouldn’t want a billionaire to evict the noisy neighbors who were keeping our mothers up late? But it helps to parse out what mattered about both Thomas stories and what is mostly a distraction. That Thomas is a “hypocrite” for claiming to like parking outside Walmarts to commune with real people while secretly indulging his taste for luxe global travel? Doesn’t really matter. Harlan Crow’s penchant for cunningly little embroidered Nazi table linens? Weird, surely, but materially inconsequential….
What mattered last week and what still matters this week is whether the Crow/Thomas dealings can be seen as classic quid pro quo (or perhaps quid pro Crow)corruption. We too often think this can only happen in a scene in which cartoon ducks with big sacks of cash pay politicians to do their bidding, which is never how this actually happens. And the longstanding defense to those claims is that Justice Thomas is too independent a thinker and jurist to be influenced by gifts of bibles and vacations and rent-free housing. But what this new reporting shows—and what actually matters—is that Crow and those like him, who have poured billions of dollars into funding cases before the court, campaigns to seat certain justices on the court, and crusades to keep other justices off the court, turn out to just own the whole building. In tandem with the Leonard Leos and Mark Paolettas who have been rendered in art for all eternity, the Harlan Crows are the actual landlords of the houses where the six conservative justices seemingly get to live rent-free.
f you’re defending Thomas’ unlawful refusal to disclose these transactions by saying he’s too famous/powerful/important/busy/put-upon to disclose these transactions, you are missing the point. Disclosure laws aren’t tawdry “gotcha” traps that form the basis of smear campaigns. Disclosure rules are the only means of transparency in a world of increasingly broken democratic systems. Citizens United and its dismantling of campaign finance reform? Justified on the grounds that disclosure rules suffice to ferret out corruption. We don’t demand that public figures deal honestly with the public because we are mean; we do it because law and democracy rise and fall on knowing who paid who for what.
At The New Republic, Michael Tomasky wrote this piece after the first revelations and before we learned about the real estate transactions: The Democrats Need to Destroy Clarence Thomas’s Reputation.
ProPublica’s report last week is jaw-dropping. In the end it shows this: Thomas used to report his gifts from right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow. Then they became a little controversial. So what did Thomas do? Stop accepting the gifts? That’s what you or I would do, or at least make them far less frequent and ostentatious. But Thomas doesn’t think like you or I do. He thinks: How I can twist the dagger into the liberal establishment’s flesh even further? So rather than stop accepting the gifts, he just decided to stop reporting them. Which ProPublica says is against the law.
Can he be impeached? Not now, with the GOP in control of the House. If that changes, sure, they can try, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others have suggested. Of course, he would be acquitted in the Senate, where two-thirds are required to convict (indeed, Samuel Chase survived).
But that’s no reason for Democrats not to do it. In fact, as I suspect AOC understands, the way partisanship works today in this country, that’s precisely an excellent reason to do it: Have a long hearing that lays bare every instance of his and his wife’s corrupt activities in a high-profile venue that Americans will watch; make the case to swing-voting Americans that he is dishonoring the court’s name and reputation; drive his approval ratings into the toilet (in a 2022 YouGov poll, Thomas already had the highest “very unfavorable” rating of the nine justices, at 32 percent); and force the Republican senators to vote to keep this clearly undeserving, mediocre, arrogant, unscrupulous hornswoggler on the court.
Make him a political issue (not in time for 2024, alas, but in general). Destroy his reputation. If nothing else, ensure that he goes down in history the way he deserves, as one of the most unqualified Supreme Court justices ever, who has gone on to leave as light an intellectual footprint as someone serving three-plus decades could leave. Make him—and his wife, Ginni, who is also completely without scruples in the way she, as the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, entangles herself in our public life—a metaphor for every insidious thing the far-right wing has done to this country.
Painting by Vanessa Stockard
It’s really up to the Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin to start the process of investigating Thomas, but does Durbin have the guts to do what needs to be done? I don’t think so. He needs to be forced into it by public outrage. I got a newsletter about this from Tomasky in my email today. I can’t find it online, but here’s some of it:
Earlier this week, I wrote in response to ProPublica’s first report that the Democrats need to destroy Thomas’s reputation by holding hearings on his dealings, which of course is something they’ve never done. “Have a long hearing that lays bare every instance of his and his wife’s corrupt activities in a high-profile venue that Americans will watch,” I wrote. “Make the case to swing-voting Americans that he is dishonoring the court’s name and reputation; drive his approval ratings into the toilet (in a 2022 YouGov poll, Thomas already had the highest ‘very unfavorable’ rating of the nine justices, at 32 percent); and force the Republican senators to vote to keep this clearly undeserving, mediocre, arrogant, unscrupulous hornswoggler on the court.”
Now the case for action is even clearer. But action by whom? There’s only one serious contender: the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s controlled by the Democrats, and they can do whatever they are prepared to do. But what exactly is that?
Last Monday, after the first ProPublica report, committee Chairman Dick Durbin vowed that the committee “will act.” He did not elaborate on that. Later, he urged Chief Justice John Roberts to investigate Thomas. Then I saw on cable news Thursday night (I can’t find anything online Friday morning) that he called on Merrick Garland to do something.
Mr. Chairman: Stop tossing the football around. You have a gavel, and you have subpoena power. Subpoena Clarence Thomas. Next week.
What? Horrors! Subpoena a Supreme Court justice? Can that even be done?
Yes it can, but only if the Democrats have the guts to do it.
The other big story today is about 21-year-old leaker of top secret documents, Jack Teixeira. Here are the latest stories:
Charlie Savage at The New York Times: Teixeira’s case is unusual even in the small world of leak cases.
It is hard to predict how the case against Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified documents to friends on a gaming server, will play out — both because the matter is still very preliminary and because the facts are so unusual that there is limited value in comparing it to the general pattern of leak cases.
By Steve Hanks
Based on the charging documents in his case, Airman Teixeira does not appear to have been acting as a foreign agent, differentiating him from classic spying cases. He also does not appear to have been acting as a whistle-blower or otherwise trying to educate the general public by sharing secrets with the news media for publication, making his case different from another sort that has become more common in the 21st century.
He also does not fit a third category of past cases of mishandling classified information: the hoarder. Prosecutors have charged people who are neither spying nor trying to enlighten the public for taking files home and keeping them. But because Airman Teixeira is accused of transmitting large numbers of files to other people who were not authorized to see them, his case is more serious.
These differences show how past cases may be poor guides for how this will play out.
Defendants also have an incentive to make a deal so they can ensure a shorter sentence than the threat they are facing under the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the unauthorized retention and disclosure of national-security secrets. It carries a sentence of up to 10 years per count, and each leaked document could be its own count. Plea deals in leak-related cases have typically resulted in a few years of prison.
But prosecutors may be less willing to offer a relatively attractive prison sentence in a case as serious as Airman Teixeira’s, which involved hundreds of classified documents that revealed sensitive matters, like how extensively the United States has penetrated Russian military communications.
Read more at the NYT and in these articles:
The Washington Post: Leak raises fresh questions about Pentagon’s internal security.
BBC News: Jack Teixeira’s charges in full: ‘Top secret’ access, leak searches and the Espionage Act.
The Wall Street Journal: Airman, Arrested for Leaks, Chatted in Groups Fascinated by Weapons and War.
That’s it for me. I hope you find something here to interest you. Have a great weekend!!
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
So what does a Florida-based Dotard Ex-President have in common with a Massachusetts-based Computer Geeky Junior Airman? They both have a need to share Top-Secret Documents to impress their friends.
The biggest difference is that the Geek was frog-marched into court and arrested for posting them on Discord. He was charged under the Espionage Act. The Dotard is still at large, and likely so are some Top Secret Documents. We know he flaunted them around The Donny Dotard Clubhouse, but what other things happened with them? There are so many questions about our classified documents processes now that we’re an international embarrassment.
There’s other news too. Ron DeSantis quietly–and in the dead of night– signed a six-week ban on abortion in Florida. Florida used to have abortion access making the South a death zone for fertile women. Attorney General Garland has asked the Supreme Court to block the order by the Texas Grand Inquisitor on the status of mifepristone. Regulatory chaos is likely to result in the FDA and could spread to other agencies, given the implications of the judge’s lunatic rationale. It’s the one day you can be happy there is such a thing as Big Pharma. The manufacturer of the pill has also filed for an immediate stay. We’re on Supreme Court Watch now. If they do nothing, the chaos will start at midnight with this decision and the conflicting one from Washington State. All of these restrictions are highly unpopular with voters.
Oh, and have I mentioned Uncle Clarence Thomas sold his mother’s house to his billionaire buddy without reporting it, so he broke the law? She still lives in the house, and her new landlord takes care of the place.
Welcome to the Neoconfederacy of Dunces or, as JJ mentioned yesterday, the Dawning of the Age of Idiocracy.
This one comes pretty directly out of some weirdo world. This is from Hans Nichols, writing for AXIOS. “Conservatives plot text warnings on “woke” products.” Yes, this does seem like a direct assault on the first amendment rights of businesses granted by Scalia et al. not that long ago.
A conservative group is offering a new service that texts “Woke Alerts” straight to the phones of grocery shoppers who want to know which brands are accused of taking political positions that are offensive to the right.
So, you can see that we have so much to write about this week that we’re torn between leaving something uncovered or quoting so much we run up the word counts. And, of course, JJ shows us that the political cartoon crowd has a lot of fodder.
So, there are a lot of links up top. Let me just highlight a few things.
Here is more detail on the Supreme Court Watch for the ruling on mifepristone. This is from NBC News.” The Justice Department and the drugmaker are asking the Supreme Court to block the abortion pill ruling. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories want to freeze a court decision that curbs access to the abortion pill mifepristone.”
The Biden administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to block part of a court decision that prevents pregnant women from obtaining the key abortion drug mifepristone by mail.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Food and Drug Administration, urged the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to put on hold the entirety of a decision issued by Texas-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that handed a sweeping victory to abortion opponents.
“This application concerns unprecedented lower court orders countermanding FDA’s scientific judgment and unleashing regulatory chaos by suspending the existing FDA-approved conditions of use for mifepristone,” Prelogar wrote in court papers.
Danco Laboratories, which makes Mifeprex, the brand version of the pill, filed a similar request on Friday.
Danco said it would be “irreparably harmed” if the decision goes into effect because it “will be unable to both conduct its business nationwide and comply with its legal obligations.”
This is the latest set of witnesses to discuss Trump’s Classified Documents theft. This is from the New York Times. “Witnesses Asked About Trump’s Handling of Map With Classified Information. The map is just one element of the Justice Department’s inquiry into former President Donald Trump’s possession of sensitive documents and whether he obstructed justice in seeking to hold onto them.”
Federal investigators are asking witnesses whether former President Donald J. Trump showed off to aides and visitors a map he took with him when he left office that contains sensitive intelligence information, four people with knowledge of the matter said.
The map has been just one focus of the broad Justice Department investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he departed the White House.
The nature of the map and the information it contained is not clear. But investigators have questioned a number of witnesses about it, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, as the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s Trump-focused inquiries, Jack Smith, examines the former president’s handling of classified material after leaving office and weighs charges that could include obstruction of justice.
One person briefed on the matter said investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing the map while aboard a plane. Another said that, based on the questions they were asking, investigators appeared to believe that Mr. Trump showed the map to at least one adviser after leaving office.
A third person with knowledge of the investigation said the map might also have been shown to a journalist writing a book. The Washington Post has previously reported that investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing classified material, including maps, to political donors.
The question of whether Mr. Trump was displaying sensitive material in his possession after he lost the presidency and left office is crucial as investigators try to reconstruct what Mr. Trump was doing with boxes of documents that went with him to his Florida residence and private club, Mar-a-Lago.
Among the topics investigators have been focused on is precisely when Mr. Trump was at the club last year. In particular, they were interested in whether he remained at Mar-a-Lago to look at boxes of material that were still stored there before Justice Department counterintelligence officials seeking their return came to visit in early June, according to two people familiar with the questions.
Hannah Knowles writes on “How DeSantis backed a six-week abortion ban — while barely talking about it. The Florida governor went from signing a 15-week ban last year to signing a six-week ban late at night on Thursday.”
The governor’s quiet embrace of the six-week ban reflects his team’s political calculations heading into 2024, as he gears up for a presidential primary where hard-line activists and voters wield influence. It underlines the continued pressure in the GOP for politicians to embrace tighter laws — even as numerous Republicans, including some DeSantis allies, worry that abortion bans have helped sink their candidates in critical general elections. And it highlights DeSantis’s longtime reluctance to make abortion a signature part of his public profile, though he has enacted major changes to laws on the procedure.
“The numbers show that Florida is a destination” for abortion, said Chad Davis, a candidate for the state House who worked for ex-state senator Kelli Stargel, the sponsor of the 15-week ban. “That’s an embarrassment to him.”
DeSantis has generally avoided talking about abortion, even as he tours the country touting other legislation he’s signed. Rather than roll out the six-week bill as a major agenda item, he gave vague endorsements: “I’m willing to sign great life legislation,” he told one reporter who put him on the spot. A six-week ban has proved divisive in his orbit, with some donors strongly opposed and other Republicans eager to simply move on.
President Biden has put out a statement on the arrest of the Leaker and his plans to review the classified documents processes. Not let’s see hin do something about getting White Christian Nationalists out of the Military.
I’ll leave you with this from the High Priestess of QAnon.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lady Justice, by Laura Pierre Louis
“The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.” No one knows the source for this quote–one candidates is Sun Tzu and another is Sextus Empricus. But it looks like that is what is happening now in the many legal investigations of Donald Trump. Frankly, I’ve let go of frustration over how slowly the wheels are turning, because I believe there is progress being made. I’m not convinced Trump will ever go to prison, but I think he will finally pay a price for his crimes against our country. Here’s the latest:
The New York Times: Trump to Face Questioning Thursday in N.Y. Attorney General’s Lawsuit.
Donald J. Trump is set to be questioned under oath on Thursday in a civil fraud lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the latest in a series of legal predicaments entangling the former president, who also faces a separate 34-count criminal indictment unsealed last week.
Ms. James’s civil case, which was filed in September and is expected to go to trial later this year, accuses Mr. Trump, his family business and three of his children of a “staggering” fraud for overvaluing the former president’s assets by billions of dollars. The lawsuit seeks $250 million that it contends they reaped through those deceptions, made in Mr. Trump’s annual financial statements — and asks a judge to essentially run him out of business in the state if he is found liable at trial.
Ms. James’s office plans to question Mr. Trump as part of the discovery phase of the case, in preparation for the trial.
The former president, who spent the night at his Manhattan residence in Trump Tower, arrived at the attorney general’s office shortly before 10 a.m. As a crowd chanted “New York hates you,” Mr. Trump’s motorcade drove into the parking garage underneath the office building at 28 Liberty Street….
This is the second time that lawyers for Ms. James, a Democrat, are questioning Mr. Trump under oath: He also sat for a deposition in the summer of 2022, shortly before the attorney general filed her lawsuit. During that deposition, Mr. Trump lashed out at Ms. James, accusing her of being motivated by politics and then invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination hundreds of times over the course of four hours.
Depositions are held in private, so the specifics of his testimony will not be immediately known. But as of Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump was not expected to assert his Fifth Amendment right, people familiar with his thinking said.
Because he was in the White House or on the campaign trail for several years — and no longer running his company — Mr. Trump might try to avoid providing direct answers to Ms. James’s questions, instead giving insubstantial responses. He might say, for example, that he does not recall a particular incident or was not present for it. He could also claim that he delegated the valuation of his assets to employees.
Trump vented his anger and frustration in ugly, deranged posts on his Twitter clone, Truth Social. Examples:
This man belongs in a rubber room!
Special Counsel Jack Smith is moving rapidly in his January 6 and stolen documents investigations. The Washington Post reports that Smith is looking into Trump’s fundraising using lies about election fraud: Special counsel focuses on Trump fundraising off false election claims.
Federal prosecutors probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol have in recent weeks sought a wide range of documents related to fundraising after the 2020 election, looking to determine if former president Donald Trump or his advisers scammed donors by using false claims about voter fraud to raise money, eight people familiar with the new inquiries said.
Franco/Flemish School; Justice; The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology; unknown British artist
Special counsel Jack Smith’s office has sentsubpoenas in recent weeks to Trump advisers and former campaign aides, Republican operatives and other consultants involved in the 2020 presidential campaign, the people said. They have also heard testimony from some of these figures in front of a Washington grand jury, some of the people said.
The eight people with knowledge of the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation.
The fundraising prong of the investigation is focused on money raised during the period between Nov. 3, 2020, and the end of Trump’s time in office on Jan. 20, 2o21, and prosecutors are said to be interested in whether anyone associated with the fundraising operation violated wire fraud laws, which make it illegal to make false representations over email to swindle people out of money.
The new subpoenas received since the beginning of March, which have not been previously reported, show the breadth of Smith’s investigation, as Trump embarks on a campaign for reelection while assailing the special counsel investigation and facing charges of falsifying business records in New York and a separate criminal investigation in Georgia.
The subpoenas seek more specific types of communications so that prosecutors can compare what Trump allies and advisers were telling one another privately about the voter-fraud claims with what they were saying publicly in appeals that generated more than $200 million in donations from conservatives, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.
Read more at the WaPo.
Trump is hilariously suing Michael Cohen for $500 million for violating a nondisclosure agreement. Raw Story:
Former President Donald Trump is launching a $500 million lawsuit against his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, alleging that he violated attorney-client privilege when he issued a tell-all book about the hush payment he helped Trump faciliate to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
But that claim doesn’t make any sense for Trump, said former Manhattan prosecutor Karen Friedman Agnifilo on CNN’s “OutFront” on Wednesday — because it implicitly requires Trump to admit that everything Cohen said, which he is now denying by pleading not guilty to criminal charges against him in New York, is actually true.
“When you look at this, Trump is alleging that Michael Cohen broke attorney-client privilege, he’s talking about all these falsehoods that he put out there,” said anchor Erica Hill. “Is there a legal merit here? I mean, does he have a case?
“It’s an interesting case here because, on the one hand, he’s saying everything is false, right?” said Agnifilo. “So if he was breaching attorney-client privilege, you’re doing that by telling things that were said to you in confidence. But so, is he saying things that Michael Cohen is saying are true because I told him in confidence, and now he’s breached that privilege? Or is he saying that the things are false? Because if they’re false, why didn’t he bring a defamation claim? So it kind of makes no sense.
“It really reads to me like he’s just trying to put his defense in the criminal case out and try and get his statements out there in the court of public opinion.”
She added: “I also think it’s worth noting that there is a little bit of witness intimidation going on here as well. And he’s just using the court system like he seems to want to do, by going after his foes and adversaries.”
Politico: Appeals court rejects Peter Navarro’s bid to retain hundreds of presidential records.
A federal appeals court panel on Wednesday rejected a bid by former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro to retain hundreds of government records despite a judge’s order to return them promptly to the National Archives.
“There is no public interest in Navarro’s retention of the records, and Congress has recognized that the public has an interest in the Nation’s possession and retention of Presidential records,” the three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded in a unanimous two-page order.
The Justice Department sued Navarro last year, seeking to reclaim hundreds of records — contained in Navarro’s personal ProtonMail account — that the government said should have been returned to the National Archives after the Trump administration came to an end in January 2021.
Justica Justice, by Fabiano Millani
Navarro acknowledged that at least 200 to 250 records in his possession belong to the government, but he contended that no mechanism exists to enforce that requirement — and that doing so might violate his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly rejected that claim, ordering Navarro to promptly return the records he had identified as belonging to the government.
But Navarro appealed the decision, rejecting the notion that the Justice Department had any legitimate mechanism to force him to return the records. And he urged the court to stay Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling while his appeal was pending. But the appeals court panel — which included Judges Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins, both appointees of President Barack Obama, and Judge Neomi Rao, an appointee of President Donald Trump — rejected Navarro’s stay request.
Within minutes, Kollar-Kotelly put the squeeze on Navarro, ordering him to turn over the 200 to 250 records “on or before” Friday. She also ordered him to perform additional searches or presidential records that might be in his possession by May 8, with further proceedings scheduled for later in the month.
I’m not sure if these records are related to the January 6 investigation, but Navarro has claimed that giving them up will violate his Fifth Amendment rights.
The flurry of filings is the latest twist in a saga that began when the National Archives discovered that Navarro had relied on a ProtonMail account to do official government business — the result of a congressional investigation into the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
Navarro is also trying to fend off criminal charges for defying a different congressional investigation — the probe by the Jan. 6 select committee — into his role in strategizing to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election. He faces charges for contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena issued by the select committee, a case that has been repeatedly delayed amid battles over executive privilege and immunity for presidential advisers.
In its brief order rejecting Navarro’s stay, the appeals court panel concluded that returning the documents would not violate Navarro’s protection against self-incrimination.
Allegory of Justic, by Gaetano Gandolfi
The wheels of justice are grinding slowly in the Trump investigations, but it looks like they are moving more quickly than the fight for women’s rights their own bodily autonomy. This decision makes no sense to me.
AP: Court preserves access to abortion pill but tightens rules.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A federal appeals court ruled that the abortion pill mifepristone can still be used for now but reduced the period of pregnancy when the drug can be taken and said it could not be dispensed by mail.
The decision late Wednesday temporarily narrowed a ruling by a lower court judge in Texas that had completely blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the nation’s most commonly used method of abortion. Still, preventing the pill from being sent by mail amounts to another significant curtailing of abortion access — less than a year after the reversal of Roe v. Wade resulted in more than a dozen states effectively banning abortion outright.
The case is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We are going to continue to fight in the courts, we believe the law is on our side, and we will prevail,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday, speaking to reporters from Dublin during a visit by President Joe Biden.
Opponents that brought the Texas lawsuit against the drug last year cast the decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as a victory.
Abortion rights groups expressed relief that the FDA approval would remain in place for now but criticized the court for reinstating restrictions on the drug. Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion provider that operates six clinics in five states, said in a tweet they were continuing to offer mifepristone in clinics and through virtual services while reviewing the decision that came down shortly before midnight Wednesday.
For goddess sake! Just leave women alone to decide on their medical care in consultation with their doctors!! It’s time to ban Viagra, which is far more dangerous than Mifepristone.
In other news, the case of the leaked classified documents is moving rapidly. The New York Times has now named the leaker: Leader of Online Group Where Secret Documents Leaked Is Air National Guardsman.
The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.
Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak of the government documents to the private online group. One official said Airman Teixeira might have information relevant to the investigation.
Federal investigators have been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online but have not identified Airman Teixeira or anyone else as a suspect. The F.B.I. declined to comment.
Starting months ago, one of the users uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events.
The New York Times spoke with four members of the Thug Shaker Central chat group, one of whom said he has known the person who leaked for at least three years, had met him in person, and referred to him as the O.G. The friends described him as older than most of the group members, who were in their teens, and the undisputed leader. One of the friends said the O.G. had access to intelligence documents through his job.
While the gaming friends would not identify the group’s leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira.
The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira’s childhood home — posted on social media in family photographs — also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.
The Times also has established, through social media posts and military records, that Airman Teixeira is enlisted in the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Posts on the unit’s official Facebook page congratulated Airman Teixeira and colleagues for being promoted to Airman First Class in July 2022.
This is kind of funny, because The Washington Post claimed an exclusive in a story this morning that did not name the leaker: Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says. But it really wasn’t an exclusive, because Aric Tolder reported the story at bellingcat first.
Now, he has the byline in the NYT story. Hahaha. Hooray for the underdog. He also plans to stay at bellingcat for now.
I imagine there will be more news breaking on this story today. I’ll be watching. Have a great Thursday everyone!!
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