In the closing days of his presidency— as President Donald J. Trump was preparing to declassify and make public almost a thousand pages of highly classified records pertaining to the FBI investigation into Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 presidential election to help elect him, and defeat Hillary Clinton — he turned to conservative columnist John Solomon for help.
On Jan 14, 2021, less than a week before Trump was to leave office, Solomon excitedly declared on his podcast, “I am here to tell you that, just a little while ago, President Trump authorized the declassification of all remaining FBI documents of the Russia probe to be made public before he leaves office.” Solomon said that the records consisted of a “foot and a half stack tall of documents from the FBI and Justice Department,” which, Solomon promised, would, in turn, contain “bombshell after bombshell.”
Towards that end, on Jan. 19, 2021, the day before he was to leave office, Trump signed a presidential order declaring that the Russia papers were to “be declassified to the maximum extent possible.” The order was signed about 7 p.m., ET.
On the very next day, though, just as Joe Biden was about to take his oath of office, Trump’s then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, wrote a memo apparently clarifying Trump’s order, indicating that the documents would not be made public anytime soon. Meadows wrote in his Jan. 20, 2021 memo that the White House was “returning the bulk of the… documents to the Department of Justice” because of concerns by the department that their release would violate the Privacy Act.
Despite this, Solomon was able to post a story on his own website, Just the News, on the night of Jan. 19, 2021, and then another the following week, sourced from some of these very same records.
In the second of those stories, Solomon confirmed that they were based on documents that “were kept from the American people for four years until President Trump declassified them on his final day in office last week.” Solomon highlighted the fact that the documents were exclusive to him: “They were obtained by Just the News.” He also posted the actual documents online to accompany both stories.
A lawyer for former President Donald Trump retained an attorney to represent himself as prosecutors step up their inquiry into the handling of sensitive documents at Trump’s Florida residence, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.
Evan Corcoran, who has represented Trump in interactions with the government over presidential records taken to his Mar-a-Lago resort, has turned to Michael Levy, a prominent white-collar lawyer in Washington, according to people familiar with the matter.
Levy was hired by Corcoran’s law firm, Silverman Thompson Slutkin & White, to represent Corcoran in the probe, according to one of the people.
Levy, a principal at the Washington law firm Ellerman Enzinna Levy, declined to comment.
Corcoran has appeared before a grand jury in connection with U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into classified documents taken to Mar-a-Lago following Trump’s term in office and possible attempts to obstruct that probe. He appeared before the grand jury in early January, according to a person familiar with his appearance.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is coming under pressure from conservatives on his panel and outside Congress to slow down consideration of President Biden’s judicial nominees.
Graham has voted for more of Biden’s nominees than any other Republican on the Judiciary Committee, something that is coming under scrutiny from conservatives after Democrats this week celebrated the 100th successful confirmation of a Biden judicial nominee.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said Republicans shouldn’t have let Democrats confirm so many Biden nominees to the federal courts when the Senate was evenly split during Biden’s first two years in office.
“The truth is the leadership squandered a 50-50 Senate. They could have at the committee level made a major push to vote together and to stop at least the circuit court nominees. Every single one of them would have required a discharge petition. We didn’t do that,” Hawley told The Hill.
“There was no concerted effort made whatsoever,” he added. “Say what you want about [Democratic Judiciary Committee Chairman] Dick Durbin [D-Ill.] but he has not taken his eye off the ball. He’s had help from Republicans.”
Senate Democrats are well ahead of the pace set by Republicans when they controlled the Senate during former President Trump’s term in office. Senate Republicans didn’t confirm the 100th judge appointed by Trump until May of 2019 — about three months later than when Biden hit the milestone.
“I think it’s a good time near the beginning of this Congress to go back and look at the last Congress and compare that to what happened in the previous administration and figure out if we’re needlessly accelerating the pace at which they’re being confirmed,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), another member of the Judiciary Committee.
“Needlessly?” Whatever happened to a right to speedy trial and the data that shows the dockets all have more cases than they can handle now. Once again, Republicans just serve their donor overloards and obstruct good governance and outcomes. While we’re after Lady Lindsey, let’s think on this a moment.
🚨NEW: Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) legal expense trust fund has raised at least $158,000 from executives of companies that rely on the federal government or from fellow senators. @Forbes https://t.co/buMg925aTK
In November, after three months of legal challenges, the Supreme Court ordered Graham to testify before an Atlanta-area grand jury investigating former President Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Graham complied.
If the senator hopes to offset all of his legal bills, his expense fund is going to need to raise even more cash. On Nov. 30, Graham’s campaign paid $268,000 to Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP, a law firm based in South Carolina. Graham’s legal expense fund paid the firm an additional $40,000 the following week.
Robert Castellani, the CEO of North American Rescue, chipped in $10,000. His company provides medical products for the military and has won $100 million in federal contracts since 2001.
Leadership PACs for seven current Republicans maxed out with $10,000 contributions to their colleague, according to disclosures filed with the secretary of the senate and the Federal Election Commission. Republicans John Barasso (Wyoming), John Boozman (Arkansas), Michael Crapo (Idaho), Steve Daines (Montana), John Hoeven (North Dakota), James Lankford (Oklahoma) and Tim Scott (South Carolina) all routed money in Graham’s direction. The PAC of former Sen. Richard Shelby (Alabama) pitched in $10,000 as well. Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia), Kevin Cramer (North Dakota) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) sent several thousand dollars apiece. Some of these donations were reported previously by The Daily Beast and Raw Story.
Nicholas A. Mastroianni II also contributed $10,000. He is the chairperson of U.S. Immigration Fund, which helps foreign investors obtain permanent U.S. residency. To participate in the program, Mastroianni’s company needs to be approved by the Citizenship and Immigration Services.
A spokesperson for Graham, Kevin Bishop, declined to provide details about discussions Graham may have had with the donors about their businesses. “Senator Graham complies with all regulations and laws as required,” the spokesperson said.
Only one donor to Graham’s defense fund responded to Forbes’ inquiries. “I’ve worked with the senator for over a decade,” said Wallace Cheves, owner of Sky Boat Gaming, a casino developer. “I was happy to chip in.”
Defense officials during the Trump administration were aware of other spy balloon incursions into U.S. territory — but never reported these incidents to the White House and never reached a definitive conclusion that they originated from China, according to a Friday report by the Wall Street Journal.
“Following the shootdown earlier this month of a Chinese high-altitude balloon, the Biden administration revealed these past incidents, but didn’t say where they had flown, and added that they likely went undetected by the previous administration,” reported Vivian Salama. “Now it appears some intelligence officials at the Pentagon were aware of the incidents and harbored concerns that they were related to China, believing Beijing was using them to test radar-jamming systems over sensitive U.S. military sites. The data collected about the Trump-era incidents was limited to a basic assessment and therefore wasn’t shared more broadly within the government at the time.”
The balloons in question were detected over Navy facilities in Coronado, California; Norfolk, Virginia; and Guam.
Despite some officials’ suspicions of Chinese involvement, intelligence assessments “never got to be assertive” about that conclusion, and major officials like Defense Secretary Mark Esper say they do not recall being briefed on the matter.
Soleil, tour, aéroplane (Sun, Tower, Airplane), 1913, Robert DeLaunay
Michael Cohen spoke to MSNBC on Thursday about someone calling himself a “private investigator” trying to deliver a package to him. Ultimately, the truth came out that he was a process server trying to hand over a subpoena.
Detailing the scene to Nicolle Wallace, Cohen explained that the documents made it look like it was a lawsuit from The People of New York (Letitia James) vs. a list of several people.
“And it’s a subpoena. It’s a subpoena to testify,” Cohen revealed. “And I’m saying to myself, my God, this is so weird. Why would the attorney general ask for me or why would they subpoena me? All you have to do is call and ask me and I’d be happy to come in and provide any testimony that they want. Well, after reading the document the first few pages I realized it’s actually not from the attorney general but rather it’s from Trump’s lawyers. It’s like five or six of them are subpoenaing me to come in a couple of weeks and provide a deposition.”
He confessed he had no idea why, and that there were several law firms listed, everyone from the typical names like Alina Habba and more.
“It’s one of the dumbest moves I could possibly imagine they would want,” said Cohen. “Clearly, the information I’m providing is predicated on documentation, you know, on documentary evidence, and as much as they think they’re going to bully me, it’s not going to happen. They’re not going to benefit from it. And tomorrow, fortunately, I’m seeing another lawyer in order to determine whether or not I’m going to make a motion to quash the subpoena and basically show Donald the same consideration he showed to the American people.”
The information came after Cohen continued his attacks on the Southern District of New York for the Justice Department’s attempts to silence him from revealing details about Trump. He’s been engaged in an ongoing effort to obtain the documents around the ordeal, as well as the Bureau of Prisons, attempting to prevent him from publishing a book. Thus far the government has refused to give up the information, even under President Joe Biden’s administration. Cohen is going to court over the request for the information.
Air, Iron, and Water,1937 Robert Delaunay
Sooner or later, someone will deliver us from this meddlesome psychopath. Trump and the cult just won’t go away without some kind of legal or divine intervention. This is from Michael Scherer at the Washington Post. “GOP wants candidates to pledge support for nominee — but some resist. Trump said he won’t commit to supporting the winner if he loses the nomination, and other potential candidates have hedged on the issue.” I wonder what will happen to Ronna if her Uncle decides to run if she’s having such issues now?
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is so concerned that party disunity will sink GOP hopes in the 2024 presidential election that she plans to require all candidates on the official primary debate stages to first pledge their support to the party’s eventual nominee.
But many of the likely contenders are pushing back.
Former president Donald Trump said this month that he won’t commit to supporting the winner if he loses the nomination. “It would have to depend on who the nominee was,” he told a conservative radio host. Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, another potential candidate, recently tweeted that he “won’t commit to supporting” Trump.
Others have settled on more nuanced hedges. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who just created a new organization to help him explore a possible campaign, says he will support the eventual nominee, but is certain Trump won’t be that person. Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who has not decided on whether to sign a pledge, has gone so far as to speak with McDaniel about his opposition to it, arguing that Republicans should not be enforcing litmus tests.
It’s rather obvious the various ‘wings’ of the Republican party hate each other and it’s every man for himself. This presidential shit season should be a clusterfuck if there ever was one. Also, its zombie candidates refuse to die.
Arizona Court Knocks Down Lake’s Election Appeal, Calling One Of Her Key Claims ‘Sheer Speculation’ https://t.co/6gmqXcbfxQ
House and Senate Republicans widely acknowledge that bad candidates cost them seats in the 2022 election. They just don’t agree on what to do about it in 2024.
After a midterm cycle that saw underfunded and deeply conservative nominees blow winnable races across the country, the new regime at the National Republican Senatorial Committee is reversing its policy of neutrality and will now selectively intervene to pick winners in open GOP primaries. But in the House, where Republicans are protecting a paper-thin majority, the campaign committee will remain largely hands-off.
The split over strategy comes at a critical juncture for the GOP: Some of the party’s most controversial losers from 2022 are launching campaigns or considering running in 2024. That includes Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona, J.R. Majewski in Ohio and Joe Kent in Washington.
The crop of failed candidates mulling comebacks is causing headaches for party operatives who are desperate to address one of the big problems that plagued them last fall.
Let’s face it. One of our parties isn’t the least bit functional, and that continues to have an impact on our country overall.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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A Georgia judge released parts of a report produced by an Atlanta-area special grand jury investigating efforts by President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia — though the panel’s recommendations on potential charges in that investigation remain secret.
The five-page excerpt made public on Thursday revealed that a majority of the grand jury concluded that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony before the panel and recommended that charges be filed. The grand jury did not identify those witnesses in the unsealed excerpt.
“A majority of the grand jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it,” the report reads. “The grand jury recommends that the district attorney seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling.”
The unsealed document offered no major clues about the grand jury’s other findings — though the panel pointedly noted that it unanimously agreed that Georgia’s 2020 presidential vote had not been marred by “widespread fraud” as has been claimed by Trump and his allies.
“The grand jury heard extensive testimony on the subject of alleged election fraud from poll workers, investigators, technical experts, and State of Georgia employees and officials, as well as from persons still claiming that such fraud took place,” the report reads. “We find by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”
A special grand jury examined attempts by Donald J. Trump and the former president’s allies to overturn his 2020 loss in the state. A small portion of its report released on Thursday made it difficult determine what, if any, indictments the jury recommended….
A court on Thursday released portions of a report by a special grand jury investigating whether Donald J. Trump and his allies interfered in the presidential election in Georgia in an attempt to overturn the 2020 result. The released portions — just six total pages — do not delve into the grand jury’s conclusions or say whether they recommended indictments related to election interference.
But the jurors said they believed that at least one unnamed witness who testified in the inquiry may have committed perjury and should face indictment. They also found “that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election,” rejecting arguments made by Mr. Trump and his supporters.
Here are the details:
The publicly released portion of the report does not mention the names of anyone that the jurors think should or should not be indicted. Nor does it mention, beyond potential perjury, which Georgia laws the jurors believe may have been violated. Read the released parts of the report here.
A judge decided to release only a small portion of the grand jury’s full report. Here’s why.
The special jury in the Trump case heard months of private testimony from 75 witnesses, including the former president’s allies and state officials. But it will be up to the local district attorney to decide whether to bring any charges.
A central element of the investigation is the now-famous call by Mr. Trump on Jan. 2, 2021, during which he told Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, that he needed to “find” 11,780 votes — the number he needed to overcome Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lead in the state.
Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows has been subpoenaed by the special counsel investigating the former president and his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s office is seeking documents and testimony related to January 6, and Meadows received the subpoena sometime in January, the source said. An attorney for Meadows declined to comment.
The move to subpoena one of Trump’s most senior aides – in addition to the recent subpoena of former Vice President Mike Pence, as CNN reported last week – marks the latest significant step in the special counsel’s investigation into Trump’s role in seeking to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
Smith also is simultaneously investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office. While the subpoena is related to January 6, Meadows also may be of interest in the documents investigation. He was one of Trump’s designees to the National Archives and played a role in discussions around returning government records in his possession.
The special counsel’s subpoena could set up a clash with the Justice Department and Meadows over executive privilege. The former White House chief of staff, citing executive privilege, previously fought a subpoena from a special grand jury in Georgia that was investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. A judge later ordered Meadows to testify, finding him “material and necessary to the investigation.”
Meadows was involved in the infamous phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and in a December 2020 White House meeting about election fraud claims. Meadows also visited a site where an audit of Georgia’s election was underway and sent emails to Justice Department officials about unsubstantiated fraud allegations.
On January 6, Meadows was in and out of the Oval Office and witness to Trump’s actions as rioters overtook the US Capitol that day.
The recent subpoena for Meadows also underscores the aggressive nature of the special counsel’s probe.
I’ve seen many people saying this means that Meadows is not cooperating, so I found this tweet from a former federal prosecutor interesting:
Before wrapping up, prosecutors usually want testimony of key cooperators to be on record before the GJ. If they still want the cooperation kept quiet, they may give the cooperator a GJ subpoena. So, for now, the Meadows subpoena doesn't tell us whether he is/isn't cooperating.
Special counsel Jack Smith is locked in at least eight secret court battles that aim to unearth some of the most closely held details about Donald Trump’s actions after the 2020 election and handling of classified material, according to sources and court records reviewed by CNN.
The outcome of these disputes could have far-reaching implications, as they revolve around a 2024 presidential candidate and could lead courts to shape the law around the presidency, separation of powers and attorney-client confidentiality in ways they’ve never done before.
Yet almost all of the proceedings are sealed, and filings and decisions aren’t public….
A key sealed case revealed Wednesday is an attempt to force more answers about direct conversations between Trump and his defense attorney Evan Corcoran, where the Justice Department is arguing the investigation found evidence the conversations may be part of furthering or covering up a crime related to the Mar-a-Lago document boxes.
House of Squam Light, Gloucester, Edward Hopper
About half a dozen cases are still ongoing in court, either before Chief Judge Beryl Howell or in the appeals court above her, the DC Circuit. Most appear to follow the typical arc of miscellaneous cases that arise during grand jury investigations, where prosecutors sometimes use the court to enforce their subpoenas.
More challenges from subpoenaed witnesses – including former Vice President Mike Pence – are expected to be filed in the coming days, likely under seal as well. Pence may raise novel questions about the protections around the vice presidency….
Investigations that implicate government officials often beget sealed court proceedings, because confidential grand jury witnesses become more likely to assert privileges that prompt prosecutors to ask judges to compel more answers, criminal law experts say.
“I think we are in extraordinary times. Part of it is I think President Trump continues to assert these theories long after they’ve been batted away by the court,” Neil Eggleston, a former White House counsel who argued for executive privilege during the Clinton administration and the Whitewater investigation.
The toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, is drawing new attention to the dangers of increasingly long freight trains — part of a series of cost-savings efforts by freight railroads that have drawn scrutiny from the industry’s critics.
The sheer bulk of the 150-car train that went off the rails Feb. 3 is just one factor investigators are expected to consider amid the unfolding ecological disaster near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, which caused a massive fireball, forced an evacuation and has left a lingering odor, fears of lasting contamination and thousands of dead fish. But union officials, regulators and congressional researchers say the industry’s trend toward ever-growing train lengths is causing a host of safety concerns that regulators need to address.
“The longer the train, the heavier the train, the more wear and tear it puts on the actual rail itself, as well as the equipment,” said Jared Cassity, a legislative director for the country’s largest rail union, SMART-Transportation Division. “We’re seeing more wear and tear. We’re seeing more unintended train separations, which is where the train breaks apart.”
The Ohio derailment is still under investigation by multiple agencies, including the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB, an independent agency, has said preliminarily that an overheated wheel bearing on one of the cars is partially the culprit for the derailment.
However, derailments like these typically have multiple points of failure, and the NTSB’s investigation will likely take over a year to complete. Such NTSB probes typically examine any conceivable cause that could have led to a crash, including equipment malfunctions, poor system design, the lack of safety precautions, inadequate training, crew fatigue and myriad other factors.
On the night of Friday 3 February, at least 50 out of 150 train cars of a train heading from Conway, Pennsylvania, to Madison, Illinois, derailed. The train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, a town of about 5,000 residents along the Ohio and Pennsylvania border. A huge fire that spanned the length of the derailed cars erupted. No injuries or deaths were reported.
Marshall’s House, Edward Hopper
Residents within a one-mile radius of the derailment were evacuated as officials noted that over a dozen cars carrying vinyl chloride, a carcinogenic chemical, were involved in the derailment and could have been exposed to the fire.
On Monday 6 February, officials enacted a mandatory evacuation, threatening to arrest residents who refused to evacuate, as fear of an explosion rose. Governor Mike DeWine told residents that leaving was “a matter of life and death”. Crews ended up releasing toxic chemicals from five derailed tanker cars to prevent an explosion. Small holes were made into the train cars, whose chemicals were released into pits that were lit on fire. Pictures of the chemical release showed huge clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky over homes.
Evacuated residents, who were staying at shelters and schools, were given the clear to return to their homes on Wednesday 8 February as officials deemed air and water samples safe for residents.
On the chemicals that were released:
The most concerning chemical being carried by the derailed train was vinyl chloride, which is used to make polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a hard resin used in plastic products. Vinyl chloride is colorless and highly flammable. It has been linked to a rare form of liver cancer, as well as other types of cancer like leukemia and lung cancer. Short-term exposure effects include dizziness and drowsiness, while high exposure can lead to hospitalization and death. Another chemical on board was butyl acrylate, also used in plastic production.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) later released information that showed three previously unreported chemicals were also released upon the derailment: ethylhexyl acrylate, isobutylene and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether. Exposure to the chemicals can cause shortness of breath, burning in the skin and eyes, coughing, headaches and nausea, among other symptoms.
In total, the EPA has reported five chemicals that were contained in rail cars that were “derailed, breached and/or on fire”, in a letter the agency wrote to Norfolk Southern.
At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”
By Andrew Wyeth
When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.
In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.
Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.
A bit more:
In recent weeks, Musk has been obsessed with the amount of engagement his posts are receiving. Last week, Platformer broke the news that he fired one of two remaining principal engineers at the company after the engineer told him that views on his tweets are declining in part because interest in Musk has declined in general.
His deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs as well.
Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person. Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.
There’s more at the link, believe it or not. I never thought anyone could be more of a malignant narcissist than Donald Trump, but Musk might actually surpass him.
I’ll end there. Please share your thoughts on these stories, and post links to stories you have found interesting.
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I’m not a big fan of this holiday, but if you celebrate it, I hope you enjoy the day. Meanwhile, today’s news is the same old same old unloving mess.
I mostly ignored the news yesterday; I’m trying to relax because I’m still recovering from my cold. Finally, at 10PM, I turned on MSNBC only to learn about another school shooting, this time at Michigan State University.
A White House official told CBS News early Tuesday that President Biden had been briefed on Monday night's shooting at Michigan State University and has spoken to Gov. Whitmer about the situation. https://t.co/odxocKOpSy
Three Michigan State University students were killed and five others were critically wounded in a shooting at the university Monday night, authorities said. The gunman was later found dead in Lansing of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
Law enforcement officials at the university identified the shooter as Anthony Dwayne McRae, a 43-year-old man with no obvious affiliation to the school. McRae was neither a current nor former student or faculty member at Michigan State, said Chris Rozman, the university’s interim deputy chief of police and public safety.
The suspect was previously sentenced to 18 months in state prison on a weapons charge, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections. Arrest records show he was convicted and ultimately sentenced in November 2019 for possessing a loaded firearm inside a vehicle, which is illegal in Michigan without a concealed carry license. He was discharged in May 2021.
Michigan State Police initially confirmed the death toll on Monday night, announcing that five people were hospitalized with injuries and noting that all were in critical condition. Four of the five students transported to Sparrow Hospital in Lansing underwent surgeries for their injuries overnight, a hospital representative said. The fifth student was immediately admitted to the medical center’s critical care unit, and all five remained in critical condition on Tuesday morning, according to the representative.
Police located McRae’s body in the city of Lansing at around 11:30 p.m. Monday, Rozman said, thanking a caller whose tip led authorities to the suspect.
An investigation into the East Lansing, Michigan shooting led to a possible connection between 43-year-old Anthony McRae and Ewing, New Jersey.
Police say a note was found in McRae’s pocket “indicating a threat to two Ewing Public Schools.”
All five Ewing Township public schools closed Tuesday morning “out of an abundance of caution,” according to police.
There are additional officers from Ewing police and other agencies at public and private schools.
They plan to open the schools again tomorrow.
It’s difficult to know how to react to these shootings that have become almost routine in the U.S. The GOP and the gun lobby are wholly responsible for these tragic events. I can’t imagine why any young person today would vote for a Republican. Here’s a reaction from Detroit Free Press columnist (and mother of a young boy) Nancy Kaffer.
A @freep columnist prepares to tell her 12-year-old son about another MI mass shooting. His first active shooter drill was in kindergarten. https://t.co/OZ2pLUwRSr from @NancyKaffer of @freep
He went to bed at 9 p.m., because he’s 12 and it’s a school night, before I saw the news alerts rolling in: A shooting on Michigan State University’s campus. The shooter still on the loose. One person, reportedly, slain; five at Sparrow Hospital. It’s 11:30 p.m., and I’m watching the news. The dead now number three, and there’s a blurry picture of the shooter on my screen. I hope at least they catch the guy before my son wakes up. At least then I can say it’s over.
I can’t not tell him, not anymore. He has a phone. He has a laptop, required for school. He has friends with phones and laptops and older siblings. I had to tell him about Oxford, in November of 2021; he listened, quietly — he is not, by nature, quiet — and asked: “Are you sending me to school tomorrow?”
His first active shooter drill was kindergarten. I didn’t know. They didn’t have active shooter drills when I was his age. There had been a substitute teacher, clearly as blindsided by the drill as any of her young charges. Administrators used a code name to communicate the actions of the fictional shooter. It made the drill seem real. He came home that day earnestly explaining to me that his class had to hide in the bathroom, because a bad guy had been in the school….
This isn’t the first time; it won’t be the last. I know what I’m supposed to say. I’m meant to be empathetic but matter of fact, to validate his feelings, but make him feel safe. I’m told to watch him for signs of trauma. I have to keep my cool. If I lose it, he will, too.
The children at MSU are older than he is, six or 10 or 12 years; a gulf to him, to me, the blink of an eye. Wasn’t it just yesterday that he took his first steps?
I hope you’ll go read the whole column. What a time to be a child–or a parent. How much longer will we tolerate this horrendous, meaningless violence in this country?
Mike Pence plans to fight the subpoena he received from Jack Smith’s January 6 Grand Jury.
NEWS: Mike Pence is planning to resist special counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena.
His reason? It violates the separation of powers; after all, Pence was president of the Senate on Jan. 6 — an officer of Congress.
Mike Pence is preparing to resist a grand jury subpoena for testimony about former President Donald Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the former vice president’s thinking.
Pence’s decision to challenge Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request has little to do with executive privilege, the people said. Rather, Pence is set to argue that his former role as president of the Senate — therefore a member of the legislative branch — shields him from certain Justice Department demands.
Pence allies say he is covered by the constitutional provision that protects congressional officials from legal proceedings related to their work — language known as the “speech or debate” clause. The clause, Pence allies say, legally binds federal prosecutors from compelling Pence to testify about the central components of Smith’s investigation. If Pence testifies, they say, it could jeopardize the separation of powers that the Constitution seeks to safeguard.
“He thinks that the ‘speech or debate’ clause is a core protection for Article I, for the legislature,” said one of the two people familiar with Pence’s thinking, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his legal strategy. “He feels it really goes to the heart of some separation of powers issues. He feels duty-bound to maintain that protection, even if it means litigating it.”
Pence’s planned argument comes after an FBI search that followed his attorney’s voluntary report of classified material in his possession last month — drawing him into a thicket of document-handling drama that’s also ensnared Trump and President Joe Biden. While Pence aides say he’s taking this position to defend a separation of powers principle, it will allow him to avoid being seen as cooperating with a probe that is politically damaging to Trump, who remains the leading figure in the Republican Party.
Pence is preparing to launch a presidential campaign against his onetime boss. Aides expect the former vice president to address the subpoena — and his plans to respond it — during a visit to Iowa on Wednesday.
Pence is as delusional as Trump if he thinks he has any chance to win the Republican nomination, much less become president. But he’s not the only delusional Republican hopeful.
From the Washington Post article:
Nikki Haley, who served as U.N. ambassador and governor of South Carolina, announced Tuesday that she is running for president, becoming thefirst major rival to officially challenge Donald Trump for the GOP nomination in 2024.
Haley made her announcement in a 3½-minute video released online, in which she declares, “It’s time for a new generation of leadership.” The video emphasizes Haley’s gender and her family’s immigrant roots.
A veteran of the Trump administration, Haley begins as an underdog in the GOP race. If successful, she would become the first woman and first Asian American to lead the Republican ticket. She previously made history as the country’s first female Asian American governor and the first Indian American to serve in the Cabinet.
Haley has shifted her posture toward Trump over the years. She criticized him when he first ran in 2016, before joining his administration the next year and later vowing not to run against him in 2024. In recent months, she has disavowed the pledge as she moved toward a planned announcement speech here in Charleston on Wednesday.
To say that Haley has “shifted” her position on Trump is a vast understatement. She has been all over the map. She’s a wishy-washy flip flopper. I can’t imagine the GOP base will support her for the nomination.
The US military has recovered “significant debris” from a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down this month, the Pentagon has said, after the White House claimed China had been operating a high-altitude balloon program spying on the US and its allies for many years.
The US Northern Command said in a statement: “Crews have been able to recover significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified as well as large sections of the structure.”
The balloon, shot down off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February, was the first of a series of mysterious objects shot down by the US military over an eight-day period in North American airspace.
However, China’s surveillance program, according to John Kirby, the US national security council spokesperson, dated back to at least the administration of Donald Trump, which he said was oblivious to it….
“We detected it, we tracked it. And we have been carefully studying to learn as much as we can. We know that these PRC [People’s Republic of China] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners.”
There will be an all-senators classified briefing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning, the office of the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said, and the White House’s office of national intelligence will brief John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, on Wednesday, CNN reported.
Separately in Japan, the Fuji News Network reported on Tuesday that Tokyo had concluded that the object that flew over Japanese waters near the south-western region of Kyushu in January last year was mostly likely a Chinese spy balloon.
I’m going to end with two opinion pieces, one on the GOP and Social Security and the other on the GOP book-banning craze.
Paul Krugman: Republican's Long War Against Medicare and Social Security https://t.co/Bt4QEAUNM2
Krugman begins by noting the Republicans’ noisy fake outrage when Biden accused them of wanting to “sunset” Social Security and Medicare during his State of the Union speech. Of course “sunset” was exactly the word Rick Scott used in his plan for a future Republican majority in the Senate. Fortunately, they didn’t get one in 2022.
But, of course, many Republicans dowant to eviscerate these programs. To believe otherwise requires both willful naïveté and amnesia about 40 years of political history.
First of all, if Republicans had absolutely no desire to make major cuts to America’s main social insurance programs, why would they sunset them — and thus create the risk that they wouldn’t be renewed? As Biden might say, c’mon, man.
And then there’s that historical record. Two things have been true ever since 1980. First, Republicans have tried to make deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare every time they thought there might be a political window of opportunity. Second, on each occasion they’ve done exactly what they’re doing now: claiming that Democrats are engaged in smear tactics when they describe G.O.P. plans using exactly the same words Republicans themselves used.
So, about that history. It has been widely forgotten, but soon after taking office Ronald Reagan proposed major cuts to Social Security. But he backed down in the face of a political backlash, leading analysts at the Cato Institute to call for a “Leninist” strategy — their word — creating a coalition ready to exploit a future crisis if and when one arrived.
To that end, Cato created the Project on Social Security Privatization, calling for replacing Social Security with individual accounts — which George W. Bush tried to do in 2005. By then, however, Cato had quietly renamed its project; “privatization” polled badly, and Bush insisted that it was a “trick word” used to “scare people.”
So there’s a history here, and there’s a similar history for Medicare. Many people probably recall that Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in 1995. I don’t know how many people realize that Gingrich’s key demand was that President Bill Clinton agree to large cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
After Republicans gained control of the House in 2010, Paul Ryan began pushing for major cuts in spending. One key element was converting Medicare from a system that pays medical bills to a system offering people fixed sums of money to be applied to the purchase of private insurance — that is, vouchers.
Read the rest at the NYT link.
Banning ideas and authors is not a ‘culture war’ – it’s fascism | Jason Stanley | The Guardian https://t.co/o02cyv73fY
A wave of Republican enthusiasm for banning concepts, authors and books is sweeping across the United States. Forty-four states have proposed bans on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, and 18 states have passed them.
Florida’s Stop Woke Act bans the teaching of eight categories of concepts, including concepts that suggest that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex”. Many of the laws also target Nikole Hannah-Jones’s influential 1619 Project.
These laws have already started to take effect. Administrators and teachers have been forced out of their positions on the suspicion of violating these laws, and what has started as a trickle may soon become a flood.
In January, Florida’s board of education banned AP African American studies, on the grounds that it included concepts forbidden by Governor Ron DeSantis’s law, including critical race theory and intersectionality, as well as authors such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Roderick Ferguson, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The College Board chose to remove these authors and subjects from its curriculum, claiming, as it turns out dubiously, that it did so independently of Florida’s pressure.
These laws have been represented by many as a “culture war”. This framing is a dangerous falsification of reality. A culture war is a conflict of values between different groups. In a diverse, pluralistic democracy, one should expect frequent conflicts. Yet laws criminalizing educators’ speech are no such thing – unlike a culture war, the GOP’s recent turn has no place in a democracy.
What are the consequences of these laws?
The concepts these laws centrally target include addressing structural racism, intersectionality and critical race theory….
The laws are manifestly incoherent. The failure to teach about structural racism will make Blackchildren born into poverty feel that their parents and grandparents are responsible for their own impoverished position relative to white children, and so will make Black children feel “anguish or other forms of psychological distress” because of “actions … committed in the past by other members of the same race”. The “anguish” and “psychological distress” these laws forbid are only anguish felt by the dominant racial group, white Americans.
In other national contexts, everyone would clearly recognize the problematic nature of laws of this sort. Germany’s teaching of its Nazi past creates clear anguish and guilt in German children (and perhaps for this reason, Germany is the world’s most stable liberal democracy). If the German far right passed laws forbidding schools from teaching about the sins of Nazism, on the grounds that such teaching does in fact quite obviously cause anguish and guilt in German children, the world would not stand for it for one moment. Even Israel’s far-right government strenuously objected when Poland drafted a law that would make it illegal to suggest that Poland had any responsibility for Nazi atrocities on its soil. Why isn’t there greater outcry when such laws are passed to protect the innocence of white Americans?
It is frequently claimed by proponents of such laws that banning discussion of structural racism and intersectionality is freeing schools of indoctrination. And yet indoctrination rarely takes place by allowing the free flow of ideas. Indoctrination instead rather takes places by banning ideas. Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as “freedom from indoctrination” is as Orwellian as politics gets.
Head over to The Guardian to read the whole piece.
That’s it for me today. What are your thoughts? What other stories are you following?
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Hervé Télémaque No Title (The Ugly American) 1962/64, MoMA
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Each new day I sit here, reading the news, thinking about which headlines are most substantive and meaningful, I soon discover we’ve got a bizarre timeline going on. Every day gets more surreal. I’m writing songs again to deal with it. It’s probably why I’ve been so inspired by the works of Warren Zevon. I worked on “Living Next Door to the Ugly American Inn” this week.
Facebook punished me for using that term to describe Airbnb invaders and the local tourist pimps and whores that drag them into our neighborhoods. Facebook told me “Ugly American” was a slur instead of an essential politically-themed novel written in 1958 by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The movie of the same name came out in 1964 featuring Marlon Brando. It’s also the name of an American adult animated sitcom created by Devin Clark and developed by David M. Stern. That came out in 2010 on Adult Swim. It’s also a video game. I’ll probably be suspended for publishing this there, but who cares?
A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the “Ugly American.” Today we must act to prevent an ugly America.
Hervé Télémaque, “One of the 36,000 Marines over our Antilles”
Those words have never been so valid as at this moment. LBJ spoke of pollution and its threat to the country’s national resources. Today it seems more accurate to define it in terms of how our society interacts with one another in the political environment. It seems odd that I think of it in terms of how Americans from the rest of the country tend to act when they stay in our neighborhoods instead of the Motel Six by the airport. Although I spent enough time in Europe and saw the behavior. I tried hard to be a chameleon wherever I went, lest I be considered among that number. I got so good at it that I was frequently mistaken for a Canadian by folks that didn’t know I came from Omaha when I attended the University of Nebraska. Then they said, you must be from the east. I was like, yup, eastern Nebraska, which is Omaha.
Many of these folks pimping out houses in neighborhoods don’t even live here. Lots of them are LLCs that aren’t located here.
I cannot understand how someone could do that to their neighbors and neighborhood. Then, I saw this and realized that money changes everything. (Thank you, Cyndy Lauper.)
“Gonna have to start petitioning to have Mardi Gras three times a year and I can stop going to work on these houses!” Dittmar, who works as a carpenter outside of Carnival Season, said.
It’s his second year holding down a spot on the parade route and his services don’t come cheap. This year, he’s got three “big groups” paying him $2,500 each to hold their St. Charles Avenue spots and one group paying another $800 for a spot on the Endymion route.
Just a block away, Vera Hendriks and Alex Foley are holding a spot for their boss, who’s paying them with tickets to MOM’s Ball.
And while they were eating lunch, they got an offer to expand their turf for another $100 each.
“Once you’re out here you’ll meet people who offer you money to just sit here,” Foley said. “I haven’t had an experience like this.”
But it’s not just the hustlers making money on the route. Working from home has revolutionized how people stake out parade spots for people like Michael Scruggs, who was technically on the clock Friday morning.
“Unfortunately not all my clients are on Louisiana time, so they don’t realize it’s Mardi Gras time,” Scruggs said as he answered emails from a folding chair on the neutral ground.”
And if you’re thinking about getting in on the game, Freebird has some advice for you.
“Stay out of it! It’s mine,” he said with a laugh. “Or do it somewhere else. Uptown is my route!”
Hervé Télémaque, a French artist born in Haiti whose poignant works tackling racism and colonialism have only recently garnered mainstream recognition in Europe and the U.S., died in a hospital near Paris on Thursday. He was 85.
The Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, which is now hosting a version of Télémaque survey that first appeared at the Serpentine Galleries in London, announced Télémaque’s passing. The museum said he had been battling an autoimmune disorder.
Télémaque has proven a hard figure to classify. During the ’60s, he was grouped in with the Narrative Figuration movement, a French style that sought to revive representational painting as a leftist political strategy. He has also been considered a Pop artist, and in a recent show presenting a global history of Surrealism, he was labeled a tangential figure of that style, too.
But to say Télémaque is a member of any of these movements would not adequately capture the vibrancy and the complexity of his art, which often took up histories of racism and colonialism—and their continued influence on the present—in striking, ambiguous ways
Okay, now, some Gratuitous Warren Zevon music.
I heard Woodrow Wilson’s guns I heard Maria crying Late last night I heard the news That Veracruz was dying Veracruz was dying
Someone called Maria’s name I swear it was my father’s voice Saying, “If you stay, you’ll all be slain You must leave now, you have no choice” Take the servants and ride west Keep the child close to your chest When the American troops withdraw Let Zapata take the rest
So, why am I writing a Song called “Shooting Down the Sky”? Well, it’s not often you live in times where Reuters reports this. “Ruling out aliens? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet“. I’m curious why no one is telling us about these four unidentified sky objects that Biden called NORAD to shoot down. After all, I probably paid for a bit of an F-22 raptor, even if it’s only part of a bolt.
The U.S. Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said on Sunday after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects that he would not rule out aliens or any other explanation yet, deferring to U.S. intelligence experts.
Asked whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin for three airborne objects shot down by U.S. warplanes in as many days, General Glen VanHerck said: “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.”
The Chinese aren’t wasting time playing tit-for-tat in the big game in the sky. This is from the Washington Post. “China says at least 10 U.S. balloons have flown in its airspace since 2022.” I thought Donald Trump had created the US Space Force so we could have some really high-tech budget busters to deal with them. I guess it was all about the uniforms, decals, and soundbites.
China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday said the United States has sent at least 10 unsanctioned balloons into Chinese airspace since last year, as the two countries feud over a Chinese airship discovered and shot down by the U.S. military this month. The United States denied the allegation.
Hitting back at allegations that Beijing had used the balloon, discovered floating over the western United States, for surveillance, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in a press briefing that it was “common” for U.S. high-altitude balloons to fly into other countries’ airspace.
“The United States should first reflect on itself and change course, rather than slander, discredit or incite confrontation,” Wang said.
Hervé Télémaque: “Inventaire, un homme d’intérieur”
So, our next big conflict is about balloons? Isn’t that a bit like World War 1? At least the Zeppellins Airships were visually interesting. The BBC sums it up here. “Mystery surrounds objects shot down by US military.” This is not what all those 90s movies told me to expect. Will Smith, the nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
The US military is unsure what three flying objects it shot out of the skies over North America were – and how they were able to stay aloft.
President Joe Biden ordered another object – the fourth in total this month – to be downed on Sunday.
As it was travelling at 20,000ft (6,100m), it could have interfered with commercial air traffic, the US said.
A military commander said it could be a “gaseous type of balloon” or “some type of a propulsion system”.
He added he could not rule out that the objects were extra-terrestrials.
The latest object – shot down over Lake Huron in Michigan near the Canadian border – has been described by defence officials as an unmanned “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it.
It was downed by a missile fired from an F-16 fighter jet at 14:42 local time (19:42 GMT).
The incident raises further questions about the spate of high-altitude objects that have been shot down over North America this month.
US Northern Command Commander General Glen VanHerck said that there was no indication of any threat.
“I’m not going to categorise them as balloons. We’re calling them objects for a reason,” he said.
“What we are seeing is very, very small objects that produce a very, very low radar cross-section,” he added.
Speculation as to what the objects may be has intensified in recent days.
Well, of course, speculation is intensifying! You’re not telling us a damned thing! Paging, Ron Serling!!!
Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon Xbox Live and PSN Cartoon!
Steve Bannon—the nativist American media personality who’s backed by a Chinese billionaire—hasn’t paid the lawyers who spent years defending him against an onslaught of criminal charges, according to three sources who spoke exclusively to The Daily Beast.
I have a mixed bag of reads for you today: some stories about the terrible earthquake in Turkey and Syria, including a long read about the situation in Syria; a long read about the case of a six-year-old in Virginia who shot his teacher; a story about the still-unidentified flying object shot down over Alaska, and some new Trump investigation stories.
ANTAKYA, Turkey (AP) — Rescue crews on Saturday pulled more survivors, including entire families, from toppled buildings despite diminishing hopes as the death toll of the enormous quake that struck a border region of Turkey and Syria five days ago surpassed 25,000.
Dramatic rescues were being broadcast on Turkish television, including the rescue of the Narli family in central Kahramanmaras 133 hours after the 7.8-magnitude temblor struck Monday. First, 12-year-old Nehir Naz Narli was saved, then both of her parents.
That followed the rescue earlier in the day of a family of five from a mound of debris in the hard-hit town of Nurdagi, in Gaziantep province, TV network HaberTurk reported. Rescuers cheered and chanted, “God is Great!” as the last family member, the father, was lifted to safety.
Turkish President Recep Tayypi Erdogan, on a tour of quake-stricken cities, raised the death toll in Turkey to 21,848, which pushed the total number of dead across the region, including government and rebel-held parts of Syria, to 25,401….
Still, the day brought one astonishing rescue after another, numbering more than a dozen.
Melisa Ulku, a woman in her 20s, was extricated from the rubble in Elbistan in the 132th hour since the quake, following the rescue of another person at the same site in the same hour. Ahead of her rescue, police announced that people shouldn’t cheer or clap in order to not interfere with other rescue efforts nearby. She was covered in a thermal blanket on a stretcher. Rescuers were hugging. Some shouted “God is great!”
Just an hour earlier, a 3-year-old girl and her father were pulled from debris in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province, and soon after a 7-year-old girl was rescued in the province of Hatay.
The rescues brought shimmers of joy amid overwhelming devastation days after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake and a powerful aftershock hours later caused thousands of buildings to collapse, killing more than 25,000, injuring another 80,000 and leaving millions homeless.
JINDERIS, Syria — It took four days and nights after the earthquake for the rubble to fall silent here. The strongest voices belonged to the women, residents said. Parted from their children, or fighting to save them, they screamed until their lungs gave out.
In this forgotten pocket of rebel-held northwest Syria, there were no international rescue workers to save them. No aid shipments brought painkillers to the survivors when stocks ran low. Just six miles away, across the border in Turkey, thousands of tons of relief poured in; support teams from as far away as Taiwan answered the Turkish government’s call for help. But Syria, divided against itself and isolated from much of the world, was left to pick up the pieces alone, as it has again and again over more than a decade of war and dislocation.
In the shattered town of Jinderis, at least 850 bodies had been recovered by Friday morning. Although hundreds are still missing, few believed there were any lives left to save. “We needed help here, we asked for help here,” said the town’s mayor, Mahmoud Hafar. “It never came.”
By Sandra Bierman
On Friday, the Bab Al-Salama border crossing into Syria was almost empty. A single ambulance with flashing lights was waiting to enter. The only Syrians crossing back were those being returned to their families in body bags.
On a rare visit to this Syrian enclave, controlled by Turkish-backed armed groups, The Washington Post found communities gripped by shock and bewilderment, and very much alone. In Jinderis, fathers stood watch over the remains of their homes and told of waking up to find their wives and children dead. As hulking excavators clawed the rubble, searching for a 13-year old boy, a man asked reporters to help him contact the United Nations for help. “Maybe they don’t know what happened in Jinderis,” he said. “No one could see this and not come here.”
This part of Syria has endured crisis after crisis, home to millions of people who have braved war and displacement, hunger and disease. Even before the earthquake, 4.1 million here required humanitarian assistance.
Heartbreaking. Read the rest at the WaPo. There are also many photographs the story.
USA TODAY examined earthquake patterns over the past 100 years and how the unfolding tragedy in Turkey and Syria compares. Here is what we found.
See maps and charts at the USA Today link.
The Virginia Six-Year Old Who Shot His Teacher
This is a very interesting investigative piece about the case of a six-year-old boy who shot his first-grade teacher. I can’t do it justice with excerpts, but I’ll give you a taste, and hope you’ll go read the rest.
It was Jan. 4. A 6-year-old in her first-grade class at Richneck Elementary School had stolen her phone and slammed it to the floor, apparently upset over a schedule change, according to text messages Zwerner sent to a friend.
Administrators, she wrote, were faulting her for the situation.
The 6-year-old “took my phone and smashed it on the ground,” Zwerner wrote in a text message obtained by The Washington Post, “and admin is blaming me.”
Two days later, the 6-year-old told classmates at recess he was going to shoot Zwerner, showed them a gun and its clip tucked into his jacket pocket, and threatened to kill them if they told anyone, according to an attorney for the family of a student who witnessed the threat, offering the first account of events leading to the shooting from someone in Zwerner’s class.
That afternoon, the 6-year-old did as he promised, authorities said — firing a bullet through Zwerner’s upraised hand and into her chest as she was midway through teaching a lesson.
Zwerner’s lawyer and other educators at the Newport News, Va., school have alleged the shooting came after school administrators downplayed repeated warnings from Zwerner and other teachers about the boy. The incident sparked a staffing shake-up at Richneck and the ouster of Superintendent George Parker III.
Olesya Serzhantova_(Serjantova)
Administrators had ample warning about the child’s behavior problems.
Teachers’ fears about the 6-year-old date backto his kindergarten year, when he tried to strangle his teacher, according to a letter Zwerner’s attorney sent to the school system Jan. 24 announcing her intent to sue. The letter was first reported by the Daily Press.
“The shooter had been removed from the school a year prior after he chokedhis teacher until she couldn’t breathe,” says the letter, obtained by The Post through a public records request. It was not immediately clear how a boy so young could have choked an adult. The Post was not able to learn other details of the incident and authorities have not released information about the boy.
Early this fall, as Richneck teachers sought to settle their new crop of students inside the low-slung red-brick building nestled amid trees, news of the 6-year-old’s troubled history circulated swiftly among the staff, according to text messages between teachers.
Less than a week into September, officials switched the 6-year-old to a half-day schedule due to misbehavior — but administrators were already lagging in efforts to accommodate the student, according to Toscano’s letter and to text messages sent between Zwerner and a friend of hers who teaches at the school.
It was not clear what specific incident triggered the schedule change.Toscano wrote in her letter that the 6-year-old “constantly cursed at the staff and teachers and then one day took off his belt on the playground and chased kids trying to whip them.”
What was going on in this child’s home life? It certainly seems as if abuse could be a clue to his behavior. And how was he able to get his hands on his mother’s gun, which she claimed was locked in her bedroom closet?
Text messages and a photo shared between teachers show that a student in Zwerner’s class reportedly hit a teacher so hard with a chair that her legs became dotted with green and purple bruises — and that, at another point, a kindergartner was accused of pushing a pregnant teacher to the ground and kicking her in the stomach so hard that she feared for her unborn child, two weeks shy of giving birth. It was not immediately clear how administrators responded to those episodes, although one educator wrote in a text this fall that the bruised teacher had “heard nothing from admin.”
On Nov. 9, the second-grade teacher wrote in a text message to a colleague that she was applying to work in another district because of “how bad the first graders are right now put together with the fact we don’t have doors.”
Yes, you read that right. The classrooms didn’t have doors because the administration said it would cost too much to put them in.
Diane Toscano, Zwerner’s lawyer, has said teachers relayed several warnings to administrators on the morning of the shooting, including at least three reports that the boy had a gun. The Post interviewed a kindergartner who said the boy threatened to punch her at lunch that day and that she informed a staffer — but that the staffer did little more than give the boy a verbal warning.
In the direct aftermath of the shooting, two second-grade classes were left briefly wandering the hallways in search of a safe place to hide because their classroom was not equipped with doors and they had not rehearsed safety drills, according to one second-grade teacher, one fifth-grade teacher and a parent of a second-grade student, as well as text messages obtained by The Post. A second-grade teacher told The Post she had asked to have doors installed but administrators refused, saying the doors would be too expensive.
As someone who attended elementary school in the 1950s, I can’t begin to comprehend what is happening these days. Not only do we have teenagers and adults committing school shootings; there are also 6-10 year-old kid bringing guns to school and even killing other kids. I hope you’ll read this story; it’s both frightening and fascinating.
The Pentagon said it shot down an unidentified object over frozen waters around Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden, less than a week after a U.S. fighter jet brought down a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic in an episode that increased tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Unknown artist
U.S. officials said they could not immediately confirm whether the object was a balloon, but it was traveling at an altitude that made it a potential threat to civilian aircraft.
At a news conference on Friday, John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Biden ordered the unidentified object near Alaska downed “out of an abundance of caution.” [….]
Pentagon officials said they were able to immediately bring down the object over water, so they could easily avoid the dilemma posed by the spy balloon drifting over populated areas, which had prompted commanders to recommend to Mr. Biden to wait to shoot down the machine in order to avoid any chance of debris hitting people on the ground.
Three U.S. officials said that as of Friday evening, the government did not know who owned or sent the object seen above Alaska, which, like the Chinese balloon last week, was shot down by an F-22 fighter jet using a Sidewinder air-to-air missile.
Several officials said they believed the object shot down Friday was a balloon, but a Defense Department official said it broke into pieces when it hit the frozen sea, which added to the mystery of whether it was indeed a balloon, a drone or something else.
Mr. Kirby said that the object was “much, much smaller than the spy balloon that we took down last Saturday” and that “the way it was described to me was roughly the size of a small car, as opposed to the payload that was like two or three buses.”
So we still don’t know what this object was. Maybe we’ll find out today.
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team turned over more materials with classified markings and a laptop belonging to an aide to federal prosecutors in recent months, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.
The Trump attorneys also handed over an empty folder marked “Classified Evening Briefing,” sources said.
The previously undisclosed handovers – from December and January – suggest the protracted effort by the Justice Department to repossess records from Trump’s presidency may not be done.
The Trump attorneys discovered pages with classified markingsin December, while searching through boxes at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence. The lawyers subsequently handed the materials over to the Justice Department.
A Trump aide had previously copied those same pages onto a thumb drive and laptop, not realizing they were classified, sources said. The laptop, which belonged to an aide, who works for Save America PAC, and the thumb drive were also given to investigators in January.
By Ophelia Redpath
Excuse me, how do we know that Trump didn’t order the aide to copy the documents? And how do we know there aren’t other electronic copies out there? I just can’t believe that Trump never shared any of those stolen documents.
The FBI confirmed it found an additional classified document during a search Friday at the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence.
The search for classified documents as well as materials that aren’t classified but are subject to the Presidential Records Act lasted about five hours. Agents removed one document with classified markings plus six additional pages without classification markings.
The consensual search follows a discovery, relayed by Pence’s representatives to the National Archives and Records Administration last month, that documents bearing classified markings had been, they said, “inadvertently” boxed up and found in the former vice president’s home in Indiana.
A lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump appeared before a federal grand jury investigating his handling of sensitive government documents that he took to his Mar-a-Lago club and residence after he left office, two people briefed on the matter said on Friday.
The lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, a member of Mr. Trump’s legal team who handled his responses to the government over its repeated requests for the return of such records, could offer firsthand knowledge of the search the F.B.I. undertook in August and any insights into whether Mr. Trump knew that documents remained at the club.
Mr. Corcoran did not respond to a request for comment. And it was not immediately clear when and under what circumstances he appeared. His appearance was reported earlier by Bloomberg News.
Mr. Corcoran has raised eyebrows within the Justice Department for his statements to federal officials assuring them that Mr. Trump had returned all classified materials in his possession.
As part of Mr. Trump’s legal team, Mr. Corcoran was in discussions with the Justice Department in January 2022, after the National Archives and Records Administration recovered 15 boxes of presidential material from Mar-a-Lago containing nearly 200 individual classified documents.
In May 2022, Mr. Corcoran was in touch with the department after a grand jury subpoena was issued for any remaining classified material that Mr. Trump retained. He was also on hand the next month when the top Justice Department counterintelligence official visited Mar-a-Lago and collected more than 30 additional classified documents.
At the time, another lawyer working for Mr. Trump, Christina Bobb, signed a statement attesting that a “diligent search” for all remaining classified documents had been conducted and that what was turned over was all that remained. The attestation was drafted by Mr. Corcoran, but Ms. Bobb added language to it to make it less ironclad before signing it, according to people familiar with what took place.
Former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman explained to MSNBC’s Joy Reid the significance of former Vice President Mike Pence’s cooperation with the Justice Department, as it subpoenas him for information in the January 6 investigation.
Above all, Akerman said, we are approaching the unprecedented possibility that a former vice president may have to testify at the criminal trial of his former president.
“If you had [Pence], you know, as you said, for hours and hours, and hours, what would you want to ask him?” asked Reid. “Myself personally, I would also want to know what the Secret Service agents were saying, did you trust them? Because this could be about Donald Trump, but it could also be about some of them. What would you want to know?”
“Yeah, I think we want to know exactly what his suspicion was based on,” said Akerman. “I mean, why did he think they were trying to whisk him out of the Capitol so quickly? Was it one of the people that was close to Donald Trump that was in charge of doing that? Did somebody say something to him? I mean, I’m sure he knew that part of this whole plot was to stop that vote, stop the Congress from considering the electoral count. And that one way to do it was to get him off premises, get him out of the Capitol. So I think, you know, he probably did have other conversations with people.”
“I mean, don’t forget, once Mike Pence told him there’s no way no how I’m gonna do this, Donald Trump knew that the only way he was going to stop this whole count was through the violence, through the disruption in the chaos that ensued at the Capitol and that one of the ways to do it of course was to get Mike Pence out of the Capitol as a result of all this violence and used the Secret Service as a foil and an excuse to do that,” continued Akerman.
I hope you find something here that interests you. What other stories have you been following?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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