I woke up this morning hoping to find that Elon Musk had kept his word and stepped down as CEO of Twitter after a clear majority of Twitter users voted him out in a poll he posted. It hasn’t happened yet. From CNN:
A Twitter poll created by Elon Musk asking whether he should “step down as head of Twitter” ended early Monday morning with most respondents voting in the affirmative.
Musk had said he would abide by the results of the unscientific poll, which began Sunday evening and concluded with 57.5% voting yes, 42.5% voting no.
More than 17 million votes were cast in the informal referendum on his chaotic leadership of Twitter, which has been marked by mass layoffs, the replatforming of suspended accounts that had violated Twitter’s rules, the suspension of journalists who cover him and whiplash policy changes made and reversed in real time.
Elon Musk has said Twitter will only allow accounts with a blue tick to vote on changes to policy after a majority of users voted for him to quit.
Mr Musk launched a Twitter poll asking if he should step down as chief executive – 57.5% of users voted “yes”.
Since then, he has not commented directly on the result of the poll.
But he has said that Twitter will alter its rules so that only people who pay for a subscription can vote on company policy.
One user claimed that so-called bots appeared to have voted heavily in the poll about Mr Musk’s role at the firm. Mr Musk said he found the claim “interesting”….
In response to a tweet saying Twitter Blue subscribers “should be the only ones that can vote in policy related polls. We actually have skin in the game”, Mr Musk said: “Good point, Twitter will make that change”.
Twitter’s paid-for verification feature was rolled out for a second time last week after its launch was paused. The service costs $8 per month, or $11 for people using the Twitter app on Apple devices, and gives subscribers a “blue tick”.
Previously a blue tick was used as verification tool for high-profile accounts as a badge of authenticity and was free.
I honestly doubt if he’ll do that, because then he would reveal how few people are willing to pay him.
Elon Musk is actively looking for someone to replace him as CEO of Twitter, CNBC reports.
Detail from Garden of Emoji Delights, by Carla Gannis
The news comes after Musk posted a Twitter poll Sunday asking if he should step down as the head of the company. On Monday, when the poll closed, the majority of the 17.5 million votes cast said he should go. The tech boss had promised to “abide by the results” at the time he posted the yes-or-no poll, but he has yet to formally declare his intention to leave.
After buying the social media site for $44 billion in October, Musk said in court last month that he would only be Twitter’s CEO on a temporary basis. “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time,” he said.
According to the unnamed sources cited in CNBC’s story about his search for a successor, Musk was allegedly looking for a new Twitter CEO before posting his poll over the weekend. The search is said to be ongoing.
But by his own account, the search to find someone to run the social media giant is challenging. “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive,” Musk tweeted on Sunday. “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” he wrote a day later.
The final meeting of the House Select Committee investigating January 6 didn’t offer any big surprises, but they did announce four criminal referrals on Trump to the DOJ. Of course the referrals are essentially meaningless, but the Committee also will transmit the evidence they have gathered in support of the referrals.
The historic criminal referral the House Jan. 6 committee issued urging the Justice Department to pursue charges against President Donald Trump is unlikely to sway many minds among prosecutors already pursuing multiple investigations, former DOJ officials said.
Prosecutors are more interested in the thousands of pages of witness statements and other records gathered by the House panel over the past 15 months, current and former officials said.
“I’m sure the Attorney General will welcome any new evidence the committee sends over, but the authority to indict rests with the executive branch, not Congress,” said University of Baltimore Law School Dean Ronald Weich, a former DOJ liaison to Congress. “The decision of whether to bring criminal charges is solely within the purview of the Justice Department. I expect DOJ to respond courteously to the committee, but the referral will not change the outcome.”
By Mark Bryan
“I think a referral will have zero practical effect on what DOJ does,” said Randall Eliason, a former federal public corruption prosecutor in Washington. “They are already investigating, and they’re not going to decide whether or not to charge based on whether they got a referral from Congress.”
Just last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland emphasized prosecutors wanted to see the House’s evidence, but he notably omitted any desire to see what conclusions lawmakers reached about what that evidence proved.
“We would like to have all the transcripts and all of the other evidence collected … by the committee, so that we can use it in the ordinary course of our investigations,” Garland told reporters gathered in his conference room at DOJ headquarters.
In some ways, the House’s new criminal referral could have less impact than others Congress has sent to the Justice Department in the past. That’s because while some referrals spur DOJ into action, prosecutors already have investigations open into the main areas where the Jan. 6 committee sees potential crimes: Trump’s alleged incitement of the attack on the Capitol and his prolonged effort to undermine the 2020 presidential election results.
The committee is sitting on a stockpile of nearly 1,200 witness interview transcripts and reams of hard-won documents about Donald Trump’s attempt to derail the peaceful transfer of power. While the select panel’s nine members gathered on Monday to refer evidence of Trump’s potential crimes to the Justice Department, that raw information — not the showmanship of a final in-person public meeting — will tell the story the committee has labored to piece together.
The 160-page executive summary, which precedes a final panel report set for release as soon as Wednesday, hints at the extraordinary range of documents the committee collected. It references at least 30 “productions” of documents from various witnesses and agencies, including White House visitor logs, Secret Service radio frequencies and the Department of Labor, where then-Secretary Eugene Scalia produced a Jan. 8, 2021, memo seeking to call a Cabinet meeting to discuss the transfer of power.
“The select committee intends to make public the bulk of its nonsensitive records before the end of the year,” the panel’s chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), said Monday. Thompson has stressed that the taxpayer-funded investigation’s materials should be made available to the public: “These transcripts and documents will allow the American people to see the evidence we have gathered and continue to explore the information that has led us to our conclusions.” [….]
Yet crucial questions remain about which evidence the panel will treat as off-limits to the public — including whether it will post hundreds of hours of video interviews alongside its transcripts. Thompson has also emphasized that transcripts will be redacted to exclude private information and law enforcement or national security-related details. And some witnesses who requested anonymity would receive it, Thompson has said.
Call records, with the exception of ones that the committee has found relevant to the probe, would likely remain secret as well, according to the chair.
Hellscape 2020, Walter Simon
The report should still be a BFD:
Even so, the panel’s introductory materials gave tantalizing clues about what’s to come. The committee’s executive summary referenced just over 80 of the panel’s interviews and documents collected from 34 agencies or witnesses; among them, Christoffer Guldbrandsen, a documentarian who captured footage of Trump ally Roger Stone, and Bernard Kerik, who advised Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in his bid to collect evidence to challenge the 2020 results.
The summary also reflects voluminous contacts among key players in Trump’s alleged plot that were not previously known but could be of interest to federal prosecutors. For example, the document describes numerous contacts that then-DOJ officials Jeffrey Clark and Ken Klukowski had with Trump campaign attorney John Eastman in the closing days of 2020 and into early 2021.
In addition, the summary casts doubt on the testimony of some select panel witnesses — like former Secret Service and Trump White House aide Tony Ornato and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who the committee said were not as forthcoming as others who spoke to it.
During her testimony, McEnany had disputed the allegation that Trump was resistant to calling off the mob, but the summary noted that her former deputy Sarah Matthews had told the panel otherwise. Ornato, who played a potentially key role as a witness to an alleged altercation between Trump and his security detail on Jan. 6, drew similar scrutiny after telling the committee he could not recall relaying the account of the altercation despite others’ testimony to the contrary.
“The Committee is skeptical of Ornato’s account,” the panel added in a footnote.
Read the rest at Politico.
Whether or not to indict Trump will be up to Special Prosecutor Jack Smith.
Witnesses had lost hope and disappeared. Criminal suspect No. 1 had become president. And the long-awaited indictment now seemed unreachable.
Then, American prosecutor Jack Smith came along and took charge, sending his investigators on an aggressive mission to win back reluctant witnesses—by targeting the tight-lipped politicians and militant nationalists who had kept them silent.
The story may sound familiar, if not a bit like resistance fan-fiction. But this story is actually about Smith’s efforts in Kosovo, a small country in southeastern Europe that was historically an Albanian enclave in Serbia. It was difficult every step of the way. Smith had to defend his work from widespread accusations that he was conducting an unfair political prosecution to remove the nation’s favorite leader. And the narrative was that cooperators are traitors—and that these lawyers like Smith were trying to destroy the country.
It may prove to be an invaluable experience.
The Nightmare, Mark Bryan
Since the U.S. Department of Justice appointed Smith as the trusted special counsel investigating former President Donald Trump last month, there have been dozens of news profiles focusing on his time as a domestic prosecutor investigating public corruption. Several have even incorrectly identified the international court he served on. But this is the first sweeping look at what exactly he accomplished while on a special assignment abroad in Europe, where he took down Kosovo’s sitting president—and gained the credentials to target an American one.
Kosovo investigation until Smith took over. “It has huge political consequences. It takes bravery. Jack’s got to decide whether he’s going to indict a former president of the United States. But he did the same thing when it came to Hashim Thaçi.”
Kosovo’s now ex-president remains trapped inside a jail in the Dutch city of The Hague. Understanding how he got there helps contextualize Smith’s legacy at the controversial international prosecutor’s office he led until last month—and his ability to face Trump now.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
Today, the House Ways and Means Committee will consider whether to release Trump’s tax returns to the public.
The House Ways and Means Committee will meet Tuesday to discuss former President Donald Trump’s tax returns and weigh whether to release the information to the public, the end to a years-long effort from Democrats to learn more about Trump’s financial background.
The highly anticipated meeting is years in the making but comes as Democrats have just days to act on whether to release the former president’s tax returns. While there is historic precedent for Ways and Means to release confidential tax information, a decision to put it out to the public would come with intense political fallout as Trump has already declared he is running for president in 2024.
The committee has had access to Trump’s taxes for weeks after winning a lengthy legal battle that began in the spring of 2019. House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal requested the first six years of Trump’s taxes as well as tax returns for eight of his businesses back in April of 2019.
Mayday, Lena Rushing
Neal and his ranking member Kevin Brady have had access to the information, and rank-and-file members on the committee will have begun to have access and review at least some of Trump’s tax information, according to a source familiar.
It’s not clear if members would have access to all of the information.
Republicans on the committee are preparing to push back hard if Democrats vote to release any of Trump’s tax information, committee sources tell CNN. The argument Republicans will wage, however, won’t center on defending Trump explicitly but rather what the release means for politicians and ordinary people in the future.
Democrats on the committee would rely on section 6103 of the tax code to lawfully release information about Trump’s taxes, but Republicans are prepared to argue that Democrats are abusing the provision, attacking a political enemy and potentially unleashing a system where even individuals could have their personal information exposed if they become targets of the committee.
I’m searching for some reads outside the realm of the current attention hogs. Let’s see what I can come up with!
The first one was shared by a friend that hit home with me. This is from the Washington Post. It’s a project I’ve been trying to do for a while, but I start and stop a lot. “We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking. ‘They’re more like friends than objects,’ one passionate bookseller says. What are we to do with our flooded shelves?”
Humorist and social critic Fran Lebowitz owns 12,000 books, mostly fiction, kept in 19th-century wooden cases with glass doorsin her New York apartment. “Constitutionally, I am unable to throw a book away. To me, it’s like seeing a baby thrown in a trash can,” she says. “I am a glutton for print. I love books in every way. I love them more than most human beings.” If there’s a book she doesn’t want, Lebowitz, 72, will spend months deciding whom to give it to.
“I kept accumulating books. My life was overflowing with books. I’d have to live to 150 to reread these books,” says Martha Frankel, a writer and director of the Woodstock Bookfest. She amassed 3,600 — and that was just in the office that she closed in 2018 — “but the idea of getting rid of these books made me nauseous.”
America is saturated with old books, congesting Ikea Billy cases, Jengaing atop floors, Babeling bedside tables. During months of quarantine, book lovers faced all those spines and opportunities for multiple seasons of spring cleaning. They adore these books, irrationally, unconditionally, but know that, ultimately, if they don’t decide which to keep, it will be left to others to unceremoniously dump them.
So, despite denial, grief, bargaining, anguish and even nausea, the Great Deaccession commenced.
When Dr. Daughter entered Kindergarten, she came home crying about an assignment. When asked what the assignment was, I realized the gargantuan task in front of her. Her father and I were massive book collectors. We had bookcases filled with books in just about every room of our 4 bedroom, a two-story house with a mostly finished basement. I calmed her down saying that I’d write a note explaining that there were literally hundreds of books all over the house and that she should focus on counting the books in her room. She already had plenty. Assignment completed! End of tears!
I had been thinking about all of this when I contemplated the recent portrait ceremony of Judge Robert L. Wilkins. Wilkins was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2014, where he sat alongside then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. On Oct. 14, his official portrait was hung at the court, in a ceremony typically representing one of the highlights of a judge’s tenure on the bench.
What struck me most about Wilkins’ speech was that he used it to detail a sometimes submerged narrative about the complicated meaning of freedom: He told the story of his own family’s long journey through U.S. constitutional history, a very different encounter with the Framers’ ideas about freedom and justice.
Excerpts from his remarks at that event are reprinted, with Wilkins’ permission, below.
My maternal grandmother, Marcella Hayes, was with us during my investiture to become a District Court Judge. She has now gone on to glory. She was a documenter of our family history, and I inherited that habit from her. Inspired by my Grannyma, I have traced the maternal side of my family back six generations, to my great-great-great-great grandmother, Edie Saulsbury. Edie was born sometime around 1810, when James Madison, considered by many the father of our Constitution, was President of these United States. She was born into slavery, and thus was not even considered a “person” within the meaning of Madison’s Constitution. She was impregnated by a white man at the tender age of 16, where the legal system did not even define the rape of a Black woman by a white man as a crime, did not allow a Black person to testify in court against the white person anyway, and made it a crime punishable by 30 lashes on the bare back for a Black person to raise a hand against a white person, even to defend oneself from being ravished. Edie gave birth to that child, a boy named Alexander, who would endure a life of slavery. She would later give birth to 12 more children, conceived with my fourth great grandfather, a man named David, who was enslaved and belonged to a neighboring family.
My father, John Wilkins, passed away almost 40 years ago. But he is here through me and my brother Larry, and through my many cousins and other relatives on the Wilkins side here today. I have also been able to trace my paternal side back six generations. My paternal grandfather’s name was Rev. George R. Wilkins. His maternal grandfather, my great-great grandfather, was named George Richardson. George Richardson was born in 1848, and, when asked, during the 1900 census, he reported to the census taker that he was born in South Carolina, his mother was born in South Carolina, but that his father was born “at sea.” Think about that: The most plausible explanation for this series of events is that George Richardson’s father, my great- great-great grandfather, was born aboard a slave ship. That would also mean that—six generations back—my fourth great grandmother delivered my third great grandfather in the filthy bowels of a slave vessel. I have not yet been able to determine my fourth great grandmother‘s name, but for the moment, let’s call her Nancy. George Richardson named one of his daughters Nancy, so perhaps he did so in honor of his grandma.
Consider for a moment the circumstances under which those two of my fourth-great grandmothers, Edie and Nancy, lived and brought children into this world. Circumstances of kidnapping, coercion, abuse and despair. And all that vile treatment was absolutely legal. All of it was condoned and facilitated by Madison’s Constitution.
I recommend reading all of it.
Politico has this lede today. “‘THE central issue’: How the fall of Roe v. Wade shook the 2022 election. More than 50 Democratic and Republican elected officials, campaign aides and consultants took POLITICO inside the first campaign after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.” Authors Elena Schneider and Holly Otterbein argue that it’s the decision that handed so many elections to the Democratic Party and defied the historical trend of the out party sweeping elections on the off presidentional year.
On May 4, less than 48 hours after a draft opinion was published showing the Supreme Court was poised to end the federal right to abortion, a group of eight strangers gathered around a conference table in the Detroit suburbs to talk about the news.
They were all white women, mostly in their 30s to 50s and without college degrees. Their home county, Macomb, had voted for President Barack Obama twice and President Donald Trump twice. In the upcoming gubernatorial race, they were undecided, frustrated by how Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer had handled the pandemic.
But when it came to the possibility of abortion being illegal, there was no equivocation: The women were stunned — and enraged.
It was the kind of conversation women everywhere were having with their mothers, sisters, daughters and friends. But behind a glass window in that conference room and tuning in over Zoom, a half-dozen consultants and staffers from Whitmer’s reelection campaign and the pro-abortion rights group EMILY’s List listened to likely the first Democratic focus group conducted in the wake of the report.
The moderator peppered the women with questions about the draft opinion and the possibility it would trigger a 1931 law outlawing nearly all abortions in Michigan. Then she turned to a recent comment from a Republican candidate that the Whitmer team had considered relatively tame, compared to other GOP reactions. Businessman Kevin Rinke had said that when it came to pregnancy, “There are choices that go into our lives, and there’s cause and effect, so people maybe need to consider their choices.”
The remark “elicited a lot of, ‘Fuck this guy and fuck all the guys out there who think they know better than women,’” said Molly Murphy, the Democratic pollster who moderated the discussion in early May. “This was not just about rape and incest and ‘no exceptions,’ which is obviously all very important, but it said so much more about control, about politicians who think they know better than these women — it added a layer to this that none of us were expecting.”
One Republican Congressman elected to the House for the first time from New York State seems to have completely fabricated his work,education, and life history. This is from the New York Times. “Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction. Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But he seems to have misrepresented a number of his career highlights.
George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.
His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.
But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
He also has a record of check fraud dating back to his days in Brazil. If you read their investigation, you’ll see that he’s a cipher. Nothing he told the public is true. This is a fascinating mystery.
At the same time, new revelations uncovered by The Times — including the omission of key information on Mr. Santos’s personal financial disclosures, and criminal charges for check fraud in Brazil — have the potential to create ethical and possibly legal challenges once he takes office.
Mr. Santos did not respond to repeated requests from The Times that he furnish either documents or a résumé with dates that would help to substantiate the claims he made on the campaign trail. He also declined to be interviewed, and neither his lawyer nor Big Dog Strategies, a Republican-oriented political consulting group that handles crisis management, responded to a detailed list of questions.
NBC News reports that the Jan. 6 committee is finalizing its report.
The House Jan. 6 committee met Sunday to finalize its plans to issue at least three criminal referrals for former President Donald Trump, NBC News has learned exclusively.
The committee, gathering publicly Monday, is expected to vote on referrals asking the Justice Department to pursue at least three criminal charges against Trump related to the Capitol riot: obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the government and inciting or assisting an insurrection.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in part during the meeting overheard by NBC News that he believed referrals were “warranted.” A source familiar with the committee’s plans told NBC News about the meeting and its location in the Capitol complex.
The Jan. 6th committee will broadcast its final public meeting live today at noon est. This reporting is from CNN where you can get live updates once the meeting starts.
The committee will release an executive summary of the investigation’s report on Monday after the meeting, a committee aide said Sunday. The final report, to be released two days later, will provide justification from the panel’s investigation for recommending the charges.
Why now? Republicans are expected to dissolve the panel when they take over the House in January.
So, I did end on some Trumpy news but it didn’t involve much Trumpyisms so I hope that’s okay.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Late last night, after receiving widespread condemnation from the likes of the EU and the UN, Elon Musk restored the Twitter accounts of some of the journalists he had impulsively suspended on Thursday. Supposedly he did this based on an unscientific poll of Twitter users.
U.S. and international officials condemned Twitter and Elon Musk on Friday after the social media company abruptly suspended several U.S. journalists, expressing concern about retaliation and the potentially chilling effect on free speech.
The moves invited sharp rebuke from public officials at the European Commission and the United Nations, as well as criticism from a U.S. senator. Even some of Musk’s own supporters, who advocate a broad interpretation of free speech, appeared taken aback by the about turn….
Accounts that were suspended include @ElonJet, which tracks the location of Musk’s private plane through the use of publicly available data, as well as other accounts that track helicopter and plane locations. Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists on Thursday night, including from The Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN.
Musk later accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family — although he provided no evidence that any of the journalists had done so.
Also on Friday, the account of Linette Lopez, a journalist who has written critically of Musk and Tesla, also appeared to be suspended. It was not immediately clear what had prompted the suspension….
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) tweeted in defense of the reporters Friday, saying Musk’s actions “are a fast track to Twitter becoming obsolete.”
European Commission Vice President Vera Jourová, whose brief includes the rule of law and disinformation, tweeted that the “arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying.”
“EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct,” she wrote. “@elonmusk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.”
Elon Musk has reinstated the accounts of the journalists he had suspended after claiming they had shared details about the location of his private jet.
The Twitter CEO launched a poll on the social media site on Thursday asking if the accounts of the journalists should be reinstated “now,” or in “7 days from now.”
In the early hours of Saturday morning he tweeted, “The people have spoken. Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now.”
More than 58 percent of the 3.8 million respondents voted for “now” in the poll….
Journalists including Insider columnist Linette Lopez, Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steven Herman of VOA, as well as Aaron Rupar, Tony Webster, and Keith Olbermann, all found their Twitter accounts suspended with no warning….
While the accounts of Harwell, O’Sullivan, Binder, Lee, Herman, Rupar, Webster, and Mac were all reinstated, those of Olbermann and Lopez still appeared to be suspended as of Saturday morning.
The ElonJet account that has been dedicated to tweeting the location of Musk’s private jet also remained suspended….
Twitter also targeted rival, Mastodon, by blocking users from adding their Mastodon username to their Twitter profile.
There’s quite a bit of news about January 6 investigations. First, the House select committee will be wrapping up its work next week.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol plans on Monday to vote on issuing criminal referrals against former President Donald J. Trump for insurrection and at least two other charges, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it.
It had been widely expected the panel would recommend charges against Mr. Trump for obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The panel’s members had already argued in federal court that they believed it was likely that he committed those two felonies. But the addition of an accusation of insurrection was a new development.
The House impeached Mr. Trump last year for incitement of insurrection, and the members of the panel have long argued Mr. Trump was the central figure who fomented an insurrection against the United States as he sought to cling to power. Politico earlier reported that a charge of insurrection would be considered.
By Vicky Mount
Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 committee tasked with studying possible criminal referrals, was the lead impeachment manager against Mr. Trump on the count of incitement of insurrection.
Referrals against Mr. Trump, which the committee is slated to approve as part of its report, would not carry any legal weight or compel the Justice Department to take any action, but they would send a powerful signal that a congressional committee believes the former president committed certain crimes….
The committee also was set to consider whether to issue criminal and civil referrals for some of Mr. Trump’s top allies during a meeting scheduled for Monday as it prepares to release a voluminous report laying out its findings about the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Members also were expected to discuss the forthcoming report and recommendations for legislative changes.
A federal judge revealed Friday that earlier this year she granted Justice Department investigators access to emails between three Trump-connected attorneys and Rep. Scott Perry as part of the federal investigation into election subversion efforts by the former president and others.
At the request of DOJ, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell unsealed a June opinion in which she determined that 37 emails sent among Trump-era Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, his aide Ken Klukowski and conservative attorney John Eastman and Perry (R-Pa.) — another top Donald Trump ally who chairs the House Freedom Caucus — were not protected by attorney-client privilege.
Notably, Howell indicated in her opinion that investigators had prioritized accessing any emails sent to or from Perry’s account.
Howell also unsealed a second opinion, issued in September, in which she determined that 331 documents from Clark — whom Trump nearly installed as acting attorney general as part of his bid to seize a second term — were similarly not protected by attorney-client privilege.
The documents were largely versions of a potential autobiography Clark had outlined in mid-October 2021, writing that recounted a bizarre effort to have Trump install him as acting attorney general in order to get more traction to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. The outline included a description of a pivotal Jan. 3, 2021, meeting between Trump and senior DOJ officials where almost the entire top echelon of the department threatened to resign if the then-president put Clark in charge.
Clark’s legal team waded into the fight over the apparent book outline. But Howell seemed to disapprove of aspects of the approach Clark’s lawyers took to the document dispute, describing their strategy at one point as “throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.”
The information revealed in the opinions is the most significant insight yet into what prosecutors are doing with evidence they have obtained in their review of figures associated with Trump’s quest to remain in power despite losing reelection.
The House Ways and Means Committee is considering publicly releasing Trump’s tax returns next week.
The House Ways and Means Committee scheduled a closed-door meeting for Tuesday at which lawmakers are likely to review former President Donald Trump’s tax returns and may vote to release some of them.
The meeting notice sent to lawmakers Friday doesn’t specify what action the committee might take or which documents, reports or analysis, if any, it might make public. The panel has focused its efforts and its legal case on potential changes to the Internal Revenue Service program for annual audits of presidents, which is an agency policy not required by law.
Under the tax code, the Ways and Means Committee chairman—currently Rep. Richard Neal (D., Mass.)—has the authority to request anyone’s tax returns and records from the IRS. He can then review them, and so can agents he designates. The committee can consider them in a closed-door meeting and then vote to make those normally confidential records public as part of a report to the House.
Under the tax code, the committee has the authority, at its own discretion, to include otherwise confidential tax-return information in reports to the House, which are made public.
“God willing this is the final chapter in this saga,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D., N.J.), a senior Ways and Means member who has been a persistent advocate for obtaining the returns.
Read more at the WSJ. I didn’t encounter a paywall when I clicked a link at Memeorandum.
A man already being investigated for his role in the January 6 riots has been hit with additional charges after being accused of planning to kill the law enforcement officers who investigated his case, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday.
Tennessee resident Edward Kelley, 33, allegedly obtained a list of law enforcement officials and discussed plans, starting December 3, to kill these officials with Austin Carter, 26, and a witness who eventually reported their activities to authorities, the complaint says.
Kelley, who was one of the first people to enter the Capitol grounds on January 6, was previously charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, civil disorder, destruction of government property, and seven other charges for his role in the Capitol riot.
According to the complaint, a witness who was interviewed by the FBI said Kelley handed Carter an envelope with a document of the names, titles, and phone numbers of approximately 37 law enforcement officials who investigated him and were “present at arrest or home search” of Kelley on May 5, 2022.
The witness then met with Kelley and Carter on December 3 at a park in Maryville, Tennessee, where Kelley discussed plans with both Carter and the witness.
The witness said Kelley stated “with us being such a small group, we will mainly conduct recon missions and assassination missions,” with one of these missions being an attack on Federal agents. KellLaey also asked whether or not the witness owned firearms and said “we will do more long-distance things,” which the witness believed to be a reference to assassinations.
A new office at the Pentagon is scrutinizing hundreds of reports of unidentified objects in air, sea, space and beyond, senior U.S. defense officials said Friday, and while it has discovered no signs of alien life, the search is set to expand.
The issue has taken on increasing seriousness as a bipartisan group of lawmakers presses the Defense Department to investigate instances of unidentified phenomena and disclose publicly what they learn. Established in July, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is evaluating recent reports and soon could evaluate accounts that date back decades, officials said.
Black cat in snow, by Vicky Mount
The Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Ronald Moultrie, told reporters during a news conference, the first to discuss the office and its ongoing work, that “At this time … we have nothing” to affirm the existence of space aliens.
The proliferation of drones, including those operated by foreign adversaries and amateur hobbyists, account for many of the reports, officials said.
“Some of these things almost collide with planes,” said Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the new office, who spoke to the media alongside Moultrie on Friday. “We see that on a regular basis.”
The U.S. government employs sophisticated sensors around the globe to collect data, and the office analyzes it for relevant information, they said, declining to elaborate.
While most of the reports the Pentagon investigates are about aerial objects, defense officials are increasingly concerned about unusual activity below the surface of the ocean, in space and on land. For that reason, the Pentagon now uses the term unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, rather than previous descriptions such as “unidentified flying object.”
Moultrie said that, “Unidentified phenomena in all domains …pose potential threats to personal security and operational security, and they deserve our urgent attention.”
Unidentified “trans-medium” objects, he said, is a class of phenomena that would jump between domains, like from the air to the sea. None has been documented yet, Moultrie noted.
What else is happening? What stories are you following today?
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Le Désespéré , The Desperate Man, self portrait, 1843-184, Gustave Courbet
Good Day Sky Dancers!
This is one of those days that makes me want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head. Just about every headline is about some narcissist that should be in a padded cell somewhere. I will go down that road, but I am not about to obsess about the details or the people. I’m really sick of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Elon Musk is maniacally destroying himself, Tesla, and Twitter. He’s holed up in the Twitter building 24-7, drawing attention to himself, banning anyone that bothers him, and selling off Tesla stock to keep the lights on in his hidey-hole even if Tesla crashes and burns. Trump is holed up in Mar-a-Lago 24-7, drawing attention to himself, using his Truth Social to draw attention to himself, and watching the Trump Family Crime Syndicate crash and burn.
Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.
The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.
The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.
Many of the journalists suspended Thursday, including Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, had been covering that rule change, as well as Musk’s claims that he and his family had been endangered by location sharing.
Twitter did not directly respond to questions about the suspensions. But Musk suggested on Twitter, without evidence, that the journalists had revealed private information about his family, known as doxing. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” he tweeted late Thursday.
“Harwell was banished from Twitter without warning, process or explanation, following the publications of his accurate reporting about Musk,” The Post’s executive editor Sally Buzbee said in a statement. “Our journalist should be reinstated immediately.”
At least eight other journalists were suspended the same evening, including New York Times technology reporter Ryan Mac.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Skull People, c 1827
CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan was suspended shortly after posting a tweet about Musk’s claim that a “crazy stalker” had chased his young son in Los Angeles, according to screenshots.
O’Sullivan said Thursday that all those journalists who were suspended with him were people who cover Musk.
“As we saw with the jet tracker last night, Musk seems to be just stamping out accounts that he doesn’t like,” O’Sullivan said on CNN.
A spokesperson for the network said the suspensions were “impulsive and unjustified” — but not surprising.
“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses Twitter,” the network said in a statement. “We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”
Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of The Washington Post, said Harwell’s suspension “directly undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.”
Harwell was “banished from Twitter without warning, process or explanation, following the publication of his accurate reporting about Musk” and should be reinstated immediately, Buzbee said in a statement Thursday night.
A spokesperson for The New York Times, who called the suspensions questionable and unfortunate, said no explanation was provided to Mac or the newspaper about the ban.
Director of research for VerityData, Ben Silverman, wrote in an email to CNBC on Wednesday, “Musk’s prior sales going back to November 2021 were expertly timed, so Tesla shareholders need to pay attention to Musk’s actions and not his words – or lack thereof when it comes to his recent selling.”
However, he continued to sell portions of his sizable holdings in Tesla after agreeing to buy Twitter in a deal worth $44 billion. The acquisition closed in late October. Musk, who is also CEO of SpaceX, a major defense contractor, immediately appointed himself chief executive of the social media company.
After Musk’s Twitter takeover, he told employees there that he sold Tesla shares to “save” their business.
Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tesla shares have been declining this year, and sliding even further since he took on that new responsibility.
Shares of Tesla closed down 2.6% on Wednesday at $156.80, dropping the company’s market capitalization to $495 billion. Tesla shares were down 55% year to date as of Wednesday’s close.
Now, some Tesla investors are calling for Musk to hand over the reins at one of his companies as the electric vehicle company’s stock plummets — raising concerns that the billionaire is stretched too thin. Tesla closed Wednesday at $156.80 per share, with an overall valuation of less than $500 billion, sharply down from when Musk signaled his interest in Twitter over the spring and Tesla was valued at over $1 trillion.
Contributing to the losses, Musk sold about $3.5 billion worth of Tesla stock in recent days, according to a financial filing Wednesday night. That added to another more than $3.9 billion in Tesla shares sold by Musk in early November, according to the filings.
Shares of Tesla rose less than 1 percent during trading Thursday as the broader markets fell.
“Wake up tesla [board] — what is the plan? Who is running tesla and when is Elon coming back?” tweeted Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor who supported Musk’s Twitter bid.
He added in a tweet late Wednesday that Tesla needed to buy back shares “to take advantage [of] the low share price Elon has created,” as investors anticipated a potential further blow to the company’s value on Thursday.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment. Tesla and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.
It appears Musk can shut up when it’s an inconvenient question.
Funny, yes. But it is far, far worse than you think. And to understand why, we have to begin tracing the web of corporations involved in producing these worthless digital cards. They lead to some sleazy places.
Before we start down the rabbit hole of partnerships, corporations and other entities that lead to criminals and fraudsters, I need to address one question up front: What exactly are buyers of the Trump Trading Cards purchasing? Yes, they are NFTs, but unlike others of these digital art pieces, the people foolish enough to purchase a Trump Trading Card don’t actually own the things they paid for, at least not in the traditional sense. If any buyer decides to sell their Trump card in a secondary market, they don’t get all the proceeds. The fine print reveals that 10% of every secondary market sales goes right back to Trump and his fellow grifters. For more details, buyers are told to click the link to terms and conditions. Buyers have to confirm they read the terms and conditions but…the terms and conditions are nowhere to be found.
“The Flatterers” — Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1592
Makes me wonder what rubes bought these. Maybe Russians are having Trump do money laundering for them again?
Trump himself is not producing the cards, any more than he has developed any real estate projects since 2010. Instead, he has reached a licensing agreement with a company called NFT International LLC. All his licensing agreements, dating back decades (Real estate, Trump Steaks, Trump University etc.) have all had the same terms: The licensor pays Trump a bunch of cash up front, then he gets a share of the revenue produced by whatever the grifty product is. That number has ranged from 10% to 50%, and there is no reason to expect that this time it is any less – in fact, it is almost certainly more.
You may follow the link to go down the dark rabbit hole of NFT International LLC. Be sure to bring a flashlight.
Kevin McCarthy’s imperiled speakership bid is threatening to incapacitate Republicans during a crucial planning period, virtually guaranteeing a sluggish start for the new House majority.
The GOP leader on Thursday took the unusual step of punting conferencewide races for committee leadership slots until after his speaker election on Jan. 3, a maneuver that could help insulate him from disgruntled members who fall short in those contests and their allies.
But that delay will also mean days, if not weeks, of uncertainty for GOP committees as they begin their stint in the majority. Some of the most important panels, including those charged with tax-writing and border security, won’t be able to prepare bills, tee up hearings, or even hire staff. While some House committees already have uncontested leaders in place, those chairs won’t be able to choose their member lineup or potentially pay staff. The GOP’s subpoena power, too, will be frozen.
“Without question, delays in selecting chairmen and committee members put a lot of pressure on the agenda,” said retiring Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), who led the influential House Ways and Means Committee the last time the GOP had the majority.
The decision to formally punt comes as little surprise to many lawmakers, who had speculated that McCarthy might delay contested fights as a point of leverage as he works to lock down support. Still, many Republicans say they’re concerned that limbo could have lingering effects — particularly if the speaker’s election gets ugly and drags on past Jan. 3.
“Youth Making A Face” — Adriaen Brouwer, 1632 – 1635
You can get a Trump v. Twitter twofer at the Washington Post: “Trump reinvents ‘rigged’ election myth around Twitter allegations. Republicans are now following Trump in claiming foul play in the 2020 election took the form of social media censorship, replacing debunked claims of fraudulent ballots.”
Instead, Trump was now advancing a new theory of how the election was “stolen” from him: a supposed scheme among social media companies, the FBI and the Democrats to suppress information that might have helped Trump’s campaign.The claim is fueled in part by new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s decision to release internal documents about the platform’s brief suppression of a 2020 news story about then-candidate Joe Biden’s son amid concerns it might be the result of disinformation efforts.
Well, alright then. It doesn’t get any more discombobulated than that!
There was an outbreak of tornadoes in Southern states yesterday, including in New Orleans. Fortunately they missed Dakinikat, although she heard the nearby hits as she sheltered under her desk. She can tell us all about it in the comments. There’s also a huge winter storm crossing the country. It’s very bad in the Midwest and we are getting a lot of snow in parts of Massachusetts later today and tomorrow. It looks like those of us on the coast will get mainly wind driven rain, but you never know.
There were so many tornadoes yesterday between Louisiana and Mississippi it's difficult to get an accurate count. It's been reported that 21 tornadoes touched down in Louisiana alone! Baton Rouge dodged some bullets. pic.twitter.com/wz2pQmZEMl
At least three people have died and multiple people have been injured after tornadoes touched down in Louisiana on Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Wednesday afternoon, a tornado passed through the New Orleans area, killing one and leaving over 42,000 without power in the New Orleans area, according to utility company Entergy.
A 56-year-old woman was found dead outside of her house in St. Charles Parish and eight people were taken to St. Charles hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, Parish president Matthew Jewell said. The Louisiana Department of Health earlier on Wednesday confirmed that two people, a 30-year-old woman and her 8-year-old son, had been killed in Caddo Parish after a tornado touched down in the area Tuesday.
Jewell said that tens of homes were damaged by the tornado, the second in just two weeks that touched the parish.
The tornado also touched down in Arabi, causing “major damage” to St. Bernard Parish. Officials asked that people avoid the area as authorities assess the damage.
“Parish officials have confirmed a tornado touched down in Arabi causing major damage,” St. Bernard Parish tweeted. “Firefighters and police are assessing the damage. Please stay out of the area until further notice. Thank you,”
According to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, several homes and businesses suffered “catastrophic damage” and at least one of the sheriff’s office’s facilities suffered “severe damage,” but there were no reported injuries at the facilities, authorities said….
Earlier in the day, at least two tornadoes tore through New Iberia, Louisiana, causing “significant damage” to the Southport Boulevard subdivision and the Iberia Medical Center, New Iberia Police Capt. Leland Laseter said in a Facebook video post.
Infrared imagery from #GOESEast this morning is tracking a large winter storm system currently bringing heavy snow and blizzard conditions to parts of the northern Plains & Upper Midwest. To the South, severe thunderstorms are bringing a threat for tornadoes to central Florida. pic.twitter.com/yYOeOOzbzL
Three incoming House freshmen who flipped Democratic seats in November attended a conservative gala in Manhattan on Saturday — along with white nationalists, right-wing conspiracy theorists and European representatives of far-right parties with authoritarian roots.
The event, sponsored by the New York Young Republican Club, has attracted attention for the remarks made by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Ms. Greene told the crowd that had she and Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Donald J. Trump, organized the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, she would have made sure the insurgents were armed.
“And I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won,” she told the audience. “Not to mention, it would have been armed.”
But the three congressmen-elect in attendance have received scant notice, and their presence has raised questions about the influence of the party’s extremist fringe on the new Republican-led House.
The leader of the Young Republican Club, Gavin Mario Wax, opened Saturday night’s event on Park Avenue in Manhattan by calling for “total war” on Republican enemies.
Attendees included Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigration website VDare, which publishes writings by white nationalists and which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. Also in attendance was Jack Posobiec, a far-right commentator known for promoting the PizzaGate conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and Democratic elites were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria.
The Republican gala has become an unexpected flash point as the party prepares to take the gavel in the House after winning a razor-thin majority in the midterms. Democrats have questioned the silence of House Republican leaders since the gala’s attendance list and speeches came to light in an article by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s HateWatch.
“The unwillingness of so-called Republican moderates in New York and throughout the country to explicitly denounce the reckless extremism of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks for itself,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the incoming House Democratic leader, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Marjorie Taylor Greene told the crowd at the NY Young Republicans gala last night that, “the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol would have succeeded if she had planned it and that the insurrectionists would have been armed.”
Mark Meadows is a liar—at least by omission. And newly revealed text messages prove it.
In 2021, the former White House chief of staff for Donald Trump released a book, The Chief’s Chief, which offered a sycophantic account of his tenure serving the reality-TV-star-turned-president. It made little news because it provided little news. In the book, Meadows fawns over Dear Leader. He blames Trump’s 2020 loss on Fox News’ less-than-enthusiastic coverage of Trump, other purported media conspiracies, and massive fraud. Of course, he cites no confirmed instances of significant voter fraud. But he insists it was clear Trump won. “I knew he didn’t lose,” he writes. How? Well, because of all the “palpable” excitement at the Trump rallies and the “feeling I got during the final days of President Trump’s campaign.” Alrighty, then. But there’s more: “If you looked at the social media traffic from that night—which, I did, constantly—there was no doubt about it: President Trump was going to be reelected by a healthy margin.” Talk about reality bias.
No savvy reader would expect Meadows to present an honest and accurate depiction of what transpired in the weeks after the election and on January 6. But he strives mightily to provide a phony recounting. He cites debunked allegations of fraud and claims the Democrats and the liberal media had plotted for years to set up a pretext in which Trump’s assertions of fraud could be dismissed as conspiracy theory nonsense and labeled “crazy” or “paranoid.” He calls this the “long con.” In Meadows’ telling, Trump and his attorneys merely engaged in legitimate court challenges to “uphold the Democratic process.” (Meadows mistakenly capitalizes “democratic.”) The problem, apparently, was that the courts, including the Supreme Court, didn’t have the guts to support these challenges. And then Trump, on January 6, simply made a farewell address to his followers that “did not call for violence,” and afterward he left the stage, informing Meadows he had no intention to head to the Capitol himself. When moments earlier he had told his loyalists that he would march with them toward Congress, Trump “had been speaking metaphorically.” (According to testimony provided to the House January 6 committee, Trump was intent on leading the throng and even got into a physical altercation with a Secret Service agent who would not allow him to do so.) Meadows shares not a single detail about his or Trump’s actions—or inaction—during the ensuing riot.
Meadows was peddling disinformation. His book says nothing about Trump’s multiple efforts after Election Day to overturn the results. Missing from these pages: Trump pressuring Georgia election officials to “find” him enough votes to win that state (an effort in which Meadows participated); the fake electors scheme; Trump’s attempt to force the Justice Department to declare the election corrupt; the crazy conspiracy nutters who met with Trump and pushed him to seize voting machines; Trump muscling his vice president to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory; Trump’s refusal to take steps to quell the January 6 riot; and much more.
Read the rest at Mother Jones.
Rolling Stone has a creepy scoop about Kanye West and his love of Hitler.
Kanye West allegedly called Hitler a "marketing genius" within the first 15 minutes of a high-level meeting in late 2015.
Nearly a dozen sources talked to us about the rapper’s alleged admiration for Hitler.https://t.co/CW59SFVycC
FOR THE PAST two months, Kanye West has dominated headlines for a nonstop stream of reprehensible behavior. What started out as a controversy over the rapper’s ‘White Lives Matter’ T-shirts descended into a torrent of antisemitic remarks before he appeared on Alex Jones’ show in early December to praise Nazis and Hitler. “I see good things about Hitler,” West said during the bizarre three-hour interview where he falsely claimed Hitler had invented highways and microphones.
West’s remarks mirrored earlier claims former business and music industry sources had told CNN and NBC this fall — that the musician had lauded Hitler and made several antisemitic comments within the past five years, paying at least two settlements to former employees who allege he made such remarks in the workplace.
But as nearly half a dozen sources who worked with West tell Rolling Stone, his alleged obsession of Hitler and Nazis dates back even further than previously reported. They claim that West has been discussing his admiration for Hitler and what he sees as positive achievements of Nazi Germany for nearly two decades, describing it as a well-known but well-kept secret within the rapper’s inner circle.
Beyond just fascination, two sources claim, West allegedly took inspiration from Nazi propaganda strategies and power-gaining tactics to achieve his own fame and success. “It’s not a stretch to now compare Kanye’s ‘by any means necessary’ methods and tactics with Adolf Hitler’s,” a former longtime collaborator says. “To know that a Hitler/[Joseph] Goebbelsplaybook has been a central inspiration to Kanye’s own media playbook helps bring a great deal of clarity to the exact types of moves he’s been making over his career.” (West did not reply to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.)
In the years before the release of West’s 2004 Grammy-winning debut album The College Dropout, West’s success as a rapper was unclear. While he was a wonderkid producer, music label executives believed West’s semi-preppy look and suburban upbringing wasn’t a fit for the gangster rapper image of the early 2000s. West’s persistence won out when he was signed to Roc-A-Fella in 2002 and quickly began working on his first album. It was in those early studio sessions the then-26-year-old frequently discussed Hitler and Nazis and quizzed others on their thoughts, according to a 2003 music industry source who claims to have witnessed the conversations firsthand. “It was like a daily thing,” the source says.
The topic wasn’t couched in general conversation, the music source says. Instead, West allegedly would approach collaborators and industry executives and ambush them with questions — seemingly trying to catch people off-guard. “Going up to somebody like, ‘So what do you think about the Holocaust?’ the music source explains.
That is sooooo creepy.
Speaking of creepy people, Elon Musk is still a bully and a hypocrite.
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.” 🤣
The Washington Post: Twitter account that tracked Elon Musk’s jet is suspended permanently.https://t.co/J3QZGSPF5n
Jack Sweeney, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida, was a big fan of the billionaire industrialist Elon Musk. In 2020, Sweeney launched a Twitter account, @ElonJet, that used public air-travel data to map the flights of Musk’s private jet, thinking it’d be cool to track how Musk managed his business empire.
But when Sweeney woke up Wednesday morning, he was stunned to see that the 530,000-follower account on Twitter, the social media platform Musk bought in October, had been “permanently suspended” without explanation. A notice on Sweeney’s Twitter account said only that the company had, “after careful review … determined your account broke the Twitter rules,” without saying which rules it broke.
On Wednesday evening, the account was briefly restored, with Twitter outlining new rules seemingly designed to prevent Sweeney from posting the real-time locations of planes used by Musk and other public figures as long as he included a slight delay. Sweeney, over Twitter, asked Musk how long he’d have to delay the data to comply.
But Wednesday evening, Musk threatened to escalate the conflict against Sweeney, saying a car carrying Musk’s son, X Æ A-12, had been “followed by [a] crazy stalker” in Los Angeles, implying without providing evidence that location data had been a factor in the purported episode. “Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family,” Musk tweeted.
Sweeney, 20, shared publicly available information about Musk’s flights, not his family members or his cars. The records stopped and ended at airports, and Musk has provided no further detail as to what legal basis Musk would cite in a lawsuit.
Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” had been critical of Sweeney’s account but pledged last month to keep it online, tweeting, “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.” [….]
Sweeney’s other Twitter accounts, which tracked the air travel of college sports teams, celebrities and politicians, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, climate envoy John F. Kerry and former president Donald Trump, remained online for several hours after the Musk jet account was suspended.
But on Wednesday afternoon, after Sweeney began discussing the issue publicly, those accounts as well as Sweeney’s personal account were suspended.
Twitter also blocked people from tweeting a link to a version of the account Sweeney runs on Instagram. When a user tries to tweet the link, Twitter says, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
Meanwhile, Musk has been selling more Tesla stock. Is it wrong that I hope he keeps losing big?
Musk has sold four tranches of shares worth a total of almost $23bn since announcing his takeover of Twitter.
It is the third sale since declaring in April there would be “no further TSLA sales” to support the deal. https://t.co/a8CIaZkg9I
It looks like Rudy Giuliani could soon be disbarred.
An arm of the D.C. Bar found Thursday that Rudy Giuliani violated the terms of his license to practice law in the nation’s capital when he filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania trying to block certification of the results in the 2020 presidential election. https://t.co/3sTn6ncJnr
An arm of the D.C. Bar found Thursday that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal attorney to President Donald Trump, violated the terms of his license to practice law in the nation’s capital when he filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania trying to block certification of the results in the 2020 presidential election.
The preliminary finding by the D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility means Giuliani and his legal team will have to file additional briefs detailing his defense and his role in the lawsuit, as officials consider what discipline he should face. Robert Bernius, the board’s chairman, said after a private 15-minute discussion Thursday that the finding was “preliminary and nonbinding.”
Hamilton “Phil” Fox III, the lead prosecuting attorney for the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel, told the board that Giuliani’s conduct “calls for only one sanction, and that’s the sanction of disbarment.”
“What Mr. Giuliani did was use his law license to undermine the legitimacy of a presidential election, to undermine the basic premise of the democratic system that we all live in, that has been in place since the 1800s in this country,” Fox said.
But Bernius asked whether disbarment was extreme, noting that former D.C. administrative law judge Roy Pearson Jr. was suspended from practicing law in the city for only 90 days when he sued a dry cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants. That D.C. case garnered national attention.
In hearings last week, Fox argued thatGiuliani had “weaponized” his law license in filing the lawsuit in Pennsylvania that falsely claimed that the November 2020 presidential election in that state was riddled with fraud. Those claims, Fox said, were “unfounded.”
He told the board that Giuliani had a “distinguished” career as a former federal prosecutor and a former U.S. attorney in New York. But “that was 20 years ago,” he said. “It’s like there are two different people. I don’t know if something happened to Mr. Giuliani or what.”
I’ll end there, because I’m late again. Insomnia is playing havoc with my life! What stories are you following today?
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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.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
When Dr. Daughter entered Kindergarten, she came home crying about an assignment. When asked what the assignment was, I realized the gargantuan task in front of her. Her father and I were massive book collectors. We had bookcases filled with books in just about every room of our 4 bedroom, a two-story house with a mostly finished basement. I calmed her down saying that I’d write a note explaining that there were literally hundreds of books all over the house and that she should focus on counting the books in her room. She already had plenty. Assignment completed! End of tears!
I recommend reading all of it.
One Republican Congressman elected to the House for the first time from New York State seems to have completely fabricated his work,education, and life history. 
He also has a record of check fraud dating back to his days in Brazil. If you read their investigation, you’ll see that he’s a cipher. Nothing he told the public is true. This is a fascinating mystery.
The Jan. 6th committee will broadcast its final public meeting live today at noon est. 
In the early hours of Saturday morning he tweeted, “The people have spoken. Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now.”
The documents were largely versions of a potential autobiography Clark had outlined in mid-October 2021, writing that recounted a bizarre effort to have Trump install him as acting attorney general in order to get more traction to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. The outline included a description of a pivotal Jan. 3, 2021, 
Shocking new charges have been filed against Edward Kelley, a January 6 defendant, according to Insider: 
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