“Organ cat, prayer book, Bruges or Ghent c. 1480-1490 (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum
Happy Caturday!!
It has been another busy news week, and today there are some stories that follow up on recent news and others that look further back in time. As we move closer to the midterm elections, things are looking better for Democrats to keep control of the Senate. Of course the fallout continues from the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The judge in the case released more information on the search warrant, and there could be more coming. A court has ordered the DOJ to release a memo related to the Mueller investigation that Bill Barr refused to make public. A Michigan judge made an important decision on abortion laws in the state. Finally, the NYT published a fascinating op-ed by two law professors who argue that the U.S. Constitution is “broken.”
On Thursday, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) seemed to admit that the Grand Old Party doesn’t have the highest quality roster of candidates.
“I think there’s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate,” McConnell said. “Senate races are just different, they’re statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”
Writing in Vanity Fair, Eric Lutz reported, “He didn’t mention any of those candidates directly, but he almost certainly could have been talking about any of Donald Trump’s handpicked contenders, who earned the former president’s support seemingly for one of two reasons: He knows them from television, or they’re loyalists who have organized their campaigns almost entirely around his 2020 election lies. There’s a lot of crossover there, obviously, but the first camp includes Mehmet Oz, a former TV doctor who apparently believes raw asparagus belongs in a crudité, and Herschel Walker, the former football great whose own campaign staff reportedly regards him as a ‘pathological liar.’” [….]
“Then there’s the second camp of MAGA candidates, which includes the likes of Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel protégé who literally has the backing of some of the Internet’s most well-known white nationalists. (Masters has attempted to distance himself from this community.) One of several extremists on the ballot in Arizona, where election deniers Kari Lake and Mark Finchem are respectively running for governor and secretary of state, Masters is trailing Democrat Mark Kelly by eight points, according to a Fox News poll released this week,” Lutz reported. “None of this to say to say that these bumbling extremists can’t win; if a country is capable of electing Trump president, Georgia is certainly capable of electing a guy like Walker. But McConnell’s apparent sense that this batch of bozos might dash GOP dreams of a Senate majority may be well-founded, even if midterms tend to favor the party that doesn’t control the White House.”
Republican Senate hopefuls are getting crushed on airwaves across the country while their national campaign fund is pulling ads and running low on cash — leading some campaign advisers to ask where all the money went and todemand an audit of the committee’s finances, according to Republican strategists involved in the discussions.
In a highly unusual move, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week canceled bookings worth about $10 million, including in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. A spokesman said the NRSC is not abandoning those races but prioritizing ad spots that are shared with campaigns and benefit from discounted rates. Still, the cancellations forfeit cheaper prices that came from booking early, and better budgeting could have covered both.
“The fact that they canceled these reservations was a huge problem — you can’t get them back,” said one Senate Republican strategist, who like others spokes on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “You can’t win elections if you don’t have money to run ads.”
The NRSC’s retreat came after months of touting record fundraising, topping $173 million so far this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures. But the committee has burned through nearly all of it, with the NRSC’s cash on hand dwindling to $28.4 million by the end of June.
As of that month, the committee disclosed spending just $23 million on ads, with more than $21 million going into text messages and more than $12 million to American Express credit cardpayments, whose ultimate purpose isn’t clear from the filings. The committee also spent at least $13 million on consultants, $9 million on debt payments and more than $7.9 million renting mailing lists, campaign finance data show.
Former President Donald Trump has offered a shifting array of defenses in response to the August 8 FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which uncovered a trove of secret documents.
Among them is the claim that he declassified all of the documents while in office under the president’s sweeping powers over national secrets.
But procedural documents unsealed Thursday by federal judge Bruce Reinhart, including the cover sheet of the warrant used in the search, revealed that this defense may not be as effective as Trump hoped, legal experts say.
One implication of the new information is that even if Trump is right about the documents being declassified, he still could have broken the law, Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law scholar, tweeted….
[The cover sheet] showed that the FBI believes that Trump may be guilty of the willful retention of national defense information, concealment or removal of government records, and obstruction of federal investigation.
Bradley P. Moss, a national security attorney, told Insider that the new documents “clarify but ultimately do not change much” of what we previously knew.
A striking detail, he said, is that the FBI believes Trump has obstructed its probe.
“Clearly, the FBI currently believes Mr. Trump not only took properly marked classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, but he kept them and resisted turning them over when confronted by the government,” Moss said.
The day after federal agents searched Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump told a group of conservative lawmakers that “being president was hell,” according to three people at the meeting.
But to some he sounded ready to have the job again.
“He was not to be deterred,” said Rep. Randy Weber of Texas, one of a dozen Republican House members who met with Trump on Aug. 9. He described Trump’s state of mind in the immediate aftermath of the search as “pretty miffed, but measured.”
Everything that’s occurred since that Bedminster, New Jersey, meeting — and since federal agents seized a trove of top secret and other highly classified documents from his resort — has put Trump exactly where he and his supporters want him to be, according to people close to him. He’s in a fight, squaring off with Washington institutions and a political establishment he says are out to get him, issues he brought up in the meeting with the lawmakers and in conversations with others.
Taken together, it’s reoriented Trump’s thinking about whether he should announce a presidential campaign before or after the midterm elections, according to those who have spoken with him over the past two weeks. They said Trump feels less pressure to announce early because viable challengers who might otherwise force his hand have faded into the background. But there are other reasons to wait.
Trump is now inclined to launch his candidacy after the November elections, in part to avoid blame should an early announcement undermine the GOP’s effort to win control of Congress, said one person close to him, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk more freely.A post-midterm announcement would suit Republican leaders who’ve been urging Trump to hold off so that he doesn’t overshadow the party’s candidates.Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign and administration official, described Trump’s attitude in recent days after speaking with him, as “business as usual.”
Business as usual for Trump: the possibility of multiple criminal charges and crappy lawyers who have no clue how to defend a criminal.
Judge orders release of Bill Barr’s memo protecting Trump
A federal appeals court has ordered the release of a secret Justice Department memo discussing whether President Donald Trump obstructed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The unanimous panel decision issued Friday echoes that of a lower court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, who last year accused the Justice Department of dishonesty in its justifications for keeping the memo hidden.
The panel of three judges, led by Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, said that whether or not there was “bad faith,” the government “created a misimpression” and could not stop release under the Freedom of Information Act.
The memo was written by two senior Justice Department officials for then-attorney general William P. Barr, who subsequently told Congress that there was not enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s inquiry. A redacted version was released last year but left under seal the legal and factual analysis.
Department officials argued that the document was protected because it involved internal deliberations over a prosecutorial decision. But the judges agreed with Jackson that both Mueller and Barr had clearly already concluded that a sitting president could not be charged with a crime. The discussion was over how Barr would publicly characterize the obstruction evidence Mueller had assembled, the Justice Department conceded on appeal.
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Justice Department must make public an internal memo senior lawyers there prepared in 2019 about whether then-President Donald Trump’s actions investigated in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia amounted to crimes prosecutors would ordinarily charge.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Justice Department failed to meet its legal burden to show that the memo from the department’s Office of Legal Counsel was part of a genuine deliberative process advising then-Attorney General William Barr on how to handle sensitive issues left unresolved when Mueller’s probe concluded in March 2019.
Trump was never charged in Mueller’s probe and the special prosecutor’s final report declined to opine on whether what he did in response to the investigation amounted to a crime.
However, some Trump opponents have called on the Attorney General Merrick Garland to reconsider the issue now that Trump is no longer president. Release of the long-sought DOJ memo could fuel those calls and draw more unwanted attention to Trump’s potential criminal liability at a time when he is besieged by a slew of other legal woes relating to his handling of classified government records, his role in inspiring many of those involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and his broader efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election.
A Michigan judge ruled Friday prosecutors in the state’s largest counties are barred from bringing criminal charges for months to come under a state law banning most abortions.
The decision from Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Jacob Cunningham comes after two days of hearings and means every county in Michigan with an abortion clinic is at least temporarily immune from the threat of criminal prosecutions over abortion procedures.
“As currently applied, the court finds (the abortion law) is chilling and dangerous to our state’s population of childbearing people and the medical professionals who care for them,” Cunningham said.
“The harm to the body of women and people capable of pregnancy in not issuing the injunction could not be more real, clear, present and dangerous to the court.”
At times, Cunningham seemed to ridicule arguments from conservative prosecutors seeking to enforce the 1931 abortion law. He said prosecutors would suffer zero harm from not having the ability to prosecute abortion providers.
Going much further, he told these prosecutors to instead focus their efforts elsewhere.
“The court suggests county prosecutors focus their attention and resources … to investigation and prosecution of criminal sexual conduct, homicide, arson, child and elder abuse, animal cruelty and other violent and horrific crimes that we see in our society,” Cunningham said.
Is the Constitution broken?
Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, law professors from Harvard and Yale respectively, published this guest essay at The New York Times: The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed. You’ll need to go to the NYT link if you’re interested, because it’s very long. The main idea is that the Constitution is dated and favors conservatives; liberals need to change their thinking about “constitutionalism.”
When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong. But struggling over the Constitution has proved a dead end. The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism.
The idea of constitutionalism is that there needs to be some higher law that is more difficult to change than the rest of the legal order. Having a constitution is about setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass day to day. Our Constitution’s guarantee of two senators to each state is an example. And ever since the American founders were forced to add a Bill of Rights to get their handiwork passed, national constitutions have been associated with some set of basic freedoms and values that transient majorities might otherwise trample.
But constitutions — especially the broken one we have now — inevitably orient us to the past and misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on what the present and future demand for and from those who live now. This aids the right, which insists on sticking with what it claims to be the original meaning of the past.
Arming for war over the Constitution concedes in advance that the left must translate its politics into something consistent with the past. But liberals have been attempting to reclaim the Constitution for 50 years — with agonizingly little to show for it. It’s time for them to radically alter the basic rules of the game.
In making calls to regain ownership of our founding charter, progressives have disagreed about strategy and tactics more than about this crucial goal. Proposals to increase the number of justices, strip the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to invalidate federal law or otherwise soften the blow of judicial review frequently come together with the assurance that the problem is not the Constitution; only the Supreme Court’s hijacking of it is. And even when progressives concede that the Constitution is at the root of our situation, typically the call is for some new constitutionalism.
If that whets your appetite for me, click the link and read the rest.
Those are today’s main political stories as I see it. Maybe we’ll have some time to take a breath before more shocking news breaks. I can use a quite weekend and I wish you the same.
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Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) successfully urged the Louisiana Bond Commission on Thursday to delay a $39 million future line of credit for the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board–which the city needs for its flood response–until city officials agree to enforce the state’s abortion ban. The move comes right at the start of hurricane season, on the same day New Orleans has issued a flood advisory.
The financing that’s being held hostage would, specifically, be used to build a power station for the Sewerage & Water Board to help combat flooding. Melinda Deslatte, a research director at Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, live-tweeted today’s meeting, in which Republican politicians decided to punish New Orleans, a Democratic stronghold in the state, for defending abortion rights in the wake of a near-total ban. (Officials in New Orleans, including even the police, have vowed not to enforce the state’s new ban, which has already pushed out all three of its abortion clinics.)
Read more about the impact on the City at the link. Here’s more from investigative reporter Sam Karlin living in the city. The NOPD will not make arrests but now say they will investigate.
City councilmember JP Morrell reacts to our story on NOPD's policy that requires officers to investigate abortions, even if they don't make arrests. https://t.co/A5d7ofQCxg
We currently have a police shortage typical of many big cities these days. Why put our police to work on this ridiculousness and make a big deal of it? Landry seeks to replace John Bel Edwards as Louisiana’s governor next year. Will Louisiana’s three big cities that lost their abortion clinics and the surrounding areas come out to ensure he doesn’t get into the position to Desantis/Abbott our state into White Christian Nationalism? Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, a shocking story presented on MSNBC by Alex Wagner shows that “DeSantis imposes extreme culture war framing on nuanced U.S. civics.” This includes downplaying the role of slavery in the country, promoting Scalia and his strict views on originalism, showing that slave-owning founders didn’t like slavery with no citations to the quotes, and promoting the idea that the founders really wanted a country that was essentially a Christian state with no separation between that religion and the state. It even includes a cartoon of the idea of a porous and fluid fence rather than a wall. This is all wrapped up in a seminar aimed at getting Florida’s educators to join in clearly White Christian Patriarchal Nationalism propagandizing.
Please watch and see the appalling materials as a young Florida Civics Teacher reveals the material and its shortcomings. A discussion with Professor Jelanie Cobb follows.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the first arrests made by the state’s new elections police force Thursday: Twenty people previously incarcerated for murder or sexual assault who he said had illegally voted in the 2020 election.
The GOP-led Florida legislature passed a bill creating the Office of Election Crimes and Security earlier this year at DeSantis’s behest. While the 2020 election went smoothly in Florida — DeSantis called it the “gold standard” for elections — the governor has said there are still issues and conservative lawmakers have sought to further tighten voting regulations.
The governor — widely considered a potential 2024 presidential candidate — heralded the arrests, saying the unit had “sprung into action to hold individuals accountable for voter fraud.” DeSantis said they had been arrested for violating the rules of a constitutional amendment passed by Florida voters in 2018 that allows formerly incarcerated people to register to vote — except for those who committed felony sexual assault or murder.
“This is just the opening salvo,” DeSantis said. “This is not the sum total of 2020.”
But voting groups and experts said that if anything the initial arrests indicate Florida’s election system is robust and crimes rare. Some expressed concern that the new unit could have a chilling effect, particularly on vulnerable groups of voters, such as formerly incarcerated people who are legally entitled to vote.
“It’s 20 people out of millions of voters,” Michael McDonald, an expert on voting and a professor of political science at the University of Florida. “These arrests are inconsequential to the integrity of the electoral system.”
DeSantis made the announcement flanked by law enforcement officers in Broward County, which has the most registered Democrats of any county in Florida. The arrests came about six weeks after the office opened and five days before the state’s primary election.
A federal judge has suspended partial enforcement of Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” a bill that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed that restricts how companies and schools discuss race.
DeSantis signed the bill into law in April. It would limit race-based teachings in schools, and the way that private companies carry out mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings. Companies that have 15 employees or more could face civil lawsuits if someone accuses them of violating the law.
In his opinion, Chief US District Judge Mark Walker blocked the employer portion of the law, saying it violated free speech. He compared the law to Netflix’s blockbuster science-fiction hit, “Stranger Things.”
“In the popular television series Stranger Things, the ‘upside down’ describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world,” Walker, a nominee of then-President Barack Obama, wrote in his opinion. “Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down.”
“Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely,” Walker continued. “But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.”
The governor’s press office told Insider on Friday that it planned to appeal the decision.
“Judge Walker has effectively ruled that companies have a first amendment right to instruct their employees in white supremacy,” said communications director Taryn Fenske. “We disagree and will be appealing his decision.”
The law targeted what many Republicans call “critical race theory.” Formally, critical race theory examines racism in US institutions stemming from slavery and the Jim Crow era. Democrats have argued it’s mostly taught in law schools, and defenders of DEI trainings say it’s necessary to prevent implicit bias, discrimination, and racism.
Gustav Klimt – Hope, II, 1907′
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your future Orwellian Republican State!
The bad news for Never Trump Republicans this week wasn’t just that Liz Cheney lost the primary for her Wyoming congressional seat on Tuesday. It wasn’t even that she lost by such an overwhelming margin. It was that her loss fit a pattern in which the GOP’s voters have roundly rejected Republican after Republican who voted to impeach Trump. Only two of the 10 House Republicans who did so will even be on the ballot in November — one of whom is running in a district that Joe Biden won by more than 10 percentage points in 2020.
It’s clear at this point that the Republican Party is a pro-Trump party, and that its voters recoil from candidates who are ardently opposed to the former president. The results of this primary season — and Cheney’s loss in particular — show a Never Trump wing on the verge of extinction.
Cheney’s loss follows those this year of Reps. Peter Meijer of Michigan, Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, and Tom Rice of South Carolina, among those Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. Another four Republican House members who voted to impeach — Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, John Katko of New York, and Fred Upton of Michigan — opted against even running for reelection.
This continues a trend within the GOP since Trump took office, as Republican critics like Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Jeff Flake of Arizona have opted not to seek reelection, while others, like Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, lost their primaries.
“I’m unaware of any Republican primary where the organizing principle that Trump is a bad guy was ever successful,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a close Trump ally in Congress who had been campaigning against Cheney since days after her impeachment vote, told Vox. “Republicans might have squeaked through who were not pro-Trump, but those candidates had some other organizing principle. Liz Cheney didn’t, and that’s why she lost so badly.”
Even an ardent Never Trumper like Tim Miller, a former top Republican operative and author of a recent New York Times bestseller, Why We Did It, conceded that Trump won the battle for the soul of the GOP. “A lot of people misunderstand what is happening in this moment and think the Republican Party might somehow go back to being the party of Liz Cheney and Paul Ryan,” Miller said. “It’s never going back — at least not any time on the horizon.”
By Wednesday, Eric Trump was bragging about his father as one of the all-time great political assassins. “Last night, my father killed another political dynasty, and that’s the Cheneys,” he told the Newsmax host Eric Bolling. “He first killed the Bushes, then he killed the Clintons. Last night, he killed the Cheneys. He’s been rino hunting ever since he got into politics, and last night he was successful again.” Trump’s story, as narrated by his son, is that of a political axe murderer—a grim reaper of the “Republican in Name Only” establishment. In the Trump lexicon, “killer” is a compliment. Donald Trump himself has bragged about this, explaining that the term constituted high praise from his ruthless father, Fred, who taught him to be one.
The family must be so proud. Trump has zealously stuck to the paternal creed. From the start, he has been an almost uniquely destructive force in American politics, a leader not only willing to blow anything up that stands in his path but one who glories in the act. The result has been a Republican Party transformed almost entirely into Trump’s Republican Party. Nearly all of those who stood against him have been purged or defeated or have cravenly renounced their previous views. “She may have been fighting for principles,” Taylor Budowich, a Trump spokesperson, said, after Cheney’s loss, “but they are not the principles of the Republican Party.” Which is as close to an inarguably true statement as has ever been issued by the Mar-a-Lago government in exile. The Republican Party’s ideology these days is simply whatever-Trump-wants-ism, as it made clear when it did not even bother to issue a new policy platform at its 2020 convention, settling instead for a simple resolution saying that it was for Trump. Being a classy winner, though, is clearly not part of the emerging party doctrine. After the Wyoming results came in, Budowich posted to Twitter a video compilation of Trump dancing, set to the tune of “na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye,” along with the message “Bye bye, @Liz_Cheney.”
The results of this midterm season so far have shown how nearly complete Trump’s Republican triumph already is. Dozens of election deniers who have adopted the former President’s lies about his 2020 election loss have won Republican nominations, up and down the ballot. Only two of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his role in the January 6th insurrection are still in the running to remain in Congress. And, of course, polls show that Trump himself remains a strong front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024. The headlines after Tuesday’s voting would have been inconceivable in the immediate aftermath of his failed effort to hold onto power: “Trump’s dominance in GOP comes into focus,” the Washington Post said. “Cheney’s Wyoming defeat is a win for Trump and a decisive blow to fading GOP establishment,” the Los Angeles Times declared. “Cheney’s defeat end of an era for GOP; Trump’s party now,” the Associated Press said. So why are Trump’s opponents—at least some of them—feeling in any way optimistic?
But, over the summer, a new school of what might be called “Trumptimism” has taken hold among some Democratic strategists and independent analysts. In the mess of our current politics, they discern a case for optimism—history-defying, experience-flouting optimism that maybe things won’t work out so badly after all in November. “In the age of Trump, nothing is normal,” Simon Rosenberg, the president of the liberal think tank the New Democrat Network and a veteran strategist, told me, on Thursday. “Nothing is following traditional physics and rules, so why would this midterm?”
Follow the link to read the rationale behind the assertion. Meanwhile, the Republican with the most fluid values ever discourages Liz Cheney from running for President. “What Mitt Romney says about Liz Cheney possibly running for president”. If this man ever had a hope to make any of us sorry he couldn’t hold any higher office he’s blown it now.
As Rep. Liz Cheney contemplates her next move after losing the Republican primary in Wyoming this week, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney says he wouldn’t encourage her to run for president.
“I’m not going to encourage anyone to run for president. I’ve done that myself, and that’s something I’m not doing again. I don’t know if she really wants to do that. She would not become the nominee if she were to run. I can’t imagine that would occur,” Romney told the Deseret News on Thursday.
Cheney, he said, might run for other purposes but “I’m not in collaboration with that effort.”
Remember, this is from the man that put his dog on the top of his car while driving fast. He’s all in it for the convenience.
On Thursday, September 15, President Biden will host at the White House the United We Stand Summit to counter the corrosive effects of hate-fueled violence on our democracy and public safety, highlight the response of the Biden-Harris Administration and communities nationwide to these dangers, and put forward a shared vision for a more united America.
President Biden decided to run for president after the horror of the hate-fueled violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Since taking office, his Administration has consistently taken steps to counter hate-motivated violence — from signing the bipartisan COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, to releasing the first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, to signing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most significant legislation in three decades to reduce gun violence.
Even as our nation has endured a disturbing series of hate-fueled attacks, from Oak Creek to Pittsburgh, from El Paso to Poway, from Atlanta to Buffalo, Americans remain overwhelmingly united in their opposition to such violence. The United We Stand Summit will bring together heroes from across America who are leading historic work in their communities to build bridges and address hate and division, including survivors of hate-fueled violence. The summit will include a bipartisan group of federal, state, and local officials, civil rights groups, faith and community leaders, technology and business leaders, law enforcement officials, former members of violent hate groups who now work to prevent violence, gun violence prevention leaders, media representatives, and cultural figures. It will feature a keynote speech from President Biden as well as inclusive, bipartisan panels and conversations on countering hate-fueled violence, preventing radicalization and mobilization to violence, and fostering unity.
As President Biden said in Buffalo after the horrific mass shooting earlier this year, in the battle for the soul of our nation “we must all enlist in this great cause of America.” The United We Stand Summit will present an important opportunity for Americans of all races, religions, regions, political affiliations, and walks of life to take up that cause together.
Is this possible given that the states that have more wildlife and vacant land still control entire states and send 2 senators to the District? Will, this 30% that includes Racists, Gun Toting Militias, White Christian Militias, Incels, and folks that hate independent women and the GLBT community really coming around to uniting with the rest of us?
Thank you @potus for your leadership in combating the threat of extremist violence, including violence targeting our LGBTQ+ community. The United We Stand summit is one important step toward improving the federal government's response to these threats.https://t.co/ZIxpU5OSTw
This is from the HRC link above. It’s from The Washington Post.
Biden will deliver a keynote speech at the gathering, which the White House says will include civil rights groups, faith leaders, business executives, law enforcement, gun violence prevention advocates, former members of violent hate groups, the victims of extremist violence and cultural figures. The White House emphasized that it also intends to bring together Democrats and Republicans, as well as political leaders on the federal, state and local levels to unite against hate-motivated violence.
Biden, a Democrat, has frequently cited 2017’s white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, with bringing him out of political retirement to challenge then-President Donald Trump in 2020. He promised during that campaign to work to bridge political and social divides and to promote national unity, but fulfilling that cause remains a work in progress.
Sindy Benavides, the CEO of League of United Latin American Citizens, said the genesis of the summit came after the Buffalo massacre, as her organization along with the Anti-Defamation League, the National Action Network and other groups wanted to press the Biden administration to more directly tackle extremist threats.
But how do we solve a problem like Greg Abbott, Marjorie Taylor Green, Ron DeSantis, Jeff Landry, Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and all the the other Trump Zombies?
Vote them out if we can! I’m not sure his voters can be shamed into embracing the American Dream ever again.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Today at 1PM, Judge Bruce Reinhart will hold a hearing about whether he should release the FBI affidavit he consulted in his decision to approve the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. A number of media organization are arguing for the release, while the DOJ opposes it because it could discourage witnesses from coming forward to help in their investigation.
In addition, ABC News has a scoop about Kash Patel’s plans for White House documents before the FBI Search and Maggie Haberman attempted to Whitewash Trump’s motives for stealing highly classified documents.
There is also news in the case against Trump’s companies in New York. Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg has agreed to a plea deal that requires him to testify against The Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation when they go to trial in October. He will not have to implicate Trump or his family directly.
Finally, news from the January 6 grand jury and some Secret Service news.
Specifically, CNN and the other outlets are asking for the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida to unseal the entire record filed with the court, including all probable cause affidavits filed in support of the search warrant. These lay out why investigators believe that there is probable cause that a crime was committed and the evidence of that crime existed in recent days at the site where the search was sought.
The request was filed after the Justice Department submitted its own request with the federal court to unseal certain warrant materials. In remarks announcing the request, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department is seeking the release of the “search warrant and property receipt” from the FBI’s search.
In the unsealing filing by CNN and the other outlets with the court, they pointed to “the historic importance of these events.”
“Before the events of this week, not since the Nixon Administration had the federal government wielded its power to seize records from a former President in such a public fashion,” the outlets said in the filing.
The filing said that “tremendous public interest in these records in particular outweighs any purported interest in keeping them secret.”
The affidavit for the FBI’s August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago would shine more light on what brought federal agents to the Florida property, and the justice department has already said it’s not comfortable with it being made public.
“The affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course,” prosecutors argued earlier this week, adding, “Disclosure of the government’s affidavit at this stage would also likely chill future cooperation by witnesses whose assistance may be sought as this investigation progresses, as well as in other high-profile investigations.”
Trump meanwhile asked for it to be made public, writing on his Truth Social platform, “There is no way to justify the unannounced RAID of Mar-a-Lago”.
“I call for the immediate release of the completely Unredacted Affidavit pertaining to this horrible and shocking BREAK-IN,” he said.
But making the document public may not be the best move for him. A former senior justice department official told the Washington Post these types of affidavits usually reflect poorly on whomever’s property is being searched. “There’s no exculpatory information. It’s never a good story for the defendant,” the person said.
Kash Patel’s plans for documents from the National Archives
In June of this year, seven weeks before the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in search of classified materials, former Defense Department appointee and outspoken Trump loyalist Kash Patel vowed to retrieve classified documents from the National Archives and publish them on his website.
Trump had just issued a letter instructing the National Archives to grant Patel and conservative journalist John Solomon access to nonpublic administration records, according to reporting at the time.
Patel, who under Trump had been the chief of staff for the acting defense secretary, claimed in a string of interviews that Trump had declassified a trove of “Russiagate documents” in the final days of his administration. But Patel claimed Trump’s White House counsel had blocked the release of those documents, and instead had them delivered to the National Archives.
“I’ve never told anyone this because it just happened,” Patel said in an interview on a pro-Trump podcast on June 22. “I’m going to identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified at the National Archives, and we’re going to start putting that information out next week.”
Patel did not provide a clear explanation of how he would legally or practically obtain the documents.
For four years, former President Donald J. Trump treated the federal government and the political apparatus operating in his name as an extension of his private real estate company.
It all belonged to him, he felt, melded together into a Trump brand that he had been nurturing for decades.
“My generals,” he repeatedly said of the active-duty and retired military leaders who filled his government. “My money,” he often called the cash he raised through his campaign or for the Republican National Committee. “My Kevin,” he said of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader.
And White House documents?
“They’re mine,” three of Mr. Trump’s advisers said that he stated repeatedly when he was urged to return boxes of documents, some of them highly classified, that the National Archives sought after Mr. Trump took them with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., in January 2021. A nearly 18-month back-and-forth between the government and Mr. Trump ended in an extraordinary F.B.I. search for the documents at Mar-a-Lago last week.
The question, as with so much else around Mr. Trump, is why? Why did he insist on refusing to turn over government papers that by law did not belong to him, igniting another legal conflagration? As with so much else related to Mr. Trump, there is not one easy answer.
These are the possible reasons Haberman suggests:
Exciting documents: The documents were exciting to Trump, who has always been a “pack rat.”
‘L’état, c’est moi’: He thought he was king and could do whatever he wanted.
Ripping up paper: Trump couldn’t have cared less about carefully handling documents. He did whatever he wanted and ignored norms and rules.
Personal information: Trump may have wanted to keep documents “because they contained details about people he knew,” like the ones that referred to French president Emmanuel Macron.
Missing from the list? The possibility that Trump wanted to sell documents to foreign leaders or use them as blackmail.
It's only astounding if you pretend Maggie is an objective reporter and not an embed whose primary job at the NYT is laundering Trump's spin. Properly viewed, this story makes complete sense. https://t.co/3tqKYHRmRn
ALLEN WEISSELBERG, THE Trump Organization’s finance chief, will say in Manhattan court Thursday that he conspired with several of the ex-president’s companies when he pleads guilty to state tax crimes, two sources familiar with the case tell Rolling Stone.
As part of Weisselberg’s plea deal, he has agreed to testify against The Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation at trial, which is scheduled for October.
If called to the witness stand during trial, Weisselberg will provide testimony that is the same as what he admits to in court this week, the source said. One of the sources said that while Weisselberg is agreeing to testify, that does not mean he necessarily will; it depends on whether prosecutors decide to call him. The New York Times first reported that Weisselberg was expected to plead guilty, and CNN reported he would testify if called.
Weisselberg will not go beyond his testimony to help the criminal probe, one of the sources said. Still, his potential testimony could pose a severe threat to Trump’s companies. This possible testimony, which allegedly implicates Trump’s businesses, could be key to prosecutors’ securing a guilty verdict against these companies. When a company is found to have engaged in criminal conduct, significant fines can pile up quickly — potentially leading to its demise.
Weisselberg’s expected guilty plea stems from an indictment last year from the Manhattan district attorney’s office accusing him and several of Trump’s companies of tax crimes in a “sweeping and audacious illegal payment scheme.” These financial offenses related to the lavish perks that came with being CFO of Donald Trump’s real estate empire. (The Trump Organization has maintained its not guilty plea, so his namesake business, and several related entities, remain under indictment.)
Allen H. Weisselberg, for decades one of Donald J. Trump’s most trusted executives, has reached a deal to plead guilty on Thursday and admit to participating in a long-running tax scheme at the former president’s family business — a serious blow to the company that could heighten its risk in an upcoming trial on related charges.
Mr. Weisselberg will have to admit to all 15 felonies that prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office accused him of, according to people with knowledge of the matter. And if he is called as a witness at the company’s trial in October, he will have to testify about his role in the scheme to avoid paying taxes on lavish corporate perks, the people said.
But Mr. Weisselberg will not implicate Mr. Trump or his family if he takes the stand in that trial, the people said, and he has refused to cooperate with prosecutors in their broader investigation into Mr. Trump, who has not been accused of wrongdoing.
Even so, his potential testimony will put the Trump Organization at a disadvantage and is likely to make Mr. Weisselberg a central witness at the October trial, where the company will face many of the same charges.
On cross-examination, the Trump Organization’s lawyers could accuse Mr. Weisselberg of pleading guilty only to spare himself a harsher sentence; under the terms of the plea deal, Mr. Weisselberg, who was facing up to 15 years in prison, will spend as little as 100 days behind bars. They might also argue that it would be unfair to hold the Trump Organization accountable for a crime that was not committed by the Trump family, who control the company.
Federal prosecutors investigating the role that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies played in the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have issued a grand jury subpoena to the National Archives for all the documents the agency provided to a parallel House select committee inquiry, according to a copy of the subpoena obtained by The New York Times.
The subpoena, issued to the National Archives in May, made a sweeping demand for “all materials, in whatever form” that the archives had given to the Jan. 6 House committee. Those materials included records from the files of Mr. Trump’s top aides, his daily schedule and phone logs and a draft text of the president’s speech that preceded the riot.
It was signed by Thomas P. Windom, the federal prosecutor who has been leading the Justice Department’s wide-ranging inquiry into what part Mr. Trump and his allies may have played in various schemes to maintain power after the former president’s defeat in the 2020 election — chief among them a plan to submit fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The subpoena was not related to a separate investigation into Mr. Trump’s retention and handling of classified documents that were removed from the White House at the end of his tenure and taken to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla. That inquiry led this month to a court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago during which federal agents carted off several boxes of sensitive materials.
Asking the National Archives for any White House documents pertaining to the events surrounding Jan. 6 was one of the first major steps the House panel took in its investigation. And the grand jury subpoena suggests that the Justice Department has not only been following the committee’s lead in pursuing its inquiry, but also that prosecutors believe evidence of a crime may exist in the White House documents the archives turned over to the House panel.
The U.S. Secret Service learned of a threat to House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) days before the Jan. 6 insurrection but failed to pass that information along until hours after the Capitol was breached, according to newly revealed emails.
Emails obtained by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington showed that Secret Service agents discovered a Parler account on Jan. 4, 2021, that posted a series of violent threats against the House speaker and Joe Biden, but the agency did not share them with law enforcement until more than five hours after Donald Trump supporters broke into the Capitol.
“Good afternoon, The US Secret Service is passing notification to the US Capitol Police regarding discovery of a social media threat directed toward Speaker Nancy Pelosi,” the agency said in a message sent at 5:55 p.m. that day.
On Dec. 31, 2020, the account referred to the day Congress certified Biden’s win as “#1776 all over again” and listed a series of enemies, including Pelosi, and encouraged fellow Trump supporters to keep their “MAGA gear hidden” until they had checked into hotels and be wary of both police and locals….
The threats became more specific closer to Jan. 6, when the account targeted the president-elect.
“Biden will die shortly after being elected,” the account posted Jan. 6. “Patriots are gonna tear his head off. Prison is his best case scenario.”
“We’re all on a mission to save America. Lone wolf attacks are the way to go,” read another post from the following day. “Stay anonymous. Stay alive. Guns up Patriots!!”
Other emails obtained by CREW show the Secret Service learned of threats against vice president Mike Pence but failed to act.
That’s it for me today. What other stories are you following?
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I woke up today with a sense of unreality. It’s not quite clinical derealization, just a feeling that everything is out of kilter. I’ve had this feeling at times during the years we’ve been dealing as a country with Trump and then having a pandemic superimposed on top of the Trump insanity. Right now I think the feeling is triggered by the rapidly breaking news over the past week or so and the amazing possibility that Trump could actually be indicted along with the real possibility that his cult followers could explode into mass violence.
Yesterday we learned that New York prosecutors are close to a plea deal with Trump Organization CFO. Alan Weisselberg. Experts are saying that a conviction of Weisselberg would basically be the end for Trump’s company. Weisselberg says he absolutely won’t testify against Trump, and I assumed that meant the deal would permit him to stay clammed up. I actually argued with Dakinikat about this yesterday, but she was right. Weisselberg could still be forced testify to a grand jury. And he wouldn’t be able to take the fifth, since he already admitted guilt.
This plea would do two things– Put a ton of pressure on Trump Org,, which is still a defendant, and also permit the DA to put Weisselberg in the GJ (even though he says he is not cooperating) and force him to testify.
We also learned that Eric Herschmann, who appeared prominently in the January 6 Committee testimony, has received a subpoena to testify to a Trump grand jury in Washington DC. Politico: Justice Department subpoenas Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann. Herschmann was at the White House on January 6, 2021, and he seems to know where all the bodies are buried.
A federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6 attack has subpoenaed Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann for documents and testimony, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Herschmann represented Donald Trump in the former president’s first impeachment trial and later joined the White House as a senior adviser. He did not work in the White House counsel’s office, but did provide Trump with legal advice. Because of that responsibility, there will likely be litigation over the scope of the subpoena and over how executive and attorney-client privileges may limit Herschmann’s ability to comply….
During the tumultuous final weeks of Trump’s term, Herschmann clashed with other aides and advisers who pushed the defeated president to fight the election results. He was also present for many of the most consequential meetings in that period of time. Among them was a high-stakes meeting where most of the Trump Justice Department’s top brass threatened to resign rather than work under a colleague who wanted to advance spurious claims of widespread voter fraud.
Herschmann also sparred with Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn when they urged Trump to have the military seize voting machines. The Jan. 6 select committee has aired numerous portions of his testimony to their panel, which is blunt and sometimes darkly amusing.
A team of computer experts directed by lawyers allied with President Donald Trump copied sensitive data from election systems in Georgia as part of a secretive, multistate effort to access voting equipment that was broader, more organized and more successful than previously reported, according to emails and other records obtained by The Washington Post.
Surrealist Wardrobe, Marcel Jean, 1941
As they worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the lawyers asked a forensic data firm to access county election systems in at least three battleground states, according to the documents and interviews. The firm charged an upfront retainer fee for each job, which in one case was $26,000.
Attorney Sidney Powell sent the team to Michigan to copy a rural county’s election data and later helped arrange for it to do the same in the Detroit area, according to the records. A Trump campaign attorney engaged the team to travel to Nevada. And the day after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol the team was in southern Georgia, copying data from a Dominion voting system in rural Coffee County.
The emails and other records were collected through a subpoena issued to the forensics firm, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, by plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit in federal court over the security of Georgia’s voting systems. The documents provide the first confirmation that data from Georgia’s election system was copied. Indications of a breach there were first raised by plaintiffs in the case in February, and state officials have said they are investigating.
“The breach is way beyond what we thought,” said David D. Cross, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, who include voting-security activists and Georgia voters. “The scope of it is mind-blowing.”
We also found out yesterday that the DOJ doesn’t want to reveal the information in the affidavit they used to convince a judge to approve a search warrant for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property because that could interfere with active criminal investigations: Hugo Lowell at The Guardian: Justice department asks not to disclose affidavit behind Mar-a-Lago search.
The US Department of Justice has asked a judge not to release the affidavit that gave the FBI probable cause to search Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, worsening distrust among top Trump aides casting about for any insight into the intensifying criminal investigation surrounding the former president.
The affidavit should not be unsealed because that could reveal the scope of the investigation into Trump’s unauthorized retention of government secrets, the justice department argued, days after the Mar-a-Lago search warrant showed it referenced potential violations of three criminal statutes….
Jonni Cheatwood, Visual Atelier
“The affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course,” the justice department said, adding that it did not oppose unsealing both a cover page and a sealing order that wouldn’t harm the criminal investigation.
In arguing against unsealing the affidavit, the justice department also said that the disclosure could harm its ability to gain cooperation from witnesses not only in the Mar-a-Lago investigation but also additional ones that would appear to touch on the former president.
“Disclosure of the government’s affidavit at this stage would also likely chill future cooperation by witnesses whose assistance may be sought as this investigation progresses, as well as in other high-profile investigations,” prosecutors added.
Former President Donald Trump claims that he “will do whatever” he can to bring down “the temperature” following last week’s FBI’s raid of his Florida home and club, Mar-a-Lago. But even a glimpse of Truth Social — Trump’s social media company — shows that the MAGA website has been a haven for private, doxxed information not only about authorities involved in the federal raid, but also of their families.
A review of Truth Social postings by Rolling Stone shows Trump supporters have spent the past week doxxing both Judge Bruce Reinhart, the magistrate judge who approved the Mar-a-Lago warrant, and an FBI agent involved in preparing the request, as well as their families. The information includes their purported home addresses, phone numbers, places of worship, private offices, and similar information about the men’s families and junior employees….
Former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler posted the name of an FBI agent involved in the preparation of the warrant on Truth Social, as well as the names of his wife and child, their social media accounts, and the school the child attends. Truth Social removed the post by Ziegeler but the verbatim text of the post, complete with contact information for the agent and his family, have spread across Trump’s social media in a series of posts with no apparent attempts at moderation by the company.
When a federal court unsealed the search warrant, the court redacted the names of FBI agents involved. But the names became public when the pro-Trump outlet Breitbart obtained a leaked copy of the warrant and posted an article highlighting the agents’ names. In a move that added fuel to the MAGA doxxing push, Truth Social subsequently issued a push notification to its users that linked out to a third-party news article listing the agents’ names, according to CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan.
Truth Social fans have similarly targeted Judge Reinhart. Immediately after news of the warrant broke, Truth Social filled with calls to doxx the judge. “I bet he didn’t think anybody would leak his name, be nice if we had his address and phone number,” one user wrote. “BRUCE REINHART MAKE HOM [sic] FAMOUS WHATS HIS ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER?” bayed another.
Within a day, Truth Social users had already arrived at and posted what they believed to be personal information of both Reinhart and his wife, including posts with addresses and a personal phone number for him. “Office maybe or home,” one Truth Social user wrote next to a south Florida address, adding “GO GET HIM, FLORIDA.”
Civil war is among the many terms we now use too easily. The American Civil War was a bloodbath driven by the inevitable confrontation between the Union and the organized forces of sedition and slavery. But at least the Civil War, as I said Friday on Morning Joe during a panel on political violence in America, was about something. Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government.
The United States now faces a different kind of violence, from people who believe in nothing—or at least, in nothing real. We do not risk the creation of organized armies and militias in Virginia or Louisiana or Alabama marching on federal institutions. Instead, all of us face random threats and unpredictable dangers from people among us who spend too much time watching television and plunging down internet rabbit holes. These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.
There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.
So that’s yesterday’s news. Today most of the talk is about the primaries in Wyoming and Alaska, where two women who have opposed Trump are up for reelection and another woman who supports Trump is running for the House.
Tuesday’s primaries in Alaska and Wyoming will spotlight two big Republican detractors of former President Donald Trump — and now two big targets of his revenge tour this election cycle.
The incumbents, Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Liz Cheney, may also see two diverging results at the ballot box.
Wassily Kandinsky
Polls close in Alaska at 1 a.m. ET on Wednesday and in Wyoming at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday….
Cheney, Wyoming’s lone member of the House, has…cemented herself as the one of the most vocal anti-Trump members of Congress.
She earned the ire of Trump, his ardent supporters and many of her fellow Republican lawmakers after she crossed party lines — with nine other House Republicans — to impeach him after the attack on the U.S. Capitol last year.
She was censured one month later by the Wyoming Republican Party and, though she initially survived a leadership vote among the House GOP caucus, she was subsequently booted from her position as the No. 3 House Republican.
Legislatively, Cheney and Trump were not political foes: As noted by FiveThirtyEight, Cheney voted with him on the issues 92.9% of the time.
But she has broken with Trump on what she calls the greatest issue of all: His continued, baseless attacks on elections. As vice chair of the House Jan. 6 committee, she has taken a major role in a year-long investigation into Trump’s conduct before, during and after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
On Tuesday, Wyoming Republicans determine the fate of Representative Liz Cheney, the putative leader of the anti-Trump forces in the Republican party.
Six days after the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol – when no other Republican in the House or Senate was willing to rebuke Trump – Cheney charged on the House floor that “the president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”
The next day, Cheney joined nine other House Republicans and 222 Democrats in voting to impeach Trump.
So far, three of these 10 principled Republican lawmakers have lost their primaries. Two have won them. The remaining four are retiring.
As vice-chair of the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee investigating the causes of that attack, Cheney has ceaselessly and tirelessly helped lay out the case against Trump during eight public hearings held in June and July, with more to come.
In response, Trump has done everything possible to end Cheney’s career. He made sure House Republicans revoked her status as the third highest-ranking leader of the Republican caucus, and that Wyoming Republicans censured her.
Trump also selected Cheney’s opponent in Tuesday’s Republican primary, Harriet Hageman – who has rallied behind Trump and amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
I’m not sure what made me think of this Sun Tzu quote exactly. I’ve been hearing “justice delayed is justice denied” more frequently. That’s a more recent quote from William Gladstone. It’s quiet this morning on the news front. So quiet, you might just hear a grinding sound.
This is from Politico: “Judge orders Graham to testify in Atlanta-area Trump probe. Investigators intend to query Graham about two phone calls with Georgia election officials that included a discussion of the process for counting absentee ballots.” I keep wondering if the FBI will find the kompromat on Lady Lindsey in one of those leatherbound boxes found in the basement of Mar-a-Lago.
A federal judge on Monday turned down Sen. Lindsey Graham’s bid to throw out a subpoena compelling him to testify before the Atlanta-area grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
“[T]he Court finds that the District Attorney has shown extraordinary circumstances and a special need for Senator Graham’s testimony on issues relating to alleged attempts to influence or disrupt the lawful administration of Georgia’s 2022 elections,” U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May wrote in a 22-page opinion rejecting Graham’s effort and sending the matter back to state courts for further proceedings.
The ruling is a victory for District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the grand jury probe that resulted in a subpoena for Graham (R-S.C.) to appear for an Aug. 23 interview. Investigators intend to query Graham about two phone calls with Georgia election officials, at the same time Trump was attempting to subvert his defeat, that included a discussion of the process for counting absentee ballots.“
Senator Graham has unique personal knowledge about the substance and circumstances of the phone calls with Georgia election officials, as well as the logistics of setting them up and his actions afterward,” May wrote. “And though other Georgia election officials were allegedly present on these calls and have made public statements about the substance of those conversations, Senator Graham has largely (and indeed publicly) disputed their characterizations of the nature of the calls and what was said and implied. Accordingly, Senator Graham’s potential testimony on these issues … are unique to Senator Graham.”
“In a statement issued later Monday through his Senate office, Graham indicated he would appeal the ruling.
Whatever gravitas Senator Graham may have had is now gone. Donald Trump has hung his ass as a trophy somewhere on some Golf Club wall.
Tehran, in its first public reaction, said Salman Rushdie and his supporters were to blame for an attack that left the “Satanic Verses" author with severe injuries.https://t.co/qvUCMeAKo4
More information is being released and reported on the attempted murder of author Salman Rushdie. This is from The Washington Post. It’s written by Jennifer Hassan. “Iran denies involvement in Rushdie attack, says he brought it on himself.”
Iran denied any involvement Monday in last week’s attack that left author Salman Rushdie with severe injuries after he was stabbed in the neck and abdomen onstage at an event in western New York.
In its first public reaction to the stabbing, Iran said Rushdie and his supporters were to blame for the attack, more than three decades after Tehran issued a directive for Muslims to kill Rushdie because of his book “The Satanic Verses,” published in 1988.
“We do not blame, or recognize worthy of condemnation, anyone except himself and his supporters,” Nasser Kanaani, spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said of the stabbing, which has been condemned by world leaders and has rocked the literary world.
Kanaani told reporters that through his writing,the Indian-born British American novelisthad insulted “the holiness of Islam” and crossed “the red lines of more than 1½ billion Muslims.”
The Three Judges, 1858/60, Honoré Victorin Daumier
The 24-year-old man accused of stabbing author Salman Rushdie had been in direct contact with members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on social media, European and Middle Eastern intelligence officials told VICE World News.
Hadi Matar has been charged with attempted murder after Rushdie, 75, was repeatedly stabbed on stage ahead of a speaking event in Chautauqua, New York, on Friday. On Sunday, Rushdie’s son Zafar Rushdie said his father was in a critical condition and had sustained “life-changing” injuries but had been taken off a ventilator and had been able to speak.
A NATO counterterrorism official from a European country said the stabbing had all the hallmarks of a “guided” attack, where an intelligence service talks a supporter into action, without direct support or involvement in the attack itself.
“Close scrutiny needs to be paid to his communications,” said the NATO official, who was not authorised to speak on the record. “More investigation will reveal more information on the exact nature of the links.”
There’s no evidence Iranian officials were involved in organising or orchestrating the attack on Rushdie. Security officials who confirmed the social media contact would not elaborate on the nature of the communications because investigations are ongoing. They would not disclose who initiated the contact, when it took place, or what was discussed.
And this is interesting in terms of the Department of Justice investigations and the former guy. There are two separate warrants now that we know about.
Encouraging news – DOJ may have a 2nd investigation of Trump – no details. See attached. pic.twitter.com/uVcF9owwHf
The last we heard of Trump, he threatened the DOJ if they didn’t let him “help” the investigation. This is from a blog post of Katelyn Caralle, the U.S. Political Reporter For Dailymail.com.
Donald Trump confirmed that he told the DOJ he would ‘do whatever I can to help the country’ after outrage ensued after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate
‘People are so angry at what is taking place,’ Trump told Fox. ‘Whatever we can do to help—because the temperature has to be brought down in the country’
Added a warning: ‘If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen’
A report Sunday revealed Trump had a representative tell a DOJ official he had a message for Attorney General Merrick Garland
‘The country is on fire. What can I do to reduce the heat?’ was the message
Allies of former President Donald Trump have claimed that he unilaterally declassified every single government document that he took with him to Mar-a-Lago on his way out of the White House in 2021.
The case in question involved a New York Times request for documents relating to covert operations in Syria that Trump had revealed in a tweet by criticizing “massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels” made by the United States government.
By talking about the matter publicly, argued the New York Times, Trump had in essence declassified the existence of the program, which would then make documents about it available to reporters through requests via the Freedom of Information Act.
The Trump DOJ pushed back on this, however, and successfully argued that mere presidential proclamations are insufficient to formally declassify documents.
“The Times cites no authority that stands for the proposition that the President can inadvertently declassify information and we are aware of none,” wrote the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in its decision against the Times. “Because declassification, even by the President, must follow established procedures, that argument fails.”
Excuse me while I chuckle.
“A defeated former president who was at the center of a failed coup allegedly walks out the door with nuclear secrets, refuses to give them back and then leaves a creepy, semi-threatening message for the attorney general — that’s apparently where we are.”https://t.co/m3TopZQ9rD
Jennifer Rubin has much to say about Trump and how he easily absconded with Federal Documents, including Top Secret National Security Matters. Rubin writes this for The Washington Post: “Leaving with nuclear secrets would be Trump’s dumbest, scariest stunt yet.”
A defeated former president who was at the center of a failed coup allegedly walks out the door with nuclear secrets, refuses to give them back and then leaves a creepy, semi-threatening message for the attorney general — that’s apparently where we are. Donald Trump and his apologists are as dangerous to our national security as spies and traitors who would spirit away our most closely held secrets.
The documents at issue supposedly include material so confidential it merits a top secret rating (TS/SCI) that no president — let alone an ex-president — can wish away.
Former FBI special agent and lawyer Asha Rangappa dismisses Trump’s assertion that he declassified everything: “The claim is bogus because clearly the current position of the United States government is that these documents are classified. This is controlling, whatever he did before he left office.” She adds, “He has no classification authority as of Jan. 20, 2021. Trump forgets that whatever awesome powers and immunities he held as president now belong to [President] Biden.”
Indeed, this nondefense bolsters the conclusion that Trump knew the documents were classified. “It is an admission because it would mean Trump had knowledge of the content of the documents, and that he apparently planned to remove them once relabeled,” observes Ryan Goodman, national security law expert and co-editor of Just Security.
The more facts we know, the worse it gets. According to New York Times reporting, “At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government.” Perhaps Trump, a compulsive liar, and his counsel were less than honest.
Even more stunning, just before Attorney General Merrick Garland’s public announcement regarding the search, a close Trump associate reached out to DOJ with a message for Garland. Trump wanted Garland “to know that he had been checking in with people around the country and found them to be enraged by the search,” the Times reported. A threat? A plea? Maybe both, but it certainly reflects Trump’s telltale mix of ignorance, arrogance, lawlessness, narcissism and recklessness.
I hope we get more justice on this than we got from Richard Nixon’s lawlessness.
What’s on your reading and blogging list 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.
In a highly unusual move, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week canceled bookings worth about $10 million, including in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. A spokesman said the NRSC is not abandoning those races but prioritizing ad spots that are shared with campaigns and benefit from discounted rates. Still, the cancellations forfeit cheaper prices that came from booking early, and better budgeting could have covered both.
[The cover sheet] showed that the FBI believes that Trump may be guilty of the willful retention of national defense information, concealment or removal of government records, and obstruction of federal investigation.
Taken together, it’s reoriented Trump’s thinking about whether he should announce a presidential campaign before or after the midterm elections, according to those who have spoken with him over the past two weeks. They said Trump feels less pressure to announce early because viable challengers who might otherwise force his hand have faded into the background. But there are other reasons to wait.
A bit more from Politico: Appeals court backs ruling to release DOJ memo on Trump prosecution.“The harm to the body of women and people capable of pregnancy in not issuing the injunction could not be more real, clear, present and dangerous to the court.”
But constitutions — especially the broken one we have now — inevitably orient us to the past and misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on what the present and future demand for and from those who live now. This aids the right, which insists on sticking with what it claims to be the original meaning of the past.
But how do we solve a problem like Greg Abbott, Marjorie Taylor Green, Ron DeSantis, Jeff Landry, Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and all the the other Trump Zombies?
In the unsealing filing by CNN and the other outlets with the court, they pointed to “the historic importance of these events.”
Patel, who under Trump had been the chief of staff for the acting defense secretary, claimed in a string of interviews that Trump had declassified a trove of “Russiagate documents” in the final days of his administration. But Patel claimed Trump’s White House counsel had blocked the release of those documents, and instead had them delivered to the National Archives.
“They’re mine,” three of Mr. Trump’s advisers said that he stated repeatedly when he was urged to return boxes of documents, some of them highly classified, that the National Archives sought after Mr. Trump took them with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., in January 2021. A nearly 18-month back-and-forth between the government and Mr. Trump ended in 
The New York Times: 
It was signed by Thomas P. Windom, the federal prosecutor who has been leading the Justice Department’s wide-ranging inquiry into what part Mr. Trump and his allies may have played in various schemes to maintain power after the former president’s defeat in the 2020 election — chief among them a plan to submit fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Good afternoon, The US Secret Service is passing notification to the US Capitol Police regarding discovery of a social media threat directed toward Speaker Nancy Pelosi,” the agency said in a message sent at 5:55 p.m. that day.
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