“The eyes of the world are upon you,” Eisenhower speaking to troops before Normandy invasion.
Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and President Biden is in France to mark the occasion. Some reports:
President Biden and key U.S. allies were in Normandy Thursday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.S.-led allied forces’ D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The brazen air and sea invasion would mark the beginning of the end of World War II, leading to the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German forces in Europe less than a year later.
Mr. Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were together to mark the most significant victory of the Western allies in the war, as well as the largest seaborne invasion in history. Mr. Biden is in France through the weekend for D-Day anniversary commemorations and plans to meet with leaders of key allies during his visit.
“Seventy-three-thousand brave Americans landed at Utah and Omaha beaches in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the president will greet American veterans and their family members while in France to honor their sacrifice,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in announcing the president’s trip.
Mr. Biden and first lady Jill Biden met WWII veterans one by one ahead of a memorial ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery on Thursday, presenting each one with coins made to commemorate the D-Day anniversary. He chatted and joked with some of the men, asking about their hometowns, thanking them for their service and calling them the greatest generation ever.
The president delivered remarks later Thursday at a commemoration ceremony that was also attended by members of Congress from both parties, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi.
The Independent: D-Day – latest: Biden warns world ‘will not surrender to bullies’ as he commemorates 80th anniversary.
President Joe Biden has vowed to not “surrender to the bullies” as he praised D-Day veterans for their bravery at a commemorative event.
The US President addressed the crowd in Ver-sur-Mer, France, on the 80th anniversary of the landings as he promised the 50 countries standing with Ukraine “will not walk away”.
“Make no mistake the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine. To see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked,” he said.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable.”
He added: “History tells us freedom is not free. You want to know the price of freedom come here to Normandy to look.”
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden greet a World War II veteran during ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. AP
Yahoo News: D-Day latest: Biden brands Putin ‘tyrant and bully’ in Normandy speech.
US President Joe Biden referred to Vladimir Putin as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘bully’ in his D-Day commemoration speech, after hailing the ‘resolute’ Second World War troops who fought in Normandy 80 years ago today.
President Biden was among the speakers at an international gathering in northern France to commemorate the June 1944 conflict. Biden recognised the bravery of troops who stormed the beaches in Normandy, before going on to speak about the Ukraine war and how ‘the struggle between dictatorship and freedom is unending’.
Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had given France’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, to a number of US veterans, while the Danish prime minister said it is our generation’s “responsibility” to stand up to Vladimir Putin.
The New York Times’ Roger Cohen has a special report on D-Day with photos by Laetitia Vancon: D-Day at 80: Veterans of the pivotal battle of World War II are disappearing. Europe, facing new conflict, recalls what their comrades died for.
They were ordinary. The young men from afar who clambered ashore on June 6, 1944, into a hail of Nazi gunfire from the Normandy bluffs did not think of themselves as heroes.
No, said Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa, the allied soldiers “in this great battle were ordinary,” youths who “rose to this challenge with courage and a tremendous will to win, for freedom.”
In front of the general, during a ceremony this week at Deauville on the Normandy coast, were 48 American survivors of that day, the youngest of them 98, most of them 100 years old or more. The veterans sat in wheelchairs. They saluted, briskly enough. Eight decades have gone by, many of them passed in silence because memories of the war were too terrible to relate.
When the 90th anniversary of D-Day comes around in 2034, there may be no more vets. Living memory of the beaches of their sacrifice will be no more.
“Dark clouds of war in Europe are forming,” General Williams said, as he alluded to allied determination to defend Ukraine against Russian attack. This 80th anniversary of the landings is a celebration, but a somber one. Europe is troubled and apprehensive, extremism eating at its liberal democracies.
For more than 27 months now, there has been a war on the continent that has taken hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian lives. Russia was not invited to the commemoration even though the role of the Soviet Red Army in the defeat of Hitler was critical. A decade ago, President Vladimir V. Putin attended. Now he speaks of nuclear war. It is a time of fissuring and uncertainty.
Remembering the fight against Hitler in WWII is so important today, when a criminal and conman has apparently hypnotizes a large portion of the U.S. population. We can’t allow him to end our democracy and turn Europe over to Putin.
Back in the USA, Senate Republicans showed their true colors yesterday in a vote to protect the right to contraception.
CNN: Senate GOP blocks bill to guarantee access to contraception.
Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to block a bill put forward by Democrats that would guarantee access to contraception nationwide, as Democrats seek to highlight the issue in the run up to November’s elections.
The bill – the Right to Contraception Act – would enshrine into federal law a right for individuals to buy and use contraceptives, as well as for health care providers to provide them. It would apply to birth control pills, the plan B pill, condoms and other forms of contraception.
The legislation failed to advance in a procedural vote by a tally of 51 to 39. Most Republicans dismissed the effort as a political messaging vote that is unnecessary and overly broad.
GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins crossed over to vote with Democrats in favor of advancing the bill. Schumer switched his vote to a no at the last minute in a procedural move that will allow Democrats to bring the bill back up in the future if they want.
“This is a show vote. It’s not serious,” GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said. “Plus, it’s a huge overreach. It doesn’t make any exceptions for conscience. … It’s a phony vote because contraception, to my knowledge, is not illegal. It’s not unavailable.”
The vote is part of a larger push by Senate Democrats to draw attention to how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has affected all aspects of reproductive health – not just abortion – as the election draws closer. Democrats are highlighting the issue this month, which marks the two-year anniversary of the high court’s ruling.
“In the coming weeks, Senate Democrats will put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said ahead of the vote.
Democratic senators have also introduced a legislative package to establish a nationwide right to in-vitro fertilization, which is expected to come up for a vote as soon as next week.
The Daily Beast: Biden Campaign Names and Shames Republicans Who Voted to Block Contraception Bill.
The Biden campaign posted a video on Wednesday night showing the faces of the 39 senators who voted against the legislation. (Seven Republican senators were not present for the vote.)
“These are the Trump-aligned Republicans who just blocked a bill to protect a woman’s right to contraception,” the campaign tweeted on X….
Ahead of the vote, Schumer said that Senate Democrats would “put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” according to the Associated Press.
Polling has consistently shown that there is broad bipartisan support among American voters for contraception, with 92 percent of respondents telling Gallup in 2022 that birth control was “morally acceptable.”
Republicans argued that legislation to enshrine the right to contraception is unnecessary, as it remains freely accessible and available across the country….
But Schumer said in a post-vote speech that “we are kidding ourselves if we think the hard-right is satisfied with overturning Roe,” warning that birth control could be next as reproductive rights continue to be threatened.
“So, make one thing clear: today was not a ‘show vote’ – this was a show-us-who-you-are vote,” he said. “And Senate Republicans showed the American people exactly who they are.”
Recall that after the Dobbs decision, Clarence Thomas stated his desire to overturn the decisions that made contraception, same sex marriage, and sex between same sex partners basic rights–all based on the right to privacy.
Speaking of the right wing SCOTUS justices, last night a former clerk of Samuel Alito appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show.
HuffPost: Former Alito Law Clerk ‘Aghast’ After Seeing Jan. 6 Flag Outside His Home, Calls For Recusal.
A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said Wednesday she was shocked after learning two flags affiliated with rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were flown outside his homes, saying she believed he should recuse himself from several cases before the court.
Susan Sullivan, who worked as a clerk while Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, spoke to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell amid the controversy surrounding the flags.
“I was aghast when I saw those photographs because I’ve never known Justice Alito to be anything other than an honorable man, to be a man of integrity,” Sullivan, now a professor at Temple University, told O’Donnell. “It is irrelevant if Mrs. Alito flew it or not. The fact is that flag was there.”
“This is not an insignificant symbol,” she went on. “Irrespective of why it is there, who put it there, it shouldn’t have been there. The problem is that flag is incendiary and it cannot do anything other than raise a reasonable inference of bias.”
Alito has rejected the calls for him to recuse from January 6 related cases.
“I am confident that a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that the events … do not meet the applicable standard for recusal,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers last month. “I am therefore required to reject your request.”
Sullivan rejected that claim in the Wednesday interview and an earlier opinion piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying recusal was warranted especially because of the decision before the court.
“[It is] the symbol of these people who attacked the capitol. They support Trump unconditionally,” she said. “So if you have cases before the court that directly relates not just to the former president but to criminal cases that involve that election process…”
“The stakes have never been higher and recusal is, to me, it just defies logic that one would not recuse themselves from a case like this,” Sullivan added. “The stakes are too high.”
Why isn’t Senator Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee doing anything to rein in Alito?
Noah Berlansky at Public Notice: Dick Durbin needs to step up and do his damn job.
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held a lengthy oversight hearing to badger Attorney General Merrick Garland and push the GOP’s false narrative about President Biden weaponizing the DOJ against Donald Trump.
Even though the hearing was conducted in obvious bad faith, it was in some ways successful, at least in the limited sense that Republicans grabbed a lot of headlines and forced Garland to spend a day on the defensive. Virtually every major news outlet it extensive coverage, ranging from the New York Times to MSNBC to Newsmax….
Congressional oversight hearings give Congress a chance to focus the national conversation on what members want to talk about. It gives them a chance to pressure executive branch officials to adopt congressional priorities, or to explain and potentially embarrass themselves.
In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves.
Republicans like Jim Jordan are ignorant about a lot of things. But they understand that the gavel is power, and they are not afraid to use it. Senate Democrats need to get over their qualms and, in this instance, behave more like their rivals across the aisle….
Hearings drive narratives. But they can do more than that. Congress has real power to pressure government officials, and hearings are a way to demonstrate and exercise that power.
Read more at Public Notice.
More odds and ends:
The Daily Beast: Hunter Biden Prosecutors Might’ve Already Lost the Jury.
The Hunter Biden trial starting in Wilmington, Delaware, is a poster-child case for potential jury nullification.
Biden, the only surviving son of President Joe Biden, is being tried for possessing a firearm while being a user of illegal drugs or drug addict and for lying about the same on a purchase form when he bought a gun. On the surface, the prosecution—a culmination of more than a half-decade of investigation by Special Counsel David Weiss—would appear to have a slam dunk case because there is no real dispute he bought the gun, or that he had a drug addiction around the time he bought the gun.
The strict definition of jury nullification is when a jury has determined that a defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—but either rejects the evidence or refuses to apply the law because the jury “wants to send a message about some social issue that is larger than the case itself, or because the result dictated by law is contrary to the jury’s sense of justice, morality, or fairness.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hunter Biden
Let’s be clear. Juries are not supposed to do that. They are supposed to convict if the evidence proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and acquit if it doesn’t.
But while the definition of nullification conjures up images of a jury making a social justice-inspired speech in refusing to convict, the reality is quite different because the jury does not need to make such a blatant statement. Rather, the sense that jurors may have of unfairness can be evidenced in an acquittal—despite strong evidence of guilt. (There’s also, of course, the possibility of a hung jury.)
What that means is skilled defense counsel can bring out the factors of unfairness without having to specifically ask a jury to ignore evidence or the law, while skilled prosecutors need to guard against the kind of evidence and testimony that may lead to nullification.
Thus far, the trial is revealing an outmatched prosecution, which has already blundered into a couple of minefields. Defense counsel Abbe Lowell is a seasoned high-profile defense counsel who has defended Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and got former presidential candidate John Edwards acquitted on campaign finance charges (brought by then-DOJ lawyer Jack Smith).
In the opening by the Biden defense team, Lowell focused on the requirement that the false statements on the gun ownership form had to be “knowing”—a term that Lowell claimed the prosecution tried to avoid in its opening. The utility of this defense is that it works synergistically with the effects of Biden’s admitted drug addiction affecting his decision-making abilities, as well as necessitating a deep dive into the details of his addiction and the specific timeline of when he was using crack cocaine and his efforts to get clean.
The defense appears to be setting up a defense theory that, on the specific date Biden bought the gun, he genuinely believed he was not an addict because he had just finished an 11-day rehabilitation program.
More at the link.
Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Judge Reshuffles Hearings in Trump Documents Case.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case abruptly changed the proceeding’s schedule on Wednesday, reshuffling the timing for hearings on an array of important legal issues.
The move by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was unlikely to have much impact on the overall trajectory of the case, but it reflected the substantial number of unresolved legal motions she is juggling. Last month, Judge Cannon scrapped the case’s trial date, saying she could not yet pick a new one because of what she described at the time as “the myriad and interconnected” questions she had still not managed to consider.
Judge Cannon kept in place a hearing she had set for June 21 to discuss a motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel named to oversee the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, was illegally appointed to his job.
Similar motions have been rejected in cases involving other special counsels, including Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, and David C. Weiss, who has brought two criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
The most important change Judge Cannon made to the schedule in a brief order was arguably the cancellation of a three-day hearing that had been set to take place starting June 24 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.
The hearing was originally meant to consider whether Mr. Trump’s lawyers should be permitted access to communications between prosecutors working for Mr. Smith and officials at the National Archives and several national security agencies.
Giddy up
The lawyers want those communications to bolster their claims that Mr. Smith worked hand in glove with the Biden administration and members of the so-called deep state to bring the documents case against Mr. Trump.
Prosecutors had objected to holding the proceeding at all, telling Judge Cannon in March that no similar hearings had ever been held in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits. In her order on Wednesday, she said she would place the hearing back on her calendar at some point in the future.
Instead of that hearing, Judge Cannon said there would now be a shorter one, on June 24 and 25, to consider different topics, including any lingering discussion about Mr. Smith’s appointment.
Judge Cannon also told the defense and the prosecution to be ready to debate Mr. Trump’s motion to exclude from the case any evidence — including more than 100 classified documents — that the F.B.I. discovered in August 2022 when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
The two sides will argue as well over Mr. Trump’s attempt to suppress the private audio notes that prosecutors obtained from one of his lawyers through a process that pierced the normal protections of attorney-client privilege. The notes by the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, were central to the government’s allegations that Mr. Trump had obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the classified materials he took to Mar-a-Lago.
Finally, the parties are expected to discuss Mr. Smith’s request to Judge Cannon to alter Mr. Trump’s conditions of release by barring him from making public statements that could endanger F.B.I. agents working on the case.
Aileen Cannon is an expert at causing unnecessary delays without triggering an appeal to the 11th Circuit. If she rules that Jack Smith was illegally appointed, that would be cause for immediate appeal, so she will probably find some way to just waste more time.
Jose Pagliery at The Daily Beast: Trial Lawyer Lost 8 Lbs Skipping Trump’s McDonald’s Courthouse Lunches.
Donald Trump’s lead lawyer says the former president’s seven-week criminal trial in New York took a physical toll—but he still managed to lose weight by skipping Trump’s notoriously unhealthy meals.
Todd Blanche appeared on a podcast, For The Defense, hosted by the attorney David Oscar Markus.
“Was it McDonald’s for lunch every single day, or did you get something else?” Markus asked.
“Oh, no-no-no,” Blanche said. “Well, first of all, I didn’t have lunch one day. I ate in the morning and at night.”
Delivery of McDonalds order for Trump’s courthouse lunch
“Look, President Trump’s team takes care of everybody. Like, everybody gets food. You know, there’s a lot of food. It’s not always McDonald’s. There’s a lot of… variety. There’s pizza, and there’s other non-healthy alternatives to McDonald’s.”
Blanche smiled, turning away from the camera and raising his eyebrows.
“Look, I loved it, because, you know, you come in from lunch, and as you know when you’re on trial, you’re trying to figure out what the heck you’re gonna stuff in your belly with the hour that you have. And we would walk in, and there would just be this, just, plethora of just food everywhere,” he said, gesturing with his hands.
The public got a peek last Thursday, when Donald Trump Jr. posted a TikTok video from what legal teams sometimes call the “war room,” where defendants strategize during breaks. The clip showed Trump Sr. sitting before a half-finished 20-ounce Diet Coca-Cola, an opened bag of Lay’s potato chips, a box of Milk Duds, a Milky Way bar, a theater-sized box of Whoppers malted milk balls, and what appeared to be four Hostess SnoBalls….
Trump’s go-to McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake—was first described by close ally Corey R. Lewandowski in a 2017 book, Let Trump Be Trump.
How is it possible that Trump hasn’t had a heart attack by now?
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.
I don’t know if anyone is reading this. I’ve had quite a disturbing day so far. My phone suddenly stopped working and I was unable to make or receive calls. I spent a couple of hours messaging back and forth with tech support, and they finally got things working. Somehow I got thrown off the network and couldn’t get back on. But the guy finally figured it out and I can phone and text again. Fortunately, I got a very kind and patient representative who hung in there with me all that time.
Dakinikat wondered if the problem could have something to do with the solar storm that made the northern lights visible all the way down South. I guess it’s possible. The phone was working yesterday until around 1PM. I didn’t realize there was a problem until later though. Anyway, enough of my boring life.
Since it’s Caturday, I want to recommend a lovely piece in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols about his much loved cat Carla, who recently passed away: The Cat Who Saved Me. I will never owe another cat the debt that I owe her.
Almost 15 years ago, I was in bad shape. I was divorced, broke, drinking too much, and living in a dated walk-up next to a noisy bar. (It was only minutes from my young daughter, it had a nice view of the bay here in Newport, and I could afford it.) The local veterinary hospital was a few doors down; they always kept one or two adoptable animals in the window. One day, a gorgeous black cat, with a little white tuxedo patch and big gold-green eyes, showed up in a small cage. I stared at her for a while. She stared back patiently.
Tom NIchols with Carla
I wasn’t taking very good care of myself at that moment, so I decided I couldn’t take care of a cat. I walked on. For weeks, the cat sat there. For weeks, we stared at each other. One day, as I was deep in my cups, I took a walk with a friend and co-worker who also happened to be my next-door neighbor. “You look at that damn cat every day,” he said. “Just go in and get it.”
So I did.
The cat was called “RC” and she was a stray, but her preexisting spaying and good health showed that she’d once had a home. Now she was the queen of the animal clinic: Because of her gentle temperament, the staff would let her out of the cage after hours, and she would sit on their desks while they did their paperwork.
I picked her up. She looked at me as if to say: Yeah, I recognize you. You’re the doofus who stared at me for weeks. I signed the papers and took her home. She was fluffy and black-haired, so I decided I would name her after Carla Tortelli from the show Cheers; thus, she became Carla T. Nichols. She explored the apartment quietly for a day or two, and then, one afternoon, I found her on my bed, stretched out on her back, paws up, purring. Yep, she was saying. This will do.
I was still deeply depressed, but every night, Carla would come and flake out over my keyboard as I struggled to work. That’s enough of that,she seemed to say. And then we would go into the living room, where I would sit in a chair and Carla would sit on the armrest. (We’ve now both seen almost every episode of Law & Order.) Slowly, she added routine to my life, but mostly, we had lots of hours of doing nothing—the quiet time that can feel sort of desolate if you’re alone, but like healing if you have the right company.
Soon, I started to see daylight. I met a woman named Lynn. I laid off the booze. I got help of various kinds.
Lynn started to come to the apartment more often, but Carla gave her a full examination before bestowing approval: That cat was not going to let some newcomer waltz in and wreck the careful feline therapy she’d been providing. Finally, Carla climbed on the pillows one morning and curled up around Lynn’s head. Okay, she was saying. Lynn can stay.
That was the beginning of the turnaround. I hope you’ll go read the rest. It’s a wonderful description of what can happen when you welcome a special animal into your life.
A few interesting news stories to check out:
ProPublica: IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million.
Former President Donald Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an IRS inquiry uncovered by ProPublica and The New York Times. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.
The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.
But when Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the IRS has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.
The first write-off came on Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, ProPublica and the Times found.
Emile Munier, A small child reading to a cat
There is no indication the IRS challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the IRS. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.
The issues around Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the IRS undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. ProPublica and the Times, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the IRS would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties….
The reporting by ProPublica and the Times about the Chicago tower reveals a second component of Trump’s quarrel with the IRS. This account was pieced together from a collection of public documents, including filings from the New York attorney general’s suit against Trump in 2022, a passing reference to the audit in a congressional report that same year and an obscure 2019 IRS memorandum that explored the legitimacy of the accounting maneuver. The memorandum did not identify Trump, but the documents, along with tax records previously obtained by the Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of the inquiry.
Read more at the ProPublica link. There’s also an article at The New York Times: Trump May Owe $100 Million From Double-Dip Tax Breaks, Audit Shows.
More trouble for Trump? Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast writes: Trump Campaign Hid Settlements With Women, New Complaint Says.
A sex discrimination lawsuit against Donald Trump’s campaign has triggered new accusations that Trump’s lawyers have intentionally covered up settlement payments to women, in violation of federal law.
On Friday, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, demanding an investigation into the alleged cover-up. The complaint cites new allegations from 2016 Trump campaign aide A.J. Delgado, which she lodged in a sworn court declaration earlier this week as part of her ongoing discrimination suit against Trump’s political operation.
Delgado’s filing presented evidence of top Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz openly admitting that the campaign wanted to use a law firm to cover up a potential settlement payout in 2017. The arrangement, as Delgado described it, appears specifically designed to evade the consequences of federal disclosure laws that require campaigns to publicly report the identities of payment recipients.
“In other words, the payment would be routed through a middleman, to hide the fact that the Campaign had settled, from the public and the FEC,” Delgado stated. “I thus have direct, personal experience with the Defendant-Campaign hiding settlement payments to women, routing them through a ‘middleman law firm,’ which to the public would only appear as payments ‘for legal services.’”
Delgado also claimed to have “information and reason to believe” that other campaign payments have hidden settlements with women “who raised complaints of gender discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment.” Those payments, she said, are related to the $4.1 million that flowed to Kasowitz’s law firm over a two-month period immediately following the November 2020 election, as well as millions in mysterious legal reimbursements to the campaign’s compliance firm, Red Curve Solutions, which The Daily Beast first reported earlier this month, prompting a federal complaint.
The declaration is particularly significant in that it captures a direct admission of the campaign’s actual intentions behind this middleman arrangement—to keep the existence of a settlement from the public, and, by doing so, from the FEC itself.
More at the Daily Beast link.
Did you hear about Trump promising to cut taxes for oil companies in return for a $1 billion donation to his campaign? Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Sleazy $1 Billion Shakedown of Oil Execs Gives Dems an Opening.
A new Washington Post report that Trump made explicit policy promises to a roomful of Big Oil executives—while urging them to raise $1 billion for his campaign—is a powerful story in part because it wrecks what’s left of that mystique. In case you didn’t already know this, it shows yet again that if Trump has employed that aforementioned knowledge of elite corruption and self-dealing to any ends in his public career, it’s chiefly to benefit himself.
James Pelham, little girl reading with her cat
That counter narrative is a story that Democrats have a big opportunity to tell—if they seize on this news effectively. How might they do that?
For starters, the revelations seem to cry out for more scrutiny from Congress. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has been presiding over hearings into the oil industry as chair of the Budget Committee, says it’s “highly likely” that the committee will examine the new revelations.
“This is practically an invitation to ask more questions,” Whitehouse told me, describing this as a “natural extension of the investigation already underway.”
There’s plenty to explore. As the Post reports, an oil company executive at the gathering, held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last month, complained about environmental regulations under the Biden administration. Then this happened:
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
Obviously industries have long donated to politicians in both parties in hopes of governance that takes their interests into account, and they explicitly lobby for this as well. But in this case, Trump may have made detailed, concrete promises while simultaneously soliciting a precise amount in campaign contributions.
For instance, the Post reports, Trump vowed to scrap Biden’s ban on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports “on the first day.” He also promised to overturn new tailpipe emission limits designed to encourage the transition to electric vehicles, and he dangled more leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, “a priority that several of the executives raised.”
“The phrase that instantly came to mind as I was reading the story was ‘quid pro quo,’” Whitehouse told me. He also pointed to a new Politico report that oil industry officials are drawing up executive orders for Trump to sign as president. “Put those things together and it starts to look mighty damn corrupt,” Whitehouse said.
I mean, it would be a bribe, wouldn’t it?
Clarence Thomas is whining again. The AP via Politico: Thomas says critics are pushing ‘nastiness’ and calls Washington a ‘hideous place.’
FAIRHOPE, Alabama — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told attendees at a judicial conference Friday that he and his wife have faced “nastiness” and “lies” over the last several years and decried Washington, D.C., as a “hideous place.”
Thomas spoke at a conference attended by judges, attorneys and other court personnel in the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference, which hears federal cases from Alabama, Florida and Georgia. He made the comments pushing back on his critics in response to a question about working in a world that seems meanspirited.
Jan Steen, Children want to teach a cat reading
“I think there’s challenges to that. We’re in a world and we — certainly my wife and I the last two or three years it’s been — just the nastiness and the lies, it’s just incredible,” Thomas said.
“But you have some choices. You don’t get to prevent people from doing horrible things or saying horrible things. But one you have to understand and accept the fact that they can’t change you unless you permit that,” Thomas said.
Thomas has faced criticisms that he accepted luxury trips from a GOP donor without reporting them. Thomas last year maintained that he didn’t have to report the trips paid for by one of “our dearest friends.” His wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas has faced criticism for using her Facebook page to amplify unsubstantiated claims of corruption by President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
He did not discuss the content of the criticisms directly, but said that “reckless” people in Washington will “bomb your reputation.”
“They don’t bomb you necessarily, but they bomb your reputation or your good name or your honor. And that’s not a crime. But they can do as much harm that way,” Thomas said.
His reputation is already shot to hell. Why doesn’t he just resign and get out of Washington if he hates it so much?
The New York Times: Will You Accept the Election Results? Republicans Dodge the Question.
Less than six months out from the presidential contest, leading Republicans, including several of Donald J. Trump’s potential running mates, have refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, signaling that the party may again challenge the outcome if its candidate loses.
In a series of recent interviews, Republican officials and candidates have dodged the question, responded with nonanswers or offered clear falsehoods rather than commit to a notion that was once so uncontroversial that it was rarely discussed before an election.
The evasive answers show how the former president’s refusal to concede his defeat after the 2020 election has ruptured a tenet of American democracy — that candidates are bound by the outcome. Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans are now emulating his hedging well in advance of any voting.
For his part, Mr. Trump has said he will abide by a fair election but has also suggested that he already considers the election unfair. Mr. Trump frequently refers to the federal and state charges he is facing as “election interference.” He has refused to rule out the possibility of another riot from his supporters if he loses again.
“If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” Mr. Trump said last month when asked by Time magazine about the prospect of political violence. “It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
The authors go on to list several prominent Republicans who have refused to say if they will accept the election results. Read the rest at the NYT.
I’m going to end there. I’m really stressed out by my phone issue and a think I need a nap. Take care everyone.
Camilla Dickerson, Christabel with Cat
I have mostly legal news for you today. I’ll begin with some reactions to the Fani Willis witch hunt down in Georgia.
George Chidi at The Guardian: Is appearance of impropriety enough to oust Fani Willis from Trump case?
Is the appearance of impropriety enough to change the trajectory of the Donald Trump trial in Georgia?
That’s one legal question Scott McAfee, the Fulton county superior court judge, will wrestle with as he contemplates whether to throw the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade off the trial of the former president and co-defendants in the sprawling racketeering and election interference case.
The stakes are high. If Willis is disqualified, it will plunge the prosecution against Trump, and others, into chaos, likely triggering delays that could go beyond the November election. If Willis remains, the prosecution of the former US president for seeking to undermine Georgia’s 2020 election will continue – though it will be badly damaged in terms of political optics.
Defense attorneys argued early in the hearing Friday on the defense motion to remove Willis and her office from the case that the standard for disqualifying Willis requires only that the defense prove the appearance of conflict of interest.
“She is supposed to be disinterested under the sixth amendment, and she has been anything but that,” argued attorney John Merchant, who is representing Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official and co-defendant in the trial. “If this court allows this kind of behavior to go on … public confidence in the system will be shot.”
Willis’s team countered that the legal standard isn’t an appearance of a conflict, but an actual conflict, and that it’s a high burden that the defense hasn’t met. If Willis had concocted a scheme of self-enrichment with Wade, she would not have approached two other people to lead the prosecution first, nor would she have been pushing for the earliest-possible date to begin the trial, said Adam Abbate, an assistant district attorney for Fulton County.
McAfee expressed a sense of ambiguity in case law related to prosecutorial disqualification, noting that there was no clear-cut previous example resembling the issue before him.
“There are a number of cases that appear to exclusively rely on an appearance of impropriety,” McAfee said. “They acknowledge that there is some ambiguity here.”
Click the link for more discussion of the case. This whole “scandal” seems so silly to me. And why is a defendant in the case given so much credence by the justice system? I question whether this would be happening if Fani Willis were a white man.
At Esquire, Charles Pierce writes: The Fani Willis Evidentiary Hearing Was a Joke.
Down in Fulton County in Georgia, Judge Scott McAfee began hearing closing arguments in the hearings that will determine whether or not Fulton County DA Fani Willis will continue as the prosecutor in her monumental RICO case against a whole mess of defendants, including the mess that is the former president*, accused of conspiring to ratfck the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Judge McAfee already has said he will need at least two weeks to render the decision. And the stall-ball strategy reaches another judicial arena. Christ, I’d hate to be waiting for some of these judges to make our lunch order. We’d starve.
By Vincenzo Calli
The case is a joke. It literally is a product of one of the people under indictment, a career Republican operative named Michael Roman. It tangled the case all up in Willis’s romance with prosecutor Nathan Wade, which, in turn, tangled the case up in Wade’s divorce proceedings. From the Guardian:
“This was a disqualification hearing that quickly denigrated into a daytime soap opera,” said J Tom Morgan, a former district attorney in DeKalb county, a Fulton county neighbor. “Have they proven a conflict of interest, where this all started, absolutely not.”…It’s not exactly clear what the standard Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the case, will use to determine whether Willis should be disqualified. Georgia law allows for a prosecutor to be disqualified if there is an actual conflict of interest. Experts say state law has long established this high bar to clear and the defendants in the case have not done so. But McAfee has suggested that defense lawyers may not need to prove an actual conflict, but merely the appearance of one. “I think it’s clear that disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one,” he said at a recent hearing.
Oh, I love the sound of that. Judge McAfee needs two weeks to decide whether he feels like Willis has a conflict of interest? Between this, and the Supreme Court’s punting the can down the road and into the Potomac, and Judge Aileen Cannon down in Florida slow-talking everything in the purloined documents case, it is now my considered opinion that the American judicial system needs a damn shot clock.
Now here’s a real legal scandal for you.
Jane Mayer at The New Yorker: The Scandal of Clarence Thomas’s New Clerk.
Last week, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas shocked the legal community when the news broke that one of his new law clerks will be Crystal Clanton—who became notorious in 2015 for apparently sending texts that said, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” For most young lawyers, sending such a text would indeed have been the “end of story.” Instead, Clanton is on the cusp of clinching one of the most coveted prizes in the American legal system. In the past several years, as Clanton has risen through the ranks of conservative legal circles, the story of her alleged racist outburst has been curiously transformed into a tale of victimhood. The new narrative is that Clanton was somehow framed by an unnamed enemy who—for motives that remain unclear—fabricated the racist texts to defame her.
This new account has been greeted with suspicion by many. If the revised story is a lie, then it threatens to implicate not just Justice Thomas, who has endorsed it, but several lower-court federal judges and the leader of a major political group aligned with former President Donald Trump. Indeed, the whole affair may prove one of the most shopworn axioms of political reporting—that the coverup is worse than the crime.
Loe Saalborn Woman with a Cat 1950
When the vile texts were sent, Clanton was the second-in-command and field director of the hard-right youth group Turning Point USA. The organization, a nonprofit advocacy group closely allied with Donald Trump’s Presidential aspirations in 2024, is well known for poisonous rhetoric: its leader, Charlie Kirk, has recently denigrated Martin Luther King, Jr., as “awful,” questioned whether Black pilots are capable of flying planes, and argued that televised public executions, perhaps by guillotine, should be held in America, with young people watching. Yet, even within Turning Point, colleagues were so shocked by the bluntness of Clanton’s alleged texts that they preserved screenshots of the messages, which were shared in 2017 with The New Yorker. At the time, multiple Turning Point employees told me that Clanton was the author of the messages.
In 2017, Clanton told me, via e-mail, that she didn’t recall sending the texts, and that they seemed out of character. But when she was asked directly if she denied sending them she declined to answer. The screenshots of the messages bore her cell-phone number. Another former Turning Point employee, John Ryan O’Rourke, who was the recipient of the texts, said at the time that he preferred not to discuss them. Several other Turning Point colleagues had also seen and circulated the screenshots. And there was more evidence. In addition to the racist comments, the screenshots show Clanton asking, “Can I come to Starbucks in 5?”; she showed up at one, on cue, a few minutes later. (In 2018, the online platform Mediaite revealed another offensive statement by Clanton, sent on Snapchat. The post featured a photograph of a man who appeared to be Arab, accompanied by a caption that she had added: “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.”)
Clanton was kicked out Turning Point because of the texts. The Gini Thomas came to the rescue.
The story would likely be long forgotten, were it not for an extremely strange plot twist. After the texting scandal, Ginni Thomas, the lobbyist and politically active wife of Clarence Thomas, who had worked closely with Clanton as an adviser to Turning Point, unofficially adopted Clanton as the couple’s protégée. The Thomases harbor deep anger at the mainstream media, stemming in part from the Justice’s embattled 1991 confirmation hearing, and evidently saw in Clanton a fellow-victim. Soon after leaving Turning Point, Clanton started working for Ginni Thomas. Remarkably, the Thomases then invited Clanton to live with them at their home in exurban Virginia, for the better part of the next year. The couple encouraged Clanton to go to law school, and Justice Thomas himself recommended her when she successfully applied to the Antonin Scalia Law School, at George Mason University. Justice Thomas also helped Clanton, who graduated in 2022, line up a prestigious judicial clerkship with Chief Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Pryor is one of the most conservative members of the federal bench, and a well-known “feeder” of clerks to Justice Thomas’s chambers.
Supreme Court clerkships, which last for a year, are extremely valuable in both professional and financial terms. It’s common for former clerks to receive half-a-million-dollar bonuses when they sign on for their first law-firm jobs, and the credential eases the path to coveted academic and political positions. An extraordinary number of Thomas clerks—twenty-two, according to the Associated Press in 2018—populated the high ranks of the Trump Administration or were nominated by Trump for judgeships; others have fanned out across the nation to other prominent posts.
There’s much more at the New Yorker link.
And then there’s the Supreme Court, which appears to be trying to help Trump postpone his federal criminal cases.
Sonja West at Slate: SCOTUS Is Slow-Walking for Trump.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the case in which former President Donald Trump claims a virtually king-like right of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution. The court’s two-paragraph statement grants the case and sets the argument date at the end of April, without explanation. The announcement came with little fanfare, appearing on the court’s website (if you knew where to look) under the yawn-inducing heading of “Miscellaneous Order.”
But while the justices may be attempting to disguise their decision as the normal workings of a court of law, we need to be clear: This was an extraordinarily political act. They had before them a menu of options on how to handle this unprecedented case, and from those options, they chose one of the most beneficial for Trump’s chances of reelection. This is a big deal, and the court should not be allowed to hide its deliberate decisionmaking behind a smokescreen of generic legal maneuvering.
Berény Róbert (Budapest, 1887 – Budapest, 1953)
In fact, at every point in this process, the court has acted exactly as Trump’s legal team wished they would. First, the justices denied a mid-December request to take the question on an expedited basis, forcing it instead to go through a burdensome and predictably meaningless hearing in a lower court. Once the case returned to them, they then stayed silent for a bewildering two weeks before eventually announcing they would take the case. And, finally, they once again refused to act quickly and instead scheduled the oral argument a full seven weeks away, in late April. While technically they could have stalled even longer and refused to hear the case until next fall (and for all we know the late-April date was some sort of compromise position), the result of their judicial foot-dragging is the same: It very likely delays Trump’s election obstruction trial until after the election.
By camouflaging their actions in the banality of court procedure, the justices are obscuring the extent of the power they are exercising. Scholars and journalists who cover the court are left struggling over how to explain to the public the momentousness of what is really happening. “The thing that I find most challenging about covering this Supreme Court is that I have a ‘this is an exceptionally alarming decision’ voice that I try to use very sparingly, so as not to diminish its effectiveness with overuse,” Vox Supreme Court correspondent Ian Millhiser wrote on Threads following the court’s decision on Wednesday. “But I don’t know how to accurately convey what happens in this Court without using it often….
…[S]pecial prosecutor Jack Smith suspected the justices would want the final say on the question, so in mid-December he asked them to please bypass federal appellate court review and instead take the case as quickly as possible. Resolving this issue speedily, Smith told the justices, was of “imperative public importance.” Indeed, public polling shows that whether Trump is charged criminally for these events is one of the things that voters have said would affect their decision in November.
Yet the court refused this request, sending the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where a panel of judges did expedite their review and unanimously upheld Chutkan’s ruling. Trump immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, and Smith once again asked the court to either uphold the lower court’s ruling or decide the case as soon as possible.
More at the link.
David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast: Supreme Court Picks Up Where the Jan. 6 Mob Left Off.
I don’t think most Americans realize how close we are to losing everything we most value about our system of government.
It is not just that the leader of one of our two political parties has declared that if reelected he will assume the powers of a dictator. It is not just that he and his followers actively support enemies of the United States. It is not just that he and members of his party in the U.S. Congress seek to strip away more fundamental rights from American women and men, or that they have already demonstrated they are willing to tolerate egregious abuses of presidential power, or that they will abet efforts to steal election results with which they disagree.
It is all these things. But as we saw again this week, while opponents of fundamental American values control the House of Representatives, have a significant voice in the U.S. Senate, and aspire to reclaim the White House, the branch of government that has been most corrupted by the American right remains the United States Supreme Court.
The Court—through its decision to hear the ludicrous, anti-constitutional arguments of Donald Trump’s lawyers that his actions to steal a presidential election were protected by so-called “presidential immunity”—reminded us that throughout this century the right wing on the court has done grave damage to our country and the judicial system whose oversight has been entrusted to them.
By Joan Barber
Cases like Citizens United (granting the rich more influence in elections), Shelby County (undermining voting rights), Heller (expanding gun rights), Bruen (striking down sensible gun controls), Dobbs (overturning Roe v. Wade), and Students for Fair Admissions (gutting affirmative action) are just a few of the notable examples of their service to their benefactors and their political agenda.
The Court’s decision to hear the Trump immunity case was outrageous, legally indefensible, and handled procedurally in a way that made it clear they were no longer acting as a court, but rather as the judicial arm of the Republican Party.
They took a case they should not have accepted, agreeing to hear arguments that were already rejected in an expertly argued appeals court decision. Just as damagingly, they did so in a way that—regardless of their final ruling—would mean American voters would likely not hear a verdict before November’s election.
It is a dark irony. They have chosen to hear the Department of Justice’s case against Donald Trump for election interference in a way that is itself election interference.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
The DC appeals court has upended a large number of January 6 cases that have already been decided.
The Washington Post: Appeals court ruling means over 100 Jan. 6 rioters may be resentenced.
More than 100 people convicted of participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol may have to be resentenced after a federal appeals court Friday overturned a sentencing enhancement used to help determine their punishments.
The decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit came in the case of retired Air Force Lt. Col. Larry R. Brock Jr., who had appealed his felony conviction of obstructing the work of Congress that day. Former president Donald Trump faces the same charge.
The court, a panel of three Democratic appointees, did not overturn the conviction. But it said that a lower court judge erred in deciding that Brock should face a stiffer sentence for “substantial interference with the administration of justice,” ruling that the penalty does not apply to crimes committed at the Capitol.
At least 100 people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack have had their punishments shaped by that enhancement, and they could now ask to be sentenced anew. That does not mean they would necessarily face lighter terms. Sentencing enhancements raise the suggested range of prison time that a judge must consider. But in D.C., judges have generally imposed penalties below those recommended ranges, and they have often said their punishments would be the same regardless of what enhancements they applied.
Resentencing can also be dangerous for defendants. One participant in the riot who succeeded in undoing his 60-day misdemeanor sentence on technical grounds was given another 60 days behind bars by a judge who cited the man’s lack of remorse. (That ruling is now on appeal.)
Still, many will surely ask for lower punishments. Edward Ungvarsky, a defense attorney involved in several Jan. 6 cases, said there is “great potential” for some defendants to win earlier release. “Even if a judge suggested their sentence would be the same regardless of application of any enhancements,” he said, that judge “still has to meaningfully reconsider that sentence.” The ruling could also have an impact in plea negotiations, eliminating a bargaining chip used by prosecutors to encourage defendants to plead guilty without a trial.
Read more at the WaPo.
Finally, I want to recommend this piece by Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic: Why Is Trump Trying to Make Ukraine Lose? The former president isn’t in office—but is still dictating U.S. policy.
Nearly half a year has passed since the White House asked Congress for another round of American aid for Ukraine. Since that time, at least three different legislative efforts to provide weapons, ammunition, and support for the Ukrainian army have failed.
Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, was supposed to make sure that the money was made available. But in the course of trying, he lost his job.
BySuzanne Clements
The Senate negotiated a border compromise (including measures border guards said were urgently needed) that was supposed to pass alongside aid to Ukraine. But Senate Republicans who had supported that effort suddenly changed their minds and blocked the legislation.
Finally, the Senate passed another bill, including aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, and the civilians of Gaza, and sent it to the House. But in order to avoid having to vote on that legislation, the current House speaker, Mike Johnson, sent the House on vacation for two weeks. That bill still hangs in limbo. A majority is prepared to pass it, and would do so if a vote were held. Johnson is maneuvering to prevent that from happening.
Maybe the extraordinary nature of the current moment is hard to see from inside the United States, where so many other stories are competing for attention. But from the outside—from Warsaw, where I live part-time; from Munich, where I attended a major annual security conference earlier this month; from London, Berlin, and other allied capitals—nobody doubts that these circumstances are unprecedented. Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president’s foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility.
For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don’t they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize. Johnson himself said, in February 2022, that a failure to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “empowers other dictators, other terrorists and tyrants around the world … If they perceive that America is weak or unable to act decisively, then it invites aggression in many different ways.” But now the speaker is so frightened by Trump that he no longer cares. Or perhaps he is so afraid of losing his seat that he can’t afford to care. My European colleague shook his head, not because he didn’t believe me, but because it was so hard for him to hear.
Since then, I’ve had a version of that conversation with many other Europeans, in Munich and elsewhere, and indeed many Americans. Intellectually, they understand that the Republican minority is blocking this money on behalf of Trump. They watched first McCarthy, then Johnson, fly to Mar-a-Lago to take instructions. They know that Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent figure at the Munich Security Conference for decades, backed out abruptly this year after talking with Trump. They see that Donald Trump Jr. routinely attacks legislators who vote for aid to Ukraine, suggesting that they be primaried. The ex-president’s son has also said the U.S. should “cut off the money” to Ukrainians, because “it’s the only way to get them to the table.” In other words, it’s the only way to make Ukraine lose.
Read the rest at The Atlantic. It’s not that long. There is a paywall, but you can usually get one free article.
That’s it for me today. What do think? What other stories have captured your interest?
Michael Peter Ancher, Sunday afternoon in a fisher family’s house, a young girl reading.
Dakinikat provided us with plenty of scream-worthy news yesterday, so I’m going to try to find a few more upbeat stories today. Wish me luck.
First up, I looked around for cat news, and I found a heart-warming story about a lost cat and the dog who saved his life. BBC News: Dog leads owner to cat stuck 100ft down Cornish mine shaft.
A lucky cat was rescued by firefighters after falling 100ft (30m) down a mineshaft in Cornwall – and it was all thanks to a quick-thinking dog.
After six days of searching, Mowgli’s owner Michele Rose said she had “almost given up hope” of finding her missing pet.
But she said she saw her dog Daisy “going berserk”, running in and out of woods near their home in Harrowbarrow.
Daisy’s intervention led to the rescue of her feline friend, Ms Rose said.
Daisy guided her along a footpath toward the Prince of Wales old mine workings, she said, before “stopping dead in her tracks” next to the mineshaft.
“Daisy is a superstar, she’s an amazing dog.
“Without Daisy doing that Mowgli could still be down there, that’s for sure,” Ms Rose said.“She was persistent in making me follow her, it was amazing.”
The RSPCA and Cornwall Fire and Rescue were called but it was “too dark” on the first night to access the mineshaft, the RSPCA said.
The next morning the team, led by RSPCA animal rescue officer Stephen Findlow, spotted Mowgli, who was 100ft down – but remarkably uninjured – and he was pulled to safety.
The family has another cat, Baloo, who greeted Mowgli after he was pulled up.
Ms Rose said she adopted kittens Mowgli and Baloo in December 2022 and oversaw a gentle introduction to Daisy, who was already resident.
She added: “Daisy was already a year old when the kittens arrived and they have all been inseparable ever since.“She is quite matriarchal and puts up with them, they love her and she’s very protective of them.”
Here’s a story about cats being “crime fighters.” The Chicago Tribune, via Police1.com: Ill. PD to expand program ‘deputizing’ feral cats to contain city’s rat population.
NILES, Ill. — Police in Niles, Illinois — a suburb of Chicago — expressed satisfaction with a pilot program begun in August to “deputize” five feral cats to control the rat population, a police official told Pioneer Press. Now, the department says it is looking to extend the program.
The cats have lived around the 7800 block of Nordica Avenue for about three years under the care of a resident. The Niles police department recruited the cats because they are a natural deterrent to rats, according to Niles Police.
Earlier in the year, Niles officials passed a wildlife ordinance to curb rat problems in the village. According to the village’s website, the Community Development Department tracks and investigates rat complaints and inspects alleys and properties. The department gives out free rat traps to residential properties.
By James Pelham, 1800s
Niles Police Sergeant Dan Borkowski told Pioneer Press through email that the department reviewed complaint data from the Development Department and resident feedback and decided to continue and expand the feral cat program. Borkowski said the department had yet to determine where the cats will be placed because it’s contingent on cat availability and host families to take care of the cats.
Borkowski said they would keep the cats in a more defined territory. The village’s animal control officer gave Sarwat Hakim, the resident who has been watching over the feral cats, three makeshift, tarped shelters for the felines….
Hakim said the cats usually stay in the neighborhood or head off into the forest preserves, where they hunt for rats.
Hakim said before the cats were in the neighborhood, she used to see a lot of rats and rat traps. She hasn’t seen a rat trap in the neighborhood for about a year, which she is a fan of because she worries about kids potentially playing with them.
Hakim said she started caring for one feral cat three years ago when it kept returning for food. The cat gave birth to 15 cats, most of which were put up for adoption, with four of the cats staying behind.
“They’re so united you wouldn’t believe it,” said Hakim.
Hakim said she and her daughter-in-law feed the cats chicken in the morning, canned tuna for lunch and dinner, with cat food, both dried and canned, served as a snack. The cats also like to drink milk, she said.
“I hope nobody harms them and lets them stay because they’re benefiting us getting rid of the rats,” she said.
I suppose I should find some politics news.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has a great piece about Rep. James Comer. (He’s the guy who wants to impeach President Biden for lending money to his brother.): The political perils of taking James Comer’s word for it.
One can think of the claims presented by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) as though they are the experiments of a ninth-grade physics class.
The assignment is simple: Build a contraption that will ensure an egg survives a fall from the roof of the school. So Comer and his friends get together and sketch out little parachutes and agree that the parachutes will work great and talk about how cool the different little parachutes are.
They build the parachutes and take them over to Fox News’s desk and Fox News takes the eggs and puts them in the parachute and holds it one hand over the other and lets go: the egg survived! What a parachute! Going to hype this parachute for a few days until you come up with a new one.
Sometimes, though, Comer or one of his buddies has to take the egg to the actual roof. Maybe Comer thinks some of the parachutes will actually work; probably he knows that a lot of them won’t. But either way, the teacher holds them over the edge of the building and subjects them to reality.
Ssssssssssplat. Over and over and over again. Different eggs and different parachutes but the same result.
Thanks to his incessant chatter about his parachutes and how cool they are, Comer has — despite this pattern — built a reputation with his peers as a really great parachute-maker. A lot of them have only heard Comer talk about his parachutes or have only seen the Fox News tests of the parachutes, so they really think he’s got it, he’s a master of Newtonian physics. Asked to head to the roof for their own tests, they simply grab the parachutes that Comer’s made. Bad move.
So what happened when another Republican Congressman tried to use Comer’s “evidence” in a non-Fox appearance?
On Thursday morning, Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) put some to the test. Murphy appeared on CNN to discuss subpoenas issued by Comer’s Oversight Committee to President Biden’s son Hunter and the president’s brother, James Murphy sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, which, along with Oversight and Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Judiciary Committee, is tasked with leading the stalled impeachment investigation into the president.
Murphy was asked by host John Berman whether he would vote to hold the Bidens in contempt should they not comply with the subpoena. “Absolutely,” Murphy replied. Then he got out the parachute.
WC Mills, Gentleman in a top hat reading with his cat beside him
“You know, here’s the deal, John,” he said with the confidence of a guy who has never seen Comer’s physics experiments at work. “It’s very, very clear. Why … would Hunter and Jim create 20 shell companies to not — to be legal? We’ve seen time and time again — and Representative Comer has proved this — there was money, influencing peddling that Biden had during his last couple of years as vice president. And then after, right afterwards, they wanted to gain the money back.”
Sssssssssplat.
Comer likes to talk about the “shell companies,” ignoring that a number are simply corporate entities like one that serves as the structure for Hunter Biden’s law firm and another that’s a consulting company he ran. The Washington Post examined each of these “20 shell companies” finding that — despite Murphy’s insinuations — they were created because this is how business structures often work. (Comer tends not to talk about the much more extensive web of corporations controlled by the Trump Organization, which might have given Murphy pause.)
What happened when Murphy tried to explain what Joe Biden did that was criminal?
Comer also has not by any stretch proved that there was influence peddling by Joe Biden. That’s the crux of what he wants to prove and what his investigations are pointed toward. He’s shown, with an abundance of evidence, the already-obvious efforts by Hunter Biden to leverage his last name as he sought out business deals — but has also accrued numerous sworn statements from former Hunter Biden partners that Joe Biden wasn’t involved in the effort. (Among those drawing that line was Devon Archer.)
Berman, however, took the conversation in a different direction. He asked Murphy why he’d vote to hold Hunter or James Biden in contempt when he voted against holding former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon in contempt in 2021 after Bannon failed to provide testimony to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
“Well, I think it’s a little bit different when you have a president of the United States,” he said. “We have somebody who’s not an elected official. You know, the president of the United States was selling his influence, his son was selling his influence—”
Berman interjected: “I don’t understand. We’re talking—”
“It’s a little bit different of standards, John, when you have somebody who’s in elected office,” Murphy continued, “versus somebody who’s not in elected office.”
Berman then asked what elected office Hunter Biden held. Oops!
Unfortunately for Rep. Comer, it turns out that he also lent money to his brother.
Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: James Comer, Like Joe Biden, Also Paid His Brother $200K.
House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) on Wednesday subpoenaed President Joe Biden’s brother, James Biden, who Comer has implicated in unsubstantiated allegations of “shady business practices” in the Biden family.
Comer has in particular been trying to make hay out of two personal loan repayments from James Biden to his brother, for $40,000 and $200,000—with all transactions occurring in 2017 and 2018, when Joe Biden was neither in office nor a candidate.
By Escha van den Bogerd
But if Comer genuinely believes these transactions clear the “shady business practices” bar, he might want to consider a parallel inquiry into his own family.
According to Kentucky property records, Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal—also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company—the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper.
But unlike with the Bidens, Comer’s own history actually borders a conflict of interest between his official government role and his private family business—and it’s been going on for decades.
While Comer and House GOP allies have tried to cast the Biden transactions as evidence of unsavory and possibly impeachable offenses, multiple news organizations—including CNN, The Wall Street Journal, FactCheck.org, and the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner—have all thrown cold water on the notion that the payments are evidence of anything other than a brother helping a brother.
Click the link to read the rest.
Speaking of conflicts involving people holding high-level positions, The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus has an op-ed about serious ethics issues for Clarence and Ginni Thomas: The Crystal Clanton case shows a system failure.
Well, so much for getting to the bottom of the story of Crystal Clanton, the judicial law clerk accused of sending racist texts. And so much for all the talk about having Supreme Court justices abide by the code of conduct that covers other federal judges. In this case, at least, the mechanism to enforce that code turned out to be toothless. The judicial discipline system is better at self-protection than self-policing.
To review: Clanton is a protégé of Justice Clarence Thomas and Ginni Thomas. She met Ginni Thomas while working at the conservative youth group Turning Point USA. Her employment was terminated in 2017 after the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer unearthed texts apparently sent by Clanton: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like f— them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” Clanton told Mayer in an email that “I have no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager.” (Clanton was 20 when the texts were sent in 2015, and evidence suggests that this was not an isolated episode).
After leaving Turning Point, Clanton went to work for Ginni Thomas and lived in the Thomas’s home for almost a year. She attended George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and, with enthusiastic backing from Clarence Thomas, secured one of the most prestigious judicial clerkships in the country, for William H. Pryor Jr., chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Pryor, a reliable “feeder” of clerks to Thomas and other conservative justices, recommended Clanton for a district court clerkship, with Judge Corey Maze of Alabama, before she joined his chambers.
Girl with cat, by Merle Keller
And she appears to be en route to the high court. “It is certainly my intention to consider her for a clerkship should she perform as I expect and excel in her clerkships,” Thomas has written.
When the news of Clanton’s clerkships surfaced in 2021, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee filed an ethics complaint; the matter was assigned to the 2nd Circuit to handle. Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston dismissed the complaint without even appointing a special committee to look into the facts, as provided for under the rules and suggested by the 11th Circuit judge who conducted the initial review.
Livingston did not examine the underlying question of whether Clanton sent the racist texts. Rather, she found only that Pryor and Maze “performed all of the due diligence that a responsible judge would undertake” before hiring Clanton. The judges, she said, were “in possession of information that the allegations were false — that the anonymous sources relied on in the media accounts were not trustworthy,” and that “they have been repeatedly informed that the allegations of racist text messages and remarks are not true.”
In fact, there were on-the-record sources and screen shots of the texts. Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet confirmed to me that Clanton was “terminated from Turning Point after the discovery of problematic texts.”
There’s much more at the link.
Of course, creepy news keeps breaking about the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Tori Otten at The New Republic: Why Is Mike Johnson Flying a Christian Nationalist Flag Outside His Office?
House Speaker Mike Johnson has three flags hanging outside his office: the American flag, the Louisiana state flag, and a flag representing a movement that wants to turn the United States into a religious Christian nation.
Normal stuff, you know?
The flag is white with a green evergreen tree in the middle and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” at the top. A report published Friday by Rolling Stone confirmed that the flag is outside his district office in Washington.
The flag was originally used as a banner during the Revolutionary War, but over the past decade, it has been embraced by a sect of Christianity called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR. A central tenet of NAR’s belief system is that it is God’s will for Christians to take control of all aspects of U.S. society—including education, arts and entertainment, the media, and businesses—to create a religious nation.
The NAR fully embraced Donald Trump when he announced he was running for office, endorsing him early on and helping endear him to other Christian movements. As a result, the Appeal to Heaven flag has become popular among Trump supporters.
The flag has appeared in photos of far-right politicians and election deniers such as Doug Mastriano, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Pennsylvania governor. Mastriano lost to Democrat Josh Shapiro.
The flag was also everywhere at the January 6 insurrection. Rolling Stone estimated that there may have been hundreds of Appeal to Heaven flags throughout the mob.
It should not be surprising that Johnson subscribes to the NAR belief system. He has a well-documented history of opposing abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and environmental policy on the grounds that they are non-Christian.
But it’s upsetting and deeply concerning that he is able to embrace it so openly without so much as a slap on the wrist. What’s more, Rolling Stone’s revelation comes just days after the House of Representatives censured Rashida Tlaib for her comments about Israel and Palestine.
Man reading with cat, by Gustaf Dalstrom
One more politics story about the Democratic Mayor of New York City. The New York Times: F.B.I. Seizes Eric Adams’s Phones as Campaign Investigation Intensifies.
F.B.I. agents seized Mayor Eric Adams’s electronic devices early this week in what appeared to be a dramatic escalation of a criminal inquiry into whether his 2021 campaign conspired with the Turkish government and others to funnel money into its coffers.
The agents approached the mayor after an event in Manhattan on Monday evening and asked his security detail to step away, a person with knowledge of the matter said. They climbed into his S.U.V. with him and, pursuant to a court-authorized warrant, took his devices, the person said.
The devices — at least two cellphones and an iPad — were returned to the mayor within a matter of days, according to that person and another person familiar with the situation. Law enforcement investigators with a search warrant can make copies of the data on devices after they seize them.
A lawyer for Mr. Adams and his campaign said in a statement that the mayor was cooperating with federal authorities, and had already “proactively reported” at least one instance of improper behavior….
The surprise seizure of Mr. Adams’s devices was an extraordinary development and appeared to be the first direct instance of the campaign contribution investigation touching the mayor. Mr. Adams, a retired police captain, said on Wednesday that he is so strident in urging his staff to “follow the law” that he can be almost “annoying.” He laughed at the notion that he had any potential criminal exposure.
The Mayor’s attorney says that Adams is not personally under investigation. We’ll see, I guess.
The federal investigation into Mr. Adams’s campaign burst into public view on Nov. 2, when F.B.I. agents searched the home of the mayor’s chief fund-raiser and seized two laptop computers, three iPhones and a manila folder labeled “Eric Adams.”
The fund-raiser, a 25-year-old former intern named Brianna Suggs, has not spoken publicly since the raid.
Mr. Adams responded to news of the raid by abruptly returning from Washington, D.C., where he had only just arrived for a day of meetings with White House and congressional leaders regarding the migrant influx, an issue he has said threatens to “destroy New York City.”
On Wednesday, he said his abrupt return was driven by his desire to be present for his team, and out of concern for Ms. Suggs, who he said had gone through a “traumatic experience.” [….]
The warrant obtained by the F.B.I. to search Ms. Suggs’s home sought evidence of a conspiracy to violate campaign finance law between members of Mr. Adams’s campaign, the Turkish government or Turkish nationals, and a Brooklyn-based construction company, KSK Construction, whose owners are originally from Turkey. The warrant also sought records about donations from Bay Atlantic University, a Washington, D.C., college whose founder is Turkish and is affiliated with a school Mr. Adams visited when he went to Turkey as Brooklyn borough president in 2015.
I guess we’ll learn more as time goes on.
I hope everyone has a great Caturday and Veteran’s Day weekend!!
By Hilda Belcher, 1881-1963
Last night the Supreme Court released their decision in the mifepristone case. They stayed–for now–Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s order to ban the abortion pill nationwide. The New York Times reports: Supreme Court Ensures, for Now, Broad Access to Abortion Pill.
The order halted steps that had sought to curb the availability of mifepristone as an appeal moves forward: a ruling from a federal judge in Texas to suspend the drug from the market entirely and another from an appeals court to impose significant barriers on the pill, including blocking access by mail.
The unsigned, one-paragraph order, which came hours before restrictions were set to take effect, marked the second time in a year that the Supreme Court had considered a major effort to sharply curtail access to abortion.
The case could ultimately have profound implications, even for states where abortion is legal, as well as for the F.D.A.’s regulatory authority over other drugs.
If the ruling by the judge in Texas, which revoked the F.D.A.’s approval of the pill after more than two decades, were to stand, it could pave the way for all sorts of challenges to the agency’s approval of other medications and enable medical providers anywhere to contest government policy that might affect a patient.
Judges Alito and Thomas dissented. Only Altio wrote a dissenting opinion. From The Washington Post: Supreme Court preserves access to key abortion drug as appeal proceeds.
In the only noted dissents, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would not have granted the Biden administration’s request for a stay of the decision by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
Thomas did not explain his reasoning. Alito said the administration and the public would not have been harmed by agreeing with the lower court, which wanted to reimpose restrictions loosened by the FDA in recent years.
“It would simply restore the circumstances that existed (and that the Government defended) from 2000 to 2016 under three Presidential administrations,” Alito wrote. He disputed that the court’s intervention at this time would have sent a signal: “Contrary to the impression that may be held by many, that disposition would not express any view on the merits of the question whether the FDA acted lawfully in any of its actions regarding mifepristone.”
By Alice Kent Stoddard
There could have been other dissents; we only know that at least 5 justices voted for the stay. On what happens next:
The 5th Circuit next month will review the merits of the case brought by antiabortion groups against the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone — a review that will be conducted by a separate, and likely different, three-judge panel than the one that made the initial ruling. That merits decision will almost surely be appealed to the Supreme Court no matter the outcome. But until then, the justices’ Friday order says the status quo will remain in place: Mifepristone will be available under existing FDA regulations nationwide.
Joyce Vance wrote a lengthy and detailed discussion of the issues in this case; it’s well worth reading the entire piece at Vance’s Substack page, Civil Discourse: Not Quite Midnight at the Supreme Court. Here is a brief excerpt.
I figured that I’d set my alarm for midnight to see how the Court would rule on the government’s request to stay the Fifth Circuit’s order. That order, you’ll recall, did not side with Texas federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision to overrule the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone, a drug proven safe and effective for abortions and miscarriage treatment for over 20 years. But it would have permitted the remainder of the restrictions on Mifepristone that Kacsmaryk ordered to remain in place while the litigation proceeded. That includes requiring the drug be obtained in person and not through the mail, necessitating multiple doctor’s office visits and in-office consumption of the medication, and restricting use to prior to the seventh week of pregnancy—while the litigation proceeded.
When the Supreme Court ruled, they stayed all of it. They preserved the status quo, so Mifepristone will remain available up to 10 weeks, and can be obtained via the mail and used at home while the courts are reviewing the case. But that’s a temporary reprieve.
The stay will last while the case is on appeal to the Fifth Circuit. Presumably the party that loses in that court will appeal to the Supreme Court. They are not required to hear an appeal in a civil case like this. If the Court were to refuse to hear it (“certiorari denied”), then the stay would end and the Fifth Circuit’s order would go into effect. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the appeal (“cert granted”), the stay will continue until the Court enters final judgment. Because the case involves important issues, it’s very likely the Court will take the case.
Best Friends, by Maxime Dastugue
Vance spends a several paragraphs discussion Altio’s dissent. Not surprisingly, she is quite critical of Alito’s reasoning. Here’s part of it:
Alito rehashed the debate over the use of what has become known as the Court’s “shadow docket”—a docket used for resolving emergency requests. Interestingly, he seemed to take Justice Barrett to task, associating her views with those of progressive justices like Elena Kagan who have objected to the Court’s use of the docket to make decisions without explaining its reasoning (this makes it understandably difficult for lower courts to understand and apply the Court’s logic). Alito notes that Barrett in a 2021 concurrence with a denial of injunctive relief wrote that the Court should not act “on a short fuse without benefit of full briefing and oral argument” in a case that is “first to address the questions presented.” He says that while he agreed with those rulings, if the justices believed that then, they should believe it now. He does not, however, explain why, if he did not believe it back then, it’s okay for him to believe it now. Apparently what’s good for the goose is unnecessary for the gander.
Injunctions present complicated questions, and courts typically, but not always, try to preserve the status quo and protect parties from being harmed or prejudiced while litigation is pending. For instance, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, one of the cases Justice Alito offered up, Justice Kagan was objecting to the Court’s refusal to keep Texas’s heartbeat law from going into effect while litigation was underway. And that is what the Court ended up doing in this case—preventing any change in the approval status or regulations surrounding Mifepristone’s use while the case is pending. So Justice Alito’s arguments have a tinge of sour grapes, not legal principle.
There’s much more criticism of Alito at the link. Next, Vance addresses the latest news about Judge Kacsmaryk’s bias and dishonesty.
Meanwhile, additional evidence of Judge Kacsmaryk’s anti-abortion bias (there was already plenty) and an improper effort to conceal it has surfaced. In anticipation of his judicial confirmation process in 2019, he requested that his name be removed, pre-publication, from a law journal article he had authored, replacing it with some colleagues from the religious conservative legal group he was working for. The article was critical of legal protections for abortion and transgender people. All federal judicial nominees have to complete a document called a Senate Judicial Questionnaire. The completed application packet is submitted under oath before a nomination can advance. Among other things, it requires nominees to list everything they have published. Kacsmaryk failed to disclose the article and also failed to disclose interviews he gave on Christian talk radio that included his views on abortion and other issues, information the questionnaire calls for.
Again, read more at the Substack link.
Kacsmaryk also has a serious financial conflict of interest. CNN reports: Details about multimillion-dollar stock holding concealed in abortion pill judge’s financial disclosures.
The federal judge who issued a nationwide ruling blocking the approval of a common abortion medication redacted key information on his legally mandated financial disclosures, in what legal experts described as an unusual move that conceals the bulk of his personal fortune.
Woman with Cat, by Theodorus Gerardus Iherminez
In his 2020 and 2021 annual disclosures, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk wrote that he held between $5 million and $25 million in “common stock” of a company – a significant majority of the judge’s personal wealth. The name of the company he held stock in is redacted, despite the fact that federal law only allows redactions of information that could “endanger” a judge or their family member.
CNN obtained a previous financial disclosure for Kacsmaryk – which is not available online – from 2017, when he was a judicial nominee.
On that unredacted form, Kacsmaryk reported owning about $2.9 million in stock in the Florida-based supermarket company Publix. It’s not clear whether that’s the same holding as the redacted stock, although Publix’s share price had significantly increased by 2020 and 2021 and the company is no longer listed on his more recent disclosures.
Redactions are approved by a judicial committee. The redacted holding accounted for at least 85% of Kacsmaryk’s total reported wealth in 2021, and potentially more.
“The whole point of a disclosure is to explain where you have conflicts,” said Michael Lissner, the executive director of the Free Law Project, a nonprofit that has published judicial disclosures. “If you have stock and you’re not saying what it’s in and it’s this much of your personal wealth, that’s a conflict you have. The public deserves to know.” [….]
The redaction is the latest example of Kacsmaryk not being fully transparent as a judge and judicial nominee, even as he has become one of the most controversial judges in the country.
That’s in addition to his not be fully forthcoming in his Senate confirmation hearing, as Joyce Vance described above.
Two more articles on the Supreme Court from Slate:
Christina Cauterucci at Slate: Birth Control Is Next. If you look closely, attempts to restrict contraception are already in the works.
At first glance, what’s happening right now in Iowa looks like a rosy vision for the future of reproductive rights.
The Republican-controlled state Senate recently passed a bill that would increase access to certain types of contraception by allowing pharmacists to dispense it to patients without a prescription. Their GOP counterparts in the state House have included a similar provision in a larger health care bill. And Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has indicated that the legislation is one of her top priorities this session.
Girl on Divan with Cat (Eta with the Cat) – Róbert Berény 1919 Hungarian 1887-1953
But look elsewhere in Iowa, and you’ll get a different view. Earlier this month, the state attorney general’s office announced that it would suspend payments for emergency contraception for survivors of sexual assault. The medication had been funded through a program for crime victims, but the Republican attorney general is considering a permanent end to its provision. She is “carefully evaluating whether this is an appropriate use of public funds,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
In other words, counter to a refrain that has taken hold on the left since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, conservatives are not coming for birth control next. They’re coming for birth control now.
Some corners of the right are already in full-blown attack mode. Pulse Life Advocates, one of the Iowa-based anti-abortion groups that is advocating against the over-the-counter contraception bill, states on its website that “contraception kills babies.”
It’s relatively uncommon for an anti-abortion group to state its animus toward birth control so plainly. For years, the major players on the anti-abortion right have claimed to support contraception. They seem to understand that more than 90 percent of Americans are in favor of legal birth control and that most people opposed to abortion likely see contraception as an effective means of reducing demand for it….
Cauterucci writes that it would be foolish to believe Republicans’ reassurances about keeping birth control legal.
Conservatives have tried hard to maintain a veneer of rationality on the issue of contraception. But almost a year into the emboldened post-Dobbs anti-abortion movement, the cracks in that facade are starting to show.
Currently, the right to contraception in the U.S. rests on Griswold v. Connecticut, a landmark 1965 Supreme Court decision that is based, as Roe was, on the right to privacy. In a concurring opinion in Dobbs, Clarence Thomas wrotethat the court “should reconsider” several precedents that concern the right to privacy—including the legality of gay intimacy, the right to gay marriage, and Griswold. And a growing number of Republicans are willing to state that Griswold was wrongly decided, including Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn and former Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters.
But the Supreme Court won’t even have to overturn Griswold for conservatives to curtail access to birth control. Across the country, they are executing a game plan that rests on three strategies: Conflate contraception with abortion, claim that birth control is dangerous to women’s health, and let right-wing judges do their thing.
Read more details at Slate.
By Mimi Matthews
This article really shocked me. Mary Anne Franks at Slate: Chief Justice John Roberts’ Mockery of Stalking Victims Points to a Deeper Problem.
Stalking is so closely correlated with lethal violence that experts refer to it as “slow motion homicide”: More than half of all female homicide victims in the U.S. were stalked before they were killed. Despite the terrifying and dangerous consequences, many victims of stalking do not report the abuse to law enforcement for fear they will not be taken seriously.
The reasonableness of that fear was vividly illustrated by the Supreme Court oral arguments in Counterman v. Colorado on Wednesday morning, as members of the highest court of the land joked about messages sent by a stalker to his victim, bemoaned the increasing “hypersensitivity” of society, and brushed aside consideration of the actual harm of stalking to focus on the potential harm of stalking laws.
For nearly two years, Billy Raymond Counterman sent thousands of unsolicited and unwanted Facebook direct messages to C.W., a local musician, ultimately driving her to abandon her career and leave the state. Counterman, who had previously served time in federal prison for making violent threats against his ex-wife and her family, argues that his conduct towards C.W. was free speech protected by the First Amendment. Counterman maintains, supported by amicus briefs from influential civil libertarian organizations such as the ACLU, the EFF, and FIRE, that stalking cannot be criminally prohibited except when the government can prove that the stalker subjectively intended to terrify his victim. The state of Colorado, supported by amicus briefs from First Amendment scholars, stalking experts, and domestic violence victim advocates, argues that it is enough to prove that the stalking would be terrifying to a reasonable person in light of the totality of the circumstances. If the court rules in Counterman’s favor, delusional stalking—no matter how objectively terrifying or threatening—will be transformed into an inviolable constitutional right.
And the ACLU is on the side of the stalkers! The justices got a kick out of the threatening messages sent by the stalker.
During oral argument, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted a handful of the thousands of unsolicited messages Counterman sent to C.W. “Staying in cyber life is going to kill you,’” Roberts read aloud. After a pause, he joked, “I can’t promise I haven’t said that,” prompting laughter from other justices and the audience. Picking out another message, which he described as an “image of liquor bottles” captioned as “a guy’s version of edible arrangements,” Roberts challenged Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser to “say this in a threatening way,” leading to more laughter from the court. And the laughs didn’t stop there: Counterman’s attorney, John Elwood, shared with the court that his mother would routinely tell him to “drop dead” as a child, but “you know, I was never in fear because of that.”
By Suzy Scarborough
There were more chuckles when Justice Neil Gorsuch returned to Elwood’s anecdote during his questioning of Weiser, but Gorsuch shifted to a more serious tone to express his concern about the reasonable person standard. “We live in a world in which people are sensitive, and maybe increasingly sensitive,” he began. “As a professor, you might have issued a trigger warning from time to time when you had to discuss a bit of history that’s difficult or a case that’s difficult,” Gorsuch continued, a reference to Weiser’s prior experience teaching on a law school faculty. “What do we do in a world in which reasonable people may deem things harmful, hurtful, threatening? And we’re going to hold people liable willy-nilly for that?”
Justice Clarence Thomas echoed the concern, asking whether the reasonable person standard is appropriate given that people are “more hypersensitive about different things now.” [….]
The justices’ message was clear: Stalking is not the problem; sensitivity is. To them, stalking is quite literally a state of mind: If the stalker didn’t mean for his conduct to be frightening, then it isn’t. All the target has to do is understand that; she just needs to lighten up, take a joke, accept the compliment, grasp the lesson. Just because someone has made objectively terrifying statements is no reason to overreact and get law enforcement involved; victims should wait for the stalker to do something really frightening before they jump to conclusions.
That is just plain terrifying! Women’s lives are already in danger in this country; The Supreme Court is making this state of affairs even worse.
More stories to check out, links only:
Heather Cox Richardson on the history of Earth Day, which is today, at Letters from an American.
The New York Times: Airman Shared Sensitive Intelligence More Widely and for Longer Than Previously Known.
The Washington Post: FBI leak investigators home in on members of private Discord server.
The Guardian: A California journalist documents the far-right takeover of her town: ‘We’re a test case.’
Anthony L. Fisher at The Daily Beast: America’s Tragedy Is Its Culture of Fear—Armed With Millions of Guns.
Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times: The Sickening Déjà Vu of Watching Trump Manhandle DeSantis.
The Washington Post: Twitter removes labels from state-controlled media, helping propaganda.
The Washington Post: SpaceX didn’t want to blow up its launchpad. It may have done just that.
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