Thursday Reads
Posted: June 29, 2023 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Donald Trump, SCOTUS | Tags: Affirmative Action, Climate change, excessive heat, iran, jet stream, Mark Milley, military academies, poor air quality, Supreme Court, Trump stolen documents case, Walt Nauta, wildfires 13 Comments
Summer Day or Embrace on the beach, (1904), by Edvard Munch
Good Day!!
There is some Trump investigation news this morning, plus, news just broke that the Supreme Court has gutted Affirmative Action in college admissions.
But before I get to those stories, a few articles about the awful summer weather we are having. Here in New England and across much of the Midwest, we’re having poor air quality because of the Canadian wildfires; and in much of the Southern U.S. people are suffering greatly from excessive heat.
Dangerous air quality and hazy skies persist as smoke from Canada’s raging wildfires drifts south, leaving more than 100 million people under air quality alerts across a dozen states from Minnesota to New York and down to the Carolinas.
Chicago had the worst air quality among major cities in the world early Thursday, according to IQAir. The air in Washington, DC, Minneapolis, Detroit and New York City was among the top 10 most polluted.
Smoke will continue to drift across the Midwest and into the mid-Atlantic and Northeast on Thursday. Forecast models predict a slow improvement beginning Thursday and additional decreases by Friday.
The worst air quality is likely to remain over the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, with some increase in smoke in states including Washington and New York, but levels are not expected to reach those seen a few weeks ago.
In Canada – which is seeing its worst fire season on record – authorities have also issued air quality alerts across several provinces.
“With no end in sight to the Canadian wildfires and west to northwesterly winds expected to persist from south central Canada into the north central to northeast U.S., poor air quality conditions are likely to continue,” the National Weather Service warned.
The New York Times is providing live updates on the smoke as it works it’s way toward NYC.
The New York Times on the heat: Misery Engulfs the South as Heat Wave Spreads.
Even for Southerners used to spending a lot of time outside, this week’s brutal heat and humidity — which spread from Texas across the Gulf Coast and north into Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas on Wednesday — are a little much….
An oppressive heat wave that baked Texas and Oklahoma last week, contributing to several deaths, has engulfed much of the southern and central United States, raising the heat index to dangerously high levels from Kansas City to the Florida Keys.
High Summer, 1915, by Edvard Munch
Temperatures will climb up to 20 degrees above normal for much of the region through at least the weekend, reaching the upper 90s or low 100s in many places, with the heat index — a measure of how heat and humidity make the air feel — soaring even higher….
Major cities where the heat index could reach between 110 to 120 degrees over the next few days include Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans and Nashville, as well as Little Rock, Ark.; Jackson, Miss.; and Montgomery, Ala. “Many areas outside of Texas will experience their most significant heat of the season so far,” a forecast from the National Weather Service said.
Health experts consider a heat index of over 103 degrees dangerous, with a higher risk of cramps, exhaustion and heat stroke, particularly after exercise or long stretches in the sun.
High humidity will continue to produce “potentially life-threatening” heat through the rest of the week, the Weather Service said, and nighttime temperatures will offer little respite, staying unseasonably high even while the sun is down.
“That’s substantial because your house isn’t cooling off as much at night,” said Rob Perillo, the chief meteorologist at KATC-TV in Lafayette, La. “When you’re shooting 95 at noon, and it’s above 95 until 7 at night,” he added, “it’s not only hotter, but it’s hotter longer.”
NBC News: Scorching heat and Canada wildfires could be tied to ‘wavy, blocky’ jet stream.
Scientists say a closely watched atmospheric pattern — the jet stream — is behind both the Canadian wildfires and the scorching heat in Texas, raising questions about how it shapes extreme weather events and whether climate change is disrupting its flow.
The jet stream, a ribbon of air that encircles the Northern Hemisphere at high altitudes, drives pressure changes that determine weather across North America. The jet stream’s wavy pattern creates areas of high and low pressure.
In recent months, the jet stream’s patterns trapped and stalled a ridge of high pressure over northern Canada, which caused a heat wave and primed the landscape for the wildfires that later sent smoke pouring into the Midwest and the eastern U.S. Earlier this month, another ridge of high pressure centered over Texas, sending temperatures soaring.
Summer Night’s Dream/The Voice, by Edvard Munch, 1893
More than 100 million people in the U.S. faced either blistering heat or unhealthy air quality Wednesday.
In recent weeks, the jet stream has appeared unusual and disjointed, scientists say. Some researchers think climate change is disrupting its flow and causing it to bake regions in heat longer. They are concerned that changes in the patterns could cause extremes to increase more rapidly than climate models have projected as the world warms.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, likened visualizations of the jet stream’s appearance in recent weeks to the swirling brushstrokes of a post-impressionist painter.
“I’m honestly at a loss to even characterize the current large-scale planetary wave pattern,” Mann tweeted this month. “Frankly, it looks like a Van Gogh.”
Now that’s an interesting interpretation!
In other news, the right wing Supreme Court has struck again.
Adam Liptak at The New York Times: Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.
In disavowing race as a factor in achieving educational diversity, the court all but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions will become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.
Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.
Universities can consider how race has affected an applicant’s life, but he emphasized that students “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench — a rare move that signals profound disagreement. The court, she wrote, was “further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”
“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” she said in her scorching dissent.
The ruling could have far-reaching effects, and not just at the colleges and universities across the country that are expected to revisit their admissions practices. The decision could prompt employers to rethink how they consider race in hiring and it could potentially narrow the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates entering the work force.
Read more details at the NYT.
There is exception to the ruling: it doesn’t apply to military academies. I wonder why?
https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1674431227670175745?s=20
On to the Trump investigation stories.
ABC News: Top Trump campaign aide identified as key individual in classified docs indictment: Sources.
One of the top advisers on Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is among the individuals identified but not named by special counsel Jack Smith in his indictment against the former president for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The Mystery of a Summer Night, 1892, by Edvard Munch
Susie Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted advisers leading his second reelection effort, is the individual singled out in Smith’s indictment as the “PAC Representative” who Trump is alleged to have shown a classified map to in August or September of 2021, sources said.
Trump, in the indictment, is alleged to have shown the classified map of an unidentified country to Wiles while discussing a military operation that Trump said “was not going well,” while adding that he “should not be showing the map” to her and “not to get too close.”
The alleged exchange between Trump and Wiles is the second of two instances detailed by prosecutors in the indictment showing how Trump allegedly disclosed classified information in private meetings after leaving the White House. The first was a July 2021 audio recording, obtained by ABC News earlier this week, in which Trump is heard showing people what he describes as a “secret” and “highly confidential” document relating to Iran.
ABC News has reported the meeting involved people who were helping Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with his memoir, according to sources. Smith’s team has spoken to the meeting’s attendees, which included the writers helping Meadows with his book and at least two aides to Trump, according to sources….
It does not appear, based on the indictment, that Trump was charged specifically for his retention of either the Iran document or the classified map shown to the person identified as Wiles. Rather, the two instances speak to what Smith’s prosecutors see as Trump’s state of mind in how he handled and sometimes shared classified materials in his possession after leaving the White House, sources said, as well as his alleged efforts to subvert the government’s efforts to get the documents back.
Rolling Stone: Trump Demanded ‘My Documents’ Back Even After His Lawyers Told Him He’d Be Indicted.
LAST MONTH, DONALD Trump’s lawyers told him he was on the cusp of a federal indictment in the classified documents case. But the former president still wanted “my documents” and “my boxes” back, asking some of his lawyers if they could get them from the federal government, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter and two other people briefed on it.
It’s one of many such conversations Trump has had over the past few months, the sources say. In these conversations, Trump also claimed it was “illegal” that he could no longer have the documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid. Those materials, Trump insisted, belonged to “me.” Trump has also asked if there are any other possible legal maneuvers or court filings they could try to accomplish this that they hadn’t thought of yet.
For much of his post-presidency, Trump has incorrectly insisted to various aides and confidants that the highly classified documents he continued to hoard were “mine.” In some of these conversations, according to the source with knowledge of the matter, Trump has also mentioned that he’ll get the documents back in 2025 — because he predicts he’ll be president again, and therefore regain unfettered access to the government’s most sensitive secrets.
Summer Night – Inger on the Shore, 1899, by Edvard Munch
Apparently some of Trump’s lawyers have gone along with his claims.
Two sources familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone that several lawyers — some retained by Trump and others politically aligned with him — have briefed Trump that he is, in their view, entitled to the return of government documents under an obscure part of the Presidential Records Act, specifically 44 USC 2205(3), which asserts that “Presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representative.”
But experts on classification rules disagree. “Whatever one might say about his Presidential Records Act argument, there’s no argument that it immunizes him from criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act,” Brian Greer, an attorney who served in the CIA’s office of general counsel from 2010 to 2018, tells Rolling Stone. Nor does the act allow a former president to defy a lawful court-ordered subpoena for documents and obstruct justice, as the special counsel alleges Trump did in the indictment, Greer adds.
Hugh Lowell at The Guardian: Trump valet arraignment delayed after losing Florida lawyer over fees dispute.
Donald Trump’s valet charged in the classified documents case had his arraignment on Tuesday delayed for a second time to July by a magistrate judge, after he was forced to abandon his top choice Florida lawyer over a dispute about legal fees, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The valet, Walt Nauta, appeared alongside Trump when the former president pleaded not guilty to 37 criminal charges in federal district court in Miami this month but could not himself enter a plea – a necessary step to start trial preparation – because he lacked local counsel.
Two weeks later, Nauta remains without a lawyer admitted to practice in the southern district of Florida after the person at the top of the shortlist drawn up by Nauta’s defense team decided he needed to charge higher fees to represent him the night before the arraignment, the people said.
The previously unreported dispute over fees in effect meant Nauta could not retain the person as his Florida lawyer, the people said, even though he would be paid by Trump’s political action committee Save America, which has also been paying the fees of his lead lawyer, Stanley Woodward.
The reason for the rate hike was not clear, but at least one Florida lawyer who had seriously considered representing Nauta decided several days ago that the reputational and legal risks of working with Trump’s co-defendant in the documents case were too great.
Susan Glasser at The New Yorker: Why Donald Trump Was So Mad at Mark Milley That He Confessed to a Crime.
With the sounds of papers rustling in the background, Trump is heard complaining about General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He said that I wanted to attack Iran—isn’t it amazing?” Trump told his visitors, who included book advisers to his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. A few days earlier, I had reported about Milley’s concerns in the final months of Trump’s Presidency that Trump might provoke a military conflict with Iran as part of his effort to remain in power, despite losing the 2020 election. This, Milley told others, was one of the “nightmare scenarios” that he was working to prevent. At Bedminster, Trump apparently brandished the Pentagon’s attack plan—which he claimed had been presented to him by Milley. “This totally wins my case,” Trump said. “You know, except, like, it is highly confidential.” He added, “See, as President, I could have declassified it; now I can’t, but this is classified. . . . it’s so cool.” The tape ends with a line that was not included in the federal indictment: Trump asking, “Bring some Cokes in, please?” The whole exchange was happening, in other words, not in some top-secret facility, but with someone standing by to fetch drinks, in Trump’s office, right near the pool at his country club.
Summer Night on the Beach, Edvard Munch
To legal observers and, indeed, to pretty much anyone who could hear, the audiotape sounded like an admission of guilt. But this is Trump, a serial liar for whom an obvious defense presents itself: that he was not telling the truth to his visitors when he claimed to be showing them secret papers. And, sure enough, by Tuesday, Trump told reporters on his way back from a New Hampshire campaign appearance, “It was bravado, if you want to know the truth”—bravado here being a Trump synonym for “bullshitting.” This is the 2023 equivalent of dismissing the “Access Hollywood” tape as mere “locker-room talk” that had nothing to do with Trump’s actual behavior toward women. He even suggested that the papers he is heard shuffling through were just “building plans.” For Trump, it’s better to be a liar than a convict.
The damning evidence against Trump would not exist if not for his rift with Mark Milley, a remarkable feud between the Commander-in-Chief and the nation’s top general that had been a secret backdrop to the public drama that played out after the 2020 election. At the time the tape was made, in the summer of 2021, Trump was apoplectic that Milley’s fears about him were becoming public. Two recently published books—one by the journalists Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker of the Post, and the other by Michael Bender, then of the Wall Street Journal—had reported new details about Milley’s efforts, including regular “land the plane” phone calls with Meadows, the White House chief of staff, to prevent Trump from drawing the military into his quest to overturn the 2020 election. Milley was even quoted fretting about Trump and his supporters staging a “Reichstag moment”—a fear that seemed eerily prescient on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, seeking to block congressional certification of Trump’s defeat. Trump, in turn, publicly denounced Milley and said that he had only picked him as chairman in 2018 to spite James Mattis, his soon-to-quit Defense Secretary at the time.
Glasser, as always, is long-winded, so you’ll need to read more at The New Yorker to get the full story about Trump’s rage at Milley. Milley was afraid that Trump might try to attack Iran after he lost the election. Basically, Milley told the truth about him, and Trump never likes people who do that.
Legendary journalist Bob Woodward tore into former President Donald Trump in an interview on CNN Wednesday evening, calling him the largest threat to national security he had ever seen from any U.S. government official.
This comes amid the release of an audio tape of Trump boasting to patrons of his New Jersey golf club about possessing highly classified defense information about an attack on Iran — which he now denies — and reporting that he was motivated to do so by anger at Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley for working to constrain his post-2020 election impulses.
“Bob, you’ve interviewed the former president a lot,” said anchor Anderson Cooper. “We’ve discussed your own tape of him. What stands out to you about this latest recording?”
“Well, it really shows that Donald Trump is an alarming, dangerous threat to national security,” said Woodward, who helped expose the Watergate scandal decades ago and has recently been caught up in a legal battle with Trump over White House transcripts. “In the book, ‘Peril’ that I did with Robert Costa, we recount two National Security Council meetings where Trump, not General Milley or the Defense Department, was agitating for a possible attack on Iran. And he is pushing it. And General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the number one military man in the country, is telling Trump, you don’t want a war. If you start a war, you’re going to get into a conflict that you can’t get out of.”
“You see him in this reporting that we did from these meetings from notes, that it is the generals who say, no, no, no,” Woodward continued. “And Trump says, well — in one of the meetings the Iranians have enough to make two nuclear bombs, and he’s worried about that and thinking that maybe they should consider an attack. And these contingency plans are most sensitive documents in the government because what they do is they outline in a crisis how we might attack Iran, what the casualties would be, how many ships would be sunk, how long it might take. And that’s something you can’t treat casually, as Trump has.”
That’s it for me. What stories have caught your interest today?
Thursday Reads: Drip, Drip, Drip
Posted: June 1, 2023 Filed under: Donald Trump, just because | Tags: Carlos Deoliveira, iran, James Trusty, Mar-a-Lago security footage, Margo Martin, Mark Meadows, Mark Milley, Special Counsel Jack Smith, stolen documents case, Susan Glasser, Tim Parlatore, Walt Nauta, Yuscil Taveras 43 Comments
The Balcony in Vernonnet, 1920, Pierre Bonnard
Good Morning!!
The evidence against Trump keeps coming out bit by bit. Yesterday was a big day for news about the stolen documents case. CNN first broke the news that Trump was caught on tape discussing a classified document that he retained after leaving the White House. Then The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post added more information to the story.
Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.
The recording indicates Trump understood he retained classified material after leaving the White House, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation. On the recording, Trump’s comments suggest he would like to share the information but he’s aware of limitations on his ability post-presidency to declassify records, two of the sources said….
Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Justice Department investigation into Trump, has focused on the meeting as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of national security secrets. Sources describe the recording as an “important” piece of evidence in a possible case against Trump, who has repeatedly asserted he could retain presidential records and “automatically” declassify documents.
Prosecutors have asked witnesses about the recording and the document before a federal grand jury. The episode has generated enough interest for investigators to have questioned Gen. Mark Milley, one of the highest-ranking Trump-era national security officials, about the incident.
Ramo de gladiolos, lirios y margaritas (1878), Claude Monet
It’s interesting and significant that the meeting at which Trump talked about the document was at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey. The incident took place at a meeting with two ghost writers who were working on Mark Meadows’ autobiography. Other attendees were “communications specialist” Margo Martin, and other Trump aides. It appears that Martin may be the source of the recording.
Back to the CNN story:
Meadows’ autobiography includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.”
The document Trump references was not produced by Milley, CNN was told….
The meeting in which Trump discussed the Iran document with others happened shortly after The New Yorker published a story by Susan Glasser detailing how, in the final days of Trump’s presidency, Milley instructed the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern. The story infuriated Trump.
Glasser reported that in the months following the election, Milley repeatedly argued against striking Iran and was concerned Trump “might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified.” Milley and others talked Trump out of taking such a drastic action, according to the New Yorker story.
Glasser reported that in the months following the election, Milley repeatedly argued against striking Iran and was concerned Trump “might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified.” Milley and others talked Trump out of taking such a drastic action, according to the New Yorker story.
Trump appeared to be holding the secret document he was describing because the recording picked up the “sound of paper rustling.” Even if he didn’t show it to the others, he never should have had the document in an unsecured meeting room with people without security clearances.
Some observers were wondering if Trump could be charged with espionage if this recording is “top secret,” because then it might not be able to be used in court. But Hugh Lowell reports at The Guardian that it is only classified as “secret”: Trump regretted not declassifying retained military document in recording.
The document at issue is understood to be classified as “secret” – significant as the justice department typically prefers to charge espionage cases involving retention of materials at that level, rather than “top secret” papers that might be too sensitive or “confidential” papers that are too low.
The recording was made at Trump’s Bedminster golf club in July 2021, when the former president met with people helping his former chief of staff Mark Meadows write a book, by his aide Margo Martin who regularly taped conversations with authors to ensure they accurately recounted his remarks.
Apple Tree In Blossom, 1898c, Carl Larsson (Swedish 1853-1919
For several minutes of the audio recording, the sources said, Trump talks about how he cannot discuss the document because he no longer possesses the sweeping presidential power to declassify now out of office, but suggests that he should have done so when he was still in the White House.
But the previously unreported suggestion that he should have declassified the document presents a potentially perilous moment, as it indicates Trump knew that he had retained material which remained sensitive to national security – as well as the limitations on discussing it with unauthorized people. CNN earlier reported that prosecutors had the recording.
Prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith appear to have obtained the recording around March, as the criminal investigation targeting Trump intensified and numerous Trump aides were subpoenaed to testify before the federal grand jury hearing evidence in the case in Washington.
The tape was played to multiple witnesses, including Martin, when she testified in mid-March after having her laptop and phones imaged by prosecutors, the sources said. The first time the Trump lawyers learned about the tape was after Martin testified, one of the sources said.
As I suggested earlier, it appears that Martin’s laptop was the source of the recording. The New York Times also reported that Martin attended the meeting and doesn’t quite claim she is the source, but it seems pretty likely, since prosecutors had her laptop. A bit more from The New York Times story:
Bouquet de Mimosa sur la Table 1938, Édouard Vuillard
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday night, James Trusty, a lawyer representing Mr. Trump in the case, indicated that the former president was taking the position that he had declassified the material he took with him upon leaving office.
“When he left for Mar-a-Lago with boxes of documents that other people packed for him that he brought, he was the commander in chief,” Mr. Trusty said. “There is no doubt that he has the constitutional authority as commander in chief to declassify.”
Mr. Trusty said officials could prove that Mr. Trump had declassified material. But when pressed on whether Mr. Trump had declassified the document in question at the Bedminster meeting, Mr. Trusty declined to say.
That’s pretty weak.
Here’s The Washington Post story, which you can read if you’re interested. It’s mostly a recap of the other reports and background on the investigation: Prosecutors have recording of Trump discussing sensitive Iran document.
One more Trump stolen document investigation story from The New York Times: Prosecutors Scrutinize Handling of Security Footage by Trump Aides in Documents Case.
For the past six months, prosecutors working for the special counsel Jack Smith have sought to determine whether former President Donald J. Trump obstructed the government’s efforts to retrieve a trove of classified documents he took from the White House.
More recently, investigators also appear to be pursuing a related question: whether Mr. Trump and some of his aides sought to interfere with the government’s attempt to obtain security camera footage from Mar-a-Lago that could shed light on how those documents were stored and who had access to them.
The search for answers on this second issue has taken investigators deep into the bowels of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, as they pose questions to an expanding cast of low-level workers at the compound, according to people familiar with the matter. Some of the workers played a role in either securing boxes of material in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago or maintaining video footage from a security camera that was mounted outside the room.
Two weeks ago, the latest of these employees, an information technology worker named Yuscil Taveras, appeared before a grand jury in Washington, according to two people familiar with the matter.
So now we know the name of the aide who helped Walt Nauta move the boxes around.
Mr. Taveras was asked questions about his dealings with two other Trump employees: Walt Nauta, a longtime aide to Mr. Trump who served as one of his valets in the White House, and Carlos Deoliveira, described by one person familiar with the events as the head of maintenance at Mar-a-Lago.
Phone records show that Mr. Deoliveira called Mr. Taveras last summer, and prosecutors wanted to know why. The call caught the government’s attention because it was placed shortly after prosecutors issued a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, demanding the footage from the surveillance camera near the storage room.
The call also occurred just weeks after Mr. Deoliveira helped Mr. Nauta move boxes of documents into the storage room — the same room that Mr. Deoliveira at one point fitted with a lock. The movement of the boxes into the room took place at another key moment: on the day before prosecutors descended on Mar-a-Lago for a meeting with Mr. Trump’s lawyers intended to get him to comply with a demand to return all classified documents.
The Trump Organization ultimately turned over the surveillance tapes, but Mr. Smith’s prosecutors appear to be scrutinizing whether someone in Mr. Trump’s orbit tried to limit the amount of footage produced to the government.
They asked Mr. Taveras an open-ended question about if anyone had queried him about whether footage from the surveillance system could be deleted.
The Times doesn’t know what Taveras told the grand jury. Read more at the link.
Today, Hugo Lowell has another story at The Guardian on the turmoil among Trump’s many lawyers: Months of distrust inside Trump legal team led to top lawyer’s departure. And get this: Lowell learned all this because he was sitting at the next table in a restaurant.
Donald Trump’s legal team for months has weathered deep distrust and interpersonal conflict that could undermine its defense of the former president as the criminal investigation into his handling of classified documents and obstruction of justice at Mar-a-Lago nears its conclusion.
The turmoil inside the legal team only exploded into public view when one of the top lawyers, Tim Parlatore, abruptly resigned two weeks’ ago from the representation citing irreconcilable differences with Trump’s senior adviser and in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn.
But the departure of Parlatore was the culmination of months of simmering tensions that continue to threaten the effectiveness of the legal team at a crucial time – as federal prosecutors weigh criminal charges – in part because the interpersonal conflicts remain largely unresolved.
It also comes as multiple Trump lawyers are embroiled in numerous criminal investigations targeting the former president: Epshteyn was recently interviewed by the special counsel, while Parlatore and Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran testified to the grand jury in the classified documents inquiry.
The turmoil has revolved around hostility among the lawyers on the legal team who have come to distrust each other as well as their hostility directed at Epshteyn, over what they regard as his oversight of the legal work and gatekeeping direct access to the former president.
In one instance, the clashes became so acute that some of the lawyers agreed to a so-called “murder-suicide” pact where if Parlatore got fired, others would resign in solidarity. And as some of the lawyers tried to exclude Epshteyn, they withheld information from co-counsel who they suspected might brief him.
Read all the details at The Guardian link.
So . . . that’s the latest on just one of the Trump investigations. Will we learn more today? Drip, drip, drip.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: November 15, 2022 Filed under: 2022 Elections, Donald Trump, just because, morning reads | Tags: Adam Frisch, Arizona, California, Colorado, House of Representatives, iran, Katie Hobbs, Loren Boebert, Nancy Pelosi, Russia, Trump whisperers 27 Comments
Solitude (Loneliness), Paul Delvaux, 1956
Good Morning!!
As Daknikat wrote yesterday, it looks as if Republicans will win enough seats to control the House with a very small majority. But they won’t be able to do much. I suppose they’ll spend their time and energy investigating Hunter Biden and any other crackpot problem they can dream up. The good news is than Lauren Bobert’s seat is still undecided for now.
AP News: California wins leave GOP poised to seize US House control.
Two threatened U.S. House Republicans in California triumphed over Democratic challengers Monday, helping move the GOP within a seat of seizing control of the chamber while a string of congressional races in the state remained in play.
In a bitter fight southeast of Los Angeles, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel defeated Democrat Jay Chen in a district that was specifically drawn to give Asian Americans, who comprise the largest group in the district, a stronger voice on Capitol Hill. It includes the nation’s largest Vietnamese community.
East of Los Angeles, Republican Rep. Ken Calvert notched a win over Democrat Will Rollins. With 80% of the votes tallied, Calvert, the longest serving Republican in the California congressional delegation, established a nearly 5,500-vote edge in the contest.
Ten races in the state remained undecided as vote-counting continued, though only a handful were seen as tight enough to break either way.
It takes 218 seats to control the House. Republicans have locked down 217 seats so far, with Democrats claiming 205.
Should Democrats fail to protect their fragile majority, Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield would be in line to replace Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.
Read about the remaining undecided races at the link.
The Independent: Lauren Boebert – live: Republican under fire for ‘embarrassing’ tweet as she leads race by just 1,200 votes.
Lauren Boebert has taken aim at Nancy Pelosi and called for the House Speaker’s ousting while her own future in politics continues to hang in the balance.
“Waiting this long for election results is going to make firing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House that much sweeter,” she wrote on Twitter on Monday.
Automat, Edward Hopper
Republicans are just one seat away from control of the House of Representatives, with the balance of power potentially hinging on th eoutcome of Ms Boebert’s race among serveral others that have not yet been decided.
Ms Boebert’s race is still too close to call and it is unlikely that the outcome will be known until the end of the week – at the soonest.
The far-right Republican is currently leading Democratic challenger Adam Frisch by just 1,122 votes in what has shaped up to be an unexpectedly close race. The race could be headed for an automatic recount if neither candidate fails to win by a margin of more than 0.5 per cent.
If only she would lose! This is from Newsweek yesterday: Lauren Boebert in Danger as Rejected Mail-in Ballot Checks Could Help Rival.
The race for Colorado’s third congressional district remains too close to be called, as Trump-endorsed Rep. Lauren Boebert is currently only slightly ahead of her rival, Democrat Adam Frisch.
But the incumbent congresswoman’s narrow lead could once again be overturned if thousands of likely rejected votes in favor of her challenger were to be “cured”, as a recount looms over the Colorado race.
Every year in Colorado, thousands of ballots are reportedly rejected for issues related to signature verification, such as a missing signature or a discrepancy in the signature. Local officials then alert voters of the issue, giving them a week to fix the problem and make their vote count. The process, which is done in 23 other state besides Colorado, is called “ballot curing.”
Boebert was widely projected to win the midterms, with polling website FiveThirtyEight giving her a 97 in 100 chance of victory in the days ahead of the vote.
As of November 14 and with nearly all of the ballots being counted, Boebert is leading with 50.1 percent of the vote (162,040 votes) against Frisch’s 49.8 percent (160,918 votes).
A recount could be called if the final margin between Boebert and Frisch is less than or equal to 0.5 percent of the leading candidate’s vote total. At the moment, the gap between the two candidates is 0.38 percent.
Frisch could still oust the Republican incumbent, an election denier and one of Donald Trump‘s most ardent supporters, if thousands of votes likely rejected for signature verification were cast in support of the Democratic nominee.
So it’s still up in the air.
In Arizona, Katie Hobbs finally triumphed in the race for governor. AZ Central: Katie Hobbs elected Arizona’s 5th female governor, defeating election denier Kari Lake.
Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic election chief who built a national profile by standing up to false claims about the 2020 presidential election, has won the state’s race for governor.
The Associated Press, NBC News and CNN called the race for Hobbs shortly after 7 p.m. Monday, following a nail-biter week of election returns that highlighted the competitiveness of politics in the state.
The Lonely Ones, by Edvard Munch, 1935
“Democracy is worth the wait,” Hobbs posted on social media before issuing a statement thanking her family, volunteers and staff for their work.
“This was not just about an election — it was about moving this state forward and facing the challenges of our generation,” the statement read, ending: “Let’s get to work.”
Late-in-the-race polling showed her Republican opponent Kari Lake, the former television news anchor, with the momentum as Nov. 8 neared. Instead, voters offered a stunning rebuke of Lake, who was one of the nation’s most prominent election deniers.
With Hobbs’ win, Arizonans followed voters in other battleground states who rejected gubernatorial candidates who pushed false claims about election results.
As Arizona’s 24th governor, Hobbs will be the fifth female to hold the top elected office, more than in any other state.
That’s amazing. We just finally got our first female governor here in Massachusetts.
Donald Trump is supposedly announcing that he’s running for president today, and The New York Times and Washington Post can hardly wait. The NYT even hired another “Trump whisperer” to go along with their star access journalist Maggie Haberman. This is from Emptywheel: In the Wake of Trump’s Third Electoral Failure, NY Times Boasts of Hiring a Third Trump Whisperer.
…Jonathan Swan is a good reporter. Indeed, his move to the NYT, which frees him to write like a human being rather than a McKinsey consultant (AKA Axios style), will likely be a significant improvement on his coverage of DC politics.
But it is downright insane that, at a time the GOP and Fox News are at least making noise about ditching Trump, the NYT pitched this hire — and their own political reporting — in terms of Trump.
Our insightful, authoritative and addictive coverage of the election this year drove home an essential truth: The Times’s political team is simply the best in the business.
Take our coverage of Republicans and Donald J. Trump.
We have Maggie Haberman, the dominant reporter of the Trump era, whose prolific, revealing and exclusive coverage has become indispensable to millions of readers. We have Michael Bender, whom Maggie admired as her “fierce competitor” from his days at The Wall Street Journal, and who has delivered exclusives on everything from the former president’s plans to buy Greenland to examinations of how Trumpism remade the Republican party.
And today we are thrilled to tell you that Jonathan Swan, a gifted, dogged and high-impact reporter, will be joining The Times. Jonathan, a national political reporter at Axios, is one of the biggest news breakers and best-sourced reporters in Washington.
Even if you have never met Jonathan, you know his stories. He first reported that Trump would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris climate deal, that Steve Bannon would be fired and that Paul Ryan would retire from Congress.
Or perhaps you watched his riveting interview with then-President Trump in 2020, which won Jonathan an Emmy (and made his facial expressions famous.) Ben Smith, the former media columnist for The Times, wrote at the time that it was “perhaps the best interview of Mr. Trump’s term.’’
Jonathan’s nine-part written series on the final days of the Trump administration won broad acclaim, and the podcast on which it was based rose to No. 1 on the Apple charts. [my emphasis]
Weekend Retreat, by Alan Parry
Again, I think the Swan hire is a net good for reporting — but aside from the degree to which Swan is an improvement over Jonathan Martin, who just moved to become Politico’s Politics Bureau Chief — that has nothing to do with the NYT.
Particularly accompanied as it is by Maggie’s multiple efforts to suggest Trump is still The One, the pitch of Swan as a Trump-whisperer — rather than simply as a very good reporter of right wing politics — this announcement commits to keeping Trump (as a politician, rather than, for example, a criminal suspect, something none of these three are very good at reporting) the center of attention.
The Washington Post article hyping Trump’s announcement–two years ahead of the 2024 election–of courses features gossip reporters Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey: Trump campaign operation takes shape ahead of expected 2024 announcement.
Really, who the hell cares? Why don’t these newspapers cover President Biden, who is actually accomplishing plenty, while Trump is likely to be indicted before 2024? Or they could cover the fact that Russia is still working to influence our elections, which CNN reported this morning: CNN Exclusive: US intelligence suggests Russia put off announcing Kherson retreat until after midterm elections.
The US has intelligence that Russia may have delayed announcing its withdrawal from the Ukrainian city of Kherson in part to avoid giving the Biden administration a political win ahead of the midterm elections, according to four people familiar with the intelligence.
Senior Russian officials discussed the US midterms as a factor during deliberations about the withdrawal announcement, one person familiar with the intelligence said. Waiting until after the US election was always a “pre-planned condition” of Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson, a second person familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
Still, the election was far from the only consideration in Russia’s retreat, officials said. Military analysts say Russia had few other operational options and had been preparing to pull back for weeks, leading US officials to wonder when the Russians would officially acknowledge the withdrawal.
While the intelligence is not a formal assessment of Russia’s intentions, it is a sign that Russia has a continued interest in influencing the US political landscape — although the sources said Russia probably miscalculated the impact such an announcement would actually have on the elections.
“I doubt Americans would really have noticed,” said another source familiar with western intelligence.
President Joe Biden last week appeared to hint that the US believed that the timing of Russia’s announcement was more than mere coincidence.
“I find it interesting they waited until after the election to make that judgement, which we knew for some time they were going to be doing, and it’s evidence of the fact that they have some real problems – the Russian military,” Biden said at a press conference last Wednesday.
Carl Gustav Carus, Woman on the Balcony
I’m going to end with this shocking story from The New York Times about Iran: Stymied by Protests, Iran Unleashes Its Wrath on Its Youth.
One girl, a 14-year-old, was incarcerated in an adult prison alongside drug offenders. A 16-year-old boy had his nose broken in detention after a beating by security officers. A 13-year-old girl was physically attacked by plainclothes militia who raided her school.
A brutal crackdown by the authorities in Iran trying to halt protests calling for social freedom and political change that have convulsed the country for the past two months has exacted a terrible toll on the nation’s youth, according to lawyers in Iran and rights activists familiar with the cases.
Young people, including teenage girls and boys, have been at the center of the demonstrations and clashes with security forces on the streets and university campuses and at high schools. Iranian officials have said the average age of protesters is 15.
Some have been beaten and detained, others have been shot and killed on the streets, or beaten in the custody of security services, and the lives of countless others have been disrupted as the authorities raid schools in an effort to crack down on dissent.
The authorities are targeting thousands of minors, under the age of 18, for participating in the protests, according to interviews with two dozen people, including lawyers in Iran involved in cases and rights activists, as well as parents, relatives and teenagers living in the country. Rights groups say that at least 50 minors have been killed.
The lawyers and many of the individuals interviewed for this article asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
The targeting of young people comes amid a broader crackdown on protesters in which 14,000 people have been arrested, according to the United Nations. On Sunday, state media said an unidentified person had been sentenced to death for setting fire to a government building.
There’s much more at the link. Sorry to hit you with this horrifying story, but I thought it was urgent. What can the U.S. do about this? The U.N.?
Please share your thoughts and any other stories that interest you in the comment thread.
Friday Reads: The Final Days
Posted: July 16, 2021 Filed under: just because, morning reads | Tags: Coup attempt, Donald Trump, iran, January 6 Capitol insurrection, Joint Chiefs, Keith Kellogg, Mark Milley, Mike Pence, Secret Service, Trump books 11 Comments
Soiree, by Andrea Kowch
Good Morning!!
The revelations about Trump’s final days just keep on coming. The Washington Post released another excerpt from the book by their reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig yesterday, and today The New Yorker a piece by Susan Glasser, who apparently has a book coming out next year.
Among the stunning details in the Rucker/Leonnig excerpt is that Mike Pence didn’t trust all of the the members of his Secret Service detail, seemingly suspecting that they were aiding Trump’s attempted coup.
At 2:13, Pence’s Secret Service detail removed the vice president from the Senate floor and took him through a side door to his ceremonial office nearby, along with his wife, Karen, their daughter Charlotte, and his brother, Greg, a congressman from Indiana. The Pences were hurried across one of the Capitol’s many ornate marble hallways to get there, but the path proved eerily close to danger. One or two minutes later, marauders chanting Pence’s name charged up the stairs to that precise landing in front of the hallway, and a quick-thinking Goodman led the rioters in a different direction, away from the Senate chamber. Had Pence walked past any later, the intruders who called him a traitor would have spotted him….
As rioters marauded through the Capitol, it was clear whom they were looking for. Some of them shouted, “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump didn’t exactly throw them off the hunt. At 2:24, the president tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
At that moment, Pence was still in his ceremonial office — protected by Secret Service agents, but vulnerable because the second-floor office had windows that could be breached and the intruding thugs had gained control of the building. Tim Giebels, the lead special agent in charge of the vice president’s protective detail, twice asked Pence to evacuate the Capitol, but Pence refused. “I’m not leaving the Capitol,” he told Giebels. The last thing the vice president wanted was the people attacking the Capitol to see his 20-car motorcade fleeing. That would only vindicate their insurrection.
The third time Giebels asked Pence to evacuate, it was more of an order than a request. “They’re in the building,” Giebels said. “The room you’re in is not secure. There are glass windows. I need to move you. We’re going.”
At 2:26, after a team of agents scouted a safe path to ensure the Pences would not encounter trouble, Giebels and the rest of Pence’s detail guided them down a staircase to a secure subterranean area that rioters couldn’t reach, where the vice president’s armored limousine awaited. Giebels asked Pence to get in one of the vehicles. “We can hold here,” he said.
“I’m not getting in the car, Tim,” Pence replied. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”
The Pences then made their way to a secure underground area to wait out the riot.
Much as I can’t stand Pence, he did the right thing on that terrible day.
As we’ve learned, General Milly also came through, and even the much hated Bill Barr refused to support Trump’s authoritarian obsession.
Meanwhile, Trump was excitedly watching the MAGA attack on TV. He couldn’t have cared less that the Vice President and hundreds of Congresspeople were in danger.
Back at the White House, [Pence’s national security adviser, Retired Lt. General Keith] Kellogg was worried about Pence’s safety and went to find Trump.
“Is Mike okay?” the president asked him.
“The Secret Service has him under control,” Kellogg told Trump. “Karen is there with the daughter.”
“Oh?” Trump asked.
“They’re going to stay there until this thing gets sorted out,” Kellogg said.
A Siesta, by John Singer Sargent
Trump said nothing more. He didn’t express any hope that Pence was okay. He didn’t try to call the vice president to check on him. He just stayed in the dining room watching television.
Around this time, Kellogg ran into Tony Ornato in the West Wing. Ornato, who oversaw Secret Service movements, told him that Pence’s detail was planning to move the vice president to Joint Base Andrews.
“You can’t do that, Tony,” Kellogg said. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”
Pence had made clear to Giebels the level of his determination and Kellogg said there was no changing it.
“He’s going to stay there,” Kellogg told Ornato. “If he has to wait there all night, he’s going to do it.”
At this point, can anyone seriously doubt that Trump would have been OK with his thugs hanging Pence? Pence and Kellogg need to testify under oath before the January 6 committee.
If you haven’t read the Washington Post article yet, please do.
General Mark Milley was a significant source for the Rucker/Leonnig book, and he apparently talked extensively to Susan Glasser as well. Glasser writes at The New Yorker: “You’re Gonna Have a Fucking War”: Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran.
The last time that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke with President Donald Trump was on January 3, 2021. The subject of the Sunday-afternoon meeting, at the White House, was Iran’s nuclear program. For the past several months, Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his quixotic campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power. The chairman secretly feared that Trump would insist on launching a strike on Iranian interests that could set off a full-blown war.
There were two “nightmare scenarios,” Milley told associates, for the period after the November 3rd election, which resulted in Trump’s defeat but not his concession: one was that Trump would try “to use the military on the streets of America to prevent the legitimate, peaceful transfer of power.” The other was an external crisis involving Iran. It was not public at the time, but Milley believed that the nation had come close—“very close”—to conflict with the Islamic Republic. This dangerous post-election period, Milley said, was all because of Trump’s “Hitler”-like embrace of the “Big Lie” that the election had been stolen from him; Milley feared it was Trump’s “Reichstag moment,” in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.
Study for the Pigeons, by Henry Koerner
To prevent such an outcome, Milley had, since late in 2020, been having morning phone meetings, at 8 a.m. on most days, with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in the hopes of getting the country safely through to Joe Biden’s Inauguration. The chairman, a burly four-star Army general who had been appointed to the post by Trump in 2019, referred to these meetings with his staff as the “land the plane” calls—as in, “both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck, we’re in an emergency situation. Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January.”
This extraordinary confrontation between the nation’s top military official and the Commander-in-Chief had been building throughout 2020. Before the election, Milley had drafted a plan for how to handle the perilous period leading up to the Inauguration. He outlined four goals: first, to make sure that the U.S. didn’t unnecessarily go to war overseas; second, to make sure that U.S. troops were not used on the streets of America against the American people, for the purpose of keeping Trump in power; third, to maintain the military’s integrity; and, lastly, to maintain his own integrity. He referred back to them often in conversations with others.
As the crisis with Trump unfolded, and the chairman’s worst-case fears about the President not accepting defeat seemed to come true, Milley repeatedly met in private with the Joint Chiefs. He told them to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump and not to carry out any such orders without calling him first—almost a conscious echo of the final days of Richard Nixon, when Nixon’s Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, reportedly warned the military not to act on any orders from the White House to launch a nuclear strike without first checking with him or with the national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger. At one meeting with the Joint Chiefs, in Milley’s Pentagon office, the chairman invoked Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, saying they should all hang together. To concerned members of Congress—including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—and also emissaries from the incoming Biden Administration, Milley also put out the word: Trump might attempt a coup, but he would fail because he would never succeed in co-opting the American military. “Our loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution,” Milley told them, and “we are not going to be involved in politics.”
Read the rest at The New Yorker.
Raw Story has an investigative article on the January 6 Capitol attack: Anatomy of an insurrection: How military veterans and other rioters carried out the Jan. 6 assault on democracy, by Jordan Green.
The slow-moving tedium of prosecutorial legal machinery and the GOP campaign to deflect responsibility can make it easy to lose sight of the big picture of what transpired on Jan. 6. But based on an aggregate review of individuals cases, along with other sources, a Raw Story analysis of the critical events in the Jan. 6 siege reveals a striking degree of coordination, sustained and intentional violence, planning and preparation, and determined effort to disable the United States’ critical governance apparatus by participants, including many with recent military experience. Many of the rioters who played critical roles in breaching the Capitol came away from the experience vowing to wage war against the United States. Few among those who are being prosecuted have expressed any remorse for their actions.
Day Trip, by William Haskell
Amid the hundreds of prosecutions of Trump supporters motivated by the big lie, the GOP has punished lawmakers who fail to bear allegiance to the former president and run afoul of the party line that the election was stolen, while thwarting the House investigation into the events of Jan. 6. GOP intransigence makes it likely that the Democratic-led investigation will become reduced to another partisan snipe-fest, undermining its potential to hold people accountable and prevent future attempts to overturn democracy….
A handful of defendants, including Oath Keepers members, have pleaded guilty, as fresh arrests fatten the docket weekly. Those recently charged are not minor players: In addition to people who trashed media equipment and assaulted reporters, they include the first boogaloo-identified rioter, with hints that there are more to come, and a man who organized a resistance cell under the cover of a Bible study. Critically, the FBI has yet to make an arrest for bombs that were planted outside the Democratic and Republican headquarters on the eve of the insurrection. Even under the most optimistic scenario, the prosecutions are likely to drag on for years: Among the few cases set for trial, white nationalist Christian Secor isn’t scheduled to begin deliberations until January 2022.
Beyond the chaotic events that took place when hundreds of Trump supporters unleashed mayhem on the Capitol, it remains unknown to what degree, if any, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers coordinated their actions. And beyond Trump’s feverish promotion of the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally and instruction to his followers to “walk down to the Capitol,” it also remains to be seen whether the siege may have been directed by the president or his surrogates through intermediaries such as Trump confidant Roger Stone or “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander.
Notably, the mob began its advance on the Capitol well before Trump had finished speaking at the Ellipse, suggesting that key players had decided in advance to disrupt the certification of the electoral vote, while Trump’s exhortations mobilized thousands more to reinforce the riot that was already unfolding at the seat of American government.
This is a very long and interesting article. I hope you’ll check it out.
I’m sorry to have to keep focusing on Trump news, but that’s what’s out there today. As always, this is an open thread. What’s on your mind?
Thursday Reads: Matt Gaetz’s Wild and Crazy Scandal
Posted: April 1, 2021 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, just because, U.S. Politics | Tags: David McGee, DOJ, Don Gaetz, FBI, Fox News, iran, Joel Greenberg, Matt Gaetz, Robert Levinson, sex trafficking, Tucker Carlson 8 Comments
Saad Yagan, 2017
Good Afternoon!!
What on Earth is going on with Matt Gaetz? The story just keeps growing stranger by the day. It all began with this New York Times story published on Tuesday: Matt Gaetz Is Said to Face Justice Dept. Inquiry Over Sex With an Underage Girl.
Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, according to three people briefed on the matter.
Investigators are examining whether Mr. Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws, the people said. A variety of federal statutes make it illegal to induce someone under 18 to travel over state lines to engage in sex in exchange for money or something of value. The Justice Department regularly prosecutes such cases, and offenders often receive severe sentences.
It was not clear how Mr. Gaetz met the girl, believed to be 17 at the time of encounters about two years ago that investigators are scrutinizing, according to two of the people.
The investigation was opened in the final months of the Trump administration under Attorney General William P. Barr, the two people said. Given Mr. Gaetz’s national profile, senior Justice Department officials in Washington — including some appointed by Mr. Trump — were notified of the investigation, the people said.
Then Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox and made everything worse for himself.
Aaron Rupar at Vox: Matt Gaetz’s disastrous Tucker Carlson interview, explained.
Hours after the New York Times broke the news that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is under federal investigation for alleged sex trafficking, he was given a platform by Fox News host Tucker Carlson to tell his side of the story. But Gaetz ended up botching the softball interview so thoroughly that Carlson ended up telling his millions of viewers it was “one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted.”
Pablo Picasso, 1939
At various points during the interview, Gaetz — who denies the allegations — volunteered the existence of criminal allegations against him that aren’t yet part of the public record, brought up sexual misconduct allegations against Carlson that most of his viewers probably weren’t aware of, and went out of his way to involve Carlson in stories about his personal life.
“I can say that actually you and I went to dinner about two years ago, your wife was there, and I brought a friend of mine — you’ll remember her — and she was actually threatened by the FBI, told that if she wouldn’t cop to the fact that somehow I was involved in some pay-for-play scheme, that could face trouble,” Gaetz said. “So I do believe there are people at the Department of Justice that are trying to smear me. Providing for flights and hotel rooms for people that you’re dating who are of legal age is not a crime.”
It sounds like he’s admitting he paid for travel and hotel rooms for a person he was dating, doesn’t it?
…more importantly than the bizarreness of the interview is the fact that Gaetz didn’t do a very convincing job trying to refute the very serious criminal allegations underpinning the federal investigation. His defense basically amounts to claims that he’s the victim of a vast conspiracy….
During the interview with Carlson, Gaetz denied improper conduct, but he did so in a very limited and specific way, using language that raised more questions than it answered.
Butterflies and Poppies, Vincent Van Gogh
“The New York Times is running a story that I have traveled with a 17-year-old woman, and that is verifiably false; people can look at my travel records and see that that is not the case,” Gaetz said — even though a 17-year-old is not a “woman,” the allegations go beyond mere “traveling,” and it’s unclear how “travel records” could disprove any of them.
Gaetz went on to allege that word of the investigation was leaked as part of an extortion plot, saying “what is happening is an extortion of me and my family involving a former Department of Justice official” who demanded $25 million in exchange for making the sex trafficking allegations go away.
But during an MSNBC interview a short time later, one of the Times reporters bylined on the Gaetz story, Katie Benner, debunked one of Gaetz’s central claims, saying unequivocally that the former official Gaetz accused by name of being part of an extortion plot isn’t even involved in the investigation.
I’m still very confused.
Washington Post fact checker Salvador Rizzo explains why travel records could not prove the allegations against Gaetz are false. Basically, these records aren’t available to the public.
Here’s the bottom line: House members’ personal travel and expenses are not subject to disclosure, so there would be no public records to check regarding Gaetz’s private life.“If this was just personal travel, and he wasn’t using campaign or official funds, there’s no disclosure,” said Jordan Libowitz, communications director for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Airline flight manifests and personal credit card or bank statements would chart who went where with whom at what times and at whose expense, but those sensitive records are not public. Only law enforcement investigators could look through them by getting subpoenas.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post: The Matt Gaetz allegation, explained.
“The Justice Department is investigating Rep. Matt Gaetz — a Florida Republican considered a close political ally of former president Donald Trump — over an alleged sexual relationship with an underage girl,” The Washington Post’s Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett explain. That relationship allegedly included paying for the girl to travel, potentially across state lines, adding the complexity of potential federal charges related to sex trafficking, according to the Times. Both the Post and Times stories are constrained for fairly obvious reasons, including the limits of available information and the need to accurately convey the potential risk Gaetz faces.
Landscape with Butterflies, 1956, by Salvador Dali
The investigation apparently spun out of another sex-trafficking probe in Florida. That one focused on a former county official named Joel Greenberg, who was charged in the summer with a number of federal offenses, including sex trafficking of a minor.
“According to an indictment in the case, Greenberg abused his access to a statewide database, using it to look up the personal information of people with whom he was in ‘sugar daddy’ relationships, including the minor, and to help produce fake identification documents to ‘facilitate his efforts to engage in commercial sex acts,’ ” Zapotosky and Barrett report. “He was also accused of seeking to undermine a political opponent by surfacing fabricated evidence of racism and misconduct.”
It’s worth noting that questions about Gaetz’s relationships have emerged in the past. A Mother Jones article from 2019 documents concerns raised by a former member of Gaetz’s staff about a 21-year-old he was then dating and who was apparently posting photos of the two of them on Instagram alongside other photos showing not-conservative-politician-friendly activities.
There’s more explanation and confusion at the link. What is clear is that there are two different investigations that Gaetz is trying to combine in his defense. Other than that, I’m still confused.
Gaetz’s father chimed in at Politico yesterday: Matt Gaetz’s dad says he wore a wire for FBI probe into DOJ extortion claims.
Rep. Matt Gaetz’s father, Don, a former Florida Senate president, said he is working with the FBI, including wearing a wire on more than one occasion as part of an investigation into an alleged extortion plot that the pair said was organized by former federal prosecutor David McGee.
Herons and Lilies, 1934, by Frank W. Benson
“The FBI asked me to try and get that information for Matt and an indication we would transfer money to Mr. David McGee,” Don Gaetz said in an interview late Tuesday, without specifying what information he was referring to.
McGee, who is now in private practice with a Pensacola, Fla.-based law firm, did not respond to a POLITICO request seeking comment, but told other media outlets there is no truth to the alleged extortion plot.
Don Gaetz said in the interview he wore a wire during a meeting earlier this month with McGee and said he was set to meet Wednesday with Stephen Alford, a local developer who he said is also part of the alleged extortion scheme. During that meeting, Don Gaetz said, he was again set to wear a wire and try to get Alford to talk about payments he allegedly was to make to McGee, but the meeting fell apart when news broke that his son was being investigated by the Justice Department. Alford did not respond to text messages seeking comment.
In separate interviews, Don and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) acknowledged a Justice Department probe involving the younger Gaetz, 38, into whether he had improper involvement with a 17-year-old girl. The Gaetzes say they are the target of an extortion plot seeking money to keep the DOJ investigation quiet.
Today The Washington Post reported that the scandal involves Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran and is believed to be dead. Here’s a summary at The Week: The Matt Gaetz case now involves a missing FBI agent last seen in Iran.
When Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) father received a message that referred to a Justice Department investigation into his son and asked for help funding the search for Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran 14 years ago, he thought the request was suspicious and went to the FBI, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post on Wednesday.
On Tuesday night, The New York Times reported that in the waning months of the Trump administration, the DOJ launched an investigation into whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and paid for her to travel with him out of state. Gaetz, who denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crimes, released a statement saying his family had been targeted by extortionists, and his father wore a wire at the insistence of the FBI.
Boy with butterfly net, by Henri Mattisse, 1907
People familiar with the matter told the Post that Gaetz’s wealthy father, Don Gaetz, received a text message and document from two men who said if he gave them money to help with the search for Levinson, Matt Gaetz would be seen as a hero and his legal troubles would likely go away. Levinson disappeared from Iran’s Kish Island in 2007 while trying to get information on the country’s nuclear program, and was last seen alive in a 2010 hostage video. His family has said the U.S. government told them they believe Levinson is dead.
When Don Gaetz received these messages, the DOJ investigation into his son was not known publicly. It isn’t clear how the men learned about the investigation, and they do not appear to have any direct connection with the investigation. People with knowledge of the matter told the Post it will be hard to prove this was an extortion attempt because the men did not threaten to expose Gaetz’s DOJ investigation if the family did not give them money.
Matt Gaetz appeared on Fox News Tuesday night and accused a lawyer named David McGee of being involved in this effort. McGee has represented the Levinson family for years, and on Tuesday night he said Don Gaetz called him and they had a “pleasant conversation” about “the trouble his son was in.” McGee denied being involved in any extortion attempt, and his law firm on Wednesday called the allegation “false and defamatory.” Catherine Garcia
One more Gaetz story from ABC News: In investigation of Rep. Gaetz’s alleged sexual relationship with minor, feds looking beyond Florida, sources say.
Sources told ABC News the investigation has been going on for months and began during the Trump administration. Former Attorney General Bill Barr was briefed on the investigation’s progress several times, the sources said.
One source told ABC News that federal authorities have already interviewed multiple witnesses as part of their probe.
Morning Bird Dance, Edvard Munch
Gaetz has reportedly told confidants he is considering retiring from Congress and possibly joining the right-wing media outlet Newsmax, according to an Axios report earlier Tuesday.
Yet within the last several weeks Gaetz started reaching out to prominent attorneys, according to one source. The source said that one of the attorneys Gaetz asked to represent him was Washington attorney Bill Burck, who represented Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Don McGahn during the Mueller probe. Burck turned down the case, according to a person familiar with the decision.
So this story keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. One interesting point is that apparently Gaetz is very unpopular with Republicans and they are rooting for him to go down in flames. A few more links to check out:
Jeff Stein at Spy Talk: Gaetz ‘Extortion’ Figure’s Levinson Obsession.
The Daily Beast: The Creepy, Disturbing Case That Ensnared Matt Gaetz.
Ben Jacobs at New York Magazine: Matt Gaetz Gets a Scandal As Wild As Him.
Raw Story: Here are 7 new bombshell details from the complex and unraveling Matt Gaetz investigation story.
The Daily Beast: Republicans Have Been Waiting for a Matt Gaetz Scandal to Break.
The Hill: Fox has no interest in hiring Matt Gaetz.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this story, because it’s still so confusing to me. I guess we’ll be learning more soon. So what’s on your mind today? As always, this is an open thread.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments