Paris Through the Window, Marc Chagall
There’s some big news in the stolen documents case today. Special prosecutor Jack Smith has asked Judge Aileen Cannon for a gag order to stop Trump from claiming that the FBI planned to assassinate him when they searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents that he stole from the government. This is significant, because if Cannon refuses, Smith could appeal to the 11th Circuit court and request that she be removed from the case.
Here are the basics, from Katelyn Polantz at CNN: Special counsel asks judge for gag order in Trump classified documents case.
Special counsel’s office prosecutors on Friday asked a federal judge in Florida to place a gag order on Donald Trump that would limit his ability to comment about law enforcement that searched his Mar-a-Lago resort.
The request – a first in the classified documents mishandling case – comes after the former president has repeatedly and misleadingly criticized the FBI for having a policy in place around the use of deadly force during the search and seizure of government records at his resort in August 2022.
While Trump has told his supporters he could have been in danger because of the policy, the policy is standard protocol for FBI searches and limits how agents may use force in search operations. The same standard FBI policy was used in the searches of President Joe Biden’s homes and offices in a separate classified documents investigation.
Polanz is minimizing what Trump has said. He actually accused the FBI of trying to kill him and claimed President Biden ordered them to do it.
Prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith wrote to Judge Aileen Cannon in a filing Friday night that the conditions that allow Trump not to be in jail awaiting trial should be updated.
The request will force Cannon into the center of an intensely charged and politicized battle, grappling with Trump’s ongoing presidential campaign and the First Amendment at the same time prosecutors are escalating their concerns to her about proceedings she oversees. The judge so far has moved slowly to resolve disputes in Trump’s criminal mishandling and obstruction of justice case before her, and no trial date is set.
“Trump‘s repeated mischaracterization as an attempt to kill him, his family, and Secret Service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceedings,” prosecutors wrote.
His recent comments, they added, “invite the sort of threats and harassment that have occurred when other participants in legal proceedings against Trump have been targeted by his invective.”
The use of deadly force policy is included among several pages of paperwork governing FBI search protocol and policies when they went to Mar-a-Lago, which was made public in Trump’s case in federal court this week. The paperwork also lays out that agents would wear unmarked, business casual attire, and specifies that if Trump were to arrive at Mar-a-Lago during the search, leadership on site would speak to him and his Secret Service detail.
Alan Feuer writes at The New York Times: Prosecutors Seek to Bar Trump From Attacking F.B.I. Agents in Documents Case.
Federal prosecutors on Friday night asked the judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case to bar him from making any statements that might endanger law enforcement agents involved in the proceedings.
Prosecutors tendered the request after Mr. Trump made what they described as “grossly misleading” assertions about the F.B.I.’s August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. This week, the former president falsely suggested that the F.B.I. had been authorized to shoot him when agents discovered more than 100 classified documents while executing a court-approved search warrant there.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that President Biden “authorized the FBI to use deadly (lethal) force” during the search.
Mr. Trump’s post came in reaction to an F.B.I. operational plan for the Mar-a-Lago search that was unsealed on Tuesday as part of a legal motion filed by Mr. Trump’s lawyers. The plan contained a boilerplate reference to lethal force being authorized in cases of emergency, which prosecutors said that Mr. Trump badly distorted.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi Cat in a window
“As Trump is well aware, the F.B.I. took extraordinary care to execute the search warrant unobtrusively and without needless confrontation,” prosecutors wrote in a motion to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the classified documents case.
“They scheduled the search of Mar-a-Lago for a time when he and his family would be away,” the prosecutors added. “They planned to coordinate with Trump’s attorney, Secret Service agents and Mar-a-Lago staff before and during the execution of the warrant; and they planned for contingencies — which, in fact, never came to pass — about with whom to communicate if Trump were to arrive on the scene.” [….]
Prosecutors did not seek to impose a gag order on Mr. Trump in the classified documents case, but instead asked Judge Cannon to revise his conditions of release to forbid him to make any public comments “that pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation.”
Still, if Judge Cannon agrees to the request, it would mean that Mr. Trump could be placed in custody were he to violate the revised conditions.
You might also want to read Marcy Wheeler’s post: Jack Smith Invites Aileen Cannon to Protect the Country Rather than Just Donald Trump. I’m not going to excerpt from it, because it’s mostly long quotes from the filing.
This is from Andrew Weissmann on Twitter (I refuse to use that other stupid name):
Smart move by Smith as Judge Cannon won’t be likely to grant the gag order, will show her patent bias, and Smith can then appeal to the 11th Circuit.
Asha Rangappa asked him:
Can she just avoid ruling on it, like she has everything else?
Weissmann:
in theory yes, but I don’t think if she tries that ploy that Smith won’t mandamus her, and her lack of action one way or the other will look really bad on appeal.
I’ll be waiting anxiously to see what Loose Cannon does or doesn’t do.
Some analysis of Trump’s victimization strategy by Juliette Kayem at The Atlantic: Trump’s Assassination Fantasy Has a Darker Purpose.
When Donald Trump insinuated this week that his successor and the FBI were out to kill him, he showed how central violence has become to his conception of political leadership. The former president declared Tuesday on Truth Social, his social-media platform, that he “was shown reports Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL FORCE).” [….]
The genesis of the former president’s complaint is that, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 to obtain classified documents that were at the center of an investigation, agents were explicitly authorized to use force. This was not remotely unusual: FBI agents are routinely armed. The “reports” that Trump saw misinterpreted the parameters of the search, which—as the security analysts Asha Rangappa and Tom Joscelyn explained in Just Security—was guided by elaborate restrictions on when weapons could be used. The FBI subsequently said it followed a “standard policy statement limiting the use of force.” Attorney General Merrick Garland noted today that similar conditions were used in a search related to classified documents at Biden’s home in Delaware.
Victor Lukyanov, Summer Rain
The FBI had also carefully arranged to enter Trump’s property when he would be out of state—an odd way of carrying out an assassination. Still, the idea that Trump had been at physical risk rocketed across Truth Social. The X account of the House Judiciary Committee Republicans reposted—with the addition of siren emojis—a thread insinuating that FBI agents were acting like the “Gestapo” and had “risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests.” Trump’s campaign upped the hysteria with a fundraising email declaring that “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” and that “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.” By evening, the longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon was asserting that “this was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him.” [….]
The claim that Biden and the FBI were looking to kill Trump is easy to dismiss as the typical hyperbolic ranting of the ex-president and his fans, and it competes in the news with other disturbing things he says and does. The assassination claim initially seemed to have come and gone in the news cycle. But the story was still out there, to be absorbed by Trump’s audience.
Since the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Trump has become more and more apocalyptic in his language. This week, he sent another dangerous signal to his supporters: FBI agents are an armed enemy, ready to assassinate the former president. Unless, of course, Trump and his mob get to them first.
On Thursday, Trump held a rally in the Bronx, and, as usual, created some controversy that the mainstream media pretty much ignored.
Edith Olmstead at The Daily Beast: Trumpworld Claims 25,000 People Attended His Rally. Aerial Shots Show Otherwise.
Trumpworld is once again splintering from reality. This time, the diversion relates to counting—specifically, how many people attended Donald Trump’s rally in the Bronx on Thursday.
Trump, who has long obsessed over the size of crowds at his events, shared an article from Right Side Broadcasting Network to his Truth Social account that quoted the Trump campaign as saying 25,000 people attended the “electrifying” event. The New York Times reported that Trump’s team had acquired a permit for an event for 3,500 people.
“The sheer numbers show the great enthusiasm that President Trump has gained among voters in even the bluest areas of the United States,” the Right-Side Broadcasting Network article crowed.
That number later appeared on Fox News, was shared across various MAGA social media accounts, and also popped up on the official X account of the Republican Party.
But aerial footage of the event, and The Daily Beast’s reporter on the ground, told a different story. ABC7’s coverage of the event showed a much smaller crowd located in an amphitheater at Crotona Park.
While law enforcement told the New York Post that the crowd was between 8,000 and 10,000 people, The Daily Beast had a reporter in attendance, who estimated about 1,000 people were there.
You can see photos at the Daily Beast link.
Oscar, by Annie Troe
At the rally, Trump invited some local criminals to share the stage with him. Talia Jane at The New Republic: Trump Proudly Accepts Endorsements From Rappers Charged With Murder.
Criminals of a feather flocked together on Thursday as Trump hosted two Brooklyn rappers out on bail for murder conspiracy during a campaign rally in the Bronx.
Rappers Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow were indicted in 2023, alongside some 30 other people, as part of a massive investigation into two rival Brooklyn gangs. Sheff G—real name Michael Williams—allegedly used his accomplishments to help fund widespread violence. According to the New York Daily News, Williams was released on a $150,000 cash or $1 million bond in April after being charged with conspiracy, multiple murder counts, criminal possession of a weapon, assault with a weapon, and 12 shootings. Williams’s lackey Sleepy Hallow—real name Tegan Chambers—was released with a $200,000 cash or $150,000 bond bail for conspiracy charges.
Trump proudly brought the rappers on stage with him to give remarks to the red behatted crowd on Thursday. Williams told the crowd, “They’re always going to whisper the accomplishments and shout your failures. Trump gonna shout the wins for all of us.”
Chambers kept it even more brief and simply shouted, “Make America Great Again.”
Justin Jouvenal and Ann E. Marimow at The Washington Post: Wife of Justice Alito called upside-down flag ‘signal of distress.’
The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a Washington Post reporter in January 2021 that an upside-down American flag recently flown on their flagpole was “an international signal of distress” and indicated that it had been raised in response to a neighborhood dispute.
So if the NYT hadn’t reported on this, the WaPo would have stayed silent?
The Post subsequently reported on May 17 that residents said the flag was raised following a heated confrontation between Martha-Ann Alito and a neighbor over political yard signs, one of which carried a profane anti-Trump message and another that carried a message along the lines of “you are complicit.” One resident, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy in a sensitive situation, said the flag flew for between two and five days.
Samuel Alito told Fox News last week that the signs attacked his wife directly. Martha-Ann Alito has not publicly commented on the recent reports.
Now the Post tells us what really happened in 2021:
On Jan. 20, 2021 — the day of Biden’s inauguration, which the Alitos did not attend — Barnes went to their home to follow up on the tip about the flag. He encountered the couple coming out of the house. Martha-Ann Alito was visibly upset by his presence, demanding that he “get off my property.”
As he described the information he was seeking, she yelled, “It’s an international signal of distress!”
Alito intervened and directed his wife into a car parked in their driveway, where they had been headed on their way out of the neighborhood. The justice denied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had raised it.
Martha-Ann Alito then got out of the car and shouted in apparent reference to the neighbors: “Ask them what they did!” She said yard signs about the couple had been placed in the neighborhood. After getting back in the car, she exited again and then brought out from their residence a novelty flag, the type that would typically decorate a garden. She hoisted it up the flagpole. “There! Is that better?” she yelled.
Wow. She sounds kind of unhinged.
Abbie VanSickle at The New York Times: Justice Sotomayor Describes Frustration With Being a Liberal on the Supreme Court.
Some days, after Justice Sonia Sotomayor listens to the Supreme Court announce its decisions, she goes into her chambers, shuts the door and weeps.
“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” Justice Sotomayor told a crowd on Friday at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she was being honored. “There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”
The comments about the challenges of being a liberal on a court dominated by conservatives came at the tail end of a public conversation with her friend and law school classmate, Martha Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School and human rights scholar.
Kyohei Inukai, Cat resting on a window sill
The justice set a tone of optimism even as she voiced frustration with some of the court’s rulings, a possible signal that the end of the term, when the most high-profile decisions typically land, could bring more conservative victories. She urged a long-term view of pushing for the values she views as guiding principles — equality, diversity and justice.
“There are moments when I’m deeply, deeply sad,” she said, without citing any specific cases. “There are moments when, yes, even I feel desperation. We all do. But you have to own it, you have to accept it, you have to shed the tears and then you have to wipe them and get up.”
Decisions in dozens of cases are still pending, including on abortion, guns, the free speech rights of social media companies, the regulatory power of government agencies and whether former President Donald J. Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
Today Trump will speak at the Libertarian Convention and it may not go well for him.
NBC News: Libertarian convention crowd appears hostile to Trump ahead of Saturday speech.
Trump is set to deliver a speech Saturday at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention, and if Friday night’s program is any indication, he could be facing a hostile crowd.
Former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who quickly endorsed Trump after dropping out, was booed during his convention remarks Friday night when he mentioned Trump.
“I’m speaking to you as a libertarian at my own core. I have gotten to know Donald Trump over the course of the last several years and the last several months,” Ramaswamy said as many in the crowd booed in response.
Ramaswamy continued, urging the audience of about 100 to ask themselves if they wanted to influence the next administration.
Separately, as Libertarian party members reviewed procedures and motions, a person at a microphone proposed that “we go tell Donald Trump to go f— himself.”
The audience cheered and roared with applause.
“That was my motion too!” another man yelled. “We are a Libertarian convention looking to nominate Libertarians. We do not need to give that time to non-Libertarians.”
Behind the two men, a third chanted, “F— Donald Trump.”
Politico: Libertarian convention devolves into fighting, obscenities on eve of Trump’s visit.
Donald Trump won’t be speaking to his usual self-selected crowd of adoring red-hatted MAGA fans when he addresses the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday.
As delegates gathered at the Washington Hilton on the eve of his speech, the party’s decision to host the former president, which had split the organization, erupted Friday into open revolt. Fuming delegates at the convention said they plan to protest Trump’s speech, and one group sought unsuccessfully to remove the former president along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from the agenda — a move that resulted in thrown punches and obscenities between supporters and opponents of the move.
“I would like to propose that we go tell Donald Trump to go fuck himself!” Kaelan Dreyer, a Libertarian from New Mexico, yelled into a microphone, winning cheers from the crowd. After shouting vulgarities at the convention’s chair and fending off punches, he was led out of the convention hall.
Ralph Hedley, Blinking in the sun
The raucous opening to the convention reflects the pockets of hostility that Trump faces as he appeals to the Libertarians to help him box out a growing, third-party threat from Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign.
“The vast majority of Libertarian Party members are not happy with this invitation,” said Bill Redpath, a 40-year veteran of the Libertarian Party and a former national party chair who’s helped organize their presidential ballot access for decades. “There are some people who call Trump the most Libertarian president of our lifetimes. That’s utterly ridiculous.”
Suburban Philadelphia options trader Jeff Yass, a libertarian and one of the GOP’s biggest donors, who was not in attendance at the convention, said it was “unclear” whether Trump could make inroads with libertarian voters. Yass, who bankrolled an effort to stop Trump from winning the Republican nomination and financed several of his primary opponents, has said he doesn’t plan to contribute to Trump, but will vote for him.
“He has some libertarian instincts for sure. Anti-war is big,” said Yass, who has also praised Trump for his support for education reform policies, which the two have spoken about. “But anti-immigrant, anti-free trade are not good.”
I guess he’s not bothered by Trump’s fascist tendencies.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn on the current state of the presidential polls: A Polling Risk for Trump. His advantage may not be as stable as it looks.
The polls have shown Donald Trump with an edge for eight straight months, but there’s a sign his advantage might not be quite as stable as it looks: His lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.
Disengaged voters on the periphery of the electorate are driving the polling results — and the story line — about the election.
President Biden has actually led the last three New York Times/Siena national polls among those who voted in the 2020 election, even as he has trailed among registered voters overall. And looking back over the last few years, almost all of Trump’s gains came from these less engaged voters.
Importantly, these low-turnout voters are often from Democratic constituencies. Many back Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate. But in our polling, Biden wins just three-quarters of Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t vote in the last cycle, even as almost all high-turnout Democratic-leaners continue to support him.
This trend illustrates the disconnect between Trump’s lead in the polls and Democratic victories in lower-turnout special elections. And it helps explain Trump’s gains among young and nonwhite voters, who tend to be among the least engaged.
Trump’s dependence on these voters could make the race more volatile soon. As voters tune in over the next six months, there’s a chance that disengaged but traditionally Democratic voters could revert to their usual partisan leanings. Alternately, they might stay home, which could also help Biden.
Read more at the NYT.
I guess that’s enough politics news for today. Have a nice Memorial Day weekend.
Edvard Munch painted this portrait of his brother at age 12
We’re living in upside-down world–or something. This morning before reporting for his trial, Trump claimed that people are being “mugged and killed outside” the courthouse. Based on reports from people who have attended the trial, it has been quiet there, with very few protesters from either side. This man is clinically insane. He belongs in a psychiatric hospital. And yet, he is supposedly leading Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race.
What is going on in this country? Check out the results of the latest Harris poll. Lauren Aratani at The Guardian: Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden.
Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.
The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
Many Americans put the blame on Biden for the state of the economy, with 58% of those polled saying the economy is worsening due to mismanagement from the presidential administration.
The poll underscored people’s complicated emotions around inflation. The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing. In reality, the rate of inflation has fallen sharply from its post-Covid peak of 9.1% and has been fluctuating between 3% and 4% a year.
In April, the inflation rate went down from 3.5% to 3.4% – far from inflation’s 40-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 – triggering a stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones index to a record high.
A recession is generally defined by a decrease in economic activity, typically measured as gross domestic product (GDP), over two successive quarters, although in the US the National Bureau of Economic Research (NEBR) has the final say. US GDP has been rising over the last few years, barring a brief contraction in 2022, which the NEBR did not deem a recession….
The only recent recession was in 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the US economy has grown considerably. Unemployment has also hit historic lows, wages have been going up and consumer spending has been strong.
Painting by Edward Hopper, age 9
And this from Jason Lange at Reuters: Biden’s approval rating falls to lowest level in nearly two years-Reuters/Ipsos poll.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s public approval rating this month fell to its lowest level in almost two years, tying the lowest reading of his presidency in a warning sign for his reelection effort, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
The four-day poll, which closed on Monday, showed just 36% of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance as president, down from 38% in April. It was a return to the lowest approval rating of his presidency, last seen in July 2022. While this month’s drop was within the poll’s 3 percentage point margin of error, it could bode poorly for Biden as he faces off with Republican Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Biden, a Democrat, has been largely tied with Trump in national polls asking voters how they will vote. But Trump has had slight leads over Biden in many polls in the states seen as most likely to determine the winner in the U.S. Electoral College.
The poll laid out Biden’s weaknesses as well as a few strengths. The state of the economy was seen as the top issue, picked by 23% of respondents as the most important problem facing the country. Some 21% saw political extremism as the top issue and 13% picked immigration.
Some 40% of respondents in the poll said Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, had better policies for the U.S. economy, compared to 30% who picked Biden, while the rest said they didn’t know or didn’t answer the question.
Who are these people, and what is wrong with them? Apparently lots of them don’t even follow the news or politics at all. This is from Will Bunch’s email newsletter (I don’t have an on-line link, unfortunately): “The voters Biden is losing don’t read the New York Times. Many don’t read anything.”
The constantly simmering fire on social media about how the mainstream news media covers — or doesn’t cover — President Joe Biden had a 55-gallon barrel of gasoline tossed onto it this weekend. It started on Friday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the very first time — the latest in an apparent economic winning streak for the 46th president — and it barely garnered a peep in either the New York Times or Washington Post.
Biden’s most online fans were still seething about that slight two days later when some were shocked to see the Post put a U.S. economy story at the top of the Sunday paper, with the headline: “Buying slows as gloom spreads.” So with the lowest unemployment since the 1960s, the record stock market, real growth in wages and in sectors like manufacturing, that’s what the paper went with? Gloom?
Veteran journalist Kevin Drum instantly pulled up a slew of data that contradict the Post’s glum but mostly anecdotal analysis and asked “why does the Post publish a jumble of misleading or outright incorrect economic statistics instead of just looking them up first?” That kind of question — asking why these elite newsrooms or cable news outlets like MSNBC and CNN are quick to play up Biden’s age or stylistic stumbles while ignoring his accomplishments, as he remains in a dead heat with four-times-indicted Donald Trump — epitomizes the deeply held thought that Biden’s struggles are perhaps largely due to the myriad failings of the mainstream media.
Critics are absolutely right to be furious. But at the same time, I don’t think the New York Times is the reason Biden isn’t clobbering an opponent who’s stuck in a Manhattan courtroom facing 34 felony charges. I think his real problem is the millions of Americans who wouldn’t open the New York Times if you dropped it on their lap with a slice of pizza tucked inside.
Painting by Michaelangelo, age 13
There are basically three clumps of voters in America. There are — praise the Lord — millions of diligent, civic-minded Americans who watch debates or read news, somewhere, to better understand the candidates. But there is also a large pool of what I would call the disinformed, who also pursue information but get it from propaganda sites like Fox News that twist reality, or worse. Many of them liked Trump in 2016 and like him even more now.
The group where Biden used to do OK but is now struggling is a third bloc I’d call the uninformed. Either by choice or by the realities of working multiple jobs or going to school or raising kids, millions of Americans get no news other than the snippets that pop up on TikTok or somehow interrupt the football game. These folks don’t know the New York Times, but also no one at the New York Times knows these folks — until their odd views show up in the polls and everyone is shocked.
For all the deserved carping about negative portrayals of Biden and overly positive coverage of Trump in print, a recent NBC News poll found that among the dwindling number of Americans who identify newspapers as their primary news source, the incumbent Democrat is winning by landslide proportions, 70% to 21%. NBC also found Biden leading with the millions who still watch nightly news on the traditional networks. These viewers, like newspaper readers, tend to be older — and, yes, Biden leads among senior citizens. Maybe because they are better informed?
Conversely, I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that when ranked by news consumption, Trump’s biggest lead is with voters who say they don’t follow the news at all. In the NBC poll, one in seven reported they don’t follow politics — and they are supporting Trump by a solid 53-27% margin. This category is also the most likely to pick a third-party candidate like Robert F.Kennedy Jr., or Cornel West, or Jill Stein, and also most likely not to vote at all.
So basically, we’re fucked unless some of these no-nothings figure out that we’re headed for a dictatorship and decide maybe they’d like to keep some of their rights. Unfortunately, some of these no-nothings appear to be Supreme Court justices.
Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Alito’s “defense” of flying the J6 flag is transparent BS.
Everyone is waiting to see what the United States Supreme Court will do with Donald Trump’s outlandish claim he should be given absolute immunity from prosecution for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Oral arguments indicated that even the conservative justices have some concerns about that stance, but we’ve now learned that Justice Samuel Alito seems pretty on board with Trump’s coup attempt.
It’s yet another ethics scandal for the Court, and it’s a reminder that the right-wing justices operate in a realm of complete unaccountability.
Last week, the New York Times broke news that on January 17, 2021 — 11 days after Trump exhorted his supporters to storm the Capitol and three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration — an upside-down American flag hung outside the Alito home in Alexandria, Virginia. Hanging the flag upside down is literally prohibited by the flag code, save for “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” There’s a long tradition of upside-down flags being flown by protesters on the left and the right, but by January 17, 2021, it was widely known as a symbol used by “Stop the Steal” supporters.
How long the upside-down flag hung at the Alito home isn’t clear. The Times reviewed a January 18, 2021, email from a neighbor that said that it had been upside down for a number of days by that point. Several neighbors spoke to the Times about it but requested to remain anonymous, in part because they feared reprisal. Alito made a brief email statement to the Times, and while the statement succeeded in throwing his wife under the bus, it didn’t do much else. Alito said he “had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag” as it was “briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on lawn signs.”
Even if one takes this statement at face value, it falls far short of an explanation. Several days after an attempted insurrection, a Supreme Court justice let his wife hang a well-known symbol of that attempted insurrection because she got into a spat with the neighbors? Even if the lawn signs were “personally insulting” to the Alitos in some way, how is flying an upside-down flag a legitimate response?
Painting by Salvador Dali, age 4 or 6
Alito was more expansive with conservative Fox News correspondent Shannon Bream, but even in that friendly atmosphere, he couldn’t come up with a convincing explanation. He told Bream a neighbor had put up a sign that said “Fuck Trump,” and it was 50 feet from a children’s bus stop. Mrs. Alito decided to talk with those neighbors, but according to Alito, the conversation didn’t go well, and then those neighbors put up a sign that attacked his wife and blamed her for January 6.
Then, when the Alitos were taking a neighborhood stroll, Mrs. Alito got into an argument with one of the residents of that property, who called her “the c-word.” After that, she was distraught and decided to make what Fox News characterized euphemistically as “some sort of statement” by hanging the flag upside down. Notably, when the Washington Post spoke with a neighbor who described the content of the offending signs, they said they did not even mention the justice directly.
None of these additional details makes Alito or his wife look any better. The most charitable reading is that after a neighbor accused Mrs. Alito of being an insurrection enthusiast, she reacted by hoisting a symbol of support for insurrection. A Supreme Court justice’s wife is busy acting out the Matt Bors comic where a MAGA type reacts to hearing someone say Trump fans are racist by going full Nazi.
Needham goes on to explain why nothing will be done about this. I recommend reading the whole thing.
More insanity from Trump:
You probably heard that Judge Aileen Cannon unsealed some more DOJ documents yesterday, and the MAGA crowd discovered that when the FBI executes a search warrant, they are routinely authorized to use force if necessary. Now Trump is claiming that Joe Biden wanted the FBI to assassinate him when they searched Mar-a-Lago. Never mind that Trump was in New Jersey at the time and everyone–including the FBI–knew that.
David Kurtz in TPM’s Morning Memo: Aileen Cannon Gifts Trump Bogus New Fodder For His Disinformation Campaign.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has screwed up the Mar-a-Lago case in so many ways it defies easy categorization. Her slow rolling of the trial is obviously her single gravest sin. But there’s another layer of malfeasance going on here that came more clearly into view yesterday.
Over the objection of Special Counsel Jack Smith, Cannon ordered the unsealing of previous filings in the case. In some of those filings, it’s becoming apparent, Trump has tucked in information about the case that he wants to seed in the public imagination and use as fodder for his presidential campaign and for fighting the criminal charges outside of court.
Cannon has given him a green light to do so, and the results became apparent yesterday.
In one of the filings, Trump drew attention to the FBI’s deadly force policy, which was in effect during the search of Mar-a-Lago, as it is in every FBI field operation. As soon as the filing was unsealed, right-wing news outlets seized on it and accused Biden of being responsible for gunning for Trump.
Trump himself later in the day amplified these bogus attacks on social media:
Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE—25TH AMENDMENT!
It became a campaign fundraising email, too: “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!”
Of course none of this is true. The same deadly force policy that is in effect for every FBI operation was in effect for the Mar-a-Lago search. The FBI doesn’t need special authority to use deadly force; it has standing authority to use deadly force when circumstances warrant it. This is a standard operating policy, and Biden had nothing to do with its promulgation in general or its application in the Mar-a-Lago search in particular.
But you can see the dynamic plainly from what I just had to do to explain this to you: Trump wants to use the criminal justice process to generate more disinformation, Cannon facilitates him doing so with her rulings, right-wing media go apeshit, Trump gooses the reaction some more, and then a day later I come along and try to unpack it all for you, including the underlying falsity, with a put-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube futility. The FBI issued an unusual statement in similarly futile fashion.
This is all bad enough, but there’s another even darker layer here: It feeds the right-wing animosity toward federal law enforcement that has already led to two attacks on FBI field offices in the past two years.
And Trump is fund-raising off of this nonsense. The Washington Post actually deigned to cover this story. The author is Hannah Knowles: Trump email falsely says Biden was ‘locked & loaded’ to ‘take me out’ in Mar-a-Lago search.
Donald Trump on Tuesday falsely claimed in a campaign fundraising email that President Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” during a 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents, an extraordinary distortion of a standard FBI policy on the use of deadly force during such operations.
Painting by Pablo Picasso, age 8
Trump appeared to be referring to a law enforcement document, released Tuesday in court filings in the classified documents case, that describes the FBI’s plans for a court-authorized search on Aug. 8, 2022, at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club. FBI agents recovered classified material from Trump’s time in the White House — which the former president is now charged with illegally retaining. One page in the document includes a “policy statement” on the use of deadly force, which says officers may resort to lethal force only when the subject of such force poses an “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury” to an officer or another person.
Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, and some of his allies suggested Tuesday that this was evidence that Biden’s Justice Department was prepared to fatally shoot him. In fact, Trump was not at his Florida property the day of the search. FBI agents specifically sought to avoid a confrontation with Trump, choosing a day when Trump would not be at the property and giving the Secret Service a heads-up, The Washington Post previously reported.
A former president falsely accusing his successor and rival of posing a threat to his life is without precedent in modern U.S. history. The comments marked a sharp escalation of Trump’s baseless attacks on Biden, as the former president faces 88 criminal charges across fo perur indictments in federal and state courts. Trump has frequently accused Biden of weaponizing the legal system against him in coordination with the Justice Department and local prosecutors. There is no evidence of such coordination.
A Tuesday evening fundraising email from the Trump campaign that was signed in the candidate’s name arrived with the subject line, “They were authorized to shoot me!” and said of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
Trump also wrote Tuesday on his social media site, Truth Social, that “Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”
The horrifying thing is that at least 30 percent of people probably believe this.
Speaking of Judge Cannon, yesterday, the New York Times ran a guest essay by Brian Greer, a “lawyer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of General Counsel from 2010 to 2018.”: It Is Inexcusable How Judge Cannon Is Delaying the Trump Documents Case.
The task before Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the classified documents case of Donald Trump, is not easy. She must protect Mr. Trump’s constitutional rights while also ensuring the prompt and fair administration of justice.
Still, it is inexcusable that she is utterly failing to keep the case moving along in a fair but timely manner. And unfortunately, there isn’t much that the special counsel in the case, Jack Smith, can do about it.
While working as an attorney in the C.I.A.’s Office of General Counsel, I developed an expertise in Espionage Act prosecutions similar to the one pending against Mr. Trump, who is accused of illegally taking classified state documents from the White House after he left office and then obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them. I know firsthand that cases like this can be quite complicated and lengthy.
Self-Portrait by Albrecht Dürer, age 13
But outside of the unique issues raised by Mr. Trump’s status as a former president (for example, immunity and the Presidential Records Act), the prosecution against him is actually not particularly complex. The volume of classified records subject to discovery is not outside the norm, and if the defendant were not Donald Trump, this would be a relatively routine Espionage Act prosecution for unlawful retention of classified records.
With a competent and determined judge, Mr. Trump’s due process rights could have been well protected and the trial could have reasonably been set for this summer. However, this is not the first time Judge Cannon — a Trump appointee — has granted delay after delay, and thanks to a recent scheduling order, it’s now all but certain that the case will not go to trial until after Election Day.
If Mr. Trump wins the election, the case will be effectively over. The Trump Justice Department would almost certainly dismiss the indictment at his behest when the clock strikes noon on Jan. 20, 2025.
Informed voters know all this, of course, but the uniformed people who respond to polls may not even know that Trump stole hundreds of highly classified documents and stored them in a bathroom and on a stage in large hall at his private club.
One way of taking a measure of how Judge Cannon has failed is by looking at the progress of pretrial litigation, which started soon after Mr. Trump was indicted in June 2023. In a criminal trial, the purpose of pretrial litigation is threefold: to ensure the defense gets access to all discoverable material; to resolve “dispositive” motions that could result in dismissal of the case if granted, like Mr. Trump’s presidential immunity assertion; and to determine what the trial will look like. The latter is an especially important task here given that Mr. Trump is charged with illegally mishandling some of our most closely guarded secrets, which could be further compromised depending on how they are used at a public trial.
Measured against these goals, Judge Cannon has made almost no progress over the past 11 months. That is shocking and indefensible.
On the scope of discovery, Judge Cannon has failed to rule on Mr. Trump’s motion — filed four months ago — to compel additional discovery from the government. Under her new schedule, she may not rule on it until July. A ruling granting Mr. Trump’s motion could result in months of additional delays.
The discovery and use of classified information is one of the thornier issues in cases of this nature. Here, too, the judge has made almost no progress, and her inexperience is showing. She has ruled on just one substantive motion with respect to Mr. Trump, which was filed by the government in December and applied to only a sliver of the classified information at issue in the case. Under her new scheduling order, the next phase of litigation involving classified information won’t begin until mid-June. Judge Cannon won’t even begin to address the difficult questions about how classified information will be used and disclosed at trial until August at the earliest, even though Mr. Trump’s team has had access to over 90 percent of the classified discovery since last fall.
On efforts to dismiss the case, in February, Mr. Trump made seven such motions, and so far Judge Cannon has ruled on only two. Some of them are plainly frivolous, but she has insisted on extensive hearings for each one, some of which have not been held yet.
I feel sick just reading this. There’s more at the link.
That’s about all I can take today; I’m going to have to take some deep breaths and do something other than read or watch the news for awhile. Before I go, here are some links to interesting stories:
Alex Patterson at Media Matters: On social media, news outlets give more attention to Kamala Harris using an expletive than Trump’s corrupt promise to oil executives.
Radley Balko at The Watch: Trump’s deportation army.
Ian Ward at Politico: The right’s fascism problem.
Andy Kroll at ProPublica: Scenes From a MAGA Meltdown: Inside the “America First” Movement’s War Over Democracy.
Marc Caputo at The Bulwark: Meet Trump’s ‘Human Printer.’ Her name is Natalie Harp. She’s 32. And she has unbelievable access to the man who might be president again.
The Atlantic: New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity.
NOTE: The art works in this post are from a Twitter thread by James Lucas.
Take care, Sky Dancers!!
A woman sewing blue denim pants, by “Master of the Blue Jeans.”
I’m going to begin today with a story that has nothing to do with politics or current events–just because I think it’s interesting. Did you know that people wore blue jeans way back in the 16th century? I didn’t. An art exhibit will soon open in Paris that will focus on a mysterious artist, known only as “Master of the Blue Jeans.”
Sonja Anderson at Smithsonian Magazine: When Were Blue Jeans Invented? These Paintings Suggest the Fashion Trend Dates Back to the 1600s.
An exhibition centered on the “Master of the Blue Jeans” is opening in Paris this month—and the work on display is not that of Levi Strauss, founder of the eponymous clothing company, but rather a 17th-century Italian painter.
The upcoming show at Galerie Canesso features two paintings by the mysterious artist, who was active in northern Italy in the 1600s and is known only by his “master” moniker. The painter’s oil canvases depict early iterations of the stiff blue fabric beloved today, as worn by Italian peasants. According to a statement, the pieces have proved to be important artifacts in garment history, “pushing back [blue jeans’] provenance by centuries.”
Speaking with Artnet’s Vittoria Benzine, Maurizio Canesso, an art collector and the gallery’s founder, says, “People are still not very familiar with the true history of blue jeans, as they confuse it with the material made by Levi Strauss.”
In truth, Canesso argues, when the American businessman behind Levi’s jeans started selling denim work pants in the late 1800s, he merely added metal rivets and structure to a fabric that already boasted a storied European past.
“Jeans come from Genoa, while denim comes from the French city of Nîmes,” says Canesso. Blue jeans were made with perpendicular stitches in northwest Italy, while denim was woven in chevron patterns in southern France. But the key component of the fabric’s history is its coloration.
“Until the 11th century, no one could wear blue fabric because they didn’t know how to make blue color adhere,” Canesso says. “Only in the year 1000 did this begin to happen using woad leaves, and at a very high cost. The genius of the Genoese was to find the indigo stone in India and make this an industrial and therefore low-cost process.”
The ten denim-themed paintings attributed to the master were previously thought to be the work of several different artists. But in 2004, curator Gerlinde Gruber reattributed the group of artworks to a single unnamed painter then dubbed the Master of the Blue Jeans. By 2010, Canesso had acquired all of the master’s works, and he presented them in an exhibition at his Paris gallery that same year.
“Unfortunately, we have no new theories about who the Master of the Blue Jeans was,” Véronique Damian, an art historian at Galerie Canesso, tells the Observer’s Vanessa Thorpe. Evidence indicates the artist spent the bulk of his career in Italy’s northern region of Lombardy, though he may trained elsewhere.
I’m including some of the artist’s work in this post, just because.
In the more painful world of politics, Trump had a bad day in New York yesterday, and he got some bad news in India; but he got some gifts from judges in Florida and Georgia.
As I’m sure you’re aware, Stormy Daniels testified in Trump’s hush money case yesterday.
The Washington Post: Stormy Daniels testifies, Trump curses in an angry day in court.
Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress at the center of Donald Trump’s hush money trial, testified Tuesday about a disturbing sexual encounter she says she had with him, leading to angry, profane muttering from the former president that alarmed the judge.
It sounds like the sex actually was nonconsensual though. Daniels’ description of what happened sounds very much like a date rape situation in which she was taken advantage of by a much older and more powerful man. She was 27. He was 60. He was much taller and stronger. She was invited for dinner, but there was no dinner. When she was ready to leave, she went to the bathroom. When she came back, he was on the bed in boxers. She tried to leave, but he blocked the door. This description is from Harry Litman on Twitter:
thought time to go. when opened the bathroom door, Trump had come in and was on the bed, in boxer shirts and a t-shirt. she was startled. felt like room spun in full motion. blood leaves my hands and feet. “ohmygod — what did I miss to get here?” she laughed nervously
The next thing I knew I was on the bed. opposite side of bed. missionary position. objection – sustained
I blacked out. but I was not drugged in any way, no alcohol. didn’t feel threatened physically “There was an imbalance of power for sure. but I was not threatened verbally or physically”
Had sex with him on the bed. Merchan sustaining objections to details. Staring at ceiling didn’t know how I got there. sustained. stricken touch his skin? objection sustained. he wasn’t wearing a condom. concerning to her but didn’t say anything.
sex was brief. remembers getting dressed. sitting on edge of bed, noticed completely dark outside. hard to get shoes on, hands shaking so hard. DJT: “oh it’s great, let’s get together again honey bunch.” I just wanted to leave. DVD she signed was on nightstand.
DJT: “We have to get together again soon” “we were so fantastic together. talked about the show” I just left as fast as I could. Didn’t express any concern about Melania. or mention her. didn’t have dinner. took cab back to hotel.
I felt ashamed I didn’t stop the sex so I didn’t tell many people about it. Remembered some additional details later. Merchan very stern about level of detail — wants to keep it spare.
It’s pretty clear from Daniels’ description that she was traumatized. I doubt if the judge understands that, but maybe some jurors will. Just because she is a porn actress doesn’t mean she can’t be raped. Her description is also reminiscent of E. Jean Carroll’s experience–Trump lifted her up against the wall and grabbed her genitals before she realized what was happening. It’s also reminisce of his own description in the Access Hollywood tape–how he can grab women “by the pussy. If you’re a star they let you do it.”
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: “He was bigger and blocking the way”: Stormy Daniels takes the stand and reminds people who Trump is.
Daniels matters for reasons outside of the courtroom and the specifics of this hush-money trial. Daniels’ story is yet another reminder of what may prove to be Trump’s electoral downfall: His bottomless misogyny.
On the witness stand, Daniels reportedly spoke quickly and was apparently quite nervous. Initially, her story of meeting Trump sounded funny. She painted him as a pathetic older man trying — and failing — to impress the younger woman. When he first asked her to dinner, she replied “no,” but with an expletive. Her publicist eventually talked her into it, hoping Daniels could leverage the connection into a spot on “The Apprentice.” In his hotel room, she described him wearing “silk or satin” pajamas and asked him to put on real clothes. He allegedly used the “don’t even sleep in the same room” line when she asked about his wife, Melania, who had recently had a baby. Daniels described Trump as “pompous” and “arrogant.” She recounted how she jokingly spanked him with a magazine, hoping to tease him into being less of a jerk.
Then the tone of her story changed, as she described how they came to have sex. Trump waited until she was in the bathroom, Daniels said, and then he stripped down to boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “The room spun in slow motion,” she recalled on the witness stand. When she made for the door, “he was bigger and blocking the way,” she said of Trump. She denied it was sexual assault, however, because “I was not threatened either verbally or physically.” [….]
Whether or not Trump’s sexual encounter with Daniels was consensual in the legal sense, she describes it as unwanted.
“I didn’t say anything at all,” she told the court repeatedly. Claiming that she “blacked out” during the encounter, afterward, Daniels said, “my hands were shaking so hard” and “I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it and that I didn’t say ‘No.'”
Another painting by Master of the Blue Jeans
A person doesn’t have to be threatened in order for sex to be nonconsensual. Back to Marcotte’s piece:
Following Daniels’ testimony on Tuesday, I was struck by how much it has in common with what E. Jean Carroll described in her two recent civil trials, where both juries found that Trump had sexually assaulted her in the 90s. Carroll, too, told of a random encounter with Trump she initially thought to be flirty but not sexual. Like Daniels, Carroll describes teasing Trump, who famously has no sense of humor about himself. In both cases, the women describe Trump becoming aggressive after the light mockery. In Carroll’s case, the judge described what happened after as what “many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.'” Daniels, to be clear, frames her encounter with Trump differently.
Since the release of the “Access Hollywood” video in 2016, in which Trump can be heard bragging about sexual assault, the Beltway media has repeatedly tried to move on from the story of Trump’s legion of issues with women. Indeed, when Carroll’s accusations first came out in 2019, the press barely paid any mind. But the story of his rampant misogyny has never fully gone away. There was the Women’s March that overshadowed his 2017 inauguration. Then the over two dozen women who stepped forward with stories of being subject to the sexual harassment and assault Trump himself described so vividly. Trump, of course, is more responsible than any other person on the planet for the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the stampede of Republican state legislators banning abortion. He promised to stack the Supreme Court with anti-choice justices, and his three appointees provided the votes necessary in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended the legal right to abortion. While Trump has tried to make moderate-sounding noises on this issue, he keeps inadvertently revealing his anti-choice radicalism. In a recent Time interview, for instance, he indicated that he’s fine if states “monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion.”
Noah Berlansky at Public Notice: Stormy Daniels details Trump’s sleazy contempt for women.
On the stand, Daniels provided ugly details about how Trump treated her, and about how Trump treats, and views, women. These insights are notable, but they’re not new. In 2016, leaked audio of Trump making grotesque and sexist comments about women to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush almost derailed his presidential campaign. Last year, Trump was held liable for sexual assaulting and then repeatedly defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
But Daniels’s testimony is a reminder that contempt and mistreatment of women is a core theme of Trump’s life and politics. Both the press and Democratic opponents have struggled to make this issue central to 2024, even though abortion rights and women’s health care are the key issues of the campaign. It’s unclear whether the trial will spark more reporting and discussion of Trump’s treatment of and attitudes about women. But it should….
Daniels’s testimony is intended to establish the background facts of the payment. It also, though, paints Trump as a liar, a bully, and a sexual manipulator. Daniels said while she was in Trump’s hotel room, she went to the bathroom, and when he came out he was in his boxer shorts, a moment Daniels describes as “like a jump scare.” She said, “the room spun in slow motion” and she realized “I’ve put myself in this bad situation.”
Daniels is careful to emphasize that Trump did not physically coerce her. He did, however, according to Daniels, suggest that if she cooperated with him he could help her career through his connections and a possible appearance on the Celebrity Apprentice reality show, where Trump was the star. She eventually agreed to have sex even though Trump did not use a condom — she was adamant about using condoms in her adult film shoots.
By Master of the Blue Jeans.
She testified that during sex she stared at the ceiling and tried to think of something else, and afterwards she had trouble dressing because her hands were shaking. She said, “I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it and that I didn’t say no.”
Daniels kept in touch with Trump for some time because he was still offering her the chance to appear on Celebrity Apprentice, which would have been a huge mainstream boost to her career. She met with Trump once more in Los Angeles, at which point “he kept trying to make sexual advances, putting his hand on my leg, scooting closer.” She rebuffed him, and in a later phone call he admitted he was not going to put her on his television show. At that point she ceased communicating with him.
Again, Daniels has not accused Trump of sexual harassment or violence, and she says their encounter was consensual. Her testimony makes clear, though, that Trump was pressuring her for sex in return for business opportunities — a variation on the ugly tradition of the Hollywood casting couch. We don’t know if Trump ever had any intention of keeping his promises or of helping Daniels. But whether he did or not, his actions as she describes them were sleazy at best, and she found the experience painful and traumatic enough to leave her literally shaking.
The encounter doesn’t sound consensual to me. As I said above, it sounds like date rape.
More Trump legal news, and it’s not good.
Kyle Cheney at Politico: Judge Cannon indefinitely postpones Trump’s classified docs trial.
The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal case in Florida — on charges that he hoarded classified secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his presidency — has indefinitely postponed the trial, once scheduled for May 20.
The date had been widely expected to move amid a tangle of pretrial conflicts between special counsel Jack Smith and Trump’s attorneys. Smith had urged Judge Aileen Cannon to reschedule the trial to begin on July 8, but an order from the judge on Tuesday afternoon suggested that she is unlikely to even decide on a new trial date before late July.
Cannon, a Trump appointee who took the bench in late 2020, indicated in the order that, before setting a new trial date, she intends to resolve the backlog of other issues in the case that have piled up on her plate. Smith’s defenders have criticized Cannon for what they see as a plodding pace in resolving pretrial matters, and tensions between the special counsel and the judge have flared in recent months over a series of puzzling rulings that threatened to derail the case.
“[F]inalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [classified evidence] issues … would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions,” Cannon wrote in the five-page order.
That reshuffling further clouds the picture for Smith, who is also awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity that could determine whether his other case against Trump — charges in Washington D.C. for attempting to subvert the 2020 election — can move forward this year….
Trump has sought to delay all of his criminal cases until after this year’s election. If he wins, he could shut down the two federal cases brought by Smith, and the state cases in New York and Georgia also might have to be frozen.
And from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Court of Appeals agrees to consider DA removal in Trump election case.
The Georgia Court of Appeals on Wednesday decided to hear an appeal of a judge’s ruling allowing District Attorney Fani Willis to remain at the helm of Fulton County’s election interference case against former President Donald Trump.
The court’s decision almost certainly means a significant delay of a trial here for Trump and his 14 co-defendants and signals that Willis’ leadership role isn’t guaranteed. It is unclear how long the appeals court will take to decide the issue but they are not known for moving swiftly.
Farmers wearing jeans, 1930s
“There’s no way this case gets to trial this year,” said Atlanta defense attorney Andrew Fleischman, who is closing following the case. “I would expect the appeals court to issue its opinion some time next year.”
On March 29, Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee issued a “certificate of immediate review,” which allowed the defendants to appeal his ruling to the Georgia Court of Appeals before a trial begins.
Under Appeals Court rules, such a pretrial — or interlocutory — appeal is typically assigned to a three-judge screening panel. And all it takes is for one of those judges to decide whether the court accepts the appeal. The court’s order one-page order did not divulge which judge voted to grant the application.
In his order granting the pre-trial review, McAfee said he will continue working on the case, resolving pending motions, while the appeals court takes up the removal issue.
The bad news for Trump is that he is losing a significant percentage of Republican voters in the primaries, which are still going on. Niki Haley is still getting votes. Adam Wren and Madison Fernandez at Politico: Unexpected warning signs for Trump in busy Indiana primary.
In 2016, Indiana put Donald Trump on the doorstep of the GOP presidential nomination. But eight years later, the state he called “Importantville” delivered his campaign some flashing red warning signs as Nikki Haley cleaned up in the suburbs.
By virtue of its late-in-the-nominating-calendar primary, the Hoosier state has always occupied a unique and occasionally powerful perch to make or break candidacies: Sen. Ted Cruz and then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich dropped out immediately after Trump’s victory that year. But the barn-red state also often acts as a pace car for Republicans nationally.
And in a primary that saw a record-breaking $98 million splash across the state, according to AdImpact, Tuesday was no exception.
A zombie Haley candidacy continued to punch above its weight in the Trumpiest of states: The former South Carolina governor is on track to break 20 percent for the first time since she dropped out of the race two months ago.
Read more at the link.
I don’t know if you’ve been following the reporting about New York Times editor Joe Kahn and his pathetic explanations for why his paper seems to be rooting for another Trump presidency.
Dan Froomkin at Press Watch: New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it.
Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.
He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.
But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.
Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party:
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.
But critics like me aren’t asking the Times to abandon its independence. We’re asking the Times to recognize that it isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak.
Marlon Brando wearing jeans in The Wild One
Kahn’s position is, not coincidentally, identical to that of his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who I recently wrote about in my post, “Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants.”
And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.
Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.
“I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that,” he said.
I translate that to mean that the old guard has reasserted total control over the rabble.
Read the rest at Press Watch.
I’ll wrap this up with a couple of creepy stories about Robert Kennedy Jr.
The New York Times: R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain.
In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor. Mr. Kennedy said he consulted several of the country’s top neurologists, many of whom had either treated or spoken to his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before his death the previous year of brain cancer.
Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said.
While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head.
The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.
Gross. Maybe that explains some of his weird ideas?
NBC News: RFK Jr.’s new hire who downplayed Jan. 6 appears to have been at the Capitol during the attack.
A right-wing social media influencer hired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign who previously said Jan. 6 was “Democrat misdirection” appears to have himself been on the restricted grounds of the U.S. Capitol during the attack.
Marilyn Monroe in blue jeans
NBC News first reported that Kennedy’s campaign hired Zach Henry’s firm, Total Virality, for “influencer engagement” in March. Henry had worked as deputy communications director for Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign, as well as for Blake Masters during his Senate run in Arizona.
Henry, as NBC News reported, had posted that Jan. 6 was “no MAGA insurrection Just more Democrat misdirection” and appears to have embraced conspiracy theories about the Capitol attack, including posting that “antifa” was behind it, which is false.
But photos and videos uncovered by NBC News and online “sedition hunters,” who have aided the FBI in hundreds of cases against Capitol rioters, appear to show Henry among the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, beyond the previously established police lines, although it is unclear whether any of the barricades and “restricted” signs remained by the time he arrived.
There is no indication that Henry entered the Capitol or that he engaged in assaults on police officers or in destruction of property. Federal prosecutors have almost entirely focused their resources on Jan. 6 participants who either went inside the building or committed violence or destruction outside it, so there is little chance that Henry would be charged; the few nonviolent Jan. 6 defendants who were charged solely for going on restricted Capitol grounds were generally charged with misdemeanors.
But Henry’s presence on Capitol grounds would be significant given his previous social media posts about Jan. 6 and his new position on Kennedy’s campaign as Kennedy runs for president as an independent against former President Donald Trump.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
It’s spring, but here in New England, we are awaiting a winter storm–a Nor’easter with high winds, torrential rains, and even snow in some areas. The storm is expected to last from this afternoon into Friday. It’s supposed to get stormy later this afternoon, but I can see outside my window that it is already raining. It’s a good day to read book and maybe take a nap.
The world news is awful. Benjamin Netanyhu is a monster. Yesterday, we learned that 7 workers for José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen were killed in 3 Israeli strikes in Gaza that sound targeted. The charity said they had coordinated with the IDF and had large signs on the roofs of their vehicles identifying them as aid workers.
David Graham at The Atlantic: A Deadly Strike in Gaza.
Seven people working for a humanitarian aid group led by the chef José Andrés were killed in an Israeli air strike in the central Gaza Strip today. The strike is a black mark for the Israel Defense Forces, and likely to turn world opinion further against the Gaza campaign. But more than its geopolitical significance, the strike is a horrifying moment on a human level. Innocent people, doing good work to feed a starving population, have died for no reason at all.
The group, World Central Kitchen, has been engaged for months in efforts to feed severely malnourished Palestinians in Gaza. WCK said the workers were “traveling in a deconflicted zone in two armored cars branded with the WCK logo and a soft skin vehicle,” and that the strike happened despite the group coordinating its movements with the Israel Defense Forces. Footage shows a puncture directly through the WCK emblem prominently displayed atop a vehicle.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged the strike, which he described as an accident. “Unfortunately, there was a tragic incident in which our forces unintentionally hit innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” he said. “As it happens in war, we are investigating the matter fully, we are in contact with the governments, and we will do everything possible to prevent this from happening again.”
When Netanyau made this statement, there was an obvious smirk on his face.
Back to the Atlantic:
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the trucks were traveling along a route approved by the IDF when they were struck by an Israeli drone. Security forces believed that there was an armed Hamas member in the convoy, but the target was not actually traveling in any of the vehicles at the time of the strike. After each of the first two vehicles was struck, the passengers moved the wounded to a third, before another strike hit that one, killing the seven people. A Haaretz source inside the defense establishment blamed units in the field for acting rashly.
Writing on X, Andrés mourned the deaths: “The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon. No more innocent lives lost. Peace starts with our shared humanity. It needs to start now.” [….]
The deaths are the latest senseless act of violence in a cycle that began with Hamas’s October 7 attacks, which killed more than 1,000 Israelis. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have died in Israel’s campaign in Gaza since. Netanyahu says the operation will destroy Hamas, though many commentators inside and outside of Israel find that goal unrealistic. The IDF has blamed civilian casualties on Hamas, which has intertwined its operations with noncombatants. Many aid workers have died, as well as nearly 100 members of the media, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The New York Times: José Andrés: Let People Eat.
In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.
The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.
People gather around the carcass of a car used by US-based aid group World Central Kitchen, that was hit by an Israeli strike the previous day in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on April 2, 2024. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.
These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.
Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.
From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.
All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.
That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.
We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.
Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.
The World Central Kitchen has pulled out of Gaza for now, and without them Palestinians will starve.
Reuters: Biden ‘outraged’ by Israeli airstrike that killed aid workers in Gaza.
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he was “outraged and heartbroken” by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza that killed seven people working for World Central Kitchen (WCK) and he called on Israel to do more to protect aid workers.
Israel’s investigation of the incident “must be swift, it must bring accountability, and its findings must be made public,” Biden said in a statement.
“Even more tragically, this is not a stand-alone incident,” he said. “This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed.” [….]
Biden said Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers or civilians in Gaza.
“The United States has repeatedly urged Israel to deconflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations, in order to avoid civilian casualties,” he said.
Biden also spoke to Chef Andres by phone. Read about it at Axios. That’s a start, but Biden needs to do more. I think he should cut off military aid to Israel.
As usual, there is lots of Trump news.
First, late last night Special Prosecutor Jack Smith filed a response to Judge Aileen Cannon’s order that both sides submit jury instructions based on her faulty interpretation of the Presidential Records Act.
Hannah Rabinowitz and Tierney Sneed at CNN: Special counsel blasts judge’s jury instruction request in Trump documents case.
In perhaps prosecutors’ strongest rebuke yet to how Judge Aileen Cannon has handled the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, special counsel Jack Smith said in court filings late Tuesday evening that the judge had ordered briefings based on a “fundamentally flawed” understanding of the case that has “no basis in law or fact.”
Smith’s team harshly critiqued Cannon’s request for jury instructions that embraced Trump’s claims that he had broad authority to take classified government documents and said it would seek an appeals court review if she accepted the former president’s arguments about his record-retention powers.
In an unusual order last month, Cannon asked attorneys on the classified documents case to submit briefs on potential jury instructions defining terms of the Espionage Act, under which Trump is charged over mishandling 32 classified records. Specifically, Cannon asked the special counsel and defense attorneys to write two versions of proposed jury instructions.
The first scenario would instruct a jury to assess whether each of the records that Trump is accused of retaining fell into the categories of “personal” or “presidential” as laid out by the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate law that governs how White House records belonging to the government are to be handled at the end of a presidency.
The second version Cannon asked for assumes that as president, Trump had complete authority to take records he wanted from the White House, which would make it nearly impossible for prosecutors to secure a conviction. If she were to institute this sort of instruction, Smith’s team said, “the Government must be provided with an opportunity to seek prompt appellate review.”
“Both scenarios rest on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise — namely, that the Presidential Records Act and in particular its distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘Presidential’ records, determines whether a former President is ‘authorized,’ under the Espionage Act, to possess highly classified documents and store them in an unsecure facility,” the special counsel’s team wrote.
If allowed to be presented to a jury, prosecutors said, “that premise would distort the trial.” [….]
Prosecutors have repeatedly said that PRA is not relevant to the charges against Trump, as the conduct he is accused of happened after his term as president ended. Trump’s claim that he deemed the records personal are “pure fiction,” invented once the National Archives had retrieved boxes with classified information from Mar-a-Lago two years after he left office, they wrote Tuesday.
Their new filing sheds light on some of the evidence that investigators have collected about Trump’s record-keeping habits during his presidency. According to the prosecutors’ account, there is no evidence that Trump designated the relevant classified records as personal when he left the White House, and the prosecutors said he got the idea that he did have such power many months later, from the leader of a conservative legal organization.
That leader is Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch. Fitton is not an attorney.
Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Frustrated Prosecutors Ask Trump Documents Judge to Act on Key Claim.
In an open display of frustration, federal prosecutors on Tuesday night told the judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case that a “fundamentally flawed” order she had issued was causing delays and asked her to quickly resolve a critical dispute about one of Mr. Trump’s defenses — leaving them time to appeal if needed.
The unusual and risky move by the prosecutors, contained in a 24-page filing, signaled their mounting impatience with the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who has allowed the case to become bogged down in a logjam of unresolved issues and curious procedural requests. It was the most directly prosecutors have confronted Judge Cannon’s legal reasoning and unhurried pace, which have called into question whether a trial will take place before the election in November even though both sides say they could be ready for one by summer.
In their filing, prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, all but begged Judge Cannon to move the case along and make a binding decision about one of Mr. Trump’s most brazen claims: that he cannot be prosecuted for having taken home a trove of national security documents after leaving office because he transformed them into his own personal property under a law known as the Presidential Records Act.
The prosecutors derided that assertion as one “not based on any facts,” adding that it was a “justification that was concocted more than a year after” Mr. Trump left the White House.
“It would be pure fiction,” the prosecutors wrote, “to suggest that highly classified documents created by members of the intelligence community and military and presented to the president of the United States during his term in office were ‘purely private.’” [….]
Mr. Smith’s prosecutors told Judge Cannon in their filing on Tuesday that the Presidential Records Act had nothing to do with the case and that the entire notion of submitting jury instructions based on it rested on a “fundamentally flawed legal premise.”
Instead, they asked her to decide the validity of the Presidential Records Act defense in a different way: by rejecting Mr. Trump’s motion to dismiss the case based on the same argument. That motion has been sitting on her desk for almost six weeks.
The prosecutors want Judge Cannon to take that course of action, because any decision she makes on the motion to dismiss can be challenged in an appeals court. But if the case is allowed to reach the jury, any ruling she might make acquitting Mr. Trump cannot be appealed.
Read the rest at the NYT.
Marcy Wheeler puts it in plain language: Jack Smith to Aileen Cannon: Treating Non-Lawyer Tom Fitton’s Theories as Law Will Lead to Mandamus.
Both Trump and Jack Smith have responded to Aileen Cannon’s whack order to write proposed jury instructions as if the Presidential Records Act says something it doesn’t. Neither are all that happy about it.
Trump used his response to claim that having the jury assess whether Trump really did make these documents personal records rather than simply steal them would put them in the role that, he’s arguing, only a (former) President can be in.
Smith — as many predicted — spent much of the filing arguing that Cannon cannot leave this issue until jury instructions because it must have an opportunity to seek mandamus for such a clear legal error; they cite the 11th Circuit slapdown of Cannon’s last attempt to entertain this fantasy in support.
Along the way, though, Smith also did something I had hoped he would do: explain where, and when, Trump’s own whack theory came from in the first place.
It came from Tom Fitton’s Xitter propaganda in response to the public report, in February 2022, that Trump had returned documents, including classified ones. But even after Fitton first intervened, Trump’s handlers continued to treat any remaining classified documents as presidential records for months.
Read about Fitton’s half-baked “theory” at the link. As I understand it, madamus means that Smith would ask the appeals court to remove Cannon from the case and replace her.
Earlier yesterday, the Judge Juan Merchan, who is in charge of the New York criminal case against Trump for interfering in the 2016 election by paying off women he was sexually involved with, added family members to his gag order. The Guardian: Trump faces an expanded gag order. It won’t stop the death threats.
When Judge Juan Merchan issued a gag order last week to bar former president Donald Trump from attacking potential witnesses and others involved in his pending hush-money trial in New York, he left open a loophole that Trump jumped to exploit.
The former president immediately went on the attack against Merchan’s own daughter, falsely accusing her of posting social media content that called for Trump to be jailed.
Merchan’s original gag order had covered potential trial witnesses, jurors, district attorney Alvin Bragg’s staff and Merchan’s staff while excluding the prosecutor and the judge – but hadn’t explicitly included Merchan’s and Bragg’s family members.
Merchan responded by expanding the gag order on Monday to cover their families, writing that Trump’s attacks on his daughter were part of a broader pattern of attacking family members of the judges and attorneys involved in his cases that “serves no legitimate purpose. It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game’ for Defendant’s vitriol.”
Judge Juan Merchan
That pattern has played out in case after case – and if the past is prologue, his supporters will take it one step further. When Trump attacks those involved in his cases, death threats soon follow.
Bragg, whom Trump has called an “animal” and “degenerate psychopath”, and Merchan, who he’s claimed “HATES ME”, have received death threats ever since the case began.
Read more at The Guardian.
Erica Orden and Meredith McGraw at Politico: ‘It’s clearly strategic’: Why Trump kept attacking judges’ families.
Every time prosecutors and judges tried to muzzle Donald Trump, he lashed out at their families.
In three different court cases over the past six months, judges imposed gag orders that restrained the former president from vilifying witnesses, court employees and others involved in the proceedings against him. In each case, Trump responded by verbally attacking not only the prosecutors and judges themselves, but also their family members.
“It’s clearly strategic,” said Ty Cobb, who served as a White House lawyer under Trump but has become a frequent critic of the former president.
“His attacks are designed around his traditional approach to delegitimizing the proceedings.” [….]
After Trump spent several days denigrating the adult daughter of Justice Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing Trump’s Manhattan criminal case, Merchan issued an expanded gag order barring Trump from attacking the judge’s own family. Merchan also expanded the gag to cover the family of the lead prosecutor, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
“The average observer, must now, after hearing Defendant’s recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well,” Merchan wrote. “Such concerns will undoubtedly interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitutes a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself.”
It’s not just the rule of law that’s under threat. Outside the courtroom, Trump’s judges have faced persistent threats to their personal safety, including “swatting” calls directed at their homes and a racist voicemail threatening murder.
In his latest fusillade on social media, unleashed within days of Merchan’s original gag order, Trump called Merchan’s daughter a “Rabid Trump Hater” due to her work at a digital marketing agency that has Democratic clients. And he claimed that she had used an image of Trump behind bars as a profile picture for a social media account, although a court official said she had abandoned and deleted that account, and that it had been taken over by someone else.
How can this horrible person actually have been president? And how can he be permitted to run again? And if he is elected in November the plan is for him to run again in 2028 (if we still have election then).
Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Project 2025 reveals its goal: Trump as president for life.
Project 2025, the Republican plan to functionally annihilate not just the federal government but democracy as well if Trump wins in November, is an unceasing parade of horrors.
Kristen Eichamer holds a Project 2025 fan in the group’s tent at the Iowa State Fair, Aug. 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa….AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
Banning the abortion pill nationwide? Check. Rolling back protections for LGBTQ people? Check. Deporting literally millions of undocumented immigrants? Check. But amid each objectively horrible aim is an even more more insidious one: abolishing the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms. It’s an unvarnished, right-out-in-the-open plan to keep Trump in office well past 2028.
It’s not as if this is genuinely unexpected. By July 2019, Trump had “joked” at least six times about being president for life. Floating that as a possibility, as Peter Tonguette did last week over at The American Conservative, is a great opportunity to show fealty to a candidate who values loyalty over all else.
The American Conservative is a “partner” of Project 2025, along with such luminaries as Stephen Miller’s America First Legal law firm (currently suing everyone over the mildest of diversity efforts) and the Claremont Institute, which gave us Christopher Rufo and Moms for Liberty.
As Media Matters notes, the reasoning in Tonguette’s piece is dubious at best, but that doesn’t really matter. Project 2025 doesn’t rest on solid law, respect for democracy, or an understanding of history. It rests only on the notion that Trump should be allowed to exhibit raw, vicious, and unchecked power.
Read the rest at the link.
At least one family pushed back on Trump’s lies yesterday. In a speech in Michigan yesterday, Trump talked about Ruby Garcia, a woman who was murdered allegedly by an undocumented immigrant.
The Washington Post: Trump said he spoke to murder victim’s family. The victim’s sister said it never happened.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Donald Trump used his campaign event in Michigan on Tuesday to denounce what he called “Biden’s border bloodbath,” zeroing in on the case of a young woman killed by someone immigration officials say had entered the country illegally.
At the Gardner Museum, an empty frame hangs where a painting was stolen.
Before I get started on today’s political news, I wanted to note the anniversary of the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist on Monday. It’s a Boston story I’ve always found fascinating. I’m illustrating this post with some of the 13 missing works of art.
CBS News: Isabella Stewart Gardner art heist happened 34 years ago, FBI still receiving tips.
BOSTON — Thirty-four years ago two thieves robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, making off with hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen artwork. The heist has been the subject of mystery and documentaries ever since.
“I have been here for a long time looking for these, and I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t affect me. I walk by the empty frames every day,” said Anthony Amore, Director of Security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
In 1990, two men snuck into the museum disguised as police officers answering a distress call. The duo tied up to two guards and were in the museum for 81 minutes. They made off with numerous pieces of art including 13 works from famous painters like Rembrandt. The art is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
“I believe that information is going to come in, or I am going to get the stuff first, but one way or another we will get the art back,” said Amore.
Over the past year, the museum and the FBI have received hundreds of tips and emails. Amore says most are theories or conjecture, but a few are an occasional tip. He says 20 of those calls came from people who thought they spotted the works of art on the wall during house showings or on pictures from Zillow. They were just reproductions used to stage the homes for sale.
“There is a lot of these things out there, and when we do see things from Zillow, or any other real estate website, we don’t look at it and say, ‘That is our painting.’ Nevertheless, we follow it,” said Amore. “I am amazed that people notice because Zillow has millions of listings, and people go through and go, ‘That’s that missing Gardner painting.”
There is a $10 million reward for information leading to finding the paintings.
The New York Times: Empty Frames and Other Oddities From the Unsolved Gardner Museum Heist.
In the pre-dawn hours of March 18, 1990, following a festive St. Patrick’s Day in Boston, two men dressed as police officers walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and walked off with an estimated $500 million in art treasures. Despite efforts by the local police, federal agents, amateur sleuths and not a few journalists, no one has found any of the 13 works lost in the largest art theft in history, including a rare Vermeer and three precious Rembrandts.
The Concert, by Johannes Vermeer
The legacy of the heist is always apparent to museum visitors who, decades later, still confront vacant frames on the gallery walls where paintings once hung. They are kept there as a reminder of loss, museum officials say, and in the hope that the works may eventually return. Last month, Richard Abath, the night watchman who mistakenly allowed in the thieves, died at 57. He was a vital figure in an investigation that remains active, but where the trails have grown cold.
Here are five oddities that make this one of the most compelling of American crimes.
The thieves took a really strange array of stuff.
Important paintings were taken from their frames during the heist. But other items that were stolen were not nearly of the same caliber: a nondescript Chinese metal vase; a fairly ordinary bronze eagle from atop a flagpole; and five minor sketches by Degas. The thieves walked past paintings and jade figurines worth millions, including a drawing by Michelangelo, yet they spent some of their 81 minutes inside fussing to free the vase from a tricky locking mechanism.
The handcuffed guard was later scrutinized.
Abath, one of two guards on duty, was handcuffed and gagged with duct tape. He was never named a suspect. But over the years investigators continued to review his behavior because he had, against protocol, opened the museum door to the thieves. (The second guard, who is still living, was never a focus of investigative interest.) The F.B.I. monitored Abath’s assets for decades but never saw any suspicious income. He consistently said he told investigators everything he knew, and an F.B.I. polygraph he voluntarily took was deemed “inconclusive.”
The empty frames have stayed on the walls.
The museum was once Gardner’s home and she wanted to ensure that her expansive art collection was displayed in the same manner she had arranged it. She stipulated in her will that not a thing was to be removed or rearranged, or the collection should be shipped to Paris for auction, with the money going to Harvard University. Though it’s long been reported that the empty frames are left hanging to accord with that will, the museum says that is actually a long uncorrected mistake. “We have chosen to display them,” it said in a statement “because 1.) we remain confident that the works will someday return to their rightful place in the galleries; and 2.) they are a poignant reminder of the loss to the public of these unique works.”
Read the rest at the NYT.
I wish I could spend the day reading about famous art thefts and missing or recovered paintings, but I suppose I’d better take a look at the politics news . . .
On Monday Judge Aileen “Loose” Cannon shocked legal observers with a strange order.
USA Today: Judge in Trump classified documents case proposes ‘insane’ jury instructions, experts say.
The judge presiding over charges against former President Donald Trump for allegedly hoarding classified documents after leaving the White House proposed on Monday jury instructions for the eventual trial that favor his claim that he declassified the records.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s proposal tips the scales so far in Trump’s direction that legal experts say the prosecutor, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, might ask an appeals court to remove her from the case.
Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney, said the Presidential Records Act isn’t a way around rules for handling classified documents because the records are still government property, not Trump’s personal possessions.
Rembrandt von Rijn Self-Portrait
“Expect their response to be hard-hitting,” Vance said of prosecutors in a post on Substack. “The bottom line is that the Presidential Records Act doesn’t forgive Trump for violating criminal laws regarding handling of national secrets.” [….]
Cannon gave lawyers for Trump and Smith until April 2 to submit proposed jury instructions for the eventual trial. The order on Monday came after a hearing in which she didn’t resolve the dispute over whether the documents fell under the Presidential Records Act.
But her order called for lawyers on both sides to “engage” with two possible instructions she proposed.
In one, Cannon said jurors should “make a factual finding as to whether the government had proven beyond a reasonable doubt” the records are personal or presidential.
In the other, Cannon proposed telling jurors “a president has sole authority under the PRA to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency. Neither a court nor a jury is permitted to make or review such as categorization decision.”
Neither of those instructions reflects what the Presidential Records Act says.
Legal experts blasted the order as “insane” and “nuts.”
“This second scenario is legally insane,” and under it Cannon could simply dismiss the charges, said Bradley Moss, a national-security lawyer.
George Conway, another lawyer and frequent critic of Trump, argued Cannon shouldn’t be hearing the case and shouldn’t even be a federal judge. Cannon was appointed by Trump and has been widely criticized for decisions that have delayed the trial, including two overturned by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“This is utterly nuts,” Conway said.
Vance said both proposals from Cannon “virtually direct the jury to find Trump not guilty.”
“It turns out it’s two pages of crazy stemming from the Judge’s apparent inability to tell Trump no when it comes to his argument that he turned the nation’s secrets into his personal records by designating them as such under the Presidential Records Act,” Vance said.
Read more about the Presidential Records Act at USA Today.
Jose Pagliery at The Daily Beast: Mar-a-Lago Judge’s Stark Ruling: Jury Sees Secret Files or Trump Wins.
The MAGA-friendly federal judge who keeps siding with Donald Trump in his Mar-a-Lago classified records case has forced prosecutors to make a stark choice: allow jurors to see a huge trove of national secrets or let him go.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s ultimatum Monday night came as a surprise twist in what could have been a simple order; one merely asking federal prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers for proposed jury instructions at the upcoming trial.
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, by Rembrandt van Rijn
But as she has done repeatedly, Cannon used this otherwise innocuous legal step as yet another way to swing the case wildly in favor of the man who appointed her while he was president.
Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith must now choose whether to allow jurors at the upcoming criminal trial to peruse the many classified records found at the former president’s South Florida mansion or give jurors instructions that would effectively order them to acquit him.
Alternatively, Smith could appeal to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, where more experienced judges have already overturned Cannon and reined her in. But doing that will only further delay a trial that’s at least three months behind schedule, entirely by the judge’s own design. (She froze the investigation and tried to slow-roll document review until the appellate court forced her to stop.)
Ray Brescia at The Daily Beast: Judge Aileen Cannon Could Get Herself Booted From Trump’s Classified Documents Case.
…[O]ver the last six months, a slow-moving car-crash of a case has been unfolding, with a judge who seems committed to protecting the former president at every turn of the road. In that case, Judge Aileen Cannon is adjudicating the prosecution of the former president in the classified documents case in a haphazard way at best. At worst, she is doing all she can to protect the former president from facing the classified documents case before the election, if at all.
Her recent rulings—announcing she is likely to release the names of the government’s witnesses and potentially expose them to ridicule and violence, and a highly questionable decision on how she may instruct the jury should we ever get one—do not just make special counsel Jack Smith’s case more difficult. In a perverse way, the more difficult she makes it, she might actually help Smith in the end.
Should Smith ask an appellate court to review Judge Cannon’s rulings, not only is he likely to get those decisions reversed, her actions to delay and attempt to block the effort to bring the former president to justice may end up getting her removed from the case altogether.
In many respects, we’ve been here before. Back in 2022, in a highly questionable move, Judge Cannon presided over a case challenging the FBI’s entry into Mar-a-Lago pursuant to a lawful subpoena to determine whether the former president was harboring classified documents there (he was). Her willingness to entertain such a brazen and unprecedented effort should have been laughed out of court. Instead, she intervened in that case to protect the former president.
The appeals court “roundly criticized” Trump for filing the case and Cannon for accepting Trump’s arguments and order the case dismissed.
That order to dismiss the underlying case was one filed by Trump. Here, should Smith appeal and prevail on any of the questionable decisions issued by Judge Cannon, the remedy would not include dismissal of that case.
That does not mean Smith is without recourse. Should Smith prevail, an appellate court would be well within its rights to send it back to the trial court, but unlike where it ordered Cannon to dismiss the case brought by Trump, here, it could direct that a different judge take up the matter.
And that is exactly what might happen if Judge Cannon continues to do what should seem obvious that she is doing to anyone watching this matter: she is putting her thumb on the scale in favor of the defendant over and over again.
If Judge Cannon keeps going down this road, Smith can seek an immediate appeal of any of those orders that seem to improperly hamstring his prosecution and ask the appellate court. In this instance, that would be the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the same court that previously overturned Cannon in her fool’s errand related to the search of Mar-a-Lago. Smith can ask the court to not just overturn those orders, but also re-assign the case to a different judge.
I hope this latest insanity from Cannon will convince Smith he needs to get her removed from the case.
Landscape with Obelisk, by Govaert Flink
More Trump legal news:
BBC News: Trump needs a $464m bond in six days. What if he can’t get it?
If Mr Trump wants to continue his appeal in the case without the state seizing the fine from him, he must submit the full amount in cash or secure a bond from a private company by 25 March.
But on Monday, his lawyers said that despite their “diligent efforts” it had been “practically impossible” to find a company willing to act as a guarantor of the full sum and asked for a pause.
“We really are in a moment of serious crisis for Trump personally, as well as for his business,” said Professor Will Thomas from the University of Michigan Ross Business School.
So with the clock seemingly ticking, here’s what could happen next in the case.
If Mr Trump wants to continue his appeal in the case without the state seizing the fine from him, he must submit the full amount in cash or secure a bond from a private company by 25 March.
But on Monday, his lawyers said that despite their “diligent efforts” it had been “practically impossible” to find a company willing to act as a guarantor of the full sum and asked for a pause.
“We really are in a moment of serious crisis for Trump personally, as well as for his business,” said Professor Will Thomas from the University of Michigan Ross Business School.
So with the clock seemingly ticking, here’s what could happen next in the case….
A panel of appeals court judges will decide by 25 March whether the $464m judgement can be paused while Mr Trump appeals.
This would be a best case scenario for the former president, who is no doubt eager to avoid having to pay an estimated 16% of what Forbes reports is his $2.6bn net worth.
The fact that Mr Trump has assets in the state of New York that can be seized, however, could reassure a court that he would be able to pay the penalty if he lost the appeal, according to Mr Thomas….
“I think it is very likely that he will get some kind of stay – unless they find some other stopgap option,” he told the BBC.
Mr Trump could still find a way to secure a bond – for a fee – if his request for a stay is rejected, although according to his lawyers, this could be difficult.
The bonding company would be agreeing to pay the financial penalty if Mr Trump loses his appeal and cannot do so himself.
But his legal team said they had already approached 30 companies without success.
Read about the other possibilities at the link. Again I’m sick and tired of Trump getting special treatment.
Édouard Manet, Chez Tortoni
CNBC reports that the Chubb Group, which covered Trump’s bond in the E. Jean Carroll case, wasn’t interested in giving Trump any more financial support: Chubb ended Trump fraud bond talks after backing E. Jean Carroll appeal bond, court filing says.
Donald Trump and his co-defendants were in talks with insurance giant Chubb for a $464 million appeal bond in the former president’s civil fraud case, but the company backed out — days after it raised eyebrows for giving Trump a bond in a separate case, according to a Trump lawyer.
Chubb was one of more than 30 companies that refused to craft a bond that would put the massive business fraud judgment on pause, attorneys for Trump said in a New York appeals court filing Monday.
The attorneys in that filing asked the appeals court to “put the brakes” on the judgment before New York Attorney General Letitia James can start to collect on it — a process that could begin as soon as next week. James has said she will seize Trump’s assets if he cannot pay the judgment.
A panel of judges on that court has yet to rule on Trump’s request to pause the judgment without him having to post a fully secured bond.
Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said in that filing that Chubb was the only company willing to consider underwriting an appeal bond secured by a blend of liquid assets and real property.
The other companies — which included Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, Liberty Mutual, Allianz, and Travelers — wanted only cash or other liquid assets.
More details at the link.
In other news . . .
Yesterday the Supreme Court gave Texas the go-ahead to enforce a new law allowing police to arrest people they suspect of being undocumented immigrants. An appeals court quickly blocked the law again, according to the Texas Tribune. Texas’ new immigration law is blocked again.
A federal appeals court late Tuesday night stopped a state law allowing Texas police to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the Texas-Mexico border — hours after the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed it to go into effect.
Earlier in the day, the high court had allowed the law to go into effect after it sent the case back to the appeals court, urging it to issue a ruling promptly. The appeals court soon scheduled a hearing for Wednesday morning. And on the night before hearing oral arguments the appeals court issued an order to let a lower court’s earlier injunction stopping Senate Bill 4 stand, according to a filing.
Edgar Degas, La Sortie de Pesage
The Supreme Court earlier Tuesday let SB 4 go into effect but stopped short of ruling on the law’s constitutionality, which has been challenged by the Biden administration.
Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas at Austin law professor, said the back-and-forth is “indefensibly chaotic.”
“Even if that means SB 4 remains paused indefinitely, hopefully everyone can agree that this kind of judicial whiplash is bad for everyone,” he said.
SB 4 seeks to make illegally crossing the border a Class B misdemeanor, carrying a punishment of up to six months in jail. Repeat offenders could face a second-degree felony with a punishment of two to 20 years in prison.
The law also requires state judges to order migrants returned to Mexico if they are convicted; local law enforcement would be responsible for transporting migrants to the border. A judge could drop the charges if a migrant agrees to return to Mexico voluntarily.
Mexico isn’t happy with the new Texas Law. The New York Times: Mexico Condemns Texas Law, and Says It Will Not Accept Deportations From the State.
Mexico will not accept deportations made by Texas “under any circumstances,” the country’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow Texas to arrest migrants who cross into the state without authorization.
The ministry condemned the state law, known as Senate Bill 4, saying it would separate families, violate the human rights of migrants and generate “hostile environments” for the more than 10 million people of Mexican origin living in Texas.
Mexico’s top diplomat for North America, Roberto Velasco Álvarez, rejected the ruling on the social media on Tuesday, saying that immigration policy was something to be negotiated between federal governments.
The Mexican government has severely criticized the measure since last year, and rejected the idea of local or state agencies, rather than federal authorities, detaining and returning migrants and asylum seekers to Mexican territory.
More details at the NYT link.
Those are the biggest stories today, as I see it. What do you think? What else is happening?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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