Even if those courts ultimately reject Trump’s immunity arguments — an outcome that most legal experts expect — the protracted delays help the former president, whose strategy across his various trials has been to drag them out for as long as possible. Lengthy delays in his federal criminal cases create the possibility that, if he wins the presidency this November, Trump could avoid the charges altogether by having the Justice Department end the prosecutions or perhaps even by pardoning himself.
Wednesday Reads
Posted: January 31, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump | Tags: Blue voters in red states, David Weiss, Hunter Biden, MAGA conspiracy theories, Mike Johnson, presidential immunity, Rick Perlstein, Taylor Swift, Texas border standoff, Travis Kelce, Trump legal expenses 7 CommentsGood Morning!!
I’m an old lady now, and I haven’t followed popular culture for years. For example, I’ve never watched a reality TV show or any recent situation comedies. I don’t have that much time left on earth; and I’d rather focus on things I care about, like reading good books and following politics.
Obviously, I’ve heard of Taylor Swift, I know what she looks like, but I’ve never heard her music. It would be difficult not to know that she’s dating a member of the Kansas City Chiefs, Travis Kelce. But now I’m learning more about her, because she has become the focus of the latest insane MAGA conspiracy theories.
HuffPost: The Right’s Newest Conspiracy Is The Super Bowl-Taylor Swift-Joe Biden ‘Psyop.’
It’s a conspiracy involving the deepest of deep states: The world’s most popular entertainer, America’s most popular sporting event and the president of the United States. Its goal, according to theories circulating in the outskirts of MAGA world, is to covertly compel fans to throw the 2024 election to the Democrats.
Right-wing speculation reached a fever pitch this week around pop mega-star Taylor Swift and boyfriend Travis Kelce after Kelce’s team, the Kansas City Chiefs, qualified for Super Bowl LVIII on Sunday, a victory the two celebrated with much-photographed postgame smooch. A day later, The New York Times ran a piece noting President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is hoping for Swift’s endorsement.
Those two seemingly unrelated events — and the possibility that Swift would use her massive star power and huge online reach to help Biden beat Donald Trump — are driving right-wing media into a meltdown. And that one of the country’s biggest celebrities will use her fanbase to help Biden is already being treated as inevitable by some of the right’s biggest influencers….
But there’s more to this than the possibility of a Swift nod swinging a close election. For years, right-wing conspiracists have pushed the notion that Swift, who began her career in the conservative world of country music and was once referred to as “Aryan goddess” by white supremacists, is somehow a Democratic “agent” because she endorsed Democrats in the 2018 midterms and Biden in the 2020 presidential election. (Swift has admitted she regrets not getting involved in 2016.)
“There have been have claims for several months that she’s a psyop, that she’s a Pentagon asset, that she’s a political weapon,” said Brennan Suen, the deputy director of external affairs for Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog. “The claims have gotten completely wild.” [….]
Kelce, for his part, appeared in a Pfizer commercial promoting the COVID vaccine. COVID shots have long been the subject of right-wing conspiracies, with adherents falsely believing the government is covering up adverse reactions or that the vaccines harbor microchips.
Now, high-profile conservative figures are promoting the unfounded idea that Swift, the NFL and the Democratic Party are together involved in a “psyop” campaign to deliver the election to Biden. Fox News host Jesse Watters recently suggested that Swift was a “front for a covert political agenda” and bizarrely called her a “Pentagon asset” — which, of course, the Pentagon denied….
By that logic, Swift’s appearances at Chiefs games isn’t to cheer on her boyfriend or even to promote her tour — it’s really to get the country to vote blue in November.
There’s more nutty nonsense at the HuffPost link.
Rolling Stone: Trump Allies Pledge ‘Holy War’ Against Taylor Swift.
Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift hasn’t even endorsed President Joe Biden for reelection yet. That hasn’t stopped members of MAGAland’s upper crust from plotting to declare — as one source close to Donald Trump calls it — a “holy war” on the pop megastar, especially if she ends up publicly backing the Democrats in the 2024 election.
According to three people familiar with the matter, Trump loyalists working on or close to the former president’s campaign, longtime Trump allies in right-wing media, and an array of outside advisers to the ex-president have long taken it as a given that Swift will eventually endorse Biden (as she did in 2020). Indeed, several of these Republicans and conservative media figures have discussed the matter with Trump over the past few months, the sources say.
While Swift has not yet issued an endorsement in the 2024 race, The New York Times reported Monday that Swift is a key name on Biden aides’ “wish lists of potential surrogates.” A potential Swift appearance at Super Bowl LVIII alongside her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, has already prompted the MAGA right’s culture-war pugilists into a conspiracy-fueled froth about how this NFL season has been rigged to boost Biden.
Behind the scenes, Trump has reacted to the possibility of Biden and Swift teaming up against him this year not with alarm, but with an instant projection of ego. In recent weeks, the former president has told people in his orbit that no amount of A-list celebrity endorsements will save Biden. Trump has also privately claimed that he is “more popular” than Swift and that he has more committed fans than she does, a person close to Trump and another source with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.
Last month, the source close to Trump adds, the ex-president commented to some confidants that it “obviously” made no sense that he was not named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year — an honor that went to none other than Swift in December.
Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: Why Trumpers are losing it over Taylor Swift.
Swift is not running for election and is not really a political figure. Thus targeting her seems at best pointless and at worst counterproductive for a political movement.
But the conservative media marketplace often has different incentives than the Republican Party — which is part of why the Republican Party is such a mess. Swift’s music now effectively functions as the soundtrack for the GOP crawling into a dumpster and setting itself on fire….
Why have Republicans chosen this moment for their much-more-than-two-minutes Swift hate? Well, this week Swift released a provocative album titled The GOP Sucks and So Does Donald Trump.
Ha ha. No, she didn’t do anything like that at all. Instead, her sin was … attending a football game. Last Sunday, she went to see the Kansas City Chiefs/Baltimore Ravens matchup because she’s dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — who has been reviled by the right for making ads for the Pfizer covid vaccine and (gulp) alleged woke beer brand Bud Light. The Chiefs won, giving them a berth in the Super Bowl and destroying right-wing talking points about Swift being the Chiefs’ Yoko Ono.
During the game, cameras kept panning to catch Swift’s reaction, which makes sense since she’s a massively famous pop star and her presence at NFL games this season is driving huge TV ratings.
Swift didn’t ham it up for the cameras to try to make herself a focus of attention. Nonetheless, her presence annoyed right-wing punditry, which saw Swift and collectively started gibbering and snorting like rabid warthogs.
“End Wokeness,” a large right-wing account that Elon Musk is fond of, tweeted that “What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic and natural. It’s an op.” [….]
As this newsletter is being readied for publication late Tuesday, examples of right-wing figures revealing that Swift has given them a terminal case of brainworms are so plentiful that it would be impossible to cite them all.
Newsmax host Greg Kelly went as far Monday as to accuse Swifties of “elevating her to an idol … and you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!” Another Newsmax host dismissed the Swift-Kelce relationship as “fake.”
Meanwhile, one of Fox News’ “hard news” shows devoted a segment to attacking Swift, her fans, and Kelce, who a commentator derisively referred to as “Mr. Pfizer.”
But that was nowhere near as wild as a segment earlier this month during which Fox News host Jesse Waters described Swift a “Pentagon asset” developed at a NATO meeting and deployed to help Democrats.
Where do they get this stuff? It’s so difficult for me to comprehend the way these people think.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that historian Rick Perlstein is now writing a column called “The Infernal Triangle” for The American Prospect. His focus is on the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. Today he quotes a letter he received from a reader in Arkansas:
Oh, Rick, you get it … My husband and I are old and sitting right slap dab in the middle of red Arkansas with MAGA friends and family all around. They try to pull us into their discussions but we change the subject. I stopped going to church because the churches no longer teach Christ’s message, but Trump’s message. We are too old to move but if I was young I’d get out … Even if Trump doesn’t win, his followers will take up arms (Our relatives love to show off their assault rifles) much worse than Jan. 6 so either way we are screwed … Will my son lose his job as a government inspector? Will my black, gay, openly political blue neighbors be imprisoned or simply lynched the way it was done here in the ’50s or ’60s? And if so, how do I stay neutral while horrible things are happening to good people? I have no fight left in me … Sorry to rant on so long so I’ll wrap this up now. I could use your help though. How do we prepare in a practical sense? How will this affect my everyday life? How do people in Russia go on about their lives and jobs? I assume I will have to kiss ass like in North Korea in order to live but then there are some things worse than death!
I won’t quote the rest of the piece–it’s about the need for fiction that spells out what could be coming if Trump wins and democracy dies. But this letter shows what it’s like for ordinary people in red states who can’t accept the MAGA brainwashing. Dakinikat and J.J. have a better idea what it’s like; here in blue Massachusetts, I have no direct contact with Trump crazies. Reading that letter from Arkansas brought home to me the danger we face.
More interesting reads from today’s news:
Elie Mystal at The Nation: Texas Is Spoiling for a Civil War.
Many Democrats treat the Empire of Texas as an alarming sideshow. Sure, the state executes the most people in the country, places bounties on those who smuggle pregnant people out of state to receive reproductive care, and uses migrants for target practice—but for many liberals Texas is just a sick joke that can be disregarded until Ted Cruz shows up for a football game. Even now, as the state openly repudiates federal laws, the most common refrain from the “always-online” liberal community is “Good: Give Texas back to Mexico.”
Razor wire at the Texas border
That is not the right answer. First of all, Texas doesn’t want to leave. It wants to invade the rest of the United States and remake the country in its own Christofascist image. Moreover, as is typical with these “states’ rights” types, the definition of “freedom” envisaged by the white guys running Texas is one where they are the only ones forever free—and they are allowed to subjugate women and people of color in their grabbable areas. But most important, allowing a state like Texas to thumb its nose at human rights and federal authority does nothing but give aid and comfort to other would-be rebel states to do the same.
Texas is not a sideshow; it is ground zero in the battle to reassert states’ rights over individual rights and the federal government. And, with the help of Republican judges and a Democratic administration that still seems bound by a rule book Texas is eager to torch, Texas is more or less winning the first battle in this Civil War reenactment.
The flash point for this crisis is, of course, the border. I have written before about Eagle Pass, Tex., as a place along the Rio Grande where it is popular for immigrants to make the crossing. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has erected a series of sadistic obstructions across this part of the river—including buoys ringed with razor wire and underwater traps—meant to maim and even drown people trying to swim across the river. Should people, and their children, survive Abbott’s gauntlet, Texas officials on the other side have been accused of pushing them back into the river, or denying the survivors medical aid or even water.
In response to this murder-barrier, which is in clear violation of both federal law and international human rights laws, US Attorney General Merrick Garland… filed a lawsuit. Because when a rebel force erects a literal death trap on federal lands, the right answer is to use the slow and plodding legal process instead of sending, I don’t know, a Zumwalt-class naval destroyer into the river to clear the obstructions. The lawsuit is still pending while people drown, of course.
Whether Donald Trump faces a potential prison sentence in 2024 is at the mercy of a federal appeals court that’s operating on its own schedule — at a time when every day matters.
More than 50 days have elapsed since Trump’s criminal proceedings in a Washington, D.C., trial court — on charges for attempting to subvert the 2020 election — were paused indefinitely. They won’t resume until the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and, most likely, the Supreme Court resolve the question hanging over the entire case: whether Trump, as a former president, is immune from criminal prosecution.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal election case, has tried to keep it on an expeditious track, and the trial is officially slated to begin on March 4. Chutkan, though, has strongly suggested she’ll push back that start date to account for each day of delay caused by Trump’s immunity appeal.
Even if the appeal were resolved this week against Trump, that calculation would put his earliest trial date in late April. But if the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court take additional weeks or months to deliver a final ruling, the opening days of Trump’s trial could be pushed to the summer or fall.
If, at that point, Trump retains his grip on the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he and his allies are certain to exert intense pressure to postpone the trial until after the election. Chutkan, an Obama appointee, could plow forward with a trial anyway — and she’s repeatedly indicated that the campaign calendar has no bearing on her own.
The New York Times: Trump’s PACs Spent Roughly $50 Million on Legal Expenses in 2023.
Donald J. Trump piled up legal expenses in 2023 as he was indicted four times, spending approximately $50 million in donor money on legal bills and investigation-related expenses last year, according to two people briefed on the figure.
It is a staggering sum. His lone remaining rival in the 2024 Republican primary, Nikki Haley, raised roughly the same amount of money across all her committees in the last year as Mr. Trump’s political accounts spent paying the bills stemming from his various legal defenses, including lawyers for witnesses.
The exact figure spent on legal bills will be reported on Wednesday in new filings to the Federal Election Commission. But even those totals can be imprecise depending on how certain expense items are categorized by those doing the paperwork.
The broader picture expected to be outlined in the documents is one of a former president heading toward the Republican nomination while facing enormous financial strain….
Mr. Trump, who has long been loath to pay lawyers himself and has a history of stiffing those who represent him, has used funds in his political action committee, known as Save America, to underwrite his legal bills. The account was originally flooded with donations that were collected during the period immediately after the 2020 election when he was making widespread and false claims of voting fraud.
But with Save America’s coffers nearly drained last year, Mr. Trump sought to refill them through a highly unusual transaction: He asked for a refund of $60 million that he had initially transferred to a different group, a pro-Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc., to support his 2024 campaign.
In addition, Mr. Trump has been directing 10 percent of donations raised online to Save America, meaning 10 cents of every dollar he has received from supporters is going to a PAC that chiefly funds his lawyers.
Mr. Trump has paid legal expenses through both Save America and a second account, called the Make America Great Again PAC, which is an outgrowth of his 2020 re-election committee. In the first half of 2023, Save America transferred $5.85 million to the Make America Great Again PAC, which spent almost all of that sum on legal and investigation-related costs….
The net result was redirecting $42.5 million from a super PAC devoted to electing him as president to a committee now chiefly devoted to paying his lawyers. The refund was nearly equal to the $43.8 million the super PAC spent on so-called independent expenditures, such as television advertising, to shape the 2024 primary last year.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers working to dismiss their client’s gun case argued Tuesday far-right extremists and former President Donald Trump unduly pressured prosecutors once willing to cut a deal.
A new filing in Delaware’s federal court — where Hunter Biden stands accused of lying about drug use to purchase a firearm he kept for fewer than two weeks — contends political motivations tainted special counsel David Weiss’ case after a plea deal was in the works last year.
“In response to that outcry from former President Trump, extremist House Republicans, and right-wing media looking to make Mr. Biden’s fate a political issue in the next presidential election, the prosecution blew up that deal,” his lawyers write.
“[Weiss] now has brought felony charges against Mr. Biden both here in Delaware and in California and is seeking a heavy prison sentence for charges the prosecution was willing to resolve for probation just months ago.”
The deal in question would have seen President Joe Biden’s 53-year-old son plead to two counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax and agree to certain legal stipulations, reports show.
After it fell apart in July, Weiss charged Biden with three gun charges in Delaware and nine tax charges in California.
Biden’s lawyers now say those charges would not have been brought had their client’s father not been Trump’s primary opponent in the 2024 presidential election.
Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: The ‘Profound Influence’ of Christian Extremists on Mike Johnson.
A Daily Beast investigation of [Mike Johnson’s] affiliations, influences, and public statements shows that Johnson’s worldview was forged in a radical theological tradition—the leaders and adherents of which have disputed some of the country’s most important constitutional principles, including amendments that freed the slaves and extended basic rights to all citizens.
That may sound dramatic, but Johnson’s connections to one particular strain of Christian fundamentalism elicit legitimate questions about the speaker’s biblical and constitutional interpretations. Those questions are all the more pressing given how open leaders of this movement have been about using anti-democratic means to achieve their desired religious ends—and given Johnson’s own prominent role in the GOP effort to overturn the 2020 election.
While Johnson’s legal endeavors to keep Donald Trump in office have been well documented, so, too, have his ties to that fundamentalist strain, known loosely as Christian dominionism.
In a definitional sense, Christian dominionism is the belief that Christians should hold “dominion” over things like media, culture, and politics. In practice, it’s a radical theology—unifying a number of fundamentalist ideologies—advocating for biblical interpretations of law and society and hard-line views on issues like abortion and marriage.
More broadly, Christian dominionism seeks to establish the United States as a Christian nation governed by biblical law. And several leaders in the dominionist movement have had a profound impact on Johnson personally—by Johnson’s own admission.
In December 2021, for instance, Johnson publicly praised David Barton, a Christian nationalist whose historical studies have been rejected as wildly inaccurate. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s entry on Barton notes that he has repeatedly “demonized LGBTQ persons and communities, arguing that HIV and AIDS are god-given consequences for living out one’s LGBTQ life.”
And yet, Johnson said just two years ago that Barton has had “a profound influence on me, and my work, and my life, and everything I do.”
Those comments came at a national gathering of Christian lawmakers in North Texas, where Johnson said he was first introduced to Barton and his ministry “a quarter-century ago.”
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What stories are you following?
Wednesday Reads: Allies Turning on Trump, and A MAGA Speaker Candidate
Posted: October 25, 2023 Filed under: 2020 Elections, 2024 Elections, Donald Trump | Tags: 5th Amendment, Fani Willis, Georgia election interference case, grand jury, Jenna Ellis, Mark Meadows, Mike Johnson, Republicans, Speaker of the House search, Tom Emmer, use immunity, witness tampering 4 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Vase of Flowers, by Paul Gauguin
Yesterday, another shoe dropped in the Georgia election interference case when former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis accepted a plea deal.
CNN: Former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis pleads guilty in Georgia case.
Former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty Tuesday in the Georgia election subversion case and will cooperate with Fulton County prosecutors – the third guilty plea in the past week.
At an unscheduled hearing in Atlanta, Ellis pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements, a felony stemming from the election lies that Ellis and other Donald Trump lawyers peddled to Georgia lawmakers in December 2020.
She was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.
Ellis delivered a tearful statement to the judge Tuesday while pleading guilty, disavowing her participation in Trump’s unprecedented attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
“If I knew then what I knew now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this experience with deep remorse,” Ellis said, her voice breaking at times.
The development comes after back-to-back guilty pleas last week in the sprawling case from former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who helped devise the fake electors plot.
These three plea deals are a monumental step forward for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who charged the case in August and is preparing for trials against Trump, his former attorney Rudy Giuliani, his chief of staff Mark Meadows and other top figures. (They have all pleaded not guilty.)
Ellis, Chesebro and Powell all agreed to testify on behalf of the prosecution at future trials. By flipping, these onetime Trump insiders are now on track to become major Trump nemeses. They are all lawyers and can shed light on what was happening behind the scenes in 2020.
The New York Times: With Plea Deals in Georgia Trump Case, Fani Willis Is Building Momentum.
Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., had no shortage of doubters when she brought an ambitious racketeering case in August against former president Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies. It was too broad, they said, and too complicated, with so many defendants and multiple, crisscrossing plot lines for jurors to follow.
But the power of Georgia’s racketeering statute in Ms. Willis’s hands has become apparent over the last six days. Her office is riding a wave of momentum that started with a guilty plea last Thursday from Sidney K. Powell, the pro-Trump lawyer who had promised in November 2020 to “release the kraken” by exposing election fraud, but never did.
Maple Tree Listening, by Kazuko Shiihashi
Then, in rapid succession, came two more guilty pleas — and promises to cooperate with the prosecution and testify — from other Trump-aligned lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis. While Ms. Powell pleaded guilty only to misdemeanor charges, both Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Ellis accepted a felony charge as part of their plea agreements.
A fourth defendant, a Georgia bail bondsman named Scott Hall, pleaded guilty last month to five misdemeanor charges.
With Mr. Trump and 14 of his co-defendants still facing trial in the case, the question of the moment is who else will flip, and how soon. But the victories notched thus far by Ms. Willis and her team demonstrate the extraordinary legal danger that the Georgia case poses for the former president.
And the plea deals illustrate Ms. Willis’s methodology, wielding her state’s racketeering law to pressure smaller-fry defendants to roll over, take plea deals, and apply pressure to defendants higher up the pyramids of power.
The strategy is by no means unique to Ms. Willis. “This is how it works,” said Kay L. Levine, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta, referring to large-scale racketeering and conspiracy prosecutions. “People at the lower rungs are typically offered a good deal in order to help get the big fish at the top.”
Later yesterday, ABC News published a scoop about former chief of staff Mark Meadows: Ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows granted immunity, tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims: Sources.
Former President Donald Trump’s final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith’s team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter.
According to the sources, Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being “dishonest” with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in.
“Obviously we didn’t win,” a source quoted Meadows as telling Smith’s team in hindsight.
Trump has called Meadows, one of the former president’s closest and highest-ranking aides in the White House, a “special friend” and “a great chief of staff — as good as it gets.”
The descriptions of what Meadows allegedly told investigators shed further light on the evidence Smith’s team has amassed as it prosecutes Trump for allegedly trying to unlawfully retain power and “spread lies” about the 2020 election. The descriptions also expose how far Trump loyalists like Meadows have gone to support and defend Trump.
Sources told ABC News that Smith’s investigators were keenly interested in questioning Meadows about election-related conversations he had with Trump during his final months in office, and whether Meadows actually believed some of the claims he included in a book he published after Trump left office — a book that promised to “correct the record” on Trump.
Peonies and Irises, by Emil Nolde
ABC news found several passages in the book that differ from Meadows’ reported testimony. See examples at the link. People are claiming that Meadows “flipped” on Trump, but that’s not what this sounds like:
Under the immunity order from Smith’s team, the information Meadows provided to the grand jury earlier this year can’t be used against him in a federal prosecution.
That immunity came after a lawyer for Meadows requested that his client be immunized to testify before the grand jury, sources familiar with the matter said. A senior Justice Department official signed off on the request and an immunity order was then issued by U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge at the federal court in Washington, D.C., days before Meadows appeared before the grand jury in March, sources said.
Had Meadows not been granted immunity, prosecutors expected him to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, sources said.
It sounds like Meadows was given “use immunity” in order to force him to testify without taking the Fifth. That’s not “flipping.” It just means that he cannot be prosecuted for truthful testimony he gave to the grand jury. He may end up cooperating with the government, but he hasn’t done it yet.
The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell agrees: Trump chief Mark Meadows testified in 2020 election case after immunity order.
Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows testified to a federal grand jury earlier this year about efforts by the former president to overturn the 2020 election results pursuant to a court order that granted him limited immunity, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The immunity – which forces witnesses to testify on the promise that they will not be charged on their statements or information derived from their statements – came after a legal battle in March with special counsel prosecutors, who had subpoenaed Meadows.
Trump’s lawyers attempted to block Meadows’ testimony partially on executive privilege grounds. However, the outgoing chief US district judge Beryl Howell ruled that executive privilege was inapplicable and compelled Meadows to appear before the grand jury in Washington, the people said.
The precise details of what happened next are unclear, but prosecutors sought and received an order from the incoming chief judge James Boasberg granting limited-use immunity to Meadows to overcome his concerns about self-incrimination, the people familiar with the matter said.
That Meadows testified pursuant to a court order suggests prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith were determined to learn what information he was afraid to share because of self-incrimination concerns – but it does not mean he became a cooperator.
Typically, under limited-use immunity orders, witnesses provide limited statements. With the payoff potentially small and with the increased difficulty that comes from charging immunity recipients in the future, the justice department is broadly averse to seeking such orders.
The approval must also come from the top echelons of the justice department, according to guidelines, and the preferred method for federal prosecutors to obtain testimony is to have defendants plead guilty, and then have them offer cooperation for a reduced sentence.
Nevertheless, I think it’s unlikely that Meadows will be willing to go to prison for Trump; so he may end up cooperating. He just hasn’t done it yet.
Anemones, Edvard Munch
Last night in a Truth Social post, Trump blatantly attempted to witness tamper Mark Meadows.
From an analysis post by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump rages as former acolytes turn against him under legal heat.
In a rage-filled stream of consciousness on his Truth Social network on Tuesday night, Trump lashed out at the ABC report about Meadows.
“I don’t think Mark Meadows would lie about the Rigged and Stollen 2020 Presidential Election merely for getting IMMUNITY against Prosecution (PERSECUTION!),” the former president wrote.
“Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future our Failing Nation. I don’t think that Mark Meadows is one of them, but who really knows? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
The other big story today is House Republicans’ endless search for a Speaker candidate they can agree on. The latest candidate is Rep. Mike Johnson, an ultra-MAGA guy, after Trump put the kibosh on previous candidate Tom Emmer, who supported the transition of power in 2020.
Politico: ‘I killed him’: How Trump torpedoed Tom Emmer’s speaker bid.
Just hours after Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) won the Republican Conference’s nomination to be House speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to deride the congressman as “totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters” and a “Globalist RINO.”
He then got on the phone with members to express his aversion for Emmer and his bid for speaker.
By Tuesday afternoon Trump called one person close to him with the message, “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.”
Just minutes later, Emmer officially dropped out of the race.
His withdrawal made Emmer the third nominee for speaker to have his hopes dashed for the most cursed job in politics. And it showed that while Trump may not be able to elevate someone to the post — his earlier choice for the job, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), also flopped — he can very well ensure that a person doesn’t get it….
Trump had signaled to aides last week that he did not support Emmer’s bid for the speakership. The former president complained that Emmer had criticized him following the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 Capitol riot and, among other things, had not forcefully enough defended him against his multiple indictments.
The House will supposedly vote on Johnson for Speaker today. So who is Mike Johnson?
The Washington Post: 5 things to know about Mike Johnson, the GOP’s latest House speaker nominee.
It remains unclear whether Johnson has enough support to win the gavel. But after he was nominated in a Republican closed-door vote on Tuesday, Johnson, flanked by his colleagues, projected confidence, promising to restore voters’ trust in government and to govern effectively if he is elected speaker.
Red Roses with Blue, by Alex Katz
Here are five things to know about Mike Johnson and his political views.
He opposed certifying the 2020 election.
Johnson, 51, contested the results of the 2020 election — urging President Donald Trump to “stay strong and keep fighting” as he tried to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the presidential race.
Johnson also objected to certifying Biden’s electoral win and was one of the architects of a legal attack on the election that consisted of arguing that states’ voting accommodations during the pandemic were unconstitutional. He led a group of 126 Republican lawmakers in filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court alleging that authorities in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan “usurped” the constitutional authority of state legislatures when they loosened voting restrictions because of the pandemic. The court rejected the underlying complaint — filed by the state of Texas — due to lack of standing, and dismissed all other related motions, including the amicus brief.
He voted against further Ukraine aid.
Johnson, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, was one of 57 lawmakers — all of them Republicans — who voted against a $39.8 billion aid package for Ukraine in May.
According to the Shreveport Times, Johnson explained his opposition to the bill by saying that the United States “should not be sending another $40 billion abroad when our own border is in chaos, American mothers are struggling to find baby formula, gas prices are at record highs, and American families are struggling to make ends meet, without sufficient oversight over where the money will go.”
Johnson has also called for more oversight of the aid sent to Ukraine — totaling more than $60 billion to date. In February, following a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the topic, he tweeted that American taxpayers “deserve to know if the Ukrainian government is being entirely forthcoming and transparent about the use of this massive sum of taxpayer resources.” [….]
He is anti-abortion.
Johnson, a constitutional lawyer who identifies as a Christian, opposes abortion and has celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that established constitutional protections for abortions nationwide.
“There is no right to abortion in the Constitution; there never was,” Johnson told Fox News on the day the decision was announced, calling it “a great, joyous occasion.”
The antiabortion nonprofit Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America gives Johnson an A+ ranking on this issue, stating that he “has voted consistently to defend the lives of the unborn and infants,” including by “stopping hard-earned tax dollars from paying for abortion, whether domestically or internationally.”
He is a close ally of Donald Trump
Johnson is a close ally of Trump, having served on the former president’s legal defense team during his two impeachment trials in the Senate.
He has called charges against Trump — which include a federal case relating to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election — “bogus,” and has said the legal and political systems have treated Trump unfairly.
He supports LGBTQ restrictions.
Johnson has positioned himself on the far right of the political spectrum on several social issues, even within the current conservative Republican conference. Notably, he introduced legislation last year — modeled after Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill — that would have prohibited discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as related subjects, at any institution that received federal funds. The Human Rights Campaign, a pro-LGBTQ civil rights organization, gave Johnson a score of 0 in its latest congressional scorecard.
Johnson also opposes gender-affirming care for minors and led a hearing on the subject in July. In a statement, he described gender-affirming care — meaning medical care that affirms or recognizes the gender identity of the person receiving the care, and which can include giving puberty or hormone blockers to minors under close monitoring from a doctor — as “adults inflicting harm on helpless children to affirm their world view.”
Roses, by Vincent Van Gogh
NBC News: GOP speaker nominee Mike Johnson played a key role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Well before he secured the GOP nomination for House speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., played a key role in efforts by then-President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory in the 2020 election.
Johnson, who currently serves as the GOP caucus vice chair and is an ally of Trump, led the amicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four swing states won by Biden: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called on the Supreme Court to delay the electoral vote in the four states in order for investigations on voting issues to continue amid Trump’s refusal to concede his loss. It alleged that the four states changed voting rules without their legislatures’ express approval before the 2020 election.
Johnson at the time sought support from his GOP colleagues for the lawsuit, sending them an email with the subject line “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.”
“President Trump called me this morning to express his great appreciation for our effort to file an amicus brief in the Texas case on behalf of concerned Members of Congress,” Johnson wrote in the December 2020 email, which was obtained by NBC News….
The lawsuit swiftly drew backlash from battleground state attorneys general, who decried it as a “publicity stunt” full of “false and irresponsible” allegations. Legal experts also pointed to a series of hurdles the lawsuit had faced, saying that Texas lacked the authority to claim that officials in other states failed to follow the rules set by their legislatures….
Johnson’s role in pursuing efforts to overturn the 2020 election results has regained attention recently amid his speakership bid. On Tuesday, the political team of former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming — who broke with Trump over his baseless claims of a stolen election — circulated a New York Times article that called him “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” on Jan. 6, 2021, aimed at keeping then-President Trump in office even after he lost.
The Times reported last year that many Republicans who voted to discount pro-Biden electors cited an argument crafted by Johnson, which was to ignore the false claims about mass fraud in the election and instead hang the objection on the claim that certain states’ voting changes during the Covid-19 pandemic were unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court ultimately rejected Texas’ effort to overturn the election results.
This guy is MAGA all the way. As speaker, he would likely try to find a way for the House to decide the 2025 election. We’ll find out later today if House Republicans can get together enough votes to elect him.
That’s all I have for you today. No war news. I’m really burned out on that. Feel free to post on anything in the comment thread.
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