Posted: March 20, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, immigration, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Chubb Group, E. Jean Carroll case, Isabella Stewart Gardner art heist, Jack Smith, Judge Aileen Cannon, Mexico, New York fraud case, stolen documents case, Texas immigration law |
Good Morning!!
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.
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Posted: November 1, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Donald Trump | Tags: fascism, Gaza, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Israeli-Hamas war, New York fraud case, Trump family, Trump legal problems, Trump trials, Trump's violent rhetoric |
Good Afternoon!!
Paul Gauguin, Pêcheur et baigneurs sur l’Aven
How long has it been since we had normal news cycles during the week and slow news days on the weekends? Was it this crazy before 2015, when Trump decided to make our lives a living hell?
I know there were crises during the Obama administration–the financial meltdown, the Tea Party, but it wasn’t this insane, was it? I don’t know. I don’t recall lying awake at night from anxiety over the state of our nation when Obama was president. That has been happening to me since Trump’s 2016 campaign.
I don’t think we lived in fear of losing our democracy before Trump came along. There was a rise in racist incidents after Obama was elected, but we didn’t have public officials inciting an insurrection with neo-fascist groups leading a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, injuring hundreds of police officers in the process.
Now we have a former “president” who was impeached twice and has been indicted four times running for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The man is also on trial for damages in two civil cases, having already been found liable for bank, tax, and insurance fraud, defamation, and sexual assault.
His plans if elected include pulling the U.S. out of NATO, handing over Ukraine to Russia, firing long-term federal employees and replacing them with political appointees, politicizing the DOJ in order to prosecute his political enemies, and getting rid of the FBI. I’m sure I’ve left things out of this list.
Despite all this, the media largely treats Trump as if he were a legitimate political candidate, ignoring his violent threats against judges, prosecutors, and other “enemies,” and his obviously declining cognitive abilities, while accepting Republicans’ claims that President Biden is the one who is too old and befuddled to be president.
There have been more unsettling developments just recently, with the terrifying war between Israel and Hamas and the new House Speaker who openly promotes policies that would overturn the Constitution. We’ve already focused quite a bit on Speaker Mike Johnson, but there is still more to examine.
But first, the latest on the war.
NBC News: Desperate search for survivors after Gaza refugee camp is hit in Israeli airstrike.
Desperate Palestinians were using their bare hands Tuesday to retrieve bodies buried in the ruins of a Gaza refugee camp moments after it was hit by an airstrike that reduced more than a dozen buildings to rubble, killed dozens and wounded hundreds of people, according to local health officials.
The Israeli military said its attack on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza killed senior Hamas commander Ibrahim Biari, who they said was an architect of the Oct. 7 terror attack that left more than 1,400 people dead in Israel across kibbutzim, at a music festival and throughout in the nation’s south, with hundreds more taken hostage.
“Tonight we eliminated the murderous terrorist Ibrahim Biari,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said.
Biari was the commander of Hamas’ Central Jabaliya Battalion and he was targeted as part of a wide-scale “strike on terrorists and terror infrastructure,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.
“During his assassination, many terrorists were killed, terrorists who stayed with him in Mena and in the underground area of the building,” Hagari said.
The aftermath:
Footage of the aftermath of the attack showed hundreds of anguished people clambering in and out of what appears to be several giant craters and struggling to find buried victims.
“My three kids are gone, my kids, no one is alive,” one despondent man named Jabar could be heard saying as his friends tried to console him.
Dr. Atef Al-Kahlot, director of the nearby Indonesian Hospital, said the total number of people wounded and killed is about 400.
“We are still searching for missing persons and carrying out rescue operations from under the rubble in Jabalia,” Al-Kahlot said at a press conference.
Mohammad Al-Khatib, who lives in the Beit Lahia project, next to the Indonesian Hospital, said that after they heard the bombs, then ambulances and private cars trying to rescue people, he and others rushed to the hospital.
“Oh God! The things we found!” he said.
“We found people reducing the wounded and the martyred and taking them to the hospital. … The problem is that there’s no empty spaces in the hospital. The people and the wounded are lying on the floor.”
CBS News: First foreigners leave Gaza through Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
Hundreds of foreign passport holders and some of the wounded trapped in Gaza started leaving the war-torn territory Wednesday as the Rafah border crossing to Egypt opened to them for the first time since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. A list of foreign passport holders who can leave Gaza via the Rafah crossing has been released by Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry.
At least five NGO workers who have been confirmed as Americans are listed as approved to cross on Wednesday, but it remains to be seen how many of at least 400 American citizens the U.S. State Department says are stuck in Gaza will be able to cross in coming days.
One American trapped in Gaza told CBS News she does not expect to cross yet.
“They started letting foreigners out today but it’s not Americans because I guess we’re not as important as we thought,” Utah resident Susan Beseiso told CBS News on Wednesday.
“The American Embassy and the State Department haven’t called us since the last time we went to the border and got bombed four times. They haven’t been communicating with us or doing anything to get us out,” Beseiso said….
Footage showed the gate of the crossing on the Palestinian side of the border being opened Wednesday morning as people began to cross into Egypt for the first time since the war began. Convoys of desperately needed aid have previously passed between Egypt and Gaza but no people had been allowed through the Rafah crossing up until now.
At least 320 foreign passport holders had crossed into Egypt from Gaza, Reuters reported Wednesday. Some 545 foreigners and dual nationals along with dozens of sick and wounded were expected to leave throughout the day.
AP (via Politico) reports on more Israeli attacks that took place today: Another wave of Israeli strikes hit Gaza refugee camp as crossing opens for foreigners and wounded.
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli airstrikes hit apartment buildings in a Gaza refugee camp for the second day in a row Wednesday, Palestinian officials said, as the territory’s only functioning border post opened to allow foreign passport holders to leave for the first time since war broke out over three weeks ago.
Autumn Landscape, Vincent Van Gogh
Al-Jazeera television, one of the few media outlets still reporting from northern Gaza, aired footage of devastation in the Jabaliya camp near Gaza City and of several wounded people, including children, being brought to a nearby hospital. The Hamas-run government said the strikes killed and wounded The Al-Jazeera footage showed nearly identical scenes as the day before, with dozens of men digging through the gray rubble of demolished multistory buildings in search of survivors.many people, but the exact toll was not yet known.
The toll from Tuesday’s strikes was also unknown, though the director of a nearby hospital said hundreds were killed or wounded. Israel said those strikes killed dozens of militants, including a senior Hamas commander who was involved in the militants’ bloody Oct. 7 rampage that ignited the war, and destroyed militant tunnels beneath the buildings.
The strikes came as Israeli ground forces pushed to the outskirts of Gaza City, days after launching a new phase of the war that Israel’s leaders say will be long and difficult. As when Israeli troops first pushed into Gaza in larger numbers over the weekend, internet and phone service was cut for several hours Wednesday.
Just one story about the new House Speaker–on his response to war–and a few more links to check out.
The Washington Post: GOP plan to fund Israel aid with IRS cuts would cost $90 billion, tax chief says.
House Republicans’ plan to pay for emergency aid to Israel by cutting the Internal Revenue Service’s budget would increase the deficit by $90 billion over 10 years, the chief of the tax agency said Tuesday.
Seeking to pay for $14 billion in proposed aid to Israel sought by both parties, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Monday unveiled legislation that would cut roughly $14 billion from funds recently approved by Democrats to expand the IRS. But Daniel Werfel, who was appointed by President Biden as the IRS commissioner last year, said the cuts would make the bill more expensive, by reducing audits of the wealthy and large corporations and hampering the agency’s ability to collect revenue that funds the government.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last year that the $80 billion IRS expansion would cut the deficit by more than $100 billion by improving collections and enforcement. The IRS expansion was approved to pay for Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature economic legislation, in 2022.
Although it specifies that taxpayer services would be spared from cuts, the House GOP bill does not identify precisely how it would cut $14 billion from that $80 billion expansion that has improved a broad range of agency functions. The legislation would also prohibit the CBO from counting the legislation against existing domestic spending caps. The nonpartisan budget office estimated that the bill would add $12.5 billion to the deficit through 2033 — far less than Werfel’s estimate.
“This type of the cut, over the cost of the Inflation Reduction Act, would actually cost taxpayers $90 billion — that’s with a ‘B,’” Werfel told The Washington Post.
Of course this bill is going nowhere, because Democrats and Senators of both parties won’t support it. And if it got to Biden’s desk, he would veto it. What it will do is slow down necessary support for Israel and Ukraine.
More interesting stories on Johnson:
David Firestone at The New York Times: Mike Johnson Just Confirmed How Unserious He Is.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: “A kind of Stepford wife”: It’s more than a prayer keeping Mike Johnson’s wife suddenly out of view.
Thomas Zimmer at Substack: “Faith and Family” vs Democracy. On the normalization of Mike Johnson, the media’s inclination to accommodate power, and the perpetuation of “real American” extremism.
Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: Does New Speaker of the House Mike Johnson Have a Bank Account?
On Trump’s trials
Today Don Jr. is expected to testify in the New York fraud case. Ivanka and Eric Trump, as well as Donald Trump himself are also scheduled to testify in coming days.
The Washington Post: Transformed Trump family will take center stage in New York courtroom.
Donald Trump had been a pariah on Wall Street for years when a banker in Deutsche Bank’s private wealth department started speaking with his daughter Ivanka. After a number of meetings, the banker emailed a supervisor in 2011with an important update about the future of the Trump business.
“Ivanka Trump will become a client for sure. She is the heir apparent of this Empire,” wrote the banker, Rosemary Vrablic,according to an email that is part of a filing in a civil case against Trump now underway in New York.
Autumn Leaves, John Everett Millais
Grounded in its real estate empire, the family’s future seemed clear then.
But Trump’s four-year presidency — and the tumultuous period of investigations and criminal and civil litigation since he left office — have reshaped much of the Trump family’s wealth, business and dynamics with one another, according to court filings, financial records, emails and interviews with people close to the family.
Ivanka Trump, once considered by Trump’s business partners to be the most likely of his children to take over the Trump Organization, has largely stepped away from the limelight of both business and politics, at times telling others she was stung by the scrutiny she received in Washington,according to people who know her. She and husband Jared Kushner, who both served as senior White House aides when her father was in office, now spend most of their time in Miami, after purchasing a mansion on a private island while Kushner luresMiddle Eastern business for his investment fund.
These days, it is Trump’s second son, Eric,who as executive vice president of the Trump Organizationis most involved in the family real estate business, while his eldest, Donald Trump Jr., is said by campaign advisers to be more interested in politics. Of the three, Eric Trump now speaks most regularly to his father, Trump advisers say, as the two have grown closer as a result of the second Trump son’s leadership of the family business. One adviser estimated the two now speak multiple times a day.
The relationships between Trump and his three eldest children are likely to be on display over the next two weeks, as Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka are all scheduled to take the witness stand in the civil fraud trial in New York over the Trump Organization’s business practices. Donald Jr., 45, is up first, scheduled to appear on Wednesday; Eric Trump, 39, is scheduled to appear the following day, and Ivanka Trump, 42, on Nov. 8. Trump himself is scheduled to testify on Monday.
The four criminal trials Trump separately faces potentially threaten his freedom and could affect next year’s elections, as Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. They involve allegations that he tried to overturn a presidential election, mishandled classified documents, obstructed justice and directed a hush money payment to an adult-film actress.
But the New York civil trial potentially has more immediate ramifications for Trump’s family.
Read more at the WaPo.
One more on Trump, recommended by J.J. This is by Mark R. Reiff of UC Davis from The Conversation, via Raw Story: Trump’s rhetoric echoes a fascist commitment to a destructive and bloody rebirth: expert.
Reiff highlights the media’s failure to deal with Trump’s insane, violent rhetoric.
Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.
As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.
Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is guilty of “treason,” Trump said in September 2023, just for reassuring the Chinese that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration. And for this, Trump says, Milley deserves death.
Watts, James Thomas; Autumn Evening on the Wharfe
And back in April, Trump said that his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would result in “death and destruction.” Then, in early October, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed suit against him for business fraud.
Trump’s prior rhetoric is also now on record as having inspired many of those convicted to engage in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But it is not just government officials whom Trump suggests be targeted for extrajudicial killings. Mere shoplifters should be killed too. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving,” Trump said to cheers at the California Republican Party convention in September.
This rhetoric may seem like crazy bluster, which is no doubt why many people appear prepared to ignore it. But put in its historical context, what Trump is doing is echoing views that are part of a long tradition of illiberal and outright fascist thought. For fascists have always seen the use of violence as a virtue, not a vice.
First, this is the natural result of the way that fascist communities define themselves. According to Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi and for a time the official legal theorist of the party under Adolf Hitler, one builds and maintains a community by identifying and vilifying its enemies. And in this kind of highly polarized environment, the threat of violence always hangs in the air.
Second, among fascists, machismo is much admired. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose own outrageous rhetoric has also encouraged violent behavior by his supporters, simply “beamed” when Russian President Vladimir Putin praised him for his masculinity.
Trump often acts as a sycophant for Putin too, and machismo also is a big part of Trump’s own public persona.
Third, fascists are obsessed with purity. They long for a world where they can live among their own racial, ethnic, religious and ideological kind on land they view as exclusively theirs.
But in the real world, people are too intermixed for this to occur naturally. True purity of community is an aspiration that can be made real only through violence and subjugation. Hence the Holocaust,genocide and ethnic cleansing, and other more limited attacks on minority and immigrant populations.
Please read the rest at the link above.
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
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