America’s strength is closely tied to the role mothers play in shaping character, education and moral order within families. From morning until night, mothers serve as the first teachers of empathy, aspiration and discipline. It is mothers who do so much to shape a child’s mind — how to think, how to distinguish right from wrong and how to persevere in challenging times.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: May 9, 2026 Filed under: just because | Tags: cat photos, caturday, CDC, cost of the Iran war, Donald Trump, gerrymandering, hantavirus, Iran War, Jeff Bezos, Justin Wolfers, Melania Trump, mothers, Samuel Alito, Voting Rights Act 3 CommentsGood Day!!
Tomorrow, May 10, is Mothers Day. My Mother is no longer alive, but I still talk to her frequently. I think of her every day and take comfort in remembering stories she told me and the many times she encouraged me.
Tomorrow is also the day I stopped drinking, way back in 1982. I can’t believe it will be 44 years! My mother was visiting me on those first days of sobriety. No one believed I could do it, but somehow I knew that day that I was really going to stop drinking this time. I think having my Mom there with me helped, even though she wasn’t sure I could do it either. I love you Mom.
In the “news,” Jeff Bezos’ newspaper, The Washington Post, has seen fit to publish an “opinion” piece, supposedly written by Melania Trump. Obviously, she didn’t write it, even though it’s incredibly simplistic. Here’s bit of it: Mothers are America’s strength.
A mother’s devotion to her child is unmatched. This love takes many forms: strength, compassion, wisdom, grace, joy, labor, humor and even grief, to name a few. The love between mother and child has helped shape America’s identity since the nation’s founding 250 years ago.
It is time to revisit the enduring American family traditions that have supported generations, while also recognizing the challenges for mothers of building both a career and a home. This balancing act reflects the realities women face today.
The household is our nation’s smallest institution, yet it is the foundation of all others, including democracy itself. The values cultivated in homes often shape the moral voice of the next generation. Looking ahead, we must consider how to strengthen this vital role.
Being a modern mother demands the discipline and restraint to not disregard what came before us. In this spirit, the healthy evolution of the American family can best be achieved by preserving the elements of the past that have proved their worth. In doing so, America can restore the honor of motherhood after years in which feminism often placed career above family, with consequences to our nation.
There just had to be a dig at feminism, right? Here’s her list of accomplishments:
I constantly challenge myself, as first lady, to think beyond the traditional responsibilities of the East Wing. That has resulted in many new opportunities, including leading four reunifications of Ukrainian and Russian children with their families, addressing the U.N. Security Council on achieving peace through education, and, at the White House, launching Fostering the Future Together, a global effort to help children thrive through the safe and innovative use of technology. But family always comes first.
(Emphasis added) Does she know the East Wing has been torn down?
The Voting Right Act decision fallout:
I don’t really want to write about redistricting, even thought that still seems to be the leading story today. Dakinikat did a great job with that topic yesterday.
I’ll just share this interesting piece by Carl Hulse in The New York Times (gift article): How Minority Districts Fueled the G.O.P.’s Southern Ascendancy in Congress.
Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, formerly the No. 3 Democrat in the House, is certain he would never have been elected to Congress without changes in the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court determined last week amounted to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
“And about half of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus wouldn’t be there,” said Mr. Clyburn, the first African American sent to Congress from his state since Reconstruction. He was part of the historic 1992 class of Black and Hispanic lawmakers elected after new maps were drawn to comply with 1982 changes meant to strengthen the Voting Rights Act.
The predominantly Democratic minority groups that set to work back then to increase their representation were boosted by some unlikely allies: Republican strategists who saw an opportunity to break the Democratic hold on the South and force an extraordinary realignment.
Now, Republicans see the chance to cement their grip on the region — and to try to maintain their thin House majority — by eliminating the minority districts that initially worked to their advantage and to take those seats for their own.
It is the latest chapter in an ongoing political saga that has had profound implications for the House of Representatives over the past three decades. Redistricting in minority communities could again be a major factor in deciding the November elections as Republicans try to lessen the traditional midterm advantages for the party out of power — the Democrats in this case — in a year when they face particularly strong headwinds.
Having consolidated their power throughout the South, Republicans are now emboldened to try to eliminate the majority-minority districts, believing they can carry them without risking their strength elsewhere as Democratic-leaning minority voters are dispersed into other districts.
Are they right?
But as Republicans and Democrats have both seen as they have waged a tit-for-tat battle this year to redraw districts around the country to their advantage, such changes do not always work out as planned. The true consequences of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling remain to be seen.
The G.O.P. may find it more difficult to win in more diverse districts of the kind that existed before the reshuffling of maps prompted by the Voting Rights Act.
And Democrats now must decide whether they want to maintain the predominantly minority districts they once demanded as a matter of basic fairness or try to turn the tables on Republicans in blue states and reconfigure them in an effort to threaten G.O.P. lawmakers in those states.
In the late 1980s, Republicans had been deep in the House minority for nearly 40 years. But growing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party had begun moving white Southern conservatives into the Republican ranks, as illustrated by high-profile party switches in Washington. Then the redistricting initiated under a series of court decisions aimed at fostering more minority representation provided yet another opening that might have seemed counterintuitive at first glance.
Architects of the maps realized that if they could maximize Black and Hispanic representation in the new districts, they would simultaneously dilute Democratic strength in surrounding jurisdictions where coalitions of white and Black voters had elected white Democrats for decades. The shift would ultimately create dozens of openings for Republican candidates in what had formerly been known as Democrats’ “Solid South.”
Hulse’s argument is interesting. He also notes that
Some civil rights figures such as Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat, warned at the time that the new maps could empower Republicans by weakening the partnership of progressive white and Black voters in the South. But others said the new districts were the only way to overcome centuries of institutional discrimination against minorities in the region.
“Gerrymandering was done to keep Black folks out,” Mr. Clyburn said. “If you gerrymander to keep them out, you’ve got to gerrymander to bring them in.”
Who was right? We may find out in November. Use the gift link to read the rest.
In other voting news, It seems Sam Alito cheated in his opinion on the Voting Rights case. Sam Levine, Will Craft and Andrew Witherspoon at The Guardian: Samuel Alito’s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ.
The claims Samuel Alito, a supreme court justice, made about voter turnout in Louisiana in a landmark Voting Rights Act case were based on a misleading data analysis, a Guardian review has found.
In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, where many Section 2 suits arise,” Alito wrote in a majority opinion in the case, which concerned Louisiana’s congressional map, joined by the five other conservative justices on the court. “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than whitJuson piece in The New York Times (gift article): Hegseth Says This War Has Cost $25 Billion. I Tallied Up the True Amount.
The Defense Department says the conflict with Iran has cost taxpayers $25 billion so far. But this tally significantly understates the true cost. By my calculations, the bill for a typical American household likely runs to thousands — or even tens of thousands — of dollars.
Yes, that’s a wide range; blame the economic fog of war. But what’s clear is that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is trying to obscure just how expensive this war will be.
The Pentagon’s stated number reflects only a narrow accounting of the tab that Operation Epic Fury is running up. It’s the price of the more than 2,000 Tomahawk and Patriot missiles already fired, the warplanes already flown and in some cases lost, and the rest of the gear already chewed through. It does not measure the true cost of the war — including the human toll. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, acknowledged as much when he told the House Budget Committee on April 15, “I don’t have a ballpark for you.”
I do. Since the start of the war, oil markets have been disrupted, and consumer confidence has cratered. The global economy is groaning, and military budgets are growing. The toll from this upheaval must be counted in lives disrupted, jobs lost, companies shut down (see: Spirit Airlines), and the income and output sacrificed. The less easily quantified costs — death, disability and mental health — could become much more dramatic should President Trump send troops into Iran, which still can’t be ruled out.
Start with oil. While the White House is keen to tell you that oil markets will bounce back to normal, futures markets disagree. Futures prices for oil at the end of 2026, 2027 and 2028 are all still sitting well above where they were before the start of the war. Indeed, the November 2026 futures price of West Texas Intermediate hit a new high this week at $86.12 a barrel. It could be that oil traders are pricing in near-term disruption. Or perhaps they see the current episode as raising the risk of future disruption. Either would be expensive.
The rise in geopolitical risk is costly. Recent research by the Fed economists Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello suggests that heightened geopolitical risk leads to lower investment and employment and dramatically raises the chances of an economic disaster. Their measure of this risk has skyrocketed, and their estimates of the effect of risk on the economy suggest a cost of about $200 billion, with a million fewer Americans working in a year.
The war has also pushed the Federal Reserve Bank into a corner. Back in February, many economists expected a couple of rate cuts this year; markets now think that’s unlikely. If the Fed raises rates, it may succeed at beating back a war-fueled burst of inflation, but only by destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and edging the economy closer to recession. A reasonable guesstimate — informed by the Fed’s own models — is that this will cost the economy about $200 billion.
Use the gift link to read the rest.
One more on Iran from Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic (gift article): Trump Is ‘Bored’ With the War He Started.
President Trump really, really wants the war with Iran to end. He has declared victory many times, including about three weeks ago, when Iran briefly reopened the Strait of Hormuz. He has repeatedly extended his cease-fire deadlines instead of following through on his (sometimes-apocalyptic) threats to resume hostilities. This week, his administration abruptly abandoned an effort to escort ships through the strait in part because of a fear that it could provoke violent, escalating confrontations.
Trump is tired of the war, which has proved far more difficult and lasted far longer than he had expected. His party is warily watching rising gas prices and falling poll numbers. He doesn’t want to be bogged down in a Middle East conflict like some of his predecessors were. He doesn’t want it to upend his high-stakes summit next week in China. He is ready to move on.
Trump is left with a vexing question: How do you end a war when your opponent won’t budge? And while Trump grasps for an exit, the hard-liners in Tehran have used the war to tighten their grip on power. Iran seems hell-bent on pulling off something it’s historically done well: humiliating an American president.
Trump never thought it would turn out like this. After the impressive military operation to snatch Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, the president set his eyes on Iran, telling confidants that it would “be another Venezuela,” a pair of outside advisers told me. They, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. Trump believed that the U.S. military was unstoppable, and that he had a chance to topple Tehran’s theocracy, a prize that had eluded his predecessors. He was redrawing the world’s maps and expected a victory to come in days, a week or two at most. The initial U.S.-Israel onslaught killed Iran’s supreme leader and included waves of bombings that reportedly obliterated much of the country’s missile capabilities. But Tehran did not capitulate, and instead attacked its Persian Gulf neighbors and seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. With a mix of mines, small attack boats, and drones, Iran effectively closed the waterway. Energy prices soared. The conflict settled into a stalemate and then a fragile cease-fire. One high-profile, official round of negotiations failed. No more are scheduled….
…the real question is the timing: A number of experts have forecast that Iran can withstand pressure from the blockade for months, not weeks. A U.S. intelligence assessment delivered to policy makers this week agrees, suggesting that Iran could make it at least three or four more months. If so, and Iran continues to keep the strait closed, then prices will continue to rise in the West, including in the United States during a midterm-election year. It then becomes a matter of pain: Which side can withstand the most economic hardship?
Use the gift link to read more.
The Hantavirus outbreak:
NBC News: 7 states prepare to receive Americans possibly exposed to hantavirus.
The U.S. has entered emergency response mode as a cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak sails toward Tenerife, one of Spain’s Canary Islands, where it will evacuate nearly 150 passengers on board, including at least 17 Americans.
State and local health officials in the U.S. are monitoring at least eight passengers who disembarked on April 24 and returned home. For the time being, those individuals are not being told to isolate, since they have not developed symptoms.
As early as Sunday, global health authorities will help transport passengers still on board the ship — all of whom are currently asymptomatic — to their respective home countries. Passengers will be taken to a “completely isolated, cordoned-off” area in Tenerife, then board guarded vehicles to transport them to a section of the local airport that will also be cordoned off, Virginia Barcones, Spain’s head of emergency services, said Thursday at a press conference.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday in a statement that it is sending a team of epidemiologists and medical professionals to the Canary Islands to meet the Americans on board, who will fly to Nebraska upon arrival.
“Because the disease status of the exposed passengers is unknown and responders will be in close contact with potentially symptomatic individuals, it makes sense for emergency responders to don gloves (rubber or latex), a respirator mask like an n95, a protective gown, and eye protection,” a CDC epidemiologist who did not speak on behalf of the agency said in a text message.
The flight will land at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. The repatriated passengers will then be transported to the National Quarantine Unit at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. It’s unknown how long the quarantine will last.
AP: Experts wonder ‘Where is the CDC?’ as a hantavirus outbreak unfolds on a cruise ship.
No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.
In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government’s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.
To President Donald Trump, “We seem to have things under very good control,” as he told reporters Friday evening.
To experts, the situation aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.
“The CDC is not even a player,” said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I’ve never seen that before.”
Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.
Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain’s Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a University of Nebraska quarantine center for evaluation and monitoring. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.
There’s more at the link. I guess RFK Jr. doesn’t think this outbreak is that concerning. The scary thing is that it can take weeks for the symptoms to show up in a person who has been exposed, and 38 percent of people who get the disease die. And it can be spread person to person.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
Wednesday Reads: Everything is Awful and Stupid.
Posted: April 29, 2026 Filed under: just because | Tags: 86 47, Donald Trump, Iran War, James Comey indicted again, Justice Department, Ken White, OPEC, Popehat, Roberts Court, Samuel Alito, SCOTUS, Todd Blanche, UAE, Voting Rights Act 7 CommentsGood Day!!
I’ve been getting more sleep than usual lately, but my chronic insomnia kicked in last night. I got almost no sleep. I’m really not ready to face another day with Trump and his antics, but I’ll do the best I can.
This news just broke from the Supreme Court:
The Washington Post (gift link): Supreme Court limits key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act.
Kate Riga at Talking Points Memo: Alito Pens Decision That ‘Eviscerates’ The Voting Rights Act.
The Roberts Court finally achieved its years-long goal of killing the Voting Rights Act Wednesday, publishing a ruling that, the liberal justices say, will make proving racial discrimination in redistricting virtually impossible.
“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent.
“Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic,” she continued. “The majority claims only to be “updat[ing]” our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law…”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by all five other justices inthe bench’s right wing. Kagan was joined in her dissent by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Clarence Thomas also wrote a concurrence joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Alito defangs the law by unilaterally cancelling out congressional fixes to it — primarily, that plaintiffs bringing claims of racial vote dilution no longer have to prove that the legislators drawing the maps did so to purposefully discriminate. This bar had proved so difficult to overcome, especially as legislators became more adept at using facially neutral language, that Congress adopted amendments to the VRA asserting that if the maps have a discriminatory effect, that’s enough. Chief Justice John Roberts, then working in the Reagan administration, spearheaded the unsuccessful effort to doom the passage of those amendments.
Alito hand waves this history away, in part, by echoing Roberts’ reasoning in an earlier decision that eviscerated the VRA’s preclearance requirement, which required jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination in voting to submit changes in election laws to the federal government for clearance before they could take effect. Roberts, in Shelby County v. Holder, said that the country had made such great strides in racial equality that the preventative measure was no longer necessary — ushering in a flood of new voter restrictions, particularly in the states that comprised the old Confederacy.
Read the rest at TPM.
Trump has insomnia too, it seems. He posted an idiotic message to Iran at an ungodly hour:
He is such an embarrassment! Of course the corporate media report this as if it’s perfectly normal. Here’s the latest on the Iran situation:
NBC News: Trump warns Iran ‘better get smart soon’ as he weighs military options over Strait of Hormuz.
President Donald Trump warned Iran “better get smart soon” Wednesday, as he weighed military options for the Strait of Hormuz with peace talks at an impasse.
Members of Trump’s national security team presented him with multiple options this week for how to handle the continuing bottleneck in the strait after negotiations failed to reopen the critical waterway, a U.S. official and a person familiar with the meeting told NBC News.
The standoff between Washington and Tehran, including the continued U.S. naval blockade, means the key trade route has been effectively blocked for two months.
The threat of prolonged disruption to the global economy has sent energy prices soaring — gas price averages in the U.S. reached $4.23 a gallon,the highest level in nearly four years, while the international benchmark price for oil, Brent crude, surged to $115 a barrel early Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Iran’s national rial currency hit a record low against the dollar, as Tehran’s economy also showed growing signs of strain.
The options discussed during Monday’s meeting in the Situation Room included whether the U.S. military presence in the strait should change — either increase or decrease — and whether the military should become more aggressive in conducting operations there, the U.S. official said.
Trump has not made any decisions about the way forward, the sources said, and it’s not clear when he might make a decision.
They don’t even note that the warning from Trump came in an idiotic Truth Social post until paragraph 11!
Trump and other top administration officials met with a group of energy industry executives on Tuesday, discussing possible next steps in continuing the blockade of Iran’s ports “for months if needed” and how to minimize impacts on American consumers, a White House official told NBC News.
The meeting was hosted by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent included executives from Chevron, Trafi, Vitol and Mecuria, among other companies.
The U.S. showed little immediate enthusiasm for a new Iranian proposal that would end the war and reopen the strait without resolving the impasse over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program — a key stumbling block in the stalled peace talks.
There’s quite a bit more information at the link.
President Donald Trump is quietly telling administration insiders to prepare for an “extended” blockade of Iran as negotiations to end the war with the regime drag on.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing “U.S. officials,” that Trump has told his aides that the blockade of Iran will continue, as the two sides remain far apart on Trump’s stated goal of getting the regime to give up its nuclear arms capabilities altogether. The report followed a meeting in the Situation Room on Monday, where Trump administration officials reviewed an offer to end the war from the Iranian regime that included reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for delaying talks about nuclear weapons.
The report also suggests that Trump appears to be digging in and trying to tighten the screws on Iran’s economy.
“In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports,” according to the report. “He assessed that his other options—resume bombing or walk away from the conflict—carried more risk than maintaining the blockade, officials said.”
“Yet continuing the blockade also prolongs a conflict that has driven up gas prices, hurt Trump’s poll numbers and further darkened Republicans’ prospects in the midterm elections,” it continued. “It has also caused the lowest number of transits through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began.”
In other Middle East news, the UAE is leaving OPEC. AP: The UAE’s departure from OPEC shakes up the alliance that influences oil prices worldwide.
The decision by the United Arab Emirates to leave the OPEC oil cartel shook up the 65-year-old alliance that produces some 40% of the world’s crude oil and exerts major influence over the price of energy around the globe.
OPEC countries
The UAE said in the announcement Tuesday that when it leaves OPEC this Friday, it plans to carry on with its long-held goal of increasing crude production “in a gradual and measured manner, aligned with demand and market conditions.”
Right now, that’s academic as far as oil prices go, since Iran is still blocking the Strait of Hormuz, which means much of the oil from Persian Gulf producers such as the UAE cannot be exported. But the departure could have long-term effects on oil prices….
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was formed in Baghdad in September 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. It has 12 members — counting the UAE — that hold more than 80% of the world’s proven oil reserves. Other members are Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Libya, Nigeria and the Republic of the Congo….
The group, headquartered in Vienna, aims to regulate oil prices by coordinating increases or decreases in production.
The goal has been to keep prices high enough so member governments can balance their budgets and reap the benefits of their natural resources — but not so high as to cause a recession in consuming countries or to halt energy-consuming activity, a phenomenon known as demand destruction.
Trump has really screwed us and the rest of the world with his illegal Iran war. Analysis by Andrew Roth at The Guardian: Trump in tough spot as he tries to avoid deal that highlights US failures in Iran.
Donald Trump is learning first-hand about the perils of mission creep.
The US-Israel war in Iran has just passed its eighth week – twice as long as the president predicted it would take when US warplanes launched their joint attack with Israeli forces to decapitate the Iranian leadership and paralyse its military. The military attacks were successful. The predictions about the political cause-and-effect to follow were not.
Iran has survived the initial strikes and remains defiant, closing the strait of Hormuz in a move that has blocked off a fifth of the global oil trade. The US has responded with its own blockade to lock in Iranian oil, inflicting losses of an estimated $500m daily on Tehran and threatening the country’s long-term energy production – but negotiations have stalled and it is not clear if the White House is willing to withstand the pain of a sustained economic war or the risk of a military operation to open the strait.
“This has gone from being a war of choice to a war of necessity,” said Aaron David Miller, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment and a former US diplomat and Middle East negotiator.
The war had transformed from a conflict involving Iran, the US and Israel to a “global economic crisis which shows no signs of abating”. Just this week, petrol prices in the US approached a four-year high, and they are expected to continue to rise before a crucial midterm election that could allow the Democrats to retake congress.
“The status quo is not tolerable … there has to be a fix to it,” Miller said. “It strikes me that the administration is in a very tough spot.”
But the solution remains elusive. One option would be to negotiate a temporary reopening of the strait of Hormuz but to delay nuclear talks on the fate of the more than 400kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) – as well as the country’s right to enrich uranium in the future.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Yesterday the “Justice” Department indicted James Comey for the second time. The indictment is unbelievably stupid. He is accused of threatening to assassinate Trump because he posted on social media a photo of some seashells spelling “86 47.”
Attorney Ken White AKA Popehat wrote about it at The Popehat Report: The Comey Threat Indictment Is A Grave Embarrassment To The United States Department of Justice And The Rule of Law.
On April 28, 2026, the United States Department of Justice indicted former FBI Director James Comey over a mildly sassy arrangement of seashells. The charge is preposterous and no competent or honest prosecutor would bring it. It represents a betrayal of the professional and ethical obligations of every U.S. Department of Justice attorney involved, and reflects the complete collapse of the Department’s credibility and independence in favor of a cultish and cretinous devotion to Donald Trump.
The indictment concerns James Comey’s May 25, 2025 post to his Instagram account remarking “Cool shell formation on my beach walk” and showing shells arranged to spell out “86 47.” [….]
47 is Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States, and “86” is slang for ditch, get rid of, or discard.
Based on this, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina — the venue of the sassy beach stroll — secured an indictment against Comey for two federal felonies: threatening the President of the United States in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 871 and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce in violation of Title 18, United States Code, 875(c). In both counts, the government asserts that “a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of intent to do harm.” That is, of course, a preposterous lie….
Let’s look at what the government would have to prove to convict Comey of these offenses, using cases from the Fourth Circuit, which governs this district. To prove a threat against the President in violation of Section 871, the prosecution must offer “(1) the proof of “a true threat” and (2) that the threat is made “knowingly and willfully.”“ United States v. Lockhart, 382 F.3d 447, 449-450 (4th Cir. 2004). To prove a threat in interstate commerce in violation of Section 875(c), the government must prove that “(1) that the defendant knowingly transmitted a communication in interstate or foreign commerce; (2) that the defendant subjectively intended the communication as a threat; and (3) that the content of the communication contained a “true threat” to kidnap or injure.” United States v. White, 810 F.3d 212, 220-21 (4th Cir. 2016). For purposes of both statutes, a “true threat” is a statement which an “ordinary, reasonable recipient who is familiar with the context in which the statement is made would interpret it as a serious expression of an intent to do harm.” White, 810 F.3d at 221.
Prosecutions for threats against the President played a substantial role in developing the First Amendment doctrine of “true threats,” which separates bluster and rhetoric from actual threats to do harm. In Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705 (1969), the United States Supreme Court took up the conviction of an 18-year-old man who said this during an anti-draft protest during Vietnam: “They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J. . . . . They are not going to make me kill my black brothers.” The Court articulated the core of the “true threat” doctrine, noting that political rhetoric, hyperbole, and robust debate that does not convey an intent to do harm is protected by the First Amendment:
“But whatever the “willfullness” requirement implies, the statute initially requires the Government to prove a true threat. We do not believe that the kind of political hyperbole indulged in by petitioner fits within that statutory term. For we must interpret the language Congress chose “against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964). The language [**1402] of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes, see Linn v. United Plant Guard Workers of America, 383 U.S. 53, 58 (1966), is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact. We agree with petitioner that his only offense here was “a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President.” Taken in context, and regarding the expressly conditional nature of the statement and the reaction of the listeners, we do not see how it could be interpreted otherwise. Watts, 394 U.S. at 708.”
No minimally rationally person could possibly conclude, seeing James Comey’s beachside dad joke, that he was expressing a sincere intent to harm the President. Nobody could look at it and conclude that Comey intended to convey that message. In evaluating whether a threat is “true,” the trier of fact must consider the context. Here the context is seashells. The context is the former Director of the FBI, a lifetime member of law enforcement, who is a well-known critic of the President and a target of the President’s wrath, using a campy mechanism to express opposition to the President, using slang for “ditch” or “eject” or “get rid of.” No rational person could see that and say “the former director of the FBI is saying he’s going to kill the President”!”
I could now cite to you a legion of cases for that proposition, finding rhetoric far more concerning than this protected by the First Amendment, analyzing language and context to show this is protected. But it wouldn’t matter, would it? If you are a minimally rational person, you don’t need to see the precedent, and if you’re a cultist, no amount of precedent matters to you.
He does go on; read the rest at the link above.
From Blanche’s press conference yesterday:
I hope Blanche doesn’t have plans to continue legal work in the future. I don’t think he’s going to have a license. The same goes for the lawyers who prosecute this case.
One more from The Washington Post: Prosecutions of Trump’s foes add to GOP’s headaches in midterms.
This is just who Trump is. We can only hope the Democrats will win the House and Senate and impeach him.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
Wednesday Reads: We Are At The Mercy of No-Nothings
Posted: May 22, 2024 Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Corruption and Criminal Insanity, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, just because | Tags: Early works by famous artists, Judge Aileen Cannon, Mar-a-Lago search, media malpractice, no-nothing voters, political polls, Samuel Alito 7 CommentsGood Day!!
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!!
Finally Friday Reads: Of Harpies, Hags, and Magical Vaginas
Posted: June 23, 2023 Filed under: just because | Tags: @repeat1968, Amy Coney Barrett, anti abortion rights legislation, Corrupt Supreme Court Justices, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, John Buss, Randy Rainbow, Samuel Alito 23 Comments
Harpy. A hybrid monster formed of a vulture with the head (and sometimes the torso) of a woman.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
We’re all aware of the ongoing chaos created by the U.S. Supreme Court and its many unprecedented decisions. The majority of people have no confidence in them. ProPublica has shown how corrupt many are, having been bribed and brought in as pets to right-wing billionaires active in the Federal Society. We can see the blood on their hands just one year after their bizarre decision with Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade. They’re clearly paid henchmen to rid their overlords of inconvenient people.
We’ve recently determined that many men in Congress and state legislatures creating this legislature don’t even understand women’s bodies or reproduction. Yet, here they are, inflicting us with the Middle-Age religious ideology of the Dark Ages. This article from the Guardian is 8 years old but still stands up, as evidenced by the chaos and ignorance that rules the Dobbs Decision. “Women’s bodies can’t perform magic. Someone, please tell Republicans. One congressman this week thought that if women swallow pills, they end up in their vaginas. The GOP still knows nothing about female anatomy.” This was written by Jessica Valenti.
Do Republican men think women are mythical creatures, like unicorns or fairies? It’s the only explanation I can come up with to make sense of the party’s continued insistence that women’s bodies can perform feats of absolute magic.
On Monday, during testimony on a state bill that would ban doctors from using telemedicine to prescribe abortion pills, Idaho Republican Rep Vito Barbieri asked a testifying physician if pregnant women could swallow small cameras so that doctors could “determine what the situation is”.
Dr Julie Madsen – who I imagine must have been suppressing the eyeroll of a lifetime – responded that it couldn’t be done because “when you swallow a pill it would not end up in the vagina.”
Barbieri now says the question was a rhetorical one (that’s the ticket!) but his gaffe reminds us all about just how little Republicans understand about women’s bodies. Though, again, I’m honored that they think we hold such awesome abilities. After all, who could forget then-Rep Todd Akin’s assertion that women who were “legitimately” raped would not get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Like a superpower! Or Rush Limbaugh’s belief that women’s bodies are so all-powerful that we actually require a birth control pill every time we have sex to keep from getting pregnant. But it doesn’t stop there.
Conservatives apparently also think that women are so magic as to almost be immortal – you see, they don’t believe that abortion are ever necessary to save a woman’s life or protect her health. They’re so sure of this, in fact, that they’ve been willing to bet our lives on it. It was just four years ago that House Republicans proposed to pass a bill that would have made it legal for hospitals to deny life-saving abortions to women who needed them and even deny them transfer to another hospital willing to perform the procedure. Maybe they just think we have nine lives?
Republicans must think we’re magic – how else do they think we can possibly have all these kids (since we’re not supposed to need or want or get abortions) with no paid maternity leave, no subsidized child care, no livable minimum wage and a culture that thinks we’re supposed to grin and bear it?
Shockingly, all the fairy tale tales conservatives have told themselves about women’s bodies and abilities hasn’t done the Republicans any favors around election time. And despite trainings for Republican candidates to learn how to talk about gender without saying something idiotic about rape or vaginas, Republican men continue to think stupid things about women and women continue to not vote for them.
So please, keep it up, guys. Talk more about what our vaginas can do, or how getting pregnant after rape is a “gift from god”. The more we watch as men who lack basic knowledge of biology and the human reproductive system make laws about what we can do with our own bodies, the more I believe that maybe women really are magic. We take care of our families as Republicans insist we’re “strong” enough to do with less. We battle back against archaic laws and dinosaur politicians. We do things a lot more impressive than swallowing a pill and having it migrate to our vaginas. That’s just weird.
Dracopopodis, from “Historia animalium” by Konrad Gesner, 1551/1558
So now, knowledge about women’s reproductive systems cannot be taught in Medical School or practiced even in extreme emergencies. This is from The New Republic and is written by Tori Otten. “Ob-Gyns Say More People Are Dying Since Dobbs Overturned Right to Abortion. A new KFF poll finds health professionals are incredibly concerned about the restrictions on abortion.”
Health professionals say that maternal mortality has skyrocketed in the year since Roe v. Wade was overturned, a new survey from KFF found, a sign of how harmful abortion bans are.
The Supreme Court rattled the country when it rolled back the nationwide right to abortion on June 24, 2022. In the year since then, Republican-led states have cracked down on abortion access, imposing confusing restrictions or outright bans on the procedure. Many in the GOP argue that they are not limiting access to medically necessary procedures, but instead are saving lives.
KFF surveyed nearly 600 ob-gyns nationwide from March to May, and found that 68 percent say the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision worsened their ability to respond to pregnancy-related emergencies. The survey also found that 64 percent of ob-gyns “believe that the Dobbs decision has worsened pregnancy-related mortality” and 70 percent believe the ruling increased racial and ethnic inequities in maternal health.
Three old hags surround a basket of newborn babies with bats in the distance. Etching by F. Goya, 1796/98.
What’s the response of Republican candidates for the Presidency? Well, Mike Pence takes it to infinity and beyond. This is from Politico Playbook: “Mike Pence’s plan to go further on abortion.” How farther can this go?
PENCE LEANS IN ON ABORTION POLITICS — Tomorrow marks one year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, revoking the constitutional right to abortion it established. And ever since, Republicans have been twisting themselves in knots over how to handle the fallout.
Trump avoids talking about the matter almost entirely. Florida Gov. RON DeSANTIS signed a six-week abortion ban in the middle of the night in April and has barely spoken about it since. Sen. TIM SCOTT (R-S.C.) originally waffled on whether he’d support a nationwide abortion ban. And former South Carolina Gov. NIKKI HALEY has been vague about how she’d handle the issue as president.
Then there’s MIKE PENCE.
More than any other Republican candidate, the former VP has staked his pitch to voters on his unabashed restrictionist stance.
While some Republicans — including Trump and former New Jersey Gov. CHRIS CHRISTIE — say that in a post-Roe America, abortion policy should be left up to the states, Pence has endorsed a nationwide ban on the medical procedure at 15 weeks of gestation.
While some Republicans say the party shouldn’t weigh in on banning widely used abortion drugs, Pence’s 501(c)(4) group Advancing American Freedom has filed an amicus brief supporting a challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the most widely used abortion pill.
And this weekend, while Pence will be among a parade of 2024 hopefuls addressing evangelical conservatives at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference in Washington (more on that below), he is the only candidate who’ll also speak at the Students for Life rally on the National Mall, in addition to being the only candidate invited to address a nationwide Susan B. Anthony List call for activists commemorating the end of Roe.
Yesterday, we caught up with Pence to talk about the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs ruling. We wanted to know how he squares his own position with the political reality that abortion restrictions are consistently unpopular in polls and whether he’s worried that opposition will blow back on him and the GOP at the ballot box.
The upshot: not a bit. And he thinks Republican candidates need to stop running scared from the issue and embrace it head on. Listen to excerpts in Playbook Daily Briefing
HOW PENCE SEES IT: The GOP, Pence said, faces a choice, “whether or not we’re going to continue to be a party grounded in the conservative principles that have won not only the White House, but won majorities over the last 50 years again and again — or whether our party is going to shy away from those core traditional principles.”
As for him? “For me, for our campaign, we’re going to stand where we’ve always stood, and that is stand without apology for the right to life,” he said.
In our interview, Pence flatly rejected the conventional wisdom in Washington that Republicans suffered in the midterms because of Dobbs blowback. Those who lost, he said, had a “common denominator” that “has not to do with the issue of abortion.”
“Rather, where candidates were focused on the past — focused on relitigating the past — we did not fare well,” Pence said, a veiled reference to Republicans parroting the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election.
PENCE VS. THE FIELD: His unabashed stance on abortion is one way Pence differentiates himself from the rest of the GOP’s 2024 field. And he’s certainly not shy about drawing that contrast, particularly vis-a-vis Trump.
Winged Sphinx
Most Democratic strategists see this as a winning discussion, given current polling on the types of people likely to vote in the General Election. This is from NBC News. “Poll: 61% of voters disapprove of Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. On the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, 53% say abortion access nationwide has become too difficult, a new NBC News poll finds.”
On the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, 6 in 10 voters remain opposed to the court’s removing federal protection of the right to abortion, according to results from a new national NBC News poll.
Nearly 80% of female voters ages 18-49, two-thirds of suburban women, 60% of independents and even a third of Republican voters say they disapprove.
Women have no desire to be the property of politicians, let alone the crazy ones cited in the Guardian article who can’t even figure out their reproductive systems.
And, again, let’s state that all of this is because of a group of “corrupt and shady” SCOTUS appointees who all happen to be Republican so far. Alito, Grand Inquisitor of the Dobbs Debacle, is turning out to be corrupt, arrogant, and still thoroughly repulsive.
A harpy in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia, Bologna, 1642.
If you haven’t read about all the free fishing trips Alito got already, Joyce Vance’s substack is an excellent place to go.
You should read the full piece in ProPublica for yourself, but it’s lengthy, so we’ll hit the high notes here tonight in case you need to save it for the weekend. Suffice it to say, this reporting dramatically increases concerns about the Court’s legitimacy. My friend and colleague Barb McQuade put it best: “Pro tip: If you’re a Supreme Court justice, don’t take free trips, even when the seat on the billionaire’s private plane would ‘otherwise go unoccupied.’ Normal people don’t get free fishing trips to Alaska. It is not your winning personality that makes you different.”
And now, for the next entry in the most corrupt SCOTUS evah! Wait that would be Clarence Thomas. He’s been at the grifting game a long time. However, even this newbie might catch up. This is from the Salon Link below.
This is reported by Tatyana Tandanpolie. This is actually a twofer. Two hyper-zealots with a need for a good life and a crusader’s need for blood.
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has personal ties to a leader of the legal clinic under the Notre Dame initiative that funded Justice Samuel Alito’s July 2022 speaking trip to Rome, CNN reports.
Just months after she was sworn in at the Supreme Court in 2020, Barrett, who had left her judgeship and job as a Notre Dame law professor, sold her private home in South Bend, Indiana, to a recently hired Notre Dame professor who was assuming a leadership role at the Religious Liberty Initiative, according to records discovered by the left-leaning non-profit watchdog group Accountable.US.
The initiative’s legal clinic has curried favor with the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020 and filed at least nine “friend-of-the-court” amicus briefs in religious liberty cases before the Court. Alito joined the majority in deciding in favor of the initiative’s conservative positions in several of those cases, including the one that reversed Roe v. Wade, and others on issues of school prayer and COVID-19 restrictions on churches.
Neither Barrett’s real estate transaction nor Alito’s trip to Italy to deliver a keynote at a gala violated the court’s ethics rules, several experts told CNN.
“It raises a question – not so much of corruption as such, but of whether disclosures, our current system of disclosures, is adequate to the task,” Kathleen Clark, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis Law School who specializes in government ethics, told the outlet.
Barrett sold the home to Brendan Wilson, then a Washington D.C.-based lawyer, for $905,000, a transaction that she was not required to disclose on her annual financial forms. Federal regulations exclude sales of the “personal residence of the filer and the filer’s spouse” from financial matters judges are mandated to disclose.
I don’t think Republicans know what “public service” is supposed to be about. They seem to believe that the public should service them, and then they become overlords of the public’s access to civil liberties. All of this is funded by billionaire nutters and actual taxpayers.
Okay, I just couldn’t resist posting this. Tech Dudes and the Maga Hags go at it big time. I guess infighting among the enemy is a good sport. Oh, to be a fly around the Supreme Court Building now. I could use a little bit of Alito v Thomas right now fighting for the belt of least guilty amongst us.
Have a great weekend!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: June 22, 2023 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Donald Trump, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: Jack Smith, Lordy there are tapes, missing submersible, OceanGate, Paul Singer, Samuel Alito, sinking of migrant boat, stolen documents case, Supreme Court ethics 6 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
It’s another big news day today. Here’s what’s happening.
Big media is focused on the missing submersible with billionaires on board and there’s breaking news at doesn’t sound good.
UPDATE: I just saw on CNN that the debris appears to be from the submersible.
From the Associated Press article:
The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that an underwater vessel has located a debris field near the Titanic in the search for a missing submersible with five people aboard, a potential breakthrough in an increasingly urgent around-the-clock effort.
The Coast Guard’s post on Twitter gave no details, such as whether officials believe the debris is connected to the Titan, which was on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic. The search passed the critical 96-hour mark Thursday when breathable air could have run out.
The Titan was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic — but experts have emphasized that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air. And it’s not known if they survived since the sub’s disappearance.
Rescuers have rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said an undersea robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the sea floor, while a French research institute said a deep-diving robot with cameras, lights and arms also joined the operation.
At the same time, another tragedy has been virtually ignored. Jill Fillipovic at CNN: Opinion: While we hope for the best for the lost Titanic-exploring submersible, let’s not forget these other victims.
It’s interesting to watch the national fascination with this story [the missing submersible], especially compared to, say, the attention paid to the sinking of another boat, this one full of desperate migrants in the Mediterranean last week; dozens were killed, and hundreds of men, women and children are still missing. Many migrants, mostly from Syria, Egypt and Pakistan, may be dead.
And the Greek Coast Guard, despite indications that the boat was in distress, did not intervene, blaming the smuggled migrants who they say didn’t want help. Widespread outrage and anguish for the hundreds of souls taking an extraordinary risk in search of a better life, and those who failed them along the way, seems much more justifiable than the frenzy over a small, lost group of hyper-niche tourists, tragic as both circumstances may turn out to be. And yet, while the migrant story is far from being ignored, it’s not receiving the same breathless moment-by-moment updates accorded the lost Titanic hunters.
But human interest, we know, does not at all run proportional to human suffering, and often has little to do with who or what is deserving of significant attention. And the story of a vessel occupied by wealthy curiosity-seekers, lost in the depths of the ocean in its search to find a vessel occupied by wealthy curiosity-seekers lost in the depths of the ocean, has all the component parts of an addictive story: irony, suspense, potential tragedy, potential glory, lifestyles of the rich, aspiration and hubris.
Read more at at the CNN link.
It’s now coming out that there were many safety issues with the submersible.
Experts from within and outside OceanGate raised concerns about the safety of its Titan submersible as far back as 2018, years before it went missing during a deep-sea dive to the Titanic shipwreck site.
Several of those complaints have resurfaced this week, as the frantic search for the vessel — and its five passengers — continues.
“It hasn’t surprised us,” said Will Kohnen, the chair of the Marine Technology Society’s Submarine Committee (formerly the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee), about the Titan’s disappearance. “We’ve been aware of this project for some time and have had some concerns.”
In March 2018, after one of the international industry group’s annual conferences, Kohnen drafted a letter to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush — the pilot of the missing vessel — expressing “unanimous concern” on behalf of its members about the development of the Titan and its planned Titanic expeditions.
“Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry,” he wrote, according to a copy obtained by the New York Times….
Kohnen told Morning Edition‘s A Martínez on Wednesday that the group’s main concern was a lack of oversight and adherence to industry-accepted safety guidelines.
“Most of the companies in this industry that are building submersibles and deep submersibles follow a fairly well-established framework of certification and verification and oversight, through classification societies,” he said. “And that was at the root of OceanGate’s project, is that they were going to go solo, going without that type of official oversight, and that brought a lot of concerns.”
You can also check out this piece at TechCrunch: A whistleblower raised safety concerns about OceanGate’s submersible in 2018. Then he was fired.
The director of marine operations at OceanGate, the company whose submersible went missing Sunday on an expedition to the Titanic in the North Atlantic, was fired after raising concerns about its first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull and other systems before its maiden voyage, according to a filing in a 2018 lawsuit first reported by Insider and New Republic.
David Lochridge was terminated in January 2018 after presenting a scathing quality control report on the vessel to OceanGate’s senior management, including founder and CEO Stockton Rush, who is on board the missing vessel.
According to a court filing by Lochridge, the preamble to his report read: “Now is the time to properly address items that may pose a safety risk to personnel. Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions, so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place.”
The report detailed “numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns,” according to the filing. These included Lochridge’s worry that “visible flaws” in the carbon fiber supplied to OceanGate raised the risk of small flaws expanding into larger tears during “pressure cycling.” These are the huge pressure changes that the submersible would experience as it made its way and from the deep ocean floor. He noted that a previously tested scale model of the hull had “prevalent flaws.”
More details at the link.
Samuel Alito has temporarily taken the pressure off Clarence Thomas.
A couple of days ago, ProPublica published a story about a luxury fishing trip to that Samuel Alito took with Leonard Leo. They were accompanied by billionaire Paul Singer, who flew both men on his private plane.
From ProPublica: Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court.
In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.
Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.
In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.
Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.
Experts said they could not identify an instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift paid for by one of the parties.
“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.
ProPublica sent a series of questions to Alito before publishing the story. Instead of answering them, Alito got his pals at the Wall Street Journal to publish a whiny defense–before the ProPublica article came out.
NYT story by Adam Liptak: Justice Alito Defends Private Jet Travel to Luxury Fishing Trip.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the unusual step late Tuesday of responding to questions about his travel with a billionaire who frequently has cases before the Supreme Court hours before an article detailing their ties had even been published.
In an extraordinary salvo in a favored forum, Justice Alito defended himself in a pre-emptive article in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal before the news organization ProPublica posted its account of a luxury fishing trip in 2008….
Justice Alito said he had spoken to Mr. [Paul] Singer [who flew Alito to Alaska on his private plane] only a handful of times, including on two occasions when Mr. Singer introduced the justice before speeches. “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially,” Justice Alito wrote.
He added that he did not know of Mr. Singer’s connection to the cases before the court, including one in which the court issued a 7-to-1 decision in favor of one of Mr. Singer’s businesses, with Justice Alito in the majority.
But Mr. Singer’s connection to the case, Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, was widely reported. A Forbes article covering the decision bore the headline “Supreme Court Hands Billionaire Paul Singer a Victory Over Argentina.” An article in The New York Times noted that the parties to the case included “NML Capital, an affiliate of Elliott Management, the hedge fund founded by Paul Singer.”
Alito’s justification for taking the free private plane flight was ludicrous and got him mocked all day long on Twitter.
Justice Alito said he was not required to disclose the trip on Mr. Singer’s private jet in “a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.”
A federal law requires disclosures of gifts over a certain value but makes exceptions for “personal hospitality of any individual” at “the personal residence of that individual or his family or on property or facilities owned by that individual or his family.” Justice Alito wrote that a jet is such a facility, quoting from dictionary definitions.
In March, the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts, issued new guidelines requiring disclosure of travel by private jet and stays in commercial properties like resorts.
This morning, CNN published another embarrassing story for Alito.
Last July, Alito was feted in Rome by Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative, which has in recent years joined the growing ranks of conservative legal activists who are finding new favor at the Supreme Court – and forging ties with the justices. The group’s legal clinic has filed a series of “friend-of-the-court” briefs in religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020.
After the high court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome to deliver a keynote address at a gala hosted at a palace in the heart of the city. It was his first known public appearance after the decision.
At the start of his speech, he thanked the group for the “warm hospitality” it provided to him and his wife, which, he later said, included a stay at a hotel that “looks out over the Roman Forum.”
During various parts of the address, he gleefully mocked critics of his ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion. What really “wounded” him, the conservative justice said, was when Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, “addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare ‘the decision whose name may not be spoken’ with the Russian attack on the Ukraine.”
Justices are often known for usually maintaining a low profile, and the court’s public information office in recent years has been less forthcoming about their public appearances. But the court’s ruling last year in the abortion case propelled the nine jurists and their rulings to new heights and fueled new questions about the justices’ behavior both on and off the bench.
Alito joined the majority in ruling in favor of the Religious Liberty Initiative’s position in several of the cases for which it submitted briefs, including the one that reversed Roe, which he authored, and a 2022 decision that said a high school football coach had the right to pray on the 50-yard line after games.
I wonder which right wing justice will be next? I hope some investigative journalist is looking into which billionaire(s) have given gifts to Brett Kavanaugh. It’s also notable that the introductions to the billionaire sugar daddies came from former Federalist Society head Leonard Leo. Check out this piece from Josh Marshall at TPM: Leonard Leo’s SCOTUS-FedSoc Sponsor Family Program.
There’s big news today on the Trump stolen documents case.
Last night, Jack Smith sent the first installment of discovery to Trump’s lawyers.
Special counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday court filing that hints that investigators collected for the case multiple recordings of the former president – not just audio of an interview Trump gave at Bedminster for a forthcoming Mark Meadows memoir.
Prosecutors in the filing used the plural “interviews” to describe recordings of Trump – made with his consent – obtained by the special counsel that have now been turned over to his defense team. It is unclear what the additional recordings may be of or how relevant they will be to the Justice Department’s case against the former president, though the recordings include the Bedminster tape where Trump speaks about a secret military document to a writer and others, the prosecutors said in the filing.
he prosecutors’ update to the court on Wednesday night marks another swift move toward trial, which the Justice Department has said should happen quickly, and captures at least some of the extent of the evidence investigators secured to build their historic case against Trump.
The first batch of discovery production – made up of unclassified materials – includes transcripts of witness testimony in front of the grand juries in Washington, DC, and Florida that were probing the mishandling of government documents from Trump’s White House. It also includes materials collected via subpoenas and search warrants; memos detailing other witness interviews given through mid-May in the investigation; and copies of the surveillance footage investigators obtained in the probe.
The first batch of evidence, provided on Wednesday, “includes the grand jury testimony of witnesses who will testify for the government at the trial of this case,” the special counsel’s office wrote.
More from Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:
Federal prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s retention of national security material were examining evidence within weeks of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last year that he might have handled classified documents at his Bedminster club in New Jersey, according to two people close to the matter.
The indications of classified documents at Bedminster so alarmed prosecutors that they focused part of the investigation on whether Trump might have transported the materials or disclosed their contents there in addition to refusing to return them to the government, the people said….
The suspicion that Trump travelled with classified documents between Mar-a-Lago, his winter residence, and Bedminster, his summer residence, started early in the criminal investigation that intensified after the FBI search and culminated in Trump being accused of violating the Espionage Act….
Within weeks of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, the justice department sought to act on the indications of classified documents at Bedminster when it told the Trump legal team that prosecutors believed the former president still possessed classified materials, the people said.
The message in the letter, which became a formal court motion filed under seal weeks later, was clear: arrange for new searches of all of the Trump properties because, as of that time, the only place that had been combed for classified documents was the Mar-a-Lago resort.
Whether to acquiesce with the request split the Trump legal team. Trump in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn and Trump lawyer Chris Kise were uneasy about being ordered around by the government, while the other Trump lawyers Tim Parlatore and Jim Trusty suggested a cooperative approach.
The legal team ultimately decided on working with the justice department and, in one exchange, asked prosecutors which Trump properties and where at the Trump properties they wanted them to search.
A few more details at the link.
Trump now knows who has testified in the grand jury and what secrets they have revealed. He must be throwing ketchup around at Bedminster. He has posted several insane messages on Truth Social. Here’s a sample:
I wonder how long it will take him to reveal information he gets from the discovery. If he starts attacking Mark Meadows, we’ll have a clue.
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