The TV at Vaugh’s taunts us with this week’s highs. 101, 99, 99, 100,100, 100, and 98. I’m afraid to watch for the “feels like” temperatures.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s another week of incredible heat here. Temple and I arrived at Vaughn’s last night to discover their new window units blasting cold air. At least one corner of the bar was cold. I was told it’s not so good over there on the opposite side. It was pretty quiet but much cooler than my house. There were quite a few moments last night when Temple and I were alone in the bar while others went out to smoke whatever. I’ve never experienced that before.
I go for short, quick walks with Temple, then scurry her home. I’ve noticed how many of the usual dog walkers do the same. The National Weather Service tells us to stay inside. Plus, there’s a surge in Covid. The kids have just started school, and I hope they don’t have to isolate again. It’s not good for kids. I’ve started to wonder if isolation is a new reality. I already go to places where I’m least likely to find a raging Trumper or a Piety Performance. I’ve been talking to a long-time friend about how worn-out and anxious that makes us. It’s just safer alone or with close friends or family if they’re nearby.
I have to admit that loneliness is not something in my emotional range. I like that safe feeling of being by myself, knowing that I can’t be interrupted by any outbursts or nonsense. I know how to entertain myself for long periods of time. That was a skill my mother taught me. I do realize that we’re more isolated now and that it’s bound to have differing impacts on different people. It’s a long read. It’s also an interesting one.
The question that preoccupied me and many others over much of the past eight years is how our democracy became so susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue. The question that keeps me up at night now—with increasing urgency as 2024 approaches—is whether we have done enough to rebuild our defenses or whether our democracy is still highly vulnerable to attack and subversion.
There’s reason for concern: the influence of dark money and corporate power, right-wing propaganda and misinformation, malign foreign interference in our elections, and the vociferous backlash against social progress. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been of compelling interest to me for many years. But I’ve long thought something important was missing from our national conversation about threats to our democracy. Now recent findings from a perhaps unexpected source—America’s top doctor—offer a new perspective on our problems and valuable insights into how we can begin healing our ailing nation.
In May, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published an advisory, warning that a growing “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” threatens Americans’ personal health and also the health of our democracy. Murthy reported that, even before COVID, about half of all American adults were experiencing substantial levels of loneliness. Over the past two decades, Americans have spent significantly more time alone, engaging less with family, friends, and people outside the home. By 2018, just 16 percent of Americans said they felt very attached to their local community.
Prison Paintings 9 1972 Gulsun Karamustafa born 1946 Purchased with funds provided by the Middle East North Africa Acquisitions Committee 2019 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T15189
I feel very attached to my community, but recently, it’s just been easier to just stay home. Am I the only one here?
An “epidemic of loneliness” may sound abstract at a time when our democracy faces concrete and imminent threats, but the surgeon general’s report helps explain how we became so vulnerable. In the past, surgeons general have at crucial moments sounded the alarm about major crises and drawn our attention to underappreciated threats, including smoking, HIV/AIDS, and obesity. This is one of those moments.
The rate of young adults who report suffering from loneliness went up every single year from 1976 to 2019. From 2003 to 2020, the average time that young people spent in person with friends declined by nearly 70 percent. Then the pandemic turbocharged our isolation.
According to the surgeon general, when people are disconnected from friends, family, and communities, their lifetime risk of heart disease, dementia, depression, and stroke skyrockets. Shockingly, prolonged loneliness is as bad, or worse, for our health as being obese or smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Researchers also say that loneliness can generate anger, resentment, and even paranoia. It diminishes civic engagement and social cohesion, and increases political polarization and animosity. Unless we address this crisis, Murthy warned, “we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.”
What does all of this loneliness and disconnection mean for our democracy?
Murthy carefully connects the dots between increasing social isolation and declining civic engagement. “When we are less invested in one another, we are more susceptible to polarization and less able to pull together to face the challenges that we cannot solve alone,” he wrote in The New York Times.
It’s not just the surgeon general who recognizes that social isolation saps the lifeblood of democracy. So do the ultra-right-wing billionaires, propagandists, and provocateurs who see authoritarianism as a source of power and profit.
There have always been angry young men alienated from mainstream society and susceptible to the appeal of demagogues and hate-mongers. But modern technology has taken the danger to another level. This was Steve Bannon’s key insight.
Long before Bannon ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he was involved in the world of online gaming. He discovered an army of what he later described as “rootless white males,” disconnected from the real world but highly engaged online and often quick to resort to sexist and racist attacks. When Bannon took over the hard-right website Breitbart News, he was determined to turn these socially isolated gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech. Bannon pursued the same project as a senior executive at Cambridge Analytica, the notorious data-mining and online-influence company largely owned by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. According to a former Cambridge Analytica engineer turned whistleblower, Bannon targeted “incels,” or involuntarily celibate men, because they were easy to manipulate and prone to believing conspiracy theories. “You can activate that army,” Bannon told the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
Egon Schiele, Prisoner! (April 24, 1912). Courtesy of the Albertina.
Clinton’s analysis is just what you would expect. Full of research, examples, and elucidation of where this might lead. It’s a heavy read but fully worth it.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a defamation counterclaim by Donald Trump against the writer E. Jean Carroll in her pending lawsuit that accuses the former president of defaming her after she wrote that he had raped her.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, in a separate order made public Monday, ruled that Carroll’s lawyers can give the Manhattan District Attorney’s office a videotape and transcript of their deposition of Trump that they took last fall for the lawsuit.
That order raises the chance that Trump’s sworn testimony in Carroll’s case could be used against the former president as part of the DA’s pending criminal prosecution.
DA Alvin Bragg Jr. charged Trump, 77, earlier this year with falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. That case, in which Trump has pleaded not guilty, is set to go to trial next May.
Trump’s counterclaim in the Carroll suit focused on what he argued were her false statements, which he alleged badly harmed his reputation, a day after a jury verdict in May in her favor for $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation in a related civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Carroll during a CNN interview said that she thought in her head, “Oh, yes, he did — oh, yes, he did” — after jurors in that case did not find that Trump had raped her.
In the same interview, Carroll described her encounter in court with Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina right after the jury verdict, when Tacopina shook hands with her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge.
“Well, Joe Tacopina is very likeable. He’s sort of like an 18th Century strutting peacock,” Carroll said on CNN. “So, he sticks out his hand — first he congratulated Robbie. And then, he was congratulating people on the team. And as I put my hand forward, I said, ‘He did it and you know it.’ Then we shook hands, I passed on.”
Judge Kaplan, in dismissing the counterclaim, wrote that Carroll’s statements repeating a claim that Trump had raped her were “substantially true” because the jury had found he digitally penetrated her, even if it did not find that he had penetrated her with his penis, as is required for a rape charge under New York law.
Many people in Fulton County are preparing for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to announce an indictment against former U.S. President Donald Trump for allegedly trying to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election in Georgia.
An Atlanta-area lawyer tells 11Alive he believes Willis could indict Trump this coming week. It would be a state indictment and could be the most significant out of all the indictments since someone can only be pardoned on federal charges.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”
That infamous phone call between the then president and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger happened on January 2, 2021. Almost three years later, bright barriers surround the perimeter of the Fulton County Courthouse in preparation for Trump’s possible indictment for election interference in Georgia.
“We’ve never had this happen before, so no one quite knows what’s going to happen,” attorney Darryl Cohen said.
Cohen is a former Fulton County assistant district attorney and said while there’s a lot we don’t know, there’s certain things that are likely to happen.
“There are going to be Trump supporters that love him. There’s going to be Trump haters that hate him, and we don’t know if they’re going to be together or if they’re going to clash,” Cohen said. “We don’t know how many people are going to turn out, so this could all be the beginning of a story that we cannot begin to understand until it unravels.”
Normally someone goes to Fulton County Jail after an arrest, but Cohen believes that’s unlikely for the former president.
“I think that he will be mug shot and fingerprinted at the Fulton County Courthouse. We have a serious, really serious security problem,” Cohen said.
Cohen said if Willis announced an indictment against Trump, it would be assigned to a Fulton County superior judge.
Barbara Ess, Fire Escape [Shut-In Series] (2018-19). Courtesy of Magenta Plains.
Donald Trump blared Sunday morning that his legal team would be “immediately asking for recusal” of U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan from his latest criminal case, proclaiming (but not revealing) “very powerful grounds” for the demand.
Hours later, his attorney John Lauro would publicly walk back that plan, saying Trump was speaking with a “layman’s political sense” and reacting primarily because Chutkan was nominated to the bench by a Democrat. (She was confirmed 95-0 by the Senate in 2014 after Barack Obama nominated her).
“We haven’t made a final decision on that issue at all,” Lauro said on a podcast hosted by Florida defense attorney David Markus. “I think as lawyers we have to be very careful of those issues and handle them with the utmost delicacy.”
On Monday morning, Trump was again hammering on the recusal issue, calling Chutkan “the Judge of [special counsel Jack Smith’s] ‘dreams’ (WHO MUST BE RECUSED!).”
The back-and-forth on public airwaves and social media underscores the familiar tension between Trump and his legal team, which has been rocked by infighting, departures and conflicting advice in recent months. All of it, however, is secondary to Trump’s own whims and instincts, which have served him politically but are grating against the rules and norms of behavior for those charged with serious federal crimes.
Paul Sérusier, Solitude, Huelgoat Landscape, c.1892, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, Rennes.
If former President Donald Trump committed a “technical violation of the Constitution,” it doesn’t mean he necessarily broke any criminal laws, John Lauro, Trump’s criminal defense attorney, argued Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Lauro appeared to signal how he’d defend the former president in a trial that will stem from the four-count criminal indictment returned last week by a federal grand jury that had been examining Trump’s possible role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd about Trump’s alleged pressure campaign to get former Vice President Mike Pence to reverse the election, Lauro claimed that Trump and Pence had merely disagreed over whether a vice president could constitutionally take actions that could lead to a presidential election’s being overturned.
“A technical violation of the Constitution is not a violation of criminal law,” Lauro contended, saying it was “just plain wrong” to suggest that Trump had pressed Pence to break the law.
“And to say that is contrary to decades of legal statutes,” he continued.
“These kinds of constitutional and statutory disagreements don’t lead to criminal charges,” Lauro said. “And one thing that Mr. Pence has never said is that he thought President Trump was acting criminally.”
In response to the latest indictment, Pence said he believes “that anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.” He said Wednesday that Trump surrounded himself after the 2020 election with “crackpot lawyers” who told him only what his “itching ears” wanted to hear.
My thought is that’s a very good way to get all those unindicted co-conspirators on the people’s side because it sure looks like they’re getting the fickle finger of blame from the Trump Team
Anyway, I’m going to go eat a fresh peach and yogurt with some honey in the coldest spot in the house.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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“Yesterday was a bad hair day.” John Buss, @Repeat1968
Happy Indictment Week Three, Sky Dancers!
We anticipate Fulton County, Georgia’s DA, will give us a week 4 shortly! So, I’ll start right out! What the fuck is wrong with one-third of the country? Tal Axelrod of ABC News reports on this new poll. “Nearly two-thirds of Americans think Jan. 6 charges against Trump are serious: POLL — Trump was indicted for the third time on Tuesday and has pleaded not guilty.”
Overall, 65% of adults think the charges are serious, including 51% who said they are very serious and 14% who said they are somewhat serious.
Only 24% said they are not serious, including 17% who said they are not serious at all.
Just over half — 52% — think Trump should have been charged with a crime in this case, while 32% said he should not have been. And a plurality of Americans (49%) said Trump should suspend his presidential campaign, while 36% said he shouldn’t.
At the same time, 46% think the charges against Trump are politically motivated, while 40% do not, per the ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel.
The results show that the public believes the latest charges are more serious than those in two other indictments: one federal case in Florida concerning Trump’s alleged mishandling of and refusal to return government secrets after leaving office and the other state case in New York City over his hush money payments to an adult film actress in the days before the 2016 election, for which he is accused of falsifying business records.
He has pleaded not guilty in both of those cases and denies all wrongdoing.
In ABC News/Ipsos polls in the wake of the previous indictments, 42% of Americans said the documents-related charges were very serious and 30% saw the hush money-related charges as very serious, compared to 51% in this most recent indictment.
The asshole staged a violent coup attempt at the People’s House. WTF are these complacent assholes thinking? It was televised! Some of his droggies are in jail for Seditious Conspiracy. What will it take to wake these jerks up? I agree with this Congress Critters. Let the Trial be televised! Let them resee how all the freaking witnesses against him are Republicans. Trump even got charged under the KKK Act and will now face a tough Black Woman as judge. How is that a political set-up by Democrats! Rebecca Shabad of NBC News has this story. “House Democrats call for live broadcasts of court proceedings in Trump criminal cases.”
More than three dozen House Democrats are calling on the policymaking body for federal courts to permit live broadcasting of court proceedings in the Justice Department’s cases charging former President Donald Trump with federal crimes.
In a letter led by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who served on the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Democrats asked that the Judicial Conference “explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump.”
“It is imperative the Conference ensures timely access to accurate and reliable information surrounding these cases and all of their proceedings, given the extraordinary national importance to our democratic institutions and the need for transparency,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, sent Thursday to Judge Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the secretary of the Judicial Conference.
The letter, whose signatories also included other members who served on the former Jan. 6 committee, noted that the Judicial Conference has “historically supported increased transparency and public access to the courts’ activities.”
“Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings,” the letter said. “If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.”
The letter was sent on the same day that Trump was arraigned at the federal courthouse in Washington during a proceeding that was not televised or live-streamed. He pleaded not guilty to four federal counts over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which led to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Federal prosecutors filed the grand jury indictment Tuesday.
Trump’s next court hearing in the case is set for Aug. 28. A trial date has not yet been set.
Before I continue, I should mention that the headline contains the number of years Trump could face so far, as calculated by the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump. You can get a great list of all the indictments and charges there with their individual number of maxium years for conviction.
Donald Trump was in a massive huff Thursday after he entered his not guilty plea to four charges stemming from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to CNN. Sources told the outlet the former president was “pissed off” after departing the courthouse in Washington, D.C., and that he had been especially annoyed by one particular aspect of the hearings: namely, being referred to by Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya as “Mr. Trump.” He’s apparently grown accustomed to still being called “Mr. President” by supporters at his Bedminster golf club and Mar-a-Lago, despite being turfed out of the Oval Office over two years ago.
Trump was “pissed off” after he motorcaded through traffic, the sources said.
After the 27-minute legal proceeding, the former president did not take questions as he had planned to do at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport before his return flight to New Jersey.
Trump did speak briefly to the media, criticizing the charges and claiming he was being persecuted because he was running for office.
Trump had been fingerprinted and processed at the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse before he pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
One aspect of the hearing that irked the former president — who is still referred to by his former title when at his Bedminster golf club or Mar-a-Lago resort — was when Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya referred to him as simply “Mr. Trump.”
I just hope it has serious agita from the experience and chokes on a grizzly, greasy over-cooked Big Mac.
Lawrence O’Donnell had me glued to the screen last night discussing two press concerence held by Trump Lawyer John Lauro. Instance one had his panel talking about a mistep. The second instance had them stumped. Was this simply a PR stunt to help find a hold out Trumper in the Jury? This is from The Daily Beast. “MSNBC Panel Stunned by Trump Lawyer’s ‘Admission’ on Fox News. Attorney John Lauro appeared on Fox News Thursday night to discuss the events of Trump’s latest indictment—but analysts say he said too much.” This is reported by William Vaillancourt.
An MSNBC panel was shocked by a pair of television interviews Thursday where Donald Trump lawyer John Lauro seemed to confirm an allegation contained within the Jan. 6-related indictment of the former president.
Lauro had told Fox News host Laura Ingraham earlier in the evening that, leading up to Jan. 6, Trump voiced his approval for Pence to send the election back to the states rather than have the Electoral College vote be certified.
“What President Trump said is, ‘Let’s go with option D,’” Lauro said on The Ingraham Angle. “Let’s just halt, let’s just pause the voting and allow the state legislatures to take one last look and make a determination as to whether or not the elections were handled fairly. That’s constitutional law. That’s not an issue of criminal activity.”
Lauro said basically the same thing on Newsmax a bit later.
MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell was surprised at the revelation.
“That is a Trump criminal defense lawyer quoting Donald Trump committing a crime,” he said. “Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer tonight added information to Jack Smith’s 42-page description of Donald Trump’s crimes. The conversation that John Lauro just described appears on page 34 of the indictment against his client.”
There was fun to be had when two Former Federal Prosecutors had to figure out what they had just seen.
MSNBC contributor and former Department of Justice lawyer Andrew Weissman considered Lauro’s statements to be “an admission,” as he wrote in a tweet.
“So, I don’t know why a defense lawyer is going to start giving facts about a critical moment,” he said on air, prompting O’Donnell to exclaim: “It’s the whole case!”
Weissman added: “It is such a damning thing when you put it in context because remember what the indictment alleges…[that] the reason this had to be done with the vice president is because prior to that, all the efforts that Donald Trump took with respect to the secretaries of state did not work.”
“I just don’t know why John, who is a good lawyer, didn’t just zip it and not say anything,” he continued.
“They don’t teach TV in law school,” O’Donnell quipped.
Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, also an MSNBC contributor, was stunned as well, saying bluntly, “It makes no sense.”
A few cartoon characters preening like stereotypical white men with big signs and not much else. Why do they all look alike?
My additional favorite headline came from The Washington Post. “Among MAGA extremists, Trump charges draw big talk, small crowds. The threat of pro-Trump political violence isn’t gone but has shifted from organized movements, analysts say.” They are all afraid of getting time in the Big House and that ain’t Mar-a-Lardo.
“Many people have really given up,” said Steve Corson, 66, of Fredonia, Ariz., standing alone outside the courthouse in a “We the People” hat, a starkly different experience from Jan. 6, 2021, when he marched to the U.S. Capitol alongside thousands of other Trump fans.
For all the online outrage, only a handful of Trump supporters turned out to protest the latest charges against the former president, continuing a shift in the right-wing fervor that once drew thousands to D.C. rallies, clogged lakes with boat parades and mobilized a de facto “MAGA militia” in the armed groups that took his extremist rhetoric to the streets.
So, that’s it for me today. I’m trying to beat the heat and do what I can around the house. Right now, it’s my ritual cold bath and blasting fan and something to read. Stay safe out there! Cross the street if you see any dude in his maga militia playsuit!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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ROUND HILL, Va. — They said goodbye to Aimee outside her elementary school, watching nervously as she joined the other children streaming into a low brick building framed by the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Christina and Aaron Beall stood among many families resuming an emotional but familiar routine: the first day of full-time,in-person classes since public schools closed at the beginning of the pandemic.
incomprehensible to the parents around them. Their 6-year-old daughter, wearing a sequined blue dress and a pink backpack that almost obscured her small body, hesitated as she reached the doors. Although Aaron had told her again and again how brave she was, he knewit would be years before she understood how much he meant it — understood that for her mother and father, the decision to send her to school was nothing less than a revolt.
Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.
At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern home-schooling movement. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.
Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
Jamison describes how right wing Christians have used home schooling to indoctrinate their children and tie them to their religious beliefs.
Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country.More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessonsabout race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
But now younger generations are rebelling.
Former home-schoolers have been at the forefront of those arguing for greater oversight of home schooling, forming the nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education to make their case.
“As an adult I can say, ‘No. What happened to me as a child was wrong,’” said Samantha Field, the coalition’s government relations director.
More about Christina and Aaron Beall:
Christina, 34, and Aaron, 37, had joined no coalitions.They had published no memoirs. Their rebellion played out in angry text messages and emails with their parents, in tense conversations conducted at the edges of birthday parties and Easter gatherings. Their own children — four of them, including Aimee — knew little of their reasons for abandoning home schooling: the physical and emotional trauma of the “biblical discipline” to which they had been subjected, the regrets over what Aaron called “a life robbed” by strictures on what and how they learned.
Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herdedaboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift. Sometimes they still flinched when they remembered their parents’ literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.”
The Bealls knew that many home-schooling families didn’t share the religious doctrines that had so warped their own lives. But they also knew that the same laws that had failed to protect them would continue to fail other children.
“It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse, to make them invisible, to strip them of any capability of getting help. And not just in a physical way,” Christina said. “At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.”
I’ve quoted a lot, but there is much more to this fascinating story. Much of it was new to me, although I was not completely surprised. I hope you will check it out.
Next up a story about infighting among Trump’s many lawyers.
With three anticipated indictments, two ongoing court cases, and an ever-expanding cadre of lawyers, former President Donald Trump is at a critical juncture—and yet his legal advisers are starting to turn on each other.
According to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation, clashing personalities and the increasing outside threat of law enforcement has sown deep divisions that have only worsened in recent months. The internal bickering has already sparked one departure in recent weeks—and that could be just the beginning.
As Trump’s legal troubles keep growing—with criminal and civil investigations in New York City, Washington, and Atlanta—so too does the unwieldy band of attorneys who simply can’t get along.
The cast of characters includes an accused meddler who has Trump’s ear, a young attorney who lawyers on the team suggested is only there because the former president likes the way she looks, and a celebrity lawyer who’s increasingly viewed with disdain. Worst of all, now that federal investigators have turned the interrogation spotlight on some of Trump’s lawyers themselves, defense attorneys on the team seem to be questioning whether their colleagues may actually turn into snitches.
“There’s a lot of lawyers and a lot of jealousy,” said one person on Trump’s legal team, explaining that the sheer number of lawyers protecting a single man accused of so many crimes is without parallel.
At the center of the controversy is Boris Epshteyn, who has been in Trump’s orbit since 2016 and now is so close to Trump that he’s been compared to a presidential chief of staff.
Part of the concern over lawyers turning on each other is due to the fact that the Department of Justice already has one Trump attorney’s professional notes, which could position him as a future witness against his own client, and the DOJ has another lawyer who said too much in an unrelated case and has positioned herself as yet another potential witness against her client.
But much of the anger from Trump’s lawyers is directed at the former president’s right-hand man, Boris Epshteyn, who’s accused of running interference on certain legal advice from more experienced courtroom gladiators.
Boris Epshteyn
Epshteyn, who’s a lawyer himself, has risen through the ranks in Trumpworld over the years, first as an adviser for Trump’s 2016 campaign, then as a more senior adviser for 2020, and now part of Trump’s innermost circle for 2024.
Ephsteyn seems to have the former president’s supreme confidence, with what’s described as a final say on all matters related to public relations and legal issues. But there’s snickering in the shadows. Several sources ridiculed the way Ephsteyn refers to himself as “in-house counsel”—normally a term for a company’s corporate attorney—noting how it echoes the way John Gotti’s mafia lawyer used to describe his services for the infamous Gambino crime family.
Epshteyn’s meddling has particularly affected the lawyers working to defend Trump from Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith and his investigation into whether the former president broke the law when he took top secret documents on his way out of the White House in January 2021 and hoarded them at Mar-a-Lago.
Another complication is there are separate groups of lawyers working on different cases in Georgia, New York, and Washington DC.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which indicted Trump in March for faking business records, is about to dump thousands of documents of evidence on defense lawyers Todd Blanche, Susan Necheles, and Joe Tacopina—who aren’t allowed to freely share those documents with the former president. They may even have to fight Trump to prevent him from stupidly posting sensitive details on social media.
The DA’s prosecutors are already trying to fracture Trump’s legal team by attempting to disqualify Tacopina and make him seem like a weak link, because he has a tenuous connection to a key witness in the case, the porn star Stormy Daniels whose hush money payment Trump tried to hide while running for president back in 2016.
Meanwhile, defense attorneys Alina Habba and Christopher Kise are gearing up for a civil trial in October against the New York Attorney General, who seeks to bleed the Trump Organization dry and destroy Trump’s ability to do conduct business in the financial capital of the world by holding him personally liable for bank and insurance fraud.
In Georgia, the defense lawyers Drew Findling, Melissa Goldberg, and Jennifer L. Little are preparing for the Fulton County District Attorney to indict Trump in July or August over the way he intimidated the state’s top elections official in 2021 while trying to overturn his loss there—a recorded phone call where he was advised by yet other lawyers he trusted.
And an entirely different team of lawyers split up between the nation’s capital and his oceanside Florida estate—former federal prosecutors M. Evan Corcoran, John P. Rowley, and Jim Trusty up north and Halligan down south—are gearing up for two different fights with the Department of Justice.
Again, I’ve quote quite a bit, but there is much much more to this story.
The third long read is from Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel. It’s about the media’s failure to include Trump’s many legal problems in their analysis of his chances at winning the nomination in 2024.
Over the weekend I argued that all horserace coverage of the GOP primary is useless if it doesn't account for possible Trump indictments. https://t.co/5Gxud33hvJ
Its analysis of the numbers and Ron DeSantis’ early failures isn’t bad. But because it is silent about how the expanding field might play in the likelihood of Trump indictments, it is entirely worthless.
For example, the content and timing of indictments may have an utterly central impact on the two dynamics described in the piece: Trump’s diehard base and the unwillingness of others in the party to criticize Trump directly.
The rapidly ballooning field, combined with Mr. Trump’s seemingly unbreakable core of support, represents a grave threat to Mr. DeSantis, imperiling his ability to consolidate the non-Trump vote, and could mirror the dynamics that powered Mr. Trump’s takeover of the party in 2016.
It’s a matter of math: Each new entrant threatens to steal a small piece of Mr. DeSantis’s potential coalition — whether it be Mr. Pence with Iowa evangelicals or Mr. Scott with college-educated suburbanites. And these new candidates are unlikely to eat into Mr. Trump’s votes. The former president’s base — more than 30 percent of Republicans — remains strongly devoted to him.
[snip]
The reluctance to go after Mr. Trump, for many Republicans, feels eerily like a repeat of 2016. Then, Mr. Trump’s rivals left him mostly alone for months, assuming that he would implode or that they were destined to beat him the moment they could narrow the field to a one-on-one matchup, a situation that never transpired.
Consider how each of three legal risks (and these are only the most obvious) might affect these issues. This post builds on this series I did last month:
As I was starting my day, I discovered that my internet was down. It finally came back, and I’ve been belatedly looking around at the latest news. Every day it gets crazier and crazier. Why did I ever think we could be rid of Trump if he lost the 2020 election? Fat chance. Will he ever go away? Maybe if he finally goes to prison or dies of old age. In the meantime, we’re stuck with a dangerous high profile lunatic who may have the ability to destroy not only our democracy, but also our national security.
How many of those top secret documents did Trump read or share with visitors to his office–where documents were stored in boxes and even in his desk?! What if he decides to reveal government secrets on Truth Social or in TV interviews? Some Democrats are worried he could do something that insane.
The damning photograph that the Department of Justice released Tuesday night, showing classified documents spread out across the carpeted floor at Mar-a-Lago, confirmed that former President Donald Trump had kept records related to intercepted communications—possibly involving secret spy satellites or surveillance aircraft.
And the sensitive nature of those secrets, coupled with Trump’s particularly unhinged behavior in recent days, has many Democratic lawmakers nervous.
In the photo released late Tuesday, some of the documents were labeled “TOP SECRET.” Others were just “SECRET.” But either way, the White House memos cautioned that they should severely limit access to details contained within. Some of the documents can be seen with the “NOFORN” marking, indicating that no foreign nationals should ever lay eyes on them.
All of the visible cover sheets warned that the contents were “HSC-P/SI/TK,” meant to signify that the secrets they held inside were strictly controlled, clandestinely captured, and involving possible aerial reconnaissance, respectively.
Adding to the chaos, inthe hours before and after that DOJ disclosure, Trump showed himself to be increasingly volatile, taking to his own social media app to share bizarre conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Q-Anon cult material, and assert that the records he had are, in fact, no longer restricted.
“Thought they wanted them kept Secret? Lucky I Declassified!” Trump’s personal account posted Wednesday morning.
The implied threat is that he could, if he so desired, reveal them at any time….
“I would not leave it beyond him to do something as insane as that. When someone is cornered, they make very bad decisions, and Donald Trump is in a very bad situation right now. We don’t know what he will do,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) said in an interview with The Daily Beast.
Read remarks from several other Congresspeople at the link. Just a bit more:
The damage assessment currently underway by the office of Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines will take into account what could happen if these secrets were exposed. And the FBI has seized surveillance video footage from Mar-a-Lago that might show who handled those records without permission this past summer.
But Trump continues to rage-post online, which is why Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) warned that the threat is ongoing.
“Here’s what makes it truly scary: Trump is weirdly attached to all of this ‘Top Secret’ information, he constantly throws tantrums, and he has an insatiable desire for attention including on social media,” Huffman said. “Since he no longer has White House china to smash, his next tantrum might be blurting out sensitive national secrets on Truth Social, or calling his pal [Vladimir] Putin to divulge or even sell information. With anyone else these would seem like crazy scenarios, but not with Trump.”
Former president Donald Trump’s hoarding of highly classified national defence information at the Palm Beach, Florida, home could bring about a level of damage to US intelligence operations not seen in decades, according to current and former intelligence community officials and experts who spoke to The Independent.
A Tuesday court filing from the Department of Justice laid out just how many documents containing America’s most sensitive secrets were recovered from the ex-president over the last nine months.
More than 100 “unique documents with classification markings” were seized from his Mar-a-Lago club during an 8 August search by FBI agents, including three stored in Mr Trump’s desk. Classification levels ranged from confidential — the lowest level of classification in the US system — to the highest, top secret.
The department also said “certain documents” found at Mr Trump’s property bore markings denoting them as containing “sensitive compartmented information”, a designation reserved for extremely closely held secrets often involving intelligence sources and methods or nuclear weapons. Those 100 joined another 38 documents which FBI agents recovered from Mr Trump’s counsel during a 3 June meeting at Mar-a-Lago, plus another 184 documents which National Archives and Records Administration officials brought back from Florida in a set of 15 boxes Mr Trump allowed them to retrieve in January.
What national security experts told The Independent:
The experts who spoke with The Independent have decades of combined experience dealing with the most sensitive information, ranging from battlefield intelligence meant to disrupt terrorism networks to human intelligence gathered from clandestine assets and the highly technical signals intelligence collected by the National Security Agency.
All of them expressed fears that Mr Trump’s retention of such closely held secrets in a notoriously insecure facility — and one that has long been known to be a target of foreign intelligence services — will lead the US government to undertake what will be a unilateral degradation of American intelligence capabilities, on the assumption that whatever programs described in the papers stored at Mar-a-Lago may already have been or will soon be compromised.
David Priess, a former CIA intelligence officer who delivered daily intelligence briefings to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and other top officials during the George W Bush administration, told The Intependent in a phone interview that it’s possible that some programmes that may be compromised by Mr Trump’s retention of documents in such a public place could still be salvaged if the documents in question are not specific as to intelligence sources or methods….
“It’s likely that some of the information is going to lead to some at least some serious investigation and possibly some actual shutdowns of some collection,” he said.
Another former CIA analyst, who asked for anonymity because they now hold another sensitive position in the US government, said Mr Trump’s retention of documents pertaining to “HUMINT” — human intelligence that is often gathered with the aid of sources recruited in hostile countries over a period of years — could lead intelligence officials to pull the plug on long-running operations and possibly could force them to mount operations to extract operatives or assets to safety.
“There’s a good chance someone at Langley is now trying to figure out how to exfiltrate some very helpful folks from very unfriendly places,” they said.
Feinberg notes that this already happened in 2017, when Trump blabbed about a secret operation to Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office.
Meanwhile, Trump’s incompetent lawyers are blabbing scary stuff. Alina Habba, who previously represented a parking garage company, thinks violating the espionage act is a “mundane” crime.
Trump attorney Alina Habba is upset that the DOJ and FBI are looking into "mundane" crimes like "espionage" at Mar-a-Lago.
And she says that she has been in Trump’s office–where he was storing top secret documents in his desk and in boxes, and so have lots of other visitors.
After an explosive court brief and picture of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago earlier this week, the Justice Department will argue in court Thursday against a request by former President Donald Trump that a so-called special master be appointed in to review the evidence the FBI seized at his Florida resort last month.
US District Judge Aileen Cannon will be considering whether to bring in third party oversight of the Justice Department, in which an outside attorney would in theory identify and filter out evidence that should be withheld from investigators because it was privileged.
Arguing it is unnecessary, prosecutors in court filings Tuesday night provided new details about its investigation into whether classified government documents were illegally mishandled. Lawyers for the former president, who filed a lawsuit last week seeking the appointment, meanwhile argued in a Wednesday night court filing that the Justice Department could not be trusted, as Trump claimed the search itself was unjustified.
Cannon previously signaled an inclination toward granting Trump’s request, but that was before the Justice Department’s dramatic filing this week.
Sneed lists the following questions to watch for (Read details at the CNN link):
— How sharply does DOJ go after Trump’s spin?
— How are the dynamics on Trump team playing out?
— Does the judge recalibrate her approach?
— If the judge grants the special master review, what does it look like?
As you know, over the past two days, first the DOJ and then Trump lawyers turned in filings with their arguments about Trump’s request for a special master. The DOJ strongly opposed the request in a longer than usual argument (35 pages) on Tuesday; Trump’s team responded with their arguments in favor yesterday. Today journalists are reporting new insights into the two opposing filings.
According to DOJ’s recent brief, classified documents in that office were “commingled” in a desk drawer with three passports. While the government did not disclose the name on the passports, Trump himself has complained that during the search, the FBI “stole” his three passports. It seems a safe bet that the passports DOJ recovered were Trump’s.
The significance of the passports is enormous. As DOJ explained in an understated footnote, “The location of the passports is relevant evidence in an investigation of unauthorized retention and mishandling of national defense information.”
In other words, the presence of the passports in the same drawer as the classified records tends to tie the unauthorized possession of these documents to Trump himself. A photo included with the filing shows the items that were recovered from his office. Among the classification markings on the documents are “Top Secret,” meaning that the disclosure of the material could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.
A routine practice in drafting search warrants is to include a request to seize identity documents that can connect the subject of the investigation with the premises. That helps to make the evidentiary tie between the person and any contraband that might be found at the location. For example, if searching for illegal drugs in a house where multiple people come and go, agents will seek authority to seize identity documents like a driver’s license, photographs or other personal possessions located in the same room as the contraband. Finding both of these items together tends to connect the person to the contraband. Here, the presence of Trump’s passports alongside the classified documents supports an inference that he himself possessed the classified documents.
To the extent Trump may be inclined to pin all blame on his lawyer who signed a document in June attesting that all of the classified documents had been returned, the documents in his personal desk drawer are a problem for him. The former president would need to explain away the notion that he himself possessed these documents long after the government asked for their return, and despite personal assurances from Trump when Counterintelligence Section Chief Jay Bratt visited Mar-a-Lago in June to inspect the storage of documents. At the time, Trump told Bratt, “Whatever you need, just let us know.”
The former president’s continued retention of the documents, even after the repeated requests to return them, suggests a willful violation of the law.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
DOJ BIG PICTURE: you don’t make a filing this strong, bold, and factually accusatory if you don’t have every intention to indict.
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) August 31, 2022
Newly public details from the Justice Department’s criminal probe of documents taken to Mar-a-Lago suggest enormous legal peril for two of Donald Trump’s attorneys — and considerable uncertainty for Trump himself, intelligence and legal expertssaid.
There’s no way to predict whether the Justice Department will ultimately pursue charges against the former president or his associates. But in a court filing Tuesday night, government lawyers recounted numerous instances in which Trump’s lawyers allegedly misled government officials during the investigation, and in which Trump or his team appear to have haphazardly handled materials that contained national security secrets.
The evidence laid out in the filing, experts said, could build a legal case that Trump attorneys Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb obstructed the government’s investigation, allegedly telling FBI agents and prosecutors that they had handed over all classified documents when in fact many remained in Trump’s possession.
Left unanswered were key questions that could determine Trump’s legal fate: Did he direct Corcoran and Bobb to mislead the government, either before or after the FBI raid of his Florida home and club?
And, if so, why did he want to keep reams of top-secret classified documents there?
“It’s bad,” said Peter Lapp, a former FBI agent who worked on espionage cases and is now a private consultant. “It’s all pretty damning.”
Read the rest at the WaPo.
I’ll end there. I’ll be hanging out on Twitter to watch for reports from Judge Cannon’s courtroom. I hope there will be a quick resolution. If she does favor a special master, I wonder if the DOJ will appeal? What do you think? What other stories are you following?
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The asshole staged a violent coup attempt at the People’s House. WTF are these complacent assholes thinking? It was televised! Some of his droggies are in jail for 
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I just hope it has serious agita from the experience and chokes on a grizzly, greasy over-cooked Big Mac.
There was fun to be had when two Former Federal Prosecutors had to figure out what they had just seen.
Jamison describes how right wing Christians have used home schooling to indoctrinate their children and tie them to their religious beliefs.
Adding to the chaos, in
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