Catch Me if You Can 🌻🌻🌻

Goodfellas’ Golfing: Late Sunday, Twitter was full of pictures of the Former Guy stepping off a plane at Dulles Airport.  He was wearing golf attire including golf shoes rather than his usual traveling duds, leaving some tweeters to wishfully ponder whether he was being frog marched off to jail with others suggesting he was on his way to one of those unexplained Walter Reed visits.  On Monday his spokesperson said that the FG was in town for ”many meetings” and to play a round at his DC area golf course though it was hardly golf weather.  Later in the day he was seen walking on that golf course with a group of eight or so men, all white of course,  some in golf attire some in denim, a golf course no no, but only one carrying just a single golf club.  It’s not clear what that meeting was about.  Due diligence for the sale of the club? Checking out hiding locations for some more purloined document boxes like the boxes that were mysteriously moved from Mar a Lago to Bedminster for the season?  Scouting out burial sites for his current spouse?  Or more likely a “secret” meeting with his growing team of lawyers as it was also revealed yesterday by the NY Times that over the week the Justice Department issued somewhere around 40 subpoenas to the FG’s aides, current and former, including one to Bernie Kerik, the convicted felon who served as Police Commissioner back when Rudy Giuliani was the Mayor of NYC and who was one of those planning January 6^th activities at the Willard Hotel the night before the attack on the Capitol.  Additionally the phones of two of the FG’s top advisors, Boris Epshteyn who’s been coordinating his legal efforts, and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of his 2020 campaign’s election day operations, were taken. It appears that the DOJ and the no longer hands off Attorney General Merrick Garland are investigating the January 6^th insurrection conspiracy and the false electors scheme all while the National Archives and its purloined document case continues to percolate and then there’s also those inquiries into all that post-election leadership PAC funding, the slush fund where about $100 million is hanging out.  As to the purloined documents case, the Teflon FG’s stalling tactics appear to be working.  Over the weekend his lawyers told Judge Aileen Cannon, the all too FG friendly judge holding up the review of all those super-secret documents, nuclear and otherwise, that they don’t want anyone looking at anything or assessing the possible damage to national security until a special master is in place because according to them those documents aren’t secret anymore anyway and/or the FG needed them for his book writing research, as if.  They also rejected both of the DOJ’s very qualified special master suggestions, of course they did, while the DOJ, which still doesn’t believe that one is needed but appears to be trying to move things forward, said that they could live with one of those proposed by the FG’s team, former Judge Raymond Dearie, a Reagan era appointee, who has FISA court experience, while rejecting the other a prominent politically connected Florida lawyer, Paul Huck.  As to Judge Cannon, she still needs to rule on the DOJ and FG team responses.  Worth noting, the FG unsuccessfully tried to get Cannon appointed to one of his cases once before, the one where he sued Hillary Clinton and a gaggle of other Democrats alleging that they tried to rig the 2016 presidential election with the Russia scandal.  Last week, the judge who ended up overseeing that case threw it out, issuing a scathing opinion where he slammed the FG for “seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him,” and those were the judge’s kinder words.

Book Reports:  As to books, two notable ones are out or on the verge of coming out.  Remember Geoffrey Berman, appointed by the FG, he served as the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York until he was fired late in the administration for refusing to do some of those nefarious things that then Attorney General William Barr wanted him to do.  Berman reports in his book, Holding The Line, that he was asked to prosecute a number of high powered Democrats, including John Kerry as payback for the prosecutions of FG’s allies like Republican Congressman Chris Collins and his one-time lawyer/protege now enemy Michael Cohen.  Berman said that he was limited by ethics rules from going public sooner, that he’d had his book vetted by the DOJ before he could have it published and that he’s relieved to be getting his story out now.  He’s also very pleased that the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to look into his assertions because he wants it known just how much the FG’s administration, including Barr who appears to be trying to white wash his reputation these days by calling out the FG’s document stealing,  tried to inappropriately meddle into affairs where they had no business doing so. The other book due out in early October is Confidence Man by FG whisperer Maggie Haberman, who always seems to know more than she should which she then mostly sits on until it most benefits her and her employers, reveals that the FG early on made it clear that he was aware that he’d lost the election but that as 2020 turned to 2021 and Joe Biden’s inauguration approached, he went into full denial mode, telling his aides that "I'm just not going to leave….We're never leaving….How can you leave when you won an election.” 

Mediacracy:  Something’s up at CNN where new management under CEO Chris Licht appear to be trying to turn itself into Fox light in an effort to goose sagging ratings. Brian Stelter who covered media with his program Reliable Sources is out as is veteran White House reporter John Harwood.  Stelter was frequently over the top but his program was also often worth watching and Harwood was one of those willing to call out crazy when he saw it.  The skinny is that both were apparently too critical of the Republican party’s rightward shift and related antics for the new management team.  Those who remain seem a bit nervous these days about their job security, how else to explain Jake Tapper saying it would be “clever” for President Biden to invite the FG to ride along with him on Air Force One to Queen Elizabeth’s funeral or morning host Brianna Keilar’s over the top criticism of the fact that there were Marines standing behind Biden during his Philadelphia speech, a common president thing.  That’s the speech where Biden called out MAGA’s as neo fascists.  Though Tapper is probably safe, he’s too good at bending with the prevailing wind to be in jeopardy, keep an eye on both Keilar who seems to be flailing as well as the outspoken Jim Acosta who has no filter.

Primarily Yours:  It’s hard to believe it but today is another primary day, the last for this season.  Elections are being held in New Hampshire, Delaware and Rhode Island.  In New Hampshire Republicans are choosing between a right wing election denier Don Bolduc and the more usual conservative Chuck Morse to see who will get to challenge Democratic incumbent Senator Maggie Hassan.  Mitch McConnell and his team view Hassan, who squeaked through her last election, as vulnerable enough to give them a chance for a seat pick up unless of course Bolduc ends up being their candidate, than she becomes less vulnerable while his chances of returning to Senate Leadership dwindle.