Queen For a Day 🌻 🌻 🌻

The Supremes:  Say goodbye to affirmative action as we’ve known it.  Yesterday, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court’s Conservatives did what had been widely expected, they rang its death knell.  Ironically one of affirmative action’s most vociferous and long-term opponents is Ginni’s husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote a lengthy and vituperative concurring opinion. Ironic because Thomas was admitted to both the College of the Holy Cross, and Yale law school as part of their efforts to raise minority enrollment but nevertheless he holds the “taint” of that preferential treatment responsible for his inability to land any of the law firm positions he sought upon law school graduation.  The dearly departed notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a similarly difficult time obtaining suitable employment when she graduated but she saw that for what it was, discrimination.  Her experience inspired her to work harder to right wrongs and level the playing field while Thomas’ experience turned him from being a civil rights advocate to becoming a conservative and the darling of the right which fast tracked him to the Court. The Court’s conservatives have a point in that affirmative action as we knew it until yesterday’s ruling was an imperfect vehicle for leveling the field, but it was better than doing nothing, and as the Wall Street Journal noted this morning, better at raising minority enrollment than the alternative strategies now being used in States like California and Michigan where legislators had jumped the gun in putting the kibosh on traditional affirmative action policies. Notably and not surprisingly, the SCOTUS conservatives don’t have an issue with legacy admissions also known as affirmative action for white, rich kids, and is also okay with affirmative action being used for US military academy admissions because maybe giving minorities a leg up to fight for all of us even if that means dying in battle is okay? To summarize, this Court does what it wants, stare decisis be damned. As President Biden put it in an interview with MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace yesterday, this is not a normal court.  Later this morning we should learn more about just how abnormal SCOTUS is when the Court releases its opinion in the 303 Creative LLC vs Elenis case.  That case concerns a website designer who doesn’t want to be “forced” to design wedding websites for same sex couples. It’s a particularly odd case because the website designer doesn’t design wedding websites, she’s just thinking about expanding her business and wants the Court to preemptively rule that she won’t have to do business with same sex couples.  The case also mentions a call the designer says she once received from a man inquiring about her building a website for his same sex marriage, but it was reported this week that the referenced call may never have taken place or at the very least it was bogus.  SCOTUS is also expected to rule today on Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.  

 

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid:  Liz Cheney says that as a country we’ve got to stop electing stupid people to political office.  That’s great advice but for now at least we’ve got stupid, plenty of it so it shouldn’t be surprising that the former and maybe future Stupid-Guy-in-Chief’s legal woes continue to pile up, not that his supporters care.  It’s reported that both Rudy Giuliani and ex-campaign official Mike Roman have signed proffer agreements also known as Queen for a Day agreements, no not that kind of queen, with Special Counsel Jack Smith.  Roman was involved in the fake electors’ scheme and Rudy’s been involved in that and everything else. Also, it appears that the aide who was shown the Iran plan of attack at Mar a Lago and who is referred to in the text of the purloined documents indictment as “a representative of Trump’s political action committee” is Susie Wiles.  That’s significant because Wiles, a long time Florida political operative who is credited with turning the Sunshine State from purple to red and also represents some Chinese companies, is leading Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.  Wiles has met with Jack Smith’s team several times and though she’s team Trump all the way, it’s not clear that she’d lie for him. Assuming she didn’t claim memory loss or temporary blindness, she probably confirmed that the war plans were war plans rather than the blueprint for Trump’s next golf facility. One more thing, yesterday three Florida investors were arrested on insider trading charges related to the deal to take Trump’s media business, the company that owns Twitter wannabee platform Truth Social, public through the Digital World Acquisition Corporation SPAC.  More related indictments could be forthcoming..   

Happy Fourth of July 🎉🎉🎉     

Legitimate Person? 🌻 🌻 🌻

Supreme Surprise: Yesterday the Supreme Court actually did something both surprising and good. By a vote of 6 to 3 in the case of Moore v Harper, the Court rejected the independent state legislature theory, debunking the argument that state legislatures can set election rules with little oversight from state courts.  The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and supported by liberals Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson and conservatives Barrett and Kavanaugh although Kavanaugh wrote his own concurring opinion.  The specific question in front of the Court was whether the North Carolina Supreme Court had the power to strike down the Republican dominated state legislature’s extremely partisan gerrymandered congressional map for violating the North Carolina Constitution.  Relying on the now debunked “independent state legislature theory” Republican state legislators argued they could and that state courts could not stop them from gerrymandering or setting any other rules related to elections.  Initially the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled against the Republican legislators but then after an election that changed the make-up of the State Supreme Court, tilting it ruby red, the newly constituted State Supreme Court went with a do over, changing its opinion, giving the legislators final say.  Notably Trump’s kraken legal team, led by John Eastman who is now facing a disciplinary hearing in California over his legal shenanigans, had invoked the independent state legislature theory to argue that state legislators, particularly those in swingy states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia could override the results of the 2020 election to throw out Biden’s victory over Trump, a strategy that some in Republican leadership hoped to employ again in 2024.  Many thought that as a result of the North Carolina Supreme Court’s final “do over” ruling, SCOTUS would punt, something that Justice Clarence Thomas whose wife Ginni is all in on allowing state legislatures to void inconvenient vote results says they should have done so the fact that SCOTUS stepped up to issue an opinion was almost as surprising as the opinion they issued.  Chief Justice Roberts who authored the Shelby County v Holder opinion that dismantled large parts of the Voting Rights Acts may or may not be having a come to Jesus moment and  may be trying for a bit of a mulligan but whatever his motivations, the Moore ruling combined with recent rulings against racial gerrymandering in Alabama and Louisiana will make it more difficult for Republicans to manipulate the outcomes of future elections and may even make it more likely that Democrats, who are likely to pick up a few seats in states like Alabama and Louisiana and a few other states that are now “fixing” their gerrymandered districts, will retake the House. As to that House, things there continue to go downhill.  Fearful of losing his Speaker perch Kevin McCarthy is now supporting efforts by his wackadoodle caucus to expunge Trump’s two impeachments.  Kevin is also trying to expunge from Trump’s memory the comment he made yesterday about Trump maybe not being the best Republican candidate for 2024. The way things are going Kevin could end up banished to Belarus, sharing a condo or maybe a cell with the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin.    

Lordy, There are Tapes:  Well,  we knew from the text of his indictment that Special Counsel Jack Smith had at least one tape of Trump implicating himself but now via post-Licht CNN we’ve all heard it and yes Trump really did implicate himself.  The tape in question involves a conversation that Trump had at his Bedminster, New Jersey club with former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ ghost writers.  While ordering Cokes for everyone, Trump is heard casually referencing Iran war plans prepared for him by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milly to “prove” that it was the warmongering Milly rather than he who wanted to bomb Iran into smithereens. On the call, the sounds of some giggling while he shares, or in legal parlance disseminates, the war plans can be heard.  The current charges against Trump do not include dissemination of top-secret documents possibly because the actual disseminating took place in New Jersey rather than in Florida so Trump’s lawyers could try to exclude the tape but should they try, Special Counsel Jack could one up them by indicting Trump in New Jersey so jurors, to the extent the case ever moves that far forward, will likely hear the tape and learn about the war plan sharing.  As to those Iran war plans, it’s not clear whether Jack’s team actually has them because they aren’t referred to in the list of documents included with the indictment though some have pointed out that even if Jack has them, he might not want to share them with a jury or anyone else because after all they are super-secret war plans. For his part Trump insists his conversation with the ghost writers was perfect, that he was only pretending to share war plans as an act of “bravado” and that all he was waving in the air were plans for his next real estate project, maybe that lucrative “conflict of interest” one in Oman. He also insists that he’s a “legitimate person,” and apparently a large percentage of Republicans agree because he keeps rising in GOP polls and they would never vote for someone illegitimate.  Right?  And to be fair, Republicans aren’t the only ones attracted to crazy.  RFK Jr whose campaign manager Dennis Kucinich can’t name a single vaccine that he supports, is polling in the double digits among Democrats even though his positions on most issues mirror those of Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. That’s the RFK Jr who recently posted a video of himself on Musk’s Twitter shirtless doing pushups to prove his fitness for the presidency. Maybe he’s gearing up to fight the winner of the cage battle between Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, to the extent that ever happens.  Getting back to Trump and his legal woes,  Judge Aileen Cannon has issued a few rulings that could affect scheduling and the sharing of witness names, but legal guru Andrew Weissmann of Mueller era fame says don’t worry, despite concerns over Cannon’s jurisprudence her recent rulings aren’t out of line. Worth noting one delay has to do with Trump co-conspirator Nauta who still can’t find a Florida attorney willing to represent him. Anyone out there interested?  Also, because with Trump and his legal woes there’s always an also, things continue to percolate on the January 6^th front where the focus appears to have moved to the fake delegate drama raising hopes that Special Jack could be getting ready to leapfrog Fulton County’s Fani Willis who still plans to announce her indictments sometime in early August.

Red Alert:  Former Texas Congressman Will Hurd is running for President.  Hurd, a former CIA clandestine operator and occasional Trump critic, who is considered a moderate by Republican standards, is another one who stands little to no chance of winning the presidential nomination but to paraphrase Tina Turner, what’s winning got to do with it? Though he hasn’t announced. Florida Senator/former Governor Rick Scott’s name is also being bandied about. There are suggestions that Scott, best known for his company’s Medicaid and Medicare fraud, the ones that resulted in 14 felony convictions and the payment of $1.7 billion in fines back when he was in the private sector, may be doing Trump a favor by helping him knock off that other Floridian, current Governor Ron DeSantis whose culture war edicts aren’t faring well in the courts.             

 

And Just Like That 🌻 🌻 🌻

Well, That Was Weird:  On Friday, while most of us here in the east were complaining about the weather, Vladimir Putin’s favorite hotdog vendor, renaissance man Yevgeny Prigozhin went coup level rogue. In addition to his catering skills, Prigozhin is, or at least was until this weekend,  the head of the private mercenary Wagner Group as well the Internet Research Agency, the trolls who were responsible for spreading misinformation during the 2016 presidential election. As head of Wagner Group, Prigozhin controlled anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 mercenaries, many of whom were recruited from Russia’s prisons. Known for their war crime level brutality and efficiency in war, Wagner Group fighters have outperformed the regular Russian military in Ukraine something that Prigozhin regularly pointed out to the chagrin of Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, who he held responsible for intentionally putting Wagner soldiers at risk either out of a combination of incompetence and corruption or as part of game of lethal one-upmanship. Either because of his frustration with Russia’s military or because Shoigu and his team were taking actions that would have put most, if not all, of Wagner’s soldiers under their control, Prigozhin and a large group of his Wagner soldiers started marching to Moscow, either to overthrow Putin or to push him to shake up his military leadership or both. Then just as it seemed that Prigozhin might actually make it to Putin’s doorstep, a “deal” was brokered by dictator next door, Putin BFF, Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko.  The deal, to the extent it’s for real, involves Prigozhin and presumably some of the billions in gold and other valuables that he accumulated/confiscated while fighting on behalf of Russia in Africa moving to Belarus to either spend the rest of his life luxuriating at a spa, plotting another run at Putin or drinking Novichok laced tea while falling out of a first-floor window. Though the coup attempt was a surprise to most of us who were conflicted over whether to root for a Stalin wannabee over a Hitler wannabee, it turns out that US officials knew Prigozhin was up to something, which probably means that Putin was on to him as well because some of our intelligence sources probably work for Putin. It’s not clear what happens next but the general view of most of the many so-called experts and pundits who shared their views this weekend is that Putin’s hold on his government is growing increasingly precarious.  No one in the west, with the possible exception of Trump and his cronies, think that Putin losing out is a bad thing, though everyone is concerned about who will supplant him if he is dethroned because of nukes. As to the war in Ukraine, presumably some of the Wagner fighters will continue to fight alongside their Russian comrades but it’s not clear how many of them will nor is it clear how effective they will be under Russian military leadership.  That said, despite the coup attempt Russian forces with or without the help of the Wagner mercenaries didn’t miss a beat this weekend, they continued to bomb targets throughout Ukraine so at least for now the war goes on.

Which B-tch is Witch:  Back at home, despite his legal problems Trump’s chances of sweeping the Republican primaries continue to rise if all the polls are to be believed.  Two of his most diehard fans, Lauren “Bobo” Boebert and Margie Q are still verbally duking it out, fighting over which b-tch (their word, not mine) gets to impeach President Biden first.  Speaker Kevin, always one to strike a deal, sidestepped an immediate vote on impeaching Biden, instead holding a vote that sent a resolution to start the impeachment process to both the House Homeland and Judiciary Committees.  Kevin may think that impeachment would be fun but though his whole caucus voted to advance the impeachment process he doesn’t have enough votes to actually impeach Biden, yet, because there are about five Republicans who can still think straight and another ten or so purple district ones who fear that voting to impeach Biden might alienate enough of their constituents to lose them their seats. One of those swing district Republicans, George of many names Santos finally released the names of the two individuals who paid his bail bond and oddly enough he was being truthful when he said that they were family members. One is his father Gercino dos Santos and the other is his Aunt Elma Preven.  Odd because, at least so far no one has explained how the two who have only modest financial resources came up with the required $500,000 and also because though we’ve heard much about Santos’ mother and the various ways that she died, we hadn’t heard much about his father until now. On the subject of impeachment, Bobo and Margie Q’s rationale has something to do with Biden’s handling of “illegal immigration” so it’s particularly inconvenient that on Friday the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Biden policy that sets guidelines for whom immigration authorities can target for arrest and deportation, prioritizing the deportation of those who present the biggest threat to US security over the countless others just seeking refuge. Worth noting that last week newly released census data indicated that due largely to declining birth rates the median age of the US population is now 38.9 years, it was 35 in 2000 and 30 in 1980.  A rational immigration problem would help solve the aging problem a lot more effectively than demonizing immigrants and trying to raise birth rates by abolishing abortion and restricting access to birth control.  #JustSaying  

Legal Morass:  Special Counsel/triathlete Jack Smith is seeking to delay the start of Trump’s willful retention of documents/obstruction case to mid-December to give both sides more time to do the things they need to do. The August date previously set by Judge Aileen “loose” Cannon was just a place saver, Smith wants the December date to be a hard and fast one.  There are also reports that that the multi-tasking Smith has compelled at least two Republican fake electors to testify to his Washington DC grand jury by giving them limited immunity.

Happy Monday.       

 

Seriously 🌻 🌻 🌻

Retribution: Borrowing from Succession’s Logan Roy or more accurately the show’s writers, House Republicans are not serious people. Petty and into retribution, definitely, but serious, hardly.  Yesterday the Gym Jordan chaired House Judiciary Committee held a hearing featuring John Durham and his report.  Durham is the Special Counsel who was appointed by then AG Bill Barr to prove that the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election was an anti-Trump witch hunt except that he couldn’t because as he admitted yesterday during questioning by several Democratic members of the committee including Representatives Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff the Russians really did meddle in the 2106 election and that meddling included outreach to various receptive Trump family and team members. You’d think that instead of hosting Durham, Jordan and company would want to vanquish his name to the wastebin of history, but nope. Then, later in the day, House Republicans held a vote to censure California Democrat Adam Schiff, retribution for his role in Trump’s first impeachment. They had previously tried to censure Schiff but their first attempt, initiated by Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna, failed because it included a $16 million fine, a penalty that a handful of Republicans thought was a step too far even for them. Luna, an ardent Trumpist and a member of Matt Gaetz’s insurrection caucus, is another one who lied about her credentials and family history ala George Santos. Like George, despite her claims she doesn’t have Jewish ancestry, though her grandfather was a Nazi.  After Luna’s first censure resolution went down in flames, Trump threatened to primary all of those who voted against it which eased the passage on the second go round. For the record, Adam Schiff doesn’t seem to care, his Democratic colleagues have his back, the censure won’t shut him up but will probably boost his chances of winning the Democratic nomination to run for the California Senate seat being vacated by Dianne Feinstein. The Durham hearing and Schiff censure weren’t enough stupid for one day so last night Colorado’s gun toting high school dropout Lauren Boebert introduced articles of impeachment against President Biden, something to do with his failure to handle the Mexican border crisis. Worth mentioning, border crossings are down but facts aren’t really an issue here.  Naturally, Margie Q who got into a shouting match with Boebert on the House floor last night, is upset, not about the effort to impeach Biden, but because Boebert beat her to the punch.  Apparently, Kevin McCarthy isn’t happy either, he doesn’t mind the whole impeachment thing but doesn’t believe the timing is right or so he says.  As to the not Jew ish George Santos, later today the names of those who provided the bond that has been keeping him out of jail are due to be released unless of course George releases them from their obligation, instead and goes to jail as he said he would if he was forced to come clean. Not that he would lie about that, right? .

Guns and Taxes: One of the many, many things feeding Republican fury right now is that Hunter Biden, another one who Logan Roy would describe as a not serious person won’t be going to jail unless of course he falls back down the addiction rabbit hole and does some more stupid stuff.  Hunter who failed to file his taxes for a few years back when he was binging on cocaine and whatever else he was into at the time, has agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of failing to pay federal income taxes for 2017 and 2018 but will avoid full prosecution on a separate charge of lying about his drug use when purchasing a gun that he had in his possession for eleven days before his girlfriend at the time got rid of it because while she had questionable taste in men she knew that guns and drugs were a bad combo.  Hunter has since made good on the money he owed the IRS. Depending on where you stand on the political divide, Hunter either got off easy or was treated too harshly which probably means that he was treated fairly. Putting aside how Hunter was treated the rest of us got screwed because the investigation into all things Hunter which was overseen by Trump appointed US Attorney for Delaware David Weiss who was held over just to complete the task took five years and the resolution was the same as what Biden’s lawyers offered up at the beginning. The money spent on the Hunter investigation, like that spent on Durham should have been spent elsewhere or not spent at all.  Naturally, Gym Jordan, James Comer and the rest of their crowd aren’t done with Hunter.  They plan to keep on investigating his laptop, the $30 million faux bribe and whatever else because of course they will.

 

Legal Morass: On the Trump front, the mango maniac has slipped a bit in the Republican polls with just a few of his points moving to candidates not named DeSantis.  Also, the general agreement is that his interview with Fox’s Brett Bair was a disaster. Baier was prepared, asked tough questions, and pushed back against most of Trump’s lies, doing what journalists are supposed to do but what we’ve increasingly grown used to them not doing especially on Fox where softball interviews have become the norm.  No doubt Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team enjoyed the show because Trump admitted to taking all those boxes with secret, classified documents and war plans, and according to him, golf clothing with him to Mar a Lago while also saying that he ignored the subpoenas to return the purloined documents because he was too busy golfing, doing his combover and applying orange make up to comply.  To the extent Trump’s lawyers aren’t tripping over each other in an effort to get to the exit, they are probably pretty busy right now working on delay tactics because Judge Eileen “loose” Cannon has set a hearing date of August 14 for the beginning of his trial and because Jack Smith and his team have already started sharing discovery material including the names of the witnesses they plan to call. Don’t count on the August date being real, it will likely be pushed back.  Judge Cannon plans to hold the first hearing in Fort Pierce Florida, in a courthouse that suits her but that lacks adequate space and security so that location could also change.  August could be a busy month for Trump because despite NY AG Letitia James statement that all other cases against him would be put on hold to make way for Special Counsel Jack,  Fulton County’s Fani Willis says she’s not changing her schedule for anyone.  Jack and Fani are what Logan would call serious people.

Fishing:  Another day, another paid for SCOTUS junket.  The team at ProPublica have uncovered another Supreme Court Justice boondoggle. This time the Justice in question is Samuel Alito rather than Clarence Thomas.  Apparently Justice Alito failed to disclose that in 2008 shortly after being confirmed to the Court, he flew free to Alaska on a private jet owned by Hedge Fund billionaire Paul Singer and then spent some quality time fishing for salmon with Singer and the Federalist Society’s Judge picker Leonard Leo.   Instead of responding to questions about the trip, Alito front ran the ProPublica article with a WSJ op-ed of his own in which he defended his failure to include anything about the funding of the trip on his disclosure statements and rejected any assertion that he should have recused from any of the several cases that Paul Singer has since had before the Court.  The WSJ followed up with an Editorial Board opinion attacking ProPublica for engaging in “court thinning” by pushing for Conservative Justices like Alito and Thomas to recuse when they accept extravagant gifts from those with cases in front of the court.  Worth noting, Justice Kagan once refused a congratulatory gift of bagels and lox from some Hunter High School classmates so as not to violate ethics rules but expecting the conservative Justices to come clean about free flights and more, that’s a step too far for the WSJ Editorial Board.           

  

Loser, Loser, Loser  🌻 🌻 🌻

Happy Belated Juneteenth:  Another weekend, more of the same.  A slew of former Trump team members including former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, National Security Advisor John Bolton, former NJ Governor Chris Christie, Chief of Staff John Kelly and AG Bill Barr took to the talk show circuit to slam him. Bolton said that he didn’t need to read the federal indictment to believe it was spot on because he witnessed first-hand Trump’s disturbing pattern of collecting, sharing and not always returning classified material. Barr, hardly a paragon of ethical behavior, called Trump a consummate narcissist and a flawed person like a “defiant 9-year-old who is always pushing the glass towards the edge of the table” while adding that we “can’t be a therapy session for a troubled man like this.” Esper called him a “security threat,” John Kelly observed that he is acting like he’s “scared sh-tless” and Christie called him a “loser, loser, loser“ and a petulant child” who could finally be in real legal trouble.  Trump who sat for an interview with Fox’s Brett Baier yesterday slammed all of his former “best people” as incompetent fools with small brains while also taking a few jabs at Fox for not being his biggest fan anymore. Naturally, he stuck with his claim that he’d won the 2020 election while also saying in that sickening sweet voice he uses while telling obvious lies that the document he waved during a book interview at his Bedminster club wasn’t really the Iran war plan that he asserted it was at the time but was instead some other crinkly sounding paper that he’d plucked from one of his beautiful boxes.  Nevertheless, Trump is still leading all his party’s competitors in the polls because apparently Republican voters think defiant, petulant 9-year-olds should have access to the nuclear codes? 

Legal Morass: While Judge Aileen Cannon is still on the purloined documents case and probably will remain in that role, Magistrate Judge Reinhart is still ruling on some administrative issues. Like the judge overseeing the NY “hush money case” Reinhart ruled over the weekend that Trump can view but not retain any of the evidentiary material.  In addition, he is prohibited from discussing their contents with anyone outside of his legal team, a condition he’s likely to violate because of that petulant child thing.  In response to concerns that trying the case in Florida could make it harder to get a conviction despite all the convincing evidence given that the Florida jury pool, particularly in the Miami area, skews Trumpy, legal eagles Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman believe that Special Counsel Jack Smith may have intentionally omitted one or more serious charges related to document dissemination from the Florida indictment, reserving those charges, for things like sharing war plans and the like, for a subsequent indictment, one in New Jersey where the alleged sharing allegedly took place and where the jury pool and maybe even the judge would be friendlier or at least fairer. Other’s think that approach would be too cute for prosecutor Jack Smith but then again who knows?  As to the other case looming over Trump’s case, the one related to the insurrection, the Washington Post went with a someone explosive story this weekend.  In it FBI whisperer Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis, cite lots of sources who assert that officials at the DOJ and FBI including AG Merrick Garland, Deputy AG Lisa Monaco and FBI Director Chris Wray “rejected” or “rebuffed” early efforts to investigate Trump’s and his closest allies’ insurrectionist actions, attributing their wariness to concerns about appearing too partisan that were further complicated by delays in the confirmation of DOJ officials as well as pushback from senior members of the FBI.  The concern now is that by getting started so late, the DOJ has run out of time to effectively prosecute Trump and his cronies before the election gets in the way. Ironically that reluctance, which was finally overcome largely because of all the evidence uncovered by Congress’ January 6^th investigation, hasn’t stopped Republicans, particularly Gym Jordan and his weaponization committee and the likes of Margie Q and her crowd from accusing Garland and Wray of selectively going after Trump while ignoring all those “crimes” committed by the Biden Crime family, Hillary and even Obama.  As to the Biden Crime Family, Oversight Chair James Comer has upped his accusations. He still has no credible evidence but now instead of asserting that as VP Joe Biden received $5 million in bribes from Burisma, Comer’s going with $30 million. Son Hunter is no angel, but no one including Comer or Senators Chuck Grassley or Ron Johnson has proof of Joe accepting any such bribes, but that isn’t stopping the accusations and don’t be surprised if the number keeps growing because screaming bigly numbers is a good way to distract from real Trump’s real problems.

Politics As Usual:  The debt ceiling is lifted but Speaker McCarthy’s problems aren’t going anywhere.  His insurrectionist wing, a group of eleven including Matt Gaetz and Chip Roy among others, is threatening to hold up the passage of any and all budgets.  That could mean a government shutdown come September.  Having lost the debt ceiling battle, the eleven are now taking the position that the funding levels that McCarthy negotiated with Biden are upper limits rather than agreed to funding levels.  In other words, they are still trying to impose drastic budget cuts on social programs, the DOJ, the IRS and the FBI. And just to be fair, Republicans aren’t the only ones acting cranky and crazy.  The No Labels crowd who has positioned themselves as centrists but who receive the lion share of their funding from right leaning billionaires are still talking about backing a third party candidate for president.  Harlan Crow, Justice Clarence Thomas’ benefactor, is one of No Labels contributors which should tell you all you need to know about the party’s motivations. The No Labels crowd now says that they’ll back off if Trump isn’t the Republican candidate which is telling in and of itself because if Trump is the Republican candidate, a No Labels candidate would likely siphon off more Democratic votes than Republican ones, after all, Jill Stein and Ralph Nader helped Trump and GW Bush, but if Trump’s not in the race, the Republican candidate will likely be someone even more right leaning like DeSantis or Pence. If No Labels really believes that there is a viable path for a centrist candidate, they should find those other Republican options just as untenable but oddly enough, they don’t. Moving from the No Labels crowd to purported Democratic challenger RFK Jr, he’s another one with questionable support as one of his advisors is Steve Bannon and another one of his ardent fans is Alex Jones. Joe Rogan hosted RFK for a sit down on his Spotify podcast where the two bonded over their shared opposition to vaccines and spouted lots of vaccine misinformation.  As a result of calling out that misinformation, Dr. Peter Hotez, a renowned vaccine scientist who was nominated for a Nobel Prize for creating a patent free COVID vaccine that has been widely used in third world countries is being harassed and stalked even more than usual amidst demands that he debate RFK on Rogan. To be clear, Dr. Hotez is a Professor of pediatrics, molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine.  RFK Jr is mostly famous because of his name and Rogan became famous for hosting a program where people ate bugs yet Hotez, who isn’t in medicine for the money which is why he did not patent his low-cost vaccine, is being stalked and harassed by a whole bunch of people including Elon Musk.  There will not be a debate because you can’t debate stupid but sadly stupid is what we’ve got to deal with not just with regard to vaccines but also with regard to book banning and an assortment of other culture war issues.  A few rays of light on that front though as a federal judge in Tennessee has ruled that a state law limiting public drag show performances represents an unconstitutional restriction on the freedom of speech and another federal judge has stopped an Indiana ban on most gender affirming care for transgender minors limiting the ban to surgery which is rarely done anyway.

 

Beautiful Mind 🌻 🌻 🌻

Hoarders: This season’s Hoarders is wild and the good news is that it’s available almost everywhere.  It stars Donald J Trump, a Queens man with lots and lots of boxes.  According to the NY Times’ Trump whisperer, Maggie Haberman, Trump has a strange attachment to boxes, especially the ones he stored all over Mar a Lago where he keeps or at least once kept highly confidential war plans and information about nuclear capabilities of various countries alongside his favorite orange make-up, news clippings and letters from pen pals like Kim Jong un. His attachment to boxes is so strong that he even travels with some of them, presumably the ones with the most valuable information. Knowing how important those boxes are to him his aides called them the “beautiful mind material,” a reference to the movie about schizophrenic mathematician John F. Nash Jr.  Texts about Trump’s obsession with his boxes and how he micromanaged their contents and where they were stored are part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s thirty-seven count “talking” indictment. Some of the cited texts were written by Molly Michael, a White House assistant who continued working with Trump after he moved back to Mar a Lago.  Michael, identified in the indictment as Trump Employee 2, told the Grand Jury that Trump packed and looked through the boxes himself, an assertion that contradicts those provided by his lawyers. She is no longer working for Trump as she, unlike indicted co-defendant/body man Walt Nauta, doesn’t like how she looks in orange and/or knows a sinking ship when she sees one. The Washington Post reports that in an effort to right that ship, not long after he joined the Trump legal team in the fall of 2022, former Florida Solicitor General/Current Trump defense counsel Christopher Kise, proposed quietly approaching Attorney General Merrick Garland to negotiate a settlement, one that would avoid prosecution in exchange for hoarder in chief Trump returning the contents of his beautiful mind boxes.  Trump nixed that suggestion, opting instead to rely on the advice of Tom Fitton, the president of very conservative/right wing activist organization Judicial Watch.  Fitton has a BA in English from George Washington University but has never gone to law school. Of course, that lack of legitimate legal credentials hasn’t stopped him from providing legal advice. Based on his faulty analysis of the Bill Clinton’s sock drawer case, Fitton advised Trump that he was entitled to everything in his boxes.  The sock drawer analogy doesn’t apply, it involves a 2012 decision where the court concluded that former President Clinton was entitled to keep his “purely private” audio tapes of interviews with a historian, tapes stored in his sock drawer, as those tapes qualified as personal records; they were his personal thoughts rather than presidential memos or things like nuclear codes and war plans. By the way, applying his astute legal analysis, Fitton also advised Trump that he could stop the counting of ballots at midnight on Election Day especially all those absentee ballots from blue districts. Maybe Fitton should start playing shrink and advise Trump to plead hoarder syndrome insanity?  On the subject of unusual legal minds, though she doesn’t have much experience, Judge Aileen Cannon has done something right.  Yesterday, she ordered Trump and Nauta’s lawyers to quickly apply for security clearances.  That’s good but it not clear that Nauta has obtained a Florida lawyer yet.      

Red Politics:  The Republicans have another presidential candidate.  Francis Suarez, Miami’s Republican Mayor, has thrown his hat into the ever-expanding ring. Suarez who is only 45 years old,  previously admitted that he didn’t vote for Trump in either 2016 or 2020 but has warmed up to him as of late because of course.  He is probably another one of those seeking to elevate his visibility in the hopes of being considered as someone else’s running mate and/or as a candidate in 2028.  The Republicans have made significant inroads with Latin American voters and having Suarez on the ticket could further grow the party’s Hispanic support so there’s a real chance that someone might seriously consider adding Suarez to their ticket.  Hopefully, if Suarez offered to pay for everyone’s lunch at a Cuban restaurant, he, unlike Trump would really cough up the dinero.  It turns out that Trump’s visit to Miami’s Little Havana hot spot Versailles Restaurant, the one that just about every media outlet covered, was nothing more than a publicity stunt. Trump only stayed for ten minutes, didn’t eat, and didn’t foot the bill for anyone who did. Unlike Suarez, Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson is not warming up to Trump and has asked the RNC to reconsider the requirement that all candidates appearing on the Republican primary debate stage sign a pledge committing to support the eventual winner of the GOP nomination.  Hutchinson wants that pledge amended to exclude felons. No surprise that the RNC won’t make that change.  Worth noting former NJ Governor Chris Christie says he’ll sign if that’s what it takes to get onto the debate stage, he figures he can renege later because he knows that Trump, to the extent he does agree to debate, would also likely renege if someone other than him gets the party’s nod. 

A Situation:  During her Wednesday daily press conference, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that there were probably “about 787 million things” that she could say about Fox News’ Tuesday night chyron that referred to Biden as a wannabee dictator, but that instead she wasn’t “going to get into it.”  Well, management at Fox did get into it. First, they responded to inquiries about the chyron by saying that they had it taken down as soon as it came to their attention, adding that they were dealing with “the situation.”  This morning it was reported they have fired Alexander McCaskill, the news producer responsible for the chyron. McCaskill, who previously worked on Tucker Carlson’s show, was a twelve-year Fox veteran.  He is one of those named in a toxic work environment lawsuit by a former colleague.  As to Tucker, he and Fox are still duking it out with Fox’s lawyers sending him a cease-and-desist letter in an attempt to get him to halt his new Twitter series.     

   

Queens Man Arraigned  🌻 🌻 🌻

Miami Vice:  Yesterday the man from Queens was arraigned in a Miami courthouse. He was represented by two lawyers, Todd Blanche the former federal prosecutor representing him in the NY “hush money” case and Christopher Kise, a former Florida solicitor general who, despite being paid $3 million upfront to join the Trump legal squad, had previously tried to extricate himself from the purloined documents case. Kise reluctantly agreed to step up to fill the Florida attorney role when Trump couldn’t find another competent local attorney willing to do so.  Trump’s co-conspirator, Walt Nauta, joined Trump in Miami where he was fingerprinted and photographed but wasn’t formally arraigned because unlike Trump Nauta still doesn’t have a Florida attorney, convenient because Trump’s trial clock won’t start ticking until Nauta is formally arraigned. The case against Trump and Nauta is strong, probably even stronger with more witnesses and evidence than has been revealed so far, so instead of disputing the facts, their lawyers are expected to go after the way the key evidence were obtained, arguing that the prosecutors shouldn’t have been granted the crime fraud exemption that allowed them to pierce attorney client privilege, an argument that former Trump lawyer Tim Palatore previewed on MSNBC yesterday.  While Trump’s lawyers file countless stalling motions, giving Judge Eileen “loose” Cannon should she still be so inclined, plenty of opportunities to rule in his favor, Trump’s plan is to do his usual thing, taking his case to the public.  To that end, yesterday following his court appearance he, with body man co-conspirator Nauta in tow, went for a celebratory lunch in a Miami Cuban restaurant before flying back to Bedminster.  Upon arrival in New Jersey, Trump delivered a rambling speech where he admitted he took all the documents in question with him when he left Washington, asserting that he could because as President it was his right to do so while going on to say that he was being unfairly treated because of all that witch hunt stuff and besides why weren’t Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden who he will immediately have prosecuted for his horrible crimes as soon as he makes it back to his rightful perch in the Oval office and anyway all those scenes of documents popping out of boxes were staged by the complicit FBI.  While Trump was spouting lies, Fox news displayed a split screen showing the real POTUS, Biden, with the all caps chyron: WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLTICAL RIVAL ARRESTED. So much for Fox moderating its behavior post its $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and so much for Rupert Murdoch’s decision to pivot away from Trump.  Clearly Fox has decided that the $787 million and any subsequent amount they may be required to pay Smartmatic is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money that can be made amping up viewership by stoking the flames of our democracy.   

Houses of Cards:  Despite Trump’s call for masses of “peaceful” protestors to show up in Miami, only a few hundred protestors showed up to cheer him on at the courthouse. However, his supporters in Congress remained out in force.  Speaking for most of his caucus, Kevin McCarthy whose problems wrangling his cats are only getting worse, said it was okay that Trump kept documents in a Mar a Lago bathroom because bathrooms have locks, so what if those locks are inside. Ohio’s hillbilly guy Senator JD Vance announced that he will block all of Biden’s nominees to the Department of Justice to protest the indictment, saying “Trump is merely the latest victim of a DOJ that cares more about politics than enforcement.” That’s the same DOJ that, in a closed-door meeting with big donors, Florida’s Ron DeSantis promised to shrink and refocus on important things like fighting woke liberal ideology.  Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was one of those cheering Trump on outside of the Miami courthouse, called on all of the other Republican presidential wannabees to join him in committing to pardon Trump if elected and though she had earlier acknowledged that the charges against Trump were to be taking seriously because absconding with war plans puts military personnel like her husband at risk, Nikki Haley said that she’d be inclined to grant that pardon.  One candidate who likely wouldn’t is Chris Christie who used his fairly impressive oratorial skills to eviscerate Trump on Monday night in one of those CNN townhalls.  Sadly, given CNN’s current viewership and Christie’s anemic support, few were watching. While most of the Republicans in the House, or at the very least most of those willing to go on the record are Team Trump, Senate Republicans with the exception of Trump’s biggest fans, a group that in addition to Vance includes Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Tommy Tuberville and Josh Hawley, are taking a wait and see approach.  By wait and see, they’re twisting their pearls, concerned about his crimes and all that sharing of secret war plans,  but will ultimately jump on the Trump train if he’s their party candidate.

More Legal Woes: Special Counsel Jack Smith quietly sat in on the Miami arraignment, staring down Trump and proving that he, unlike Trump who said that the only reason he had all those boxes in the Mar a Lago bathroom and ballroom was because he’d been too busy playing golf to unpack them, can multi-task. We know that triathlete Smith can multitask not just because of all his biking, swimming, and running but because his team in Washington is still calling witnesses to testify in front of the grand jury, the one tasked with investigating the January 6^th uprising.  Among those who testified on Tuesday about their fake elector roles were Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald, a close Trump ally, and Jim DeGraffenreid, the Nevada party vice chair.  And there’s a good chance that Trump’s decision to keep defaming E Jean Carroll could cost him more bucks, real ones as opposed to Trump bucks.  Yesterday Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan said that E Jean could revise an earlier defamation case she has against Trump, allowing her to seek an additional $10 million in damages.

 

Pluck You 🌻 🌻 🌻

Not So Trivial Pursuit:  Here’s one for the trivia files, this weekend’s hugely disruptive Interstate 95 collapse happened right near the turnoff to the Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the site of the infamous dye dripping Rudy Giuliani press conference. Maybe if Trump had really invested in infrastructure instead of just announcing countless ersatz infrastructure weeks before moving on to insisting that the 2020 election had been stolen, calling on his supporters to insurrect and taking boxes upon boxes of documents, including quiet a few chocked with secret memos, the highway would have been strong enough to withstand a truck fire, but we’ll never know. As to those boxes, on Friday a bearded, somber Special Counsel Jack Smith spoke briefly to the press after releasing the text of the charges against Trump.  The 37-count indictment reveals damning evidence about how Trump kept documents concerning nuclear programs, potential US and ally military vulnerabilities and plans for possible retaliation in the event of a foreign attack. Those documents, at least one of which was intended only to be seen by security cleared members of the Five Eyes intelligence coalition (the US, Canada, Australia, UK and New Zealand), were kept hoarder-like in unsecured locations throughout Mar a Lago, including beneath a tacky chandelier in a dated bathroom, on the stage of a ballroom where weddings and bar mitzvahs were held, in the wing where Trump lived and in one or more closets.  To state the obvious, none of those areas qualify as SCIFs but all were accessible to foreign agents at least one of whom may be his wife who maybe the person that co-indictee Walt Nauta referred to as Ma’am with a 😊, and some others who probably work as MAL waiters or on the club cleaning staff, as well as a plethora of nosy Mar a Lago guests or members who might have taken a document or two because why bother swiping matchbooks or embossed napkins when something “cooler” was easily pluckable? Speaking of plucking, that’s what Trump suggested that at least one of his lawyers do.  According to contemporaneous verbal and written notes taken by that lawyer, Evan Corcoran, Trump who is also heard on another tape saying that he knows that former presidents can’t declassify, wanted him to pluck the “secret” stuff out of the boxes before handing them over to the FBI. Corcoran who apparently paid attention in law school, knows criminal activity when he sees it, so he documented Trump’s actions to protect himself instead of following the Guiliani, Epshteyn, Eastman, etc. route.  When or if this tragic story ends, he’ll still have a law license, the others probably not. A few of Trump’s lawyers resigned over the weekend, so he’s in the market for new ones.  Any takers? The full indictment is worth a read or, if you’d rather, a listen.  A number of podcasts of the whole text including one by The Bulwark and another by MSNBC’s Ali Velshi are available.

Kayser Sose Time:  Naturally, the usual suspects are doing their thing.  Trump who, together with his co-indictee wingman du jour, chosen box shifter Walt Nauta, is due to appear in a Miami Federal court tomorrow spent the weekend promising retribution against anyone and everyone involved in the indictment, whined about Hillary having lawyers who were “willing” to destroy her 30,000 emails while his wouldn’t do the same for him and called for his followers and their like-minded friends to protest en masse, violently if necessary.  Among those supporters, Gym Jordan, the Head of the House Judiciary Committee who never passed the Ohio Bar exam, spouted intentional legal misinterpretations while tossing in Hilary accusations in his defense of Trump on the morning talk shows, while another Lindsey Graham, who as a former military lawyer knows better, appeared on the verge of implosion when George Stephanopoulos pushed his buttons.  Once again, whatever Trump has on Graham is more than just bigly bad.  Another one of Trump’s supporters, Arizona’s Kari Lake who still claims that she won the state’s governor race reminded everyone that she and many of Trump’s ardent fans are card carrying members of the NRA who know how to use their guns. Guns may not be necessary as the judge assigned to Trump and Nauta’s case is none other than Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee who either showed extreme fealty to Trump by her earlier rulings about “his” documents or is just really incompetent or, more likely, both.  Assuming she doesn’t recuse herself, and there’s no reason to think that she will, Cannon can throw a lot of impediments in front of Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors in the form of scheduling delays, evidence acceptability and other rulings. Curiously, the odds of Cannon getting this assignment were significant, given the small pool of judges in her district so her appointment, while unwelcome, probably didn’t come as a big surprise to Jack Smith. All eyes will be on Cannon, but she’s already shown that she doesn’t care about that. Only Trump will ever promote her up the judicial ladder and to do that he, who says he’ll keep running no matter what, needs to win reelection, she could be willing to bet on that. With the exception of Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie who called the indictment devastating Trump’s Republican opponents are defending him. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, unlike quisling House leader Kevin McCarthy has stayed largely quiet, because though he doesn’t say it out loud, he’d be much happier if Trump disappeared to parts unknown. McCarthy still needs Trump because he can’t manage his crowd without him and as it stands now won’t be able to pass the key farm bill, or any other government funding bills without help from on high.  And lastly, there’s Bill Barr, the Trump Attorney General who saved Trump’s presidency when he successfully misrepresented the conclusions of the Mueller Report.  He’s telling everyone who’ll listen that guilty as sin Trump is in bigly trouble.  Better late than never? Maybe.

Sure Jan:  George of many names Santos is still refusing to identify the person or persons who provided his bail. He who never speaks truth now claims he’s protecting members of his family.  To quote the Brady’s, “Sure Jan.”  Republican Mike Gallagher, a somewhat normal Republican Congressman from Wisconsin, has announced that he plans to stay put in the House and thus will not be challenging Wisconsin’s Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin who is up for reelection in 2024.  Gallagher who was McConnell’s best chance for retaking the Wisconsin seat sees the writing on the wall and doesn’t want to face being challenged from the right by a Trumpy candidate, nor does he want to run statewide with Trump leading the ticket.  And lastly, Ukraine has begun its counteroffensive against Russia.  The fog of war is so thick that it hard to tell how much progress Zelenskyy’s forces are making but they do appear to be making some.  That despite the fact that during his debut Twitter “show” Tucker Carlson, one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite mouth pieces, used anti-Semitic tropes calling Zelenskyy “rat like,” “shifty,”  and a “persecutor of Christians.”  Following Carlson’s debut Twit Musk called for others like Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon to move their shows to Twitter.  As if.  By the way, Fox is calling foul, not about Carlson’s hateful words but they claim he’s violating the terms of his contract.   

  

Seven 🌻 🌻 🌻

🥂 🥂 🥂 🥂 🥂 🥂 🥂 As you probably heard, Trump has been indicted in relation to the purloined documents he took to Mar a Lago rather than for the January 6^th insurrection where witnesses, including Steve Bannon, are still being called to testify in front of a Washington DC grand jury. According to Jim Trusty, one of his lawyers, Trump is facing seven charges, including a charge under the Espionage Act, charges of obstruction of justice, destruction or falsification of records, conspiracy, and false statements. Naturally, immediately after hearing from his lawyers Trump took to Truth Social so that he could be the first to share the news with the rest of us. He then posted a video where he ranted about being an innocent man, the victim of election interference and questioned why he, rather than Biden, Hunter, and Hillary, was the one being charged. And, yes, his abettors and some of his Republican competitors including Gym Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy weighed in, calling the charges further evidence of how Biden, the DOJ, and the Democrats are weaponizing government and destroying the country.  Trump who is currently summering at his Bedminster,  New Jersey club, his escape hatch from Florida summers, is due to fly to hot, humid, stormy Miami to appear in a Federal court room on Tuesday where he, his lawyers, and the rest of us, will learn more details about the charges. In case you are wondering about the Miami connection, the charges were brought there rather than Washington DC due to a venue issue because, though the documents were taken from Washington, Trump’s related obstruction, lying, and espionage violations took place in Florida.  Though DC courts are more familiar with purloined document cases and a jury selected from DC’s more left leaning pool might be more inclined to convict Trump than one from Florida, Smith didn’t want to run the risk that this case against Trump would be thrown out on a venue technicality. To the extent that Trump is eventually indicted for his insurrection related activities, he will be charged and tried in Washington DC.  The use of two distinct grand juries from different Federal districts isn’t unheard of, Paul Manafort, who Trump subsequently pardoned, was convicted in both DC and Virginia and the good news here is that the Miami federal court, like the Virginia one is known to be one of those fasting acting “rocket dockets.” Will Trump being indicted matter to his base?  Probably not so much though some Republican voters and even more independents might care especially if it turns out that Trump shared defense plans with the Saudis, the new owners of American golf, or other unsavory characters.  Clearly that’s what the growing list of his challengers, including recent addition North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum but not including New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu who says he’s not running, hope despite their, or at least some of their claims that he’s being treated so unfairly.    

Sweet Alabama:  Though the Trump indictments sucked the air from the news cycle, there was another bigly story yesterday.  By a vote of 5 to 4 in the Allen v Milligan case the Supreme Court struck down a Republican drawn congressional map in Alabama, ruling that the state had violated the Voting Rights Act by squishing as many of the state’s Black voters, who represent 27% of Alabama’s population, into one of the state’s seven districts rather than the two that would have been more appropriate.   Oddly enough the decision was written by Chief Justice Roberts who was also responsible for writing the opinion in the landmark Shelby case that dismantled large parts of the Voting Rights Act.  In another surprise, in addition to reliably liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and newbie Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Brett “beer” Kavanaugh joined the majority, although he did write a separate concurrence where he warned that the Voting Rights Act shouldn’t be allowed to last forever.  Kavanaugh who still votes mostly with the right, may be this court’s version of former Justice Anthony Kennedy because occasionally, but not too often, he joins with his more liberal colleagues. The Alabama decision is likely to have consequences outside of the state, at least that’s the hope of Democrats, because there are a few other districts in Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and even Florida that are as equally racially gerrymandered.  If those states are pushed to redraw their districts, the Democrats stand a better chance of winning the House back in 2024. Worth noting, SCOTUS could have and should have issued this ruling before the 2022 midterms but instead they punted until now, so they are kind of responsible for the House currently being led by the current crop of crazies. As to the House, the Republicans are about to lose a member.  Not George of many names Santos, he’s super glued himself to Kevin and won’t leave until he’s surgically excised.  The departing member is Utah’s Chris Stewart who announced that he’s leaving to spend more time with his ailing wife.  Stewart’s seat, unlike   Santos’ is reliably Republican but as a result of his departure it will remain empty until a new election can be held. That’s a problem for McCarthy whose insurrection faction is in full rebellion mode, which also explains why they’ll be allowed to act out all their impeachment and investigatory fantasies this summer.

Pain Sponge: Once again, a head of iceberg lettuce is the victor.  This time the leafy green beat out CNN’s now former CEO Chris Licht who has been unceremoniously fired.  Licht may be gone, but CNN’s problems still remain because though, as evidenced by the Trump townhall debacle and his way too revealing profile in The Atlantic, Licht lacked judgement and failed miserably at his job, he was essentially following the orders of his boss David Zaslav who is following the orders of the very conservative/libertarian billionaire John Malone.  Zaslav has appointed four new co-heads to temporarily run things at the network while he searches for his Tom Wambsgans.               

 

  

Indictment Watch ?! 🌻 🌻 🌻

Gas Stoves: After the debt ceiling vote, the pundit wrote glowing articles about how Kevin McCarthy was exceeding expectations .  Mostly ignoring that he needed Democratic help to even get the debt ceiling legislation to the House floor, the mainstream press crowed about how he had wrangled his disparate crowd of crazies into a lean mean voting machine.  Well, they got the mean part right.  Yesterday a dozen of them, all members of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus including the likes of Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Chip Roy and Andy Biggs, staged a protest, voting against legislation that they supported, a silly bill to protect gas stoves leaks and health risks be damned, to make the point to Kevin and the rest of Republican leadership that they’re really pissed that their slash and burn budget cuts were excluded from the final debt ceiling legislation. The good news for Kevin is that at least for now, his insurrection caucus is holding off on using their one vote right to knock him from his Speaker perch, the bad news is that they have figured out another way to throw the House into disarray.  The indicted George of many names Santos didn’t participate in the gas stove insurrection, but he did manage to get some press yesterday after a Long Island judge ruled against his request to keep the identities of the three people who guaranteed his $500,000 bail private. Lyin’ Santos who has until Friday to appeal the Judge’s decision says he’ll go to jail if that’s what it takes to keep those names private, as if. Santos in jail would be a problem for Kevin who needs every vote he can get if he ever hopes to protect those all-important gas stoves or do anything else. One vote Kevin doesn’t plan to take with or without the insurrection wing or Santos involves a supplemental budget to increase defense spending even though some of his colleagues in the Senate, most notably Lindsey Graham, were promised that the Defense Department would get more money if they voted for the debt ceiling legislation. Note to Lindsey, that’s not Biden and the Democrats reneging on a promise, that’s your crowd.  

Legal Woes:  For what it’s worth a number of legal pundits including former Attorney General Bill Barr expect that Trump will be indicted soon as a result of the efforts of Special Counsel Jack Smith.  Former Impeachment prosecutor Andrew Weissmann believes that an indictment in the purloined document case, maybe even the January 6 case, could come as early as this week while former federal prosecutor/legal pundit Renato Mariotti thinks those indictments, while imminent, will take a week or so more to happen. Though the timing isn’t clear, it is clear that the still bearded but recovered from his bicycle crash Smith who NBC caught on camera outside of his DC offices yesterday, has been quite busy.   Reports are that, in addition to his Washington DC grand jury, Smith has another one doing his bidding in Miami. In all likelihood the Miami grand jury is focusing on criminal activities that originated in Mar a Lago though it’s possible, although not likely, that Smith could opt to bring all the charges related to Trump’s document grab in Florida rather than in Washington DC. One of the “crimes” that the Miami grand jury may be hearing about could relate to the mysterious flooding of the room where the Mar a Lago video logs were kept.  Oddly enough the video log room was “accidentally” flooded last October after the same Mar a Lago maintenance worker who helped move boxes of Trump’s purloined documents drained the club’s pool. Unfortunately for Trump, the maintenance worker’s Rose Mary Woods moment didn’t turn out as planned as not even 18.5 minutes of the video logs were ruined.  Damp video logs aside, the smoking gun that Smith is thought to be focusing on relates to the Iran war plans that Trump was caught on tape discussing because absconding with and possibly sharing defense plans is a bigly no-no. Though the precise timing of the expected indictments remains unclear, what is certain is that Trump’s lawyers did emerge unhappy from a recent preindictment, possibly meeting with Jack Smith and, ominously for Trump, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who never testified before the House January 6^th committee did testify before Smith’s Washington DC grand jury.  Also bad for Trump, his recently resigned lawyer Evan Corcoran taped his reflections about his days working for Trump because there’s nothing like covering your arse.   

Red: Former NJ Governor Chris Christie made it official yesterday, he’s running.  No one expects Christie to survive the Republican primaries, but the pugnacious former prosecutor is expected to do his best to verbally take down Trump which won’t be easy because Trump isn’t expected to show for the first debate and even if he does show for later debates, it’s not clear that Christie who isn’t popular with the Republican base, will be able poll high enough to qualify for later debates.  Pence, who polls a just a bit higher than Christie is expected to make his run official shortly but isn’t expected to survive the primaries either. Turning back to former UN Ambassador/South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a few lowlights from her CNN townhall are worth mentioning.  She alleged that Democrats support abortion up to 39 weeks of pregnancy; they don’t and anyway babies are lost at 39 weeks as the result of a still birth or a delivery tragedy not as a result of an elective abortion.  Haley also claimed that the presence of transgender girls in locker rooms causes 25% of teenage girls to have suicidal ideation. That’s a statistic that she made up to impress the right. Being a teenager, especially in the days of social media, isn’t easy and concerns about teen suicide can’t be dismissed but suicide is far more common among transgender youth and politicians normalizing their victimization contribute to that problem..  Bottom line, Haley is another one selling her soul to impress culture war triggered base voters who are unlikely to give her the time of day.  

Blue Plus:  Republicans aren’t the only ones with problems.  Biden has to contend with RFK Jr, Marianne Williamson and left-wing activist Cornell West who declared that he is running as an independent.  RFK Jr who was deplatformed from Twitter for spreading COVID and vaccine misinformation was recently endorsed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and participated in a Twitter Spaces chat with current Chief Twit Elon Musk, another vaccine skeptic whose ad revenues are currently down 59%. Musk has allowed RFK Jr back on Twitter because he’s all in on platforming misinformation and also because he like Dorsey likes RFK’s pro cryptocurrency position. RFK Jr who told Musk that he wants to close the border with Mexico and who blamed gun shootings on pharmaceutical drugs is actually polling around 20%, a number that Vanity Fair says is partially attributable to the fact that some voters are attracted to his name but have no idea about his political positions. Not surprising since there are a whole lot of voters on the right who want JFK Jr to be Trump’s running mate. Worth mentioning that Tulsi Gabbard also participated in the Musk-RFK Jr Twitter spaces discussion.  That’s Tulsi who also once ran for president as a Democrat but who left the party and now occasionally subs on Fox. As to Cornell West, he’s another one who won’t be sitting in the Oval Office anytime soon but who, like those who are pushing for a no-labels “centrist” candidate, someone like a Joe Manchin, will pull more votes from Biden than from Trump so think Jill Stein or Ralph Nader.  Not good to say the least.    

And: House Oversight Chair James Comer is moving forward with plans to cite FBI Director Wray in contempt for refusing to handover the Burisma related sketchy transcript that provides “evidence” of Joe Biden accepting bribes back when he was VP.  The evidence isn’t credible, Comer knows that but he’s doing Trump’s bidding and trying to tarnish Biden and who knows, it could work.  Also, despite right wing assertions to the contrary,  murder is down about 12% year to date and border crossings are down even more but that’s not stopping Ron DeSantis from flying more migrants from Texas to California because of course.  The destroyed dam situation in Ukraine is making conditions unimaginable worse for Ukrainians and on a far less tragic note, what’s up with the air quality in NY.  Eh Canada.   

 

Mind Infestation 🌻 🌻 🌻

Back to Abnormal: With the debt ceiling in the rear-view mirror, at least until after the 2024 election, Congress is back to doing its thing.  For Republican House members, particularly those in the party’s insurrection wing, that means ramping up investigations into the “Biden Crime Family,” and the FBI and acting on threats to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas and Attorney General Garland. Don’t expect Speaker Kevin to rein in his wacko wing, he tested their patience and used up most, if not all, of his goodwill making concessions to Biden to get the debt ceiling raised. As payback, he’ll let his crazies, specifically Gym Jordan and Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, move forward with their misguided investigations in the hopes that in exchange they won’t exercise their one vote right to topple him from his perch.  For Comer that means threatening to hold FBI Director Wray in contempt over his refusal to handover “evidence” that Biden, back when he was Vice President, accepted a $5 million bribe from some Ukrainians.  The “evidence” involves an allegation made back when Trump was president, one that Trump’s DOJ thought didn’t have merit.  It was one of those things brought to their attention by Rudy Giuliani back when he was pushing the narrative that Biden and Clintons were facilitating Ukrainian corruption, part of his effort to distract from the issues that led to Trump’s first impeachment trial.  Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley who has teamed up with Comer to investigate the bribe allegation admitted on Fox that he has no reason to believe it’s true but that to him truth isn’t the point. Director Wray has agreed to show Comer and Ranking Oversight Member Jamie Raskin a copy of the disputed “evidence” redacted to cover up sources but will not leave them with a copy.  Democrat Raskin is okay with that but Comer not so much.  Expect more fireworks.

Red Run: The Republican presidential wannabees are off and running, at least a bunch of them are, a few more are expected to formally enter the race this week.  During his Iowa charm offensive, Florida’s Ron DeSantis doubled down on his promise to rid the country of the “woke mind virus” while also patting himself on the back for refusing to give into “Fauci-ism dystopia” during the COVID epidemic. No point in commenting on the mind virus stuff, it exists only in the minds of Republican candidates pushing culture war issues, but as Trump has pointed out, DeSantis actually did follow Fauci’s recommendations early in the pandemic and initially facilitated vaccine distribution, but he doesn’t like to talk about that given the anti-vaccine views of the voters he’s trying to lure away from Trump.  Additionally, though DeSantis asserts that Florida had a better COVID outcome than all those blue states that followed tighter rules, it didn’t.  Statistics show that even adjusting for age, Florida fared worse than comparable states largely because those states did a better job getting vaccines to more of their residents.  Notably DeSantis, who many members of the Republican donor class still support because they continue to hope that he’s the one who can take down Trump, doesn’t have as much support among small money donors which doesn’t bode well for him long term.  DeSantis wasn’t the only Republican making news this weekend.  Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur, told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that it’s time for Ukraine to make major concessions to Russia to end the war.  Taking a page from Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who gave up Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Germany in the hopes of stopping Hitler, and we know how that turned out, he’s all-in on Ukraine ceding all of its disputed territory to Russia.  He wants the US to pivot from supporting Ukraine to disrupting Russia’s relationship with China. Apparently, he’s not all that concerned that pushing Ukraine to cede its land might send the message to China that no one would mind if they invaded Taiwan. Ramaswamy may just be auditioning for the VP slot.  His anti-woke positions match those of DeSantis and his pro-Russia one’s mesh well with Trump who says he’ll end the Ukraine “conflict” on day one of his next administration because Putin is his guy.  Apparently, Trump is still in love with North Korea’s Kim Jong un as well, he sent him congratulations to celebrate North Korea’s appointment to the executive board of the World Health Organization, a sentiment that didn’t go over well with South Korea or some of the other Republican candidates, including DeSantis, Nikki Haley and VP Pence who is no longer being investigated by the DOJ over the documents he accidentally took with him when he left Washington since he really didn’t mean to take them and unlike Trump sent them all back when he found them. Though the focus was on Trump’s remarks, why is the WHO appointing North Korea to its board? Nikki Haley got some press time this weekend too, participating in another one of CNN’s townhalls. Don’t know if anyone was watching because few watch CNN anymore, but her positions and her performance are more normal than Trump’s, granted that’s a low bar. She’s trying to appeal to independents while not offending Trump’s base, so basically, she’s tying herself in knots over issues like abortion while being supportive of Ukraine. All the candidates are just waiting for Trump to be taken down by one or more of the government attorneys investigating his crimes.  To that end, Jack Smith’s Grand Jury will be back in session this week.  Could indictments be coming soon or are we being punked again.

And:  It appears that DeSantis is still luring migrants in Texas on to private jets, dumping them in blue states without first notifying anyone that they are coming. The latest group were promised jobs and accommodations but then dumped in Sacramento where local churches and authorities fortunately stepped up to feed and house them.   If you haven’t yet, check out Tim Alberta’s scathing The Atlantic article about CNN under CEO Chris Licht. Time to crack out that head of lettuce as Licht’s remaining days at CNN are probably numbered.  If we’re lucky so are Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert’s.  Boebert, who slammed the debt ceiling legislation, promising to vote against it, didn’t vote because she failed to get to the House chamber in time. That’s odd, but not the weirdest thing we learned about her this week; her mother has claimed for years that Boebert’s biological father was retired professional wrestler Stan Lane but a definitive DNA test proved again last week that he is most definitely not her dad. Lane graciously wished Boebert well in her continued search.   Maybe time for an episode of Finding Her Roots or an Ancestry.com search?       

         

Sandbagged 🌻 🌻 🌻

Tick, Tock, Done: Yesterday President Biden won the battle of the debt ceiling but was also sandbagged, literally by a sandbag that he tripped over while jogging back to his seat after giving a speech at the US Air Force Academy graduation.  Naturally, the picture of him sprawled on the stage was displayed far and wide as evidence that he’s too old for the presidency.  Well, he maybe be old but he’s also pretty spry and appears to be fine, we all trip, and more importantly the debt ceiling deal that the “too old” guy struck with Speaker McCarthy easily passed both the House and the Senate and is headed to his desk, a good thing since Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin had already started taking extraordinary measures to keep the government funded and was twisting herself  into knots trying to figure out how to roll the T bills due to mature on Monday. In the House, where only a majority of members are needed to pass legislation, the deal, named the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, passed 314 to 117, with Democrats making up more than half of the yes votes despite their minority status and their reservations about the deal.  In the Senate, where 60 votes were required, the debt ceiling legislation passed by a vote of 63 to 36 with only 4 Democrats, Senators Fetterman, Markey, Warren and Merkley and one independent Bernie Sanders voting no. Republican Bill Haggerty did not vote. The Democrats who voted no were protesting the additional SNAP work requirements provisions, the ones that the CBO says will actually result in more people being eligible to get food stamps without working, and the impact on the environment of the inclusion of Joe Manchin’s West Virginia pipeline and other climate concerns.  The much longer list of naysaying Republicans included those who always vote no, those who wanted to see social programs slashed and burned including presidential wannabe Tim Scott, and those who want more funds spent on defense.  That last contingent, led by Senator Lindsey Graham who at the end of the day also voted no, got a commitment from leadership that a separate defense funding bill will be brought up for a vote at some time soon.      

Red Alert: While the House and Sente were doing their thing and Biden was battling sandbags, Trump and DeSantis who both opposed the debt ceiling legislation were out spreading their messages and attacking each other.  Both were in Iowa, where DeSantis was trying to prove that he can be charming, and Trump was participating in a Sean Hannity hosted town hall.  Though DeSantis didn’t trip over any real sandbags he did trip by snapping “are you blind” at a reporter who had the nerve to ask him why he wasn’t taking any questions from the press.  DeSantis who generally keeps all but the friendliest press outlets out of his Florida press conferences isn’t fond of the concept of the free press. For his part Trump who mocked how DeSantis keeps changing the pronunciation of his own name,  jumped on his run in with the press and also said that he didn’t think that Dee Santis would be around much longer. He prepared the audience for the likelihood that he could face some new indictments soon, telling them that those indictments were just deep state, politically motivated “election interference.”  The likelihood of future Trump indictments combined with a general though maybe premature belief that DeSantis doesn’t have what it takes to go the distance is emboldening more Republican to enter the race.  In addition to Chris Christie, former VP Mike Pence is expected to announce his run soon and it’s not just them.  Liz Cheney has been teasing a third party run and the relatively unknown North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum who recently signed one of the most prohibitive anti-abortion laws is also expected to enter the race.   

Legal Morass:  Trump is probably right about some more indictments being handed down sometime soon, though as we’ve all have learned soon and imminent could also mean next year or never.  The newest news on Trump’s legal morass is that Special Counsel Jack Smith has a recording of Trump discussing one of the purloined documents that he had taken with him to Mar a Lago. On the recording he’s heard admitting that he doesn’t have the ability to declassify the document being discussed because he’s out of office.  A few things about that document and his admission are notable.  First, by admitting he couldn’t declassify it, he contradicts his earlier claims that he declassified everything he took with him before he left office.  Second the document in question is marked “secret” rather than “top secret”. That matters because the FBI is generally reticent about referencing top secret documents in court settings over concerns that doing so puts national security at risk, but “secret” documents fall into what former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann calls a “Goldilocks category,” concerning enough to prosecute over but not something that puts either national security, sources or methods, or agents lives at risk. Third, the document related to plans to confront Iran, something that Chief of Staff Mark Milley had said Trump wanted to do to create a crisis that would justify him refusing to turn the keys over to Biden on inauguration day, and we know he was looking for reasons to stay in office.  Fourth, there are probably more recordings because it turns out that Trump aide, Margo Martin who by the way looks like she came from the same central casting service that provided Hope Hicks and Melania, taped all the interviews he gave to those writing books about their days in his White House.  And fifth, the interview in question was with the ghost writer responsible for former chief of staff Mark Meadow’s book and there has been lots of speculation that Meadows has spent a lot of quality time with Jack Smith’s office.  Though the focus has been on the newly revealed recording, Jack Smith has also been focusing on the firing of Chris Krebs, the respected cyber security chief who was dismissed by Trump after he said that the 2020 election had been fairly and safely conducted.   

The Blue Bird:  Like me, you may be surprised to learn that Twitter actually had a head of trust and safety.  Not anymore, she quit yesterday right after Chief Twit Musk reversed her decision that an anti-trans gender video produced by a far-right personality was too toxic for the increasingly toxic friendly Twitter. Worth noting that Fidelity has written down its position in Twitter, again, now valuing its Twitter holding at $6. 55 million down from the $19.66 million valuation it used when Elon first acquired the bird.