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.