Cool Threads 🌻 🌻 🌻

Shell Game:  In response to an order from the Federal Magistrate overseeing the Trump documents case, the DOJ has “unredacted” more from the affidavit that was included with Trump’s purloined document indictment not to be confused with his NY indictment or the much-awaited Fulton County or January 6 insurrection indictments.  The unredacted text provides a clearer explanation of the probable cause used to justify the FBI search of Mar a Lago.  The additional information reveals that shortly after Trump’s lawyers responded to a DOJ subpoena by returning only 38 classified documents, suspicious prosecutors who’d been expecting to receive many more documents subpoenaed Mar a Lago surveillance footage.  That footage from a camera called “South Tunnel Liquor” because of course Trump was keeping tabs on his liquor inventory, recorded the “gold-painted” door to the storage room where his boxes of White House goodies were being kept and included video of valet-body man, co-conspirator Walt Nauta moving more boxes out than back in.  As a result of that too cute shell game, Trump’s then lawyer Evan Corcoran who had been tasked with sifting through the contents of the boxes in response to the document subpoena had unwittingly been unable to review the contents of all the boxes because a few of the critical ones had already been stashed elsewhere, perhaps in the chandeliered/vinyl shower curtained not so luxurious bathroom?  As to Nauta who is clearly in deep doo doo as in caught in the act of criming, he was finally arraigned yesterday, represented by a Fort Pierce based Florida lawyer Sasha Dadan, whose website reveals her extensive experience in traffic court which is bad news for Nauta who really needs to be represented by someone with national security expertise rather than someone who can get you out of a speeding ticket or a DUI, preferably someone who isn’t being paid by Trump or one of his political action committees. Then again, that might not matter since it’s likely that Dadan, who once ran for a Florida House district seat as a Republican probably knows Judge Aileen “loose” Cannon because Fort Pierce isn’t all that big.  Nauta who should be spilling his guts to prosecutors, trying to cut a deal, instead plead not guilty, either because he’s really stupid, totally enthralled by Trump and/or figures that he’ll be pardoned when Trump returns to office. In other Trump troubles news, we also learned this week that Special Counsel Jack Smith has interviewed several officials from Arizona about Trump and his team’s actions there shortly after Arizona was called for Joe Biden though at least according to former Governor Doug Ducey no one from the DOJ has spoken with him even though he says he was called by VP Mike Pence after the election, as part of Trump’s efforts to get him to overturn the results.  Pence admits he called Ducey but says he was just calling to discuss the weather rather than forwarding any of Trump’s threats because he’s too pure to ever have done that.

Broken Toys: It appears that Margie Q has been kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, purportedly because she called Lauren Boebert a little b-tch on the floor of the House but just as like because they’re upset that she voted to raise the debt ceiling a sign of how close she’s become with Speaker McCarthy and those other RINOs.  Lin Wood, one of the kraken team lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results has relinquished his law license electing to retire from law rather than face disbarment in any of the multiple states that have been weighing discipling him for pushing Trump’s false election claims. Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and former FBI agent Peter Strzok are suing the Justice Department,  Strzok for wrongful termination and Page for violation of privacy.  Yesterday, Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed that their lawyers can depose Trump, not because they’ve presented evidence of his direct involvement in their firing but because of all the times he publicly mocked them and called for them to be hung. Hopefully for them, Trump whose court calendar keeps filling up will have time to meet his newest obligation. As Strzok and Page know, when Trump talks or posts bad things frequently happen, so on the same day that the former guy posted former President Obama’s address on Truth Social, Taylor Taranto one of those who participated in the January 6 “riot” was found lurking near the Obama house. Taranto also shared Trump’s post on Telegram adding “we got these losers surrounded! See you in hell.” The charming “tourist” had two firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition inside his van. According to Belarus President/Putin BFF Aleksandr Lukashenko, Yevgeny Prigozhin, another charming fellow, albeit not one of ours, is no longer in his country.  According to Lukashenko, Prigozhin is now in Russia which sounds somewhat peculiar and maybe also a bit life shortening. Ron DeSantis who is truly broken but still running second among Republicans only to Trump, is defending the dark anti-LGBTQ video his campaign shared online, the one that attacked Trump for his past support of gay and transgender people because when one thinks of Trump, the first thing one thinks of is social progressive?  In an interview with a conservative commentator, DeSantis defended the video from assertions that it  was homophobic, homophobic enough that a few other Republican candidates actually called it out, by saying it was okay because Trump has been a “pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream where he was having men compete against women in his beauty pageants,” a reference to Trump once saying he’d be okay with a transexual contestant competing for Miss Universe. And proving that he’s up for competing for most broken toy, Vivek Ramaswamy who is currently in third place in the Republican polls is another one who is against birth right citizenship only he takes things one step forward,  Ramaswamy whose parents were Indian immigrants, says every high school student should be required to pass the same civics test required for immigrants seeking citizenship before being granted the right to vote.  He also wants the voting age raised to 25. Sure, it would be a good thing for all of us, including all the members of Congress to be far more educated about civics but what he is really saying is that he wants to skew the electorate and though he’s right about younger voters tending to vote Democrat, has he met many Trump voters because civics education is hardly their thing.

Bye Bye BlueBird?  To borrow from Mark Twain, rumors of Twitter’s death have been greatly exaggerated except that this time it does appear that the bluebird is on life support.  In response to Twitter’s problematic holiday weekend, which was marked by inexplicable technological hiccups, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, rushed out the Twitter clone that his company had been set to launch later this month.  Meta’s Twitter clone is called Threads and though it’s fairly basic and still missing some of Twitter’s sorting and search features, 30 million people signed on during its first 24 hours and as of yesterday’s close that number had risen to 55 million.  Users already include quite a few media outlets, politicians, and me but no one from the EU because the EU is locked in a still unresolved data privacy dispute with Meta,  Threads, in case you are interested, is easily accessible but you do need an Instagram account to join, a dormant one will suffice.  Threads is a work in process but unlike all the other clones it appears to have reached a critical mass so stunning in size that Chief Twit Elon Musk responded by threatening a lawsuit, claiming that Zuckerberg used stolen intellectual property obtained from fired Twitter employees.  For his part Zuck denies that any former Twitter employees worked on Threads’ development, but really, what did Musk think those talented engineers were going to do?  Notably, so far given Meta’s policies, far from perfect but hate speech limiting, Threads appears to be troll free.  As a result, the Threads discourse while overwhelming is far more pleasant than that on the increasingly hate filled Twitter. Who needs a Zuck-Musk cage match, when this is so much more fun.    

And:  There are some reports that back-channel talks are taking place between former US government officials and Russia in an effort to broker an end to the Ukraine war.  The talks are very preliminary and unofficial but apparently that’s how things generally start so better than not.