Food Fight 🌻 🌻 🌻

Fried Tomatoes: On Friday Trump’s attorneys and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team appeared in front of US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to hash out the terms of the protective order governing the treatment of evidence in the January 6 election interference case. After reaching agreement on how evidence should be treated, Judge Chutkan warned Trump and his attorneys that she would “take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings” adding that repeated “inflammatory” statements about the case would force her to speed his trial, something that Trump clearly does not want her to do.  So naturally what did Trump do over the weekend? He re-truthed a social media post slamming Chutkan as “an Obama leftwing activist judge in DC …… who openly admitted she’s running election interference against Trump.”  After several news outlets and legal pundits pointed out that Trump’s re-post violated Judge Chutkan’s admonishment to behave or else, he doubled down overnight saying that Chutkan “obviously wants me behind bars.”  An ordinary defendant ignoring his judge’s warnings would be facing time in the slammer but if we’ve learned anything by now, it’s that neither Trump nor his treatment is ordinary.  Then there’s the added complication that throwing him in jail would be logistically challenging, could cause a January 6^th level riot and would probably raise his polling numbers. The ball is now in Chutkan’s court. While it would be a reach to believe that she’ll throw Trump in jail, she could express her displeasure by fining his lawyers bigly for failing to control their chosen client.  Stay tuned. 

Peach Pie:  Also stay tuned for action out of Fulton County where District Attorney Fani Willis’ grand jury will be hearing from former Georgia Lieutenant Governor, hopefully the last witness they hear from before they start voting out indictments, which are likely to involve violations of Georgia’s RICO (racketeering) law.  Over the weekend CNN reported that Willis has text messages revealing conversations between Trump’s attorneys about a voting machine breach in Georgia’s Trump-friendly Coffee County.  Trump easily won Coffee County, but his team hoped that “breaking” into Coffee County’s election machines would allow them to “prove” that the machines could easily be corrupted by dead Hugo Chavez and other like-minded Trump hating individuals who “flipped” votes to Biden.  According to the text messages, Coffee County elections official Misty Hampton who helped facilitate the voting machine breach sent a “written invitation” to Trump’s attorneys, specifically Rudy Giuliani and kraken queen Sidney Powell, six days ahead of the breach.  Willis has additional information showing that communication regarding the breach was shared up to the top of the Trump food chain, perhaps all the way to the ketchup flinger in chief. To the extent that this is the week that puts the term imminent to bed we’ll know more shortly. Lastly, proving that Trump isn’t the only one with legal problems, Hunter Biden who is not a candidate for president but who is the son of one, has a Special Counsel of his very own.  His Special Counsel is David Weiss, who until now was just a plain old US Attorney.  At his request Weiss was upgraded on Friday. The upgrade gives him the ability to pursue out of state charges.  Attorney General Merrick Garland who seems overly eager to keep his distance from the investigation complied likely so he can continue to say that he’s maintaining his hands off approach to the Hunter quagmire.  In any case, it’s not clear that Weiss’ new title means that the Hunter case has expanded, it could just mean that Weiss is playing hardball in an effort to get the case that both he and Hunter’s lawyers thought was settled,  resolved. Naturally, the same Republicans who wanted Weiss to have Special Counsel powers are now attacking his upgrade. And, of course, because fair’s fair, and we’re in a tit for tat world, Democrats are now calling for an investigation into former White House Aide/Son in Law Jared Kushner’s multi-billion-dollar deal with the Saudis, something that even Republican Oversight Chair James Comer admits reeks.

Corn Dogs: Republicans were out and about in Iowa over the weekend where Ron DeSantis supporters were being heckled relentlessly by Trump supporters. For his part DeSantis whose Florida funded cars had a real accident just a few weeks ago did the photo op thing in a bumper car ride with his kids but not before banishing all the other kids waiting their turn.  Worth noting that when former President Obama did the bumper car thing, he didn’t close it down first, but Ron is Ron and optics management isn’t one of his strengths. For his part entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who is one of the odder candidates in the Republican primary rapped an Eminem song to a crowd of well-wishers.  His positions are frightening but he’s got personality which sets him apart from pudding fingers Ron who also has awful views but has little in the way of a personality and Mike Pence who even though they tried to hang him says he’s all in on MAGA but sans Trump.  Then there’s purported Democrat RFK Jr,  who over the weekend while also campaigning in Iowa stepped in merde again.  This time the nepo baby, anti-vax guy who believes that Russia is acting in good faith in Ukraine, told MSNBC’s Ali Vitali that he would sign a 3 -month federal abortion ban.  After his comment went viral, his campaign issued a statement saying that RFK didn’t understand the question that he “couldn’t hear” because of the noise at the venue and that he totally respects a woman’s right to choose.  Vitali politely called that excuse out, saying that she was so surprised by his ban endorsement that she repeated the question to make sure that he meant it.  Though that other nepo baby, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders best known to most of us as Trump’s one time press secretary wasn’t campaigning in Iowa, she pulled a Ron DeSantis move of her own over the weekend.  Her education department announced that while schools could still offer AP African Studies classes, the state wouldn’t award students any AP credit for taking the course and would not pay for any students to take the African Studies AP test even though Arkansas pays other AP course test fees.  Arkansas schools start up again this week so in addition to being a bit, okay, a lot racist, the last-minute announcement puts schools and students who were planning to take the class in a quandary since many students who want to take the course also want the AP credit and the boost that taking an AP course adds to their GPAs.