March Madness 🌻 🌻 🌻 🌧️ ☔️ 🌀

Storm Clouds: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is off the campaign trail for now, dealing with Hurricane Idalia, the dangerous category 4 storm smashing into the gulf coast of his state, please stay safe if you are in the affected area. Though there’s never a good time for a hurricane, Ron D has got to be just a wee bit relieved that the storm is deflecting attention from the racist Jacksonville shooting and his less than impressive performance at last week’s Republican debate.  As to the debate, the poll results are in and though Trump is still way out in the lead, an Emerson College poll shows him ”down” six points to 50% with DeSantis “up” two to 12%, Ramaswamy “down” one to 9%, Pence “up” four to 7% and Haley “up” five to 7%.  The biggest take away is that Trump’s support has softened a little but with so many other candidates to pick from, his drop probably doesn’t matter much now and will only matter if the trend continues and if voters coalesce around one of his opponents. Though Ramaswamy garnered lots of attention, he probably offended more people than he impressed and only picks up more points in hypothetical polls that remove Trump’s name from consideration because why go for Trump petite when you can have Trump grande?  Miami Mayor Francis Suarez who didn’t qualify for the first debate, won’t be at any of the future ones because he’s now officially out of the race, the first candidate to throw in the towel.  

Super Monday: On Monday, Judge Tonya Chutkan made it clear that she wasn’t buying the Trump team argument that the January 6/election interference case should be put off until 2026.  Instead, she set March 4, 2024 as the trial date, that’s a few months later than the January date that Special Counsel Jack Smith requested but no one really expected the trial to start then so it’s a win for Jack and a loss for Trump’s lead lawyer John Lauro.  Lauro’s effort to delay the case for years went nowhere with the Chutkan who saw right through his absurd request and appeared disgusted at his citation of the landmark Scottsboro Boys case fair trial ruling, likely because equating Trump’s treatment to the 1931 railroading of nine African American young men was not just a push to far but truly offensive. Despite Chutkan’s admonishment that Trump behave, the “strawberry blonde” one who has taken to calling Jack Smith “demented Jack” took to social media with his usual vitriol posting “Today a biased, Trump Hating Judge game me only a two month extension, just what our corrupt government wanted.” Trump added that he would “APPEAL” He won’t appeal, only because the date isn’t appealable, but his lawyers will keep filing motions that might delay the start date.  Should the start date stick, March will be chock full of fun, not only will there be the usual March Madness basketball insanity but also a slew of primaries including multistate super Tuesday scheduled for March 5.  

The Meadows Conundrum: Most, if not all, of the legal pundits predicted that Mark Meadows wouldn’t testify on Monday, but he did. Trump’s former Chief of Staff who has kept so far under the radar that some believed that Special Counsel Jack Smith had him in witness protection really, really wants his Georgia indictment dropped or failing that to have his trial moved from Fulton County to a federal court so he took the risk of testifying on Monday and maybe even contradicting statements he’s made under oath to Jack and his team. Meadows testified that he was merely doing his chief of staff job when he organized and participated in calls as part of Trump’s pressure campaign to flip the Georgia presidential vote red. His position is that his job was to do anything Trump wanted him to do and that making sure that the election was “legitimate” wasn’t a political move that crossed the Hatch Act separation of campaigning from official government function legal line but was just part of an above board effort to make sure that the 2020 election was properly conducted, so what if that effort involved pressuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into finding 11,000 or so more Trump votes. Also. who cares that presidential elections are run by states rather than the federal government.  Most of the same legal pundits who said that it would be folly for Meadows to testify say that though his attempt to move his trial to the Federal Courts isn’t frivolous it won’t fly.  However, they could be wrong as late yesterday US District Court Judge Steve Jones asked both Meadows’ legal team and Fulton County prosecutors to provide him with briefs on whether the Fulton County case should be moved to federal court if at least one, but not all, of the acts charged against Meadows occurred “under the color” of his chief of state role. Though that likely means that the judge believes most of what Meadows did wasn’t Kosher, something he did met the standards of a Hebrew National frank. In other Fulton County news, District Attorney wants all of her 19 RICO defendants tried at once so yesterday she asked the Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee who last week ruled that Kenneth Chesebro’s request for a speedy trial be honored to clarify if that meant that his case had to be severed from the other 18 or if she could try them all on Chesebro’s expedited schedule something that Trump, one of those 19, and a few others won’t be happy about. Also, there’s some good news for Harrison Floyd, the RICO defendant who was still being held in jail. Floyd, not to be confused with actor Harrison Ford, who helped lead Black Voters for Trump is accused of participating in the scheme to intimidate poll worker Ruby Freeman into saying that she’d committed voter fraud, has finally gotten a lawyer who has arranged for his bond. On the subject of lawyers, reports are that Special Jack is looking into Rudy Giuliani’s drinking problem in an effort to establish that Trump knowingly relied on election advice from an inebriated and impaired legal counsel while ignoring the advice and conclusions of the many sober ones who told him that he’d lost the legitimately held election.