Good Shade 🌻 🌻 🌻

Contempt: Trump’s former Director of Trade Policy Peter Navarro was one of the first people to realize and speak out about the dangers of the coronavirus back when it was just that curious deadly disease affecting China. That may have been the last time he was right about something.  Yesterday, Navarro was found guilty of contempt of Congress for failing to honor a Congressional subpoena, not the biggest crime but still a crime.  Navarro had no problem sharing his White House experiences in a book or telling all about what he called the Green Bay Sweep, as in Trump’s attempted coup, on Ari Melber’s MSNBC show, but he refused to testify before Congress, claiming that he couldn’t because of executive privilege that he didn’t have.  Like Steve Bannon before him, Navarro is likely to appeal so it’s unlikely that he’ll show up in an orange jumpsuit anytime soon which is too bad because it means we are going to hear lots more from him, mostly about his huge legal bills, and to be fair they are growing by the minute as he’s not one of those who Trump is subsidizing. Trump’s also not doing much to subsidize Rudy Giuliani, who’s legal expenses and defamation fines make Navarro’s seem like chump change, but he did host a Bedminster Golf Club $100k a head tete a tete for Rudy last night, the very least he could do given how Rudy’s Ukraine shenanigans led to his first impeachment and how his false claims of election fraud led to the second, not to mention all that January 6 stuff. Though Trump is still financing loyal employee Walt Nauta’s expenses he’s off the hook for those of IT guy Yuscil Taveras who with his new non-Trump financed lawyer’s help has struck a cooperation deal with Special Counsel Jack Smith. One guy who will be wearing orange for a long time is Enrique Tarrio, the former head of the Proud Boys.  He wasn’t at the Capitol on January 6 because he’d been arrested two days prior and banned from DC for burning a Black Lives Matter flag, but nevertheless, since he was the brains behind the January 6 insurrection he was convicted of seditious conspiracy and obstructing the transfer of government and has been sentenced to serve 22 years in prison, even longer than the previous record, the 18 year sentence given to likeminded Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes.  Both of these guys, as well as quite a few others had been offered plea bargains which would have cut their sentences in half but they didn’t take the offers, instead banking on Trump, or some other Republican like Ron DeSantis who is on record saying that the insurrectionists haven’t been treated fairly because what’s a little seditious conspiracy among friends, pardoning them or commuting their sentences at some date in the future.  One guy who neither Trump nor Ron D will pardon, is Hunter Biden and the way things are going he might need one.  David Weiss, the Special Counsel on his case, has signaled that he’s planning to indict him for lying about his drug use on a gun application. Weiss had previously agreed not to do that but he’s now playing hardball, maybe because of political pressure from the right or because he’s embarrassed that the plea deal he thought he had reached with Hunter has blown up. Though we should all be able to agree that people with drug problems shouldn’t be able to obtain guns, this gun charge is generally saved for dangerous felons, and no one thinks that Hunter, who got rid of his gun shortly after he bought it, is a danger to anyone except maybe himself and his father’s candidacy.  Don’t be surprised if that charge goes away since Hunter is now represented by super-duper white collar lawyer Abbe Lowell who has also represented Jared and Ivanka.  

 

Dance Card 💃 🕺 : Turning to Fulton County, much to co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro’s chagrin Judge Scott McAfee has decided that he will be tried beside kraken lawyer Sidney Powell since both have requested speedy trials.  Chesebro, who knows Powell is a loon, isn’t happy but so be it.  Anyway, though a trial date of October 23 has been set for the two of them, it’s still not clear that anything will really happen then since there’s still a chance that the whole shebang will be moved to a federal court, something that a few of the co-defendants including Mark Meadows and Trump are seeking. House Judiciary Chair Gym Jordan who only cares about subpoenas and the like when he’s not the person being subpoenaed, has been put in his place by DA Fani Willis who rejected his efforts to get anything out of her and basically told him to get stuffed while also throwing lots of serious shade in his direction.  Among other things, she told Jordan who went to law school but never passed the legal bar that as a “non-member of the legal bar” he could learn more about the Georgia RICO law by purchasing a guide called “RICO State by State” for only $249.  She also included copies of some of the really awful heinous threats that she and her team have been receiving due to verbal attacks by people like him. As to Trump, his dance card keeps filling up and though nothing he says ever resembles the truth, he’s told radio show host Hugh Hewitt that of course he’ll testify at one or all of his trials even though we all know that he won’t because of heel spurs or something else equally deadly. Though Trump will have to appear in court for his criminal trials, he doesn’t have to make an appearance for his civil ones.  One of those civil trials, the second case involving his defamation of E Jean Caroll is all but settled, well the facts are settled, all that’s left is determining how much more than the $5 million he’s already been fined that Trump owes E Jean for calling her a liar. That case is scheduled to take place in January.  Despite Trump’s efforts to get his NYS Civil case delayed, the one where NYS AG Letitia James is seeking both to prohibit the Trump Organization from doing business in NY, at least for a while, and a $250 million fine, is still on for early October.    

 

And:  Elon Musk continues to blame the Anti-Defamation League and by extension “the Jews” for X’s loss in advertising revenue because that’s a strategy that’s worked so well in the past?  And now we’ve learned via an about to be published biography of him penned by Walter Isaacson that he really did order his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet over his concerns that the attack would lead to a “mini-Pearl Harbor” with nukes. Musk is right not to want nuclear Armageddon, but there’s something weird about a private citizen unilaterally making strategic military decisions, another reason why contracting key functions and relying on the technology of eccentric billionaires is probably not a good thing.  And it turns out that Republican leadership, including NY Congresswoman, third in GOP House leadership, Elise Stefanik knew all about George Santos’ lies when they backed him for Congress but stood by him and in Stefanik’s case campaigned for him, anyway.