Swine🐷🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🐷 

Epstein, Epstein,🐷:  The dam finally broke yesterday.  Everyone in the House with the exception of Louisiana’s Clay Higgins voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Bill that requires the Department of Justice to release its trove of Epstein files.  One of those voting for the bill was a clearly miserable Speaker Mike Johnson who asserted that he was confident that the Senate would fix the bill so that innocent people would be protected.  By innocent he didn’t mean the women who were trafficked and sexually abused when they were girls because the bill already protects them, but Epstein’s “friends,” including Trump. Apparently, Senate Majority Leader John Thune didn’t get Johnson’s message, or more likely chose to ignore it.  Instead, he allowed Chuck Schumer to bring the bill as written up for passage by unanimous consent.  The bill quickly passed through the Senate and is now sitting on Trump’s desk awaiting his signature.  Trump who was busy last night feting Saudi Arabian Prince Mohammed bin Salman A/K/A the bone cutter says he’ll sign it right after he throws all his ketchup bottles at the wall.  That said,  there’s plenty of wiggle room written into the bill and it’s more than possible that Attorney General Pam Bondi will manage to edit out what Trump doesn’t want released.  At Trump’s direction she’s already directed Jay Clayton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to open an investigation into Epstein’s ties to “prominent Democrats including Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, JP Morgan Chase and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.”  If an investigation is opened, Bondi is expected use it as a reason to sit on the files, or at the very least the files that Trump doesn’t want out in the open.  A number of Democrats have already been tarnished by the emails that the Epstein estate recently released including former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers and Virgin Island Representative Stacey Plaskett. Summers announced that he is stepping away from his public commitments and though he’s still at Harvard, his position there is in jeopardy.  His “crime,” or at least the one we know about it, is that he continued to communicate with Epstein, even seeking romantic advice from him, even after Epstein had been outed as an abuser.  Though she survived a hastily called effort to censure her for texting with Epstein during a 2019 House hearing, Plaskett is now also tarnished.  So far, despite all the hoopla Trump remains, if anything, he’s emboldened.  On Monday night he told Bloomberg’s White House Correspondent Catherine Lucey to “Quiet Piggy” for asking a question about Epstein and on Tuesday he berated ABC News correspondent Mary Bruce for asking questions about former Washington Post reporter Adnan Khashoggi and the Epstein files, calling her a “terrible persona and a “terrible reporter” while suggesting that ABC should lose its licenses.  So nice that sex trafficker Epstein’s long term friend Trump remains so comfortable publicly targeting women while defending murderers and swine.

Saudi Time: Yesterday Trump gave Mohammed bin Salmaan (MBS) the full royal treatment because it turns out that caring about the dicing of and slicing of Washington Post reporter Khashoggi is so yesterday and anyway a “lot” of people say Khashoggi wasn’t a nice guy so maybe he deserved to be put through the bone chopper.  Also, even if our intelligence services and the intelligence services of a whole bunch of our allies agree that it was MBS who ordered Khashoggi’s death, they’re all wrong. He knew nothing, kind of like everyone else in Trump’s orbit knows nothing about anything that matters.  Trump didn’t just give MBS the royal treatment while hosting him in the increasingly garish, tarted up, faux gold White House and saying that he’s a great champion of human rights, he agreed to let Saudi Arabia purchase advanced F-35 fighter jets from the US as well as lots of advanced US computer chips, including the ones needed for artificial intelligence initiatives.  In exchange, Saudi Arabia will not be recognizing Israel or joining the Abraham Accords, the two things that those sales particularly the sale of the planes were supposed to make happen, but they promised to invest trillions if not zillions more in the US even though they probably won’t though there will be more Trump related properties built within the kingdom.  So basically, Trump came out ahead, the US not so much, and Israel, not at all. At least for now, we’re not helping Saudi Arabia with its nuclear program, so that’s something.

More 💩:   Acting US Attorney Lindsey Halligan, the former beauty queen/insurance lawyer who Trump and Bondi used to get the James Comey and Tish James indictments has hit a bigly speed bump.  It turns out that, at least in the eyes of magistrate judge William Fitzpatrick who is reviewing the James Comey indictment, she engaged in  “government misconduct”  tainting the grand jury proceedings. The judge called Halligan out for suggesting to the grand jury that Comey might have to testify at trial to explain his innocence and for also improperly suggesting that the grand jurors should assume that the government had more evidence against Comey than what it presented to them.   The judge went on to say that “the record points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.”  Apparently, Halligan who had never before prosecuted a criminal case has also never watched Law and Order.  All of this is separate from the other proceeding looking into whether or not Halligan was legally appointed to her Acting US Attorney position.  The indictment mess isn’t the only one standing in the way of Trump achieving his objectives.  Yesterday,  a federal court blocked Texas from using its newly drawn congressional maps in next year’s midterms, ruling that the new map which was drawn to result in five more Republican seats is likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The court based its conclusion on a letter sent by the Trump administration to Texas in July by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon who has a history of opposing civil rights which is why she is now in charge of civil rights. In response to Dhillon’s letter which said that Texas’ districts were “unconstitutional” as drawn even though they weren’t, Texas Governor Abbot explicitly directed the Texas legislature to redistrict based on race in a manner that increased the number of Republican leaning districts while squishing minority voters into their own districts in a manner that decreased the number of likely Democratic districts. Texas is appealing the decision.  In other redistricting news, despite Trump’s threats and the resulting swatting of at least one Republican legislator, Indiana’s Republican controlled legislature voted against redistricting their map.  If the Texas decision stands, or at the very least stands through the midterms, then Trump’s efforts to make the Congressional map redder won’t have done much for Republicans but will because of the redrawing of the California districts in a manner that is expected to lead to five more Democratic seats make it bluer.  The California redistricting which California Governor Newsom clearly said was only done to counter Texas’ action is being challenged in court too but since it was achieved through a public vote, it is expected to withstand judicial review. Nothing good to report on the health care front where Trump is standing firm against extending the Obamacare subsidies while trying with the help of some Republican legislators to dismantle Obamacare altogether.