Lotsa 💩     😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢💩

Midterm Madness:  The madness, with more than a touch of hate and a whole lot of Trump retribution, continues to be ratcheted up.  At his direction, Trump’s DOJ is going after his enemies and doing its best, or in this case the worst, to disrupt the midterms.  On top of going after numerous states for “failing” to rid their voter rolls of mostly imagined aliens and indicating plans to reject Alaska’s election result if Republican Incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan doesn’t win, the DOJ filed charges again against former FBI Director James Comey as well as a few other FBI agents they’ve accused of lying about Hunter Biden’s laptop as if any normal person gives a hoot about Hunter or his laptop, especially given the grift that Trump and his family continue to engage in.  The charges against Comey accuse him of mishandling national security information by leaking information to the NY Times back in October 2016.  Putting aside that an earlier investigation of the “leak” went nowhere, if there was something there, Trump, whose first election victory owes a lot to Comey and his fascination with Hillary Clinton’s emails, has had years address the alleged leak.  This new charge was rushed out via an information rather than a grand jury indictment to beat the clock on the applicable ten-year statute of limitations. My TV legal advisor, Andrew Weissmann, says that the process was far from kosher.  Similarly, the NY Times reports that the charges against the others are highly questionable as well, more about flooding the news cycle than anything legitimate.  It’s probably not a coincidence that the Comey charge was revealed just after Manhattan Federal District Court Judge Jesse Furman ruled that Former Director Comey’s daughter Maureen, a former federal prosecutor, was unlawfully fired last year and should be reinstated and given back pay.  The Maureen Comey ruling opens the door for a slew of similarly fired federal prosecutors to also pursue restitution.  Naturally, the DOJ says that it plans to appeal the Maureen ruling.  The DOJ also notched a failure with regard to its attempt to obtain an indictment against former Trump administration aide Cassidy Hutchinson after a Washington DC grand jury rejected assertions that she’d lied when she testified about Trump’s January 6 actions.  

Turning to Hate: The anti-Amy Acton ads which questioned the Ohio Democratic Governor candidate’s horrific treatment by her mother and rape by her stepfather, who had previously raped another one of his daughters, have been widely and rightfully attacked except of course by Trump and his pathetic echo chamber.  Unfortunately, the anti-Semitic ad run on behalf of Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed have received less attention, less condemnation and even a few yawns.  The ad in question which aired widely across Michigan and on social media blames inflation, the prices of eggs, and just about everything else including our lack of universal health care coverage on Israel and by not so hidden extension “those Jewish people.”  The ad was created and paid for by Cenk Uygur whose social media feed routinely contains lots of hateful anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric.  Not so coincidentally Uygur is controversial left-wing, equally anti-Semitic or as he prefers to be called anti-Zionist, commentator Hasan Piker’s uncle. It’s fair to assume that their Thanksgiving table conversations rival those of David Duke and his KKK crowd.  It’s hard to understand how this kind of hateful crap does anything to improve El-Sayed’s odds of winning in Michigan where he already has the anti-Israel vote locked up but needs to gain more support from those members of the Black community who haven’t forgiven him for his tepid support of Kamala Harris in 2024. If anything, the ad gives his Republican opponent Mike Rogers more fodder for his, Trump’s and Vance’s already over the top Islamophobia pitch. For his part, borrowing a page from Ohio Ramaswamy’s early but then rejected playbook, El-Sayed has distanced himself from the ad, but he hasn’t condemned its message. Regardless of the outcome of the Michigan election which at this point seems to be leaning in El-Sayed’s direction, Michigan will not be sending its best to Washington. In more pleasant Senate news, yesterday Fox shifted Ohio’s Senate race between Democratic candidate and Former Senator Sherrod Brown and current Republican candidate Senator Jon Husted, whose butt Trump endlessly admires, to lean Democratic and two South Carolina former governors, David Beasley and Jim Hodges, a Republican and Democrat respectively, have endorsed Democrat Annie Andrews rather than Lindsey Graham’s sister Darline’s Senate bid.  

International Politics:  Though his party has conceded, taking a page from Trump and his father Jair, Brazil’s losing candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro, has not. Instead, he’s fled the country to avoid answering questions related to an ongoing investigation into money laundering.  The US State Department announced yesterday that they granted him and his family entry visas.  It’s reported that they arrived in Miami last night. In all likelihood he’ll dine with Trump at Mar a Lago shortly because of course.  In other international news, the outcome of the Israel elections remains up in the air.  The good news is that Israel, unlike its neighbors is a real democracy, turnout was high with 77.7% of voters including 65% of Israel’s Arab population casting ballots, and the elections went off without a hitch. The bad news is that as expected the process is messy, Bibi could still manage a “win” and at least for the time being will head a caretaker government until the coalition forming process is completed, if it ever is.  As to that process, with around 75% of the vote counted it’s not clear who will get first dibs at trying to put together a governing coalition.    

 Mega 💩:  With all the election news, it would be easy to have missed that on Monday House Judiciary Democrats released a 50-page report alleging that the DOJ withheld key information from the Epstein files about Trump’s ties to Epstein.  Their report includes allegations by Beatrice Keul, a model and former Miss Switzerland, that she was raped by Trump in a Plaza Hotel suite in Manhattan when she was 24. Keul said that while attending the American Dream Pageant, which had a partnership with Trump, she met Trump at a press luncheon at the event, that he promised to arrange her visa in the US and ensure her acceptance into New York University through Paolo Zampolli, the Trump ally who was, until very recently part of his administration. Keul alleges Trump invited her to a hotel suite where he raped her. Following the incident, Keul alleges Trump made her promise she would keep quiet and repeated his promise for visa and college admission. She says that because her passport had been taken from her on her arrival for the pageant, she was unable to leave the contest following the incident.  Later when she was able to return to Switzerland, she declined to participate in an additional Trump-sponsored pageant. The Democrats’ report also includes allegations that it was Epstein, rather than Paolo Zampolli, who introduced Melania to Trump which might explain the odd, hastily scheduled press conference that Melania held in April where she denied rumors linking her to Epstein while explicitly “clarifying” that Epstein did not introduce her to Donald. No wonder Trump is freaking out about the likelihood that Democrats retake the House. Expect more 💩storms from Trump going forward.