I don’t know if there’s a count of corrupt Trump officials and cronies but if there is, it’s voluminous:

A former Chicago bank executive was convicted on Tuesday of financial crimes related to his facilitation of millions of dollars in high-risk loans to Paul Manafort, all in an effort to obtain a coveted position in the Trump administration.

A jury in New York unanimously found the banker, Stephen M. Calk, 54, guilty of one count each of financial institution bribery and conspiracy to commit financial institution bribery.

The charges stemmed from Mr. Calk’s use of his position as chairman and chief executive of the Federal Savings Bank to push the bank to give $16 million in loans in 2016 to Mr. Manafort, who served as chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign during a key stretch.

Just after the election, Mr. Calk sent Mr. Manafort a list of 10 positions ranked in order of preference, including Treasury secretary, commerce secretary and defense secretary, as well as 19 ambassadorships, which he also ranked, starting with Britain, France, Germany and Italy.

In a statement after the conviction, Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said Mr. Calk “used the federally-insured bank he ran as his personal piggy bank to try and buy himself prestige and power.”

At the time of the loans, Mr. Manafort was trying to stave off foreclosure on several properties and was pressed for cash to support an opulent lifestyle after a stream of payments from Ukrainian consulting clients ran dry.

Mr. Manafort made two calls on Mr. Calk’s behalf in late 2016 to officials on Mr. Trump’s transition team, urging them to appoint Mr. Calk secretary of the Army, prosecutors said. Mr. Calk was interviewed at Trump Tower in 2017 for a job as under secretary of the Army, but was not hired.

Mr. Manafort, 72, was identified as a co-conspirator in the case against Mr. Calk, but he was not charged. He was, however, convicted of 10 felonies in 2018, including bank fraud related to the loans, in two cases brought by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

I guess this is just another in a long line of consequences for people who saw the opportunity to grift from the King of the Grifters himself. Many of them evaded the worst of them. Like Manafort himself:

Mr. Manafort’s seven-year prison sentence disappeared in December when Mr. Trump pardoned him.

Others, like this one, not so much.

Salon reporter Zachary Petrizzo went to CPAC and caught up with his phone buddy Mike LIndell:

While taking in the carnivalesque sights and of CPAC early on Sunday afternoon, I noticed Lindell by his booth on the conference floor. I approached and introduced myself, beginning to ask some of the questions he has avoided answering during our multiple phone conversations.

Much of the following exchange was captured on video and later posted by Raw Story. “I’m going to tell you something, and I’m going to tell everybody,” Lindell began. “In our country’s history, every single election official, if there’s fraud involved, there’s not a statute of limitations. They take the guy that won, and they put him back in office, and it’s just never happened at the presidential level.” (In fact, cases of courts overturning certified elections at any level are vanishingly rare. At the federal level, it is likely a legal and constitutional impossibility.)

“The Supreme Court will vote 9-0 to pull this [the election] down,” Lindell continued. “And you can sit here and go, ‘Come on, Mike.’ You know what? I’m just telling you what’s going to happen, and if it doesn’t happen — if they don’t watch it, that’s when the whole public is going to go, ‘You have to protect our country.'” 

Lindell continued explaining his proposed path to reinstate former President Donald Trump, which he has been discussing for months. His original deadline of an Aug. 13 deadline for Trump to return to power is now barely a month away.

Nearing the end of the interview, I asked Lindell about the raw data he claims to possess relating to the 2020 election, specifically the “packet-captures” (PCAPS) he has mentioned on several occasions. If the information is so explosive, I wondered, why doesn’t he share it with the media?

“Sorry, Zachary. Sorry, Zachary,” he responded, dodging the question by repeatedly asking whether I enjoy “destroying this country.”

The kicker:

Later on Sunday afternoon, Salon learned from sources close to Lindell that he participated in a behind-the-scenes roundtable event with Trump ahead of the former president’s keynote address. 

The Republican Party has nothing to say about this nut remaining in their Dear Leader’s inner circle.

This piece from Josh Marshall discuses and important sea change in the political establishment. It illustrates what these “both sides” types were trying to avoid being accused of — and why it was always a fools game:

On Thursday the Chairman of the Republican party of Virginia asked the University of Virginia, the state’s flagship public university, to open an investigation into Professor Larry Sabato for violating the University’s code of ‘Professional Conduct and Ethics’ with his “bitter partisanship.” UVA responded telling the Virginia GOP, in so many words, to STFU.

The most obvious and but also merited thing to say would be to castigate Rich Anderson, Chairman of the Virginia GOP, for his comical level of hypocrisy. After all this is the party currently defining itself as the party of ‘free speech’ trying to muzzle a highly respected senior professor and public commentator over what amounts to a few mean tweets. But let’s be honest. Hypocrisy is the closest thing the Trump Era GOP has to a defining brand. It doesn’t matter that I do it because your side did it worse! I’m the victim. Rinse and repeat. Blah, blah, blah …

But there’s something more worth saying about this nonsensical story.

Years ago – and in some case until quite recently – there was a group of commentators who the prestige news shows relied on for non-partisan, “both sides” commentary on the politics of the day. Two of the most visible – especially on shows like The NewsHour were Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, two think tank political scientists from AEI and Brookings respectively. Another was presidential historian Michael Beschloss. Another was Larry Sabato. Ornstein and Mann tended to focus on the function of Congress; Beschloss, the presidency; Sabato, federal elections. But they each covered the full terrain of contemporary politics. If you go back through 20-plus years of my writing the Editors’ Blog you’ll probably find some criticism of each of them, almost certainly precisely because of this studious effort to see the country’s two political parties in equal terms and treat them as such, even as the evidence for that perspective steadily dwindled.

In many ways TPM was begun, right on the heels of 1998/99 Impeachment and the 2000 election, with a sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit argument that the two parties are simply not equal. They don’t function in the same way. Despite its history and current branding the modern GOP is not just another center-right party of government, such as exists under different labels in every functioning modern democracy. It’s something different. It now functions like one of the revanchist, rightist sectarian parties which also exist in most multi-party European democracies. Under the most generous read they play different roles. The fact that the GOP is substantively the latter (rightist sectarian party) while structurally occupying the space of the former (center-right party of government) is the essence of the United States’ current crisis of democracy.

Then in the spring of 2012 Mann and Ornstein published an OpEd in The Washington Post: “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem“. The title speaks for itself but if you wanted more you could read the book that it was adapted from It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. Ornstein’s twitter feed is now so blistering in its criticism of contemporary conservatism and the GOP that it makes me blush. Beschloss now has a priceless Twitter feed made up largely of historical artifacts, photos, commemorations almost all of which function as subtweets of Trump, Trumpism or some related manifestation of the contemporary GOP.

Sabato was in many ways the final holdout. In an interview with The Richmond Times-Dispatch for an article about the state GOP investigation demand, Sabato chalked the shift up to Trump and the January 6th insurrection. “People had better pay attention because if they don’t, it’s going to happen again.”

Reading over this post I can see that some might read it as a claim of vindication. Far from it. It is a more a testament to the Republican party. It is a good and proper thing to have a mode of commentary that is as free as possible not only of partisan commitments but the ideological commitments and opinions which are closely situated to the political contests of the moment. It is useful. But especially in the early 21st century the Republican party has simply given people who want to occupy this ground no place to stand. The culture of lying is simply too deep in the fabric. The rejection of democracy itself, let alone the culture of norms in which it best thrives, is too total.

And thus here we are.

This is absolutely true and it’s been true for a long time.

I really appreciated Ornstein and Mann’s early recognition of what was going on, but like Marshall I honestly I saw this gross form of right revanchist politics emerging for two decades prior. Limbaugh was a huge influence on the party, giving licence to GOP voters to indulge every crude, sophomoric, hostile impulse they ever had going all the way back to the early 1990s. Newt Gingrich was instructing Republicans to sabotage bipartisanship and demean their opponents as “depraved” and “degenerate.” They used every lever of power (which was in the hands of the candidate’s own brother and a supreme court majority appointed by the candidate’s own father) to win the 2000 election, started a war based on lies and institutionalized torture and war crimes, among dozens of other atrocities, and the mainstream establishment all the while tut-tutted the dirty hippies of the left for trying to call attention to it.

I welcome all right wing and formerly “neutral” apostates to the Popular Front to save American democracy. Better late than never I say. But it’s important to note that some of them were very late to the party and as a result we need to skeptical of their judgement. Plenty of people on the left and center-left saw all this coming in real time. (You can read it in my archives going back almost 20 years.)

I guess we were all premature anti-Trumpists.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

― George Orwell, 1984

https://t.co/be6qIcfNHc pic.twitter.com/UpqxMO0FhE

— Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) July 13, 2021

Yep:

[Alex] Berenson, who has appeared on Fox News primetime dozens of times and even filmed a special for Fox News’ streaming service, appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to respond. Prior to interviewing the spy novelist, Carlson took it upon himself to attack The Atlantic for having the temerity to fact-check Berenson’s dubious claims.

“It should not surprise you that The Atlantic magazine, one of the most craven and corrupted pieces of garbage in journalism, has a new cover story out this week—in fact, I believe today—attacking Alex Berenson, because he read from a different script, and that can’t be allowed!” Carlson exclaimed.

“He joins us on our set tonight to respond to this predictable, I don’t even know if it is annoying, it is so dumb, but assess this hit piece on you,” the Fox News star added.

Berenson, meanwhile, claimed that Thompson had “entirely missed the point” before once again trying to make the case that the vaccines “have not worked quite as well or quite as quickly as people had hoped in a place like Israel”—despite the fact that Israel has had roaring success with its vaccinations, resulting in a nearly wide open economy and plummeting COVID-19 cases.

“The story I’m telling is pretty coherent, and I really do encourage anybody who wants to know where I really stand on this to get the booklet and read it for yourself,” Berenson said at one point, hawking his online “Unreported Truths” books.

Tucker says he’s “only asking questions.”

He is lying of course.

Before #MeToo became a potent cultural force, women at Fox News were ringing the alarms about powerful men in Broadcasting and Entertainment. Everyone knows about Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly — movies and TV series have been made about them. But Andrea Mackris was the first one to blow the whistle on the fetid swamp when she accused Bill O’Reilly of very serious sexual harassment and had the tapes to prove it.

Like Carlson before her, she signed a settlement that contained an NDA and O’Reilly went on to harass a whole bunch of other women before finally being canned for doing it.

17 years later she’s breaking the NDA, describing herself as being under tremendous pressure at the time to sign it by her own lawyers as well as Fox’s and O’Reilly’s. They dispute her account saying there was no pressure and she signed it willingly:

Yet Mackris’ older brother Lou said he recalled his sister recounting her experience in Kasowitz’s boardroom shortly after it occurred. “She felt pressured, rushed, and forced to sign the NDA. Backed into a corner. There was no other option for her,” Lou Mackris told The Daily Beast. “It wasn’t about a settlement for her. She wanted this to stop and go back to work. Obviously, that didn’t happen.”

And Mackris’ former therapist, psychiatric social worker David Schwing, also recalled that she told him about the negotiations in real time. “The lawyers made her feel like she was crazy and were really screaming at her and she was screaming,” he said. “She was talking to me about it as her therapist because she couldn’t tell anyone else. One of them was screaming with his hands on the desk and the other was playing good cop. It’s been years but it was really traumatizing for her.”

It wasn’t just the lawyers. Mackris told The Daily Beast that she felt traumatized by opinion pieces attacking her credibility by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (dismissively titled “The Nonsense Factor”) and the Philadelphia Daily News’ Michael Smerconish (“The case against Bill O’Reilly is bogus,” wrote Smerconish, an occasional O’Reilly Factor guest and substitute host on his radio show) as well as by lurid headlines in the New York Post trashing her reputation (“‘LUNATIC’ O’REILLY GAL WENT NUTS IN A BAR,” screamed one). Yet Mackris ultimately signed the agreement.

Besides her silence, it required O’Reilly to drop his preemptive lawsuit claiming that she and her lawyers had attempted to extort him out of $60 million in hush money—an allegation she vigorously denies—but also permitted her alleged harasser to go on the air that night and act like the injured party for viewers of the top-rated The O’Reilly Factor: “This brutal ordeal is now officially over, and I will never speak of it again. This matter has caused enormous pain, but I had to protect my family, and I did. All I can say to you is please do not believe everything you hear and read.” O’Reilly added that there was “no wrongdoing in the case whatsoever by anyone.”

It’s a line Fredric S. Newman, who identified himself as O’Reilly’s litigation counsel, repeats today. In a letter to The Daily Beast, he claimed that “Ms. Mackris issued a public statement in 2004 in which she stated that ‘there was no wrongdoing whatsoever by Mr. O’Reilly.’”

Not true, Mackris, said: “I didn’t release a statement, he did. It was part of the NDA on October 28, 2004. I had no choice, no way out. He uses it to abuse me. That same document says Bill won’t breach, which he’s done over and over, calling me a liar. It cuts both ways.”’

In his letter, Newman also threatened to sue Mackris, The Daily Beast, the authors of this article personally, “and anyone else who acted in concert with you in connection with your proposed story.”

What he did not do—and what O’Reilly’s 2004 statement conspicuously lacked—was offer an apology, much less an acknowledgement of the behavior memorialized on Mackris’ audio recordings (which were promptly destroyed under the settlement terms), while executives at Fox News never held him accountable. “The company made billions of dollars over those 13 years of not investigating Bill,” Mackris said.

She had filed her stunning lawsuit against one of the richest and most formidable men in television news. And she had done it years before Gretchen Carlson’s 2016 sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit resulted in the professional demise of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, which was itself a precursor to the #MeToo movement that brought down movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, network news stars Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, CBS chairman Leslie Moonves, and so many others.

In the years since, Mackris has suffered the fate of many women in a variety of industries who have had the audacity to call out their more powerful male harassers, only to be legally gagged, psychically wounded, and discarded by the people in charge and society at large. She realizes, of course, that speaking to The Daily Beast about her own ordeal can be interpreted as violating her NDA, risking potential legal consequences.

“I may not get the past 17 years back,” she reflected, “but there is one way I can retrieve my power from this storm of lies, loss, greed and grief. It’s the same thing I did back in 2004 before Fox, Bill O’Reilly and their teams of willing executioners bound me to a contract that promises to ruin whatever is left of me if I dare do it again. Tell the truth. Walk free.”

After the lawsuit settlement, O’Reilly continued to thrive at Fox News for more than a dozen years as management rewarded him with increasingly lucrative contracts while he co-authored a series of popular history books published by Macmillan, and even made multiple friendly television appearances alongside Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. That is, until his record of sexual misconduct and multimillion-dollar payouts to his victims finally caught up with him in a New York Times investigation that forced a reluctant Rupert Murdoch to cut O’Reilly loose with a statement praising him as “one of the most accomplished TV personalities in the history of cable news,” plus a $25 million golden parachute.

This was the sort of thing she endured:

Dinners involving O’Reilly and women on his staff were common, Mackris said. “It was never untoward initially, especially in Philly.” She said she didn’t consider the possibility that O’Reilly had been grooming her for something less innocent. “There were 500 reasons for me not to think that way… I’d met his family. I’d been to his house. It just wasn’t part of my thinking.”

Things changed, however, when Mackris broke up with her live-in boyfriend of eight years, her then-fiancé, a lawyer with whom she shared a pricey apartment on the Upper West Side. The breakup was devastating enough. But when he moved out, she was earning $56,000 a year and couldn’t make the rent.

Mackris recounted: “I went to Bill Shine and I said to him, ‘Listen, I don’t know how to do this, but I have to ask for a raise… I don’t make enough to pay a basic rent in Manhattan and my student loans. I don’t want to have to leave to get the six figures I would get at CNN. I would really rather stay here, and that’s not a threat, I would really rather stay here.’”

Shine responded that he would speak to O’Reilly, who promptly invited her to dinner. It was May 2002.

At the restaurant, “he started to hit on me,” Mackris recalled.

“He was talking about vibrators and masturbating and he needed a younger lover. It came out of left field. He had never spoken to me like that. I’m raised by a very conservative Christian family. We didn’t really talk about the birds and the bees—kind of ‘we were dropped by the stork.’ Nobody talked like this. I certainly never had conversations like this with any guys I had known. I barely dated growing up. Daniel [her former fiancé] was my first real boyfriend. We’re pretty conservative people when it comes to sex and stuff.”

O’Reilly’s shocking sexual talk “wasn’t in my wheelhouse and it was like, what the hell is going on in front of me? And my body was on fire. I’m sure I was turning bright red. I remember walking out and he said, ‘Stick with me and you’ll go far.’…

“I remember thinking this person had my entire life in his hands. I’m alone in New York now. I didn’t have my ex—the love of my life, the man I thought I was going to marry, and all of this was blowing up. And here’s my boss who’s turning a really weird corner with me. He never ever had been talking sexually, and then all of the sudden he was getting pretty explicit, and then he’s like ‘I’ve got your back,’ and it was financial.”

Mackris went on: “Those dinners continued. They were never my idea. They were always his idea. When these young millennial women say, ‘Well, I just say no.’ I’m like ‘Well, that’s fucking fantastic for you. I’d love for you to do that to Bill O’Reilly.’”

For a miserable six months from January to July of 2004, Mackris did leave Fox News for CNN, where she was assigned to work for Ailes nemesis Paula Zahn, who had enraged the Fox News chairman by jumping to the rival network. On the phone, she complained to her former boss, “Bill, I hate it here. This place is a mess. I really want to come back,” and O’Reilly persuaded Ailes to allow it, and sweetened her salary by hiring her for his radio show in addition to her Fox News employment.

But by August, as she worked on O’Reilly’s broadcasts from the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden, the sexual harassment had resumed: “It was the last night of the convention and we’d been working really hard all week, it was a real grind, and it was late at night. I’d gone on the subway and when I got out, I already had a message from him, so I figured immediately it was work-related. It was not. He was almost immediately masturbating, talking about all kinds of stuff, and a dildo up the butt.”

Mackris said she frequently tried to get O’Reilly to stop. “Because I was a confident, ambitious, smart, young lady and I said no, and no, and no, and no. I really thought I had been clear. I thought it had been more than obvious where I was coming from with him, and it did not matter. When you’re dealing with a malignant narcissist, who is a sexual predator, you saying no is really not the point. He’s not listening. So, it didn’t matter what I did. It wasn’t about me.

Read the whole thing at the Daily Beast. It is chilling.

I understand that Trump and O’Reilly are teaming up and going on the road for a series of paid “conversations.” Maybe Makris and E. Jean Carroll and some of the other dozens of women those two disgusting pigs harassed, assaulted and raped over the years should go on the road with them.

Trump is as disappointed in his Justices as he is in his Generals:

Former President Donald Trump, in a book out Tuesday by Michael Wolff, says he is “very disappointed” in votes by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, his own hard-won nominee, and that he “hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice.”

Driving the news: “There were so many others I could have appointed, and everyone wanted me to,” Trump told Wolff in an interview for the cheekily titled “Landslide.”

“Where would he be without me? I saved his life. He wouldn’t even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him.”

Between the lines: After the election, as Axios’ Jonathan Swan reported in his “Off the Rails” series, Trump saved his worst venom for people who he believed owed him because he got them their jobs.

He would rant endlessly about the treachery of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, reminding people of how he shot up in the primary polls after Trump endorsed him.

Over lunches in the private dining room adjoining the Oval Office, Trump used to reminisce about how he saved Kavanaugh by sticking by him.

For Kavanaugh to not do Trump’s bidding on the matter of ultimate importance — overturning the election — was, in Trump’s mind, a betrayal of the highest order.

Wolff writes that Trump feels betrayed by all three justices he put on the court, including Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, but “reserved particular bile for Kavanaugh.”

Recalling the brutal confirmation fight, Trump said: “Practically every senator called me … and said, ‘Cut him loose, sir, cut him loose. He’s killing us, Kavanaugh.’ … I said, ‘I can’t do that.'”

“I had plenty of time to pick somebody else,” Trump continued. “I went through that thing and fought like hell for Kavanaugh — and I saved his life, and I saved his career. At great expense to myself … okay? I fought for that guy and kept him.”

“I don’t want anything … but I am very disappointed in him, in his rulings,” Trump said.

“I can’t even believe what’s happening. I’m very disappointed in Kavanaugh. I just told you something I haven’t told a lot of people. In retrospect, he just hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice. I’m basing this on more than just the election.”

He was very clear before the election that he expected “his” court to subvert the constitution and do what he wanted them to do. That’s how it worked in the Trump administration, right? Just ask Allen Weisselberg:

He rolled out this talk of “courage” at yesterday’s Operation Warp Speed summit: https://t.co/UgvvpWWTI1 pic.twitter.com/ZPVMtHED5B

— Mike Sacks (@MikeSacksEsq) December 10, 2020

What the Trump Judges and Mitch McConnell and Leonard Leo and Don McGahn always knew was that Trump was the means, not the end, for the conservative legal movement; and the Judiciary, not Trumpism, best secures the conservative political movement's the survival and success.

IOW

Trump’s about to find out FedSoc used him more than he used them

— Mike Sacks (@MikeSacksEsq) November 22, 2020

Of course state GOP lawmakers and many Republican voters think differently, and just because SCOTUS didn't flip the election for Trump in 2020 doesn't mean they will lift a finger come to 2024 to stop an antidemocratic-but-legal coup

100 Democracy Scholars https://t.co/wcqqR95Bx7 pic.twitter.com/coRrsxStv2

— Mike Sacks (@MikeSacksEsq) June 1, 2021

Originally tweeted by Mike Sacks (@MikeSacksEsq) on July 13, 2021.

Of course they won’t lift a finger. They will help.

A federal judge took Team Kraken to the woodshed in a Zoom hearing on Monday over their misuse of judicial process to undermine Joe Biden’s November 2020 presidential victory on loser Donald Trump’s behalf. I didn’t catch it all, but what I did see was priceless:

U.S. District Judge Linda V. Parker said she would rule on a request to discipline the lawyers in coming weeks. But over and over again during the more than five-hour hearing, she pointedly pressed the lawyers involved — including Trump allies Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood — to explain what steps they had taken to ensure their court filings in the case filed last year had been accurate. She appeared astonished by many of their answers.

While their suit aimed to create a broad impression that the vote in Michigan — and specifically Detroit’s Wayne County — had been troubled, the affidavits filed to support those claims included obvious errors, speculation and basic misunderstandings of how elections are generally conducted in the state, Parker said.

“There’s a duty that counsel has that when you’re submitting a sworn statement . . . that you have reviewed it, that you had done some minimal due diligence,” she said.

Probably not a great sign for Lin Wood and Sidney Powell in their election fraud sanctions hearing that one of their main lawyers appears to be crying.

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) July 12, 2021

The groups efforts were part of a national strategy of challenging certified election results in state after state that Trump lost last November. Trump and his supporters claimed, “We have so much evidence” supporting “widespread, nationwide voter fraud.” What they had was less than vaporware.

If Parker decides to discipline the lawyers, she could require them to pay the fees of their opponents in the case, the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials. But she could also go further — assessing additional monetary penalties or recommending grievance proceedings be opened that could result in banning the attorneys from practicing in Michigan or disbarring them altogether.

[…]

One of the first substantial repercussions came last month, when a committee of judges in New York state suspended the law license of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as Trump’s personal attorney. The committee found that Giuliani had “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large” in violation of his ethical obligations as an attorney.

Giuliani, Powell, and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell are being sued in a 1.3 billion series of defamation suits brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion accuses the trio of a “viral disinformation campaign” alleging the company’s machines flipped Trump votes to Biden.

“If you tell me you're going to release the kraken, show me the freaking kraken for crying out loud….And don't tell me to go to Mr. Pillow man's website…." pic.twitter.com/tBWu0JeoQ7

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) July 12, 2021

The judge noted that one observer stated in an affidavit that she believed she saw election workers switching votes from Trump to Biden. Parker asked whether any of the lawyers had spoken to the witness and inquired what exactly she saw that led her to believe that votes had been switched. She was greeted with silence.

“Anyone?” she asked again.

When no one answered a second time, she said: “Let the record reflect that no one made that inquiry, which was central to [the] allegation.”

She focused on another statement from a witness who swore he saw individuals placing clear plastic bags into a mail truck — and said he believed the bags “could be ballots” headed for Detroit’s counting facility.

The judge called that allegation “really fantastical” and “speculative.”

“I don’t think I’ve really ever seen an affidavit that has made so many leaps,” she said. “My question to counsel here is, how could any of you as officers of the court present this type of an affidavit?”

Julia Haller, one of the lawyers who filed the original suit, responded that the statement accurately reflected what the man believed he had seen and that the affidavits should be viewed collectively as suggesting a “pattern of fraud.”

“The very fact that we filed 960 affidavits with our complaint shows extraordinary due diligence on our part,” Powell said.

Powell claims to possess nearly a thousand affidavits from people who saw something they thought meant something about which they knew nothing. That is, what the Krakens lacked in quality, they tried to make up with quantity.

Parker told Powell flatly that volume does not imply legitimacy.

DavidFink, a lawyer for the city of Detroit, told the judge Monday that the lawsuit had helped undermine faith in the election and helped lead directly to the Jan. 6 attack. “We can’t undo what happened, but this court can do something to let the world know that attorneys in this country are not free to use our courts to tell lies,” he said.

Forbes adds:

Powell and Wood spread baseless conspiracy theories in the wake of the election and alleged widespread fraud, leading even the Trump Administration and campaign to distance themselves from Powell and helping fringe theories about election fraud to gain steam on the far right. The Michigan lawsuit is one of four battleground lawsuits Powell filed—all of which failed, including at the U.S. Supreme Court—and Wood also brought his own failed lawsuit in Georgia. In addition to the Michigan sanctions decision, Powell is also facing sanctions and attorneys fees in Wisconsin and a separate effort by Michigan officials to have her disbarred, as well as two defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. Wood is now under investigation from the State Bar of Georgia over his post-election conduct, which could result in him being disbarred.

This entire disinformation campaign has been a fantastical web of lies.

The reason the country is in such as state of decay now is that for decades we as a country have refused to hold a certain class of scoundrel accountable for their crimes and destructive public mischief. Judge Parker has a chance to turn that around, at least outside Washington, D.C. New York’s legal hammer is descending on the Trump crime family. More needs doing inside the Beltway. Perhaps if Parker leads the way, others there might grow a spine.

Whomp ‘em up! Side ‘o the head! I said, whomp ‘em up side ‘o the head!
— a cheer heard in high school

I’m gonna have to turn in my progressive credential by the end of this, but….

Brian Beutler over at Crooked Media suggests Democrats need to change with the times. He got pushback in early December for tweeting that after 2008, the right’s “plan was to sabotage the economic recovery. This time, it’s to sabotage recovery from plague.” People of the left still have trouble wrapping their brains around the notion that “leaders of a major U.S. political faction would lay waste to innocent life for short-term partisan gain.” Remember: There is no bottom for Republicans to hit.

Beutler runs through a decade or so of recent history to make his point that, as much as Democrats think electoral contests are about kitchen-table issues and sound policy, Republicans run on culture war nonsense. They are playing a different game entirely. And with too little blowback at the polls, it works for them.

Meanwhile, Democrats cannot get traction running on responsible governance and popular policies. Republicans dominate the battle space with manufactured outrage while Democrats play defense. If they defend at all. They’d rather not dignify Republican disinformation attacks until the damage is already done. Then it’s too late. Beutler illustrates with a graph.

Democrats need to make Republicans pay a penalty, Beutler argues. The desperate attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the testosterone-gun-and-camo displays, the manufactured outrage over critical race theory, etc., exist because the white-right knows it is losing its cultural dominance. Republicans have no desire to govern. Republicans have no policy answers. They cannot win if people vote, so they are doubling down on vote suppression and their culture wars. Republicans are losers. Democrats should lean into that.

For example, Beutler cites:

if i were a democrat i would simply point out that republicans want to look at your childrens genitals before they play sports and put cameras in their classrooms so they can stare at your kids all day

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) July 7, 2021

Beutler writes:

I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t the most elevated stuff in the world; there are a lot of smart people in Democratic politics and most of them don’t want to spend their days contemplating how to outmaneuver Republicans in the realm of brutish messaging. But there’s no less honor in that than in clinging to the belief that politics is an elevated calling, only to lose elections when Republicans decide to make them about outlandish, in many cases fictional things. 

He offers a too-inconvenient truth (emphasis mine):

When I started in this business in the mid-aughts, blogs were all the rage, and the liberal blogosphere flourished on the premise that the ultimate purpose of politics should be to improve people’s lives through the enactment and implementation of good policy. That insight was correct and decent, and holds true all these many years later. It’s why Biden’s infrastructure agenda matters! But some of the same wonky minds ultimately convinced themselves that the inverse is also true; that the hidden upshot of good policy is that it makes for great politics. 

This should have struck these very smart people as suspiciously convenient. If it were true as a rule, we might expect that the passage of the American Rescue Plan, one of the most popular and consequential kitchen-table policies in history, had made Democrats politically bulletproof. In reality, it had no discernible impact on Biden’s popularity whatsoever.

And if you think about it for more than just a second, you realize it’d be a huge coincidence if both of these things happened to be right. The end goal of politics could after all be many things: the common good, liberty, group dominance, scientific innovation. The wonkosphere formed around one I agree with: the common good. But the other question—what’s the ideal politics for building power to advance political end goals?—is separate, and you could answer in many ways: divide and conquer, conciliation, pandering to the fevered imaginations of swing voters, technocratic excellence in pursuit of the common good. The wonks quite conspicuously decided that their calling in life also happened to be self-actualizing. It’s not impossible to imagine that being the case, but it is improbable. The kind of tidy theory one arrives at through motivated reasoning: both the means and the ends of politics happen to be the same things that bring me professional and intellectual satisfaction.

I marveled at how many 1990s New Agers sought to monetize their spiritual journeys. I’ve written about the campaign industrial complex by which enthusiastic young politicos work their ways into professional politics by not rocking boats … until they run for office already the kind of milquetoast Democrat big donors love and activists hate. I sat in a trainers meet-up at Netroots-Philadelphia (2019), and virtually everyone (with the exception of three) had gone from being campaign volunteers to marketing digital services to candidates.

To extend Beutler’s point, sometimes politics is grittier than business cards and intellectual satisfaction. Voters don’t care that you’ve checked every box on some progressive org’s questionnaire and have a killer digital campaign. Sometimes winning (and advancing your ultimate goals) requires getting your hands dirty with stuff that is not self-actualizing.

But political wonks want to make the Olympics on the strength of their sports visualization technology. They expect to be competitive when they show up with no physical conditioning and no skills. Developing those is not as intellectually stimulating.

That’s why I have I have my corner of election mechanics to myself. There’s no money in it, it’s not tech-heavy, and teaching under-resourced county committees how to put on their political pants on one leg at a time and tie their shoelaces (ideally in that order) is not a promising way to land a job in D.C. Why do it? Because there’s nobody else to do it.

That’s not the way we think things should be, but it is the way things are. Democrats need to dump the motivated reasoning and mix it up with Republicans more, Beutler suggests. As I’ve said, too, voters want to see that Democrats will fight. Beutler concludes that Democrats need to be less high-minded:

In the face of this belief, election after election has come and gone, and few if any have turned on the substantive policies that came into existence over the preceding two years, or that the candidates in those elections promised to support going forward. More often they turned on whose passions had been stirred the most. So ask yourself, which is the more galvanizing appeal: 1. The other side (sotto voce: which stole the last election and murdered the hero who could have stopped them) seeks to control your lives, and the life of the American mind, or 2. We passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill with those people!

Unless Dems swap out option 2 for something a little more responsive to the passions of the moment, I think I know the answer. The election won’t be about both of these things. One or the other will take hold. And what’s at stake is whether a major U.S. political party can turn their countrymen into cannon fodder for a deadly virus, embrace an attempted coup…and win.

In 2022, Democrats have a chance to win a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina. Several candidates have thrown their hats into the ring, including former state supreme court chief justice, Cheri Beasley. She lost her reelection race in 2020 by 401 votes out of 5.5 million cast. She was mentioned as a possible Biden Supreme Court pick.

Someone asked me where she stands on Medicare for All. I don’t know and I don’t care. Judge Beasley has no legislative record (although I’m pretty sure what she feels about voting rights). Beasley is an accomplished Black woman with a sterling reputation who, if she wins the primary, will be at the top of the state’s ticket in an off-year election. Galvanizing Black women to vote as they did in the South Carolina primary for Joe Biden will mean the difference between winning the seat and losing it. And when lawmakers vote in the well of the U.S. Senate, they don’t count ideologies. They count heads. Democrats need more heads in the Senate or our policy aspirations are dead, and so are a lot of fellow Americans.

The gloves need to come off. Mix it up, people.

This is where the Big Lie gets real:

The 2020 election is by far the #1 topic of Trump’s current dishonesty. But he’s also doing more and more lying about what happened at the Capitol on January 6. https://t.co/cGR59vILQz

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 12, 2021

Yep.

More from the Washington Post:

Former President Trump failed to secure a second term in office via lawsuits contesting the Nov. 3 election, a Capitol riot by his supporters or all this whacked-out chatter about “reinstatement.” Yet that doesn’t mean that he can’t still act out one of the rituals of his years in office.

Like gabbing his way through opposition-free interviews with Fox News hosts.

“Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo activated this particular time machine, showing how little concern her network has for documented reality that grinds against the Trump agenda. The two chitchatted for nearly a half-hour, with Bartiromo guiding the conversation to the former president’s safe, conspiratorial spaces. She has experience in this, of course: Just weeks after the 2020 election, Bartiromo hosted Trump in the midst of his legal challenges to Joe Biden’s victory, which had been confirmed by the data folks at Fox News itself. In that session, she propelled Trump’s fantasies about a stolen election.

The backlash over such moments appears to have unsettled Bartiromo, given the gripe that she articulated in Sunday’s “interview” with Trump: “Today, we are facing a situation where you’re not even allowed to discuss any of this. You get attacked on social media if you raise any irregularities,” she said.

Or: You get attacked on social media when you let the president continue lying with impunity. Here are some examples from Sunday’s episode:

1) “And what it is, is, they’re taking away your freedom of speech. They are taking away your right to speak.”

The Skinny: Here, Trump was referencing the tech giants Twitter, Facebook and Google — a trio that he sued last week for alleged “censorship.” Social media companies may, indeed, boot people from their platforms. Those people, of course, are free to exercise their free-speech rights elsewhere, including the nearest street corner. Folks with a high-school-level civics education know all that

2) “But when you say they work with government, they work with Democrats within government and, frankly, outside of government. They work with the Democrats. It’s a Democrat machine. It should be a campaign contribution, the largest ever made.”

The Skinny: The argument that Big Tech is a Democratic monolith runs into some static when considering that Facebook has long functioned as a springboard for right-wing disinformation.

3) “I had suggested to the secretary of defense, perhaps we should have 10,000 National Guardsmen standing by. And he reported that, as you know, but I — we should have — and he was turned down. I said, it’s subject to Congress. They run it. Nancy Pelosi runs it.”

The Skinny: Powerful though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may be, she cannot deploy the D.C. National Guard, whose own website states, “The D.C. National Guard is the only National Guard unit, out of all of the 54 states and territories, which reports only to the President.”

4) “We won this election in a landslide. We got 12 million more votes, Maria.”

The Skinny: Have a look at the transcript from this moment:TRUMP: We won this election in a landslide. We got 12 million more votes, Maria …BARTIROMO: Yes.TRUMP: … 12 million more than I got the last time …BARTIROMO: Yes.TRUMP: … the last time I won. This was a rigged election. And the people aren’t standing for it. So, we will go forward.

5) “We were very disappointed by the Supreme Court, because they didn’t have the courage to take it up. They didn’t want anything to do with it.”

The Skinny: Some context here — the Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election was among approximately 60 losses in court for Trump and his allies in the period between the Nov. 3 election and the mid-December counting of the electoral college votes.

6) “In fact, they just came out with a report in Congress, and they didn’t mention my name, literally.”

The Skinny: The Senate last month released a report on official failures relating to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. There are more than 40 mentions of Trump in the document, including this one, on p. 26: “Following the states’ certification, President Trump continued to assert that the election was stolen from him.”

7) “I will tell you they know who shot Ashli Babbitt. They’re protecting that person. I have heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official, a Democrat.”

The Skinny: Ashli Babbitt is the 35-year-old Air Force veteran who was killed as she attempted to jump through a broken doorway in a Capitol hallway. As described in a Justice Department news release, Babbitt was “among a mob of people that entered the Capitol building and gained access to a hallway outside ‘Speaker’s Lobby,’ which leads to the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. At the time, the [U.S. Capitol Police] was evacuating Members from the Chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways,” reads the Justice Department release. The document identifies the person “involved” in Babbitt’s shooting as a “U.S. Capitol Police officer.”

8) “There was also a lovefest between the police, the Capitol Police, and the people that walked down to the Capitol.”

The Skinny: “You’re gonna die tonight,” screamed one of the rioters at a police officer in a video recently released by the FBI. From a CBS News report: “The Justice Department said at least 165 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including more than 50 who were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.”

9) “If they’re going to do this very partisan investigation, because they couldn’t get support to do a straight investigation, a big part of that investigation is the reason that people went to Washington. And that’s because of the fraudulent presidential election of 2020. And that has to be a part of it.”

The Skinny: Have a look at the transcript surrounding this fraudulent remark by Trump:

TRUMP: If they’re going to do this very partisan investigation, because they couldn’t get support to do a straight investigation, a big part of that investigation is the reason that people went to Washington.And that’s because of the fraudulent presidential election of 2020. And that has to be a part of it.

BARTIROMO: Yes.

TRUMP: And everybody that got there, I think, on the one side, those people want to talk about the reason they were there, because, to me, that’s the biggest crime of all.We had a corrupt election. We had a rigged election. We had a stolen election. And that’s why you had over a million people march to Washington.

BARTIROMO: Yes.

10) “We had a corrupt election. We had a rigged election. We had a stolen election. And that’s why you had over a million people march to Washington.”

The Skinny: About 30,000 people were expected to rally at Trump’s Jan. 6 speech.

There are more of these examples, as CNN’s Marshall Cohen demonstrated on his Twitter account.

After six years of protracted network sycophancy, there should be little that’s shocking about a top Fox Newser laying out the welcome mat for Trump’s mendacity. Yet somehow there is. Across the network’s programming over the past six months, we’ve heard complaints about how the mainstream media doesn’t sufficiently press President Biden or his spokespeople on the controversies of the day. And the same network permits Trump a platform to repeat his well-rehearsed myths without intervention.

That institutional deference may well undergo a test in a couple of years, as Republican presidential contenders start pressuring Fox News for airtime. Will the network perform similar propaganda services for the entire GOP 2024 field, or just for Trump?

Bartiromo’s case, moreover, is peculiar in this regard: Her “big lie” activities late last year landed her prime real estate in the defamation lawsuits from two voting firms — Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems — seeking damages from Fox News for its numerous broadcasts linking the companies to a corrupt election.

The Smartmatic complaint even names Bartiromo herself as a defendant, and it includes extensive documentation showing how the host used her program in the weeks after the election to launder the baseless charges of Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, lawyers working to further Trump’s claims about the election. Dominion’s suit levels a similar allegation: “Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Sean Hannity also continued hosting Powell and Giuliani, giving them a platform to widely disseminate and repeat their lies about Dominion to a national (and, indeed, a global) audience, and embracing those lies as their own by endorsing and repeating them.”

Fox News has mustered vigorous defenses of its programming in both cases, stating in its Dominion response that it must cover both sides of a story. Okay, but both complaints present weighty defamation claims backed up by pages and pages of transcripts.

So Bartiromo has continued indulging the “big lie,” only now without mentioning the companies that have advanced defamation claims against her and Fox News.

You cannot see this as anything but rank intimidation of Black voters. It is outrageous, absolutely disgusting:

On Wednesday, Texas police arrested and charged Hervis Rogers, a 62-year-old Black man whose story of endurance despite voter suppression efforts went viral during the 2020 presidential primaries.

Rogers faces two felony counts of illegal voting for casting ballots before he’d fully completed his parole for a previous crime, scheduled to end June 13, 2020. Texas election code says people who receive felony convictions can vote only after they have completed their sentence, including parole. The law says if someone knowingly votes illegally, they can be found guilty of a crime. 

Rogers gained notoriety last March when he was the last person to cast a ballot at a Texas precinct where he’d waited seven hours. Rogers was widely celebrated for his commitment to voting despite ongoing racism embedded in Texas’ elections, in which officials routinely overburden and under-resourced precincts serving Black communities.

After his arrest last week, Rogers’ attorney Andre Segura said Rogers was unaware he was ineligible to vote and his prosecution should raise concerns. 

“The arrest and prosecution of Mr. Rogers should alarm all Texans,” said Segura, a lawyer with the Texas ACLU branch. “He faces potentially decades in jail. Our laws should not intimidate people from voting by increasing the risk of prosecution for, at worst, innocent mistakes. We will continue to fight for justice for Mr. Rogers and will push back against efforts to further restrict voting rights.”

Another attorney with the ACLU of Texas, Tommy Buser-Clancy, said Rogers potentially faces up to 40 years in prison. 

In 2007, then-Gov. Rick Perry vetoed a bill that would have required law enforcement officials to notify people charged with crimes when they became eligible to vote.

Please tell me the difference between these obscene laws and Vladimir Putin’s Russia? They seem to be pretty much the same thing to me.

While you have the GOP saying violent insurrectionists are being persecuted despite the fact that they are being held for assault and battery, their lapdogs in the state are doing things like this:

Rogers’ arrest harks back to the case of Crystal Mason, a Black Texan who was arrested after the 2016 election during which she cast a provisional ballot while she was ineligible to vote. The now-46-year-old woman said she was unaware of her ineligibility. Her appeal of the case is pending before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Rogers was being held in jail on $100,000 bond until receiving bail assistance from The Bail Project, a nonprofit organization that provides support to people charged with crimes who earn low incomes.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently under investigation by the Texas State Bar for filing an unsuccessful lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election, posted a tweet announcing his office would prosecute Rogers. Paxton remains one of the most prominent figures to back Donald Trump’s claims that widespread voter fraud in Black and brown communities cost Trump the 2020 election. In fact, there is no evidence voter fraud was a factor in the race, which Trump lost to Joe Biden. 

Still, inspired by Trump’s claims, conservatives across the country have worked more feverishly than usual to restrict ballot access ahead of the 2022 elections. Texas Republicans are hoping to enact some of the most restrictive voting measures in the country out of the hundreds that have been introduced since November.

Here we have the state stepping up to intimidate voters. And if the Texas GOP has its way they are going to be enlisting MAGA insurrectionist types to help:

In Texas, there is a long history of violent voter suppression by poll watchers, and thus, rising concern about vigilantes being empowered to act on anti-democratic rhetoric concerning who should be allowed to vote.