Month: October 2021

Following up on the post below, we now have a bit of a clue as to what Trump doesn’t want the January 6th Committee to see: messages like the ones described here:

As Vice President Mike Pence hid from a marauding mob during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, an attorney for President Donald Trump emailed a top Pence aide to say that Pence had caused the violence by refusing to block certification of Trump’s election loss.

The attorney, John C. Eastman, also continued to press for Pence to act even after Trump’s supporters had trampled through the Capitol — an attack the Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had described as a “siege” in their email exchange.

“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote to Jacob, referring to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

Eastman sent the email as Pence, who had been presiding in the Senate, was under guard with Jacob and other advisers in a secure area. Rioters were tearing through the Capitol complex, some of them calling for Pence to be executed.

Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel, included Eastman’s emailed remarks in a draft opinion article about Trump’s outside legal team that he wrote later in January but ultimately chose not to publish. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the draft. Jacob wrote that by sending the email at that moment, Eastman “displayed a shocking lack of awareness of how those practical implications were playing out in real time.”

Jacob’s draft article, Eastman’s emails and accounts of other previously undisclosed actions by Eastman offer new insight into the mind-sets of figures at the center of an episode that pushed American democracy to the brink. They show that Eastman’s efforts to persuade Pence to block Trump’s defeat were more extensive than has been reported previously, and that the Pence team was subjected to what Jacob at the time called “a barrage of bankrupt legal theories.”

Eastman confirmed the emails in interviews with The Post but denied that he was blaming Pence for the violence. He defended his actions, saying that Trump’s team was right to exhaust “every legal means” to challenge a result that it argued was plagued by widespread fraud and irregularities.

“Are you supposed to not do anything about that?” Eastman said.

He stood by legal advice he gave Pence to halt Congress’s certification on Jan. 6 to allow Republican state lawmakers to investigate the unfounded fraud claims, which multiple legal scholars have said Pence was not authorized to do.

Eastman said the email saying Pence’s inaction led to the violence was a response to an email in which Jacob told him that his “bull—-” legal advice was why Pence’s team was “under siege,” and that Jacob had later apologized.

A person familiar with the emails said Jacob apologized for using profanity but still maintained that Eastman’s advice was “snake oil.” That person, like several others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

You can only imagine what the messages between Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan might have been. Or whether anyone was in contact with rioters.

In the previous post, the article states that the National Archives is in favor of releasing all the memos and documents pertaining to January 6th.

They’ve seen them.

I think we might know…

​Specifics about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to keep secret the support from his White House for overturning his loss of the 2020 election were revealed in late-night court filings that detail more than 700 pages of handwritten notes, draft documents and daily logs his top advisers kept related to January 6.

The National Archives outlined for the first time in a sworn declaration what Trump wants to keep secret.

And the US House has told a federal court that Trump has no right to keep confidential more than 700 documents from his presidency, citing a committee’s need to reconstruct Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election and his actions on January 6.

The court filings are in response to a lawsuit Trump brought nearly two weeks ago in which he is attempting to block congressional investigators from accessing hundreds of pages of records they requested from the National Archives, which inherited Trump’s presidential papers. The House presents itself as in agreement with the Biden administration, in an unusual show of inter-branch alignment, to oppose Trump.

Trump lawyer John Eastman said ‘courage and the spine’ would help Pence send election to the House in comments before January 6

The records Trump wants to keep secret include handwritten memos from his chief of staff about January 6, call logs of the then-President and former Vice President Mike Pence and White House visitor records, additional court records revealed early Saturday morning.

“In 2021, for the first time since the Civil War, the Nation did not experience a peaceful transfer of power,” the House Committee wrote. “The Select Committee has reasonably concluded that it needs the documents of the then-President who helped foment the breakdown in the rule of law. … It is difficult to imagine a more critical subject for Congressional investigation.”

Trump’s court case is a crucial and potentially historic legal fight over the authority of a former president to protect his term in office, the House’s subpoena power and the reach of executive privilege.

The secret records

Trump is trying to keep secret from the House more than 700 pages from the files of his closest advisers up to and on January 6, according to a sworn declaration from the National Archives’ B. John Laster, which the Biden administration submitted to the DC District Court on Saturday.

Those records include working papers from then-White House chief of Staff Mark Meadows, the press secretary and a White House lawyer who had notes and memos about Trump’s efforts to undermine the election.

In the Meadows documents alone, there are three handwritten notes about the events of January 6 and two pages listing briefings and telephone calls about the Electoral College certification, the archivist said.

Laster’s outline of the documents offers the first glimpse into the paperwork that would reveal goings-on inside the West Wing as Trump supporters gathered in Washington and then overran the US Capitol, disrupting the certification of the 2020 vote.

Trump is also seeking to keep secret 30 pages of his daily schedule, White House visitor logs and call records, Laster wrote. The call logs, schedules and switchboard checklists document “calls to the President and Vice President, all specifically for or encompassing January 6, 2021,” Laster said.

Those types of records could answer some of the most closely guarded facts of what happened between Trump and other high-level officials, including those under siege on Capitol Hill on January 6.

The records Trump wants to keep secret also include draft speeches, a draft proclamation honoring two police officers who died in the siege and memos and other documents about supposed election fraud and efforts to overturn Trump’s loss of the presidency.

Historic court fight

Some of the questions Trump has raised in his lawsuit have never before been decided by a court. If Trump convinces judges to put Archives’ document productions on hold as the case makes its way through appeals, the delay tactic could cripple parts of the House panel’s investigation.

Generally, the House has sought records held by the Archives that speak to plans to disrupt the electoral count in Congress, preparation for the pro-Trump rallies before and on January 6 and what Trump had learned about the soundness of voting after the election.

The ex-President now claims he should have the ability to assert executive privilege even when the current President will not, and that the House’s requests for records from his presidency are illegitimate.

So far, the Biden White House has declined to keep information about the Trump White House leading up to January 6 private, citing the “extraordinary” Trump-led attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the ongoing bipartisan House investigation. And the Archives — represented by Biden’s Justice Department in court — has sided with President Joe Biden’s directions.

In its own court filing overnight, the National Archives backed the House’s request for access, arguing that the attack on the Capitol is worthy of waiving executive privilege.

“President Biden’s sober determination that the public interest requires disclosure is manifestly reasonable, and his to make,” lawyers for the Biden administration wrote in court.

The Archives has said it plans to begin releasing disputed Trump-era records to the House beginning November 12, unless a court intervenes.

Judge Tanya Chutkan of the US District Court in DC will hold a key hearing on Trump’s lawsuit on Thursday.

Former members and scholars take Congress’ side

In recent days, the fight over the Trump-era National Archives documents has been heating up.

A bipartisan group of 66 former members of Congress, including some Republicans who had served in leadership posts, told a federal court earlier this week they support the US House in the case.

Their position comes in a “friend of the court” brief this week that Chutkan could look to for legal guidance.

The former members say the need for Congress to understand the January 6 attack shouldn’t be undermined by Trump, and they are urging Chutkan to reject his request for a court order that would stop the Archives from turning over documents.

“An armed attack on the United States Capitol that disrupted the peaceful transfer of presidential power — and not the document requests necessary to investigate it — is the only grave threat to the Constitution before the Court,” the former members write.

A group of government transparency organizations, law professors and other experts are also supporting the House, and the Archives turning over the Trump records, according to court filings.

The case also could play into the possible criminal prosecution of Trump ally Steve Bannon, who has defied a subpoena from the House January 6 committee by pointing to Trump’s challenge in court and the possibility the former President might try to claim communications with Bannon are protected. The House voted to hold him in contempt last week, and the Justice Department has said it is evaluating whether to prosecute him.

This is first and foremost a delaying tactic. Trump hopes that he can keep these records from the committee until its jurisdiction runs out in 2023. He may very well prevail on that. But he’s taking a chance that the high court will end up rejecting his argument that executive privilege should shield all presidents, current and former, under all circumstances. The majority is as partisan as it gets but they may also see how that could be an impediment to future harassment of democrats which they would not like.

Also, and it’s a long shot, there might be one or two right wing justices who remember the old conservative arguments about separation of powers and congressional prerogatives. I doubt it. They all seem to be utilitarians in the moment these days but you never know.

As for the substance of the documents — I’ll bet they are doozies. The White House was chaos, nobody was thinking clearly and Trump was clear that he would maintain power by any means necessary.

What’s he hiding? His and others’ role in the attempted coup and storming of the Capitol.

Here’s something to cheer you up on a Saturday morning:

Once, Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was a bustling indoor mall, with floors and floors of retail, a pink marble atrium, and an indoor waterfall. On a recent visit, the waterfall and the pink marble were still there, but the escalator going up from the first floor was roped off, a currency exchange was closed, and small ground-level shops had been converted to display windows for Trump-branded merchandise.

There is something new: a wine and whiskey bar, called 45. Its logo, ringed with stars, looks kind of like a presidential seal. Inside, there are enormous pictures of the former president, in and around the White House.

Trump Tower embodies the contradictions of Donald Trump’s business, post-presidency. There’s a cache to sell, but also, an extremely polarizing brand. Trump’s continued espousal of lies about the 2020 election have driven away potential partners; after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, associates from Deutsche Bank to the Professional Golf Association pulled back.

There’s an ongoing criminal fraud case by the Manhattan district attorney against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. The New York attorney general and the Westchester district attorney are also investigating. Trump, his company, and his CFO have denied wrongdoing.

Donald Trump did not put his name back on many company documents after his presidency; Weisselberg, who was indicted for 15 felonies, removed his own name from some corporate documents; only Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump’s names remain on many management filings.

Even without all the brand challenges, Trump is heavily tied up in businesses such as office rentals and retail that are struggling post-pandemic. Just this month, Forbes took the former president off its tally of the 400 richest people. Had Trump sold off his assets and invested in markets while he was president — which ethics experts advised him to do — he would have been $4.5 billion richer today, Forbes said.

“What sorts of businesses would you want to be invested in, in 2021?” asked Dan Alexander, the senior editor at Forbes who calculated Trump’s wealth. “Not many people would pick large office buildings and big fancy hotels located in urban areas.”

Especially ones with Trump’s name on them. And his white working class cult doesn’t have the money for Gucci watches. Trump successfully alienated half of his customer base.

But don’t count him out:

Though there’s millions of dollars of debt, Trump still has steady income

To be sure, while Trump disclosed hundreds of millions of dollars of debt while he was president, his company still owns valuable assets. He gets a steady income from commercial real estate properties that don’t bear his name in New York and San Francisco.

Maybe a few protesters outside making that known would help? I would think that big city liberals could make it known that all of his properties are poison, wouldn’t you?

And then there’s this:

Of course he did.

Just days after Donald J. Trump left the White House, two former contestants on his reality show, “The Apprentice,” approached him with a pitch. Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky wanted to create a conservative media giant.

Mr. Trump was taken with the idea. But he had to figure out how to pay for it.

This month, the former president found a way. He agreed to merge his social media venture with what’s known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The result is that Mr. Trump — largely shut out of the mainstream financial industry because of his history of bankruptcies and loan defaults — secured nearly $300 million in funding for his new business.

To get his deal done, Mr. Trump ventured into an unregulated and sometimes shadowy corner of Wall Street, working with an unlikely cast of characters: the former “Apprentice” contestants, a small Chinese investment firm and a little-known Miami banker named Patrick Orlando.

Mr. Orlando had been discussing a deal with Mr. Trump since at least March, according to people familiar with the talks and a confidential investor presentation reviewed by The New York Times. That was well before his SPAC, Digital World Acquisition, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange last month. In doing so, Mr. Orlando’s SPAC may have skirted securities laws and stock exchange rules, lawyers said.

Also:

Mastodon has sent former President Donald Trump’s company a formal notification that it’s breaking the rules by using Mastodon’s open-source code to build its social network, named Truth. This news comes from a blog post by Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko, but others have previously pointed out that the organization behind Truth, the Trump Media and Technology Group (or TMTG), was violating Mastodon’s software license by not providing the source code for the site built on top of it. Trump’s group has 30 days from when the letter was sent to comply with the license or stop using the software, or it could lose the right to do so.

He never ever does business on the up and up. A con artist all the way down.

Ron Brownstein reviews where President Biden’s signature (and still unpassed) spending bill stands. He emphasizes that Democrats should not approach Build Back Better with the same Eeyore-ish sighs about what’s not in it that they did in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act:

“If we let our laments about what isn’t in there dominate our communication of what is in there, we will be repeating the same mistake,” Jesse Ferguson, a longtime Democratic communications strategist, told me. “When you look at the overall polling on ACA, one of the reasons it struggled in the early years is it didn’t have Democrats with it.”

In its reduced form, the reconciliation bill no longer justifies the frequent comparisons to the New Deal and Great Society that were common at the larger price tag (and which Biden reportedly repeated at his meeting with House Democrats yesterday). But even after all of the accommodations to Manchin and Sinema, the final bill will still represent the biggest concentration of new and expanded federal initiatives since President Lyndon B. Johnson passed those Great Society programs in the mid-1960s. Counting down from $3.5 trillion leaves Democrats telling a story of loss, but counting up to $1.75 trillion allows Democrats to highlight a substantial list of long-standing party priorities that will move into law.

Declare victory and take victory laps from now to November 2022 (after something gets to Biden’s desk). Ignore the naysayers and Republicans. There will be elements in the package that advance the goal of addressing climate change and more. Everything on your wish list? No. Welcome to the average American child’s Christmas morning.

“Basically, they took out all the sticks and left the carrots,” climate activist Bill McKibben told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Friday night. “But there’s so much money there that it will jump start, in important ways, the move towards renewable energy. It’s not a home run, but it’s probably enough to keep the game alive.”

And for average Americans? Brownstein adds:

Biden “is trying to crystallize some policy consequences from the growing concern with working-age families and children, which along with universal health care has been the big missing piece in the American system of public social provision,” says the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol, who has studied the history of the U.S. social safety net. “The COVID pandemic helped to underline some of those issues about balancing care of family with paid work, particularly for women. And it has become increasingly clear that you are punished if you try to have and raise children in this society. I think what he’s most insistent about, and has been all along … is that he wants to start addressing those issues.”

The framework agreement includes a suite of programs to advance that goal:

The most important effort once Democrats pass the bills is to remind Americans that the Biden programs will “help stabilize their finances and lower their costs.” Losing the drug cost reductions to Sens. Manchin’s and Sinema’s, um, proclivities, won’t help the effort. Still, “Democrats can still point to new programs that will limit families’ expenses for health insurance and child care and put more money in their pockets via the expanded child tax credit.”

Next year may be too soon for voters to feel those effects, but Democrats need them to identify those benefits with Democrats when they do.

The admonition in the title is premature. Nothing has been settled. But if Democrats want credit for what they accomplish, they have to, as evangelicals say, name it and claim it. Or else the approbrium Republicans heap on them will win the day. And perhaps both houses of Congress in 2022.

“If we are running on policy appeals and they are running on identity appeals, we are going to lose that battle,” Obama White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said. “But identity isn’t just race and gender; it’s who you are fighting for and who you are fighting against.”

People won’t know if Democrats don’t tell them because they are too busy grousing about what they didn’t get. “There’s a dark cloud in every silver lining” is a losing message that won’t activate voters. Nor will it hasten the revolution. Not the kind we want, anyway.

A-B-C. Always be closing.

Declare victory and don’t stop. The opposition does.

Even when they lose.

It’s rare to get any good news these days, but there is some this morning (Washington Post):

ROME — President Biden and the other national leaders gathered for the Group of 20 summit formally endorsed a new global minimum tax on Saturday, capping months of negotiations over the groundbreaking tax accord.

The new global minimum tax of 15 percent aims to reverse the decades-long decline in tax rates on corporations across the world, a trend experts say has deprived governments of revenue to fund social spending programs. The deal is a key achievement for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who made an international floor on corporate taxes among the top priorities of her tenure and pushed forcefully for swift action on a deal.

The plan was already endorsed by the finance ministers of each country, but its official approval by the heads of state puts added pressure on the difficult task of turning what remains an aspirational agreement into distinct legislation.

Nearly 140 countries representing more than 90 percent of total global economic output have endorsed the deal, but they each must implement the new standards in a process that could take some time.

Translation: An agreement in principle to have the rule in force by 2023 is not enacted law.

The average corporate tax rate has fallen from 40 percent in 1980 to about 23 percent today, according to the Tax Foundation. But this move from the G20 will make it harder for corporate giants to hide profits from the tax man. Here in the U.S., that assumes Biden has the votes to get legislation through Congress. As of now, he has no safety factor.

CNBC adds:

“We call on the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting to swiftly develop the model rules and multilateral instruments as agreed in the Detailed Implementation Plan, with a view to ensure that the new rules will come into effect at global level in 2023,” the draft conclusions, seen by Reuters, said.

The conclusions are to be formally adopted on Sunday.

[…]

“This is more than just a tax deal, it’s a reshaping of the rules of the global economy,” a senior U.S. official told reporters.

“Countries around the globe have decided that to finance the public infrastructure investments that they need to invest in their people, and not to have all of the burden of raising taxes full on workers … this is a way to make sure that all countries in a fair way,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CNBC Friday night.

The Post says there is more to the agreement:

The tax deal includes not just a new global minimum tax but a separate — and arguably more controversial — overhaul of how multinationals are taxed when earning profits in countries where they have no physical presence. That related but distinct tax deal is intended primarily to address anger in Europe over the U.S.-based tech giants that pay little in taxes in European countries despite earning substantial sums there. Several European leaders have said they see the measures as tied together.

Skeptics are skeptical. No surprise. Stay tuned.

A 2-week-old male cheetah cub from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, was transferred to a new cheetah foster mother at Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon, Sunday, Oct. 3. SCBI staff were hand-raising the cub, born Sept. 16, who had been abandoned by his mother. It is important for cheetah cubs to learn species-appropriate behaviors and skills from their mothers and siblings. The SCBI cub was successfully introduced to Wildlife Safari’s cheetah foster mother, Jezebel, and integrated into her litter of four cubs.

SCBI is part of the Cheetah Breeding Center Coalition—a group of 10 cheetah breeding centers across the United States that aim to create and maintain a sustainable North American cheetah population under human care. Wildlife Safari was the next institution in the Cheetah Breeding Center Coalition to have cubs. The male cub will remain at Wildlife Safari with his new family until he is at least 2 years old.

Cheetah Cam!:

Last Thursday, Oct. 21, @Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute’s cheetah mom Rosalie picked a new “den” for her cubs. She moved them, one by one, to a large clump of tall grasses in her yard. The area was well-protected, and it is not uncommon for cheetah moms to move dens. Animal care staff monitored Rosalie and the cubs but did not intervene, as Rosalie has been a very attentive mother. Unfortunately, was no webcam in the grass so the Cubs’ adoring fans had stayed tuned for updates! Why did Rosalie move her cubs? Was she scared or spooked?

It is not known why Rosalie moved her cubs. It’s completely natural for cheetah moms to move their litters. In fact, every single one of the Zoo’s females has moved cubs during the first month of life except for one. The grasses are also a very popular spot for cheetah moms to move their cubs within the first month – five have in recent memory: Amani (2011), Sanurra (2015), Hope (2017), Erin (2018), and Echo (2020).

Weather can also play a factor. This time of the year is hard. It’s warm during the day and moms get very warm inside the dens. But it’s also still chilly to be outside at night. So, it is a hard time of year to be in one place or the other 100% of the time. The warm days could have encouraged Rosalie to move her cubs out. She was observed panting in the den during the day. She had also been in that den for almost two weeks straight! It was likely pretty gross and stinky in there. In the wild, they wouldn’t stay in one place too long because the smell would attract predators.

On Sunday, Oct. 24, cheetah mom Rosalie moved her five cubs back into the den with a webcam. It took her about 30 minutes total to move all the cubs, as you can see in this video.

You tell me …

#1 for a reason. pic.twitter.com/uYH7xcPX8b

— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) October 29, 2021

You are aware that “Let’s Go Brandon” is the right’s cutesy way of saying “Fuck joe Biden.” Even Trump is saying it now.

The song in that video was banned from Youtube and Instagram for passing on COVID disinformation. It’s number one on iTunes now, along with a few other songs called “Let’s go Brandon.”

Half the country is nothing more than nasty little mean girls. Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Green are the true heirs of Donald Trump.

The NY Times has put together a devastating reconstruction of the night 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people. A few takeaways:

There is a very good case to be made that the police deliberately herded the protestors down a street where heavily armed white supremacists and other gun-crazed psychopaths were waiting. In fact, one of the armed rightwingers (Ryan Balch, above) was video’d strongly suggesting in real time that he knew that the police planned to do exactly that. The police could have forced them down a different street, one not overrun with neo-Nazis. They didn’t — and if the police didn’t know exactly what would happen, they didn’t care.

The amount of madness on the streets that night is in stark display in the video. Not just Rittenhouse and not just his first victim. There’s the revolting, strutting narcissistic entitlement of Balch; the dead-eyed white chief of police dodging tough questions with a barely concealed smirk; and even a paramedic who brought his own gun, smiling as he non-justifies this stupidity: “It’s my right.” (He who got wounded by Rittenhouse). And then there are the police who actively encourage the white supremacists and even drive by Rittenhouse after his killing spree, as he tries to surrender, people screaming at the police that this kid just shot people. The cops ignore them, he’s just a white guy with a gun walking towards them, after all. Harmless.

And you can’t help thinking, “If Rittenhouse was black…” and we all know how the next phrase would read.

As bad as the 60’s. Worse, in many ways.

Whenever we become tempted to look back on the good old days when Republicans were sober, thoughtful adults with whom we simply disagreed on policy, keep this in mind:

A suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Al Qaeda courier, speaking to a military jury for the first time, gave a detailed account on Thursday of the brutal forced feedings, crude waterboarding and other physical and sexual abuse he endured during his 2003 to 2006 detention in the C.I.A.’s overseas prison network.

Appearing in open court, Majid Khan, 41, became the first former prisoner of the black sites to openly describe, anywhere, the violent and cruel “enhanced interrogation techniques” that agents used to extract information and confessions from terrorism suspects.

For more than two hours, he spoke about dungeonlike conditions, humiliating stretches of nudity with only a hood on his head, sometimes while his arms were chained in ways that made sleep impossible, and being intentionally nearly drowned in icy cold water in tubs at two sites, once while a C.I.A. interrogator counted down from 10 before water was poured into his nose and mouth.

Soon after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, Mr. Khan said, he cooperated with his captors, telling them everything he knew, with the hope of release. “Instead, the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” he said.

The dramatic accounting capped a day in which eight U.S. military officers were selected to serve on a jury, which will deliberate Friday on his official sentence in the range of 25 to 40 years, starting from his guilty plea in February 2012.

But the sentence is largely symbolic, a military commission requirement.

Unknown to the jurors, Mr. Khan and his lawyers reached a secret deal this year with a senior Pentagon official in which his actual sentence could end as early as February and no later than February 2025 because Mr. Khan had become a government cooperator upon pleading guilty.

Jurors were told that in 2012 Mr. Khan pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, including murder in violation of the law of war, for delivering $50,000 of Al Qaeda money from Pakistan to an Al Qaeda affiliate in early 2003. The money was used in a deadly bombing of a Marriott hotel in August 2003, while Mr. Khan was a prisoner of the C.I.A. He has said he did not know how the money would be used.

He also admitted to plotting a number of other crimes with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, notably by wearing a suicide vest in a failed effort in 2002 to assassinate the president of Pakistan at the time, Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.

Sentencing was delayed for nearly a decade to give Mr. Khan time and opportunity to cooperate with federal and military prosecutors, so far behind the scenes, in federal and military terrorism cases. In the intervening years, prosecutors and defense lawyers clashed in court filings over who would be called to testify about Mr. Khan’s abuse in C.I.A. custody, and how.

In court on Thursday, Mr. Khan read from a carefully worded 39-page account that did not identify C.I.A. agents or the countries and foreign intelligence agencies that had a role in his secret detention at black sites — information that is protected at the national security court. He expressed remorse for hurting people through his embrace of radical Islam and Al Qaeda, but also found a way around a labyrinth of U.S. intelligence classifications to realize a decade-long ambition to tell the world what U.S. agents had done to him.

“To those who tortured me, I forgive you,” he said, noting that while he was in custody he had rejected Al Qaeda, terrorism, “violence and hatred.”

“I hope in the day of judgment that Allah will do the same for you and for me. I ask forgiveness from those whom I have wronged and I have hurt.”

It was an emotional day for Mr. Khan. His father, Ali, and a sister, both U.S. citizens, sat behind the court in a gallery, seeing him in person for the first time since he left the United States and joined Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks. They were 50 feet from him and did not seem to recognize the now balding middle-age man with a gray goatee when he first entered the court.

After many minutes he caught their eyes, then waved. His father looked startled. Mr. Khan craned his neck frequently during the proceedings to see his family — and at one point formed a heart with his hands.

He juxtaposed his remarks of contrition with previously unheard details of what happened to him at the hands of the United States, the country his parents and siblings adopted by becoming citizens even as he did not.

His father wept through long stretches of the descriptions, at times hiding his head in his hands, while his sister, also tearful, tried to comfort him. The jury of Marine, Navy and Army officers watched and listened soberly, but displayed no emotion.

He received beatings while nude and spent long stretches in chains — at times shackled to a wall and crouching “like a dog,” he said, or with his arms extended high above his head and chained to a beam inside his cell. He was kept in darkness and dragged, hooded and shackled, his head slamming into floors, walls and stairs as he was moved between cells.

Before the C.I.A. moved him from one prison to another, he said, a medic inserted an enema and then put him in a diaper held in place by duct tape so he would not need a bathroom break during flights. Guards moving him would hood him, aside from the time he had his face duct taped.

While held in a Muslim country, he said, his captors allowed him to pray. But at times the Americans did not.

Earlier accounts released by his lawyers said he was so sleep deprived for a time that he began to hallucinate. He described the experience: images of a cow and a giant lizard advancing on him inside a cell while he was chained to a beam above his head. He tried to kick them away but lost his balance, causing his chains to jerk him.

Mr. Khan gained attention with the release of a 2014 study of the C.I.A. program by the Senate Intelligence Committee that said, after he refused to eat, his captors “infused” a puree of his lunch through his anus. The C.I.A. called it rectal refeeding. Mr. Khan called it rape.

The C.I.A. pumped water up the rectum of prisoners who would not follow a command to drink. Mr. Khan said this was done to him with “green garden hoses. They connected one end to the faucet, put the other in my rectum and they turned on the water.” He said he lost control of his bowels after those episodes and, to this day, has hemorrhoids.

He spoke about failed and sadistic responses to his hunger strikes and other acts of rebellion. Medics would roughly insert a feeding tube up his nose and down the back of his throat. He would try to bite it off and, in at least one instance, he said, a C.I.A. officer used a plunger to force food inside his stomach, a technique that caused stomach cramps and diarrhea.

The intelligence agency declined Thursday to comment on the descriptions offered in the hearing but noted that the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.

Our response to 9/11 was insane. And Trump was still doing the Apprentice and selling foul smelling cologne. The Republicans were bloodthirsty but there were plenty of Democrats on board with this grotesque program.

This is a shameful stain on America’s character and reputation that will never be erased. No wonder we are now descending into chaos and risk losing our democracy altogether. We lost our conscience a long time ago.

I feel sick.

Amy Walter of the Cook Report makes an interesting observation about the midterms. She starts off making the usual observations about how the Democratic coalition is falling apart because Black and Latino men are unhappy and moving to the Republicans. It’s not a majority by any means, but it’s substantial enough to cause some serious heartburn among Democrats and force them to re-evaluate their approach.

Having said all that, when it comes to the midterms there is this:

Over the last few years, college-educated voters — more specifically, white college-educated voters — have become reliable Democratic voters. In fact, recent polls from Quinnipiac, CNN and Marist show Pres. Biden’s job approval rating anywhere from 11 to 19 points better among white college-educated voters than his overall approval rating. For example, Biden’s overall job approval rating in the Quinnipiac poll was 37 percent to 52 percent unfavorable. But, among white college-educated voters, Biden was in positive territory at 50 percent approve to 46 percent disapprove. 

This could give Democrats a boost, even in a not-so-great political environment. Lakshya Jain, a software engineer and contributor to Sabato’s Crystal ball, found that this “educational advantage” would help most in states that are whiter than average, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire; all of which are holding Senate contests next year. “Extrapolating from past electorates,” Jain writes, “Democrats may begin with an electorate that is anywhere between 1-3 points more favorable than 2020 in terms of presidential lean in these states. For instance, New Hampshire, which was Biden +7.2 in 2020, could see a Biden +9 electorate, given that state’s exceptionally large share of white voters.”

I realize that older, white, college educated voters are not the group that most younger Democrats are most interested in cultivating. But the Democratic Party is extremely diverse and if you want to look at it in a positive way, these older white people are voting as allies of Black and Latino women (as well as the entire working class and poor who will benefit materially from the Democrats policy agenda.) You’ve got to be able to cobble together a coalition in our system and every vote helps.

By the way, Biden and Trump split the baby boom voters. That’s a big deal since people over 60 have generally voted for the GOP in big numbers. The Baby Boom is a massive generation. If the Dems are appealing to half of them, that’s good news. For a lot of reasons.