Month: June 2022

Total chaos around the country

That’s where we stand today. It’s going to change quickly.

And it’s only a matter of time before this happens in one of the primitive states that will outlaw abortion in all circumstances.

A pregnant American woman who suffered an incomplete miscarriage while vacationing in Malta will be airlifted to a Spanish island on Thursday for a procedure to prevent infection because Maltese law prohibits abortion under any circumstances, the woman’s partner said.

Jay Weeldreyer told The Associated Press by phone from a hospital in the island nation that his partner, Andrea Prudente, is at risk of a life-threatening infection if the fetal tissue isn’t promptly removed.

Prudente, 38, experienced heavy bleeding on June 12, followed by a premature rupture of the amniotic sac and the separation of the placenta, according to Weeldreyer, 45. While the hospital is carefully monitoring her for any sign of infection, the facility cannot perform the surgery to complete the miscarriage, he said.

Malta is the only European country that bans abortion in all circumstances. But Poland is almost as bad. We’ll see similar situations like this here before long:

In Poland, abortion is almost completely outlawed and access to contraception is ranked as the worst in Europe, according to the European Parliamentary Forum. Many doctors refuse to prescribe emergency contraception or even IUDs (intrauterine devices) on ethical grounds, arguing that they are akin to an abortion.

Oxana Lytvynenko, a Ukrainian reproductive rights activist who has lived in Poland for 16 years and has been helping refugees in reception points since the war began, says that some women have no idea that their access to reproductive healthcare services will vanish upon crossing the border.

“[Ukrainian refugees crossing the border] are completely unprepared for the situation here, they don’t know the law. Even if someone has read an article somewhere about abortion in Poland, [many] still think, ‘OK, so they don’t do abortion on demand, but if there is a good reason then they will do it,’” she says.

“It’s difficult because you don’t want to re-traumatise these women just after they are so happy to be safe again. It doesn’t feel like the right moment to tell them the truth.”

Lytvynenko says she has met women at the border who have asked her to help them access medication to terminate a pregnancy, but says that the ability to access reproductive healthcare services is down to chance.

“If women in need of abortion pills cross the border, it really depends who they are met by,” she says. “If it is someone progressive, feminist, then they’ll be able to put them in touch with right people. But if it is some random man, or someone religious, then no way. They’ll either not care or they’ll say it is God’s angel and you need to keep it.”

Luckily, if pregnant American refugees from antediluvian Red states can find their way to a civilized Blue State they will be taken care of. For now. The next phase is already underway:

Pence calls for a national abortion ban https://t.co/VylxxweJak

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 24, 2022

I’m sure she’s very disappointed today.

I think it’s time for a reminder of women’s rights alleged advocate, Susan Collins’ contribution to this day. I wrote this after her repulsive speech after the Kavanaugh hearings:

But what of our nice Republican white lady, Sen. Susan Collins, the woman the entire political world, including Democrats, has put on a pedestal for years as the representation of modest, feminine moderation? Trump was effusive in his compliments after her speech — and her vote to confirm Kavanaugh. He told the press, “I thought that Susan was incredible yesterday. She gave an impassioned, beautiful speech yesterday. And that was from the heart, that was from the heart.”

He was referring to the speech in which Collins gaslighted the entire country with a paean to a man who doesn’t exist, calling him “an exemplary public servant, judge, teacher, coach, husband and father.” She told the entire country that the real Brett Kavanaugh was not the angry, petulant, bully they watched testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She whitewashed his record on health care and women’s rights, insisting that the man who just months ago, as a federal appeals court judge, voted to force a 17-year-old rape victim to give birth against her will, was not a threat to Roe vs Wade.

She attacked the protesters complaining about “dark money” being used to whip them into a “frenzy.” Worst of all, she adopted the absurd line that while she believed Christine Blasey Ford had likely suffered an attack, Kavanaugh was not the attacker. This has become the “empathetic” approach among Republicans who can read polls and see that women are running from the party as fast as they can. 

But this line is nothing new. Women have been told they were “crazy” when they say things that people don’t want to hear since the beginning of time. And the echoes of the cruder formulation deployed against Anita Hill back in 1991 — “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” — are obvious. It’s progress, I suppose, that they dropped the “slutty” part in 2018.

Collins was lobbied heavily by George W. Bush, Kavanaugh’s benefactor, and her deceitful speech shows the final absorption of the tattered remains of the GOP establishment into Trumpism. Collins and Trump are now two sides of the same coin, bound together with a common willingness to tell their voters that they can believe them or they can believe their lying eyes.  It’s all there is.

Collins is one in a long line of center-right women politicians who claimed they were pro-choice but voted for judges who pretended they didn’t have a view on the subject. They knew who these people were. We all did.

Roe v. Wade is overturned

Today is why I took to my bed for a week after the 2016 election. I knew this day would come:

The Supreme Court on Friday overruled Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after almost 50 years in a decision that will transform American life, reshape the nation’s politics and lead to all but total bans on the procedure in about half of the states.

The ruling will test the legitimacy of the court and vindicate a decades-long Republican project of installing conservative justices prepared to reject the precedent, which had been repeatedly reaffirmed by earlier courts. It will also be one of the signal legacies of President Donald J. Trump, who vowed to name justices who would overrule Roe. All three of his appointees were in the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling.

The decision, which echoed a leaked draft opinion published by Politico in early May, will result in a starkly divided country in which abortion is severely restricted or forbidden in many red states but remains freely available in most blue ones.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted with the majority but said he would have taken “a more measured course,” stopping short of overruling Roe outright. The court’s three liberal members dissented.

The right is determined to tear this country apart.

Here is @CBSNews polling from last month showing nearly two-thirds of Americans said they wanted Roe v Wade kept in place. Those who wanted it overturned described it as “a protection for the unborn”. pic.twitter.com/CHo3GRerVz

— Manuel Bojorquez (@BojorquezCBS) June 24, 2022

Yesterday this court said that the individual right to bear arms which was decided just 15 years ago is an inviolable fundamental right which means states cannot infringe the right to carry a gun anywhere, any time. The right to abortion, which has been in place for 50 years, was just overturned and sent back to the states because it’s just not as fundamental as the God-given right to shoot up elementary schools.

These justices are morally incoherent.

By the way:

With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision before the end of its 2021-2022 term, Americans’ confidence in the coeurt has dropped sharply over the past year and reached a new low in Gallup’s nearly 50-year trend. Twenty-five percent of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court, down from 36% a year ago and five percentage points lower than the previous low recorded in 2014.

They are nothing but a hard right partisan institution now. Republicans don’t ever have to do anything but steal elections and collect money from big donors going forward. All their work is going to be done by these radical Supreme Court wingnuts.

Communism! Heresy! they cried

We know by now that principles among many conservatives are like honor among thieves. Like Martin Blank’s “moral flexibility.” Like small government and states’ rights. Where they stand depends on what day it is. Guns must be protected at the federal level. They are that important. Women, not so much.

Conservatives’ stance on free markets and free association as well. Contingent. They’re all about them so long as they like your choices. Until they don’t.

Investments, for example (Slate):

ESG criteria (for “environmental, social, and governance”) are a set of standards for public companies’ actions that investors use to guide where they put their money. (These criteria could include committing to reduce carbon emissions by a certain percentage by a specific date, allowing employees work-at-home flexibility in light of pandemic safety and child care issues, or requiring that a minimum percentage of the board of directors be female or persons of color.) As more and more investors, large firms, and asset managers have gravitated toward ESG positions in recent years, they have found themselves at odds with a Republican Party that used to count on these institutions as A base of support. Republicans are now striking back, which is why you hear more of them railing against “woke capitalism” and ESG. One group recently formed a new right-wing business lobby, the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, to compete with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a long-standing supporter of mainstream Republican policies that anti-ESG activists now see as corrupted by the left. Another recent anti-ESG initiative has been to push red states to pass legislation to divest state pension fund assets from firms who follow ESG principles. For all the GOP fretting over left-wing “cancel culture,” the party is working very hard to cancel ESG.

A typical example comes from former Vice President Mike Pence, who wrote a May 26 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (“Republicans Can Stop ESG Political Bias”) full of right-wing fervor. He called ESG a “pernicious strategy” from the “woke left” including “an unelected cabal of bureaucrats” and “large and powerful Wall Street financiers” who “almost never refuse to do business with China or Russia.” He compared ESG ratings to something from the Chinese Communist Party. He warned that far-left extremists are using ESG to impose a radical agenda and take away our freedoms. In fact, it is Pence who is trying to override the free market, where millions of investors have decided ESG is what they want.

More choice when it comes to privatizing schools: good. Choice when it comes to women’s health : bad. More choices in an unregulated free market : good. People choosing not to invest with rapacious, un-diverse companies lacking even rudimentary concern for the planet: bad.

Given the growing wave of influential ESG investors, most public companies and asset managers have incorporated ESG into their operations to meet investor demand. Incorporating ESG means implementing policies and procedures to measure and accurately disclose the firm’s application of ESG principles to its business operations, workforce, and governance. For asset managers, incorporating ESG also means creating financial products that follow ESG principles, such as ESG-based investment funds. That is the free market at work. Customer demand shifts and businesses adjust their operations to meet the new demand. ESG is the product of a free market, not a cabal of pernicious financiers with international sympathies.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe the corporate model for doing capitalism is overdue for a serious overhaul. ESG and B-Corps are just lipstick on pigs. The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. About who has it and who doesn’t. Conservatives are full of empty platitudes about freedom and liberty so long it is theirs and theirs alone. Challenge that control and all the happy horseshit goes out the window.

UPDATE: It’s all nihilist pretense.

So states have no right to pass their own gun safety laws, but they have the right to control and restrict women’s freedom. This is what passes for “reasoning” on this Supreme Court. At least Republicans in Congress don’t make any pretense of engaging in deliberation.

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) June 24, 2022

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com

Except people died and the country almost did

Steven A. Engel suppressed a smile during testimony before the House Jan. 6 committee Thursday afternoon. The former United States Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel explained his department’s response to a draft lawsuit sent by President Trump on Dec. 29, 2020. Trump expected the department would file it before the Supreme Court in another of his efforts to reverse his loss in the 2020 election.

For multiple reasons it was “meritless,” Engel explained [timestamp 01:28:34], “not something that the department would bring.” People outside the department had drafted it, delivered it to the president, and the president forwarded it for review.

“Obviously, the person who drafted this lawsuit did not really understand, in my view, the law, and/or how the Supreme Court works, or the Department of Justice. So, it was just not something we would do.”

That was Engel’s polite way of saying the draft was a sad joke. Like the president who sent it.

Testimony Thursday was from Engel, former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue painted Trump and his allies’ efforts to reverse his loss as a “Harold & Kumar Mount a Coup” farce. Except Trump’s last-ditch effort involved sending an angry mob to assault the Capitol and threaten to murder lawmakers. People died. Well over a hundred police officers were injured in the melee.

Had the violence involved Trump opponents instead, he was prepared to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy troops to remain in power.

Days ahead of Jan. 6, 2021, “the United States was about one bunch short of becoming a banana republic,” writes Dana Milbank:

Screwballs enabled Trump in Congress, as well. There was Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), whose chief of staff tried to deliver a slate of fake electors to Vice President Mike Pence. And there was Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who championed Clark for the attorney general job. According to testimony released by the committee Thursday, Perry was among those seeking presidential pardons for their actions, along with Reps. Mo Brooks (Ala.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Louie Gohmert (R-Tex), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and possibly Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Trump apparently considered blanket pardons for lawmakers and staff involved in the insurrection. At one point, Trump, frustrated that DOJ officials weren’t backing up his lies, urged them: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

The smell of desperation must have been thick in the Oval Office.

No amount of reason would separate Trump from his debunked “arsenal of allegations,” as Donoghue put it. Ninety minutes after the Jan. 3 White House meeting in which Trump nearly triggered mass resignations, Donoghue’s cellphone rang. “It was the president,” he testified, “and he had information about a truck supposedly full of shredded ballots in Georgia.”

At one point, Trump complained to top DOJ officials: “You guys may not be following the internet the way I do.”

He was right. Only a crackpot would do that.

A dangerous one, one willing, said committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) , “to sacrifice our republic to prolong his presidency. I can imagine no more dishonorable act by a president.”

Kinzinger ended his questioning with a message to fellow members of Congress who abbetted Trump’s “whack-job conspiracy theories” and then requested pardons, “The only reason that I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you have committed a crime.”

The hearing ends with the invitation to an insurrection.

For those who haven't followed criminal cases, it's really hard to overstate the power of this tweet. pic.twitter.com/yqGiek7SJH

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) June 23, 2022

Will any of this testimony move public opinion? Possibly. But not among those who would debase themselves and the country like those discussed Thursday. Nor the people of the lie who fed the election conspiracy machine.

“Never in my lifetime would I have imagined a President of the United States doing this,” tweeted Republican former Ohio governor John Kasich Tursday evening. Few other Republicans are prepared to join him.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com

He’s unhappy

Even Bill Barr scoffed at 2000 Mules. Fox is ignoring it. It’s complete nonsense. That’s how desperate he is.

He can put together a full presentation of all that and I’m positive he could get Fox and OANN and Newsmax to cover it. Their “evidence” is non-existent and he knows it. He also knows that whining like this works on his followers.

Oh god. That’s just too stupid for words.

It was the pandemic too…

If you missed it: Deborah Birx testified today for the first time about Trump’s covid response.

She painted a picture of widespread dysfunction:

“People were communicating with the president dangerous ideas…on a daily basis,” she told @COVIDOversight.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/23/deborah-birx-trump-coronavirus/

Much of the hearing focused on Birx’s rival SCOTT ATLAS and new documents obtained by Democrats.

In this March 2020 email, Atlas says early response is “massive overreaction” and predicted covid would likely cause 10,000 deaths.

(US topped 1 million known deaths last month.)

After what we’ve heard today about the attempts to overturn the election this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. But in the case of the pandemic,Trump’s dependence on lackeys and yes-men resulted in human misery of epic proportions. My God. He is the GOP frontrunner for 2024 and if it’s close enough for his henchmen to steal it they are perfectly prepared to get it right this time.

The DOJ hearing is really something

Comparing Trump to Nixon has always been imperfect for a variety of reasons, but never have the parallels been as clear as during a hearing in which two top former DOJ officials testified about Trump wanting to use the department for strictly partisan political purposes.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 23, 2022

Here are some preliminary highlights just in case you are unable to watch. It will never stop being shocking. I’ll add to it as the hearing continues. These are in reverse order.

The House members who asked for a pardon, according to former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson's 1/6 testimony:

• Gaetz (R-FL)
• Brooks (R-AL)
• Biggs (R-AZ)
• Gohmert (R-TX)
• Perry (R-PA)
• Greene (R-GA) pic.twitter.com/gkQrC8zwBb

— The Recount (@therecount) June 23, 2022

Donoghue testifies that he received a call even after his scheme to replace Rosen with Clark blew up about a truck purportedly full of shredded ballots in Georgia pic.twitter.com/Uem0ItAMhV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2022

"You're going to lose your entire [DOJ] leadership … you could have hundreds of hundreds of resignations of the leadership of your entire Justice Department because of your actions. What that's going to say about you?"- Donoghue on what he told Trump about possibly firing Rosen pic.twitter.com/s7RSixhCmV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2022

Former Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller testified that he actually contacted an Italian government official to investigate the insane conspiracy theory about satellites changing votes. pic.twitter.com/9Yia28Ivlf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2022

"Pure insanity" — Kinzinger details how a crazy conspiracy theory about Italian satellites changing votes from Trump to Biden quickly made its way from the fringe of the internet to the White House pic.twitter.com/YO9UkB9UTO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2022

incredible https://t.co/L7DeSM35tl

— John Iadarola (@johniadarola) June 23, 2022

"It was so extreme to me I had a hard time getting my head around it initially" — Donoghue on the letter Clark wanted DOJ to send to Georgia basically calling for a new slate of electors pic.twitter.com/7mgMp50cnF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2022

Giuliani during his deposition on why Jeffrey Clark was given election related responsibilities: "Somebody should be put in charge of the Justice Department who isn't frightened of what is going to be done to their reputation." pic.twitter.com/ftAtGd66zQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2022

here's one of Donoghue's handwritten notes from his December 27 conversation with Trump pic.twitter.com/SPi02vvpCN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2022

Former acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue details a lengthy December 27 meeting with Trump in which Trump urgently implored him to investigate his election lies. Donoghue says he refuted Trump's claims one by one. pic.twitter.com/xkQmERLrEs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2022

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1540085048665407495

Every psycho wingnut will be armed

As predicted, the Supremes struck down New York’s decades long concealed carry law. The 6-3 super majority says that people have a right to carry guns outside the home whenever they damned well please. Great.

The Supreme Court struck down New York state’s system for issuing concealed weapons permits, ruling that the century-old law requiring that applicants demonstrate “proper cause” and “good moral character” violates the Second Amendment.

The 6-3 decision in the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, marks the widest expansion of gun rights since 2010, when the court applied nationwide a 2008 ruling establishing an individual right of armed self-defense within the home. It puts in question similar laws in at least eight other states and the District of Columbia, where authorities hold substantial discretion over issuing concealed-weapons permits.

“The Second and 14th Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court. New York law requiring that applicants justify their need for a concealed weapons permit thus was unconstitutional.

The ruling came on the same day Senate Democrats and more than a dozen Republicans were set to advance bipartisan gun control legislation past its last procedural hurdle, setting up a final passage for as soon as Friday on the biggest firearms legislation in decades.

The Supreme Court’s decision swept further than the rules for concealed-weapons permits. The court rejected the legal method overwhelmingly used by lower courts to evaluate gun regulations, which has considered such government’s interests as crime prevention. Under that standard, most weapons laws have been upheld since the Supreme Court first recognized an individual right under the Second Amendment in its 2008 decision on District of Columbia v. Heller and a subsequent ruling in McDonald v. Chicago in 2010.

Instead, Justice Thomas wrote Thursday, a weapons law is constitutional only if the government demonstrates “that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined the opinion.

Under that standard—previously asserted in dissenting opinions by Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett when they sat on lower courts—gun advocates believe more regulations will fall, allowing greater access to weapons and ammunition nationwide.

A 52-page dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer began bluntly. “In 2020, 45,222 Americans were killed by firearms,” he wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. History alone shouldn’t govern the Second Amendment’s application, he wrote, for “it is constitutionally proper, indeed often necessary… to consider the serious dangers and consequences of gun violence that lead States to regulate firearms.”

They say that we have to rely on whether or not people historically carried guns for self-defense in the 18th and 19th century. Great. They literally want to turn 21st century cities into the wild west.

And it’s not just the fake elector scheme

We knew they were investigating the fake electors scheme and that’s very serious. (Some even call it “election fraud.”) But this suggests there’s more to it. To the best of my knowledge Clark was not involved in that:

Federal investigators descended on the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, on Wednesday in connection with the department’s sprawling inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the matter.

It remained unclear exactly what the investigators may have been looking for, but Mr. Clark was central to President Donald J. Trump’s unsuccessful effort in late 2020 to strong-arm the nation’s top prosecutors into supporting his claims of election fraud.

The law enforcement action at Mr. Clark’s home in suburban Virginia came just one day before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was poised to hold a hearing examining Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department after his election defeat.

The hearing was expected to explore Mr. Clark’s role in helping Mr. Trump bend the department to his will and ultimately help in a bid to persuade officials in several key swing states to change the outcome of their election results.

Mr. Trump considered and then abandoned a plan in the days just before the Jan. 6 attack to put Mr. Clark in charge of the Justice Department as acting attorney general. At the time, Mr. Clark was proposing to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in that key swing state.

We’re going to hear much more about Clark in the hearing today. We know he took the 5th in his testimony before the committee. I don’t know specifically what crimes he is suspected of committing but apparently he isn’t the only one who thinks he’s culpable.

Here’s the story on Clark if you’re unfamiliar with the details.

Update—

Katie Benner of the NY Times knows this story inside and out. Here’s her twitter thread from this morning:

There’s a misconception that Jeffrey Clark was a low-level DOJ guy when he sought to become AG & undo the election. He was an environmental lawyer, but one who ran the ENRD, a Senate confirmed leadership role. He also ran Civil, the division that defends the admin in court.

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee, Rich Donoghue, DOJ’s former #2 official, says that in the heat of the fight over who would lead DOJ, he disparages Clark by telling him he’s an environmental lawyer who should wait in his office for an oil spill.

It’s an incredible moment and one that tells us a lot about Donoghue and his regard for Clark. But Clark’s own position at DOJ shouldn’t be underplayed. He was in an important leadership role, which makes his work to undermine the electoral college all the more noteworthy

He had access to top DOJ officials, who explicitly told him that there was no voter fraud. He secretly arranged for briefings from intel officials, who also told him that there was not voter fraud. A low level guy prob wouldn’t have that access to intelligence.

Despite his position and access to information, Clark still wanted DOJ to send a letter to Georgia officials falsely stating that the dept had concerns about the results. One open question: did Clark truly believed that Trump won, and no amount of true information mattered

If that’s the case, I find it very striking that Clark was a high level DOJ official — who had served under Bush and was not thought to be radical in any way — and not some low level guy who was brought into the DOJ with no vetting.

Clark is in keeping with candidates in the upcoming election – at all levels of state govt – who also believe that Trump won. Clark failed to ultimately operate the levers of govt that could undo an election. His allies running for office in local races could win.

(@reidepstein has written well about election deniers on the ballot)
So yes, Clark may now seem like a buffoon bc he was humiliated. But he could be the first of many officials willing to ignore evidence as they vie for power over our election outcomes

Originally tweeted by Katie Benner (@ktbenner) on June 23, 2022.

Update: I was wrong. Clark was involved in the fake elector scheme and seems to have been conspiring with Eastman with his proposed letter to the states saying that the DOJ was investigating the election.