Month: July 2022

It looks like it …

I hesitate to get too excited about this because well …you know. Lucy, football blah,blah,blah. But this time it looks pretty solid. And it’s good.

Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer looked at loggerheads after their talks on a sweeping climate, tax and health care bill ran aground nearly two weeks ago. In fact, they were working on Washington’s best-kept secret.

On July 18, four days after Manchin and Schumer’s talks seemed to fizzle out with only a limited health care deal, Manchin reached out to Schumer to see if he was amenable to picking things back up. By Wednesday afternoon, they had a deal on a bill that includes energy and tax policy, a turnaround after the two deadlocked on Democrats’ marquee party-line agenda.

“It’s like two brothers from different mothers, I guess. He gets pissed off, I get pissed off, and we’ll go back and forth. He basically put out statements, and the dogs came after me again,” Manchin said in an interview on Wednesday. “We just worked through it.”

All throughout last week, Manchin stayed quiet about the talks even as most senators, staffers and journalists had moved on: “I didn’t know if it could come to fruition. I really didn’t know, OK, so why talk about something, again, build people’s hopes up? I got the ire of everybody.”

That ire turned into jubilation within the Democratic Party by Wednesday night after Manchin and Schumer announced what they dubbed “the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” which is slated for the Senate floor next week. There’s still significant concerns to be dealt with over whether it can meet chamber rules for avoiding a filibuster, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) hasn’t signed off yet — but Manchin’s deal with Schumer amounts to the best news for Democrats in weeks.

Moreover, Manchin’s announcement came hours after final passage of semiconductor legislation, a bill Republicans threatened to block mere weeks ago in an effort to stop Democrats from pursuing a party-line tax, climate and health care package.

The Manchin-Schumer deal includes roughly $370 billion in energy and climate spending, $300 billion in deficit reduction, three years of subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums, prescription drug reform and significant tax changes. Manchin said the bill was at one point “bigger than that” but that’s where the two Democrats settled.

As part of the agreement announced Wednesday, Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to pass legislation governing energy permits. Manchin said he spoke to Schumer, Pelosi and President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

After Manchin’s talks with Biden stalled last December on the more sweeping Democratic bill known as Build Back Better, Manchin recalled Biden telling him: “Joe, it’s not going to help for me to be involved in this … if you can do anything, good. If not, I understand.”

“You know, as an old senator, he understands things are a little rough at times,” Manchin said. In a statement, Biden thanked Manchin and Schumer for their work and described the deal as “the action the American people have been waiting for.”

I don’t know for sure what happened here but we have to assume this was not as it seemed. Just hours after they passed the  Chips and Science Act that includes $52 billion in subsidies for chipmakers building new foundries in the U.S. and $170 billion in incentives for scientific research and development to bolster the U.S.’s ability to compete with China, which the Republicans had held as leverage over the Dems if they went through with a big reconciliation package, the Dems produced a complete bill, all 700+ pages of it. It certainly appears that the collapse was a feint to get McConnell to pass the other bill, thinking reconciliation was off the table.

This is very good news. Will it help Democrats in the midterms? Probably not. Polls show that most people don’t even know they passed the infrastructure bill. But if the Dems lose control of one or both houses of congress next year this will be the last meaningful legislation passed and these are important items, particularly the drug pricing and climate policies.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are crying like a bunch of toddlers:

“Well, it was obviously a double cross by Joe Manchin,” Tom Cotton said. “Just two weeks ago he said he wasn’t gonna support a bill like this. He’s been saying for months that he wouldn’t support so many of the provisions in this bill, he called them gimmicks or smoke and mirrors budgeting, but now he’s going to apparently support all of them.”

Boo hoo hoo.

Al Gore says:

The Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to be a historic turning point. It represents the single largest investment in climate solutions & environmental justice in US history. Decades of tireless work by climate advocates across the country led to this moment.

No deal is perfect and we need many more actions to solve the climate crisis. Yet, this bill is a long overdue and necessary step to ensure the US takes decisive action on the climate crisis that helps our economy and provides leadership for the world by example.

It’s time to join together in support of this bold #ClimateAction – and then accelerate our efforts to continue our work to move away from the dirty energy economy of the past and toward a sustainable future.

Originally tweeted by Al Gore (@algore) on July 28, 2022.

Update — Dave Dayen on this deal:

Five years ago today, the late John McCain strode onto the Senate floor and delivered a thumbs-down to the Republican repeal of Obamacare, a white whale they had been pursuing since well before obtaining a governing trifecta. The legislative agenda in the Trump years narrowed to a historically unpopular tax cut and deregulation.

One year ago today, Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin signed a secret deal to deliver a $1.5 trillion reconciliation bill that would include “no additional handouts or transfer payments” on any health or family care policies, and investments in “fuel neutral” energy, with carbon-capture technologies mandated for fossil fuel infrastructure, a zero-emission vehicle credit that included hydrogen fuel cell cars, with parity for both renewable and fossil fuel tax credits. Among the measures to help pay for it were a corporate minimum tax of 15 percent and an end to the carried interest loophole.

For 364 days, Manchin went back and forth on pretty much all of these provisions, rejecting the bill outright, then crawling back to the table, going into bargaining with Schumer, leaving that bargaining, and coming back. And one year to the day later, we have a bill called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which includes everything in that previous paragraph and a lot more on energy and climate, plus the ACA insurance exchange subsidies and prescription drug price reforms we knew about. But overall, the bill spends $433 billion, a little over $1 trillion less than that original topline. Much of its revenue goes to deficit reduction.

There is no such thing as a genuine surprise in Washington—usually. This was a genuine surprise. I had been talking to people this week who would or should have known that talks between Manchin and Schumer, thought to be moribund, were taking place. The closest I got to foreknowledge was one source saying that they just didn’t believe it. An army of reporters, lobbyists, and hangers-on didn’t know this was happening.

The reveal was made a few hours after the Senate cleared the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill that offers semiconductor manufacturers subsidies for reshoring and boosts science programs. Mitch McConnell had threatened that bill, something highly cherished by Schumer, if Democrats persisted with a party-line bill that raised taxes and boosted clean energy. When Manchin walked away from negotiations with Schumer just two weeks ago over those two items, McConnell let his guard down and allowed a vote on CHIPS, which was popular with many of his Republican colleagues. Schumer and Manchin waited until that cleared the Senate before announcing a reconciliation deal with taxes and climate back in.

If you told me a cosmic ray hit Washington and flipped everyone’s brains, giving Schumer the Machiavellian cunning of a Republican and giving McConnell the guileless approach of a Democrat, that might be a more plausible explanation for this display than the truth. It’s a near-legendary turn of events that infuriated McConnell so much he took hostage a bill to give dying veterans exposed to toxic burn pits medical care, something Republicans passed overwhelmingly just a few weeks ago (it needed a technical fix). The combination of the revival of the Biden agenda and red-faced Republicans making terrible choices on highly popular legislation is one for the ages.

Can it be that Democrats have finally accepted the nature of their opposition and are willing to govern accordingly?

A former anti-abortion activist reflects

Readers will have been unimpressed with Justice Samuel Alito’s decision in Dobbs to overturn Roe v. Wade after half a century. Prompted by news that evangelical activists were praying with some Supreme Court Justices, religious freedom activist Rabbi Jack Moline of the Interfaith Alliance spoke with anti-abortion activist Rev. Rob Schenck about the Dobbs ruling. Schenck is one of those praying with the justices after a decade of cultivating relationships that gained him that access.

Schenck was less than enthusiastic about Dobbs after events and studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer changed his thinking. The interview aired on State of Belief” on July 16. The following excerpt is at Mother Jones.

“I had set myself up to rejoice over this moment,” Schenck said when he realized the leaked draft ruling was authentic, “when in fact I was seeing it now as a catastrophe.”

I can only imagine. Is it your impression, knowing Justice Scalia as you did, that he would have encouraged this decision? Or would he have resisted it?

I can’t say for sure. I won’t say he most certainly would have voted with the majority on this, particularly in the way that justice Alito wrote it. I think he would have taken some issue with the way it was done; and as you said, how thin its jurisprudence was. It was filled with popular religious sentiment. You know, I’m not a lawyer; I’m most certainly not a Supreme Court litigator. But I was around enough of them and submitted briefs in enough cases I was interested in that I know what a good legal argument is, and this didn’t seem to be one. It seemed to be more of a polemic from our side of the movement! Which startled me, it took my breath away. Alito was using phrases we had invented as bumper sticker slogans in a Supreme Court decision! I don’t think Scalia would have ever signed onto that.

This fight is not over, Schenck believes:

And the talk now among my old interlocutors is, at the very least, for Congress to work for a national ban on abortion, period. Never mind that that’s contradictory to conservative sensibilities about state autonomy; because we’re not really in a conservative time anymore. I don’t think what happened at the Court in Dobbs or what is happening among the Republicans now in Congress or especially on state levels, is conservative. It’s radical, it’s fascist. And we should start saying that.

Pretty soon they may own it.

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How’s the weather in Budapest?

“Schedule F” went from being an IRS form “Profit or Loss From Farming” to a source of alarm thanks to Jonathan Swan’s Axios series on what a second Trump presidency might look like. Swan himself said he’s never received more mail, some from Trump fans giddy at the prospect of a Trumpist poisoning of the federal bureauocracy. Imagine mini-Trumps in charge of delivering, if not eradicating after pillaging, Medicare, Social Security, and other core federal functions.

Donald Trump is not coy about his plans beyond that, writes David Frum:

Trump sketched out a vision that a new Republican Congress could enact sweeping new emergency powers for the next Republican president. The president would be empowered to disregard state jurisdiction over criminal law. The president would be allowed to push aside a “weak, foolish, and stupid governor,” and to fire “radical and racist prosecutors”—racist here meaning “anti-white.” The president could federalize state National Guards for law-enforcement duties, stop and frisk suspects for illegal weapons, and impose death sentences on drug dealers after expedited trials.

Revenge is Trump’s second-term agenda. The criminal has learned from his mistakes and means to “use the law as a weapon: a weapon to shield his own wrongdoing, a weapon to wield against his political opponents.” Frum adds, “Next time, he will have the wholehearted support of a White House staff selected to enable him. Next time, he will have the backing in Congress of a party remade in his own image. Next time, he’ll be acting to ensure that his opponents never again get a ‘next time’ of their own.”

By now, however, Trump could be irrelevent to the reactionary right’s project to create a one-party state. What Americans across the politcal spectrum need to know right this minute is that if Republicans gain control of Congress this fall, they have already telegraphed where they want to take the country: Budapest.

The American right has fallen hard for Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban. His recent screed against race-mixing drove his longtime adviser Zsuzsa Hegedus to resign over “a pure Nazi speech worthy of Goebbels.” But it was not a deal-breaker for the American right.

 “CPAC’s organizer confirmed to me on Wednesday that Orban is still scheduled to address the group next week, writes Dana Milbank. Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Coalition, told Bloomberg News on Tuesday, “Let’s listen to the man speak.”

Milbank continues:

At its core, Orban’s rule has been about sustaining, and being sustained by, white nationalism. His July 23 speech was an extended articulation of the “great replacement” conspiracy idea — embraced by Carlson and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), among others — that non-White people are plotting to wipe out White people. He claimed: “Brussels, reinforced with Soros-affiliated troops, simply wants to force migrants on us.” Orban railed against a “mixed-race world” in which “European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” He warned that “Islamic civilization” is “constantly moving toward Europe” and is now “occupying and flooding the West.”

“This is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna,” he said, citing the 1683 battle between a European alliance and the Ottoman Empire. “This is why, in still older times, the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers.” This was a reference to the Battle of Tours — in the year 732, when a Frankish Christian ruler defeated an army of Moors invading from Spain.

It was good of Orban to spell that out, because now we know what Hungary’s white nationalists — and their American fan boys at CPAC — have in mind when they rage against immigration and the “great replacement.” They want to take us back to the Dark Ages.

Hell’s bells.

Defense analyst Brynn Tannehill’s assessment in The New Republic is even grimmer reading. “The truth is that American democracy is essentially broken beyond fixing and is unable to withstand a right-wing populist movement determined to destroy it,” she believes. It will take a string of miracles to stop the GOP from completing its project to turn the U.S. into Hungary:

To prevent the GOP from capturing the U.S. the way Orbán and the Fidesz Party did Hungary is going to require several miracles in a row: having a history-and-poll-defying 2022 election, then being willing to overturn the filibuster, then getting lucky with an opening on the Supreme Court and a GOP that never regains its footing or suddenly decides to abandon its quest while at the cusp of victory.

Tannehill’s view tends to be bleaker than others’, perhaps for effect, perhaps, as her bio reads, as a woman who “lives in Northern Virginia with her wife and three children.” Recent Suupreme Court opinions give her family have plenty of reason for concern.

The Jan. 6 committee’s hearings may tarnish the Trump administration. Trump himself may be losing support among the cult. But the project could be unfased. Left out of these bleak discussions about extremists’ intentions are how prosecution of Trump and his cronies might upset them.

It is difficult after the 2016 election to put much faith in Americans’ good sense. What we are left with is a hope that Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice retains enough integrity and balls to prove to the world that justice is still possible in the U.S. He/they had better get about demonstrating it publicly, and soon.

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The special boy is special no more

Josh Hawley has had more press in the lat week than he’s had in a year and it’s not in a good way. Once one of the young GOP guns with a bright future ahead of him, he’s faded from the A list.

In January 2020 he was considered a Trump heir, remembered for his defiant raised fist of solidarity as he walked past the seething rioters at the Capitol. TNR reports:

Eighteen months later, however, Hawley’s big gamble has shown little signs of paying off: He barely registers as a figure of national consequence. No one is looking to him as the leader of anything, let alone the Republican Party. In February, he received 0.2 percent of the vote when the Conservative Political Action Conference held its annual presidential straw poll. Former Vice President Mike Pence, a reviled figure in GOP circles, received five times as many votes, though both lagged far behind Trump—and, to a lesser extent, the current front-runner to succeed him, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

It also shows the limitations of a certain version of populism on the right. The movement launched by Donald Trump tapped into various cultural and economic frustrations. But efforts to intellectually backfill that movement have largely sputtered. Hawley has made big bets that taking on tech companies like Google and Facebook—largely on spurious grounds that they “censor” conservatives, though occasionally on more persuasive ones relating to concentration—would help launch his national ambitions and cement his role as the intellectual center of the right. He is a frequent guest on Fox News, where he rails against so-called “cancel culture” and pushes the idea that Republicans like him are being censored and oppressed by liberals. (Hawley made a big fuss after a book deal he had with Simon and Schuster was canceled after his support for overturning the election; he quickly signed a deal with a conservative publisher.) And yet, in spite of all of the television appearances and efforts to derail hearings into laundry lists of right-wing grievances, Hawley remains a peripheral figure.

That’s not to say that Hawley’s version of conservatism is anathema to the right. In fact, his rejection of liberalism—and his larger efforts to use the government to enforce his own illiberal ideas about speech, trade, and freedom—are growing in prominence. As libertarian blogger Aaron Ross Powell wrote in a recent newsletter, Hawley’s anti-tech stance is largely rooted in his anti-cosmopolitanism. “In fact, Hawley was arguably the progenitor of the right’s backlash against Big Tech with the explicit aim of undermining the chief mechanism by which America’s cosmopolitan spirit and culture—a by-product of its classical liberal commitments—develops and spreads,” Powell argued. “He’s been the most outspoken senator pushing to place government in charge of moderating online speech, jettisoning his party’s alleged commitment to limited government pre-Trump.”

Hawley’s larger goal has been to take the authoritarian strongman mantle from Trump—or at least to inherit it. And on that point, he has failed miserably. The “techlash” has sputtered on both the left and the right, but particularly on the right. Trump’s frequent complaints about “shadowbanning” and other “censorship” from tech companies have largely fallen out of favor as other boogeymen have proven more politically potent. Those who were complaining about Twitter and Facebook are now talking about trans athletes and “critical race theory” and Disney. Hawley, of course, is one of them. But he’s only one among many.

That hasn’t stopped him from continuing to try to place himself at the center of the new right. Speaking at the conservative group Turning Points USA’s Student Action Summit on Friday, Hawley insisted he had no regrets about the role he played in the violent assault on the Capitol. “I just want to say to all of those liberals out there and the liberal media, just in case you haven’t gotten the message yet, I do not regret it, and I am not backing down,” Hawley said, striking a belligerent note. “I’m not going to apologize, I’m not going to cower, I’m not going to run from you, I’m not going to bend a knee.” It was a poor choice of words—footage of him running like a coward from rioters he had helped to whip into a frenzy was already everywhere. Hawley, by the way, wasn’t even listed as a candidate on TPUSA’s straw poll.

He’s always been an opportunistic phony it was obvious from a mile away. So is Trump so it’s understandable that he, like so many others, thought they could project the same appeal and win big. But Trump is sui generis — a very rich, corrupt man with a TV show and a model wife. He is modeled more like an evangelical TV preacher than a politician and very few people have that peculiar mix of talents and attributes, least of all Josh Hawley.

Let’s hope this is right and he has gone the way of earlier great whitebread hopes like Scott Walker.

Josh Hawley running away to a variety of soundtracks.

Pt. 1: Chariots of Fire #January6thCommitteeHearing pic.twitter.com/tVCf2R5tUD

— Mallory Nees (@The_Mal_Gallery) July 22, 2022

Ted Cruz said he laughed at that one. What a burn…

Except when it’s just “boys talk”

This is such a typical GOP dirty trick I wouldn’t think we even need to explain it. You’d think they’d have just a little bit of embarrassment about doing it on behalf of a man who is credibly accused of assaulting more than 20 women but that wouldn’t be them:

Steve Bannon’s machinations around the 2020 presidential race were, at least according to his own words, sleazier and more cynical than even some of his harshest critics might have guessed. In leaked audio previously revealed by Mother Jones, the former Trump White House strategist said shortly before the 2020 election that Trump intended to declare victory on election night even if he was losing—part of a preexisting plan, Bannon made clear, to falsely assert that any Trump defeat was due to fraud.

But that wasn’t all. Bannon also boasted on the recording about his efforts to help position Trump for his big election-fraud lie. Aiming to hurt Joe Biden’s chances and at least narrow the election results, Bannon ensured that sexually explicit material from Hunter Biden’s laptop was widely publicized. For that, he enlisted help from his patron, exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui. Bannon also expressed approval of lies by Guo and his associates about what that material actually showed, referring to their false accusations that Hunter Biden committed salacious crimes as “editorial creativity.”

The audio comes from an October 31, 2020, meeting between Bannon and supporters of Guo, who controls pro-Trump, Chinese-language media sites and nonprofits that spread various forms of far-right disinformation.

“We got you all this stuff and you started dumping it out and the internet started picking it up,” Bannon said to people at the gathering, some of whom can be heard laughing during parts of the discussion. “The hard drive from hell stopped [Biden’s] momentum and drove up his negatives,” he said at another point.

A Bannon spokesperson and an attorney for Guo did not respond to requests for comment.

At Thursday’s hearing of the House select committee investigating January 6, the last of eight hearings the panel held this summer, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney highlighted the leaked audio uncovered by Mother Jones as fresh evidence of Trump’s plan to overthrow the election. The audio shows that “Donald’s Trump plan to falsely claim victory in 2020, no matter what the facts actually were, was premeditated,” Cheney said. “Perhaps worse, Donald Trump believed he could convince his voters to buy it, whether he had any actual evidence of fraud or not.”

About a week before the meeting with Bannon in late October 2020, Guo’s associates had begun posting videos and pictures of Hunter Biden engaged in sexual encounters and using drugs on GTV, a since shuttered video-streaming site run by Guo. In leaked messages previously uncovered by Mother Jones, Guo directed subordinates in detail on how to post and distribute material from Biden’s laptop. He further instructed them to spread false claims about the material: First, he told them to say the files included images of Hunter Biden with underage Chinese girls. There is no evidence at all supporting this allegation. Second, Guo told subordinates to claim that the Chinese government had obtained the material and used it to blackmail Hunter and his father, Joe Biden. That, too, was a lie, people involved in publishing the material told me.

Bannon’s role in this effort was never in much doubt. When the New York Post began reporting in mid-October 2020 on other material from Hunter Biden’s laptop, the tabloid explained that its journalists had learned of the hard drive from Bannon and had later received a copy of it from Rudy Giuliani. A computer shop owner in Delaware said he had given a copy of the hard drive to Giuliani.

In the leaked audio, however, Bannon explicitly acknowledged his role in making sure that Guo and his colleagues obtained and published explicit material from the laptop. “We got the hard drive and got it to you,” Bannon reiterated to the Guo associates at the meeting.

Bannon has worked with Guo since shortly after Bannon’s ouster from the White House in 2017. Guo paid Bannon at least $1 million to help launch his media companies, and Bannon later worked as a director of GTV.

The task of actually sharing the hard drive files with Guo’s associates went to two men who worked with Bannon on his War Room podcast, Jack Maxey and Vish Burra. Maxey, who became a kind of professional promoter of material from the laptop—he reportedly refers to himself as “Hunter’s laptop king”—described his involvement in providing the laptop material to Guo in March, during an online broadcast called “Real Talk With Mary Grace.” Maxey said that claims that the hard drive contained sexually explicit images of children were fabricated. Maxey called Guo “a very bad actor” and said Guo’s media company “took those images and injected images that were not in there and played a game.”

Maxey told Mother Jones in an interview that he felt that Guo and his associates’ promotion of false claims about Hunter Biden had distracted from real information on the laptop related to Hunter’s foreign business dealings while his father was vice president.

Burra, who left Bannon’s War Room in late 2020, told Mother Jones that Bannon had instructed him, “It’s your job to get out all the sex pictures.” Burra said that with Bannon’s encouragement, he eventually shared the material with a Guo assistant via files with titles including “Salacious Pics Package.”

The group Bannon spoke to on October 31, 2020, included Wang Dinggang—who at the time was a Guo ally with a YouTube channel called Lude Media that was featured on GTV. (Wang also uses the name “Lude.”) In a September 24 broadcast of that program, Wang falsely claimed that Chinese sources had sent US officials “three hard disks” of material related to Hunter Biden. In fact, the material came from the hard drive Giuliani obtained, not from China. That broadcast—which appeared three weeks before the initial New York Post story—was the first public indication that Trump allies had obtained Hunter Biden’s private files. In that video and subsequent rants, Wang falsely asserted that the material included videos showing sexual abuse of children. Those claims were repeated on another Guo site, GNews; by other right-wing publications and figures; by Giuliani; and after the election by Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

In response to an inquiry about Wang’s media activity, which is publicly available and detailed in previous reporting from Mother Jones, Wang said, “Nothing you say about me is true.”

During the October 2020 meeting, Bannon himself cited Wang’s role in distributing the material. Bannon specifically said that through “Lude’s editorial creativity over the pictures,” as well as claims about “the CCP involvement” in Hunter’s business activities, “we drove up Biden’s negatives.”

Bannon didn’t just credit the false claims about Hunter Biden with improving Trump’s position in the polls. He also asserted that efforts by Twitter and Facebook to suppress reporting by the New York Post and others on the material from the laptop had only heightened interest in it. And he explained that the Biden campaign had erred by failing to respond to the smear campaign that Guo’s associates had ignited.

“We hammered this guy every day for 10 days with the worst pictures in the world, drug addict, taking money from CCP,” Bannon said. “No response. Nothing. And the negatives just keep going up.”

“Nobody came out and said anything you’re saying’s not true,” he added. “Even the wildest allegations.”

“That’s why when people tell me, ‘Lude’s stuff’s getting crazy,’ I go, ‘Not crazy enough,’” Bannon said, drawing laughter from others in the meeting.

Bannon then went a step further: He told Guo’s associates that the lies they generated had allowed Trump to pull close enough that Biden had little chance of scoring a blowout victory. That would help Trump deploy his “strategy” of alleging fraud and declaring victory on election night, even if he was trailing or the race was too close to call. The lies about Hunter Biden, that is, would help Trump lie about the election.

Perhaps most disturbing in hindsight is what Bannon concluded after that. This strategy, he added, would likely result in political violence. “So my point is,” he said, “any peaceful resolution of this [election] is probably gone.”

I believe they thought they could reduce Joe Biden to tears because he’s sentimental about his kids. That low down trick was done against Edmund Muskie by Nixon’s boys. (None of these Trumpers, including the man himself, have ever had an original thought.)

I’m not going to go into the laptop’s provenance and all the questions about manipulation of the material. I’m afraid you’re going to hear all about it next year, unfortunately. Suffice to say that it’s confusing and salacious, just the way they like it.

This whole thing is gross but it’s par for the course. And if they take control of the House next January you can be sure that Hunter Biden’s private parts will be on rotation in the news cycle. They just love to peddle the dirty, dirty, always have.

A Texas Mom

A school curriculum protester in Texas upset because her child learned about Banksy in art class. Seriously.

Amanda Carpenter:

One of the biggest lies that former President Trump and his allies have perpetuated about January 6th is that Trump ordered the National Guard to secure the Capitol.

His press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was the first to unfurl that tale, at 3:36 p.m. on Jan. 6th:

At President @realDonaldTrump’s direction, the National Guard is on the way along with other federal protective services.

We reiterate President Trump’s call against violence and to remain peaceful.

— Kayleigh McEnany 45 Archived (@PressSec45) January 6, 2021

There is no evidence that he gave such an order.

In a video message the next day, Trump claimed “I immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement to secure the building and expel the intruders.”

But one thing that has become clear as we have learned about the 187 minutes that the Capitol was under siege is that the dithering Trump did not “immediately” do anything.

Trump lied when he said on Jan 5 that Pence was on board with his…

Over time, the lie about Trump sending in the National Guard has taken other forms. For example, Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, has claimed that Trump gave a direct order to have 10,000 National Guard troops “at the ready” on Jan. 6th, but that his request was somehow rejected by Democrats like Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In February 2021, Meadows told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, “As many as 10,000 National Guard troops were told to be on the ready by the secretary of defense. That was a direct order from President Trump.”

That lie has now been decisively put to rest.

Yesterday, the House January 6th Committee revealed testimony from Christopher Miller, Trump’s acting secretary of defense, rejecting the notion that Trump ordered thousands of Guard troops to be standing by:

To remove any doubt: Not only did Donald Trump fail to contact his Secretary of Defense on January 6th (as shown in our hearing), Trump also failed to give any order prior to January 6 to deploy the military to protect the Capitol.

Here is Secretary Miller’s testimony— pic.twitter.com/joucnUHvBB

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 26, 2022

In the audio clip, a questioner asks Miller whether there is “any accuracy” to Meadows’s statement. Miller’s reply:

Not from my perspective. I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature. So, I was surprised by seeing that publicly . . . we obviously had plans for activating more folks, but that was not anything more than contingency planning. There was no official message traffic or anything of that nature.

The questioner follows up: “Just so we’re clear, you did not have 10,000 troops, quote ‘to be on the ready’ . . . prior to January 6th?”

Miller: “A non-military person probably could have some sort of weird interpretation, but no, to answer your question, that was not part of my plan or the Department of Defense’s plan.”

Questioner: “To be crystal clear, there was no direct order from President Trump to put 10,000 troops ‘to be on the ready’ for January 6th, correct?”

Miller: “That’s correct. There was no direct—there was no order from the president.”

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Keep in mind that Miller is no Never Trumper. Within a week of the 2020 election, Trump “terminated” Mark Esper, his defense secretary for the previous year and a half, and handed the job to Miller. Given the chaotic nature of his appointment in the final days of Trump’s presidency, Miller was not subjected to Senate confirmation hearings for the position. (The confirmation hearing for the position he briefly held before that, the director of counterintelligence, was perfunctory.) And during his ten-week tenure running DoD, Miller often proved willing to indulge Trump’s most far-out demands.

For example, as the Jan. 6th Committee previously revealed, Miller heeded requests from Meadows to follow up on a conspiracy theory regarding Italian satellites that were, supposedly, rigged to flip votes from Trump. In his capacity as the highest-ranking defense official, Miller phoned a DoD attaché in Rome about it, who disabused him of the idea.

Meanwhile, in an appearance on Fox News last month, Miller and his former DoD chief of staff, Kash Patel, agreed with Meadows’s claim that Trump had authorized thousands of National Guard to be ready for Jan. 6th. Miller’s statement on Fox seems to contradict his statement given to the Jan. 6th Committee under oath and under the threat of perjury.

The Fox interview was with Sean Hannity, who moonlighted as a secret crisis communications adviser to Trump throughout his presidency and frequently coordinated with his staff. Hannity has repeatedly used his program to promote the idea that Trump’s request to secure the Capitol was stymied by Democrats on Jan. 6th.

https://twitter.com/AlanTudyk/status/1552083479063498753

Why the disparity? Well, there’s no criminal penalty for lying to the press. If he had lied to someone with journalistic integrity there would be some accountability as he would be exposed as the liar he is but no one who watches Fox news will ever learn of that.

I’m surprised that Carpenter didn’t mention the General Milley testimony to the Committee in which he says that Mark Meadows called him up to say that they needed to challenge the “narrative” that the president wasn’t in charge. I think that may be relevant…

Of course Trump didn’t order the National Guard against his devoted followers. He wanted them to stop the count that day and they were succeeding. Why would he interfere with that?

This commercial from Mothers Against Greg Abbott is brilliant.pic.twitter.com/PHjq1JQLK3

— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) July 25, 2022

It won’t be just Greg. People like Ted Cruz will have a say too.

The act is stale — and annoying

I will be shocked if Donald Trump doesn’t announce his candidacy in short order. Why? Because for the first time since he became president, beguiling Republican voters with his astonishing upset in 2016, Trump seems to be losing his iron grip on Republican voters.

Sure, he still has many avid followers but that sense of control and command over the party, the awe at his sheer ability to survive and prevail even when he loses, is suddenly looking a bit weak. Watching his appearances over the last couple of weeks, it appears that Trump is aware of the shift and since giving up is clearly not in his nature — particularly when the need for vengeance and vindication is his reason for being — he will have to try to grab the spotlight and take control sooner rather than later.

And boy has it been a bad week for Donald Trump.

In fact, it’s been a bad summer. The January 6th Committee hearings have obviously gotten under Trump’s skin. His shrill, shrieking tantrums on Truth Social, his sad social media platform, attest to that. He seems brittle and unfocused at his rallies, even though his most devoted supporters still cheer for his patented insults and chant along with the greatest hits. The act is stale — but he’s too narcissistic to admit it.

On Tuesday, Trump went back to Washington, D.C. for the first time since his ignominious departure on January 20th, 2021. He was there ostensibly to deliver a policy speech on law and order but when has he ever delivered such a thing? He had his prepared remarks which sounded suspiciously like a reworked version of his infamous “American carnage” inaugural address but, as usual, he quickly devolved into his schtick, whining about the 2020 election and mocking people for sport. His only “policy” pronouncements were an idea to round up homeless people to put them in camps outside of America’s cities, the summary execution of drug dealers and allowing the president to call in the National Guard to crack heads without regard to governors’ wishes, basically turning the service into a presidential Praetorian Guard.

Of course, Trump has never read nor would he understand the Constitution and has shown repeatedly that he doesn’t care about it, so any protestations that these ideas are unconstitutional and unAmerican would fall on deaf ears. But his crowd of D.C. sycophants seemed to love it. Still, it was a ragged performance, verging on a nostalgia act, and you get the sense that on some level he knows it.

He also must know that he’s losing elite right-wing media support.

It is clear that the Murdoch empire is cutting him loose. Fox News isn’t showing his appearance live anymore and even had the temerity to counter-program his rally last week with a fawning interview with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s young, upstart rival for the MAGA crown. Both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal turned against Trump in scathing editorials asserting that he is unworthy to run again. Anchor Brett Baier hosted Liz Cheney his January 6th nemesis and allowed her to make the case against him for the Fox News audience. The evening opinion hosts are still with him but they’ll go where their audience goes and the Murdochs have evidently decided that they won’t lose their audience if they extricate themselves from the Trump orbit.

Perhaps more telling than anything is the fact that the GOP’s small donor fundraising has fallen out of bed. Polls still show that people say they are enthusiastic about voting and many of them say they still love Donald Trump but they are not putting their money where their mouths are. Trump is almost certainly aware of this — it’s about money, after all, his first love.

So all of this adds up to what they used to call back in the 90s “Clinton fatigue,” which was just a sense of exhaustion with the endless drama. Many of the pundits attributed Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in 2000 to the knowledge among the voters that the Republicans were going to dog him just as they did his predecessor and they just weren’t up for any more of it. Trump fatigue has got to be a hundred times worse. He made Clinton look like an amateur when it came to scandals, the worst of which was that he tried to stage a coup and incited an insurrection in order to prevent the peaceful transfer of power!

The news on that front is devastating.

The Washington Post reported late Tuesday that the Justice Department (DOJ) is investigating Trump’s actions leading up to Jan. 6, citing four people familiar with the matter. Attorney General Merrick Garland, meanwhile, declined to rule out prosecuting Trump in an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt on Tuesday. This comes after two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence testified to the federal grand jury probing the Capitol riot last week. The testimony of Pence’s former Pence chief of staff, Marc Short, the most high-profile Trump official known to have appeared before the grand jury, is a sign that the DOJ’s investigation of the attack and the fake elector plot is heating up.

While the Republican poll numbers haven’t moved much in response to the January 6th hearings, opinion among Independents has shifted. And there can be little doubt that the ceaseless drumbeat of criticism from his own former staff and appointees as shown in the hearings has contributed to the Trump fatigue. Having to defend his actions against these accusations from fellow Republicans — members of his own White House — causes uncomfortable emotional dissonance and even his stalwart supporters are feeling the weight of it.

More importantly, the legal threats are becoming very serious.

That plan to have fake electors send alternate ballots for Trump, a plan which the January 6th Committee has established Trump approved, may be the plot that nails him. The New York Times obtained copies of damning emails sent among Trump’s cadre of co-conspirators (which includes the head of the Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel), one of which even said, “We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted.” This case is being actively investigated by both the Justice Department and the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney.

We don’t know exactly what Pence’s former top aide and counsel testified about last week, but, as the Washington Post reported on Tuesday night, the case has been building for many months with phone records of former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows obtained last April (which may explain why they declined to prosecute him for the congressional contempt charge.) The Post concluded that Trump himself may be under criminal investigation for the attempt to delay or obstruct an official proceeding, with which many of the 850 defendants in the January 6 insurrection cases have been charged. And, yes, he is also possibly being investigated for fraud — election fraud  — for that fake elector scheme. Oh, the irony.

That’s not even all of the pressure that has been brought to bear on Trump in the last couple of weeks.

As many of us have observed, Trump is not only driven to run again in 2024 to redeem himself as the one true president but he is also convinced that being an official candidate gives him some protection against all this legal exposure. He’ll claim it’s all a political witch hunt, as he has been doing non-stop for more than six years now. The question is if “Trump fatigue” makes that relentless mantra have the effect of making him even less politically appealing. There are warning signs everywhere that it’s a risky gambit.  

Major outlets discover DOJ is investigating Trump

Attorney General Merrick Garland in recent statements has attempted to make clear without tipping his department’s hand that its investigation into Jan. 6 is “the most wide ranging investigation in its history.” What about prosecuting the former president, NBC’s Lester Holt asked Garland on Tuesday:

Garland replied: “We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding Jan. 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable. That’s what we do. We don’t pay any attention to other issues with respect to that.”

Later that day, the Washington Post and New York Times discovered that the Department of Justice actually is probing Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 “according to four people familiar with the matter” (Post) and “a person familiar with the testimony” before the grand jury (Times). Breaking news last night.

Washington Post (EXCLUSIVE):

Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury — including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence — have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won, according to two people familiar with the matter. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

For those following Marcy Wheeler’s tracking of the investigation, this is not breaking news at all. She has contended for months that DOJ’s investigations into and prosecutions of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and Trump-adjacent players are part of its investigation of Trump himself. She comments on the Post “scoop” by Carol D. Leonnig, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey and Spencer S. Hsun in a Twitter thread:

A few notes about this WaPo story on DOJ investigating Trump. It has two main new details: 1) presumably from Marc Short and Greg Jacob’s GJ appearances and 2) that DOJ got Mark Meadows and others’ phone records.

washingtonpost.com/national-secur…

It’s a bit surprising how much detail is coming from the Pence associate camp (though basically only tells us DOJ asked abt same stuff J6C did). Remember, though, that Emmet Flood is Short’s attorney.

For decades, he has protected the Institution of the Presidency. 

It would be a remarkable thing if he were the attorney for a witness who would provide key testimony leading to the first prosecution of a President. 

The other investigative detail is that DOJ obtained phone records in April. Hmmm. April, May June, July — that’s three months ago. This would be consistent with people getting notice from their provided after an initial gag.

In other words, that’s consistent with DOJ being okay with the subjects (including the well-lawyered Mark Meadows, who refused to chat the other day) learning of the fact.

There are other steps that DOJ could take that would NOT give this kind of legal notice. 

Since @benjaminwittes is trying to unpack sourcing, these two details are key: Whereas elsewhere the witnesses have refused to comment but not the lawyers, here, the witness is not mentioned but the lawyer is.

Also, Mar-a-Lago’s stenographer.

I wouldn’t make too much of this passage–in part bc sources aren’t even billed to have knowledge of the investigation (but instead the “situation”) & in part bc this team includes bozos who treated Jonathan Turley as a credible source on precisely this topic earlier this year.

Two reasons why I wouldn’t take that seriously (aside fr involvement of Mar-a-Lago’s stenographer & journalists who treat Turley as credible): A judge has ALREADY said it’s plausible that Trump has aid & abet liability on assaults. That was even b4 evidence he knew mob was armed. 

Also, Trump’s own people have said Meadows may have exposure on financial issues. If Meadows does, it’s likely Trump may as well, for his fraudulent fundraising. 

One final point, and an important one. I and others have been asking why Meadows is not on subpoenas abt the fake electors, bc we know he was involved.

DOJ obtained Meadows’ call records in April. Meadows STILL wasn’t on fake electors subpoenas (in AZ) from June. 

I agree with Ben that Carol Leonnig is a superb journalist.

As noted, of late Josh Dawsey might as well be on Trump’s payroll, given his apparent belief that the gilt decorations at Mar-a-Lago are newsworthy, so treat his reporting as just that, MaL gilt. 

In other news, The Media just discovered that Brandon Straka’s January 13 sentencing memo had a cooperation component, and are asking for that sealed memo.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

The funny thing abt the frenzy abt Meadows’ phone records is that the most important details from that day won’t be in them. They’ll be in his Signal chats, which he may have criminally destroyed when he replaced his phone, and if not, they should be at NARA. 

National Archives and Records Administration.

Wheeler is keeping a running thread of Department of Justice actions re: Jan. 6 filed under:

WHAT DOJ WAS DOING WHILE YOU WERE WASTING TIME WHINGING ON TWITTER

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