Month: August 2022

Lol

Josh Kovensky at TPM blows the lid off that ugly rug:

When the FBI released the photo of records allegedly taken by former President Trump strewn around a floor in Mar-a-Lago, it suggested not only haphazard keeping of the government’s secrets, but also an incredibly tasteless rug underneath.

I was curious. And so, I turned to Richard Afkari — a renowned New York City rug seller famed for his encyclopedic knowledge of carpets.

When I reached out to him on Wednesday, Afkari had already read about the Mar-a-Lago searches and the most recent filing. But he hadn’t seen the photo of the documents — and the carpet underneath them — included by federal prosecutors in the filing.

I emailed Afkari the photo.

He immediately knew what he was looking at: a rug with an arabesque pattern and axminister weaving. It was likely a custom ordered pattern — more expensive, for sure — but almost certainly machine manufactured — lower quality than handmade carpets.

“It’s not a handmade carpet, it’s what we call wall-to-wall carpeting,” Afkari explained, adding that the fabric was likely made out of a mixture of wool and silk, or a shiny cotton-based substitute.

“It’s a very English taste,” he added, describing the pattern as an “arabesque design which was originally copied from early textile and artwork from the Middle East, and Turkey, and then onto Spain and into England and France, and finally here in the States.”

Afkari speaks slowly and eloquently about his subject matter. An Iranian immigrant who came to the United States during the country’s revolution, he hails from a family of rug merchants.

Afkari recounted traveling with an uncle who would journey from Iran to Germany, selling the country’s hand-woven rugs at foreign exhibitions. After the revolution, Afkari opened up a rug shop in Manhattan — on Madison Ave and 29th street.

It was into that shop, Afkari recalled, that a younger Donald Trump entered to browse in the late 1980s.

“He was looking for a Persian rug at the time, but he never ended up buying,” Afkari said. “I didn’t really know who he was at the time, but a friend walked in and started talking to him, shook his hand, said, ‘oh, Mr. Trump.’”

I asked: how expensive would a rug like this be? Were we talking hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars? Or more? Or less?

Afkari estimated that the Mar-a-Lago rug would go between $80 to $100 per square foot, likely from a manufacturer in China, though older custom rugs would have come from the United States.

“It takes at least two weeks to design the machine to make the pattern,” he said. Trump could save by ordering more square feet of the same product, but would pay more to have the arabesque carpet cover only a few rooms.

“If I were to order 100,000 square feet of the same product, it will become very inexpensive because it’s been programmed to create 500 rolls or 1,000 rolls,” he explained. “However if I say I need two rolls of carpeting to cover the bedroom and master bedroom, I get charged the same amount for 500 or 1,000 rolls that I ordered.”

It’s not clear where in Mar-a-Lago the FBI took the photo of the strewn-about documents.

I’m pretty sure they found them in his office but I can ‘t remember where I saw that. And yes, that rug is hideous. But let’s face it. The man has no taste. Here’s an example of what his designer wanted to do with Trump tower:

Here’s what Trump went with:

But let’s hear it for the common sense of the average citizens:

And for Afkari what lay atop the carpet was more shocking than the rug itself.

“If it were one of my workers with invoices thrown around like that, I would call the police,” he remarked.

Granted, the FBI arranged the documents for the photograph, but the instinct is correct. Anyone who saw a bunch of Top Secret documents in a box with a bunch of memorabilia should call the FBI. It’s not ok.

Michigan goes fully F….atuous

You think these people aren’t enemies of democracy?

A citizen-initiative ballot measure seeking to enshrine abortion rights in the Michigan state constitution was blocked Wednesday from being certified for the November ballot.

The Michigan Board of State Canvassers on Wednesday deadlocked on a party line 2-2 vote whether to certify the Reproductive Freedom for All ballot initiative to the November ballot, throwing its future into uncertainty. The measure won’t appear on the ballot for now, but the campaign behind the initiative said it plans to bring the issue before the state Supreme Court.

“(Reproductive Freedom for All) is heading to the Michigan Supreme Court to ask that the Board of State Canvassers do their jobs. The State Bureau of Elections recommended the board certify our signatures, noting it had no standing to act on the language,” the campaign said on Twitter.

“The board is disenfranchising hundreds of voters who want to restore Roe and keep in place the reproductive rights we’ve had in Michigan for the last 50 years,” it argued.

The Michigan Bureau of Elections had last week recommended to the board that it approve certification of the petition.

Reproductive Freedom for All submitted more than 750,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office in July. In its staff report the Bureau of Elections estimated the petition had 596,379 valid signatures — about 146,000 more than the minimum signatures required.

So what excuse did they come up with? You will not believe it:

Opponents, however, challenged the proposed amendment over the petition’s lack of spacing between words...

In its staff report, the Bureau noted that Michigan election law is “silent on the amount of space that must be between letters and words in a petition.”

It doesn’t get stupider than that.

The Board of State Canvassers’ two Democrats voted to certify the petition while the board’s two Republicans, including the chair, voted against certification, agreeing with opponents’ objections to the amendment’s formatting. The RFFA plans to file a request for judicial intervention to the state Supreme Court “expeditiously,” spokeswoman Darci McConnell said.

Watch the Supreme Court say they can’t make the decision this close to the election.

Think about this. The rabid right which has been lobbying for decades to outlaw abortion is now ducking putting it on the ballot because they are afraid that pro-choicers will come out to vote and it will benefit the Democratic Party. So they’re relying on ridiculous rationales like the “spacing between the words” on the ballot initiative were sloppy. It just doesn’t get any more pathetic than that. Even more pathetic, it may very well work.

His views on abortion are extreme and hypocritical

EXCLUSIVE: According to GOP #PASen nominee @DrOz, life starts at conception, and abortion is still murder at any stage.

Make no mistake: Abortion rights are at risk if Oz gets to the Senate. pic.twitter.com/Iw88Qlowte

— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) August 31, 2022

TV doctor turned Republican senatorial candidate Mehmet Oz has been tough to pin down on abortion.

He claims to be “100% pro-life,” but he also has some exceptions. And as recently as 2019, Oz defended Roe v. Wade.

But now, The Daily Beast has obtained audio from a campaign event this May where Oz staked out his most extreme position yet, telling voters he believes abortion at any stage of development is “still murder,” including from the moment of conception.

“I do believe life starts at conception, and I’ve said that multiple times,” Oz said during the event, a tele-town hall held a week before the Republican primary.

“If life starts at conception,” Oz added, “why do you care what age the heart starts beating at? It’s, you know, it’s still murder, if you were to terminate a child whether their heart’s beating or not.”

He was answering an attendee who wondered how Oz could square his current anti-abortion stance with his statements from 2019, specifically that “the heart’s not beating” six weeks into a pregnancy.

Interestingly, back in 2019, before Dr. SnakeOil became a full-fledged wingnut he was pro-choice and he said the opposite:

He was answering an attendee who wondered how Oz could square his current anti-abortion stance with his statements from 2019, specifically that “the heart’s not beating” six weeks into a pregnancy.

The one-time surgeon explained that, at the time of the 2019 interview, he had been “concerned” about making sure anti-abortion laws could be enforced.

“My mother-in-law wrote a lot of the original pro-life literature in Montgomery County,” Oz told the conservative audience. “My argument in that radio interview was as a doctor, a heart starts beating at around nine weeks. So I was concerned that if legislators picked a timeframe that’s not medically accurate, it would invalidate the law.”

Oz did in fact say something to that effect in the 2019 Breakfast Club interview. “If you’re going to define life by a beating heart,” he said, “then make it a beating heart, not little electrical exchanges in the cell that no one would hear or think about as a heart.”

He’s completely full of shit:

The context in that 2019 interview, however, was that Oz was politically pro-choice.

He was “really worried,” Oz said during that interview, about the harmful consequences for women’s health if Roe were overturned.

He even took a shot at people who believe life begins at conception—as Oz now says he does.

“Just being logical about it,” Oz said then, “if you think that the moment of conception you’ve got a life, then why would you even wait six weeks? Right, then an in vitro fertilized egg is still a life.”

He hasn’t said if he’s against in vitro fertilization but you can bet he’s going to be grilled about it. That’s an extremely unpopular stance but it’s the only logical conclusion if you believe that life begins at conception which he now says he does.

Oz is a perfect Trump candidate. He’s an inveterate liar and crooked TV celebrity. God help us if he wins.

Meanwhile, he’s making fun of John Fetterman’s health and the media is now eagerly helping him by demanding the Fetterman “come clean” about his health as if his illness is some kind of scandal that disqualifies him from office. He had a stroke. He’s recovering. So did Senator Ben Ray Lujan from New Mexico this summer. Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein had one a while back. Nobody suggested that they should resign or stalked them asking for every detail of his medical files.

Fetterman is running for the Senate not the presidency. There are no national security implications, he can be replaced by the governor if he dies, and there is zero reason to believe that knowing more about his medical situation will alter anyone’s voting intentions.

So why do they do it?

Because they're the gatekeepers, and Fetterman didn't take them into his confidence.

— Suburban Guerrilla 💙 (@SusieMadrak) August 31, 2022

Someday we really need to ask about this media habit. There are times when health is a legitimate issue but they are inconsistent in the way they approach it. Most often they treat it as a personal affront if a candidate doesn’t tell them all their intimate medical details when it really is nobody’s business and will make no difference in their job performance or if voters know or don’t know. Fetterman’s case is one of those. He’s not going to drop out of the race and his voters are not going to vote for someone else so really, what’s the point?

To anyone who says "it's just summer"… here's NASA's climate spiral👇 pic.twitter.com/xdQzXvsqPD

— Best for Britain (@BestForBritain) July 18, 2022

They needed a scapegoat

Last week Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health announced that he would be retiring at the end of the year after a long and storied career. Leading Republicans predictably responded by promising to “hold him accountable” for the pandemic. They threatened to send him to prison for “his Frankenstein experiments. ” The ensuing character assassination against this long-time government scientist is something to behold and it’s worth taking a look at how it happened.

I imagine that most people had never heard of Fauci before the COVID pandemic hit but it was not surprising that the Trump administration brought him forward to speak to the public as one of the nation’s top scientific experts on viral epidemics. Fauci guided the research on HIV/AIDS and helped create the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has helped save millions of lives throughout the developing world. His pioneering work in the field of human immunoregulation has been key to our understanding of the human immune response.

Seven presidents, of both parties, relied on Fauci’s advice on domestic and global health, with Barack Obama giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the list of Fauci’s other awards and honorary doctoral degrees a mile long. His resume could not be more impressive.

Throughout his career in government, Fauci was studiously apolitical and it was not surprising that Trump invited Fauci to share the stage with him in the early days of the pandemic. His presence signaled that the government was going to take this threat seriously. There was simply no one seen as more trustworthy among scientists and political leaders alike. So how did it come to pass that Republicans now see him as some kind of James Bond villain? Nothing could be more unlikely.

It started when conservatives became unhappy with the “lockdowns” (which were not actually lockdowns) and mask mandates. For some reason, Fauci was blamed for this despite the fact that they were all state and local initiatives operating on the advice of the CDC and their own public health officials. The CDC at the time was run by a Trump sycophant named Robert Redfield and Fauci’s only participation was as a member of the President’s COVID task force. When asked his opinion, Fauci said that people should follow the CDC guidelines. (In fact, if there is any valid criticism of Fauci on that subject it’s that early on he went along with the advice that people shouldn’t wear masks because they were needed for medical personnel, not that he was mandating them for the public.) Likewise, he didn’t close the schools or demand that businesses require vaccines or any other kind of mandate because he had no power to do any such thing.

Nevertheless, as soon as it became clear that Trump’s leadership on the pandemic was going to be as bad as his leadership on everything else, the right turned on Fauci. They certainly couldn’t blame their Dear Leader.

Dr. Fauci lost the trust of the American people when his guidance unnecessarily kept schools closed and businesses shut while obscuring questions about his knowledge on the origins of COVID.
 
He owes the American people answers. A @HouseGOP majority will hold him accountable.

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) August 22, 2022

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is just one of many Republicans now demanding that Fauci be held accountable for the pandemic and everything Republicans hated about the government response. Perhaps the most notorious of Fauci’s congressional critics is Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, an unaccredited ophthalmologist, who repeatedly challenged Fauci in Senate hearings about the pandemic, accusing him of covering up a personal involvement in the origins of the virus in Wuhan China. Although questions remain about how the virus came to be, this accusation is ridiculous and has been thoroughly debunked.

Even snake oil salesman and TV personality Dr. Oz, the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, had the nerve to say that Fauci doesn’t see patients so he doesn’t understand disease from a “patient care perspective” — which isn’t true. Fauci does see patients at the NIH Clinical Center. (Oz is no doubt upset with Fauci for refusing to endorse one of his own favorite quack remedies, Hydroxychloroquine.)

Factcheck.org looked at all of the right-wing claims against Fauci and found them to be false, even including the inane conspiracy theories such as the one claiming that Fauci’s wife is the sister of Ghislaine Maxwell, the procurer for the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. Nonetheless, the Republicans are determined to roast Fauci over the coals if they win the House in November, putting him up for a show trial to entertain the folks, in between their planned Hunter Biden hearings and Joe Biden’s impeachment.

Of course, the professional character assassins aren’t the elected GOP officials, it’s the right-wing media. It’s being led by Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who is certifiable on this subject. Last week, when Fauci announced his retirement Carlson went into an extended fantasy segment saying that Fauci had “apparently engineered the single most devastating event in modern American history,” and declaring:

“He might want to get out of town now and move to, say, Cambridge, find a safe place to hide before the reckoning. Just a thought because honestly, there’s a lot to answer for. In just the last 2 years, Fauci’s recommended treatments and preventative measures for COVID that not only didn’t work, but that he knew didn’t work. He admitted to The New York Times [NYT] that he lied about herd immunity in order to sell more vaccines, which also didn’t work, which weren’t even actually vaccines, but they did hurt a lot of people, tens of thousands.”

Everything about that is wrong, as this dense Science Magazine fact-check on Carlson’s entire segment shows. Unfortunately, Carlson’s audience won’t see it and most of them wouldn’t believe it anyway. And many more of them will die because of it. There is little mention of Trump in all of that. He is the man, of course, who spent the first year of the pandemic alternately making a fool of himself and making the crisis worse with his ineptitude and chaotic governing style so he could win the election. Fauci is Trump’s scapegoat for all of that bumbling and the favorite punching bag of arrogant 5’9″ Trump wannabes because it thrills the MAGA supporters:

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) escalates his ridiculous attacks on Dr. Fauci:

"Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac." pic.twitter.com/H7lf6OSkj6

— The Recount (@therecount) August 24, 2022

More importantly, this assault on the reputation of one of the nation’s top medical experts represents yet another battle in the culture war, and perhaps the most important one of all: the right’s war on science. From its refusal to admit climate change is real to a rejection of vaccines and beyond, the right’s attack on science is the most dangerous of all of its cynical power plays. Sadly, Fauci is just collateral damage — and so are the rest of us. 

Salon

The more he gets away with it, the more they love him

That’s a relief. Otherwise keeping classified documents in a box in Trump’s office where anyone who works there could find them might be seen as a criminal act that should be prosecuted.

TPM points out that it might not be all that easy for Trump:

There are a few stubborn problems remaining for Trump, though. 

First, given the opportunity, his attorneys have not claimed anything about him declassifying documents in any official capacity. (His team has put out media statements arguing without evidence that Trump had some sort of declassification “standing order” as president.) 

For example, when they produced documents from Trump’s home in June, “neither counsel nor the custodian asserted that the former President had declassified the documents or asserted any claim of executive privilege,” prosecutors said in Tuesday’s court filing. 

“Instead, counsel handled them in a manner that suggested counsel believed that the documents were classified: the production included a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape, containing the documents.” 

Trump’s assertion echoed a perfectly-timed “report” earlier this month from right-wing journalist John Solomon, who also happens to be one of Trump’s representatives to the National Archives, in which Trump’s office asserted that Trump had a standing order as President to basically telepathically de-classify all classified documents when he took them home from work. But no one else at the White House seems to remember such an order. 

More bad news for Trump: The classification status of the documents isn’t actually the issue. 

Rather, it’s that he had any government documents at all in his home post-presidency — when he is a regular private citizen like anyone else – and, also, that federal investigators seem to think an effort was made to hide that fact.

In June, one of Trump’s records custodians – believed to be Christina Bobb, one of Trump’s lawyers and former One America News Network host – signed a letter stating that a “diligent search was conducted of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida,” and that Trump’s team was, at the time, handing over everything they’d found. (Recall this is more than a year after Trump left office.) 

But at the time, according to prosecutors, Trump’s counsel prohibited investigators from opening certain boxes in a Mar-a-Lago storage room. 

And, now that the raid produced more sensitive documents at Trump’s home, prosecutors wrote Tuesday of a likely alleged obstruction attempt. 

“The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the filing read. 

The magical mind declassification gambit is truly silly but he’s going to stick with it and there are people who think that’s all it takes. It doesn’t get him off the hook legally but politically it works for the rubes. Dear Leader deemed everything declassified and that’s that.

It’s a neat trick because if the documents are truly sensitive, which some seem to be, they cannot be publicly revealed even if Trump says they’re declassified because a) they aren’t really declassified and b) it would be dangerous. So Trump can just say that they were no big deal and that he declassified them and it’s all good. He can even lie about what they contain and the government can’t do much about it.

Apparently, there is such a thing as a “goldilocks” document which is a classified document that won’t reveal important intelligence information but can prove to a jury that it was dangerous to take them (“juuust right.”) They run into this frequently in national security cases. So maybe they can do something like that. But that’s assuming they indict Trump which I suspect they won’t. They will determine that the documents were mishandled and he put the country in danger but that there’s no evidence they fell into the hands of any adversary so no harm no foul.

If that happens, he will once again be shown to be teflon and secure the admiration and worship of Republicans even more. To them he is a superhero for thwarting every single attempt to stop his lawbreaking.

Experiment in democracy tested by right-wing populism

“This is not a drill,” Digby wrote Wednesday. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s essay in the L.A. Times warns what is ahead if the authoritarian cult that the Republican Party has become consolidates power. “It’s really happening and the rest of us have a limited amount of time to turn it around.”

On that cheery note. Thomas B. Edsall reports that Florida governor and Trump 2.0 wannabe Ron DeSantis looks to be reelected as a launch platform for a presidential run. That is “a clear warning to those worried about declining support for democratic institutions and values in the United States.” If that isn’t enough to unnerve you, there’s this:

On taking office, DeSantis told a Hillsdale College gathering in Naples, Fla last February, “The first thing I said to the general counsel was: ‘I want you to give me a binder of all the authorities of the governor. What can I do as a matter of constitutional right without anybody checking me?’ ”

A May study from Hart Research Associates finds that too many Americans for my comfort are prepared to support positions favored by a Republican autocrat. Edsall asked several experts what an America would look like led by a DeSantis backed by Republican congressional majorities.

Arturas Rozenas, a professor of political science at N.Y.U. who studies authoritarian politics, suggested how it might play out:

You take a small step, the consequences of which to democracy are ambiguous — change election laws, voter-registration rules, increase partisan control of the Civil Service, or weaken the independence of the judiciary. Many of the changes will be too gradual to cause a reaction, but in aggregate they will confer enough advantage for the incumbent to make it impossible for the opposition to win.

[…]

Each slice of this ‘authoritarian salami’ would be dressed as a reform toward more democracy, not less. When the Polish government tried to curtail the powers of the Constitutional Court, their argument was that the court is impeding the government’s ability to implement the will of the people — so its powers are undemocratic. Similarly, Hugo Chavez obtained sweeping powers and killed Venezuelan democracy through a series of referendums in the name of popular sovereignty. The paradox is that the procedure of authoritarian takeover will appear quite democratic.

It’s the boiling frog model by another name. The Leader will try to avoid actions that clearly mark “the death of democracy.” He and his allies will move by stealth at first.

And the tipping point? Edsall asks. Rozenas responds:

The point at which “the average person” would start perceiving that their lives are now different would be when it is too late to do anything about it. One day you notice that your kid’s textbook has a picture of the president on the opening page, that the government started a war that you dislike but no one in the media is criticizing it, that the leadership is making one incompetent mistake after another, but it is not removed from office, that Civil Service employers check the historical party registration records to make sure that you are not going to be a ‘difficult’ employee who at some points sympathized with the ‘wrong’ party, that you find yourself in a disagreement with the government that is costly for you to express. At this point, it will be clear that ‘things are different now,’ but by then, it will take heroically more effort than now to do anything about it.

Larry Diamond at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution worries about a Trump presidency in 2025 implementing Schedule F purges of civil servants.

Richard Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A (Election Law Blog), worries that if Trump fails to win again but somehow gets installed as president, “then at that point the United States ceases to be a democracy. Such a move to steal an election would likely be followed by other means of solidifying and maintaining power, such as control over the military and reformulation of election rules so that the regime would be self-perpetuating.”

Street protests would be put down with violence, further stifling dissent and resistance. And if Trump (or someone like him) were to win legitimately, Hasen warns, we’d see more loyalists empowered to implement his whims, only more extreme than in Trump’s first term.

Others Edsall consulted are as concerned, with different emphasis on how an autocratic government might consolidate power.

DeSantis’s re-election bid, along with his future national prospects — along with those of Trump and the politicians who imitate him — will be a test of the direction the United States is poised to take at a time when, to quote the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, “The world’s economic-political order appears to be at an inflection point, with its future direction hanging very much in balance.”

The combination of racial and ethnic tension — and the continuance of economic dislocation unfairly distributed across the nation — has turned the United States into a testing ground for right-wing populism. The anger of the white working and middle classes that Trump and DeSantis capitalize on had its origin in two major developments over the past six decades.

The time to stop it is now. There may not be a later, at least in our lifetimes. Check now to see if the water you’re sitting in is getting hotter.

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Trump played “hide the Top Secrets” with the F.B.I.

Someday someone will make a satirical movie about the debacle of the Trump presidency. Only the debacle won’t end with his presidency. It spills over into his post-presidency. Fitting all the episodic Trumpish lunacy into a three-act structure will be as challenging as knowing what to leave out. Presuming the Trumpish dictator then controlling the White House permits it.

As today’s episode unfolds, we find that the still-president-claimant has been hiding national security documents from the F.B.I. in his office at Mar-a-Lago. The Department of Justice photo of them strewn across his carpet is all over the internet. The court filing released on Tuesday indicates that Trump’s attorneys are citing court cases that apply to sitting presidents as if they apply to Trump now. And why not? Trump thinks he is rightfully still president.

Trump demands he be declared the rightful winner of the 2020 election or that a re-do election be held “immediately” pic.twitter.com/tlWM60ar7p

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) August 29, 2022

Washington Post:

Former president Donald Trump and his advisers repeatedly failed to turn over highly classified government documents even after receiving a subpoena and pledging a “diligent search” had been conducted, leading to an FBI raid of his Florida home that found more than 100 additional classified items, according to a blistering court filing by federal prosecutors late Tuesday.

The filing traces the extraordinary saga of government officials’ repeated efforts to recover sensitive national security papers from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club, centered on a storage room where prosecutors came to suspect that “government records were likely concealed and removed … and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”

Trump obstruct justice? The hell, you say!

When law enforcement authorities returned to Ma-a-Lago with a search warrant earlier this month, they found more documents Citizen Trump had no business possessing. Not to mention the non-secure manmner in which he kept them. This included in his desk drawer along with “two official passports, one of which was expired, and one personal passport, which was expired.”

Note:

Among the most incriminating details in the government filing is a photograph, showing a number of files labeled “Top Secret” with bright red or yellow cover sheets, spread out over a carpet. Those files were found inside a container in Trump’s office, according to the court filing. A close examination of one of the cover sheets in the photo shows a marking for “HCS,” a government acronym for systems used to protect intelligence gathered from secret human sources.

The 36-page filing also reveals, for the first time, the text of a written assurance given to the Justice Department by Trump’s “custodian of records”on June 3. It says Trump’s team had done a thorough search for any classified material in response to a subpoena and had turned over any relevant documents.

That would be, in layman’s parlance, a lie.

Prosecutors’ court filing puts it more delicately. That the August search turned up 100 additional national security documents, prosecutors say, “calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.” The list of statutes Trump has violated grows by the day.

Marcy Wheeler has a lengthy thread on what’s contained in the filing. There is a lot there.

Very roughly (smarter people will weigh in):

TK is satellite stuff.

HCS-O and HSC-P distinguish operations from product.

SAP is Special Access.

SI-G is for intercepts.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 31, 2022

Trump, the man at the center of this investigation, used his Truth Social feed Tuesday morning to repost dozens of QAnon conspiracy theories before deleting them and posting more unsubstantiated allegations.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1564617652471054338?s=20&t=G7xRb85a8NI7E9AMn1yf5Q

Americans gave that man, Donald Trump, access to the nuclear football. That man, Donald Trump, took classified materials from the White House and stored them in his office closet and desk drawer at his resort. Next to his framed Time magzine covers. And he demands reinstatement as president or a do-over election.

Update: Added link in photo caption to Washington Post explanation.

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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.

The GOP descent into authoritarianism picks up speed

This piece by Ruth Ben-Ghiat in the LA Times sent a chill down my spine. It’s not that I didn’t already know what’s happening with the GOP but I think I’ve been hoping that it’s a passing phase, that people like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham were posing in order to curry favor with Trump and/or the mob. But this makes me think they are probably real converts or, at least, well on their way.

At critical junctures in their histories, political parties reassess their platforms, methods and the qualities and values they desire their politicians to embody. The Jan. 6 coup attempt that intended to keep President Trump in office illegally was such a moment for the GOP, which ever since has been remaking itself into an illiberal entity with dizzying speed.

The Republican Party is expunging the remaining democratic elements from its cadres and political culture with great vigor. It is embracing home-grown extremists, forcing out moderates, threatening dissenters and aligning itself with foreign autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

Democratic frameworks are of little use to explain this tragic trajectory, or why the GOP has supported Donald Trump through two impeachments, a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and now possible violations of the Espionage Act.

We must look to authoritarian party dynamics as they have unfolded around the world to understand the Republicans’ journey out of democracy.

In autocracies, ruling parties become personal tools of the leader, and loyalty to the head of state, rather than expertise, is the most prized political quality. Those loyalty demands surge when the leader faces legal challenges or threats to his power. After the 2016 failed military coup against him, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t just purge the armed forces, he also forced the resignations of six mayors, all of whom were prominent members of his Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

Even in democratic contexts, when an autocratic-minded leader is under investigation, loyalty becomes paramount and the party’s time and resources are channeled into defending him. Party functionaries portray the leader as a victim of a “witch hunt” and smear journalists, prosecutors and judges, as Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party did with regularity during the former Italian prime minister’s many corruption trials, and as the GOP did during Trump’s two impeachment trials.

The “Big Lie,” which claims that Trump and not Joe Biden won the 2020 election, is an outgrowth of these authoritarian party dynamics. Institutionalized as GOP dogma, the Big Lie is now a “party line” that politicians must espouse to gain endorsements as candidates or to remain in good standing.

The most ambitious Republican politicians made themselves bearers of the Big Lie early on. In November 2020, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared proudly that his state had no electoral fraud. Just one year later, he announced the formation of an Office of Election Crimes and Security and has already arrested 20 people.

The Big Lie has traction because it lets any GOP politician become a mini-Trump, denying certified election results to get to power or to try to stay there illegally. No wonder election deniers now make up nearly two-thirds of Republican candidates for state and federal jobs that have authority over voting contests.

Autocrats have long encouraged the lawless and the corrupt to populate party and state institutions. Twentieth century Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s Cabinet and his Fascist Party bureaucracy were full of former Blackshirts who had killed liberals and leftists. Forza Italia politician Marcello Dell’Utri, who was Berlusconi’s right-hand man, was convicted of Mafia association in 2004 but stayed a senator. In 2019, national legislators in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India included 11 individuals who were involved in murder cases and an additional 10 who had been convicted of serious crimes.

A similar frightening dynamic is now developing in America as the GOP cultivates politicians with the right credentials for illiberal governance.

Republican campaign ads and speeches feature party hopefuls wielding shotguns or assault rifles and spouting fiery rhetoric. In the cases of Dr. Mehmet Oz, in Pennsylvania, and J.R. Majewski, in Ohio, such ads helped earn them primary victories.

Local and state GOP politicians have long had ties with extremist groups. In Colorado, Oregon and other states, Republican officials have used members of militia groups as security for public events. Now these extremists increasingly are the party officials. A 2022 study counted 1 in 5 GOP state and local officials affiliated with groups such as the Oath Keepers.

For Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, publicizing membership in the Oath Keepers paid off: He will be the GOP candidate for secretary of state in Arizona in November. In Florida, Proud Boys members now hold seats on the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee. And dozens of individuals linked to Trump’s rally on Jan. 6 or the ensuing breach of the Capitol felt empowered to run for office, some with Trump’s endorsement.

Once unleashed, such lawless energies can be hard to tame, which is why so many authoritarian parties end up eating their own, their ranks devastated through periodic purges. The GOP is in such a phase now. Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney won her GOP primary two years ago with 73% of the vote; today she is a pariah. Just two of the 10 GOP House members who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 will remain in office, as befits the taboo on showing disloyalty to the leader.

Though Trump’s leader cult remains robust, multiple investigations make his political future increasingly uncertain. And in a sense Trump may no longer be necessary. The Republicans have normalized authoritarian party dynamics to an extent that other autocratic-minded leaders — say, DeSantis — could easily step in. The GOP is now a party ready to govern through illiberal methods, regardless of which Republican may be in the White House in 2024.

There is no doubt in my mind that DeSantis is the real thing. It’s not just about his ego as it is with Trump. He has bigger ambitions. He senses the power of authoritarianism and what it can do. And he’s experimenting with how far he can go. Others like him are watching closely.

This is not a drill. It’s really happening and the rest of us have a limited amount of time to turn it around. At this point the majority of Americans, including a large number of Republicans, oppose this. But if they continue to get away with blatant law breaking and flouting of constitutional norms, that’s likely to change. The resistance is all based upon abstract notions of democratic values and that’s a fragile thing.

Is that what it was all about?

Apparently Trump’s been bragging about having blackmail material on French president Macron for years:

ON THE FBI’S list of documents seized from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, item 1a is listed solely as “info re: President of France.” For Trump, that has been a subject of intense — and tawdry — interest for years.

Specifically, Trump has bragged to some of his closest associates — both during and after his time in the White House — that he knew illicit details about the love life of French President Emmanuel Macron, two people with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. And the former president even claimed that he learned about some of this dirt through “intelligence” he had seen or been briefed on, these sources say.  

It’s not clear whether the Macron-related document the FBI seized during the raid had anything at all to do with the French president’s personal life. Nor is it clear whether the information on Macron seized from Mar-a-Lago is derived from U.S. intelligence collection or even classified. 

But the mere revelation of its existence triggered a trans-Atlantic freakout, according to two other sources familiar with the situation. And Trump’s prior talk about Macron’s allegedly “naughty” ways that “[not] very many people know” only intensified those concerns. Both French and U.S. officials worked to figure out precisely what Trump had on Macron and France’s government, and if any of it was sensitive in nature, the sources said. The officials in both nations wanted to know if this discovery signified some kind of national-security breach — or if it amounted to a frivolous, but stolen, keepsake.

It’s not frivolous. It’s blackmail material. I suspect that many of the sensitive documents found at Mat-a-lago were saved for that express purpose. Trump is motivated by vengeance more than anything else in his life.

By the way, in case you forgot:

U.S. far-right activists helped amplify a leak of hacked emails belonging to leading French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign, some researchers said on Saturday, with automated bots and the Twitter account of WikiLeaks also propelling a leak that came two days before France’s presidential vote.

The rapid spread on Twitter, Facebook and the messaging forum 4chan of emails and other campaign documents that Macron’s campaign said on Friday had been stolen recalled the effort by right-wing activists and Russian state media to promote hacked documents embarrassing to Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton last year.

It also renewed questions whether social media companies have done enough to limit fake accounts or spammed content on their platforms and how media organizations should report on hacked information.

Twitter declined to comment on whether it had taken any specific action in response to the Macron leak. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

Analysis conducted by The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab published on Saturday found that the hashtag #MacronLeaks reached 47,000 tweets in three and a half hours after it was first used by Jack Posobiec, a writer in Washington for the far-right news organization The Rebel. Posobiec’s online biography said he coordinated grassroots organizing for a group that supported U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Posobiec’s initial tweet on the Macron documents was retweeted fifteen times within one minute and 87 times in five minutes, Atlantic Council senior fellow Ben Nimmo wrote in a blog published on Medium.

Posobiec is prolific on Twitter, where he has a large following of more than 100,000 accounts. Contacted by Reuters, Posobiec said he did not operate bots and that he used his account to share a post he saw on 4chan.

Bots helped move the hashtag from the United States to France, according to Nimmo, where surveys show far-right leader Marine Le Pen trailing Macron by more than 20 points heading into Sunday’s election.

French electoral law forbids candidates from commenting during Saturday and until polling stations close on Sunday.

WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that published hacked emails belonging to Democrats during the 2016 presidential election, provided the largest boost of attention on Twitter to the Macron emails, Nimmo said.

The group did not publish the information itself but tweeted about the leak at least 15 times.

“As the dominant publication in the field we were hours ahead of all other major outlets,” WikiLeaks said in a private Twitter message to a Reuters reporter. “That’s what our readers expect.”

Trump is them and they are Trump.