Month: June 2023

Tucker Carlson has a very lame new “twitter show”. I think he and his lawyers think they can make the case that because it’s on social media instead of TV he’s not breaking his non-compete clause. He’s just a guy sharing his opinions and talking to his friends, amirite?

We’ll see how that goes. Fox is fighting it:

Fox News has demanded that Tucker Carlson stop posting videos to Twitter, escalating the dispute between the network and its former star host over how — and if — he can continue to speak publicly now that his prime-time show is off the air.

In a letter sent to Mr. Carlson from Fox lawyers, the network accused him of violating the terms of his contract, which runs until early 2025 and limits his ability to appear in media other than Fox. The letter is labeled “not for publication,” in all caps.

Since Mr. Carlson was ousted by Fox News, he has begun producing a bare-bones version of his Fox program, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and posting it directly to Twitter. The new show, called “Tucker on Twitter,” bears some of the hallmarks of his prime-time show on Fox, including a monologue focused on current affairs and cultural issues.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, a lawyer representing Mr. Carlson, said in a statement that Fox News’s legal threat was not in the interest of the network’s audience.

“Doubling down on the most catastrophic programming decision in the history of the cable news industry, Fox is now demanding that Tucker Carlson be silent until after the 2024 election,” the statement read. “Tucker will not be silenced by anyone.”

Oooh baby. That Tucker is such a manly man isn’t he?

By the way, the stats for his new twitter show are dubious. Surprise:

Carlson debuted his new show, “Tucker on Twitter,” Tuesday of last week. The first episode drew what sound like monster stats: as of writing, Twitter says 114 million people have seen the 10-minute monologue in which Carlson rants about Ukraine and calls its Jewish president “sweaty and rat-like” and “a persecutor of Christians.”

His second episode, which dropped on Thursday, is already up to 54 million views (more than the entire population of South Korea).

The astonishing view count has prompted much celebration from Carlson and Musk’s fans, who stack those stats up against the apparently paltry ratings of cable news.

“CNN is lucky to get 500,000 viewers on a show,” crowed Carlson’s biographer Chadwick Moore. “Tucker’s video got 90 million, and counting—compared to his 3.5 million average on the dead and irrelevant medium of cable.”

“Fox News is screwing themselves,” declared radio host Jimmy Dore. “And legacy media is over.”

But there is little comparison between tweet views and cable news ratings.

First, let’s start with Carlson’s new Twitter show. Did one third of the United States watch Carlson’s first episode? Not exactly.

Musk has made a big push to show off the “tweet view” metric of posts on his platform, adding it to the interface. Now you can see how many people have viewed each tweet on the site. Last month, he hid the “video view” metric, which showed how many people watched a video on Twitter. Even the video view metric was pretty flimsy: according to Twitter, if you watch a video for two seconds, with only half the video player in-view, you count as one video view.

The tweet view metric is even less valuable. It merely counts how many people viewed the tweet, so if you scrolled past Carlson’s video on Twitter, you counted as one of the 114 million. “Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet counts as a view,” Twitter says. If you scrolled past the tweet multiple times, you counted more than once.

Presumably, a small fraction of that big number watched even part of the clip. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on the video’s metrics.

Let’s compare that to cable news. When Musk’s boosters mock the 3.5 million that Carlson used to draw on his nightly Fox News show, they are referring to a metric from Nielsen that measures the average concurrent viewers of a program. If an average of 3.5 million people watched an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, the peak of concurrents is even higher, and the total viewership would be millions more.

As Steve Hasker, the former president of Nielsen who now serves as CEO of Thomson Reuters, explained in 2015: “In TV, the standard measurement unit for viewership is the average-minute audience — how many viewers there are in an average minute of content. In the digital space, on the other hand, video measurement is commonly expressed as the gross number of times the video is viewed, even if only for one minute or one second. These two metrics are quite different, and comparing one to the other unfairly tilts the comparison against TV.”

Nielsen does have a metric to measure total audience, called cumulative viewership. As Brian Stelter noted in the New York Times recently, Fox News drew a total audience of 63 million in the first quarter of 2023. CNN drew 68 million.

So no, 114 million people did not watch Carlson’s new show on Twitter. The tweets have certainly drawn a lot of eyeballs, but those metrics are simply not comparable to cable news ratings, which belie the total audience — and enduring influence — of the television industry.

Tucker is kind of pathetic at this point. His twitter show is done in a weird looking little shack set with slapdash production. I wouldn’t surprised if he did this on purpose to prove that he’s not doing a real “show” he’s just using free speech and sharing his ideas on twitter like any other citizen. Maybe it will even work.

But Tucker is no longer TUCKER without that platform. Sorry, twitter videos just aren’t the same.

Trump gave his first interview to Roger Stone for his new radio show

DONALD TRUMP (GUEST): I tell you what, they must hate – these Democrats, these crazy lunatic Democrats like deranged Jack Smith. He’s a deranged person, in my opinion. His wife hates me more than he does. You got to see what the wife – the wife hates Trump more than she hates Trump more than any human being who’s ever lived. And it’s a shame. It’s a shame that we can have this because we did a great job with borders, with taxes, with – with everything. I mean, we did a great job with everything that people can hate so much, but I believe they hate our country.

ROGER STONE (HOST): Mr. President, many of your supporters intend to go to the Miami courthouse on Tuesday to demonstrate their support for you and to protest what they see as unfair and politically motivated charges. I urge all of your supporters … that if they decide to go, it is essential that they keep it peaceful, civil, and legal.

…

Do you have a message for those who may be planning to go to just to demonstrate their support for you?

TRUMP: I do. We need strength in our country now. Our country is being taken away from us. Our country is going communist, It’s going Marxist. It’s going really bad. And the people of our country aren’t that way. But the people running it are. And we need strength at this point and everyone is afraid to do anything. They’re afraid to talk and they have to go out and they have to protest peacefully.

…

They must be strong! They have to protest! …(uhm, peacefully)

And so that was so they had protesters. The problem is they put him so far away that nobody knew about him. They had a tremendously large – Marjorie Taylor Greene was there. You probably saw that. But they had a lot. But they put they try and put him so far away.

Look, our country has to protest. We have plenty of protest – to protest.

He really, really, really wants protests. Lots of them. I wonder why?

And just listen to this bizarre drivel:

ROGER STONE (HOST): What amazes me, Mr. President, is the way there’s almost a virtual media blackout of the news regarding this stunning corruption by the Biden crime family.

…

Do you believe that former Attorney General Bill Barr is in fact part of the deep state and was actually involved in the cover-up of the Biden bribery allegations, particularly since he when he became aware of it, he never mentioned it to you, the president of the United States, and he transferred the file and the whistleblower evidence from the Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney’s Office to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, where we made hidden and buried in a file and lay dormant with no actions taken to this very day.

DONALD TRUMP (GUEST): I think he’s a coward who didn’t do his job. He was desperately afraid of being impeached. You remember when the Democrats were saying, we’re going to impeach Bill Barr? There was no reason to impeach him, but they were going to impeach Bill Barr, and he was petrified of being impeached. I said I got impeached twice and my poll numbers went up. Not so bad. But, you know, he was a coward. And unfortunately, we have to live with that. We’ve gotten to know people now and I got to know people in Washington. I went from very seldom being there. I, I was there seventeen times during the course of my life. I never stayed over and I didn’t know people. I relied on people for references. And we got a lot of it right. We had unbelievable people, as you know, in the administration. But you also had some that we got wrong and Bill Barr was a mistake and, you know, too bad. But he was a mistake. You’re going to have some of them. But what he is what he’s done and the way he talks now.

But he’s certainly friendly with some bad people because virtually everybody you see, and especially the analysts like Gregg Jarrett is incredible. Jonathan Turley, Mark Levin has been incredible, Sean Hannity, they’ve all gone through this and they’ve looked at it very carefully. They were the ones who got the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax right. when that was all the rage, you know, it was all I was colluding with Russia. Turned out to be just – in fact they said no collusion at the end. People, eighteen people, angry Democrats that hated me came up with a report, no collusion, and it was all a hoax, just all a big hoax. This is the same kind of a hoax. And they go from one to the next. They think of it Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, impeachment hoax one, impeachment hoax two, the fake dossier, spying on the campaign. These are very dishonest, very corrupt people.

But Bill Barr is I think he’s more weak than anything else. And now he goes and he sits down, and if they can find a chair for him because it’s not that easy. And he sits down and he just bloviates and it’s disgraceful. He’s so – it’s actually unpatriotic. It’s so bad for our country, just so bad. But, you know, he’s got a lot of hatred. I fired him for just not doing his job. And, you know, I’m not going to do this anymore. I said give me a paper of resignation. And he did. He gave me a paper of resignation. And then they say, oh, they left. They didn’t leave. I said, give it to me. I could name others, too. I try to be nice by doing that. But I said, give me your resignation. Give me a paper. And you know, so he’s got dislike as a lot of people would. But he didn’t have the courage to fight it. And when they said the key word, impeachment, we’re going to impeach Bill Barr, he became a nothing and he was just a very unpatriotic person. And it’s very bad for – very, very bad for the country. And he will say anything they want him to say about me. But the indictment itself is a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. And I do believe it was put up at a time where they found tremendously horrible things about the family and other things are coming.

Why in the fuck would anyone want to put this brain damaged freak in charge of the country?

I think we knew that a federal indictment of former president Donald Trump would elicit a collective primal scream from the right wing fever swamp and they have not disappointed. And in true Trump era fashion, the response from most elected Republicans has been a collective whine about “unfairness” and the “weaponization” of the “deep state.” Some have even gone so far as to at least hint around that it’s a nice little country we have here, be a shame if anything happened to it. I would expect nothing less. This is how they roll.

There are a few dissenters from that party line. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney put out a statement saying that Trump “brought this on himself” and it’s “consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest” which is true. Former Gov. Chris Christie said “these facts are devastating” which is also true. But these and a handful of others are outliers among GOP elected officials.

One very significant former GOP official has come out swinging, however:

Bill Barr: "We can't forget here that this entire thing came about because of reckless conduct of the president. If he had just turned over the documents, which I think every other person in the country would have done … " pic.twitter.com/w3iVTI3R76

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2023

There are a number of defenses out there. But the main talking point, which we can assume was coordinated, is that this is a political prosecution engineered by President Biden to take out his most threatening political rival. And their main proof of this is that the DOJ declined to prosecute Hillary Clinton. S. Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham probably articulated this the best, including the deployment of very emotional righteous indignation:

STEPHANOPOULOS: There's an audio tape of Trump saying he knows this is secret information, he knows he's sharing it with other people. How is that okay?

LINDSEY GRAHAM: *sigh* I'm not saying it's okay. I'm not saying it's okay to take a hammer to BlackBerry. pic.twitter.com/kDyPxDSnqR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2023

He’s not saying it’s ok, he’s just saying that Hillary Clinton got off so that cancels out Trump’s crimes. Or something.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wi. says that Trump refused to prosecute Clinton but Joe Biden sent in a SWAT Team to torment Trump:

Ron Johnson wonders to Maria Bartiromo why Biden hasn't been more magnanimous in his treatment of Trump, like Trump was to Hillary Clinton pic.twitter.com/6E6Yzgv01e

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2023

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sounded the same theme:

Is there a different standard for a Democrat secretary of state versus a former Republican president? I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Let’s enforce it on everybody and make sure we all know the rules.”

It wasn’t a perfect defense of Trump but as long as he makes sure to condemn Hillary Clinton is probably good enough for the moment,

As much as I loathe the idea of re-litigating “but her emails” I’m sorry to say that it’s necessary. There was almost no push back to this talking point from the media, probably because they didn’t get the Clinton story right in the first place.

A few stepped up to point out that Clinton didn’t refuse to cooperate with the government as Trump did although Trump and his accomplices will no doubt cry inanely about her “bleaching the emails” and smashing the phones and that will be enough to sustain the argument. Trump may even say “Russia, if you’re listening” again. But those allegations are just plain silly and always have been. And the fact that she didn’t obstruct the investigation is only part of the story.

 As it happened Clinton copied all work emails to the State Department system so they had them. The Justice Department inspector general issued a report in 2018 about the FBI Investigation and determined that the people tasked with marking documents classified had not done so clearly. Moreover, only three email chains “contained any classification markings of any kind,” and they were low priority “call sheets” marked with the lowest priority of classification, which had info and details for Clinton to refer to when talking to a foreign leader. There were no nuclear secrets or war plans among them.

The State Department under Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo did two separate investigations and found in 2019 that there was “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information” and that Clinton  bore no “individual culpability.”

And let’s dispense with the “magnanimous” Trump defense. Trump tried desperately to get the DOJ to investigate Clinton (and many others he considered his political enemies.) His WH Counsel told him that the DOJ operated independently and if he did it there would be tremendous unrest from career officials and massive political blowback. That didn’t stop him. He conspired with Matthew Whittaker, then an assistant to then Attorney General Jeff Sessions (whom he later promoted to acting Attorney General) to get Sessions to assign a Special Counsel to investigate Clinton. In the end they succeeded in getting Sessions to assign John Huber, a US Attorney in Utah to look into the allegations against Clinton, including the bogus “Uranium One” scandal which had also already been dismissed. That investigation didn’t turn up anything either.

Notably, when Bill Barr became Attorney General he looked into all of it and also came up with nothing. If anyone thinks that Barr wouldn’t have prosecuted Clinton if he could have doesn’t recall just how much he hates her guts. The evidence just wasn’t there. So, the FBI, the DOJ Inspector General, two State Department probes, a Clinton hating Attorney General and a US Attorney assigned to review all the evidence found that Clinton committed no crimes. (I’m not even counting the 10 Benghazi investigations which were the genesis of the email scandal — and also came up empty.)

I know your eyes have glazed over by this point and you wonder why in the world anyone should care about this. And frankly, we shouldn’t have to. It’s long settled ancient history. But the right’s “whatboutism” and the media’s continued unwillingness to acknowledge that in 2016, once the FBI determined there was no crime, there was no crime, I fear that a lot of people who aren’t down the right wing rabbit hole will be persuaded that this is a partisan prosecution simply because of the words “classified documents.”

When former FBI Director James Comey held his first notorious press conference which he larded with inappropriate personal judgments about Clinton, he laid out the criteria the Justice Department uses when it decides whether to prosecute classified documents cases. He said:

In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.

Assuming they have proof of the charges in the Trump indictment, there can be little doubt that they met three out of those four criteria, (the fourth being disloyalty to the United States which I personally believe to be true as well.) So when you see these Republicans emitting their epic whines about how unfair all this is because Hillary didn’t get indicted, keep in mind that it wasn’t for lack of Trump trying to get it done. It was because, unlike him, she didn’t commit a crime. And even Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo and Bill Barr couldn’t find a way to make it so.

In case you were wondering, yes the House Republicans are considering a new investigation into — you guessed it — her emails. Of course they are.

When it comes to campaigning, Democrats are conservatives

Self-identified independent voters are not, not really, argues Alex Shephard at The New Republic. They are leaners, 49 percent of Americans per a recent Gallup poll. They lean toward one of the major parties or the other. They just eschew the branding. It’s not a new argument, but it’s fashionable.

“By far the dominant U.S. party isn’t Democrats or Republicans,” wrote Mike Allen of Axios. “It’s: ‘I’ll shop around, thank you.’”

Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz told TNR, “There’s a reluctance to openly identify oneself as a partisan and to say, come right out and say, ‘I think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat.’”

Shephard explains:

Self-described independents and leaners do have one thing in common. “Even among people who identify with a political party … the trend is in their disdain for the other party,” said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, or IPPSR, and professor of political science at Michigan State University. “That is actually especially true of leaners, that they don’t have a strong positive feeling about the party that they lean toward; they just have a negative feeling about the party that they lean against.”

Indeed, more than 60 percent of independents who lean Republican or lean Democrat have “very” or “somewhat” cold opinions of the other party, according to a 2017 Pew Research poll. These voters typically end up voting for Democrats and Republicans simply to ensure the party they detest more isn’t in power. “You might have many people who are willing to show up and vote, but they’re not going to encourage others to do so,” Krupnikov said. “They’re doing it in a way where they’re trying to avoid seeing the lesser of two evils, which in some sense is a sad choice to have: You’re dissatisfied with everything.”

In other words, it’s negative partisanship, an increasingly powerful part of American politics over the last 40 years. In 1980, the average Democrat and Republican thought that the other party was basically fine; in the four decades since, those feelings have evaporated.

But Shepard concludes, as others have before him, that “the idea that these voters are a secret army of moderates waiting to be unlocked by a centrist party is likely a myth.” They are not really “shopping around.”

Fine. Old news. But what are Democrats supposed to do with that information? Because their primary voter targeting tool for getting people out to vote (VAN/VoteBuilder) is premised on microtargeting individual voters, on assigning them support scores based on a variety of best guesses. Outside of registered Democrats, their strategy is based on identifying Democrat-leaners when Democrat-leaning independents stubbornly don’t want to be identified.

Chatter about how independents are not really independent does not address this practical problem.

I wrote recently:

This is my focus right now. Independents (UNAffiliated voters in NC) are the largest bloc of registered voters in NC: 36% (2.6 million voters). But statewide they voted against Democrats here 58% of the time in the last two elections. Democrats cannot win without them, but their traditional tactics, as [David] Pepper recognizes, focuses only on “the most frequent voters.” This tactic leaves many “removed from the political conversation” in what I’ve dubbed “No Voter’s Land.” These are voters campaigns are reluctant to contact (using the tactics of the last war, you might say) because computer scoring deems them not good bets.

In a sense, Democrats believes low-scoring UNAs are (in Seinfeld terms) not sponge-worthy. It’s not that they won’t vote with Democrats, it’s that Democrats lack the data to give them confidence that they might, so they cautiously avoid them. Republicans do the same.

Why? They fear that if volunteers knock the wrong door or call the wrong phone and get their heads bitten off a few times, campaigns will lose volunteers. That’s a real and valid concern. But that’s not an election-winning strategy. It’s risk-mitigation, and a strategy with real opportunity costs associated.

If Democrats focus their voter contact efforts on the bluest 30% of UNAffiliateds, and the GOP focuses theirs on the reddest 30%, who’s inviting the middle 40% to participate in our elections? 40% of 2.6 million voters is a lot of voters to ignore. 

But that’s just what a microtargeting strategy does. Instead, what Democrats should do (where past precinct turnout data is available) is identify blue-leaning neighborhoods “where the fishing is good” and adopt an alternate voter contact approach geared toward activating reluctant voters who, let’s admit, don’t like them even if they vote with them. There Democrats need an approach less about selling candidates or platforms and more about selling the idea of voters having their voices hear. By voting. Done right, we already in aggregate know how they’ll vote.

In North Carolina, for example, independent voters typically turn out 8-10 points or more below Democrats in their neighborhoods. And in the bluest counties in the bluest precincts it is 12 percent. Is that because these registrants are not engaged or because Democrats are not engaging them?

There I see schools of fish to catch, potentially tens of thousands. Standard practice is to drop individual hooks. In these blue-leaning precincts, I say cast a net. But that requires thinking outside the box.

The biggest obstacle is that when it comes to policy, Democrats are liberals. But when it comes to campaigning, where every damned election is “the most important election of our lifetime,” Democrats are conservatives.

“plans for high-value-target killings by Prince’s mercenaries”

Someone on Twitter in mid-May claimed that Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy had been indicted for arms trafficking in (of all places) Austria. I never saw any other mention of it until this morning. So, for those suffering a little Trump fatigue, apparently “the Elon Musk of the privatization of war” was indicted “with four other individuals in Austria on April 20 for exporting war materials without a license back in 2014 and 2015,” writes Ann Marlowe at The Bulwark:

The indictment accuses Prince of using an aircraft-customizing company in which he then held a controlling interest, the Wiener Neustadt-based Airborne Technologies, to retrofit two American cropdusters that were then to be shipped illegally overseas.

The charges overlap 2021 United Nations allegations that Prince had in 2019 violated the U.N. arms embargo on Libya in an aborted operation called Project Opus, financed by the United Arab Emirates to the tune of $80 million in support of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, head of one of the two perpetually contesting governments in Libya. Project Opus concerned several modified aircraft—both helicopters and fixed-wing planes—including the two mentioned in the Austrian case, which were extensively militarized:

Project Opus also involved plans for high-value-target killings by Prince’s mercenaries, including Libyans who were EU citizens. Yes, that’s right: an American planning to murder foreigners with whom we were not at war.

Prince has plied hs trade for decades without any sanction, so this news is a switch. But since Wiener Neustadt had a WWII history of being flattened as the site of a fighter aircraft factory, says Marlowe, “it stands to reason that the people who live there now might have a particular attentiveness to what Prince was doing in their midst.”

In fact, prosecutors have tried to bring a case on the export charges since 2018 only to be refused by higher authorities. Perhaps a 2019 effort was stymied by Prince’s closeness to Donald Trump’s White House—Prince represented the incoming president in secret overseas meetings in the weeks before the 2017 inauguration (more on this shortly), and Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos was Trump’s secretary of education. Or perhaps the prosecution was slowed by the Austrian government, since Airborne Technologies, which is partly owned by the Austrian government, does work for some European governments—in which case, the fact that the prosecution is now proceeding suggests that it might now have the tacit approval of the Austrian state.

Marlowe offers much more on Prince’s operations here and abroad, writing, “Overseas, Prince is one of the prices we pay for letting some spaces remain more or less ungoverned.”

Prince faces up to five years in prison if he is extradited and convicted; you cannot be tried in absentia in Austria. So wish those plucky Austrian prosecutors luck.

Stay tuned.

Like Nazis stumping for him

Ron DeSweaty pic.twitter.com/Ejz0HwVpCg

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 11, 2023

Meanwhile, he is still an ass:

On Saturday and Sunday, a group of 15 to 20 protesters donned Nazi symbols and chanted antisemitic slurs along the North Alafaya Trail in Orlando. According to videos that quickly circulated across social media, the protesters gave Nazi salutes, yelled “White power!”, waved an anti-Biden banner and at one point got into a brawl with a driver.

The protests have been met with disgust from Democrats and Republicans alike. However, DeSantis did not publicly condemn the marchers until Monday during a press conference, and then largely to deflect blame on to his political opponents.

“So what I’m going to say is these people, these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that, we’re not playing their game,” he said.

DeSantis also accused the Democrats of fostering antisemitism on Capitol Hill: “I’m not going to have people try to smear me that belong to a party that elevated antisemites to the halls of Congress.”

He called the protesters “some jackasses doing this on the street” and suggested the matter was a police issue. “First of all, state law enforcement is going to hold them accountable because they were doing stuff on the overpass, so they are absolutely going to be doing that and they should do that.”

Gee, I wonder why anyone would think to take DeSantis to task for his reaction:

DeSantis’s comments came a day after his press secretary, Christina Pushaw, drew widespread criticism over a tweet that she posted, then deleted, on Sunday. She wrote: “Do we even know they’re Nazis? Or is this a stunt like the ‘white nationalists’ who crashed the Youngkin rally in Charlottesville and turned out to be Dem staffers? I trust Florida law enforcement to investigate and am awaiting their conclusions.”

He is yet another Republican who simply cannot say anything bad about Nazis, not can he ever admit he’s wrong. He really is the true heir to Trump.

Two dozen white supremacists are outside the main Disney World entrance in Orlando right now, marching with signs featuring Gov DeSantis’s face, swastikas, the n-word and homophobic slurs.

This is the 2023 Republican Party. pic.twitter.com/ISh5dkDGYe

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) June 10, 2023

Bill Barr is a hack but he’s no longer a Trump hack, at least not in this case:

Former Trump AG Bill Barr on Trump's federal indictment: "If even half of it is true, then he's toast. I mean, it's a very detailed indictment, and it's very, very damning. This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of a witch hunt — is ridiculous." pic.twitter.com/iUTPR3qeR8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2023

Barr debunks GOP spin: "There are 2 bigs lies that are out there right now. One is that, 'oh, these other presidents took all these documents' … and the second thing is this idea that the president has complete authority to declare any document personal is facially ridiculous" pic.twitter.com/ofAeWzVfxE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2023

Barr didn’t answer the question about Clinton but you will recall that he was the Attorney General during Trump’s term and he could have brought charges against her, and I have little doubt he would have if he thought they would stick. He knew they wouldn’t. Hopefully someone will press him on that since he seems very clear that Trump did commit crimes.

The Soviets were big on purging anyone who deviated from the party line (and quite a few who didn’t) and the Russia loving MAGA freedom fighters are doing the same. They are making their requirements clear and it now goes even beyond total fealty to Donald Trump:

Republican delegates in North Carolina voted Saturday at their annual convention to censure Thom Tillis, the state’s senior U.S. senator, for backing LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and gun violence policies.

As Sen. Tillis has gained influence in Congress for his willingness to work across the aisle, his record of supporting some key policies has raised concerns among some state Republicans that the senator has strayed from conservative values.

Several delegates in Greensboro criticized Tillis, who has held his seat in the Senate since 2015, for his work last year on the Respect For Marriage Act, which enshrined protections for same-sex and interracial marriages in federal law.

Both the state and national GOP platforms oppose same-sex marriage. But Tillis, who had opposed it earlier in his political career, was among the early supporters of the law who lobbied his GOP colleagues in Congress to vote in favor of it.

Others criticized him for challenging former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and for supporting a measure that provided funds for red flag laws, which allow state courts to authorize the temporary removal of firearms from people who they believe might pose a danger to themselves or others.

The North Carolina senator initially opposed Trump’s plan to use military construction dollars to build a wall along the nation’s southern border, but he eventually shifted his position.

Tillis spokesperson Daniel Keylin defended the senator’s voting record, writing in an email to The Associated Press that he “keeps his promises and delivers results.”

Don’t ever think that marriage equality (and, apparently, interracial marriage too) isn’t on the hit list. On Immigration and guns any deviation, no matter how small, is cause for expulsion.

This is just a warning. Tillis was re-elected in 2020. But he’s on notice that he will be o-u-t if he doesn’t straighten up and fly right — and so is everyone else in the GOP.

No.

The *very reason* the Presidential Records Act was passed post-Nixon was to establish that presidential records belong to the government (the public) and not an ex-president.

Claiming the PRA says presidential records belong to an ex-president is a complete reversal of reality. pic.twitter.com/YjQcYKI9is

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 11, 2023

You’ll note in the previous post that his former lawyer says that a president has two years to decide what to return to the National Archives. Even if that were true it doesn’t mean that he gets to hold on to classified nuclear secrets and war plans and show them to people. Come on.

Trump is going to get new lawyers so we don’t know what kind of defense they will put up. But one of his former lawyers, who quit last month, says they will claim prosecutorial misconduct and complain that the Presidential Records Act gives a former president two years to give back highly classified documents that he’s storing in a bathroom at his beach club. Seriously. Here’s Watergate prosecutor Michael Conway:

Timothy Parlatore, an attorney who represented Trump until he resigned in May, recently predicted that Trump’s lawyers will file a motion to dismiss any indictment in the documents case based upon claims of prosecutorial misconduct. When defense lawyers level claims of illegal conduct by law enforcement to shift the focus away from their clients’ behavior, it can suggest the clients’ actions are increasingly indefensible. (The special counsel’s office declined to comment on Parlatore’s allegations.)

That’s a sign of desperation.

The alleged misconduct seemingly has at least two themes, at least according to Parlatore. First, he has asserted that the Justice Department’s successful efforts persuading a federal court to set aside attorney-client privilege claims were improper. Parlatore told CBS News that he was “stunned” when questioned in his grand jury appearance about information he says was protected by attorney-client privilege. 

However, special counsel Jack Smith’s aggressive challenge to claims that Trump lawyers were shielded by attorney-client privilege from testifying and providing documents was upheld by a federal district court and affirmed on appeal. The attorney-client privilege assertion was rejected by the courts under the so-called crime fraud exception, which strips the privilege if communications were made in connection with possible criminal activities.

The fact that federal courts approved the questioning of Trump’s lawyers seems an impenetrable defense to any claim that this action constituted prosecutorial misconduct.

Second, Parlatore told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday night that Trump lawyers may have told Smith in a meeting on Monday that “misconduct committed by Jay Bratt and his team in bringing the [documents] case to this level” would be a reason not to indict Trump. At least some of that alleged misconduct, according to Parlatore, focuses on Justice Department counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt’s team’s obtaining a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago in August. Parlatore claimed that Trump, under the presidential records law, had two years to review documents shipped from the White House to Florida before being required to send presidential papers to the National Archives.

Once again, such a hypothetical misconduct claim falters because a federal magistrate judge authorized the search warrant. (And that warrant led to the discovery that Trump continued to retain classified and other official documents, despite his lawyers’ claims to have complied with an earlier subpoena for those documents.)

Parlatore explained that he was speaking out now to rebut public speculation that he resigned because of his own legal problems, statements that he told O’Donnell were “completely false” and “professionally damaging.”

While prosecutorial misconduct theoretically can result in derailing an otherwise appropriate criminal prosecution, this defense rarely succeeds. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1981 ruled that even when law enforcement engages in misconduct, “absent demonstrable prejudice, or substantial threat thereof, dismissal of the indictment is plainly inappropriate, even though the violation may have been deliberate.”

The respective merits — or lack thereof — of these potential defenses did not stop Trump from taking his legal theories to the court of public opinion. On Truth Social, he ranted about the behavior of the prosecutors, urging an investigation into many “ALL TOO OBVIOUS WRONGDOINGS & CRIMES TAKING PLACE AT DOJ & THE FBI.”

This post also (and unsurprisingly) seemed to be spreading a conspiratorial theory that Justice Department prosecutors tried to “bribe and intimidate” a defense lawyer representing a witness by offering the lawyer an “important judgeship.” 

Trump’s reference resembled new claims made by Trump lawyers, first reported by The New York Times, that a federal prosecutor had “brought up” that lawyer’s municipal judgeship application, which Trump lawyers believed was a “veiled threat.” A spokesman for Smith had no comment about the incident.

Ranting on social media about alleged government misconduct is one of Trump’s favorite pastimes.

On one hand, ranting on social media about alleged government misconduct is one of Trump’s favorite pastimes. On the other hand, ranting on social media about alleged government misconduct will not get any indictment tossed out by a federal court.

Even though threadbare claims of prosecutorial misconduct have scant chance for success, the Trump legal team seems likely to press them. What other options do they have when the reported charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice, illegal retention of classified documents and violations of the Espionage Act seem so powerful?

While a good offense may be the best defense, a flimsy offense sends a message of impending trouble.

This. Is. Nuts. If that’s all they’ve got, in any normal situation Trump will be convicted.

However, Trump has his own personal judge overseeing the case, one who has no experience with national security cases, and I would not bet even a penny that this will be handled in a professional manner. It’s going to be a circus.