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Month: April 2024

Going for 2.0

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 4, 2024

A “multipronged assault”

Navy quarterback Kaipo-Noa Kaheaku-Enhada puts the ball over the goal line for a two-point conversion at the 2007 Poinsettia Bowl. Public domain via Wikipedia.

Last week, I questioned the sufficiency of the “comically long” list of MAGA “nightmare scenarios” the Biden campaign is planning for that could arise leading up to and in the aftermath of the November election. We witnessed live on Jan. 6 the lengths to which MAGA Republicans would go to maintain power. Even then it took many months of investigation to uncover the plotting Trump’s confederates did not put on public display. It’s likely that people without criminal minds are not devious enough to anticipate all the ways Insurrection 2.0 might unfold.

This time, the prospect of jail time if he loses increases Trump’s incentives for instigating mayhem. As with stochastic terrorism, his followers don’t require explicit orders from the chief to know what he wants.

From Daily Beast (via Yahoo Finance):

Maria Bartiromo didn’t even bother to wait for the 2024 election to pass before suggesting it could be stolen.

During an on-air conversation Wednesday morning with Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley, the MAGA loyalist Fox Business Network host suggested President Joe Biden can’t reasonably expect to win the 2024 election when his policies don’t seem to resonate with voters. She highlighted Wall Street Journal poll that found Donald Trump leading Biden in multiple swing states, using the question as a set-up to boost a new conspiracy theory about Democrats being forced to manipulate the election in order to help the president win re-election.

“How does Biden win?” Bartiromo asked the RNC chairman. “Republicans are talking about the potential of an election that is tampered with. Republicans are warning there is a Biden order—executive order—which allows illegal immigrants and felons to vote.”

Bullshit, of course. The executive order Bartiromo references means to remove “significant obstacles” to voting many Americans face. Especially nonwhite Americans.

The order makes no mention of undocumented immigrants nor does it expand the right to vote to any groups previously unable to do so. The president does not have any authority to extend the right to vote to undocumented immigrants, and a 1996 federal law expressly prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections.

Sarah Posner, author of “Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind,” writes Trump is “is dangerously priming his voters for a repeat of his multipronged assault on the 2020 election results and the peaceful transfer of power.”

MSNBC:

At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday, Donald Trump decried President Biden for issuing a White House proclamation of March 31 as the annual Trans Day of Visibility, which this year happened to fall on Easter. “What the h— was Biden thinking when he declared Easter Sunday to be trans visibility day?” Trump complained, to loud boos from the audience. “Such total disrespect to Christians.”

The former president omitted that Biden has observed Trans Day of Visibility on the same day every year of his presidency, and the overlap with Easter was purely coincidental. Instead, Trump turned from stoking fears of Christian persecution to another campaign trail favorite: predicting his election victory. “November 5th is going to be called something else,” he said. “Christian visibility day, when Christians turn out in numbers that nobody has ever seen before.” The crowd reacted, of course, with raucous applause.

As with Bartiromo, the former huckster-in-chief is selling what they’re buying. He’s feeding their persecution complex. Writes Posner, “After all, in the minds of Trump loyalists, if Christians (that is, Trump’s loyal base of white evangelical Christians) show up on Election Day in unprecedented numbers, how could he lose?” They cannot unless the election is stolen by THEM.

Most Christians do not share evangelicals’ paranoia, Posner explains. For the others, Trump is signaling “that they make themselves available to defend him against a possible loss.” 

The tenor of his speeches of late, especially those delivered to evangelical audiences, are built around a claim that Christian America has fallen into an apocalyptic hellscape, and only Trump can rescue it.

With their help. In Jesus’ name.

Trump’s declaration of Election Day as “Christian Visibility Day” is more than a get-out-the-vote technique. It’s a blaring alarm warning us that he could use his base’s persecution complex about the “radical left” and their messianic zeal for him to claim that any election loss must have been “rigged” not only against him but against them, too. As Jan. 6 showed, that zeal can easily turn into terrible consequences for the country.

I can’t help linking evangelicals’ persecution complex to a regional insecurity complex that lingers among many southerners (especially the less educated) a century and a half after the defeat of the Confederacy. The South and Jesus will rise again.

By any means necessary.

Update: Regarding Trump’s unscrupulousness and his MAGA followers’ “How could we lose?” hubris, it occurs to me that Pickett’s Charge was Lee’s folly because he thought his southern boys were invincible. Via the American Battlefield Trust: “Pickett was asked years following the war what caused the assault to fail. He responded rhetorically, ‘I’ve always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.’”

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Four Years Ago Today

Published by digby on April 3, 2024

Trump’s leadership killed so many people

“Let People Eat”

Published by digby on April 3, 2024

Jose Andres in the NY Times today:

In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.

The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.

Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.

These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.

Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.

All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.

That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.

The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.

In the worst conditions, after the worst terrorist attack in its history, it’s time for the best of Israel to show up. You cannot save the hostages by bombing every building in Gaza. You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.

We welcome the government’s promise of an investigation into how and why members of our World Central Kitchen family were killed. That investigation needs to start at the top, not just the bottom.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said of the Israeli killings of our team, “It happens in war.” It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces.

It was also the direct result of a policy that squeezed humanitarian aid to desperate levels. Our team was en route from a delivery of almost 400 tons of aid by sea — our second shipment, funded by the United Arab Emirates, supported by Cyprus and with clearance from the Israel Defense Forces.

The team members put their lives at risk precisely because this food aid is so rare and desperately needed. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, half the population of Gaza — 1.1. million people — faces the imminent risk of famine. The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, traveling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza.

The peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East, regardless of ethnicity and religion, share a culture that values food as a powerful statement of humanity and hospitality — of our shared hope for a better tomorrow.

There’s a reason, at this special time of year, Christians make Easter eggs, Muslims eat an egg at iftar dinners and an egg sits on the Seder plate. This symbol of life and hope reborn in spring extends across religions and cultures.

I have been a stranger at Seder dinners. I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt, the commandment to remember — with a feast before you — that the children of Israel were once slaves.

It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength. The people of Israel need to remember, at this darkest hour, what strength truly looks like.

This man’s humanity, decency and compassion are inspirations to us all. Everything he says is correct and if the Israeli government hasn’t completely given up on being regarded as a civilized 21st century nation it will listen to what he says and recognize that this is a watershed moment that will determine whether it is.

A New Trump Scandal

Published by digby on April 3, 2024

As grotesque as always

Greg Sargent has the details and it’s truly awful:

Donald Trump has invented a new criminological category he describes as “Migrant Crime,” and in Michigan on Tuesday, he seized on the horrible murder of a young woman, allegedly by an undocumented immigrant, to underscore the point. Some news accounts covered this by quoting GOP strategists, with one enthusing that this will win over “security moms,” as if Trump is engaging in something like a conventional campaign strategy here.

But Trump’s ugly demagogic rants in Michigan, and others like it, deserve to be treated as a national scandal. The cherry-picking of isolated terrible crimes to smear migrants as a class is not something we would tolerate if it were directed toward other groups. Never mind what Trump is attempting to do politically. His deranged, malicious, hateful public conduct should be seen as the real story here. It should be covered that way.

Trump’s appearance in Michigan has been overshadowed by the news that Trump may have lied about relatives of the victim, 25-year-old Ruby Garcia. At his event, Trump claimed he had spoken to “some of her family,” but her sister flatly denied he or his campaign had contacted them, and blasted Trump for singling out crimes committed by “illegal immigrants.”

That did shape some of the coverage. But it should not require a brave public intervention from a young woman enduring a horrific tragedy to prod the media into registering the appalling way Trump is twisting this murder and other similar crimes to viciously smear undocumented immigrants across the board.

During his rants in Michigan, Trump also discussed the killing of another woman in Georgia by an “illegal alien animal.” He mocked Democrats for describing undocumented immigrants as “human,” declaring, “They’re not human, they’re animals,” while keeping what “they” means vague. Trump insisted other countries are sending “prisoners, murders, drug dealers, mental patients, and terrorists” to our country, claimed migrants have “wrecked our country,” and blamed it all on “Biden’s border bloodbath.”

It was outrageous. And even more outrageous was his cult’s reaction. Gut wrenching.

Sargent runs down the facts of the Garcia killing as far as we know. She was murdered by a Mexican citizen with whom she had some sort of relationship although it’s unclear exactly what it was. The alleged killer, Brandon Ortiz-Vite was originally a DACA recipient who has been in the US since he was a child but his status expired, he was deported to Mexico and then returned at some point.

None of this can be attributed to Biden’s policies so Trump bringing it up is purely a way to demonize immigrants and smear the president. Neither would he have likely been prevented from any of this by Biden’s first term policies.

Sargent continues:

It is true that with any large group of people—undocumented migrants included—one risks seeing a small percentage of them turn to violent crime. But that’s not an argument against Biden’s immigration policies. As has been demonstrated again and again, there is no evidence that migrants are driving any kind of crime wave in the United States.

In covering Trump’s Michigan event, some news accounts dutifully noted that fact. But they tended to treat this as a conventional fact-check of typical political rhetoric, rather than treating his heinous smearing of a large class of people as itself being the story.

Trump’s constant use of the deranged “migrant crime” trope provides the hook for doing just that. The Republican National Committee now has an official website devoted to chronicling “migrant crime” and “illegal alien crime,” listed out by state (in some states no “illegal alien crimes” have yet been documented). The casual use of such terms to smear large classes of immigrants is the official party position.

All this is straight from the authoritarian playbook. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum has noted: “The repetition of the phrase ‘migrant crime’ is a tactic stolen from Victor Orban, who used to use ‘Gypsy crime’ in the same way.”

How about some stand-alone news analysis pieces devoted to that sort of malign confluence of tactics? Why not cover this hateful, dangerous rhetoric as a sign of Trump’s seething contempt for even the most minimal standards of conduct in public service and public life?

He suggests that Democrats should enter this fray as well, perhaps holding events with the Baltimore bridge collapse victims. immigrant essential workers who lost their lives doing heavy work when it it happened. He writes:

Democrats could say: This is what immigrants are really doing for our country. They could call on Trump: Stop the hate... The Trump-GOP smearing of immigrants is an absolute scandal. And it should be treated as exactly that.

I happened to be in Baltimore when the accident happened and I will say that the local officials and media (even country radio!) were very focused on those victims and their families. Maybe the national Dems, as they live in the area, have made note. They should. The demonization of immigrants is so over-the-top that Trump’s fascism is no longer theoretical.

Good News In The Heartland

Published by digby on April 3, 2024

A white supremacist in rural Oklahoma ran for city counsel and won in the last cycle. He attended the fascist Charlottesville march and when some people in the town found out about it they ran a campaign against him. They won.

It’s possible to go too far even in hardcore right wing places like rural Oklahoma. I agree with Roy Edroso who pointed out:

This is why it’s important to get the real views of conservative candidates out in front of voters. A lot of voters think these guys are just low-tax law-and-order types. When they find out what they’re *really* like, they turn against them.

I hope that’s right. It would mean that the country isn’t as far gone as I thought.

It Always Comes Back To Russia

Published by digby on April 3, 2024

Yet another corrupt connection to Donald Trump

Who could have ever predicted? The Guardian reports:

Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media managed to go public last week only after it had been kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.

The former US president stands to gain billions of dollars – his stake is currently valued at about $4bn – from the merger between Trump Media and Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which took the parent company of Truth Social public.

But Trump Media almost did not make it to the merger after regulators opened a securities investigation into the merger in 2021 and caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate as it waited to get the green light for its stock market debut.

The situation led Trump Media to take emergency loans, including from an entity called ES Family Trust, which opened an account with Paxum Bank, a small bank registered on the Caribbean island of Dominica that is best known for providing financial services to the porn industry.

Through leaked documents, the Guardian has learned that ES Family Trust operated like a shell company for a Russian-American businessman named Anton Postolnikov, who co-owns Paxum Bank and has been a subject of a years-long joint federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into the Trump Media merger.

The existence of the trust was first reported by the Guardian last year. However, who controlled the account, how the trust was connected to Paxum Bank, and how the money had been funneled through the trust to Trump Media was unknown.

The new details about the trust are drawn from documents including: Paxum Bank records showing Postolnikov having access to the trust’s account, the papers that created the trust showing as its settlor a lawyer in St Petersburg, Russia, and three years of the trust’s financial transactions.

The concern surrounding the loans to Trump Media is that ES Family Trust may have been used to complete a transaction that Paxum itself could not.

Paxum Bank does not offer loans in the US as it lacks a US banking license and is not regulated by the FDIC. Postolnikov appears to have used the trust to loan money to help save Trump Media – and the Truth Social platform – because his bank itself could not furnish the loan.

Postolnikov, the nephew of Aleksandr Smirnov, an ally of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has not been charged with a crime. In response to an email to Postolnikov seeking comment, a lawyer in Dominica representing Paxum Bank warned of legal action for reporting the contents of the leaked documents.

There is also no indication that Trump or Trump Media had any idea about the nature of the loans beyond that they were opaque, nor has the company or its executives been accused of wrongdoing. A spokesperson for Trump Media did not respond to a request for comment.

But Postolnikov has been under increasing scrutiny in the criminal investigation into the Trump Media merger. Most recently, he has been listed on search warrant affidavits alongside several associates – one of whom was indicted last month for money laundering on top of earlier insider-trading charges.

Read the whole story. It won’t surprise you except to the extent that he keeps getting away with this stuff.

Trump, Crime and Cops

Published by digby on April 3, 2024

It’s an abusive relationship

Donald Trump, the alleged “master brander”, has liberally stolen all of his most famous slogans from other politicians, starting with “Make American Great Again” which he took from Ronald Reagan. During the 2016 campaign he made a big announcement that he was going to be the “Law and Order” candidate, which made many people chuckle since it evoked the famous TV show. But it was also one of Richard Nixon’s winning slogans in 1968, used to appeal to the white conservatives who were freaking out over civil rights and anti-war protests.

I’ve never been sure if Trump is consciously aware of the political echoes of these thefts or if he really believes he came up with them himself. Either way, they resonated with Republicans who either nostalgically recalled their former leaders using those terms or think Trump is a very stable genius for creating such instantly memorable campaign slogans.

From the moment he came down the escalator in ’16 he’s been demonizing immigrants as murderers and rapists and promising to eliminate the problem with draconian crackdowns. He loves to regale his crowds with lurid, detailed accounts of violent crimes allegedly committed by undocumented migrants and goes to great lengths to present such isolated crimes as evidence of an unprecedented crime spree. In Michigan on Tuesday he proclaimed that they have “wrecked our country” and said that even though some people think it’s wrong to call them “animals” he was going to continue to do it because “they’re not humans.”

This standard piece of his stump speech thrills his followers, of course, which is part of why he does it. Racism and xenophobia are the coins of the MAGA realm. The current Agenda 2025 plan to enlist the local police and deploy red state national guard troops to blue cities to round up migrants and send them to deportation camps is undoubtedly a huge hit with the faithful. And he made the promise explicitly in his Michigan speech, declaring that “we have to get law and order back” as he stood in front of a line of police officers who all applauded when he said it.


He also promised to pass laws to give law enforcement immunity from prosecution which he usually discusses in the context of his whiny demand for presidential “total immunity” As he posted on Truth Social:

A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION. ANY MISTAKE, EVEN IF WELL INTENDED, WOULD BE MET WITH ALMOST CERTAIN INDICTMENT BY THE OPPOSING PARTY AT TERM END. EVEN EVENTS THAT “CROSS THE LINE” MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD. THERE MUST BE CERTAINTY. EXAMPLE: YOU CAN’T STOP POLICE FROM DOING THE JOB OF STRONG & EFFECTIVE CRIME PREVENTION BECAUSE YOU WANT TO GUARD AGAINST THE OCCASIONAL “ROGUE COP” OR “BAD APPLE.” SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH “GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT.” ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, OR THE AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS OF A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER. HOPEFULLY THIS WILL BE AN EASY DECISION. GOD BLESS THE SUPREME COURT!

Perhaps this is the reason the Michigan Police Officers Association gave Trump their enthusiastic endorsement on Tuesday. Donald Trump is explicitly running on a platform which says that both he and law enforcement across the land should be immune from prosecution because they need to be able to break laws in order to protect the citizens from law breakers. Evidently, his ecstatic supporters see nothing illogical about any of that.

And he’s doing this at the same time that he’s promising to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists, specifically pledging to release the detainees being held in the Washington DC jail whom he has taken to calling “hostages” and with whom he collaborated on a recording of the national anthem. Just Security reports that the movement to free these prisoners has been organized by the mother of Ashli Babbit, the anointed MAGA martyr of January 6th. She told the Washington Post that Trump called her and told her “to pass that on to the guys inside that they’re on his mind, and when he gets in they’ll get out.”

Just Security took a look at who these so-called hostages are and it turns out that 27 of the 29 are charged with assaulting police officers among other crimes, from throwing an explosive device that detonated on at least 25 cops, tasing them with electro-shock devices, spraying them with pepper spray, bludgeoning them with various makeshift weapons and generally beat them with whatever else they had at hand. These are the people Trump considers to be “hostages” and promises to pardon even as he’s basking in the warm glow of endorsements from police unions around the country and campaigning on a platform of law and order.

Last week he ostentatiously attended the wake of a New York policeman who was killed in the line of duty and the local GOP official who had invited him said they gave him an “ovation” at the service. Trump himself said he was overwhelmed by the love that the family and fellow officers showed to him and the right wing media extolled his great empathy and compassion for the victims of this horrific violence for days afterwards.

The family of another officer who died in the line of duty wasn’t as impressed. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died after suffering two strokes following a confrontation with some of those “hostages”  on January 6th didn’t rate a visit from Trump. In fact, Trump’s never had a word to say about any of the hundreds of police who were injured that day. Sicknick’s brother had something to say about him, however, and his words were on the money:

“The fact that he states he’s law and order but he sent a mob that ultimately ended up killing my brother. He has such a lack of self-awareness of what he does. He’s using that officer’s death as a campaign platform.”

Trump is currently under eighty-eight felony indictments in four jurisdictions and has been held liable in civil court for defamation, sexual assault and fraud. Some of the crimes he’s been accused of committing have to do with his actions on January 6th that resulted in a violent assault on the police who were guarding the US Capitol. Running for president again as a champion of law and order while promising to pardon all those who believed they were carrying out his wishes that day is the Trumpiest thing he’s ever done. Even more disturbing is the fact that police all over the country are endorsing him anyway.

Salon

Nobody Could Have Seen This Coming

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 3, 2024

More “stranger danger”

After terrorist and mass-casualty attacks like the El Paso Walmart mass shooting (target: Latino immigrants), the Tree of Life shootings in Pittsburgh (target: Jews), the Charleston and Buffalo shootings (target: Blacks), and others, police investigate how the killers got radicalized. What made them snap? Except lately authorities simply document common features instead.

ABC News from January:

A toxic brew of ideological extremism, blended with rage, anger and violent tendencies is making it increasingly difficult for authorities to identify motivations behind mass casualty attacks in America, according to a new assessment by the Department of Homeland Security.

The confidential analysis, distributed to law enforcement on Jan. 10 and obtained by ABC News, describes the growing challenge posed by perpetrators who “espoused and engaged with an array of narratives,” often online, “likely fueling their mobilization to violence.”

Those attackers’ range of beliefs made it easier to escape the longstanding templates law enforcement uses to catch would-be threats – and made it harder for police to intervene or secure potential targets, the analysis found.

“Since 2018, we have observed mass casualty attacks in which the perpetrators held multiple grievances, challenging our ability to identify a primary motive,” the bulletin said.

Is it really that hard?

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, multiple convicts testified they carried out the assault at Donald Trump’s direction. This is from ABC News from May 2020, prior to the Jan. 6 attack:

President Donald Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from acts of violence in communities across America, dismissing critics who point to his rhetoric as a potential source of inspiration or comfort for anyone acting on even long-held beliefs of bigotry and hate.

“I think my rhetoric brings people together,” he said last year, four days after a 21-year-old allegedly posted an anti-immigrant screed online and then allegedly opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 and injuring dozens of others.

But a nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.

If your memory of Jan. 6 needs refreshing:

These clips are from Trump’s appearances Tuesday night in Michigan.

“Twenty-nine thousand [nonwhite immigrants] from China and they all seem to be pefectly fit for military service.” Draw your own conclusions, right?

From New York Times coverage:

Donald J. Trump defended his use of the word “animal” to refer to some immigrants. He called the man charged with killing Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student, an “illegal alien animal,” and then said, “Democrats said, ‘please don’t call them animals.’ I said ‘no, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’” He also said that he once told Nancy Pelosi that “I’ll use the word animal because that’s what they are.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of fascism and authoritarianism, (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) responds, “Remember: Trump is trying to keep people in a state of existential dread so they can be emotionally manipulated and do whatever he asks, à la Jan 6. Right out of the autocratic playbook.”

“Who are the uniformed men standing behind an accused criminal as he says the EXACT SAME WORDS he said when he last launched an illegal attack on democracy?” tweeted Marcy Wheeler.

Another user replied: Berrien County Sheriff Charles Heit, Allegan County Sheriff Frank Baker and Van Buren County Sheriff Daniel Abbott. A local news report backed that up.

Later that evening before a smallish crowd:

So, how do these people get radicalized?

Remember this the next time pundits and police after a mass-violence tragedy reach for a motive and declare “nobody could have seen this coming.”

Update:

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Jack Smith Has Had Enough

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 3, 2024

Cannon headed for recusal?

Image via U.S. Senate.

With special prosecutor Jack Smith’s Florida filing on Tuesday, says former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman, “DOJ calls out Judge Cannon and her improper rulings, and signals it is ready and willing to take her up to the 11th Circuit.” That is, to have the Donald Trump-coddling Judge Aileen Cannon removed from the classified documents case.

The Department of Justice accuses Trump of illegally removing classified documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence and obstructing the government’s attempts to reclaim them.

Finally (CNN):

In perhaps prosecutors’ strongest rebuke yet to how Judge Aileen Cannon has handled the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, special counsel Jack Smith said in court filings late Tuesday evening that the judge had ordered briefings based on a “fundamentally flawed” understanding of the case that has “no basis in law or fact.”

Smith’s team harshly critiqued Cannon’s request for jury instructions that embraced Trump’s claims that he had broad authority to take classified government documents and said it would seek an appeals court review if she accepted the former president’s arguments about his record-retention powers.

Basically (not a lawyer here), Cannon is teeing up for the jury a reason to acquit Trump based on a bogus reading of the law: Trump’s. (Not exactly. We’ll get to that.) His legal team alleges he had a right to take classified defense secrets under the Presidential Records Act (PRA). The DOJ calls that “a post hoc justification that was concocted more than a year after he left the White House,” and maintains it is the Espionage Act that governs classified documents. Trump faces 32 counts of violating that act.

Cannon asked the special counsel and defense attorneys to submit their own versions of the jury instructions. Smith’s filing is here.

The first scenario would instruct a jury to assess whether each of the records that Trump is accused of retaining fell into the categories of “personal” or “presidential” as laid out by the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate law that governs how White House records belonging to the government are to be handled at the end of a presidency.

The second version Cannon asked for assumes that as president, Trump had complete authority to take records he wanted from the White House, which would make it nearly impossible for prosecutors to secure a conviction. If she were to institute this sort of instruction, Smith’s team said, “the Government must be provided with an opportunity to seek prompt appellate review.”

“Both scenarios rest on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise — namely, that the Presidential Records Act and in particular its distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘Presidential’ records, determines whether a former President is ‘authorized,’ under the Espionage Act, to possess highly classified documents and store them in an unsecure facility,” the special counsel’s team wrote.

If allowed to be presented to a jury, prosecutors said, “that premise would distort the trial.”

Not giving Cannon the benefit of the doubt her, that seems to be her point.

The New York Times adds:

At a hearing last month in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon herself expressed skepticism about Mr. Trump’s assertion, saying it was most likely not enough to dismiss the case before it went to trial.

But then within days, she made a surprising move, ordering the former president’s lawyers and Mr. Smith’s prosecutors to send her proposed jury instructions suggesting she was open to embracing the very same defense.

[…]

She has put off making several legal and logistical decisions. And she has spent time at hearings entertaining a series of unusual arguments by Mr. Trump’s lawyers that many federal judges would have rejected out of hand.

FYI (via Cornell Law School):

Mandamus at the Federal Level

In federal courts, these orders most frequently appear when a party to a suit wants to appeal a judge’s decision but is blocked by rules against interlocutory appeals. Instead of appealing directly, the party simply sues the judge, seeking a mandamus compelling the judge to correct their earlier mistake. Generally, this type of indirect appeal is only available if the party has no alternative means of seeking review. 

Marcy Wheeler points out that Smith’s filing documents that Trump got his bullshit legal theory (that a Trump employee told him was bullshit) from a February 2022 tweet by Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton “who was not an attorney.” But he has muscles he shows off every day by squeezing himself into undersized shirts.

Trump eventually claimed:

“I have been told I was under no obligation to give the material based on various legal rulings that have been made over the years.” Before this time, the second employee had never heard this theory from Trump. No other witness recalled Trump espousing this theory until after the Judicial Watch president conveyed it to him in February 2022.

Wheeler writes:

Smith doesn’t, however, draw out the implication of this explicitly.

Not only has Trump been falsely suggesting — without evidence — that he did designate these documents personal records. He couldn’t have done so, because he didn’t know of this theory until over a year after he stole the documents.

But Cannon is such a chump that she has been chasing a theory spun up by Fitton, someone who has only an English BA.

Cannon may well respond poorly to Smith’s use of 20-some pages to lay all this out. It’s the kind of thing that routinely elicits miffed responses from her.

At this point, though, it seems Smith is simply laying a record for a challenge at the 11th Circuit.

Cannon may yet postpone the start of the trial scheduled for May 20 to after the November election. Pray she doesn’t have control of the case that long.

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