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All The President’s Lawyers

Published by digby on May 17, 2024

It’s almost quaint now to look back at the shock we all felt at presidential candidate Donald Trump attacking the judge presiding in the Trump University fraud lawsuit as biased because he was Latino and Trump was talking about building a border wall. Most Americans assumed that it would be impossible that such a disrespectful and, frankly, racist person could be elected in the 21st century but as it turned out that was just a preview of many such attacks to come. (That lawsuit eventually settled for $25 million)

Because Trump is such an inveterate lawbreaker, he has been the subject of many legal cases over the years and biographers and armchair psychologists have speculated that his strategy has always been to publicly denigrate the judges and the prosecutors in these cases due to his father’s admonition that one must always fight with everything they have. But it’s just as likely that he’s following the advice of his mentor, the odious attorney Roy Cohn who has been called “one of the most reviled men in American history.” If anything it was Cohn who pulled Trump out from under his father’s shadow.

In fact, Trump’s current troubles and many in his past stem from his weird relationship with Cohn, who taught him that there are no rules and no limits to what he can get away with if he has the chutzpah to challenge the very concept of reality itself, daring people to disbelieve his lies or risk destruction. It’s the ethos of the bully and the gangster and despite all the drama in his life Trump’s gotten away with all of it, eventually becoming the most powerful man in the world with a full-fledged cult following of tens of millions of people. Cohn’s student learned his lessons well.

The case unfolding in New York these past few weeks centers on another of Trump’s lawyers, Michael Cohen, who Trump saw as a low rent Roy Cohn who would carry out the dirty business Trump feels entitled to engage in without accountability. He eagerly took on the job of Trump’s legal henchman, never questioning the ethics or morals of what he was asked to do and when asked how he could have done that he testified this week that he was “knee deep in the cult of Donald Trump.” The trial has shown how much Cohen yearned for Trump’s approval and how little Trump respected him in return.

Cohen is a broken man today, loathed by the press with which he had a hostile relationship as Trump’s hatchet man and humiliated before the entire country as a liar and a loser on the witness stand, even as he provides the testimony that corroborates evidence that his former boss broke the law. Michael Cohen paid a high price for his loyalty to Donald Trump.

We’ve also been reminded in this trial of another of Trump’s lawyers, the former US Attorney and mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani. Once a front runner himself for the Republican presidential nomination, and esteemed by many as a hero for his leadership of the city after 9/11, Giuliani is now one of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election interference trial, has been held liable for $148 million for his defamation of two election workers, is facing disbarment and was fired from his radio show. This week he left the judge overseeing his bankruptcy aghast as he’s completely non-compliant and has not followed any of the court’s instructions.

Rudy Giuliani has been completely destroyed by his loyalty to Donald Trump, which he maintains until this day despite the fact that Trump has not helped him financially and would have no power to pardon him if he were to become president again. All of this is a result of the dirty work he did on behalf of Trump’s Big Lie.

Two other lawyers, Jeffrey Clark (who appeared at the courthouse in support of Trump on Thursday) and John Eastman have had their reputations shredded and their lives upended willingly plotting with Donald Trump to overturn the election in 2020. Both men are co-defendants with Trump in the Georgia case as well and Eastman has been disbarred and was fired from jobs at Chapman University and the University of Colorado over his involvement in the January 6th plot. Loyal legal soldiers and Trump co-defendants, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, have also been destroyed by their involvement with Trump’s schemes. Like the others, they were thrilled to be part of Trump’s nefarious plans and are paying the price for it today.

Giuliani, Eastman, Clark, Powell and Chesebro are all unindicted co-conspirators in the federal case against Donald Trump brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. What an ignominious end to their legal careers. And it’s all in service of Donald Trump.

Trump has more lawyers, of course, although it’s not as easy to find them as it once was. Many can obviously see the writing on the wall. (The running joke is that MAGA actually stands for Make Attorneys Get Attorneys.) Luckily for the newer hires, the campaign is paying the bills these days so they don’t have the same worries as Trump’s previous attorneys about getting paid — yet.

Trump seems to be very attached to his attorney Alina Habba who defended him the NY civil fraud trial and the Carroll defamation cases, all of which he lost. They frequently travel together and she has attended the NY hush money trial as moral support as well. Another of his favorites is Christina Bobb, recently indicted in the Arizona fake electors case, who has been hired by the Republican National Committee to head their election integrity unit.

His top lawyer in both the Mar-a-lago and NY case, Todd Blanche, is a former prosecutor with a good reputation who has thrown his lot in with Trump entirely, moving his practice and his family down to Florida and is reportedly very “broey” with Trump. So far he hasn’t broken any laws in his defense of Trump so his reputation and standing as a lawyer remains intact.

Just as all those Republican office holders who are making the ritual pilgrimage to that Manhattan Courthouse to demonstrate their fealty to Donald Trump as Michael Cohen once did, so too should his current lawyers .

His first lawyer Roy Cohn taught Trump everything he knows about being a ruthless, belligerent, con man who can get away with murder with a take-no-prisoners, win at all costs attitude. And Trump loved him for it. But when Cohn got AIDS (and lied about it claiming it was liver cancer) and the walls started closing in on him for tax evasion and he was disbarred, Trump abandoned his mentor without a second thought. Cohn’s secretary Susan Bell told Michael Kruse of Politico that he “dropped him like a hot potato, he really did.”

If he would do that to his mentor and muse he would do it to anyone. Just look at the broken human wreck named Rudy Giuliani.

Joementum

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 17, 2024

No, not Lieberman

Only a fraction of American adults are stock investors, but it’s a large fraction (61%). Many of the more heavily invested will be cashing dividend checks while claiming the economy has gone bust under Joe Biden. So it goes.

The news has yet to trickle down to others that, yeah, people’s lives are improving under Joe Biden, as Michael Tomasky wrote this week:

Politico and Morning Consult asked respondents a series of questions about all the major economic legislation Biden has signed. Majorities know little or nothing at all about the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS act, the American Rescue Plan, and the Inflation Reduction Act. And get this: While 40 percent said Biden has done more than Trump on infrastructure, 37 percent said Trump had done more. In January, NBC found that Trump has a 22-point advantage over Biden on the question of whom voters trust more with the economy—up 15 points from the same poll in 2020.  

[…]

It’s largely a media problem. The chunk of the country (and it’s a large chunk) for whom “the media” means Fox News, their local Sinclair affiliate, and maybe a right-wing talk radio station will never hear that Biden did anything good. Instead, they’ll often hear lies, or gross distortions of the truth, or pitiful excuses that lead them to draw false conclusions. 

An MSNBC commenter just remarked that Trump and his supporters will be taking credit for the Dow hitting 40,000 for the first time. The Market (bless its holy name) is chalking up records in anticipation of Trump being president one year from now, dontcha know.

Business Insider explains that “inflation is keeping the cost of living high in many US cities, and astronomical home prices are preventing aspiring homeowners from buying.” Some gotta accentuate the negative.

With the election six months away, Business Insider looked at President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump’s plans for eight major economic categories that affect Americans’ daily lives: domestic manufacturing, higher education, healthcare, housing, labor, taxes, tariffs, and trade.

“President Biden is going to keep fighting for working families — lowering the costs of prescription drugs, housing, and childcare; investing in our future; supporting workers and small businesses; and making sure big corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share,” Lael Brainard, the director of the National Economic Council, told BI in a statement.

Business Insider reached out to Trump’s campaign team but didn’t receive a response.

Trump’s been busy facing felony charges.

In case you’ve forgotten:

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Fear Of Reprisal

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 17, 2024

Into your life it will creep

Photo obtained by The New York Times shows an inverted American flag outside at the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Jan. 17, 2021.

Is anyone keeping a list? A list of the “I know you are but what am I?” behaviors of which the right accuses its adversaries while indulging in same with gusto?

Indoctrination? Extremism? Propaganda? Intimidation?

There must be a listing somewhere, but I’m too tired of the BS to go looking just now.

The breaking news Thursday night was a photo of an upside down American flag flown outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va. on January 17, 2021. Days after the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by MAGA extremists on January 6 and three days before Joe Biden’s inauguration as Donald Trump’s replacement. Alito blames his wife.

Election rigging? Death threats? Political violence? Hating America?

Via Reuters: “Comments calling for violence against judges handling Donald Trump’s legal cases regularly appear on the pro-Trump website Patriots.Win, typically in response to posts echoing his attacks on the jurists’ integrity.”

Upside down display of the American flag is a considered a signal of distress. Donald Trump’s Stop the Steal cult appropriated the signal as a sign of alarm that a Democrat was about to occupy the Oval Office in his place. It is unclear how many days it flew outside Alito’s home, The New York Times reports. Nor is it clear why it took over three years for the neighbor who shot the photo to reveal it to the press. But it’s not a hard guess.

The Times reports (gift link), “The half-dozen neighbors who saw the flag, or knew of it, requested anonymity because they said they did not want to add to the contentiousness on the block and feared reprisal.”

Alito’s neighbors share that fear of reprisal with jurors serving in the Trump criminal trial in Manhattan. Should these anonymous Americans rule to convict Trump, they will be looking over their shoulders for years to come and fear doxxing by MAGA cultists and right-wing media personalities. Death threats could be the least of their worries for having done their civic duty. Trump, his allies in Congress, and the Trump cult call for executions for their enemies. This is what “great again” looks like under Trump’s red hats and Red Tie Brigade.

God Bless America.

But Joe Biden is destroying the country. (There’s another for the list.) Don’t ask how. You’ll out yourself as an America-hater. Samuel Alito outed himself long ago.

Update: Greg Sargent notes how if the Red Tie Brigade “were merely criticizing the prosecution on the facts and the law in substantive terms, it would be one thing. But here they are attacking the judge, his family, the witnesses, and the line prosecutors as actors in a fundamentally illegitimate proceeding.” Their action “threatens to sabotage public confidence in the justice system’s integrity and makes it harder for good-faith actors to play their roles in it without fear or favor.”

In other words, they are poisoning the well of democracy.

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Union Joe

Published by digby on May 16, 2024

Labor Historian Eric Loomis was asked to give a letter grade to Joe Biden’s administration on labor policy. Biden makes the honor roll:

Joe Biden has pledged repeatedly to go further than any of his predecessors with his support for U.S. labor rights.

“I intend to be the most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history,” Biden said at a White House meeting in September 2021 that brought together ordinary workers, labor leaders and government officials.

He has expressed this intention many times, sometimes clarifying his goals.

For example, in 2023 he said in Chicago that his administration was “making it easier to empower workers by making it easier to join a union.”

Based on my research regarding the history of organized labor in America, I would give Biden an A-minus for his record on workers rights. In my view, the man dubbed “Union Joe” has lived up to the claim, with one notable error.

He says it’s the same grade he would give to FDR.

He goes on to lay out all the positive things Biden has done for labor and raises the one case (the railroad union’s sick leave demands — which they later mostly got) as the single bad policy. It’s quite astonishing and I honestly didn’t realize most of it. He also analyzes the context in which he’s operating with the congress and the courts and it’s actually even more astonishing. Great read.

FYI Loomis also says this, which is interesting:

Water, water everywhere

Published by digby on May 16, 2024

2023:

Now:

India:

Milan, Italy

Laurie Garret writes:

Why are we seeing flooding all over the world now?

Boil some soup.
Pour into a bowl.
Wrap bowl in Saran.
Watch condensation form, & drip down.
Welcome to our CO2-filled atmosphere.

Kids, there is nothing on this earth more important than doing everything possible to get the governments around the world to take action on climate change. I’m old and I’ll be dead before too long. But this is going to change everything for the worse in the world you are going to be living in. This is literally an existential threat to life on earth.

The Adults In The Room

Published by digby on May 16, 2024

And here are Trump’s supporters today:

Maybe it’s just me but I feel as if things are hurtling even more out of control than they have been. The shamelessness is turning into recklessness. The question is whether anyone cares.

Anytime, Anywhere

Published by digby on May 16, 2024

Trump has been taunting Biden to debate repeatedly saying, “anytime, anywhere.” Now his minions and mouthpieces are having a little meltdown because Biden accepted:

The first debate is set for next month on CNN, while the second is planned for September on ABC.

Though the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee has also pushed for a Fox News debate, the Democratic incumbent hasn’t agreed to that ― and the network’s hosts are in meltdown mode as a result.

Sean Hannity criticized CNN’s Jake Tapper, who is set to be one of the debate moderators, by calling him a “radical left-wing partisan.” Hannity demanded that moderators’ mics get cut off after asking Trump questions, and he also launched into some wild conspiracy theories about Biden.

He claimed that Biden will take a “heavy dose” of “whatever he took before the State of the Union” address to win the debates. He further suggested that Biden is “secretly” trying to get out of the debates.

In fact, they’ve completely lost what’s left of their minds

I used to think this was an act but I’m beginning to think they really mean it. Listening to Mike Johnson over the course of the last few days flagrantly lying in full blown Trumpian fashion tells me that they’ve been completely absorbed now into the MAGA Bizarroworld. I think they’ve come to believe their own bullshit.

If They Had A Death Star

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 16, 2024

Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum

It’s party over public health now in North Carolina:

The North Carolina Senate Judiciary Committee approved an amended version of House Bill 237 on Tuesday morning that would prohibit the wearing of masks in public. 

The controversial bill, which would also increase criminal penalties for those who commit crimes while wearing a mask in public, comes in the wake of protests that have erupted on college campuses across the country in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict.  

Gotta nip that in the bud, as Deputy Fife would say up the road in Mayberry.

Laws dating back to the 1950s that were enacted, at least in part, as responses to groups like the Ku Klux Klan, prohibit wearing a mask in public in North Carolina, with exceptions. Those exceptions were expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic to include people wearing masks for health reasons. Newton’s bill would remove that specific exception.  

They’re just rolling back the law to what it was before COVID, dontcha know.

From the bill summary:

Under Article 4A of Chapter 14 of the General Statutes, Prohibited Secret Societies and Activities, it is generally a crime for an individual to wear a mask in public. However, under G.S. 14-12.11(a)(6), an individual can wear a mask in public for the physical health or safety of the wearer or others. If an individual wears a mask in public for health or safety reasons, a law enforcement officer can require the individual to remove the mask during traffic stops and criminal investigations when the officer has reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

Section 1 of the PCS would repeal G.S. 14-12.11(a)(6), and individuals would no longer be able to wear masks in public for health or safety reasons.

Sen. Sydney Batch (D-Wake), a cancer survivor immunocompromised during medical treatment, objected:

“My issue is that we are removing the specific section that gave people who are immunocompromised or people who were sick and just care about the community. Someone walking around with tuberculosis, wants to wear a mask to protect everybody else is no longer able to do that based on this bill.”   

“No one wants to see a grandmother arrested for wearing a mask. The fact, though, is that this would criminalize that process,” said Sen. Natasha Marcus (D-Mecklenburg), adding that wearing a mask in public is life-or-death for some people. “Stated plainly, your bill will make it illegal,” Marcus added.    

When Batch offered an amendment to add back the health exemption, Republicans tabled it on a party-line vote. The bill later passed the state Senate, also along party lines.

“Republicans are putting cancer patients, seniors, & folks with disabilities at risk of punishment for wearing protective masks they require when they go out in public,” tweeted Democrats’ state chair Anderson Clayton.

The bill heads to Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) desk where he is expected to veto it. But with a GOP supermajority, Republicans will likely override it.

Imagine what they could do with a Death Star.

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It’s The Loathsomeness, Stupid

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 16, 2024

Poisoning the well for profit and cruelty

“At least 32 people have died in Somalia after drinking water from a well that was believed to have been poisoned.” Gulf Times, 2017. Photo for illustration, UNHCR/F.Courbet

Among would-be Rambos who fancy themselves patriots, artifacts from the American Revolution serve to justify, well, whatever antisocial, anti-American behavior needs justifying. Sacking the U.S. Capitol comes to mind. They’ll wave Gadsden flags and sport tee shirts citing Thomas Jefferson’s “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Etc.

But when they’re not sacking capitols and bear-spraying police, and when their crooked lawyers are not working to overturn elections that don’t go their way, these miscreants employ a more ancient tradition: poisoning the well. Smithsonian Magazine provides a thumbnail history of “an early form of biological warfare,” the practice of belligerents as ancient as the Sumerians and as recent as the Israeli Army and ISIS iterally poisoning wells to inflict suffering on civilians. RationalWiki describes metaphorically poisoning the well as “a rhetorical technique and logical fallacy that uses the association of negative emotions to distract a subject from actual evidence in an argument,” adding, “Poisoning the well is an appeal to hate.”

Brother, do many on the right hate the country they claim so loudly to love. Abusive men, take note, the Republican Party is acting out one of those dreary murder ballads with America. If they can’t have her, nobody can.

Robert Reich sees in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan how thoroughly the right has poisoned the well of democracy by undermining human decency. He finds no one admirable in the Donald-Michael-Allen-Stormy-David saga revealed in court testimony. What has our American experiment in self-government come to when so many from MAGA foot soldiers to presidents and Supreme Court justices lack the basic honor and integrity to conduct it as intended?

This cast of characters — and there are many, many others like them in Trump world — are loathsome not because they have violated the law, but because they have contributed to creating a harsh society in which everyone is potentially bought or sold.

It’s a sell-or-tell society, a catch-and-kill society, a just-take-care-of-it society. A society where money and power are the only considerations. Where honor and integrity count for nothing.

I am not naive about how the world works. I’ve spent years in Washington, many of them around powerful people. I have seen the seamy side of American politics and business.

But the people who inhabit Trump world live in a more extreme place — where there are no norms, no standards of decency, no common good. There are only opportunities to make money off others and potential dangers of being ripped off by others.

When most sites where you might read this see you only as data to be mined, your humanity has been stripped. You’ve been reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold. Nothing more.

John Pavlovitz (someone you should read) noted in 2021 that the right-wing war on “woke” is an assault on basic human decency:

“Woke” is Republican-speak for those of us who believe every America adult should have a voice in the electoral process of this nation,
for people who don’t believe a human being’s body, gender identity, or sexual orientation are anyone else’s business,
for we who are sickened at the violence against the Asian community: the direct result of the irresponsible rhetoric of a Republican president,
for Americans who are disgusted that a cancer diagnosis now often necessitates a gofundme page, because we are making illness a financial death sentence,
for people who will not abide the assassination of unarmed people of color by members of a police force infected with white supremacy,
for those who grieve the way this nation is ravaged by preventable gun violence because those who profit from it have such a stranglehold on our lawmakers—
for those of us who exhibit the slightest empathy whatsoever toward migrant families or the working poor or people of color, when we see how hostile our nation has been to them and how oppressive it still is.

It’s woke to want fair elections.
It’s woke to be anti-racist.
It’s woke to be anti-fascist.
It’s woke to trust Science.
It’s woke to wear a mask in a pandemic.
It’s woke to be the parent of a bullied child.
It’s woke to want to be addressed with the gender you identify with.
It’s woke to want a less-polluted community.

Anything that brings equity gets this label from the Right because inequity is its only goal.

Their goal is not to water the tree of liberty. Their goal is to poison the well of democracy, to render it unusable by the rest of us who share this land, to sabotage its very foundations.

The rule of law is one of those foundations. Equal justice under law is on trial in Manhattan (and in pending Trump cases).

See the New York Times this morning for what it looks like in the West Bank where the law protects the lawless but not the disfavored, where lawbreakers become lawmakers:

The two-tier situation has only become worse during the past year. We scrutinized a sample of three dozen cases from the West Bank since Oct. 7 that shows how much the legal system has decayed. In cases ranging from stealing livestock to arson to violent assault, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes and never as a criminal suspect.

Where does the extremist right mean to take the United States? Behold the template:

In the West Bank, a new generation of ultranationalists has taken an even more radical turn against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. Their objective is to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews.

The Times investigation continues here. As Republican lawmakers threatened the International Criminal Court last month, you have been warned.

Now, what are you prepared to do about it?

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The Right’s Assault On Democracy

Published by digby on May 15, 2024

The Supremes are more than doing their part

I noted last week that Bolts magazine was featuring a reader Q&A with an election law expert and they have published some of them today. It’s quite interesting even if a little bit depressing. But we’re used to that when it comes to this subject.

Here’s one example:

What’s the most underrated case where this court weakened voting rights, but that we just don’t talk about enough? — Anonymous

There are two cases that hardly anyone has heard of but that have had a major impact on the way the Supreme Court treats the constitutional right to vote: Anderson v. Celebrezze, in 1983, and Burdick v. Takushi, in 1992. Anderson dealt with the desire of an independent candidate to gain ballot access after a state’s deadline for turning in enough signatures. Burdick was about an individual’s attempt to write-in a candidate instead of choosing one of the candidates listed on the ballot. (These two cases are the subjects of Chapters 1 and 2 of my new book.) But the specific disputes in these cases are less important than the judicial test that came out of them.

These two cases began the Supreme Court’s descent into its underprotection of the right to vote by failing to apply the highest judicial standard, known as strict scrutiny. 

Previously, the court in the 1960s had strongly protected voters by requiring a state to prove that it had a really good reason for a law that infringed upon the right to vote, and that the law actually achieved that goal. But in Anderson, the court began to weaken that test, instead balancing the burden that a law imposes on voters with a state’s interests in regulating the election as it wishes. Burdick went further, accepting a state’s desire to run its election as it sees fit. These two cases comprise what election scholars call the “Anderson–Burdick” balancing test. 

Now, states no longer have to explain, with specificity, their reasons for a law to have the Supreme Court uphold its voting regulation. As far as this court is concerned, a state can simply offer a more general assertion that it’s looking to “prevent voter fraud” or “ease election administration,”  even when doing so is at the expense of voters’ easy access to the ballot.

Check out the full Q&A if you are interested in this subject. This Court is fully engaged in the right’s assault on democracy — and they’ve been playing a very long game.

Remember, the only reason they are so intent upon doing this is because they know they are on the wrong side of history, the party of the wealthy, landowning class, and will not win if everyone has a right to vote and exercises it. They’re been trying to ensure that doesn’t happen since the founding of the republic.

Just today: