Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s not very convincing

Trump is highly, highly unlikely to testify in his NY hush money trial but he has been arguing his case (sort of) outside the courthouse every day. The NY Times did a fact check and it’s a doozy

He said:

“He puts in an invoice, or whatever, a bill. And they pay it and they call it a legal expense. I got indicted for that. What else would you call it? Actually nobody’s been able to say what you’re supposed to call it.”
— last Monday

The Times calls this false. Of course prosecutors know what to call them. They’re invoices for reimbursement of the $130,000 (plus taxes and bonus) second mortgage Cohen used to pay off Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet before the election.

They call Cohen’s payments “illegal campaign contributions” and the invoices “reimbursement intended to falsify business records.” In no way were they “legal expenses.”

He said

“Also the things that he got in trouble for were things that had nothing to do with me. He got in trouble. He went to jail. This had nothing to do with me. This had to do with the taxi cab company.”
— last Monday

Uh no.

Cohen did plead guilty to personal tax evasion related to the taxi medallions but the campaign finance violations were all about the Stormy scheme and they each carried up to five years in prison. He was sentenced to 3 years and he actually had to spend time behind bars as have many other Trump flunkies while he wines and dines his fans down at Mar-a-Lago.

He said:

“Federal Elections took a total pass on it. They said essentially nothing was done wrong or they would have done something about it.”
— last Monday

Au contraire

The Times reports that the commissioners deadlocked along partisan lines but an FEC OLC report found that Trump and the Trump org, along with Cohen “knowingly and willfully” violated federal election law. The GOPers on the commission wrote that pursuing the case wasn’t “the best use of agency resources.” It was enough that Cohen took the rap. (Yes, they actually said his punishment was enough.)

He said:

“I’m not allowed to defend myself, and yet other people are allowed to say whatever they want about me.”— on Tuesday

I think you know how dumb this is. He’s not allowed to talk about witnesses, jurors, court staff or their families but he can talk about the case. Obviously. He can’t shut up about it.

“This is all a Biden indictment. It’s in order to try and win an election.” –on Friday

Oh come on. It’s totally false. But here’s the Times’ fact check on this. …. sigh:

This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump again accused President Biden of orchestrating the legal woes he faces, offering no evidence to support that claim.

Mr. Bragg’s predecessor began investigating the hush money payments in 2018, years before Mr. Biden took office in 2021. As president, Mr. Biden has publicly emphasized the independence of the Justice Department. Moreover, news outlets including The Times have reported that Mr. Biden’s campaign strategy is to say nothing about Mr. Trump’s legal woes. Federal prosecutors in New York who work for the Justice Department have also declined to file charges against Mr. Trump.

Lacks evidence? Please. It’s the Manhattan District Attorney, not the Justice Department! The NY Times hedges as it so often does. Please.

That’s just a smattering of Trump’s courthouse babble. They tackle more statements at the link. And they are all 100% prime BS.

Dr. Elias Doonesbury is a fictional “veteran psychologist” warning the world about Trump’s dementia

But the real question is if he has a stiff gait. That’s the real sign of someone unable to perform the duties of president.

One might have thought that after the political upheaval caused by the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade the conservative justices would feel that it was the better part of valor to play it cool for a while and let the smoke clear before they launch into another radical assault on American jurisprudence. But apparently, taking away established rights for half the population was just a warm up act. Last week, they signaled pretty clearly that they’re prepared to enshrine an imperial presidency into the U.S. Constitution.

First , we were all treated to the sickening spectacle of the five conservative men on the Court batting around ideas about how many organs need to be failing before an emergency physician can step in to save a pregnant woman’s life. You see, they value the rights of states, a government entity, far more than they value the rights of individuals. Well, individual women anyway. It was obvious that at least four of the Justices are fully prepared to say that any yahoo in a state can override the federal law against allowing people to bleed to death in their ER. We’ll have to see if they can get one of the others to join them in this grotesque display of callous indifference to the suffering of pregnant patients and their families in their worst moments of distress.

The hotly anticipated immunity case that was argued the next day really brought home just how far gone the high court really is. As you know, Donald Trump has severe psychological problems that make it impossible for him to admit that has ever lost or done anything wrong. In order to preserve the fragile hold he had on his psyche in the wake of his loss in 2020, he concocted a fantasy in which he actually won and cast himself as a big hero exposing the rigged election by the other side. He went so far as to plot a coup and incite an insurrection in a vain attempt to wrest back power and in the process broke a bunch of laws for which he is now being held to account. Naturally, he cannot accept that so he and his lawyers have come up with a novel legal defense in which they claim that a president is totally immune from the rule of law.

Trump’s argument is quite explicit:

Coming from the man who routinely accused former President Obama of committing crimes and demanded that his Justice Department investigate, that’s pretty rich. (And you have to love the way he slides his belief that police officers should be immune as well in there. It’s an authoritarian smorgasbord.)

Everyone has always understood that presidents are subject to the rule of law once they’re out of office. In fact, it wasn’t until 1973 that the Justice Department’s Office of legal Counsel found it necessary to write a department policy against indicting a sitting president under the assumption that it would interfere with his or her duties while in office. We’ve mercifully not had to deal with that except in the cases of Richard Nixon, who was pardoned, and Bill Clinton who took a plea deal and gave up his law license for five years, which clearly indicates that their understanding was that they had legal liability for the crimes of which they were accused.

That’s all in the past apparently. Today we have a former president accused of very serious crimes who contends that he must be given immunity. And if he doesn’t get it? Well, we’d better hope that he doesn’t win the presidency again because unless the court gives presidents total immunity, Joe Biden is going to jail:

That can’t be read as anything but a threat. (Nice little country you have here … )

I had no expectations that the right wing Supreme Court majority would act with restraint on this issue. Bush v. Gore cured me of faith that they have any integrity when a presidential election is on the line. But going into the Supreme Court arguments last week, I think most legal scholars expected the court to be at least somewhat disdainful of the idea that a president must be allowed to be a criminal or he can’t do the job. But it turns out that at least four of them and possibly even six are quite open to the idea. Justice Samuel Alito went so far as to turn the whole case inside out and upside down by stating:

“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”

I’m pretty sure that ship sailed on January 6th. But what that comment, and others made by the right wingers on the court, shows is that they’ve bought into Trump’s Big Lie that the prosecutions of Donald Trump are partisan exercises brought by his “bitter political opponent.” And they are clearly prepared to use their own vast, unaccountable power to even out the score.

If they had any concern about their institution’s credibility they wouldn’t have even heard the case. Obviously, they don’t care about that so it appears that the best we can hope for is that they don’t decide to grant this immunity outright but rather come up with some vague distinction between “official” and “private” acts and send it back to the trial court, delaying the case until after the election. If Trump wins, I think we can be quite sure there will be no immunity for Joe Biden.

It’s disconcerting to realize that the right wing legal intelligentsia is infected with Fox News Brain Rot all the way to the top. You see it from the legal commentators in partisan media, of course. That’s to be expected. But it’s permeated the entire GOP legal establishment from state Attorneys General to judges and to people like Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr who recently said that despite the fact that he believes Trump committed illegal acts and is unfit for the presidency he plans to vote for him because Democrats want to regulate kitchen appliances and are therefore a greater threat to democracy. And now we see this extremist majority on the Supreme Court acting as rank partisan operators to ensure that a blatant criminal gets every chance to seize power so that he can pacify his broken psyche by wreaking revenge on his enemies. And they seem to be open to taking down our democracy in the process.

As former former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissman said on MSNBC over the weekend, “We are one vote away from the end of democracy as we know it.”

Salon

The blood in the water is yours

Opponents of women’s reproductive rights are just getting warmed up. As if you needed reminding.

😳Leonard Leo ally Tim Busch opines that state constitutional amendments protecting abortion rights conflict w/ the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which he says gives that “right [to life] to the unborn.” Implies they will ask SCOTUS to overturn such state amendments. 1/ pic.twitter.com/Zckz6rG1QN

— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) April 27, 2024

Presumably, this is what he meant by guidance. 3/ https://t.co/i6hJjEM1i0

— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) April 27, 2024

5/ This is the 14th Amendment. pic.twitter.com/C4VSy3apw0

— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) April 28, 2024

Abortion bans are a loser for Republicans, but they are slow learners. They need reminding.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

The DNC’s Chicago convention won’t look like 1968

When I told my partner-in-blog I’d been elected a North Carolina delegate to the 2024 DNC convention in Chicago, her advice was to bring a flak jacket. The thought had occurred to me. Those of a certain age remember too well what happened in Chicago at the 1968 convention. It is another reason a 2016 Bernie Sanders delegate insisted I run after Ezra Klein’s reverie about an open convention. Plus, anything might happen between April and August. He wanted me there in case things go off the rails. As things have in Chicago.

David Frum writes in The Atlantic why, security-wise, the kind of disruptions Chicago saw in 1968 are unlikely to happen again. Even as American campus protests over the Israeli prosecution of a war in the Gaza Strip draw headlines, 2024 is not 1968. Protesters presuming to replicate 1968 (as some will) are deluding themselves, Frum explains:

From 1968 to today, responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This new federal responsibility was formalized in a directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. The order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.

National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.

Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel. Officers were seconded from across Ohio, and from as far away as Texas and California. Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.

Campuses are lightly controlled and lightly policed, Frum adds. “Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.”

Disruptions like blocking bridges and protests inside the Cannon Office Building on Capitol Hill involve “old-fashioned civil disobedience—lawbreaking that did not threaten injury to anyone, followed by peaceful acceptance of arrest.”

National Special Security Events are different animals. Security at the 2012 convention in Charlotte was tight. (I attended on a press pass.) No one gets past the security perimeter without credentials approved by the party host committee. Protests outside the 2016 Philadelphia convention by a few N.C. Bernie delegates from my district amounted to (in my friend’s reporting) mostly face-painting and fierce crying.

With Jan. 6 informing planning, and with subsequent prosecutions as a point of reference, it is less likely any hopes of disrupting the DNC convention will remain hopes. Frum concludes:

Maybe protesters will discover an unsuspected weak point, overwhelm police, wreak viral-video havoc, embarrass President Biden, and thereby help Donald Trump. The better guess is that they will not only fail in that but also be unable to mobilize any large number to attack police lines and risk serious prison time.

Guess I’ll leave the flak jacket at home.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Speaking of polls, Philip Bump has a good bit of fun with Trump’s hilariously misleading charts like the one above ostensibly showing his crushing Biden in the latest Bloomberg poll in his newsletter this weekend. It doesn’t matter what the numbers are, Trump is always “crushing” it. He added this bit which I thought was interesting.

If the bottom of the red shaded area is not higher than the top of the shaded blue area, it’s best to describe the race as a dead heat or statistically tied. After all, consider those Pennsylvania results, with the margin of error of 3 points. That means support for Biden probably lands between 43 and 49 percent and support for Trump between 44 and 50 percent. So maybe the “real” support for Biden is 47 percent while Trump’s is 46. The crusher has become the crushee!

I put “real” in quotes because there’s squishiness all over the place here. Margins of error don’t capture all of the uncertainty, nor do April polls predict November results. 

Indeed. Remember this as you look at polling over the next few months. And recall that in 2016 the race was always within the margin of error and yet we assumed that Clinton had to win because … well, it’s the only thing that made sense. We know how that turned out.

The Trumpers insist they were never in any danger of being stolen or observed in that storage room at Mar-a-Lago. Well:

A coat hanger or “very tiny screwdriver” could be used to unlock the Mar-a-Lago storage room where former President Donald Trump stored highly classified documents for more than a year, according to a witness in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation.

The account was relayed to FBI agents by an unidentified aide to Trump in January 2023, according to newly released exhibits, and further undercuts claims by Trump that the highly-classified materials he’s accused of taking with him after leaving office were secured at all times.

Not to worry. I’m sure none of the thousands of people who attend paying events there every night of the week, (including all the foreign nationals with sketchy credentials) could figure that out. Certainly they couldn’t have known how to unlock that bathroom door where all the boxes were stored in the shower. They were all very, very secure.

Besides, Trump says the Presidential Records Act allows him to keep anything he wants, including nuclear secrets, and if he wants to display them for the whole world right there in the ballroom, that’s his privilege. He’s immune, dontcha know. Otherwise some bitter Democratic president will wreak his revenge by criminally prosecuting him for stealing them. .

Or something.

If you watch CNN you’ll no doubt be hearing a lot about their new poll from the most annoying data analyst on television, David Chalian. It shows Trump beating Biden 49-42 and this will almost surely end up being the narrative going into the next week.

Don’t listen. It’s an outlier:

There is also a new CNN poll today showing Trump with a 49-43 national lead. Given that dozens of other national polls have shown the race within the margin of error and many have shown Biden gaining or with leads THIS CNN POLL IS AN OUTLIER and should be treated that way by CNN and other commentators.

Any attempt to use the CNN to guide one’s understanding of the election given that dozens of other polls are showing a completely different race (tied) would be journalistic and/or analytical malpractice. A few months ago the Washington Post published a poll that they considered an outlier, and acknowledged it in their article about the poll, pointing out that their data was different from many other recent polls. CNN and other commentators should do the same with this poll.

This race is inexplicably tight to be sure and Trump may well be marginally ahead. But this is ridiculous.

As Larry Sabato says here:

Polls, smolls. Today CNN has Trump up nationally by 49-43%, while CBS has ties in MI, PA, and WI. If CBS is correct, then CNN is almost certainly wrong, and vice versa. RESOLVED, we will ignore polls until after the conventions. And maybe beyond.

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) April 28, 2024

I did want to flag some truly astonishing results from that CBS poll which has me contemplating tequila before noon. It’s generally a hopeful poll which shows MI, PA and WI essentially tied. But take a look at a few of the crosstabs.

Right, sure.

That’s just not true.

Delusional.

Is there some kind of collective brain damage causing this amnesia?

Trump has been saying he had the greatest economy the world has ever known on a loop for the past three years. Apparently a large majority of Americans believe him. The truth is that he inherited a strong economy that was able to withstand some of his daft ideas like the Chinese tariffs while Biden inherited a massive economic and public health crisis that happened on Trump’s watch and brought the country back in record time, doing much better than any other advanced economy in the world. But sure, Trump was better. He sat on his ass and tweeted and let Obama’s economic momentum carry him.

If he had won in 2020 you can bet we would be mired in recession right now because he and his cult were determined not to extend the stimulus and would have instead offered some more tax cuts for their rich buddies and put Jared in charge of the supply chain chaos. I’m pretty sure the vaccine program would have been a nightmare as well so we could probably count on another half a million deaths or so as well. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

But sure, everything was great under Trump and has been hard under Biden. That’s because he had to fix the horrific mess that Trump left him. I guess that’s too long ago for people to remember. It was three long years ago.

If The Supreme Court doesn’t get the Trump immunity case right, it will be time to go after Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George Bush for the potential crimes they committed while in office pic.twitter.com/oV9VvaBfJN

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 28, 2024

Adam Serwer on the immunity argument:

Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.

The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him. […]

[…]

No previous president has sought to overthrow the Constitution by staying in power after losing an election. Trump is the only one, which is why these questions are being raised now. Pretending that these matters concern the powers of the presidency more broadly is merely the path the justices sympathetic to Trump have chosen to take in order to rationalize protecting the man they would prefer to be the next president. What the justices—and other Republican loyalists—are loath to acknowledge is that Trump is not being uniquely persecuted; he is uniquely criminal.

This case—even more than the Colorado ballot-eligibility case—unites the right-wing justices’ political and ideological interests with Trump’s own. One way or another, they will have to choose between Trumpism and democracy. They’ve given the public little reason to believe that they will choose any differently than the majority of their colleagues in the Republican Party.

They are partisan above all else. There’s no other way to interpret their actions. They also have immunity from any accountability since we now know that the impeachment clause is completely impotent and they have lifetime terms. They don’t care.

“Our job is to condemn Hamas, a terrorist organization that started this war, condemn in every form antisemitism, islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry. But we do have to pay attention to the unprecedented humanitarian disaster taking place in Gaza right now.

Bernie Sanders: "Our job is to condemn Hamas, a terrorist organization that started this war, condemn in every form antisemitism, islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry. But we do have to pay attention to the unprecedented humanitarian disaster taking place in Gaza right now." pic.twitter.com/Rs27n5M2Tt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 28, 2024

It shouldn’t be necessary to say this but it’s probably a good idea. Certain universal liberal values need to be emphasized when emotions get high.