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.
White supremacy lost in Oklahoma tonight.
🚨 Voters in Enid, by a nearly 20-point margin, voted to remove City Council member and city commissioner, Judd Blevins over his ties to white nationalist groups.pic.twitter.com/rDaSkhxrKS
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.
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.
The assaulted police officers are denouncing the Trump use of the term "hostages" for Jan 6 defendants. And they're concerned about how other Trump allies are echoing the "hostage" rhetoric
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.”
"They're not humans. They're animals … I'll use the word 'animal,' because that's what they are" — Trump pic.twitter.com/T5IyRXNOFE
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.
Donald Trump, who is currently facing 88 felony charges: “We have to get law and order back.” pic.twitter.com/UdI7HaE15h
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) April 2, 2024
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.
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.
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:
Been looking for this footage since it was shown at the Jan 6th committee.
Shows the charge to the Capitol coming from the Ellipse. 👇
“Twenty-nine thousand [nonwhite immigrants] from China and they all seem to be pefectly fit for military service.” Draw your own conclusions, right?
No member of law enforcement; men (because there are no women there) who've taken an oath to protect & serve should have stood there for this. They should have walked off in disgust. They dishonor the badge. https://t.co/C66dNVfbvr
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.”
Trump: If we don’t win on November 5th, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have. I actually mean that. If we don’t win, I think this could be the last election we ever have pic.twitter.com/Puup9bB9b7
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.
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.
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.
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.
Things just got very real in the classified documents prosecution.
DOJ calls out Judge Cannon's outlandish jury instructions as destructive to a genuine trial.
Asks court to rule now to give government opportunity to appeal and seek mandamus.
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.
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.
So in order to kill one suspected “armed Hamas operative” they targeted a convoy of aid workers? This is how it’s being done? They had to kill this one guy so if a bunch of foreign volunteers were in his presence too bad?
Well, I guess we knew that, didn’t we? They haven’t even made any effort to avoid hitting children so why would they care about aid workers whom they clearly see as aiding and abetting terrorists. I suppose the kids are too just by being foolish enough to be born Palestinian.
There is no level of outrage to condemn this strongly enough.
A group of House Republicans is pushing to rename Washington, D.C.’s, main international airport after former President Trump.
Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., the House GOP’s chief deputy whip, introduced the bill Friday along with six cosponsors.
“In my lifetime, our nation has never been greater than under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump,” Reschenthaler told Fox News Digital. “As millions of domestic and international travelers fly through the airport, there is no better symbol of freedom, prosperity and strength than hearing ‘Welcome to Trump International Airport’ as they land on American soil.”
A group of House Republicans is pushing to have Dulles International Airport renamed for former President Trump. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images | Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images)
Legislative text obtained by Fox News Digital on Monday showed that, if passed, “the Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia shall after the date of the enactment of this Act be known and designated as the ‘Donald J. Trump International Airport.'”
“Any reference in any law, regulation, map, document, paper, or other record of the United States to the airport referred to in subsection (a) shall be considered to be a reference to the Donald J. Trump International Airport,” the brief bill said.
Reschenthaler’s bill is also backed by Reps. Michael Waltz, R-Fla.; Andy Ogles, R-Tenn.; Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn.; Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; Barry Moore, R-Ala.; and Troy Nehls, R-Texas, according to the website Congress.gov.
They know this will not happen as long as Biden is in office and the Democrats have the Senate. It’s all about fluffing Dear Leader. But I would imagine it will happen in a heartbeat if he’s re-elected and they have control of both houses.
I think this is a much better idea, don’t you?
Donald Trump is facing 91 felony charges. If Republicans want to name something after him, I’d suggest they find a federal prison. https://t.co/FrUNOVK7TW
— Rep. Gerry Connolly (@GerryConnolly) April 2, 2024
Boy, that sounds really bad, doesn’t it? The allegedly reformed Frank Luntz who is on TV all the time as a supposed “Never Trumper” is kindly pointing out a real blind spot in the Biden campaign.
Well, actually not:
It is President Biden’s 10th trip to WI as president and 3rd this year. He was in Milwaukee 3 weeks ago and has announced a trip to Madison on Monday.
That tweet has been up for hours and is still not deleted or corrected despite a correction by the community and tons of push back.
As Trump would say, he’s “disinformating” and I’m pretty sure he’s doing it on purpose. This guy is one of the slimiest GOP operatives of the past 30 years and he’s never really come clean.
