Daniel Uhlfelder went through the FEC reports and found all money paid to law firms by Donald Trump’s Super PAC in the first 6 months of last year.
FEC records show that between January 1, 2023, and June 30, 2023, Donald Trump’s Super PAC, SAVE AMERICA, made payments to the following law firms in these amounts: BALLARD SPAHR LLP – $109,174.55
The total amount paid to these firms between January 1, 2023 and June 30, 2023 by SAVE AMERICA is almost $19 million.
$18,789,359.07 actually
28 law firms so average of $671,048 per firm
My God. I’m sure that all Super PACs have legal expenses but this is insane. $19 million just in the first six months. I guess all his marks just love to give money to billionaires.
I hear a lot on my social media these days about how Trump is better than Biden on the Gaza war. That’s utter nonsense. It’s true that Trump isn’t particularly fond of Netanyahu (neither is Biden, actually) but that does not mean that he would ever be an ally of the Palestinians or the Palestinian allies.
Donald Trump promised on Monday that if elected president again he will bar immigrants who support Hamas from entering the U.S. and send officers to pro-Hamas protests to arrest and deport immigrants who publicly support the Palestinian militant group.
Trump, president from 2017-2021, said that if elected to a second White House term he will ban entry to the U.S. of anybody who does not believe in Israel’s right to exist, and revoke the visas of foreign students who are “antisemitic.”
He also vowed to step up travel bans from “terror-plagued countries.” He did not explain how he would enforce his demands, including the one requiring immigrants to support Israel’s right to exist under what he called “strong ideological screening.” …
Promising to drastically tighten U.S. immigration laws, Trump said: “If you want to abolish the state of Israel, you’re disqualified, if you support Hamas or the ideology behind Hamas, you’re disqualified, and if you’re a communist, Marxist, or fascist, you are disqualified.”
“We will aggressively deport resident aliens with jihadist sympathies,” Trump said.
He may now say some things on the trail that imply that he would ditch Israel, since he surely senses the tension in the Democratic coalition, but I suspect he’ll be pretty careful about that. He wants to keep Republican Israel supporters in his corner and that means the evangelicals, a huge faction.
Trump is a blatantly racist piece of work who isn’t fond of Jews (except the “good ones” like Jared) but he really, really hates brown and black people. He spits out the word “Hussein” every time he mentions Obama. If people are unaware of his history with Muslim bashing, they need to educate themselves. There is no way in hell that he is going to be helpful to Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank or Cambridge Massachusetts. He will make an already terrible, complicated situation a million times worse.
The Biden campaign is out with a stark new ad featuring a woman talking about traveling out of state to receive an abortion due to Texas’ strict abortion ban. It’s the latest in their push to put reproductive rights front and center in the 2024 race.
New Biden campaign ad features a woman who says she had to flee Texas to end a planned pregnancy after the doctors said the fetus had no chance of survival. “Because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade.”pic.twitter.com/Uy1iURYrxo
People don’t know what they don’t know. That’s tautological, but true. One reason I publish ForThe Win every two years (the 5th edition isn’t quite ready) is to give less-experienced Democratic county chairs in under-resourced counties a “cookbook” for assembling a countywide get-out-the-vote program in support of their candidates. State parties assume chairs have already learned the nuts and bolts by the seat of their pants. They instead provide sometimes overly thick manuals focused mainly on party administration. “Where’s the part about electing Democrats?” is my usual reaction.
In presidential years, people unfamiliar with local party operations start calling the headquarters here in West Cackalacky (or your Cackalacky). Some have basic election questions. Others want to discuss policy or something they just saw on the news. Angry others want to chew the ears of retiree volunteers who answer the phone as though local committees are part of the Collective with a subspace connection to decisions made in the West Wing. That’s not how this works. (There is no The Democratic Party.) But they don’t know what they don’t know. That’s why the White House comment line number is written in large letters on the wall beside the reception desk. (Comments: 202-456-1111.)
Most of what people think they know about party politics they pick up from watching the presidential contest every four years. First, because it’s the only time they are paying close attention. Second, because the news coverage is inescapable. But it leaves a false impression of how parties work day to day.
Men (it always seems to be men) call the Democratic office here every presidential cycle to ask about their favorite primary candidates. They want to know when [your candidate here] is coming to town. Explain you don’t know, and they get an attitude. You’ve confirmed Democrats are as much a waste of their time as they already believed. The voices suggest Jimbo Jones from “The Simpsons.”
“Well, this is the Democratic Party, isn’t it?”
Yes, but (I do not reply) I’m not the one who called the guy at the motor pool with his hands in a Humvee transmission to ask for the base commander’s itinerary. Callers’ grasp of force structure is a tad fuzzy.
To my knowledge, no Commander in Chief (or senior staff) has ever called down here to the motor pool for our advice on policy or for any other reason. Even for planning local campaign stops. Those calls go first to local elected and police officials. The local party committee is maybe fourth in line to get the news, and then with only a couple of days’ notice.
Protesters in Tel Aviv call for change to Netanyahu government. (via Reuters).
The race is on to see who burns out on Donald Trump first, Trump Himself or the rest of us. With his shuttling furiously between court apearances and campaign appearances, Trump can no longer tell his Nikkis from his Nancys. “I am your retribution” has turned into “IMMUNITY NOW, IMMUNITY TOMORROW, IMMUNITY FOREVER.” Although Trump is neither as smart nor as clever nor as intellectually agile as George Wallace, Jamelle Bouie nonetheless believes Wallace’s “legacy in national politics … is very clearly Trump.”
I need a break. Make that “break.”
The Russians are still bombing Ukraine. The Israelis are still bombing Gaza. Vladimir Putin is still directing the former and Benjamin Netanyahu, the latter.
Al Jazeera provides a rundown of events on Day 697 of the war on Ukraine:
A fire broke out at a natural gas terminal in the Russian Baltic Sea port of Ust-Luga, the regional governor said early on Sunday. A high alert regime has been introduced in the Kingiseppsky district, which includes the port, and no casualties have been reported, according to the AFP news agency.
Russia’s parliament will consider a law allowing for the confiscation of money, valuables, and other property from those deemed to spread “deliberately false information” about Moscow’s military actions, a senior lawmaker said on Saturday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday that he expected a number of new Western defence packages for Ukraine to be signed this and next month. “We are preparing new agreements with partners – strong bilateral agreements,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.
The wife of a Russian soldier delivered an emotional appeal for his return from Ukraine on Saturday at the election headquarters of President Vladimir Putin, a defiant gesture in a country where open criticism of the war is banned.
The Ministry of Defence in the United Kingdom stated on Saturday that Ukraine sustains a military presence along the left bank of the Dnipro River and persists in fending off Russian assaults despite logistical challenges.
Russia has lost 375,270 soldiers in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, including 750 over the past day, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine claimed on Saturday. The number has not been independently verified.
Russian marines and paratroopers are refusing to launch certain types of assaults due to concerns over the huge losses other troops are suffering, a Ukrainian official said, the Kyiv Post reported.
Nataliya Humenyuk, a press secretary for the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s Joint Command South, said that the soldiers considered “themselves ‘elite troops'” and did not “want to go into frontal assaults” that former felons and reservists typically carry out, the outlet reported.
Throughout the Russian invasion, Russia has become increasingly reliant on high-risk frontal assaults involving waves of attacks that probe Ukrainian positions and seize small portions of territory at the cost of substantial casualties.
And in Gaza on Day 107 of that war, another milestone (Associated Press):
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — The Palestinian death toll from the war between Israel and Hamas has soared past 25,000, the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said Sunday, while the Israeli government appeared far from achieving its goals of crushing the militant group and freeing more than 100 hostages.
The level of death, destruction and displacement from the war already is without precedent in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet Israeli officials say the fighting is likely to continue for several more months.
During the Cold War, nuclear disamament protesters condemned the arms race as an effort to create enough surplus weapons to make the rubble bounce. Netanyahu is doing that in Gaza with conventional arms (many of them ours). And not just rubble, but bodies.
The war has displaced some 85% of Gaza’s residents from their homes, with hundreds of thousands packing into U.N.-run shelters and tent camps in the southern part of the tiny coastal enclave. U.N. officials say a quarter of the population of 2.3 million is starving as only a trickle of humanitarian aid reaches them because of the fighting and Israeli restrictions.
Netanyahu has vowed to keep up the offensive until Israel achieves “complete victory” over Hamas and returns all the remaining hostages. But even some top Israeli officials have begun to acknowledge that those goals might be mutually exclusive.
TEL AVIV, Jan 20 (Reuters) – Thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv on Saturday to protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, accusing the veteran leader of mishandling the nation’s security and calling for a new election.
Anti-government protests that shook the nation for much of 2023 ceased after the attacks by Hamas in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Political rifts were set aside as Israelis rallied behind the military and the families of those killed or taken hostage.
But with the devastating war in Gaza in its fourth month and opinion polls showing lagging support for Netanyahu, calls for leadership changes are growing stronger, though there is no indication that his position is under any imminent threat.
This was reflected in Saturday night’s turnout in a central Tel Aviv square where many of last year’s protests took place.
While the crowd was much smaller than those seen last year, it still comprised several thousand people, with many banging on drums, yelling their dismay and waving Israeli flags.
“This is the first time we are seeing this protest happen in the north,” said Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Haifa on Saturday.
“It’s a protest with Israeli Jews and Palestinian Israelis, and it is significant because of the two coming together.
“The message here is to end the war and that they can only live peacefully side by side with a political solution for the Palestinians,” she said.
Omri Evron, a member of the Communist Party of Israel, who helped organise the anti-war protest, spoke to Al Jazeera about the message the protesters were hoping to convey.
“The killing of thousands and thousands of Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are innocent civilians, is not only reprehensible, it does not serve the security of the people of Israel. It does not bring us security, it only ensures the next massacre, the next cycle of violence,” he said.
In case you were wondering who the guy is who’s pushing this scandal about Fani Willis having an affair with her co-prosecutor, it’s this guy. (Article from 2016)
Donald Trump’s “election protection” effort will be run by Mike Roman, a Republican operative best known for promoting a video of apparent voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers outside a polling place in 2008.
Roman is to oversee poll-watching efforts as Trump undertakes an unprecedented effort by a major party nominee by calling into question the legitimacy of the popular vote weeks before election day.
The Republican nominee has insisted, without evidence, that dead people and undocumented immigrants are voting in the United States.
Trump has long claimed that the 2016 election is rigged but has amplified his claims of voter fraud in recent days. On Monday he tweeted: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!” In particular Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News that voter fraud was rampant in cities including Philadelphia, St Louis and Chicago after long warning vaguely about fraud in “certain communities”.
Multiple sources have confirmed to the Guardian that Roman, who also previously ran the Koch network’s now defunct internal intelligence agency, will oversee the Trump campaign’s efforts to monitor polling places for any signs of voter fraud.
Roman is best known for his role in promoting a video that showed two members of the New Black Panthers – a fringe group that claims descent from the 1960s radicals – standing outside a Philadelphia polling place dressed in uniforms, with one carrying a nightstick. Police are called and the two men leave.
A justice department investigation into the incident – filed in the weeks before George W Bush left office – became a political football that divided career lawyers within the justice department. The incident was repeatedly cited as evidence of Democrats setting out to harm the election process.
The case was eventually dropped but not before it became a conservative cause célèbre. As Rick Hasen, a election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said: “It was one of the most retold stories on Fox News and the right for years and took on almost mythical status as evidence of thuggery by Democrats to harm the voting process.”
It’s important to always remember that Trump didn’t invent this election fraud BS. The Republicans have been pushing this crap for decades. He’s just the first to make a profit at it.
Roman worked in the White House and was was indicted in the Georgia case which is how he’s involved in this Fanni Willis scandal.
Roman is facing seven charges in connection with the DA office’s investigation into alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, including a violation of the Georgia RICO Act, conspiracy to impersonate a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree, and conspiracy to commit false statements and writing.
I think we know what kind person this is, don’t we? He’s a racist ratfucker and political assassin. The perfect Trump staffer.
It should be good news for Biden. Generally presidents benefit from good economic “vibes.” But who knows? He’s old so they may just hate him no matter the reality.
It appears Americans are finally feeling better about the economy.
Consumer sentiment, a window into the nation’s financial mood, jumped 13 percent in January to its highest level since mid-2021, reflecting optimism that inflation is easing and incomes are rising, according to a closely watched survey by the University of Michigan. Since November, consumer sentiment has risen 29 percent, marking the largest two-month increase in more than 30 years.
Gas prices, often a key driver of sentiment, have fallen 40 percent since June 2022, to just over $3 a gallon. Weekly jobless claims are at their lowest level in more than a year. Sales of cars, clothing and sporting goods all picked up during the holidays, as consumers felt confident enough to keep spending.
Many are hopeful, too, that interest rates have peaked and the Federal Reserve may begin to cut them this year, which would make it cheaper to borrow for a range of items, including cars and homes.
“We’re seeing a continuation of the surge in sentiment we saw at the end of last year,” said Joanne W. Hsu, an economist at the University of Michigan and director of its consumer surveys. “If anyone was wondering, ‘Was December a fluke?,’ it is absolutely clear now that it wasn’t. This is a sign that consumers are feeling better. Their confidence has come back.”
That jump is fueling hope that the U.S. economy — and Americans’ perception of it — may be turning a corner after months of inflation-related unease. Rising sentiment among both Democrats and Republicans comes at a critical moment for the Biden administration, which has struggled to convince voters that its economic policies are making their lives better ahead of November’s presidential election.
“At a cerebral level, voters may still say Biden mismanaged the economy,” said Tobin Marcus, head of U.S. policy and politics at Wolfe Research and an economic policy staffer to Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama administration. “But the dissipation of their really intense personal dissatisfaction with the economy still really helps at the level of the political context.”
They may feel that Joe Biden mismanaged the economy because the Republicans waged a ,multi-decade propaganda campaign, stemming from Jimmy Carter’s unfortunate term, to convince people that Republicans are good on the economy and Democrats are bad. The opposite is true.
Biden is even doing better than St. Ronnie Reagan in his first 3 years recovering from massive economic disruption:
Biden’s inflation rate, by the way is now
For people who say that Americans care about the level of prices, not the inflation rate, note that cumulative inflation under Biden so far is close to the number under Reagan. Which is why Reagan lost the 84 election in a landslide. Oh, wait pic.twitter.com/KhThKZOZ3A
Philip Bump did a necessary deep-dive into James Comer’s mendacity about those transcripts. It’s truly astonishing that they are able to get away with this:
One of the arguments offered by attorneys for President Biden’s son Hunter when responding to a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee for a closed-door deposition was that the committee had shown a pattern of cherry-picking what would be presented to the public.
This is unquestionably true. Over and over and over and over and over, committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has made debunked and unsubstantiated public statements that cast the president and/or his son as dishonest or has rushed to release unsubstantiated claims or information that similarly collapse under scrutiny. The first year of his investigation into the Bidens made extremely little progress as a result — except where it matters, in the right-wing media universe.
Clearly, though, this has not gone unnoticed by those enmeshed in Comer’s sprawling investigation. There was that letter from Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell in November. And then, this week, a letter from an attorney for Kevin Morris, a wealthy friend of Hunter Biden who helped pay off the president’s son’s tax liability.
Morris appeared for a closed-door deposition on Thursday. His attorney, Bryan Sullivan, claims in the letter that he asked at the outset that his client’s testimony not be cherry-picked or misrepresented. Instead, he said, he received only a promise that Morris would “be treated fairly.”
“You did not treat Mr. Morris fairly and engaged in your standard practice of partially and inaccurately leaking a witness’s statements,” Morris writes in the letter obtained by The Washington Post. “Not two hours after we left Mr. Morris’ transcribed interview, you issued a press statement with cherry‐picked, out of context and totally misleading descriptions of what Mr. Morris said.”
It is very important to point out that this may simply be Sullivan’s effort to frame the moment as positively as possible for his client. We should not assume that the examples in his letter — which we’ll consider in a moment — are themselves necessarily accurate.
To his point, though, this could be ameliorated by the House Oversight panel releasing a transcript of the testimony. This is not an instantaneous process, certainly; it took three days for the testimony of Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer to be released last year. But there’s also no rush to try to frame Morris’s testimony, no demand to make public what he said. Well, there is one source of demand: the right’s appetite for any morsel of information that seems to implicate the president or his son in wrongdoing. That’s a demand for which Comer offers an endless supply.
There’s something else to consider about Sullivan’s response. Even if it is an attempt to cast his client in a more favorable light by pointing to Comer’s track record of cherry-picking, it reinforces that this cherry-picking is a liability for Comer. That he has this track record of trying to construct as damning a case as possible instead of trying to fairly represent witness testimony as broadly informative about the investigation itself.
Sullivan alleged multiple misrepresentations — again, the transcript can help tell us who is more accurately describing what occurred. Comer’s press release:
-inaccurately described why Morris made the loan to Hunter Biden,
-used scare-quotes around “loan” to suggest that the payment (vetted by attorneys, Sullivan argued) was not a loan at all,
-overstated Morris’s past support for Democratic candidates, andsuggested that this money had somehow provided Morris access to the president.
“Mr. Morris testified that he has only had cursory communications with President Biden at public events like Mr. Biden’s daughter’s wedding,” Sullivan wrote, “and said basic courtesy things as ‘hello’ and ‘how are you’ and President Biden making comments about Mr. Morris’ unkempt hair style that lasted a few minutes.”
The scare-quotes around “loan,” we should note, are probably meant to suggest that Morris didn’t expect to be repaid (though, per Sullivan, Morris testified under oath that he did). It’s also a word that has gained new importance for Comer in the past few months.
[…]
We may perhaps see if this is another example of Comer cherry-picking or framing claims that help his case or if, instead, it’s an example of how his doing so frequently in the past allows critics to disparage how he’s conducting the probe.
Neither is what one might seek in an objective investigator.
You can read the whole thing at the gift link above. It’s important to understand what they are doing but most of the media doesn’t bother to spell it out. It all becomes “where there’s smoke there’s fire” to many in the public. It destroys people and it needs to be batted back when we get the opportunity.
Photo by World Economic Forum ( CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED)
Somewhere over the last day or so someone remarked that the Masters of the Universe meeting in Davos, Switzerland seem utterly unremarkable. That is, judging by the lack of fresh ideas floating around the ultra-rich conclave. On what to do about fanatical populism spreading across the globe, they’ve got worries but otherwise nothin’, according to Nahal Toosi, Politico’s senior foreign affairs correspondent:
In conversation after conversation here, I detected resignation and helplessness among business executives when it came to their counterparts in government. There’s a desperate desire to see the world’s political leaders appeal more to moderates instead of capitalizing on extremes, but there’s also recognition that the political market doesn’t easily reward the people in the middle.
C-suite types fear the polarization will only deepen as half of the global population, in more than 60 countries, votes in 2024 — everywhere from South Africa to the United States. For them, financial consequences can be stark, especially if the results of an election threaten shipping lanes or when campaign rhetoric leads to violence in a place they’ve invested.
“The biggest concern is instability,” the CEO of a private equity fund told me.
That would be financial instability, naturally. We’ve seen social instability before.
Oh, great googa-looga, can’t you hear me talking to you Just a ball of confusion Oh yeah, that’s what the world is today Woo, hey
But even as they long for moderate forces to rise above the extremes, there appears to be little sense of how the business community can help make that happen. I kept asking for specific solutions that companies could offer to reduce societal polarization, but I received no concrete responses.
Election, elections everywhere this year, but the biggest concern is the prospect of Americans returning Donald Trump to the White House in 2025 to finish the job he started in 2017. And to finish off NATO.
Corporate leaders are reading closely about the Republican frontrunner’s views on tariffs and other economic practices, which are far more isolationist than even the relatively cautious Joe Biden. Whichever way the United States is heading will affect the policies of other governments, leading business executives to ask some very basic questions.
“It’s something as simple as this: Many businesses we have operate across borders. Is a country for or against free trade?” the private equity fund CEO said.
Consumers’ fate seemed less a concern than producers’ bottom lines, although the two are intimately interwoven.
The coats are oversized, and so are the egos.
And so, in some cases, is the sense of self-pity. In this rarefied environment, I was told that it doesn’t help to be a billionaire, millionaire or merely very rich when it comes to the political environment these days.
After all, actors on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum have anger toward the rich gathered here in Davos, often blaming them for the world’s ills.
“The right says everyone is under threat. The left says the capitalist system is exploitative,” the consumer goods company CEO said.
Biden administration spokesmen Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan stuck to safe talking points. Businessmen worry that if the Biden administration is gone in 2025, the Inflation Reduction Act will go with it, and their long-term contracts and ROI. One private equity CEO tells Toosi, “very few people have priced in the risk of Trump coming back” into their models.
At the World Economic Forum, they worry about lining their pockets while in Gaza people cannot fill their stomachs, or their children’s. And the executives wonder why “the far right and the ultra left see them as an enemy.” So far removed, allies they are not:
The US claims it is working “relentlessly” to get humanitarian aid into Gaza amid UN warnings that the territory’s 2.2 million people are “highly food insecure and at risk of famine”.
Antony Blinken, speaking at Davos this week, called the situation in Gaza “gut-wrenching”. But the US secretary of state was unable to secure any major new gains on increasing the amount of assistance entering the territory during his recent visit to Israel, even as leaders of international organizations advocate for urgent access.
“People in Gaza risk dying of hunger just miles from trucks filled with food,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the WFP, said in a statement.
Let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya Sayin’, ball of confusion That’s what the world is today, hey, hey Let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya Ball of confusion
