“Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics,” E.J. Dionne wrote yesterday. But there was more there. Beyond the threat posed by Donald Trump (and his public threats) and Trump judges’ rulings undermining voting rights, enshrining a definitive right to vote in the Constitution via amendment is necessary:
“Why do we let the state put barriers in front of people when they exercise their right to vote?” [Rick] Hasen asked in an interview. The director of UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, Hasen details his proposed amendment and the case for it in a forthcoming book, “A Real Right to Vote.” A carefully framed amendment, he argues, could simultaneously protect voter access and assure election integrity. He’d link automatic voter registration with a nationwide, universal, nondiscriminatory form of voter identification.
Polarization makes amending the Constitution nearly impossible these days, one reason Hasen addresses fears on both the left and the right. But whatever chances Hasen’s amendment has, it calls on Americans to address the most important question facing our democracy: Are we truly committed to being a democracy? We’ll decide that at the ballot box next November, but we’ll have a lot more work to do even if we get the initial answer right.
“The right of the people to keep and bear Arms” appears but once in the U.S. Constitution. Government providing for the “general welfare” appears twice (and is despised on the right). The right of (specific classes of) people to vote is referenced five times. Guess which one attracts the most attention and lobbying money? But the right of every citizen 21 and older to vote is not definitively spelled out.
Throughout history, too many Americans have been disenfranchised or faced needless barriers to voting. Part of the blame falls on the Constitution, which does not contain an affirmative right to vote. The Supreme Court has made matters worse by failing to protect voting rights and limiting Congress’s ability to do so. The time has come for voters to take action and push for an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee this right for all.
Drawing on troubling stories of state attempts to disenfranchise military voters, women, African Americans, students, former felons, Native Americans, and others, Richard Hasen argues that American democracy can and should do better in assuring that all eligible voters can cast a meaningful vote that will be fairly counted. He shows how a constitutional right to vote can deescalate voting wars between political parties that lead to endless rounds of litigation and undermine voter confidence in elections, and can safeguard democracy against dangerous attempts at election subversion like the one we witnessed in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
The path to a constitutional amendment is undoubtedly hard, especially in these polarized times. A Real Right to Vote explains what’s in it for conservatives who have resisted voting reform and reveals how the pursuit of an amendment can yield tangible dividends for democracy long before ratification.
It was over 70 years between Seneca Falls and ratification of Amendment XIX. Let’s not let that happen with securing voting rights for all citizens.
Enshrining an explicit right to vote in the Constitution would guarantee the voting rights of every citizen of voting age, ensure that every vote is counted correctly, and defend against attempts to effectively disenfranchise eligible voters. It would empower Congress to enact minimum electoral standards to guarantee a higher degree of legitimacy, inclusivity, and consistency across the nation, and give our courts the authority to keep politicians in check when they try to game the vote for partisan reasons.
We know by their words and deeds that the GOP no longer believes in democracy, notwithstanding governing decisions decided by voting appears throughout the Constitution. Let them say so for the public record. Draft Hasen’s amendment and let them vote it down again and again, first in the Congress and then in the states. Until democracy wins.
Three Palestinian college students were shot in Vermont this weekend by a long white man. They don’t know yet whether this shooting was a hate crime although it sure looks like a reasonable suspicion. There was no other apparent motivation.
From what we’re gathering, the shooter was a self-described libertarian with some possibly radical views but there isn’t any evidence yet of a particular interest in the crisis in Israel. His mother says he is religious and reads the Bible but he isn’t a far right evangelical as far as we know. At this point his motives are a mystery since he hasn’t said anything to the authorities.
The kids’ families are distraught, of course. They thought they were sending their boys to a safer place:
The uncle of a Palestinian college student who was shot on a Vermont street over the weekend said Monday that his nephew left his home in the West Bank to seek safety in the U.S. as he studied.
Now, that uncle says his family feels “betrayed” after Kinnan Abdalhamid was nearly killed as he walked on a street in Burlington, Vermont, with two of his friends on Saturday night.
“Kinnan grew up in the West Bank and we always thought that that could be more of a risk in terms of his safety and sending him here would be, you know, the right decision,” said Radi Tamimi. “We feel somehow betrayed in that decision here and, you know, we’re just trying to come to terms with everything.”
The men were wearing Keffiyeh headdresses and speaking Arabic after leaving an 8-year-old’s birthday party, family said.
Tamimi said he flew to Vermont from California to share his outrage over the ordeal, which had not been labeled a hate crime as of Monday despite pleas from Muslim advocacy groups to label it as such. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott called the attack a “heinous act of violence” in a tweet.
Cops say the suspected shooter, 48-year-old Jason J. Eaton, opened fire at Abdalhamid and his friends with a handgun. Cops said the victims told detectives that Eaton never spoke, but that he fled immediately.
He was arrested Sunday and had his first court appearance Monday, where he pleaded not guilty to a trio of attempted second-degree murder charges and was denied bail.
The victims were identified in an affidavit as Hisham Awartani, a Brown University student who was shot in the spine; Tahseen Aliahmad, a Trinity College student who was shot in the upper chest; and Abdalhamid, a Haverford College student who was shot in the buttocks.
The US is not a safe place. Gun violence can find anyone and those who have controversial views are always a target of someone. These kids didn’t deserve this. It’s a nightmare.
The sole new content concerns Engoron’s rapid rejection of Trump and the other defendants’ motion for a mistrial, despite the attorney general’s position that full briefing and argument would be helpful.
Team Trump’s implication is that the same unacceptable bias that drove Engoron to enter the gag order fueled his outright refusal to hear the mistrial motion.
So it’s another day and another grievance for Trump without even attempting to distance himself from or disclaim responsibility for the threat environment he created and then inflamed. Sound familiar?
It sure does. They aren’t even trying to make serious legal arguments in this case. This is now purely a political exercise.
Jack Smith brought up all these threats in New York in a filing in federal court on Thanksgiving regarding the gag order in DC. Presumably it was to bolster his argument that Trump’s words about people involved in these case can result in threats and intimidation by members of his cult. It included exhibits of hundreds of threatening, antisemitic and abusive texts and phone calls against those NY court personnel, particularly the clerk Trump personally targeted. As you can see by Trump’s thanksgiving post up at the top, he named her again the minute the gag order was stayed.
It will be interesting to see how all of this goes. There are many assurances from the legal beagles that the courts won’t be subject to such sophistry but I’m just going to wait to see how it unfolds. Things are going sideways far too often these days. (Also, I remember Bush v Gore….)
Dr. Joseph Ladapo is a charlatan and DeSantis doesn’t care
Ladopo unethically campaigning in New Hampshire
Ron DeSantis should be disqualified from ever holding office again on this basis alone:
Professors at the University of Florida had high hopes for Joseph Ladapo. But they quickly lost faith in him.
In 2021, the university was fast-tracking him into a tenured professorship as part of his appointment as Florida’s surgeon general. Ladapo, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pick for the state’s top medical official, dazzled them with his Harvard degree and work as a research professor at New York University and UCLA.
Professors had anticipated Ladapo would bring at least $600,000 in grant funding to his new appointment from his previous job at UCLA. That didn’t happen. They expected he would conduct research on internal medicine, as directed by his job letter. Instead, he edited science research manuscripts, gave a guest lecture for grad students and wrote a memoir about his vaccine skepticism.
Ladapo’s work at UF has generally escaped scrutiny. Yet interviews with more than two dozen current and former faculty members, state lawmakers and former agency heads, as well as reviews of internal university emails and reports, show that staff was worried that Ladapo had bypassed a crucial review process when he was rushed into his coveted tenured position and, moreover, was unsuited for the position.
His dual role at UF shows how DeSantis and state Republicans have used the flagship public university to further their political goals, with uncertain benefits for students and other faculty. The university also hired as its new president former Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, who joins several former Republican lawmakers in leadership roles in Florida higher education, including former state Sen. Ray Rodrigues, who is chancellor of the university system.
Good old Ben Sasse, the supposed “moderate” Senator who quit and went to Florida where he’s now fully immersed in the corrupt practices of Ron DeSantis’ government.
The Florida Republicans loved Ladopo, even as he evaded all questions. Like most Republicans these days, they no doubt believe “that makes him smart.”
Ladapo’s two confirmations by the state Senate included committee hearings that allowed senators to ask him questions about his performance at both jobs. State Sen. Tina Polsky (D-Boca Raton) said she had asked Ladapo during last year’s confirmation about his performance at UF, and he did not give a clear response despite follow-up attempts.
“You know he never taught a class per se, and it was just his typical word salad answers for everything,” Polsky said. “It’s really frustrating.”
Polsky said in light of the intense criticism and controversy over Ladapo, she was not surprised to hear about his problems at UF.
“It was very par for the course,” Polsky said. “This guy is a charlatan, he’s not looking out for anyone’s health and he’s going to campaign with DeSantis.”
And how about this?
United Faculty of Florida-University of Florida President Meera Sitharam, the union head representing the institution, said she wondered why the science and public health communities have not investigated Ladapo for scientific fraud, amid a report from POLITICO that he personally altered the results of a Covid study at the state Department of Health.
After that April POLITICO report was published, Ladapo tweeted: “Fauci enthusiasts are terrified and will do anything to divert attention from the risks of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines— especially cardiac deaths. Truth will prevail.”
“For some reason the medical and public health communities aren’t outright investigating him … probably because he isn’t operating as a scientist or a faculty member,” Sitharam said in an email. “He is operating in the murky world where public health is held hostage to political fortunes, which is in part because public trust in health related institutions has been deeply eroded.”
Gee, I wonder why trust in public health has been eroded?
He also didn’t bother to raise the money they all thought he was going to bring nor has he shown up to do any teaching or research. Why bother? He’s got Ron and the Republicans on his side. What are they going to do about it? Meanwhile, between his two jobs, Surgeon General and tenured professor, he’s making close to half a mill a year. It’s a very sweet grift.
If Trump manages to carry out his plans in a second term, it will be catastrophic
A professor of public policy sounds the alarm about Trump’s 2024 agenda:
I study government bureaucracies. This is not normally a key political issue. Right now, it is, and everyone should be paying attention.
Donald Trump, the former president and current candidate, puts it in apocalyptic terms: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” This is not an empty threat. He has a real and plausible plan to utterly transform American government. It will undermine the quality of that government and it will threaten our democracy.
A second Trump administration would be very different from the first. Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions.
It has three major parts.
The first is to put Trump loyalists into appointment positions. Mr. Trump believed that “the resistance” to his presidency included his own appointees. Unlike in 2016, he now has a deep bench of loyalists. The Heritage Foundation and dozens of other Trump-aligned organizations are screening candidates to create 20,000 potential MAGA appointees. They will be placed in every agency across government, including the agencies responsible for protecting the environment, regulating workplace safety, collecting taxes, determining immigration policy, maintaining safety net programs, representing American interests overseas and ensuring the impartial rule of law.
These are not conservatives reluctantly serving Mr. Trump out of a sense of patriotic duty, but those enthusiastic about helping a twice-impeached president who tried to overturn the results of an election. An influx of appointees like this would come at a cost to the rest of us. Political science research that examines the effects of politicization on federal agencies shows that political appointees, especially inexperienced ones, are associated with lower performance in government and less responsiveness to the public and to Congress.
The second part of the Trump plan is to terrify career civil servants into submission. To do so, he would reimpose an executive order that he signed but never implemented at the end of his first administration. The Schedule F order would allow him to convert many of these officials into political appointees.
Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Presidents can currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions at the federal level. This already makes the United States an outlier among similar democracies, in terms of the degree of politicization of the government. The authors of Schedule F have suggested it would be used to turn another 50,000 officials — with deep experience of how to run every major federal program we rely on — into appointees. Other Republican presidential candidates have also pledged to use Schedule F aggressively. Ron DeSantis, for example, promised that as president he would “start slitting throats on Day 1.”
Schedule F would be a catastrophe for government performance. Merit-based government personnel systems perform better than more politicized bureaucracies. Under the first Trump administration, career officials were more likely to quit when sidelined by political appointees.
Schedule F would also damage democracy. The framers included a requirement, in the Constitution itself, that public officials swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, a reminder to public employees that their deepest loyalty is to something greater than whoever occupies the White House or Congress. By using Schedule F to demand personal loyalty, Mr. Trump would make it harder for them to keep that oath.
When he was president, his administration frequently targeted officials for abuse, denial of promotions or investigations for their perceived disloyalty. In a second administration, he would simply fire them. Trump loyalists reportedly have lists ready of civil servants who will be fired because they were not deemed cooperative enough during his first term.
The third part of Mr. Trump’s authoritarian blueprint is to create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval. Internal government lawyers can block illegal or unconstitutional actions. Reporters for The New York Times have uncovered a plan to place Trump loyalists in those key positions.
This is not about conservatism. Mr. Trump grew disillusioned with conservative Federalist Society lawyers, despite drawing on them to stock his judicial nominations. It is about finding lawyers willing to create a legal rationale for his authoritarian impulses. Examples from Mr. Trump’s time in office include Mark Paoletta, the former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, who approved Mr. Trump’s illegal withholding of aid to Ukraine. Or Jeffery Clark, who almost became Mr. Trump’s acting attorney general when his superiors refused to advance Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
[…]
Mr. Clark is now under indictment for a “criminal attempt to communicate false statements and writings” to Georgia state officials. But he continues to lay the groundwork for a second Trump term. He has made the case for the president using military forces for domestic law enforcement. He has also written a legal analysis arguing that “the U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” while Mr. Paoletta told The Times, “I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.” If government lawyers will not defend norms of Justice Department independence, Mr. Trump will use the department to shield himself from legal accountability and to pursue his enemies.
We sometimes think of democracy as merely the act of voting. But the operation of government is also democracy in action, a measure of how well the social contract between the citizen and the state is being kept. When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts.
I will just add that Paoletta is a Federalist Society made man. He’s in that picture up top with Leonard Leo, the Godfather. and Clarence Thomas. I don’t think Trump will get any trouble from the Federalist Society .
It seems like only yesterday that the entire Republican Party was calling for the smelling salts over the shocking decision by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that Senators not be required to wear suits and ties on the floor of the Senate. The keening and wailing from the members of both houses over the loss of decorum could be heard from coast to coast. How could the Republic survive such a blow to the dignity of the US Congress?
Republicans were so outraged they sent a letter to the Majority Leader registering their “supreme disappointment and resolute disapproval” of the decision. The outcry was so overwhelming that the chamber ended up voting to restore the old dress code so the senate would once again be a place of honor and tradition.
How quaint it all seems in light of what commonly happens these days in those sacred halls, mostly at the hands of the Republicans themselves. Just a week or so ago we had a US Senator from Oklahoma challenging a witness at a congressional hearing to a fist fight, right there on the senate floor. We have Supreme Court nominees blatantly lying under oath about their intentions and beliefs and suffering no repercussions. A single freshman member has completely shutdown military promotions in order to force the pentagon to change a policy the majority in the government and the country support. And let’s not forget that fateful day when thousands of Republican voters stormed the Capitol and trashed the place in order to force the congress to refuse to follow the constitution and install their Dear Leader for a second term. Decorum you say?
And why wouldn’t they believe that acting like barbarians is acceptable behavior.?The leader of the GOP has become downright lewd on the campaign trail and his crowds are delirious with delight.
Trump: "If somebody is beating you by 10, 15, or 20 points, like we’re doing with crooked Joe Biden — let’s indict the motherf*cker." @KateSullivanDC pic.twitter.com/NtZfJWR5fq
Those are actually examples of Trump using crude adult language. Generally he sticks to childish insults, referring to his rival former S. Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley as “birdbrain” and repeatedly mocking former Gov. Chris Christie as “a fat pig”, something he calls his former Attorney General Bill Barr as well.
His boorishness is rubbing off on the people who work for him. When confronted with a recent article in which many of Trump’s closest advisers in the first term, particularly former Chief of Staff John Kelly, said they are shocked that none of the exposés and revelations about his manifest unfitness have made a dent in his popularity among Republicans, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung issued this statement:
“These media whores are always looking for their next grift — whether its book deals or cable news contracts — because they know their entire worth as human beings revolve around talking about President Trump…”
For the record, Kelly hasn’t made even one appearance on television that I’m aware of nor has he written a book.
His rhetoric has always been violent and lurid going back to the days when he proclaimed “I love waterboarding” and regaled his audiences with tales of generals in days gone by summarily executing dozens of Muslim prisoners with bullets dipped in pigs blood. But recently, he’s adopted the language of fascists from the 20th century declaring that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and promising to rid the country of the “communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin” within it. And he has defied the edicts of judges in his various lawsuits and criminal cases to refrain from intimidating witnesses and causing his rabid followers to issue threats against them. The violence is coming to a boil just below the surface.
I suspect that most journalists and pundits just shrug their shoulders and say, “oh that Trump, you know how he is.” And maybe his more sophomoric rhetoric isn’t really that important in the grand scheme of things, particularly compared to his actual plans and policies which are truly terrifying and require that the media pay close attention and make it their mission to ensure that the public understands the threat he poses in a second term.
But there is an effect on our culture and our politics from his crude behavior. Chris Christie appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday and said it plainly:
When you show intolerance toward everyone, which is what [Trump] does, you give permission as a leader for others to have their intolerance come out. Intolerance toward anyone encourages intolerance toward everyone.
I think to be more precise, Trump shows intolerance toward people who disagree with him and that can be anyone. And his example has given permission to vast numbers of Americans who now believe that they have no obligation to tolerate anyone they don’t like.
Now, it’s perfectly true that there was never a time in America when everyone just got alone beautifully. Our history of racism and xenophobia alone put the lie to that. But Trump’s intolerance truly is ecumenical in that it could be any group, any individual, any foe or (former) friend at any given moment. It’s entirely self-serving.
It’s making more and more people embrace political violence. The recent American Values Survey from Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in partnership with the Brookings Institution think tank found that one in three Republicans agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” – up from 15% in 2021.(22% of Independents and 13% of Democrats agree, all numbers having increased since 2021.) The truly frightening number is that among those who believe the Big Lie, 46% believe they may resort to violence, as well as 41% of Trump fans and 41% who buy into the “Great Replacement Theory.” 39% of Christian nationalists are ready to take up arms to “save the country.” Those numbers represent tens of millions of Americans.
I think this is part of what’s making so many of the rest of us feel so off-balance right now. Sure, Trump is a classic mid-20th century racist and xenophobe in the old Archie Bunker mold. But over the course of the last eight years, he has created a political environment of coarse intolerance. A whole bunch of young people don’t remember anything else — this is normal political discourse to them. And it’s translating itself in many different ways into Trump’s stated ethos of “either they win or we win” which makes a pluralistic democracy virtually non-functional. “My way or the highway” isn’t a joke. It’s the road to civil war.
David Kurtz at Morning Memo lays out the 2024 stakes:
The rule of law is on the ballot in 2024, and it trumps every other political and policy consideration.
It is the umbrella under which every other issue is addressed: Want to restore abortion rights? Want to openly debate Israel and Palestine? Want to accelerate the energy revolution to head off the worst of climate change?
Good luck. Because if Trump, as promised, harnesses the power of the federal government to attack his perceived political enemies, exact retribution for slights, overturn elections, eviscerate the right to vote, and continue the effort to lock in GOP minority rule, he will break the democratic mechanisms for adjudicating policy preferences, enacting new laws, and enforcing them.
Trump is promising a fundamental break with the rule of law and from that will flow a fundamental breakdown in democratic processes and institutions. It is as simple as it is hard to stay at maximum threat level for years on end.
If elections don’t count, if Trump and the GOP won’t accept defeat as an option, if a majority of the electorate can’t make its voice heard at the ballot box, then nothing else really matters. It’s as stark a choice as the United States has ever faced.
We are too easily distracted by side issues. The left would rather sell the process than the outcome (the brownie, what the process delivers). A friend once insisted that the goal of the local Democratic committee is to have organized precincts. No, it’s to elect Democrats. Electing its members is literally why a political party exists. Focus.
Over the holiday weekend, another friend stated displeasure with Joe Biden. It wasn’t age this time. It was Biden’s public support for Israel in its assault on Gaza. Granted, it’s not a good look. Even worse for Netanyahu. But that specific complaint flattens a 3-dimensional issue to two. Biden’s proximate responsibility is to the American hostages. Are their lives more important than those of the slain Israelis or the thousands of Palestinians killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza or the hostages from other countries? Absolutely not. But securing the safety of the American hostages is Biden’s responsibility. It’s his job. Hostages from other countries are their leaders’. That’s harsh, but real. How Hamas and Israel conduct their war is not Biden’s responsibility, not directly anyway. How Biden’s posture changes once all the Americans are freed remains to be seen.
Point being, it’s a side issue in the 2024 election, although not to those intimately impacted. Kurtz and others know that. “Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics,” E.J. Dionne writes this morning. ” To insist on this is to be a realist, not an alarmist.” If we lose the country, our displeasures won’t matter and the world will be worse. See Luckovitch cartoon above.
Did they have tears in their eyes? Did they say “Sir”? The Washington Post declines to elaborate:
The Republican Party’s finances are increasingly worrisome to party members, advisers to former president Donald Trump, and other operatives involved in the 2024 election effort, according to 10 people familiar with the matter.
The Republican National Committee disclosed that it had $9.1 million in cash on hand as of Oct. 30, the lowest amount for the RNC in any Federal Election Commission report since February 2015. That compares with about $20 million at the same point in the 2016 election cycle and about $61 million four years ago, when Trump was in the White House.
The Democratic National Committee reported having $17.7 million as of Oct. 30, almost twice as much as the Republican Party, with one year before the election.
Kevin gets schooled
Cash is not the only thing the RNC is short on. “Forget the Alamo!” is the RNC’s new cry of freedom.
Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House. He holds a degree in marketing. Not his only B.S. Users of formerly Twitter were quick to point out where McCarthy went wrong.
The audience applauded this ahistorical nonsense, so it’s on them as well. McCarthy lives on land ceded after the Mexican War, ferchrissakes.
Former President Donald Trump was met with loud boos as he arrived at Williams-Brice Stadium in South Carolina on Saturday ahead of the Palmetto Bowl.
For those still taking Donald Trump seriously, he says he’s “seriously looking at alternatives” to Obamacare. Rumor has it he’s strongly seriously about it.
The judge has already ruled that he committed fraud, fined the former president twice for violating a gag order and declared him to be “not credible.” Trump and his lawyers, meanwhile, have repeatedly antagonized the judge, attacking him in the press and even disparaging his law clerk.
Embattled Rep. George Santos said he expects to be expelled from Congress in the coming days and will “wear it like a badge of honor.”
“I know I’m going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” the New York Republican said Friday on an X Space hosted by conservative media personality Monica Matthews.
“I have done the math over and over,” he said, laughing, “and it doesn’t look really good.”
That badge of honor may look good on Kitara Ravache, but authorities probably won’t let Santos wear it with his prison jumpsuit.
Jonathan Braun of New York had served just two and a half years of a decade-long sentence for running a massive marijuana ring, when Mr. Trump, at 12:51 a.m. on his last day in office, announced he would be freed.
A Staten Islander with a history of violent threats, Mr. Braun had told a rabbi who owed him money: “I am going to make you bleed.” Mr. Braun’s family had told confidants they were willing to spend millions of dollars to get him out of prison.
At the time, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department and federal regulators, as well as New York state authorities, were still after him for his role in an entirely separate matter: his work as a predatory lender, making what judges later found were fraudulent and usurious loans to cash-strapped small businesses.
Nearly three years later, the consequences of Mr. Braun’s commutation are becoming clearer, raising new questions about how Mr. Trump intervened in criminal justice decisions and what he could do in a second term, when he would have the power to make good on his suggestions that he would free supporters convicted of storming the Capitol and possibly even to pardon himself if convicted of the federal charges he faces.
Just months after Mr. Trump freed him, Mr. Braun returned to working as a predatory lender, according to New York State’s attorney general. Two months ago, a New York state judge barred him from working in the industry. Weeks later, a federal judge, acting on a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, imposed a nationwide ban on him.
A New York Times investigation, drawing on documents and interviews with current and former officials, and others familiar with Mr. Braun’s case, found there were even greater ramifications stemming from the commutation than previously known and revealed new details about Mr. Braun’s history and how the commutation came about.
-The commutation dealt a substantial blow to an ambitious criminal investigation being led by the Justice Department’s U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan aimed at punishing members of the predatory lending industry who hurt small businesses. Mr. Braun and prosecutors were in negotiations over a cooperation deal in which he would be let out of prison in exchange for flipping on industry insiders and potentially even wearing a wire. But the commutation instantly destroyed the government’s leverage on Mr. Braun.The investigation into the industry, and Mr. Braun’s conduct, remains open but hampered by the lack of an insider.
-At multiple levels, up to the president, the justice system appeared to fail more than once to take full account of Mr. Braun’s activities. After pleading guilty to drug charges in 2011, Mr. Braun agreed to cooperate in a continuing investigation, allowing him to stay out of prison but under supervision for nine years — a period he used to establish himself as a predatory lender, making violent threats to those who owed him money, court filings show.Since returning to predatory lending after being freed, Mr. Braun is still engaging in deceptive business tactics, regulators and customers say.
-In working to secure his release, Mr. Braun’s family used a connection to Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, to try to get the matter before Mr. Trump. Jared Kushner’s White House office drafted the language used in the news release to announce commutations for Mr. Braun and others.
The man is a full-blown gangster who happened to know Jared so Trump granted him clemency. No vetting, no contrition, no nothing.
And look who the lawyer who secured it for him was:
As other convicts seeking clemency did, Mr. Braun’s family retained Alan Dershowitz, the prominent lawyer and Trump ally who worked with Jewish organizations pushing for pardons, at least one of which had received financial support from the Kushner family.
Mr. Dershowitz, who represented Mr. Trump in his first impeachment, had a direct line into Mr. Kushner’s office, and succeeded in helping win clemency from Mr. Trump for a number of other people. Mr. Dershowitz said he did not remember what steps he took to help Mr. Braun but said they were minimal.
The DOJ under Bill Barr knew the pardon process was completely corrupt but didn’t try to do much about it. The VP knew too and merely “opted” not to participate which was big of him. They just let it happen.
In case you were wondering why a marijuana offense would get such a sentence, get a load of his history:
Mr. Braun’s path to receiving a last-minute commutation began in 2009, when the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, raided what prosecutors said was a stash house for a marijuana smuggling ring run by Mr. Braun.
When Mr. Braun found out about the raid, he rented a car and drove 25 hours straight from Florida to an Indian reservation in upstate New York where, dressed in all black, he was smuggled into Canada, according to court filings. He then fled to Israel.
The Justice Department placed him on a special Interpol list that asked Israel to apprehend him. By 2010, he was back in New York, the Justice Department had charged him and he was behind bars.
In the days after his arrest, prosecutors asked a federal judge to keep him in jail until he went on trial. The prosecutors said Mr. Braun could not be deterred and was violent or willing to use the specter of violence against those who owed him money or might turn on him. Mr. Braun, the prosecutors said, had access to millions of dollars in untraceable cash, and was willing to do anything to stay out of prison.
The judge ordered that Mr. Braun be held pending trial. After nearly a year and a half in custody, Mr. Braun agreed to plead guilty. As part of the plea deal, he began cooperating secretly with the government’s investigations into other drug smugglers, particularly higher profile ones abroad, according to a former law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal workings of an investigation.
In exchange, the prosecutors agreed to release Mr. Braun from jail, putting him on house arrest and delaying his sentencing on the drug charges while they pursued new cases with his help. It is unclear what information Mr. Braun provided the authorities or whether it led to convictions.
Often, a cooperator can remain free for a few months by providing investigators with useful information. Sometimes, a court will hold off sentencing for a year or two as the cooperation continues. Throughout the process, federal authorities are supposed to monitor cooperators to ensure they do not break the law.
For reasons that remain unexplained, Mr. Braun was permitted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn to live relatively freely for nearly the next decade, and he was able to turn his focus to an enterprise rife with cash and threats: providing loans to struggling small businesses that often had nowhere else to turn.
Former prosecutors and defense lawyers said they had never heard of a defendant being allowed to delay sentencing for such a long period or using his freedom to engage in the conduct he did. A spokesman for the Brooklyn federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on Mr. Braun’s case.
The business Mr. Braun entered is known by many names: the merchant cash advance industry, predatory lending or, in the view of some law enforcement officials, loan sharking.
Small businesses — like restaurants and contractors — have long faced a problem: They need cash on a daily basis to buy ingredients and supplies, and pay employees so they can operate while awaiting customer payments.
Banks often won’t lend to them, especially small firms with troubled credit histories, providing an opening for the merchant cash advance business to offer them financing on strict, sometimes usurious, terms that include high-interest rates and exorbitant fees. (Technically, they provide cash in exchange for a percentage of future revenues, an arrangement that typically gives them access to the borrower’s books and sometimes the borrower’s bank accounts.)
An examination of court records by The Times found that between when the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn first let him out of prison in 2011 and when he reported to prison in 2020, Mr. Braun was accused of violently threatening eight people who owed him money. Another man accused Mr. Braun in a lawsuit of shoving him from the deck of a house in Staten Island in 2018.
Among those threatened was a real estate developer, who said Mr. Braun told him: “I will take your daughters from you,” according to court documents.
Another borrower said in an affidavit Mr. Braun told him, “Be thankful you’re not in New York, because your family would find you floating in the Hudson.”
Even as Mr. Braun was starting to become a threatening presence, the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn actually gave him more freedom. In May 2017, prosecutors and probation officers approved Mr. Braun being removed from house arrest.
Five months later, Mr. Braun threatened the rabbi of a synagogue that had borrowed money from him, according to New York’s attorney general. Mr. Braun told the rabbi he would beat and “publicly embarrass him,” adding: “I am going to make you bleed” and “I will make you suffer for every penny.”
Nearly a decade after he was first charged in the drug case, prosecutors scheduled his sentencing. Anonymous letters accusing him of violent threats were then filed on the docket of the judge overseeing his case.
Despite his cooperation with the ongoing drug investigations, the judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Mr. Braun tried to appeal, but weeks before the pandemic hit in early 2020, he reported to the federal penitentiary in Otisville, N.Y.
[…]
It’s like Whitey Bulgar in Boston. He’s a psychopathic mobster who made a deal with the feds and they let him run free as long as he was “helping” them.
It got worse for him. He was sued by the Federal Trade Commission for his predatory lending (aka loan sharking.)Meanwhile the NYPD was putting together a big criminal case and thought they might be able to flip Braun which turned out to be a good bet. He agreed to whatever they wanted as long as he wasn’t prosecuted.
While all this was going on, Braun and his allies were trying to get him a pardon. And it turned out this criminal went to school with Jared in the inaugural class of Kushner Yeshiva High School in New Jersey. Jared’s daddy stepped. ( He is also an ex-con, by the way.)
In the chaotic final weeks of the Trump presidency, the volume of clemency requests overwhelmed the White House Counsel’s Office. Requests were being fielded by numerous White House officials — and many came in through Mr. Kushner’s office.
It is unclear what type of due diligence, if any, the White House did on Mr. Braun. The New York attorney general and the F.T.C. had put out news releases about their civil actions against him in June 2020, and the suits they filed were a matter of public record. An inquiry to the Justice Department could have revealed the plea deal discussions.
Just hours before Mr. Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2021, the White House sent out the news release, written by Mr. Kushner’s office, announcing Mr. Braun’s commutation, along with similar summaries for the 143 convicts who received pardons and commutations in the final batch, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Kushner thought it was important to honor each person granted clemency with a personalized write-up, the person said.
The feds in NY were pissed, as you can imagine. So much for their big predatory lending case.
In the weeks that followed, investigators made another attempt to reach a cooperation deal with Mr. Braun, meeting with him in person. But no longer needing help getting out of prison, Mr. Braun essentially called their bluff, signaling that if they thought they had a case against him they should indict him. Since then, the prosecutors have brought no charges against Mr. Braun or anyone else with ties to him in the industry.
Just a few months after his release, Mr. Braun returned to working in the merchant cash advance business.
Here’s a gift link for you to read what he’s been doing to innocent people who make the mistake of doing business with him. — since his pardon! He’s a gangster, through and through.
Trump no doubt sees himself in him:
“What is so bad about me?” he said in the interview with The Times. “I never hurt anybody, never did anything wrong to anybody.”
They’re all criminals. Trump is currently in a civil trial for committing massive fraud over many years to get lower interest rates and lower insurance premiums. He’s got 91 felony indictments awaiting him and was recently found liable for sexual assault to the tune of millions of dollars. His son-in-law is as corrupt as they come having used his white house perch to secure billions just months after he left Washington and did massive favors for his friends and family while in office. This is just one example and there are many more. (Remember when Trump pardoned war criminals?)
It’s obvious that about 40% the country doesn’t know about any of that and probably wouldn’t care if they did since it’s their Dear Leader and anything he does is, by definition, “smart.” But other’s might not be so sanguine. This is blatant corruption.
Josh Shapiro isn’t yet worried about President Joe Biden’s standing.
Rather, the governor of Pennsylvania attributes Biden’s recent polling slide behind former President Donald Trump to voter “brain fog” that he thinks will clear once the general election cycle kicks into gear.
“I’m not sure folks remember just how chaotic it was, how divisive it was, how he was just in your face in your living room every day,” Shapiro said, referring to Trump. “I don’t think people want to go back to that.”
[…]
“As people are reminded of what it was like and they are forced to tune back in and listen to that during the course of a presidential race, they’re going to reject his extremism, his chaos and his danger,” he said of Trump.
I think he’s right. (I hope he’s right?) But it’s going to take effort to remind people about what it was really like. There is a lot to work with so there’s no excuse for failing to do it. And hopefully, with the reminder, the media will do its job and inform people of what he has in store for his second term. Repeatedly.
I know there are a lot of cross currents in the news right now which will affect the Democratic vote as well as the national vote. So anything can happen. But as long as Trump is on the ballot there is no choice. Hopefully most Americans will realize that.
