Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is looking at potential opportunities for higher office, including in the Senate or a potential second Trump administration.
Greene has emerged as a key ally to both former President Trump and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published Wednesday, Greene didn’t rule out running for U.S. Senate in 2026, telling the outlet, “I haven’t made up my mind whether I will do that or not.”
-She added: “I have a lot of things to think about. Am I going to be a part of President Trump’s Cabinet if he wins? Is it possible that I’ll be VP?” -Greene said would “very, very heavily” consider being Trump’s running mate if asked, saying it would be “an honor.” -The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
-She has maintained her close affinity with Trump, rushing to his defense over the various federal and state indictments he has faced in recent months. -Former Trump aide Steve Bannon said in January that Greene “sees herself on the short list for Trump’s VP,” quipping: “when MTG looks in the mirror she sees a potential president smiling back.”
I wish I believed it was impossible … but I don’t. We are in a crazy, political era and I’m afraid that all bets are off.
Here’s your future president just three years ago when she first discovered politics:
J.V. Last considers how Donald Trump might stage his booking in Atlanta:
From the time of his (latest) indictment, Donald Trump has 10 days to surrender himself to the authorities in Fulton County. The clock started running on August 14.
Ten days takes us to August 24.
You know what’s happening on August 23?
It would not surprise me—at all—if Trump chooses to surrender himself on August 23. He’d then take over the entire news cycle that day with its wall-to-wall coverage of the fingerprinting and mugshot.
And then Trump goes straight from the jail to a giant Trump rally that runs—and here I’m just spitballing—from 8-11pm ET.
He would absolutely do that. It’s his style up one side and down the other.
The entire Republican debate would be swamped. The candidates on the stage would have extra pressure to light themselves on fire in order to break through. And the second-day stories would be about how Trump schlonged Fox and the rest of the field.
Trump isn’t smart, but he is cunning and he understands both power and weakness. And he sees the same things we’re all seeing.
Trump did it to the Prime Minister of Montenegro. He’d do it to his GOP rivals in a heartbeat.
A federal appeals court said Wednesday that it would restrict access to a widely used abortion medication after finding that the federal government did not follow the proper process when it loosened regulations in 2016 to make the pill more easily available.
Food and Drug Administration decisions to allow the drug mifepristone to be taken later in pregnancy, be mailed directly to patients and be prescribed by a medical professional other than a doctor were not lawful, a three-judge panel of the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled.
Mifepristone will remain available while the Department of Justice appeals the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“You damn bet it will,” Pierce continued. “Right into the lap of Justice Sam Alito, who will undoubtedly find some obscure codicil in the Code of Hammurabi to justify upholding the ruling of the 5th Circuit, which is the Uruk-Hai to Alito’s Saruman anyway. All the lawyers seeking to ban the drug will need to do is talk very fast and use the word ‘abortifacient’ a lot. And the ducks will all be marching in formation.”
“Sooner or later, some loaded court will declare all contraceptives to be ‘abortifacients,'” Pierce adds, “and that will be the final end for a protected right of privacy.”
The three judges on the 5th Circuit “were appointed by Republican presidents. During oral arguments in May, the trio indicated a willingness to restrict access to the drug,” reports The Hill. “Medication abortion currently accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the White House stands behind the FDA’s decision. Vice President Kamala Harris issued a statement to that effect. That’s nice, but not very comforting for women watching their options for self-determination slip away.
We’ve seen that radicalized MAGA Republican pols, to date anyway, are not particularly attuned to public opinion on such matters. They’ve been a bit slow on the uptake. It remains to be seen if the Roberts Court has ears to hear what voters in Kansas, Ohio and several other states said with their votes so loudly so recently.
The Hill again:
Some conservative groups are pleading with candidates to abandon extreme positions, reports The Hill’s Nathaniel Weixel. The goal of a national abortion ban remains remote, they argue, and the aim is to win elections nationwide next year and then to continue working on restricting abortions in the states. The upshot is a “circular firing squad” among right-leaning groups and candidates, according to Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.
[…]
Republican leaders in the nation’s capital have attempted to move beyond the abortion issue, but state conservatives want to keep abortion in the national spotlight. Senate Republicans believe conservative anti-abortion moves by state legislatures and governors could backfire and wind up boosting Democratic candidates in Arizona, Montana, Nevada and Pennsylvania, as well as Ohio.
The GOP is playing with fire. Backlash to Trump in 2018 and 2020 rained on the GOP’s parades. Backlash to the Dobbs decision in 2022 turned their midterm red tsunami into a ripple. It’s not that they are slow learners as much as conservative muscle memory for doubling/tripling/quadrupling down has more influence over the GOP. Democracies depend on the consent of the governed. MAGA Republicans are building a Margaret Atwood-inspired autocracy.
That perfectly describes the immediate past occupant of the White House as well as his reputation as a business genius and champion of Christians. Seventy-four million Americans voted for him in 2020.
The throwback right won’t stop at Dobbs, or at statewide abortion bans, or at banning mifepristone. They’ll move on to chasity belts. Invest in a startup now.
Texas vote suppression and bullshit artist organization True the Vote is in trouble down in Georgia. These guys have been around for quite a while (I wrote about them for years — here’s one from 2012) but they went mainstream when Trump and his “rigged” mantra came along. They teamed up with the convicted felon and propagandist Dinesh D’Souza for the movie “2,000 Mules” which Trump claims proves his 2020 fraud accusations.
Anyway, it appears they messed with the wrong people. JV Last at the Bulwark has the story:
There’s another 2020 election case percolating in Fulton County: The Georgia State Election Board is suing True the Vote—the group whose “data” makes up the lion’s share of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules nonsense.
It’s a pretty wild example of FAFO.
The short version: True the Vote is a Texas-based group, which filed a complaint with Georgia’s State Election Board alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential campaign.
The Georgia State Election Board (we’ll just call it the SEB from here on out) investigated this complaint and found no fraud. So it asked True the Vote to share its evidence.
True the Vote’s response was:
The long version of the story is even crazier.
So it’s November 30, 2021, the heady days of #StopTheSteal, a time when anything—even the restoration of Trump to the White House—seemed possible.
That’s when True the Vote submitted its election fraud complaints to SEB as part of the lead-up to the creation of D’Souza’s 2000 Mulescash bonanza.
The complaint was wild stuff. Not just “Hey, maybe shady things happened here?” We’re talking tin-foil hat, “We have the alien autopsy tapes, dammit!”
Here are some selections from the True the Vote complaint:
-“Following a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta, True the Vote obtained [data] . . . which revealed concerning patterns of behavior consistent with reports made to our organization.”
-“True the Vote’s contracted team of researchers and investigators spoke with several individuals regarding personal knowledge, methods, and organizations involved in ballot trafficking in Georgia.”
-“John Doe described a network of non-governmental organizations . . . that worked together to facilitate a ballot trafficking scheme in Georgia.”
-“Curiously, a change in behavior seemed to occur on or around December 23, 2020, the day after Arizona authorities announced that fingerprints on absentee ballot envelopes helped uncover an illegal ballot harvesting scheme in that state. After that announcement, individuals depositing ballots into drop boxes in Georgia are seen wearing blue surgical gloves. They often put them on just before picking up their stacks of ballots and remove them as they exist the drop box area.”
Explosive stuff! Yet when SEB began investigating the complaint, it could find no supporting evidence. On April 21, 2022—just a few weeks before 2000 Mules debuted—SEB sent True the Vote a subpoena requesting some of the documentation the group claimed to have.
For example:
-What evidence was in the group’s “detailed account” of all that ballot harvesting? -Who were the group’s “researchers and investigators” and how could they be contacted? -Who were the witnesses? How could SEB interview them? Did True the Vote have sworn statements from them? Recordings of their interviews? Copies of documents they provided? -Where was John Doe? Were there transcripts of his testimony?
Pretty standard-issue stuff. If you file a complaint making the sort of assertions and allegations True the Vote did, you kind of have to expect the presiding agency to come back and ask for your documentation when it does its investigation.
Instead, True the Vote asked SEB to stop investigating.
No, really. On May 5, True the Vote said—through the group’s lawyer, obviously—that instead of providing the evidence it claimed it had, it would prefer to withdraw its complaint.
The stated reason for True the Vote’s attempt to withdraw its complaint was that the group could not reveal any information about the many people it had spoken with because the group had “pledged confidentiality” to them and these people had “come forward at risk to their personal safety and security.”
SEB’s response is priceless:
Your main objection is that your client’s “pledged confidentiality” regarding certain information sought in the subpoena. You do not specify a basis for this objection, and do not state that it is based on some legally cognizable principle or privilege. Your letter also refers to a general “risk to [your clients’] personal safety and security to varying degrees” . . . but do not provide information or context to explain this basis . . .
Without more, I do not believe there is grounds for a protective order.
You see what’s going on, yes? You have a a bunch of bullshit artists on the make for fun and profit running into a phalanx of lawyers who aren’t willing to let them simply walk away from their BS as though nothing had happened.
[…]
More than a year later, True the Vote still hasn’t complied with SEB’s subpoena, which is what led to the lawsuit. From the complaint:
After multiple good faith efforts by the SEB and its counsel to obtain the requested information and documents, True the Vote continues to indifferently vacillate between statements of assured compliance and blanket refusals, leaving the SEB with no recourse but to report, per the foregoing statute, such conduct to this Court and seek an immediate remedy.
The entire True the Vote business reminds me of my favorite part of the latest Trump indictment. It’s the moment on page 26 when Trump lawyer Ray Stallings Smith testifies before the Georgia State Senate on December 3, 2020 and starts saying . . . all sorts of crazy stuff. Here’s the indictment’s summation of Smith’s testimony:
That 2,506 felons voted illegally in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia;
That 66,248 underage people illegally registered to vote before their seventeenth birthday prior to the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia;
That at least 2,423 people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia who were not listed as registered to vote;
That 1,043 people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia who had illegally registered to vote using a post office box;
That 10,315 or more dead people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia;
That Fulton County election workers at State Farm Arena ordered poll watchers and members of the media to leave the tabulation area on the night of November 3, 2020, and continued to operate after ordering everyone to leave.
Ray Stallings Smith wasn’t on local radio or shooting the breeze with Hannity. He was testifying before one house of the Georgia legislature. And he’s a lawyer. And he just . . . made all of this stuff up.
It’s like these #StopTheSteal people thought they were in a legal Rumspringa, where formal complaints could be filed and testimony could be given and there would be no consequences.
Or maybe the better analogy is that they deluded themselves into believing that the real world functions with the same level of accountability as Twitter.
You’re testifying before a committee? Shitpost away, bro.
You’re submitting a formal complaint? Tell them your sister’s uncle’s boyfriend’s mom said she saw a guy with blue hands stuffing the ballot box next to the 31 Flavors. You can delete the post if you get too much blowback and you’ll get so many new followers by trolling the cucks at the State Election Board. Those squares have to play by the old rules. Suckers!
The right has been claiming voter fraud for decades. Groups like this institutionalized it. Trump the narcissist who can’t ever admit he lost anything was their perfect messenger. The Big Lie was the natural consequence. Now we’ll see if there might be another consequence to this craven, dishonest, strategy.
Early in the scrum of the 2016 presidential campaign, the political strategist Rick Wilson bumped into an old boss and strongly advised him not to cast his lot with Donald J. Trump. No good would come of it.
“Even if he wins, he’s going to destroy you,” Mr. Wilson remembered telling Rudolph W. Giuliani. “This guy’s going to humiliate you.”
Mr. Wilson recalled being dismissed as a provincial Floridian unable to understand the bond between two New Yorkers — outer-borough strivers who walked the Manhattan streets with proprietary airs and were now within grasp of once-unimaginable power.
“He’s going to take care of me,” Mr. Wilson said Mr. Giuliani would tell those around him. A cabinet post, probably. Maybe secretary of state.
Never happened. Instead, Mr. Giuliani became Mr. Trump’s secretary of aggression and blind allegiance: his attack dog, legal adviser, unindicted co-conspirator — and now, co-defendant in a criminal conspiracy case.
The two friends from New York, along with 17 others, were indicted Monday in Georgia in a broad racketeering case centered on the sobering charge that they illegally plotted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in favor of its loser, Mr. Trump. Adding to the ignominy for Mr. Giuliani, 79, is that he was once an innovative prosecutor who specialized in federal racketeering cases.
“I think it’s going to be scary for him,” said Mr. Wilson, a former Republican who worked as an adviser to Mr. Giuliani a quarter-century ago and is a leading conservative critic of Mr. Trump. “The justice system is ringing his bell and calling him to account.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Giuliani responded to his indictment by calling it “just the next chapter in a book of lies with the purpose of framing President Donald Trump and anyone willing to take on the ruling regime.” The Georgia case, he added in his prepared statement, “ is an affront to American democracy and does permanent, irrevocable harm to our justice system.”
On Monday night, as the grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., prepared to hand up the 41-count indictment, Mr. Giuliani could be seen on his nightly livestream show, “America’s Mayor Live,” watching a broadcast of the goings-on at the Atlanta courthouse, making sardonic comments and trying to appear unfazed.
“He’s the consummate happy warrior,” Ted Goodman, Mr. Giuliani’s political adviser, maintained.
Still, the criminal indictment of Mr. Giuliani, his first, marks the lowest point so far in his yearslong reputational tumble. Once heralded as a fearless lawman, game-changing New York City mayor and Sept. 11 hero, he is now defined by a subservience to the 45th president that sometimes veered into buffoonery.
Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor who worked under Mr. Giuliani when he was the United States attorney in Manhattan, is among a legion of former colleagues who struggle to reconcile the Rudys of then and now.
“I found him to be an inspiring leader,” recalled Mr. Richman, now a professor at Columbia Law School. “He was very focused on the law, committed to what the right thing was — and doing it.”
He said that while Mr. Giuliani’s tenure as mayor, from 1994 through 2001, had its highs and lows, “he rose to the occasion on Sept. 11th,” reassuring New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.
Now?
“In his sad commitment to be relevant, he has thrown himself in with a crew where facts and the law are either irrelevant or there to be twisted,” Mr. Richman said. “It’s the thirst for relevance. The thirst to be in the mix.”
It’s pathetic and incredibly destructive.
In my m ind he was always an asshole and hasn’t really changed all that much except to the extent he’s older and drunker than he used to be. The article describes him becoming “a defender so ferocious that some wondered about his mental well-being.” Yeah, no kidding.
Mr. Giuliani’s pattern of curious legal interpretations, provocative statements and odd behavior kept him in an often unflattering spotlight.
One example: He was duped into appearing in the Sacha Baron Cohen satire “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” in which the president’s personal lawyer is seen putting his hands down his pants while reclining on the bed of a young actress posing as a reporter. He later said he was tucking in his shirt after removing a microphone.
All mere prologue.
On Election Night 2020, with Mr. Trump’s chances fading by the hour, the president nevertheless declared victory, while also alleging electoral fraud, egged on by a conspiracy-focused Mr. Giuliani. Later, in testifying before the congressional commission investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump aides described Mr. Giuliani as having been highly intoxicated that night, a description he has rejected.
Several days later, on Nov. 12, Mr. Trump’s election lawyers advised the president that they could find no evidence of election fraud, notwithstanding what he had been asserting publicly. But Mr. Giuliani prevailed again, this time by sharing the specious theory that Dominion voting machines had converted thousands of Trump votes into Biden votes, and by encouraging the president to file a lawsuit in Georgia.
Mr. Giuliani’s actions from this point on are detailed in Monday night’s indictment, which echoes the federal indictment filed earlier this month, in which Mr. Trump was charged with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and Mr. Giuliani appears as unindicted “Co-Conspirator 1.”
The most recent indictment describes, step by frantic step, how Mr. Giuliani possessed a bullheaded determination to prove against all evidence that the election had been stolen, leading a supposedly “elite” team of lawyers that filed dozens of legal challenges across the country and hitting the road with outlandish theories.
Each step, the indictment said, constituted “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy” — legal terminology no doubt acutely familiar to the former federal prosecutor.
He had plenty of experience with conspiracies. Maybe it makes sense that he would automatically help organize one.
He is a clown now. And he’s also apparently almost broke and looking for help to pay his bills. But he is relevant if that’s what he wants. He’s very, very relevant.
Here he is last night on Newsmax:
Giuliani: Fani Willis is a politician, not a lawyer. Not an honest honorable lawyer. This is ridiculous application of the racketeering statute. There's probably no one that knows it better than I do… If she worked for me, I would’ve fired her. pic.twitter.com/KoKL3dVvwk
I just don’t know what to say to this utter bullshit the right spews. Trump spent his entire term in “executive time” doing nothing but tweeting, watching TV, flying around on government aircraft to his golf resorts for pay to play sessions on the links. The idea that he was out there working hard for the people is simply ludicrous.
That officials like Byron Donalds spread this ludicrous propaganda is perhaps the most disturbing thing about it. Does he believe it? Maybe. There are plenty of true believers. But it’s almost worse if he doesn’t. How cynical can you get?
We haven’t heard much from His Anti-Wokeness for a bit so I thought I share a little schadenfreude from Ed Kilgore to make your day:
Ron DeSantis remains the most formidable rival to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But it’s been a long, long time since he’s gotten any particularly good news in the polls. A new Emerson College survey shows him dropping into single digits and third place in New Hampshire, behind Chris Christie. In the RealClearPolitics averages of national GOP polls, he’s dropped from 30.1 percent at the end of March to 14.8 percent now. He looks relatively strong in Iowa, where it appears he is making a desperate all-or-nothing stand, but mostly just by comparison. Trump only leads him by 27 points in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, though sparse Iowa polling may disguise a less positive environment for DeSantis.
Polling aside, recent news emanating from the DeSantis campaign has been generally quite bad. He’s had three campaign leadership shakeups, a big round of staff layoffs, and at least one major “reboot” of his message and strategy. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is still building steam, and its main problem is that too much of his vast financial resources are going into legal costs in connection with indictments that aren’t hurting him at all among Republican voters. Another bad development for DeSantis is that a large field of rivals has remained in the race, spoiling his hopes for a one-on-one battle with the front-runner.
Kilgore reminds us of the last Great Whitebread Hope and shares Jonathan Chait’s description of Walker “as he appeared at the beginning of that race and see if it doesn’t sound exactly like the image DeSantis had built until his recent troubles”:
Scott Walker won three statewide elections in Wisconsin, which has supported the Democrat in every presidential election since 1984. He led national Republican polling as recently as March. He led in Iowa by enormous margins as recently as August. The Koch brothers loved him. Walker had spent his entire adult life developing an almost superhuman fealty to the principles of the modern Republican Party, its Reaganolotry, and, above all, a ruthless commitment to crushing its enemies beneath his boot heel. If there was anything that gave Walker joy … it was the goal of wiping organized labor off the map. As Grover Norquist enthused in May, “when you meet him, it’s like seeing somebody who sits on a throne on the skulls of his enemies.”
It sure sounds familiar to me and was just as stupid as the DeSantis hype. Kilgore notes:
Like DeSantis, he was relatively young, in his 40s, and thus was able to generate a sense of generational change in his party (the two previous GOP nominees were 72 and 65 years old, respectively). Like the Floridian, the Wisconsin governor had found the absolute sweet spot of the GOP Zeitgeist: the strident ideologue who somehow still appeals to swing voters, and who strikes fear into the hearts of liberals everywhere as he destroys their counterparts in his state. Walker’s very colorlessness (like DeSantis’s) enhanced his reputation as a methodical Death Star come to remake America in his state’s increasingly reactionary image.
These whiny little twits create images of tough guys and then crash and burn when people actually see them for what they are. Kilgore notes a Walker timeline by Margaret Hartmann that mirrors DeSantis’ hard-right approach that didn’t seem to work when he got on the ground in Iowa.
Also like Walker, DeSantis seems to have also underestimated Trump. Walker pretty clearly didn’t know what hit him, Hartmann suggested:
With Trump dominating the political conversation and a crowded field of 16 other Republican candidates, Walker’s campaign began imploding in earnest. After months on top, a CNN/ORC poll found Walker had dropped to third place in Iowa behind Trump and Ben Carson.
At this point, Walker’s lack of charisma started becoming a problem for him in the retail political environment of Iowa, just as it’s a problem for DeSantis, especially after he made the dubious decision to promise to appear in all the state’s 99 counties. But what actually did in Walker after his campaign lost its magic were mediocre debate performances, beginning in August:
Walker’s appearance in the first GOP debate was unmemorable. Just before the debate, he had more than 11 percent in an average of the last nine national polls, but afterward he dropped below 5 percent.
In the second debate, in September, Walker was all but invisible, struggling to draw questions and attention. And then he was done, with his support dropping to below one percent in national polls even as Trump soared and Ted Cruz replaced Walker as the “true conservative” in the race.
It’s entirely possible that Ron DeSantis is one poor debate performance away from the sad fate of Scott Walker. He’s supposedly been deep into preparations for the first candidate debate on August 23 for a while now, though he’s handicapped by not knowing if Trump is going to show. But his margin for error has disappeared. He’s hardly the political behemoth he appeared to be earlier this year, and if he can’t turn things around soon, impatient Republicans will either resign themselves to another Trump nomination or quickly find a new alternative like Tim Scott, who is waiting in the wings to steal DeSantis’s thunder and leave him on the dust bin of presidential might-have-beens.
I’ve been drawing the comparison to Walker from the moment he became the next Great Whitebread Hope. There’s always at least one in any open GOP primary. He’s a terrible candidate and a worse human being and what he’s done to Florida in the service of this terrible campaign should be a crime. Let’s hope he’s destroying himself so thoroughly that he will fade into obscurity as completely as Scott Walker has done.
One of the most compelling images that came out of the Jan. 6 House committee hearings was of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows slumped on his couch on the afternoon in question, disconsolately scrolling through his phone while Donald Trump’s angry mob stormed the Capitol. As the New York Times reported:
[White House aide Cassidy] Hutchinson said around 2 p.m. or 2:05 p.m. that day, she went to Meadows’ office because she saw rioters were getting closer to breaching the Capitol. Meadows was on his couch, scrolling through his phone, as he had been that morning. “I said, ‘Hey, are you watching the TV, chief? … The rioters are getting really close. Have you talked to the president?’ He said, ‘No, he wants to be alone right now,'” she recalled.”I remember Pat saying to [Meadows], something to the effect of, ‘The rioters have gotten to the Capitol, Mark, we need to go down and see the president now.’ And Mark looked up at him and said, ‘He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat,'” Hutchinson said.
This was the man who had been constantly by Trump’s side in the previous tumultuous weeks as the president tried every possible means to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He knew Trump didn’t want to stop the violence at the Capitol. He knew Trump actually relished it. And he knew there was nothing to be done about it.
Meadows had originally agreed to cooperate with the select committee himself and had turned over a large volume of communications pertaining to the post-election attempts to reverse the results. But after Meadows’ book “The Chief’s Chief” was published, in which he incurred Trump’s wrath by his unflattering portrayal of the president’s behavior after he contracted COVID, Meadows withdrew his cooperation and was eventually referred to the Department of Justice for contempt of Congress.
Unlike podcaster and agitator Steve Bannon and former trade adviser Peter Navarro, both of whom also refused to comply with a congressional subpoena, Meadows was not prosecuted by the DOJ. Neither was former White House communications official Peter Scavino. No explanation was given at the time, but many observers assumed that since Meadows was no longer in Trump’s orbit, he was cooperating with federal investigators.
Meadows has not publicly addressed the events of Jan. 6 or the post-election schemes since he left the White House. CNN reported that he is quietly employed in a high-level job as “the senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a pro-Trump think tank that pays him more than $500,000 and has seen its revenues soar to $45 million since Meadows joined in 2021, according to the group’s tax filings.” Nice work if you can get it. Meadows also serves as an informal adviser to the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, reportedly helping to guide the group’s rebellion against Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid and its strategy during the debt ceiling talks. But according to his “best friend,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, with whom Meadows reportedly speaks at least once a week, they “make a point not to talk about” legal matters.
All this has Trump feeling very nervous that Meadows has become a “rat.” According to Rolling Stone, Meadows’ lawyers cut off contact with the Trump team months ago and the latter have had no idea what contact Meadows has had with either special counsel Jack Smith or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Meadows has reportedly testified before the federal grand jury in Washington, but took the Fifth when called before the special grand jury in Georgia. When the federal indictment against Trump finally came down in the Jan. 6 case, Meadows was not mentioned among the “unindicted co-conspirators,” despite ample public evidence that he had been heavily involved in the plots for which Trump was indicted. That seemed like a clear indication that he’d become a key witness.
This week we received another important clue about what exactly Meadows has been up to. He was among the long list of Trump associates indicted in Fulton County on Monday night in Willis’ sweeping conspiracy case. Unlike Trump and other key figures like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, Meadows was only indicted on two counts: violation of Georgia’s racketeering act and “solicitation of violation of public oath by a public officer.”
The first of those is the overall conspiracy charge laid out in the indictment, which cites Meadows’ dissemination of false theories of election fraud and his attempts to pressure DOJ officials as well as various state officials in Georgia and elsewhere. The second relates to the fact that Meadows “actively participated in and spoke” in Trump’s infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the one when the then-president suggested “finding” enough votes to give him the win in that state. It’s easy to see why Meadows took the Fifth on that one.
On Tuesday, Meadows became the first defendant in the Georgia case (but surely not the last) to announce that he would request moving his case to federal court because his alleged criminal activity “all occurred during his tenure and as part of his service as Chief of Staff.” In his statement, Meadows explained that “arranging Oval Office meetings, contacting state officials on the President’s behalf, visiting a state government building, and setting up a phone call for the President” were all part of his duties and that you would expect the president’s chief of staff “to do these sorts of things.” It sounds like Meadows’ defense will be, as they say, that he was just following orders.
That strategy is not unprecedented and many legal observers suggest Meadows has a good chance of getting his case booted to the federal level. Willis would still be the prosecutor, but would try the case before a federal judge and a jury pool drawn from the entire state, both of them potentially more sympathetic to Meadows. There would be no cameras in a federal courtroom, which is unfortunate since a televised trial might offer one last chance to penetrate the minds of those few remaining Republican voters who aren’t completely far gone.
None of this, however, explains Meadows’ role in Jack Smith’s federal case in D.C., where the former chief of staff has apparently been treated with kid gloves throughout the process. No doubt Trump’s team is anxious to look through all the discovery material to see what they can find out.
I always thought Meadows was a bit thick, not to mention certainly unqualified for the important job that he did remarkably poorly. Apparently, he’s smart enough to hire a highly competent lawyer and take that person’s advice, which makes him a very stable genius compared to his former boss. He may be the one major Jan. 6 conspirator who gets to walk away from this mess relatively unscathed.
It’s pretty clear that Trump’s obsession with 2020 has hurt the party over the past two and a half years. Candidates for other offices want nothing more than to move on from that unpopular and unpleasant topic. Trump’s legal problems make that impossible and now he’s making it even worse:
Hours after being indicted for his attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia, Donald Trump signaled that he is going to re-litigate the matter once more. This time, it will be part of his campaign to win the presidency, not retain it.
Trump announced on his social media site that he would be holding a “major news conference” on Monday where he’d present a detailed and “irrefutable report” on voter fraud from three years ago.
The post had all the whiffs of a Four Seasons Total Landscaping moment. And it quickly transported the Republican Party right back to a conversation it studiously has tried to avoid for nearly three years.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), campaigning at the Iowa State Fair on Tuesday, was asked if pressure Trump put on public officials in Georgia to overturn the election was “anti-American.” At a press conference the same day, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was also forced to field questions about the indictment. Both Republicans instead criticized what they described as a weaponization of the legal process.
Operatives within the party were less evasive. With Trump doubling down on his stolen-election rhetoric — and his decision to schedule a media event about it two days before the first Republican debate — the consensus was he is all but guaranteeing his GOP rivals would be forced to spend time on stage next week talking about an issue that continues to divide the party.
“This is Politics 303: Mind Games and How Campaigns Fuck With Other Campaigns,” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based Republican strategist. “You do something, you make an announcement — they’re just trying to dominate the news going into the debate and get everyone to defend him.”
But, Carney said, it’s a terrible position to be in for anyone trying to win 2024 for Republicans. “If our party is talking about 2020, we’re going to lose,” he said.
For Trump’s rivals in the primary, there’s no avoiding the question now.
Pressed on whether he had listened to the recorded phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump urged the GOP election official to “find 11,780 votes,” Scott said, “Yes, but we just draw different conclusions.” He declined to answer whether he, as president, would have made the same request of Raffensperger.
DeSantis called the indictment “an example of this criminalization of politics.”
Trump’s opponents have every reason to be wary of the issue. Though election denialism may be fraught terrain for the party in a general election, in recent Republican primaries, the electorate has most often rewarded those who side with Trump on it.
After Trump’s defeat in November 2020, majorities of Republicans told pollsters they agreed with his claims that the election was stolen. And more recently, a New York Times/Siena College poll last month found three-in-four GOP primary voters said they thought Trump’s actions only reflected “his right to contest the election.”
Sarah Longwell, a Trump-averse Republican strategist who has chided his opponents in the field for not forcefully criticizing him, said focus groups she has conducted show Republican voters are divided on Trump’s 2020 election claims. But as much as half of the GOP primary electorate are fine with the idea of re-litigating the last presidential election, she said.
“Part of the reason he’s leaning into this with his press conference is he only wants people talking about this, and talking about him,” Longwell said. “The other candidates are going to have to talk about it, because it’s going to be the dominant issue in our politics. And it’s how Trump walks to the nomination.”
The problem, as Longwell and others surmise, is that stop-the-steal-style media events won’t do Trump or the party any favors in a general election with independent voters in swing states like Georgia and Arizona.
“Trump’s news conference Monday may set a record for the eyeroll emoji-use in iPhone and Android,” said Barrett Marson, a GOP strategist in Arizona. “Who’s going to believe this wacky bullshit?”
I think we know who will believe that wacky bullshit, don’t we? And there are enough of them to prevent anyone else from getting the nomination.
These Republicans who are wringing their hands over this ought to remember that Donald Trump doesn’t have to run for president again. He’s doing this to them. They just can’t quit him.
Donald Trump’s multiple indictments and ongoing court cases have one upside for Republicans: keeping President Joe Biden off the front pages. I’m skimming the news for Biden and not finding much.
The inferno on Maui offers Biden a chance at some column inches and camera time, but not until next week:
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui on Monday in the aftermath of the Hawaii wildfires, White House press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced on Wednesday.
On Aug. 21, they will meet with first responders, survivors and government officials, she said.
“In Maui, the President and First Lady will be welcomed by state and local leaders to see firsthand the impacts of the wildfires and the devastating loss of life and land that has occurred on the island, as well as discuss the next steps in the recovery effort,” Jean-Pierre said.
Biden today celebrates the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act. But most of the coverage seems to be at The Guardian. NPR places Biden coverage far down the list of this morning’s stories. A search of the New York Times landing page turns up no mention of Biden. And only one mention from today at the Washington Post.
But at least there’s a string of updates at The Guardian <sigh>.
There has been around $278bn in new clean energy investments, creating more than 170,000 jobs, across the US in the first year of the Inflation Reduction Act, according to an estimate by the advocacy group Climate Power.
The White House claims that there will be twice as much wind, solar and battery storage deployment over the next seven years than if the bill was never enacted, with companies already spending twice as much on new manufacturing facilities as they were pre-IRA.
On the one-year anniversary of President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, here's a reminder of what's happened to the CPI since its passage: pic.twitter.com/MSHhJRD2Rk
