One of the most important elements for special counsel Jack Smith to establish in order to charge former President Donald Trump in connection with the plots to overturn the 2020 presidential election, is to establish his intent — something he is attempting to do with his new interviews with Hope Hicks and Jared Kushner.
But crucially, New York University law professor and former Pentagon special counsel Ryan Goodman told a CNN panel on Thursday, that does not mean Smith has to prove Trump didn’t truly believe that the election was stolen from him.
“The best possible evidence they can get — and we don’t know exactly whether Jared Kushner or Hope Hicks gave them this — is Donald Trump acknowledging that he knows he lost,” said former federal prosecutor Elie Honig. “It’s one thing to be told by certain people that he lost, because there were other people telling him he did not lose. If you can get it out of his mouth that he knows he lost, that’s golden evidence for prosecutors.”
“I agree … that intent is essential,” said Goodman. “I agree with Elie that it would be super important and very valuable to the prosecutor if they could prove that Trump knew he lost.” However, he added, “I don’t think they need that. Even the way The New York Times reports it, they say if the prosecutor had that information, it could bolster his case or it could make it a more robust case, that’s true. But there’s so many other ways this could be prosecuted and it doesn’t matter.”
“Trump could have thought he won the election,” Goodman continued. “It doesn’t give him any legal right to pressure Mike Pence to violate his oath. That would be a separate crime. It doesn’t give him any legal right to have a scheme to create false slates of electors who declare they’re the rightful electors and to submit to congress to gum up the works, and if the prosecutor also charges former President Trump for the violence on January 6th, it does not matter whether or not he thought he won.”
“I do want to mention, Hope Hicks did give explosive testimony before the January 6th committee on that particular issue,” added Goodman. “There’s an open question, the prosecutors, were they also asking her about that, because she testified and there were text messages that she advised President Trump on January 4th and 5th, please stay peaceful on January 5th and he refused her advice. That’s in the final report from the Select Committee.”
In a sane world, setting aside the legalities involved, if Donald Trump knew that he has lost the election and was trying to steal it (which is what happened) even if he didn’t go to jail the voters would disqualify him for being a cheater. If he didn’t know that he’d lost the election and chose not listen to any of the people in his own administration and campaign who told him otherwise, the voters would disqualify him for being mentally unstable and/or stupid.
Lieberman, the former Democratic senator from Connecticut who later became an independent, is a co-chair of No Labels, a centrist group that is working to secure ballot access for a potential third-party “unity ticket” in next year’s presidential race. The group describes the effort as an “insurance policy” to preventPresident Biden, former president Donald Trumpor any other candidate who doesn’t embrace its agendafrom being elected if the group sees a path to victory.
Lieberman will appear in New Hampshire on Monday with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who’s mulled running for president next year as an independent. We talked with him about whether he wants Manchin to run and how he deals with Democrats who fear that No Labels’ efforts will hand the election to Trump. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
The Early:What’s the message No Labels will be trying to deliver in New Hampshire?
Lieberman: The reason what No Labels is doing in New Hampshire on Monday is important is that we’re really launching our own policy agenda for ‘24, which we call “Common Sense,” evoking memories of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Inevitably, as we have initiated this 2024 insurance policy project, the talk has gone to, “Who are you going to run?” That’s not irrelevant, but it’s not the question before us now.
The Early:Do you see this policy agenda as the foundation of a platform should No Labels decide to run a presidential candidate?
Lieberman: It could be. We think this is a platform that we hope candidates for the House and Senate will consider and embrace in their campaigns next year. But it could also be the basis of a campaign by a bipartisan unity ticket that No Labels would offer its ballot access to,
The Early:When it comes to the insurance policy project, are you talking with potential candidates at this point? What do those discussions look like?
Lieberman:We’re not talking to potential candidates at all, really. Occasionally somebody will talk to us and say, “Hey, you ought to consider this person or that person.” We’ll begin over the summer, probably by the fall, to try to create an actual process — you might say a nominating process, or at least a candidate review process or a candidate search process. We’ll reach out and see who might be interested in being on a bipartisan unity ticket.
The Early: Would you like to see Manchin run as part of a unity ticket?
Lieberman: I’m a great admirer and friend of Joe Manchin. I think really he has walked the walk as a centrist in the Senate. [But] as a chair of No Labels I think I’ve really got to be scrupulously neutral at this point.
The Early: Richard Gephardt, the former House Democratic leader, is launching a new group next week to oppose No Labels’ effort. “No Labels equals Trump,” Greg Schneiders, whose firm Prime Group conducted polling for the group, told our colleague Michael Scherer. “It is going to affect the race and it is going to affect it negatively for Biden, and it is probably going to elect Donald Trump.” What’s your response?
Lieberman: I don’t know [how] the group Gephardt is forming will oppose what No Labels is trying to do. But this other group has been very aggressive. Insofar as they’re involved in some of the efforts in states like Arizona and Maine and now North Carolina to have state officials add requirements to our effort to get on the ballot in those states even after we’ve submitted more than the required number of signatures — they’re violating our constitutional rights.
I’d give a respectful word of caution to all the groups that are opposing what No Labels wants to do in 2024. They obviously have the right to oppose us. But if they begin to take action that’s aimed at blocking us from achieving our constitutional right to gain access to the ballot for a third ticket, they’re really running the risk of not only unconstitutional but illegal behavior.
[”I have absolutely no idea what Joe Lieberman is talking about,” Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a center-left think tank leading the efforts opposing No Labels, wrote in an email to The Early. “No Labels is well within their rights to try to gain ballot access, and we — the broad coalition of groups and individuals that oppose that idea — have every right to try to stop them. If they do not meet every legal requirement for ballot access, members of our coalition will challenge them.”]
[Go fuck yourself, Joe — digby]
The Early: You’ve said again and again that No Labels won’t play the role of spoiler next year. How can you really know for sure that you run a spoiler candidate until the election is over?
Lieberman: We at No Labels are going to do everything we can to try to measure how a bipartisan unity ticket would do as a third choice in next year’s election. And I personally am going to argue that we be cautious about what the data tell us — to bend over backward to not run the risk that our involvement will not be as constructive as we want it to be.
When you’ve lost Third Way …
This is the stupidest thing these so-called “centrists” have ever done and there has never been a worse time to do it. Naturally Joe Lieberman is right in the middle of it.
I’ll let Stuart Stevens take it from here. I had no idea that the stated motive (besides money) behind this insurance policy nonsense is in case something happens to Biden they must offer an alternative to Kamala Harris. My God, they are even worse than I imagined:
A group of Americans is so worried about the prospects of a woman of color moving from Vice President to POTUS that it necessitates a national emergency such that only a third-party candidate can save the country.
Who are we talking about? The Proud Boys? Or No Labels?
Beneath the urgent call for a third-party candidate is a racist assumption that is deeply troubling. Much of the rationale for a third-party candidate hangs on the argument that Joe Biden is unelectable – despite winning in polls, but you can’t get hung up on the details – and Kamala Harris as his VP is a key element in that unelectabilty argument. It goes like this: Joe Biden is old – true – and voters will reject him largely because he could die in office and VP Harris would become president.
As I type this, I hear the No Labels crowd screaming, “We’re not racists.” And I agree. I don’t know anyone associated with No Labels whom I would remotely consider racist. Which is probably a large contributing factor to their inability to perceive the toxic impact of their embracing the premise that Kamala Harris is a threat to President Biden’s re-election.
Like much of the No Label’s tortured logic of the necessity of a third party, there is zero evidence to support its claims. There is no reason to believe that Harris or any VP candidate is going to impact an incumbent president’s re-election. It’s never happened, and some Vice Presidents were considered huge political liabilities to winning presidential tickets. There’s obviously Dan Quayle, but let’s talk about Harry Truman.
When FDR was running for his fourth term, unlike Joe Biden, he had clear and obvious health issues which the White House and the Roosevelt family went to great lengths to downplay. As David Welky, who is writing a book on the Roosevelt family, described in the Washington Post, “According to his son Jimmy, on July 20, the same day he accepted the Democratic nomination via radio hookup from San Diego, America’s longest-serving president turned white, complained of agonizing pains and lay on the floor for 10 minutes before composing himself. He dismissed the incident as ‘collywobbles.’” The Republicans had nominated Thomas Dewey, who at 42 was younger than any Republican currently running for the 2024 nomination.
Welky details how Roosevelt suffered an angina attack six weeks later while addressing “10,000 sailors and shipyard workers at the Puget Sound Navy Yard. Early in his speech, he felt a burning sensation radiating throughout his chest. His forehead beaded with sweat. Waves of nausea flowed through him. He suffered for 15 excruciating minutes, still speaking, before his chest relaxed.”
Joe Biden tripped on a sandbag some idiot left on the stage at the US Airforce graduation ceremony.
Like Joe Biden, FDR was under pressure to replace his VP Henry Wallace who was seen as too liberal. Walter Lippman, the nation’s most influential political columnist to a degree unimaginable in today’s crowded mediascape, wrote that the next VP was “not unlikely to be president.” Wallace was dumped, and FDR picked a candidate with a whopping 2% national support in Gallup polling: Harry Truman. Did Truman help FDR win the 1944 election? It was Roosevelt’s closest election, and it’s impossible to point to a single state FDR would not have carried with Henry Wallace.
When FDR died after 82 days in office, the 2% Truman became president and went on to win an election few believed was possible. We’ve been living with the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline since what was, at the time, the greatest upset in presidential elections. He left office four years later wildly unpopular and paved the way for eight years of Eisenhower. But he won.
Compared to Harry Truman, who was elected to a county judgeship before the Senate, Kamala Harris is an electoral juggernaut. She defeated an incumbent San Francisco DA in a very tough campaign. She was seen as such a strong incumbent no one ran against her four years later. In 2010, she ran for Attorney General against Steve Cooley, the LA District Attorney who was the strongest Republican candidate not named Schwarzenegger since Pete Wilson was elected to the Senate. The race was so close it took three weeks to declare a winner, but Harris then became the first woman, the first African American, and the first person of South Asian descent elected California Attorney General.
In 2016, she was elected US Senator from California. Then Vice President of the United States. Add it all up, and more Americans have voted for Harris than any woman in US history.
Remember when the last incumbent Vice President ran for president? That was George H.W. Bush, who was such a dominating candidate he came in third in the 1988 Iowa caucus to Senator Bob Dole and televangelist Pat Robertson. Yes, third to Pat Robertson. That must have been a fun plane ride from Iowa to New Hampshire on Air Force 2.
So why does No Labels think Harris is so unelectable that she will doom Joe Biden? There are three big moments in a VP candidate’s campaign: the introduction once picked, the convention speech, and the VP debate. Harris passed each of those three tests without the customary stumbles of VP candidates. As VP, she has served without scandal, and for all the efforts to blow up a news cycle’s worth of awkwardness into some cosmic flop, she’s had a relatively smooth if uneventful VP tenure. Which is about all any VP can hope for.
So, let’s ask again, why is it that No Labels thinks Harris is so unelectable she will doom Joe Biden? Can we just be honest? It’s because she is a woman and a woman of color. That’s not to say that every member of No Labels wouldn’t welcome a woman of color as president. (This probably isn’t the case, but let’s give them that.) But do they not realize how extraordinarily damaging it is to take the position that a woman of color can’t be elected president?
The mantra of “No Labels” is that 2024 is “unique,” and all past political equations do not apply. This is how they counter the political reality that no independent presidential candidate has won a single electoral college vote since George Wallace. The great populist independent candidate of 1992, Ross Perot, does indeed have something in common with the great masses of America. Like you and I, Ross Perot never won a single electoral college vote.
Electing an independent candidate is a wishful fantasy akin to my asserting that the next NFL draft will be unique and I’ll go in the first round. But if they believe 2024 is the ultimate rule-breaker election, they can’t allow for the possibility that a woman of color might be a plus for Joe Biden’s re-election? What kind of message is No Labels sending to every young woman in America who isn’t as white as the leadership of No Labels that the first non-white female VP is so damaging to President Biden that America can only be saved by…Joe Manchin?
Many smart, well-meaning people are involved in No Labels and should wake up to the damage they are doing to the American social fabric. Let the hateful alt-right carry the message that women of color can’t win in America. Stop what you are doing and focus on helping make history by contributing to the re-election of Kamala Harris.
At the end of the day, this is a legacy question for every person who is part of No Labels. If No Labels runs an independent candidate, the odds are overwhelming that it will help defeat Joe Biden. That will be the end of any chance No Labels has of playing a positive role in American politics and will be the organization’s legacy. Is that what No Labels supporters want? To end up on the same side as The Proud Boys?
No Labels is right about one thing: 2024 is a unique election. For the first time since 1860, a major American party is running against an incumbent president they believe is illegitimate. Democracy itself is on the ballot. This is not the time to indulge in Fantasy Football politics. No Labels should be part of saving democracy, not destroying the American Experiment. That means working for Biden-Harris not because they are perfect but because they are decent Americans who believe in democracy and are in the American tradition. Don’t blame Kamala Harris. Embrace her for the positive change she represents for this country we love. No Labels can help her make history, rather than going down in history as the group that re-elected Donald Trump.
I don’t know if it’s morning in America, exactly, but we can at least see the faint glimmer of dawn on the horizon. Even the relentlessly negative media has started to make note of it — some of them, anyway. We are still seeing headlines by newspapers and cable networks which seem to be determined to temper any positive developments with caveats and forewarnings. But the coverage has shifted a bit in the past couple of weeks which must be a welcome development for the Biden administration.
Take, for instance, the Politico Playbook from Thursday which starts off with this encouraging paragraph: “President JOE BIDEN is having a good week. A really good week, actually.” It goes on to lay out a whole bunch of good economic news, starting with the fact that the inflation number is now down to 3%, the lowest its been since March of 2021 and observing that in Washington and on Wall St., a consensus is building that the economy may have turned the corner. They did have to add that the Fed may do one more round of interest rate hikes anyway, but the betting is that it will be the last one unless something happens to change the trajectory.
Of course they also reported that even as they roll out their “Bidenomics” campaign message, there is still trepidation within the administration about declaring that the crisis has passed because of the Supreme Court’s sabotage of the school loan repayment program and the serious possibility that the MAGA caucus in the House is going to shut down the government again, over some culture war nonsense.If they do it, it will likely result in the Republicans being blamed by the public as they always are but they don’t seem to be able to help themselves.
Even taking all that into account, it’s looking good for the economy. As economist Justin Wolfers told Politico:
“The story of almost every recession in modern American history is something bad happened, and it was something bad we didn’t see coming. What could happen between now and 2024? A shit-ton of bad things. You know what else could happen? Good things.”
The four years of Trumpian chaos and terrifying instability followed by an even more terrifying global pandemic has taken its toll. We’re overdue for some good things.
This week also featured Joe Biden on the world stage with Turkey on Monday ending its year-long blockade of Sweden’s entreé into NATO . He managed to soothe the frayed nerves of Ukrainian president Zelensky and reassure eastern Europe that the US was not faltering in its commitment to its security. Biden gave a stirring speech in Lithuania to a large, enthusiastic crowd that chanted USA!, USA! at the end. He ended up in Helsinki to welcome Finland into the NATO alliance, drawing a very distinct contrast with the infamous Helsinki meeting between former president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin.
So, assuming there isn’t another disaster on the horizon, it would appear that President Biden should be able to make the case that the economy is in much improved shape and American foreign policy has stabilized. The question is, does any of that really matter to his re-election chances?
There has been a very lively debate on that subject of the past couple of years. For instance, “popularism” holds that these things don’t matter all that much in electoral terms and that the Democrats would be better off talking about the political positions they hold that are popular while soft-peddling the ones that aren’t. I’m not sure that precludes bragging about accomplishments but it would certainly indicate that they should focus on the accomplishments that people say they really care about like capping the price of insulin. Others believe that the Party should run on aspirational issues that cater to the base to boost turnout.
More recently, and more to this specific point, there has been a debate over what is called “deliverism” which is the idea that in order to persuade voters that you will improve their lives you have to … well, improve their lives. The authors, David Dayen and Matt Stoller argue in the American Prospect that the reason Democrats aren’t benefiting from the the policies they’ve enacted over the past few administrations is because they weren’t very good policies and they didn’t really do much for people. Others, like Deepak Bhargave, Shahrzad Shams and Harry Hanbury make the case in Democracy Journal believe that voters just aren’t moved by economic policy much at all, mostly because they a ill-informed about what government does and have been conditioned to see politics through a right wing frame. More importantly, their world view today is shaped by “a crisis of what French sociologist Émile Durkheim called “anomie,” or normlessness, arising from the dizzying pace of social, economic, political, and technologicalchange in our times and the weakening of institutions that foster social cohesion.” It’s this, they say, that leads people into the arms of authoritarians like Donald Trump, not economic policy.
I happen to think none of that is particularly relevant to where we are in this moment in American politics. I’m very pleased and frankly surprised at how much the Biden administration has accomplished but I don’t think that’s where people’s minds are even in the midst of economic upheaval. The Republicans have turned politics into a non-stop surreal, anarchic reality show and that’s all people have the bandwidth to consume. Of course they are concerned for their own economic well-being and they are concerned about climate change and education and all the rest. But the Trump train wreck still dominates everything and is going to overwhelm us as the campaign heats up and these criminal indictments suck up what is left of the oxygen.
This means that for this election it’s, once again, all about negative partisanship. The main motivating factor for Democrats is the threat posed by this far right Republican party that’s gleefully rolling back long established rights and granting new ones entitling their own followers to discriminate against anyone with whom they disagree. To the extent there are going to be issues beyond the horrifying prospect of Donald Trump becoming president again, they are all around foundational American ideas about freedom, democracy and personal autonomy being threatened by extremists in the Republican party.
So, while I would certainly argue that Biden should tout his “kitchen table” accomplishments and educate the public about what they mean to them (if only to assuage the pundits who will, as always, insist that he must have a “positive message”) I think Democratic success will turn on the same thing it’s turned on in the last three elections — resistance to the right wing’s precipitous authoritarian turn.
Democrats and Independents may or may not appreciate the good news in the economy or foreign policy. Hopefully they will. But they are going to come out to vote against Donald Trump and the Republican Party out of fear and anger at what they have done and are prepared to do to this country. Those are valid and important reasons and the strong emotions that drive them should not be denigrated. They may be what it takes to save us.
‘The judge said it best in one word: Wow,” tweeted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse this morning.
Michael Ponzer, a senior judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts comments on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ethics stink.
“What has gone wrong with the Supreme Court’s sense of smell?” Ponzer asks in the New York Times. He has had to abide by a written code of conduct since 1984, before any of the sitting justices were on the bench. In those years, he’s had a few complaints filed against him, but so far none found to have merit.
Ponzer’s colleagues know not just to stay inside the ethical lines, but well inside them. But the Roberts court?
The recent descriptions of the behavior of some of our justices and particularly their attempts to defend their conduct have not just raised my eyebrows; they’ve raised the whole top of my head. Lavish, no-cost vacations? Hypertechnical arguments about how a free private airplane flight is a kind of facility? A justice’s spouse prominently involved in advocating on issues before the court without the justice’s recusal? Repeated omissions in mandatory financial disclosure statements brushed under the rug as inadvertent? A justice’s taxpayer-financed staff reportedly helping to promote her books? Private school tuition for a justice’s family member covered by a wealthy benefactor? Wow.
Although the exact numbers fluctuate because of vacancies, the core of our federal judiciary comprises roughly 540 magistrate judges, 670 district judges, 180 appeals court judges and nine Supreme Court justices — fewer than 1,500 men and women in a country of more than 330 million people and 3.8 million square miles. Much depends on this small cohort’s acute sense of smell, its instinctive, uncompromising integrity and its appearance of integrity. If reports are true, some of our justices are, sadly, letting us down.
To me, this feels personal. For the country, it feels ominous. What in the world has happened to the Supreme Court’s nose?
“No one should be too poor to live in one of the richest cities — Chicago — in one of the richest countries — America — at the richest time in the history of the world,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, the opening keynote speaker, told the Netroots Nation 23 conference on Thursday. “There is literally more than enough for everybody. Everybody. No one should lose at the expense of someone else winning.”
“Now, the soul of Chicago was on full display tonight because you see, and you can feel it in the air,” said Johnson, 47, a former public schoolteacher. “This multicultural intergenerational movement that has propelled us into this moment where we don’t have to shrink and we don’t have to hide from our values. We can actually run on our principles and values and win.”
After the speech, Johnson and other officials spent an hour serving food and drinks to several thousand attendees as part of his effort to promote new legislation that would raise pay for tipped workers in the city. Johnson plans to introduce the measure at this month’s City Council meeting.
The service industry has some of the lowest-paid workers in our city. We must change that.
I look forward to bringing all stakeholders to the table so we can work together to raise the sub-minimum wage, which is good for workers, working families, and the future of our city. pic.twitter.com/0Eda7sQhjz
— Mayor Brandon Johnson (@ChicagosMayor) July 14, 2023
Johnson in April won an upset runoff victory over Paul Vallas, the candidate backed by the Chicago Police Union, the Chamber of Commerce, and other establishment Democrats. Vallas ran a traditional tough-on-crime campaign that tried to brand Johnson as a radical out to “defund the police.”
In the final stretch of the campaign, Vallas received endorsements from both Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), a close ally to Obama, and Arne Duncan, Obama’s former secretary of education, who penned an op-ed lauding the candidate’s record as CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Obamaworld was said to be “coalescing” around Vallas. But in the end, their endorsements proved inconsequential.
Johnson garnered his own set of endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), as well as local fixtures such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson. But what ultimately won Johnson the day was the ground game his campaign ran across the city, tapping into the infrastructure that the Chicago Teachers Union and Working Families Party—his two main backers—had established over decades. It was a version of the people power that Obama himself rode to the presidency in 2008, now in the hands of a progressive who beat the Obama machine.
When it came to fundraising, Paul Vallas had Brandon Johnson beat. Days before the April 4 mayoral runoff, Vallas reported contributions of over $19 million, more than half of that coming from 44 individuals or organizations. Johnson clocked in at just over $11 million, largely from unions. But where Johnson had the upper hand, and what ultimately propelled him to an upset victory, was his community outreach — appealing to supportive voters to turn out to the polls.
Johnson’s field team contacted half a million voters in the campaign’s last days. Johnson bested Vallas by 15,000 votes.
A Secret Service probe into who left a small bag of cocaine in the White House earlier this month has concluded without a suspect being identified—reigniting right-wing conspiracy theories about sham probes and Hunter Biden.
“At this time, the Secret Service’s investigation is closed due to a lack of physical evidence,” the Secret Service conceded in a press release on Thursday.
[…]
Outrage ensued from Republican lawmakers, who remain hell-bent on continuing the probe despite the Secret Service’s admission there are no leads left to chase.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) reportedly stormed out of a Secret Service briefing for lawmakers just moments after it began. Outside, he called the probe’s conclusion “bogus” and the investigation a “complete failure.”
“Y’all know you can’t go in [the White House] without giving your Social Security number anyway, and to say that it’s just some weekend visitor, that’s bogus,” Burchett said. “Nobody’s buying that at all.”
The unfounded finger-pointing at Hunter Biden was only stoked when White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre snapped at a New York Post reporter who asked if she could say “once and for all” the drugs didn’t come from a Biden family member.
“They [the Biden family] were not here on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, so to ask that question is incredibly irresponsible,” Jean-Pierre replied.
On other occasions, Jean-Pierre deflected questions about the cocaine—promising a proper probe but saying little more.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) insinuated on Thursday that the lack of answers may be part of a cover-up by the Biden administration, though she didn’t mention the president’s son by name.
“Every time there’s something strange going on with President Biden or his family, or anything regarding his administration or the White House, no one can ever seem to find an answer,” Mace said. “This is one of the most secure locations in the world, some of the best law enforcement officers in the world, and they don’t have any answers.”
Fox News' Julie Banderas: "We’re just asking questions… all the major broadcast networks last night led with the cocaine found at the White House. Not one broadcast mentioned the name Hunter Biden. Now, we’re not saying it is Hunter Biden’s. We’re calling it for what it is!" pic.twitter.com/cxZE2oRV8n
The Hunter Biden conspiracy hasn’t been limited to lawmakers.
Last week, Fox News anchor Julie Banderas stopped short of outright accusing Hunter Biden, instead claiming to be “just asking questions” about whether the coke belonged to him.
When told Hunter Biden wasn’t among the hundreds and hundreds of people who would have been in the White House in the days preceding the discovery, she insisted, “[The Bidens] were there before it was discovered and after. Hunter Biden was, in fact, at Camp David two weekends in a row with his father. These are legitimate concerns of the American public.”
The Secret Service has narrowed down 500 people as the potential source of cocaine in the White House.
But they are ending the investigation tomorrow without administering drug tests to these individuals. A total failure.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) July 13, 2023
In an impromptu press conference Thursday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) demanded the Secret Service order drug tests for hundreds of people who visited or work in the White House to see if any results returned positive for cocaine.
“It makes no sense to me whatsoever why they would not follow through on one simple task, and that’s to drug test a list of 500 people that they have that are potential suspects for this,” Greene said. “This was a failure of this investigation.”
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) said she was told that the cocaine was found in the 15th of 182 lockers used by White House visitors to store their devices. The cubby in question was unlocked and missing a key, she said.
Unlike Greene, Boebert said she’s fine with the Secret Service choosing to not drug test White House visitors, adding that it would have been “a very unusual thing to drug screen random citizens,” the Post reported.
Lol. I wouldn’t put it past a Secret Service Trumper planting the thing. I know that sounds crazy but then I wouldn’t have thought some members of the SS would join Trump’s political operation and help him try to stage a coup so… anything’s possible.
My personal favorite right wing screech on this is that it’s Jill Biden who is doing rails in the Oval. Seriously:
This is how lowlife no-class scum behaves. Mollie Hemingway is editor in chief of The Federalist and a Fox News contributor — the perfect resume for a person who would write a disgusting bottom-feeder tweet like this. @MZHemingwaypic.twitter.com/vTIt1WtZ7k
Fran Drescher, President of SAG-AFTRA, in her stunning strike announcement: “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.” pic.twitter.com/HO8OPzmi9m
Michael Knowles tag line on Twitter is “I am completely opposed to the error of the modernists….”
That is from the biggest podcast in the nation, The Daily Wire. And its raison d’etre is right wing theocracy. I would argue that it’s not science that’s caused despair and “suicidality” in the modern world — it’s people like him. But that’s just me. I’m not a scientist.
In the days since Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads app premiered, a number of rather predictable media storylines and narratives have dominated the news cycles around the latest would-be Twitter replacement. One focuses on the sheer power of Zuckerberg’s Meta empire—Threads is now the fastest-growing app in history. Zuckerberg says his new platform hit 100 million sign-ups in less than a week. Of course, many of those users were already on other Zuckerberg digital properties: Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.
A related narrative argues that this early but apparent success is a much-needed win for Zuckerberg, who squandered billions trying to convince people to join his online cartoon world, the metaverse. There’s also a more esotericstoryline about how the success of Threads might affect Zuckerberg’s looming antitrust battles. And yet somehow, the most predictable narrative is the right’s immediate cries that Threads is censoring their “free speech.”
This argument unfolded along exhaustingly familiar lines with right-wing figures regurgitating the same clichés and grievances they invoke every time a social media platform doesn’t cater to their ideological whims. On the day after Threads went live, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that “Threads will be the same Marxist style social media experience that Zuckerberg usually offers.” Less than a week after the app launched, one Fox News guest declared that the supposed censorship on Threads is “absolutely straight out of Orwell’s 1984.”
The most cited example of this supposed censorship—and the one MTG referenced in her tweet—was a warning that appeared for Threads users attempting to follow Donald Trump Jr. Apparently, if you tried to follow the former president’s son on Threads, a message popped up informing you that the account has “repeatedly posted false information.” This brief interlude into rationality concluded predictably. Trump Jr. posted screenshots and complained on Twitter. A Meta spokesperson rushed to assure him that the misinformation label was an error which was being removed.
Never mind that Donald Trump Jr. has repeatedly posted false information. It’s one of his rhetorical hallmarks. His Twitter account was banned in 2020 after he endorsed a conspiracy-minded doctor’s video claiming Hydroxychloroquine cures Covid-19. In 2019, he posted and then deleted a tweet questioning whether Kamala Harris was an “American Black.” On Instagram this year, he posted a meme nodding to the vile conspiracy theory that the attack on Paul Pelosi was actually a gay lovers’ quarrel. One study that analyzed tens of millions of Facebook interactions found that Donald Trump Jr. was one of the main “superspreaders” of election misinformation on Zuckerberg’s flagship property.
So naturally, Meta apologized and removed the warning. Oy vey…
And yet it was utterly unsurprising that Meta scrambled to assure Trump the younger that he can still spread all the misinformation he wants on the company’s new platform without consequences. For years, Zuckerberg and his enterprises have bent over backward to placate conservatives and court right-wing audiences. In the run-up to the 2020 election, he held face-to-face meetings with conservative heavyweights like Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Lindsey Graham. He rarely grants media interviews but last year he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast—one of the few media empires that enjoys a young, right-wing audience. The top publishers on Facebook are consistently right-wing figures and outlets like Shapiro, The Daily Caller, and Dan Bongino. Donald Trump has repeatedlysaid that Zuckerberg “used to come to the White House and kiss my ass.”
But none of Zuckerberg’s attempts to placate the right have ever actually worked. He may have won over the larger figures of the movement, people like Ben Shapiro—Shapiro’s Daily Wire’s coverage of Zuckerberg has been noticeably positive as of late—but the typical Republican voter is more likely to sound more like Marjorie Taylor Greene, accusing Zuckerberg of buzzword evils like peddling “Marxist style social media experiences.”
It’s hard to imagine how a social media experience might be legitimately characterized as “Marxist” but valid characterizations went out the window when outrage became the Republican base’s driving force. In fact, one reason Zuckerberg’s own algorithms tend to amplify right-wing content is that outrageous buzzwords drive engagement. When asked why right-wing content has such an advantage on Facebook, one executive told Politico, “People respond to engaging emotion much more than they do to, you know, dry coverage.”
Algorithms rewarding posts that engage with users’ emotions may be a marvelous idea when feeds are stacked with videos of dogs skidding across linoleum kitchen floors. But that same process is deleterious when it comes to news (and “news”) in our current political environment. Things go off the rails when the algorithm encourages emotional engagement in the political sphere—people reach for absurd emotional tricks like accusing their political opponents of pedophilia. And when users share avalanches of emotionally charged election fraud misinformation on Facebook, the more motivated among them might do things like storm the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overthrow American democracy.
But outrage for the sake of outrage itself is still the most powerful weapon for the exact sort of right-wing figures rushing to accuse Threads of censoring their “free speech.” Chaya Raichik, who runs the anti-LGBT account LibsOfTikTok, accused Zuckerberg of censorship after Threads removed her post saying that “non-binary isn’t real.” Again, a Meta spokesperson assured Fox Business that Raichik’s bigoted post is still live on Threads. But of course posting “non-binary isn’t real” is designed to spark emotional outrage. It’s hateful bumper sticker rhetoric and feels suspiciously like a post that was aimed to run afoul of Threads’ content moderation.
Raichik is one of a number of previously fringe-right Twitter figures who have become cozy with Elon Musk since the billionaire took over that social media platform and showed an almost impressive determination to run it into the ground. Spam accounts and misinformation are now so commonplace on Twitter that the site is basically unusable. But to the right-wing user, Elon Musk is a free speech “absolutist,” as he puts it (because, according to this right-wing ideology, private companies—not just the government—are subject to the First Amendment). And yet that characterization of Musk sinks under cursory examination: His iteration of Twitter has removed content critical of autocrats like Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Narendra Modi in India at the behest of those governments.
I’m on Threads but it has limited utility for me because it doesn’t have a web ap and I’m on my laptop most of the time. I don’t like to have to move back and forth to my phone and It’s a lot of trouble forwarding the links I want to read on the web. Whatever. It still has growing pains and I’m willing to use it for my work if that’s where it ends up. For now I’m on all of the twitter alternatives but still spend more time on twitter — reluctantly.
But the idea that Meta, of all companies, was going to be our big savior has always been laughable. All you have to do is look at what is successful on Facebook to see the problem. And the problem with it is a politics online problem generally, one which I ran into years ago when I had comments on this very blog. When right wing assholes invade it destroys the vibe and eventually the community. That’s the point. It’s just how it works. If you value free speech you instinctively don’t want to censor people for ideas but eventually you realize that they are just trolls trying to destroy what you’re doing.
Meta has made it clear that they don’t want to get into anything controversial which means the assholes win. And Elon is a right wing asshole himself. All the others just don’t have the reach and scale (at least not yet) to provide the global service that twitter did. So here we are.
“The idea that he’s entitled to this, especially, you know, we had the Biden-Trump in 2020 and Biden’s president. The idea that he’s just entitled after that doesn’t make any sense.”
What a dolt. Until; he’s ready to stand up like an adult and admit that the election wasn’t stolen and the The Big Lie is a big lie, then most Republicans still believe he IS entitled to the nomination because the presidency was stolen from him. This mealy mouthed “… and Biden’s president” instead of “and Biden won” plaintive wail is just weak, weak, weak.
