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What about the Senate crazies?

Published by digby on July 12, 2023

There have always been eccentric, senile and downright simple-minded members of congress. That’s democracy in action. But there is an unusually high number of them these days and they are all right wing Republicans.

We’re accustomed to the House MAGA chaos agents’ preposterous escapades. Like this, for instance:

It’s hard to know if Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene still doesn’t understand how the government works or how the world works but she does have a way of getting attention. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy couldn’t be more happy with her. He told Axios, “I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the best members we have, I think she’s the one of the most conservative members and one of the strongest legislators. I support Marjorie Greene very strongly.” (That was in response to a question about her ouster from the Freedom Caucus which is reportedly because she can’t be trusted not to share their strategies with McCarthy.)

The House has always been the more fractious of the two houses of congress, more partisan and subject to volatility. The idea was that the Senate with its longer terms and larger constituencies would be the “saucer that cools the tea.” With its slower processes and the advantage of not having to run for re-election constantly it was assumed that the Senators could be more deliberate in their actions and temper any radical shifts in policy that would be dangerously destabilizing.

I’m not sure that’s ever been entirely true — there have always been eccentric or radical Senators but this latest crop of Republicans seems to be intent upon giving the House a run for the crazy money. This week’s MAGA Senate Star is Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the former college football coach who replaced Democrat Doug Jones in 2020. He doesn’t seem to know a whole lot about how the congress works in any case but he certainly hasn’t signed on to any role as a “cooling” agent.

Despite his very brief time in politics he has not taken the opportunity to keep his head down and learn the ropes in the first couple of years, as most novice Senators do. He has, presumably at the prodding of a far right ideological staff, thrown a monkey wrench into the US Military. As the NY Times put it, Tuberville is single handedly obatructing the “smooth transfer of power at the highest echelons of the armed forces, including in the ranks of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” If that isn’t “Ultra-MAGA” I don’t know what is.

Tuberville is objecting to military policy that allows time off and travel reimbursement to members of the military who must go out of state to receive abortion care now that the Supreme Court overturned Roe Vs wade and many states with military installations have pretty much banned it. The policy does not pay for abortions but Tuberville apparently insists that the military force its personnel to go AWOL if they need one. (I would imagine he is in favor of throwing anyone who does that into the brig as well.) In order to force the military to do his bidding, he is holding up the promotions of all officers and blocking the confirmations of successors to the Joint Chiefs of Staff who are scheduled to depart over the next few months. Just this week the Marine Commandant retired and no one has been confirmed to take his place.

Back in May, Tuberville told a local news reporter that he calls white nationalists “Americans” and elaborated by saying that he considers a white nationalist a Trump Republican because “that’s what we’re called all the time.” He seemed to be completely clueless about what he was admitting. His staff tried to walk all that back but they apparently forgot to tell the boss because he said it again on TV this week.

After the media went into a frenzy on Tuesday, he did finally relent and admit that that white nationalism is racist but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t believe that.

Like his brethren in the House Freedom caucus, Tommy Tuberville is a MAGA performance artist and he put on quite a show. Whether he’s dim or whether he’s calculated it really doesn’t matter.

But he’s hardly alone. The Senate GOP caucus has quite a few showboaters playing for the right wing media. The granddaddy, of course, Is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who paved the way a decade ago when he strategized with the Tea Party caucus in the House to help shut down the government during budget negotiations with the Obama administration. He’s still at it, joined by another old timer, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, who’s given Oscar worthy performances in the last few years defending Donald Trump.

Third term Sen. Ron Johnson has also made a name for himself pushing snake oil cures for COVID among other things and just this week said that while he feels for the families of 9/11, he loves golf even more. He is always good for a laugh:

And then we have Rand Paul, R-Ky., who may be the most obnoxious of all:

I’ll say one thing for these men. They aren’t subtle.

A couple of newbies deserve to be mentioned as well because I think they are going to be the heart and soul of the Senate MAGA caucus. The first is the newly elected J.D. Vance of Ohio who has hit the ground running by responding to Trump’s indictment on 37 federal charges by vowing to put a hold on all DOJ nominees. He also took it upon himself to pen a letter to several colleges issuing a demand that they comply with the recent Supreme Court ruling outlawing Affirmative Action or there would be hell to pay.

And then there is the freshman Sen. from Oklahoma,  Markwayne Mullin, an election denier and former cage fighter  who told a labor leader “shut your mouth” during a testy hearing and proclaimed “I don’t want reality” during a committee meeting about teaching children about race. He suggested that they teach “Jesus loves the little children” instead. And then this happened:

Whatever pretensions the Senate may have once had as the more staid house of congress where the business of government gets done among sober statesmen they are gone now. More and more GOP Senators are unserious people putting on a show to entertain their base and keep the Fox News hits coming. Marjorie Taylor Greene would feel right at home among them.

Salon

Water, water everywhere

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 12, 2023

Crash on the levee, momma

What’s it gonna take for governments to take climate change seriously? Weren’t we just here the other day?

CNN:

Intense rainstorms inundating the Northeast are turning streets into rivers, forcing evacuations and have prompted officials in Vermont’s capital, Montpelier, to close the downtown area.

“Make no mistake, the devastation and flooding we’re experiencing across Vermont is historic and catastrophic,” Gov. Phil Scott told reporters Tuesday.

Floodwater continues to rise in some places, the governor said, “and have surpassed levels seen during Tropical Storm Irene,” he added. Irene hit the US as a hurricane in August 2011 and left entire communities submerged, killing more than 40 people in several Eastern states.

A bit south of Montpelier on Sunday, things were dicey in the Hudson Valley:

We easily brush off deadly flooding in foreign countries, even in Appalachia, dammit. But you know how this works. Until it happens to you….

🎵He’s a ma-ni-ac, ma-ni-ac….

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 12, 2023

In your head

Wrap a police tape perimeter around Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. His anti-woke mania is a crime scene.

Greg Sargent explains:

In recent weeks, plaintiffs who are suing to invalidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act” have been confronting its defenders with a seemingly loaded question: Would the law, which restricts school discussion of race, prohibit a public university professor from endorsing affirmative action in a classroom setting?

Surprisingly, lawyers defending the DeSantis administration just answered this question with a qualified “yes.” Which exposes a core truth about his anti-woke directives: They really do constitute efforts at state censorship, not just of concepts he likes to call “woke indoctrination” but also of viewpoints that are contested yet remain squarely within mainstream academic discourse.

A provision in the law prohibits instruction that “espouses” or “promotes” certain ideas. Affirmative action, for instance:

The state’s filing essentially agrees that this provision could potentially ban public agreement with affirmative action. It reiterates the state’s argument that public university professors are state employees, giving the state broad control over what they teach. And it says this:

If by “affirmative action,” plaintiffs mean … “discriminating against” a person “by virtue of his or her race … to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion”… then yes, the state may prohibit its educators from endorsing racial discrimination while speaking on behalf of the state, in a state classroom, and in return for a state paycheck.

That has the air of a snide joke, and the reasoning is qualified — if affirmative action is “discrimination” in pursuit of DEI, then endorsing it could be prohibited. But nonetheless, it’s a significant admission. It suggests that in certain scenarios, the state actually could determine that a professor’s agreement with affirmative action constitutes unlawfully espousing discrimination, notes Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute.

DeSantis has already fielded election police. They’ve come up empty, says the Brennan Center, in uncovering any “shadowy network of deep state operatives” working to unbdermine elections. The few cases of citizens caught voting after being approved to do so have been thrown out. No matter. Increase their funding 20 percent.

What DeSantis’ Florida needs now are Thought Police. Maybe re-education camps.

Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist who tracks state-level censorship efforts, points out that under the state’s own interpretation of the Stop Woke Act, professors would plainly not have to worry about expressing opposition to affirmative action, but at a minimum would have to be cautious about supporting it.

How are Floridians putting up with this bozo?

How Trump Failed

Published by digby on July 11, 2023

He only cared about himself while thousands were dying

Take the time to watch that and remind yourself of Trump’s most grotesque failure. I can’t believe it’s going down the memory hole but at least there is this documentation — Trump running his mouth on tape — that proves his horrifying misconduct.

MyKevin is twisting himself into a pretzel

Published by digby on July 11, 2023

Can he keep it together or are we in for another round of crazy?

I’m betting on crazy:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is working furiously to prevent another House floor takeover by his hardest-right conservatives as the GOP prepares to tackle some of the year’s biggest bills.

With the House back for a final stretch before its August recess, McCarthy on Tuesday afternoon summoned a group of leaders from multiple corners of his conference to shape a strategy for staving off further right-wing revolts — which his team can’t afford this summer. Underscoring the urgency of their task, the group of GOP lawmakers met in the shadow of what could become a new right-flank rebellion over the rule for debating a must-pass Pentagon policy bill.

“The speaker has called these meetings so we can get things hopefully worked out before it blows up on the floor, so there’s no surprises,” said Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, one of the 11 Republicans who held up the floor last month during an ongoing rift with leadership.

But Burchett said he remained “ticked off” about a few other things, namely party leaders’ recent treatment of his proposed amendments to that Pentagon policy bill.

And he wasn’t the only hard-right Republican who left less than satisfied after Tuesday’s meeting — which party leaders described to members as the first of several procedure-focused discussions.

“They’ve got the problem of figuring out how to put Humpty Dumpty back together. I’m perfectly willing to cooperate. But we’ve demonstrated we can get to yes, that’s not the problem,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), another of the 11 conservatives who defied leadership on the party’s own agenda in June.

“I think sitting around in rooms, frankly, and for people to repeat things … [is] probably not gonna get the job done,” Bishop added. “I think they got to figure out another path.”

According to two attendees at Tuesday’s meeting, McCarthy’s general message was more philosophical about the GOP’s need for unity, versus prescribing a specific course of action for upcoming bills. The California Republican did signal his preference on one thing: Coming to agreement on funding the government before the current shutdown deadline of Sept. 30.

Republican Study Chair Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) summed up the message from leadership as: “Our goal is not to do a CR” — referring to a continuing resolution, the sort of stopgap spending bill that’s currently seen as inevitable across Capitol Hill.

But Republicans also acknowledged that they are quickly running out of time to avoid such an outcome — they would need to thread a veritable bucket of needles on spending decisions in just six weeks of session. The party is also trying to navigate growing demands from the right flank, many of whom attended Tuesday night’s confab.

In what could prove a bad omen, even McCarthy himself seemed to acknowledge Tuesday that his party’s goal of passing the Pentagon policy measure this week could slip.

“I never put it into this week,” he told reporters. “I was always very confident we’d get it done.”

The speaker and his leadership team have spent weeks working with GOP members and their Democratic counterparts to find a compromise bill that can clear the House with conservative votes — but also preserve the bipartisan support that the legislation has almost always enjoyed on the floor.

It’s not clear whether that compromise can materialize by Friday.

“I do worry about us. I worry about what we’re gonna do. Because we’re so fractured in so many different directions,” said Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), who attended the meeting.

Republicans in disarray … imagine that.

I suspect they will end up shutting down the government. They can’t help themselves. We’ll see how that serves them in an election year.

About that weaponization

Published by digby on July 11, 2023

“He was always telling me that we need to use the FBI and IRS to go after people,” Kelly told the Times last year, adding that “it was constant and obsessive and is just what he’s claiming is being done to him now.”

This lawsuit by Lisa Page and Peter Strzok is focusing attention once again on Trump’s abuse of power. Former Chief of Staff John Kelly testified that he wanted him to use the IRS to go after them, his political enemies. His abuses were extensive and a lot of it was right out in the open. I’m not talking about the rank corruption — running his business out of the White House, signing hush money checks in the oval office, accepting unlimited graft and access in the form of both foreign and domestic money at his hotels and resorts. Nobody seems to care about that at all. I’m talking about the abuse of his power as president.

Aaron Blake has a short, incomplete, list:

Trump also wanted the IRS to investigate former FBI director James B. Comey and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, along with Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and Trump’s presidential challenger, and other perceived foes, Kelly said last year. Comey and McCabe were audited, the odds of which happening randomly is infinitesimal. (An inspector general report last year found no connection between Trump and the audits, but raised concerns that warranted further investigation.)

Trump publicly and repeatedly pushed for McCabe’s firing before McCabe was due to receive full retirement benefits, ultimately succeeding mere hours before that would have taken place.

Trump told his White House counsel that he wanted to order probes of Clinton and Comey, per the Times. (His press secretary in late 2017 also said prosecuting Comey was “something that certainly should be looked at” at the Justice Department.)

Trump said publicly in late 2020 that former president Barack Obama and former vice president Joe Biden should be indicted and indicated he had made such a case to his attorney general, William P. Barr.

He said in 2019 that it would be “appropriate” for him to ask for an investigation of Biden.

He withheld security assistance from Ukraine while seeking to have the country say it was opening an investigation involving Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, releasing the aid only when the situation became public. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney effectively confirmed this was the arrangement before backing off those comments. Trump was impeached for this, and many Republicans acknowledged it was at least improper. A key figure — European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland — indicated it was probably illegal.

A Justice Department office was tasked with investigating former secretary of state John F. Kerry in 2018, two days after Trump tweeted about Kerry’s “possibly illegal” activities and the same day Trump said Kerry “should be prosecuted,” according to former U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman’s book.

A Trump political appointee in 2018 asked Berman to prosecute a prominent Democratic lawyer, Gregory Craig, and to do so before the midterms, Berman also said. (When Berman declined, it was prosecuted in Washington, where the jury acquitted Craig of lying to the Justice Department.)

Berman recalled several other examples of political influence seeping into the Justice Department. “Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Berman wrote, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”

Trump repeatedly applied public pressure on the Justice Department to take it easy on his allies, prompting Barr to remark that Trump’s comments “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

This is a necessarily incomplete list. It doesn’t include, for example, Trump’s pardoning of political allies at a historic rate. This was his prerogative as president, but it certainly plays into the idea that Trump intended to wield the government for political benefit.

\

The sheer gall of these Republicans to spend all this time and money investigating Joe Biden and his alleged “weaponization” of the government against poor little Donnie Trump who never did anything wrong in his whole virtuous life is almost too much to bear. They just do their thing and the Democrats have to react and on and on it goes.

“They’re trying to silence our witnesses”

Published by digby on July 11, 2023

Yep, it’s the deep state

You knew the Republicans were going to say this. I’m surprised it took so long. But the fact that he was indicted before the GOP took over the House makes this absurd. And it makes the House Majority MAGAs look like gullible idiots once again.

*Sigh*. Philip Bump at the Washington Post. “Anyone offering criticism of President Biden instantly becomes credible on the right”:

The Justice Department on Monday announced that it had unsealed an indictment against Gal Luft, a director at a think tank in the Washington area. According to federal prosecutors, he is also someone who violated Iranian sanctions, trafficked weapons and aided the Chinese government without registering as a foreign agent.

The specific allegations included in the indictment were not known before Monday, but the fact that Luft had been indicted was. He was arrested in Cyprus in February, which Luft immediately suggested was a response to his having information incriminating President Biden and members of his family. Last week, the New York Post published excerpts of a recorded message from Luft, who skipped bail in April, in which Luft discussed specific elements of the indictment.

In fact, you may have heard about Luft before the announcement on Monday. His insistence that he was being targeted by the Biden administration was immediately embraced by conservative media and Republican legislators. When he skipped bail, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) lamented to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that he had gone “missing,” appearing to conflate Luft with an informant from whom Republicans had spun out a separate allegation against Biden, implying that something nefarious had befallen him.

This has been the pattern on the right for months. Anyone making any allegation against Biden and/or his family is accepted as inherently credible, however shaky the evidence or, as in the case of Luft, however obvious the conflict of interest. Not only are anti-Biden claims taken at face value, any skepticism about those allegations or, again as in the case of Luft, external indicators of unreliability are themselves folded into a voluminous conspiracy theory.

The timeline is important. It appears, both from comments by Luft in the video reported by the New York Post and in looking at court records, the indictment was handed down last fall. (Update: It occurred on Nov. 1, as Luft indicated in the video reported by the New York Post.) As mentioned, his initial arrest was in February. It is not clear why the indictment was unsealed now, but it is not the case that the charges are new. In other words, the understood order of events suggests not that he was charged because he made public allegations but, instead, that he made public allegations after he had been charged.

Yet Comer and at least one colleague on House Oversight insisted the indictment was necessarily political. “I don’t trust the DOJ or the FBI. They are trying to silence our witnesses,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said on Fox News, again to Maria Bartiromo, who has been energetically promoting the Republican allegations. “This is a way to do that.”

Again, he appears to have become a desired witness after his indictment. Speaking to Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night, however, Comer made a similar argument as Mace had. “The timing is always coincidental, according to the Democrats and the Department of Justice,” Comer scoffed.

The implication for viewers, of course, is that it was not a coincidence at all, but it is not clear what the implied noncoincidence is. Nothing has obviously changed about the status of Luft and, if the committee planned to take his testimony previously despite his fugitive status, it still can. All that has changed is that we are hearing the government’s arguments against Luft from the government, instead of from Luft.

Luft claims he spoke with the FBI in 2019 about his interactions with the Bidens, specifically Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the president’s brother James. The discussion centered on the other Bidens’ work with CEFC China Energy, which The Washington Post detailed in March 2022. In the video obtained by the New York Post, he does not appear to make allegations about Joe Biden receiving any money from foreign interests, an unproven claim from Comer and other Republicans that remains unsubstantiated.

Last week, in response to the New York Post article, Comer appeared on Newsmax. Luft is “very credible,” he insisted at the time, “and the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant that was missing, they should feel like fools right now. This is their worst nightmare, because, again, this is a credible witness that the FBI flew all the way to Brussels to interview and sent several agents to interview.”

Again, Comer asserted the credibility of Luft after it was known that Luft had been arrested and after the New York Post reported on elements of the charges that Luft had described. “We want to know why the FBI has never made public this interview” with Luft in 2019, Comer said. “Our sources in the FBI, the ones that Senator Grassley has worked closely with, say they did nothing. They never investigated any of this. They turned a complete blind eye.”

Hunter Biden agreed to a plea deal with the federal government last month for failing to report millions in dollars of income. In the video obtained by the New York Post, Luft compared his facing charges for failing to register as a foreign agent with what he alleges Hunter and James Biden did on behalf of foreign companies. Comer and Mace made the same argument in their Fox News interviews after his indictment. Incidentally, speaking to Fox News in late 2019, Luft suggested that Hunter Biden’s engagement with Chinese companies was par for the course.

The pattern here is not that government investigators are seeking to throw roadblocks in Comer’s path. Instead, it is that Comer and others on the right keep building paths into quicksand, and then have to pretend they are not sinking. You might recall the allegation raised two months ago that Joe and Hunter Biden had received a bribe from a Ukrainian executive.

That allegation stems from an interview the FBI conducted with an informant who spoke to the executive. The person believed to be that executive, however, previously denied to others that he had any contact with the Bidens. There is no other evidence of any bribe, including in the financial records obtained by House Oversight. Yet the idea that this bribe occurred is treated as a matter of fact by many on the right.

There is also the release of purported 2017 WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden in which he suggests he is sitting with his father as he pressures Chinese partners. This, too, has been elevated as proven fact despite 1) there being no evidence Joe Biden was in the room but plenty of reason for Hunter Biden, indisputably adept at leveraging his last name, to suggest that he was and 2) the public presentations of the exchange including apparent summaries of the messages instead of documented transcripts. Again, though, this idea that Joe Biden was sitting there nodding along is now accepted as a verified fact.

Even though there is still no evidence that the now-president received a dime. “The president of the United States and his family has taken millions of dollars from a company that’s 100 percent wholly owned by the Chinese Communist Party,” Comer said on Newsmax during his conversation about Luft, though he has no evidence of that first, most damning allegation.

The Newsmax host did not challenge him on it. Instead, he disparaged members of the media skeptical about the allegations as “pitiful” and “desperate shills” who are helping Biden “cover up this very obvious atrocity.” When this is the standard of scrutiny your allies apply, it is little wonder that a fugitive accused of violating sanctions and aiding the Chinese government, but who is also willing to suggest that the Biden administration is out to get him, gets to be hailed as a bold truth teller.

They throw everything at the wall in hopes that something sticks. And the endless repetition is designed to wear down the opposition until they just give up.

That may have worked in the past before they all joined a cult that worships a sociopathic would-be fascist — Democrats in those days might vote for a Republican just to stop the noise. But Trump has changed that. It’s hand to hand combat now. And it’s exhausting.

“It, at some point, it must explode. It must absolutely explode.”

Published by digby on July 11, 2023

That’s Trump talking about the country

Excerpts from Trump’s softball interview with the Nevada Globe:

TNG: What do you think that they would be saying to you now as you’re going through another campaign and this legal persecution, if you will?

President Trump:

It is persecution. It is. I call it election interference, more than anything else.

These are terrible people, disgusting people.

My father would be angry at these people. My mother would be– she’d feel a little remorse for me, because, you know, it’s very unfair.

It’s a total…this witch hunt has been going on from the beginning–from the time I came down the escalator, and it has been proven to all be false.

Everything has been proven to be false.

If you look, every single thing that they’ve done, from Russia, Russia, Russia…it has all turned out to be a hoax.

That’s what Democrats are good at is just these hoaxes.

They’re not good at policy. They’re not good at, frankly, many things.

All Democrats do is disinformation and hoaxes.

But, I think that it has been an amazing period of time.

We had an amazing presidency.

We’re leading in the polls by a lot, tremendously. We’re way up above everybody, including Biden.

But with the Republicans–we are way up over, I call him Sanctimonious—because I got him elected. But, he’s doing poorly. I don’t think he’ll do well because he has got no personality and we’re doing great.

We’ll see what happens. I think we have a really very good chance of winning it and bringing the country back by making America great again.

We were energy independent. We had tax cuts, we had regulation cuts at a level that never seen before.

We had no wars. I didn’t start wars, but I finished wars. We beat Isis.

Everything we did worked out incredibly well, and we had to do it through the guise of these witch hunts all the time. Constantly,

Adam Schiff… Shifty Shiff…and all of these people that are sick. They’re psychos.

It was an amazing period of time, and I think the reason we’re doing well now is they see how badly it is and how bad it was.

There’s more spirit now.

I got more votes than any sitting president in history in 2020, and there’s more spirit now than there was in 2016 or in 2020. I think a lot of that is because of the fact that they see how bad, just how bad they’re doing.

They’re destroying our country.

Waaaaah!

TNG: So with the indictments, we actually saw your polling numbers go up. How do you explain that phenomenon?

President Trump:

Because people are very smart. The public is actually very smart and they’ve studied it, and they saw it’s a hoax.

It’s all a big hoax.

Biden has boxes all over. Nobody does anything about it.

I come under the Presidential Records Act which allows me… it’s perfect for explaining exactly what this is all about. It gives the full authority and power to the President.

Biden doesn’t come under that act because he wasn’t the president when he took all of these documents. But I was, and they don’t mention that. The fake news doesn’t cover it.  But the people understand it. You’ve heard me speak about it. The people understand it.

I come under the Presidential Records Act which isn’t criminal, nothing.

It’s not criminal and everything I did was absolutely fine. But, it’s a very important, very important distinction when you look…when you look at the fact that one person is targeted, and the other person gets away with murder.

Look at all the money that Biden has stolen from China.

He takes money.

He take bribes.

Call it whatever you want.

But, we have a compromised president.

They paid him millions and millions of dollars through Hunter.

And, Ukraine. Money comes in, and from other countries money comes in–it comes pouring in, and the fake news doesn’t want to even cover it.

I think the Republican congress is doing a great job. Jamie Comer is doing great. Jim Jordan is doing great.

But, the fake news doesn’t want to cover it. And, yet, this is the biggest story probably in the history of our country.

This is 100 times bigger than Watergate, but they don’t want to cover it, because they want to shield the Democrat.

And, I think it’s really showing how sick the press is. It’s sick, it’s corrupt. It’s as corrupt as anything I’ve ever seen. And it’s not only what they talk about, it’s what they don’t talk about.

They won’t talk about things, and that came out with the judge’s opinion the other day where he said you couldn’t talk through Facebook and Twitter and all of these different places because you’re giving them false information…the FBI, the DOJ, et cetera, the government, the Democrats.

So it’s big stuff. I mean, it’s big stuff.

It, at some point, it must explode. It must absolutely explode.

I wonder what he’s talking about? Hmmmmm?

The following is all lies. Of course:

TNG: In the decision, the judge referred to the government as the “Ministry of Truth” in reference to Orwell’s 1984, and with that, we now know that there was election interference via massive censorship during the 2020 election cycle. Now that the judge has rendered this decision, how do you think this is going to impact the 2024 election?

President Trump:

I think it impacts it greatly because people realize…look, you had True The Vote where they found hundreds of thousands of votes. They stuffed it, right? Catherine Englebrecht. She is a fantastic woman.

They stuffed the ballot boxes.

We have it on tape and people don’t want to talk about it.

You have so many other things, but now you have a judge who made a statement, it’s a very powerful statement. Brilliant judge, brilliant man, highly respected.

But even before that, you had the 51 intelligence officers saying that it was Russian disinformation, and they knew it wasn’t.

And, even before that you had Twitter, Facebook and you had FBI Twitter.

The FBI Twitter thing was unbelievable.

The FBI Facebook and the DOJ Facebook, all of these scandals, and the pollster said it made a 17 point difference. 17 points… and just with a quarter of a point…

Look, the election was rigged. It was a rigged election.

We have no borders in our country and we have rigged elections. You can’t have a country like that.

It’s one of the reasons I am running and I’m doing it, and I think it’s one of the reasons we’re doing so well.

People see what happened, but this, the judge’s decision, the recent judge’s decision, from two days ago, was amazing.

He goes on to say that he had the greatest government the world has ever seen with the country being the richest and most successful it’s ever been under his fantastic policies which only he can produce. Or something to that effect.

This brief litany of his massive achievements and complaints about Nevada being “disgraceful state” because he won it both times and they cheated him out of it and that was it. It’s truly all he wants to talk about. And from the sound of it, the right wing press is happy to indulge him.

It’s going to be a long 16 months listening to this extended whine. Don’t his people ever get tired of hearing it? Doesn’t it sound childish and … weak?

It’s so unlike him

Published by digby on July 11, 2023

Next time he’ll get ‘er done:

Donald Trump wanted to “tap the phones” of White House aides who he suspected of leaking information, according to bombshell claims made by a former Trump administration official.

Miles Taylor, who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s chief of staff under Mr Trump, has claimed in his new book Blowback that the then-president floated the idea “to pursue leakers by tapping phones” at some point in 2018.

The idea was quickly shut down by then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly who warned Mr Trump he would be breaking the law.

Mr Kelly “quickly nixed the suggestion, knowing it would be illegal,” Mr Taylor writes in the book excerpt, obtained by Axios.

I suspect that Chief of Staff Kash Patel won;t be quite so squeamish.

If it’s Trump, it’s got to be bullshit

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 11, 2023

Delay, delay, delay

Mentor Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump well. Basic Rules for the Unscrupulous for defeating all enemies, according to one documentary: “Deflect and distract, never give in, never admit fault, lie and attack, lie and attack, publicity no matter what, win no matter what, all underpinned by a deep, prove-me-wrong belief in the power of chaos and fear.”

Delay, delay, delay is not in there explicitly. Perhaps it is a Trumpian riff on deflect and distract. But it is by now a familiar Trump tactic. Run out the clock or else bleed out an opponent’s funds for fighting. Hard to do the latter when the opponent is the federal government. So delay, it is.

Thus (Politico):

Donald Trump on Monday called for a lengthy delay before he goes to trial for allegedly hoarding military secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate, contending that proceeding while he remains a candidate for president would make it virtually impossible to seat an impartial jury.

“Proceeding to trial during the pendency of a Presidential election cycle wherein opposing candidates are effectively (if not literally) directly adverse to one another in this action will create extraordinary challenges in the jury selection process and limit the Defendants’ ability to secure a fair and impartial adjudication,” attorneys for Trump and his personal aide and co-defendant, Walt Nauta, said in a court filing Monday night.

Standard operating procedure:

The tactic is in keeping with Trump’s typical legal strategy: to drag out matters he’s facing as long as possible while hoping the legal landscape changes. But this time, it’s an effort to stave off a criminal trial that could result in a lengthy prison sentence if he’s convicted — the first ever prosecution of a former president.

“Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once instructed a new staffer. It may not have been one of Cohn’s principles, but like many other conservatives, it’s one Trump lives by. When he was running against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump made her handling of classified information a key campaign issue. Special counsel Jack Smith cites Trump’s hectoring on the matter in his indictment.

Now that his document handling is a campaign issue, well…. “Lock her up!” is now “Wait till later!” says Marcy Wheeler about the Trump filing:

Note that Trump misrepresents what his filing attempts to do (and few journalists are calling him on it). The filing is titled, “Response in Opposition to the Government’s Motion for Continuance and Proposed Revised Scheduling Order” — that is, it claims to be responding only to the government’s pitch for a December trial. But the first paragraph admits that it is also asking Cannon to entirely withdraw her own orders setting trial in August.

The Defendants, President Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta, in the above captioned matter, respectfully request that this Court deny the Government’s proposed scheduling order, withdraw the current Order (ECF No. 28), and postpone initial consideration of any rescheduled trial date until after substantive motions have been presented and adjudicated. [my emphasis]

Wheeler notes in the filing, “There’s a funny progression where Trump first says his day job running for President doesn’t leave him time to be prosecuted for stealing documents the last time he was President, then admits that he has found time in his busy schedule for two other trials.”

There is an ancient ad for Borden dairy products that goes, “If it’s Borden, it’s got to be good.” In this case, if it’s Trump, it’s got to be bullshit.

But, given that he got elected the last time by promising he would be more careful with classified information than his opponent, the most remarkable paragraph in the filing is this one, where Trump says there is no exigency to scheduling this trial (as opposed to his hush money or corporate fraud trials) before the election.

While the Government appears to favor an expedited (and therefore cursory) approach to this case, it cannot point to any exigency or urgency requiring a rapid adjudication. There is no ongoing threat to national security interests nor any concern regarding continued criminal activity

I suspect the paragraph is designed to elicit a response to the question, “is there any concern regarding continued criminal activity?” That is, I think it is an attempt to probe for what more the government continues to investigate.

And yes, the government may well respond to this by answering, “funny you should mention ongoing threats to national security because we’re still looking for all the things that disappeared up at Bedminster.”

But the underlying premise is even more remarkable, given how Trump’s got elected the last time.

Trump ran in 2016 promising he would protect government secrets. Not like that dastardly Hillary Clinton, no. And now? His lawyers argue that the “guy accused of using the access to the nation’s secrets he got by getting elected President on false promises the last time, should get a shot at accessing those secrets again, without first letting a jury decide whether he had abused his position of power the last time.”

That is, without letting the voters find out if he did before they go to the polls and give him a chance to crime all over again. But that’s our crime First Family.