Mark Meadows speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0).
New information in the Trump stolen documents case surfaced over the weekend. ABC News had a scoop on former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’ testimony to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigators. Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) this morning summarizes key points:
Meadows knew of no standing order to declassify documents
He was not involved in packing boxes, didn’t see Trump doing so, and wasn’t aware Trump had taken classified documents
Meadows offered to sort through boxes of documents after NARA inquired about them in May 2021, but Trump declined the offer
Meadows ultimately backed his ghostwriter’s account that the Iran document that Trump described to Meadows’ ghost-writer was on the couch in front of him at the time of the exchange
Meadows asked that the part about a classified Iran war plan sitting out in plain view be edited out of an early draft of Meadows’ book, “The Chief’s Chief,” ABC reports:
Sources told ABC News that Meadows was questioned by Smith’s investigators about the changes made to the language in the draft, and Meadows claimed, according to the sources, that he personally edited it out because he didn’t believe at the time that Trump would have possessed a document like that at Bedminster.
Meadows also said that if it were true Trump did indeed have such a document, it would be “problematic” and “concerning,” sources familiar with the exchange said. Meadows said his perspective changed on whether his ghostwriter’s recollection could have been accurate, given the later revelations about the classified materials recovered from Mar-a-Lago in the months since his book was published, the sources said.
Significantly, Meadows changed his testimony on the matter, Wheeler notes. Based on his court filing asking to have his Georgia charges dismissed, he’s clearly trying to frame his actions in both the Georgia and documents cases as “just doing his job,” hoping it will help him evade convictions, Wheeler continues:
There’s an arc here. The early acts in both indictments might be deemed legal information gathering. After that, in early December, Meadows takes two actions, one alleged in Georgia and the other federally, both of which put him clearly in the role of a conspirator, neither of which explicitly involves Trump as charged in the Georgia indictment. Meadows:
Asks Johnny McEntee for a memo on how to obstruct the vote certification
Orders the campaign to ensure someone is coordinating the fake electors
Wheeler explains at length how Meadows is exposed both federally and in Georgia for actions taken arguably outside the scope of his COS duties and with no clear federal policy interest.
Between the overt political nature of three of his actions and the lack of any policy argument, Fani Willis should be able to mount an aggressive challenge to this effort, though the effort is not entirely frivolous and Meadows has very good lawyers even if those lawyers don’t have great facts.
[…]
The degree to which subsequent events, including the Georgia indictment, may discredit Meadows’ federal grand jury testimony likely explains why we’ve gotten the first ever leak as to the substance of Meadows’ testimony, which often serves as a way to telegraph testimony to other witnesses. Several of the things ABC describes him as testifying to — that he had no idea Trump took classified documents and that he offered to sort through everything but Trump refused — seem unlikely. But so long as whoever else could refute that (including Walt Nauta, who helped pack up the boxes) tells the same story, he might get away with improbable testimony.
Wheeler summarizes:
Meadows appears, thus far, to have succeeded with a very tricky approach. He has great lawyers and it may well succeed going forward. But with all the indictments flying, that effort gets far more difficult, particularly given the way the overt acts in the Georgia indictment discredit Meadows’ federal grand jury testimony.
Conclusion: Mark Meadows is dancing as fast as he can.
CNN’s Daniel Dale sets the record straight on Trump’s grotesque insults toward the Fulton County DA:
Former President Donald Trump has launched a barrage of attacks, many of them dishonest, against the Georgia district attorney who is prosecuting him over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state.
Both before and after he was indicted Monday in Fulton County, Trump targeted District Attorney Fani Willis, an elected Democrat, in speeches, social media posts and a television ad released by his 2024 election campaign, which Trump also posted on social media. Below is a fact check of two of his false claims, an inflammatory claim for which there is no evidence, and a misleading claim from the campaign ad.
The legitimacy of the 2020 election
Trump has repeatedlyaccused Willis of refusing to investigate the supposed theft of the 2020 election.
He wrote in a social media post on Sunday: “The only Election Interference that took place in Fulton County, Georgia, was done by those that Rigged and Stole the Election, not by me, who simply complained that the Election was Rigged and Stolen. We have Massive and Conclusive Proof, if the Grand Jury would like to see it. Unfortunately, the publicity seeking D.A. isn’t interested in Justice, or this evidence.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim of a rigged and stolen election is a lie. The 2020 election was free and fair, in Fulton County and in the rest of the country, and nobody rigged or stole it. Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in Georgia was confirmed by three counts of the ballots and certified by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. More than two and a half years after his defeat, Trump has never presented anything remotely resembling proof that he was the rightful winner of Georgia or the presidency. Instead, he has deployed false claims that have been thoroughly debunked by Raffensperger and many others, including Trump’s own senior Justice Department appointees.
For example, Trump has continued into 2023 to claim that Fulton County election workers were caught on video stuffing the ballot box – even though this claim was debunked in 2020 and even though top officials from his Justice Department have testified to Congress that they had personally told him in 2020 that the video did not show any wrongdoing.
Georgia’s final ballot count found that Biden beat Trump by 11,779 votes. In a January 2, 2021 phone call with Raffensperger, Trump pushed the secretary of state to “find” enough votes to give him a one-vote victory over Biden in the state.
Murder in Atlanta
Trump wrote in a social media post on Sunday that instead of spending time on him, Willis “should instead focus on the record number of murders in Atlanta!”
Facts First: Trump’s claim about Atlanta having a “record number of murders” is false. Though Atlanta has struggled with a spike in murders since 2020 – part of a national pandemic-era trend that began before Willis became district attorney in 2021 – the city is nowhere near its all-time murder record.
Atlanta’s 2022 total, 170 murders, was its 23rd-highest annual figure since 1960 and not even in its top 30 highest when population size is taken into account, according to figures provided to CNN on Monday by crime analyst and consultant Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics. The 2022 total of 170 murders was Atlanta’s highest since 1996 and well above its 2019 total of 99 murders, so it was certainly high by the city’s recent standard, but Trump’s claim of a “record” is not true; the city recorded 263 murders in 1973.
In addition, as Asher and Atlanta media outlets have noted, murder is down substantially in Atlanta so far in 2023 compared to 2022 – again mirroring a broader trend around the country. Atlanta had a 25% year-over-year decline through August 5, Asher said.
The Trump campaign ad features large text reading, “ATLANTA VIOLENCE: NEARLY 60% MORE MURDERS so far this year.” But that claim is highly misleading because it is not about this year at all. Small and faded text in the ad identifies the source for the claim as a Fox News article from more than two years ago, June 2021, that compared murders so far that year to murders at the same point in 2020.
An evidence-free claim about a Willis affair
Trump claimed in a speech last week that “they say – I guess – they say that she was after a certain gang and she ended up having an affair with the head of the gang or a gang member.” He made a similar claim in a social media post on Sunday, writing that Willis “is being accused of having an ‘affair’ with a Gang Member of a group that she is prosecuting.”
Facts First: There is zero evidence for these Trump claims. Trump never explained what he was referring to, and his campaign did not respond to a CNN request for an explanation on Monday, but it appears that the former president may have been grossly distorting a January article in which the rapper YSL Mondo told Rolling Stone magazine that Willis, who became district attorney in 2021, had represented him in an aggravated assault case when she was working as a defense lawyer in 2019. YSL Mondo was quoted as saying that he had a “cool relationship” with Willis during his case, calling her a “great attorney” who understands real life, but specified that they had “auntie-to-nephew, mother-to-son type of talks.” He was also paraphrased as saying that he had no contact with her after his case was resolved.
The Trump campaign ad cited the Rolling Stone article as supposed support for the ad’s claim that “Willis got caught hiding a relationship with a gang member she was prosecuting.” YSL Mondo is a co-founder of the YSL hip-hop collective; Willis has prosecuted other YSL members since she became district attorney (YSL Mondo is not among those defendants), alleging that the group is also a criminal street gang.
But there was no sign in the article that Willis had made an effort to conceal her ties to YSL Mondo. In fact, she confirmed to Rolling Stone that she had represented him when she was in private practice and said she had liked him and continues to want him to succeed. And there was nothing at all in the article to suggest the two had ever had an affair.
Trump has a long history of attributing baseless and inflammatory claims to unnamed sources, regularly using vague phrases like “they say” or “many people are saying.” Willis sent an email to her staff last week, which was later obtained by CNN, calling unspecified claims in the Trump campaign ad “derogatory and false” and telling them not to comment.
YSL Mondo, whose legal name is Fremondo Crenshaw, faces gun, drug and gang charges after his arrest in early August in a different Atlanta-area county. His attorney did not respond Monday to a CNN request for comment for this article.
Willis is a tough, no-nonsense, 20 year prosecutor so I doubt she’s going to crumble over these inane insults. But it does put her in danger. There are a lot of Trump cultists out there and they are armed. I hope she is well protected.
Movie theaters are full, Eurodance is big: Close your eyes and it’s the 1990s again. Adding to the throwback vibe, there’s a new controversy about sex in movies. The story of a love triangle between a German film director (played by Franz Rogowski), his husband (Ben Whishaw), and an elementary school teacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Ira Sachs’ Passages premiered to strong reviews at Sundance but was given an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association for its explicit sex scenes. The film’s distributor, Mubi, has opted to release it in theaters unrated, but not before a round of interviews in which Sachs called the MPA’s decision “a form of cultural censorship” and pointed to the ratings board’s long history of disproportionately stigmatizing sex, especially when it’s between same-sex partners.
Created in 1990 to replace the disreputable X, the NC-17 rating, which bars admission to anyone under the age of 17, has fallen almost completely out of use in recent years. Last fall, the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde became the first major NC-17 release in almost a decade, and it appeared in only a handful of theaters before making its way to Netflix. In an environment where smaller, non-studio films often find their biggest audiences on streaming, ratings have come to feel increasingly less important, verging on irrelevant.
The NC-17 label has also become less important because it’s so rarely called for. Twenty-first-century cinema, particularly in the U.S., has become overwhelmingly sexless, and since violence has never much bothered the MPAA, it’s left the group with precious few chances to whip out its scarlet letter. A reaction against the leering, gratuitous nudity of the 1990s, along with a more recent reckoning with the conditions under which sex scenes are shot, has combined with mainstream movies’ overriding lack of interest in everyday life to leave the movie landscape largely void of moments of physical intimacy. […]
The online discourse about sex scenes often focuses on whether or not they’re “necessary.” Do they advance the plot? Do they tell us something about the characters we don’t otherwise know? Or are they just there to gratify the audience’s voyeuristic urges? I’d argue that, in the case of Passages, sexual explicitness is essential to the plot. […]
I’d also argue, though, that “is it necessary?” isn’t the right question, or at least the only one. Part of what makes movies (and art more generally) important is that they serve as an implicit rebuke to a strictly utilitarian view of the world, the spiritual parsimony that says that the only necessary things are the ones we can’t live without. We don’t need movies the way we need food or water, but we need them to remind us that being alive is more than drawing breath.
Amen.
I made a similar argument in my 2014 review of Lars Van Trier’s Nymph()manic, Vol. 1:
A word about the “controversial” sex scenes, which are being labeled “pornographic” by some. Really? It’s 2014, and we’re still not over this hurdle? I have to chuckle, for two reasons: 1) this is really nothing new in cinema, especially when it comes to Scandinavian filmmakers, who have always been ahead of the curve in this department. Am I the only one who remembers the “controversial” full frontal nudity and “pornography” in the Swedish film IAm Curious (Yellow)…which played in U.S. theaters 47 flippin’ years ago, fergawdsake? And 2) at the end of the day, Nymph()maniac Vol. 1 isn’t about the sex, any more than the director’s apocalyptic drama Melancholia was about the end of the world. And as any liberated adult who may have glimpsed genitalia in a film (or locker room), and lived to tell the tale, will attest, that ain’t the end of the world, either.
Back to the MPAA. So who are these people who get to decide when it’s “necessary” to slap an “NC-17” rating on a film, what is their criteria for deciding as such, and how did this rating system even come to be in the first place? First, a little history.
55 years ago, Hollywood submitted to a new voluntary film rating system developed by the Motion Picture Association of America. Films were classified based on their “suitability” for young viewers: ‘G’ for general audiences, ‘M’ for mature audiences, ‘R’ for no one under 16 admitted without a parent or guardian (later raised to 17), and an ‘X’ indicated no one under 17 would be admitted.
It’s interesting that these guidelines (the brainchild of then-association head Jack Valenti, who had resigned his special assistant post with LBJ’s White House two years earlier to take the job) were devised on the cusp of a liberated and boldly creative period of American film-making; one that ushered in the golden era of the 1970s “mavericks” (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, John Cassavetes, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, Terrence Malick, Peter Bogdanovich, and Bob Rafelson, to name a few).
Early on, a fair number of adult-themed Hollywood releases, as well as foreign films distributed here, were slapped with an ‘X’ for “explicit” content. By the mid-70s, the MPAA was reserving most of its X’s for straight-up porn, which due to crossover success of films like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones had broken free of the underground to enjoy wider distribution and more public interest. This loosened the reins a bit as to what defined “X-rated” in a mainstream Hollywood release.
By the early 80s, you could count the annual number of ‘X’ certifications for mainstream releases on one hand, and by the end of the decade, a newly modified system was set in place. ‘M’ eventually morphed into ‘PG-13’, ‘R’ pretty much stayed the course, and ‘X’ became ‘NC-17’ (no one under 17 admitted). Then there is the sometimes confounding ‘NR’ (not rated) which indicates either a film that has not yet been submitted for a rating, or that it is an uncut version of a film that’s already been submitted. Get it? Got it? Good.
The current iteration of the MPAA ratings system (G, PG, PG-13, R, & NC-17) has been in place since 1990, with sporadic additions of content qualifiers (e.g. “violence”, “language”, “substance abuse”, “nudity”, “sexual content”, and since 2007, “smoking”). The intent of these qualifiers (one assumes) is to help parents make informed decisions.
But is there a limit? One has to wonder if there is a point at which such guidelines become so finicky and specific that they cross the fine line between self-policing and creative suppression (e.g. to this day, an ‘NC-17’ rating is considered box office poison by studio execs, which sometimes puts pressure on the filmmakers to compromise their original vision and re-cut for a more fiscally viable ‘R’). Or perhaps it’s a question of whether the MPAA has remained in lockstep with changing mores. In 1990, which was the year ‘NC-17’ ostensibly became the new ‘X’ (and all it implies) Roger Ebert wrote:
As a category, I think [the “NC-17” rating] may not have entirely solved the problem. The title “NC-17” is so innocuous that it is unlikely to develop the kinds of lurid associations that X had. […] NC-17 is low profile and places the emphasis not on adult content but simply on the fact that such movies are not intended for children. […]
Ratings reformers such as myself thought the new rating should come between the R and the X, instead of replacing the X. That way, you’d have a clear-cut category for movies that were adult in content but did not deserve to be lumped with hard-core. […]
Just as some directors get the right of final cut on their movies and others do not, some directors may be able to float NC-17 projects and others will not. Much will depend on how the rating is accepted in the marketplace. […]
Strangely, sex itself is no longer considered a strong selling point in the movie industry, and even R-rated movies are not as sexy as they used to be. Today’s audiences seem to prefer action and violence. There may be a lesson there somewhere.
I’ve had it with the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings and classifications board. It has become foolish and irrelevant, and its members do not have my interests at heart, or yours. They’re too easy on violence yet bizarrely reactionary when it comes to nudity and language. Especially language. […]
In 1976 “All the President’s Men” won a PG rating on appeal, despite its 11 uses of the f-word. That was a lifetime ago in pop culture terms. More recently the documentaries “The Hip-Hop Project” (17 uses of the f-word and its multifaceted variations) and “Gunner Palace” (42 f-words) secured PG-13 ratings. Even more recently a politically pointed (and very good) documentary, “The Tillman Story,” had 16 uses of the f-word, yet its makers’ appeal for a PG-13 rating was denied.
Here’s the paradox among these inconsistencies: Context and tone, those purely subjective notions, are routinely ignored by the MPAA’s ratings decisions. […]
I don’t care if MPAA head Graves frets about perceived language sensitivities in the South and the Midwest compared to the coasts, which amounts to a generalization even the coasts might find patronizing. I do care about the increasing coarseness and sadism in our mass entertainment. I care about the messages the American movie rating system sends to all of us.
If “The King’s Speech” and “Saw 3D” warrant the same rating, then the system underneath leaves me speechless.
Or, as Jack Nicholson once famously (or infamously) put it (albeit in a more succinct and less film-scholarly fashion). “If you suck on a [breast] the movie gets an ‘R’ rating. If you hack the [breast] off with an axe, it will be a ‘PG’.”
The MPAA doesn’t see a scintilla of a hint of even the tiniest most infinitesimal possibility that their ratings system smacks of censorship. From the MPAA 2018 report:
The MPAA has resisted government censorship since its early days, and the rating system was developed as a voluntary, industry-led alternative to government censorship boards. The focus on providing information to parents about what’s in a film, rather than dictating what can and cannot go into films, serves the dual purpose of providing information to parents to help them make suitable viewing choices for their children and protecting the free speech rights of filmmakers from government intervention. […]
Filmmakers are free to put whatever content they want into their films. The rating board reviews each film on a case-by-case basis and reacts just as parents would, assigning a rating that corresponds with the level of content in each film. The rating board does not take into account the artistic merit of the films it rates. A rating is not a judgment of whether a film is good or bad.
Fair enough (and you’ll note that I have steered clear of the “c” word until now). But what about “context and tone”, as Michael Philips pointed out in his piece? If members of the board are in fact ignoring those factors (as Philips implies) …doesn’t that make its decisions arbitrary, therefore a form of censorship? Most importantly, who ARE these folks who judge what your kids should or shouldn’t see? From the same MPAA report:
The rating board is comprised of eight to 13 raters who are themselves parents. Raters must have children between the ages of five and 15 when they join the rating board and must leave when all of their children have reached the age of twenty-one. Raters can serve for up to seven years, at the discretion of the Chair. With the exception of the senior raters, the identities of raters are kept confidential to avoid outside pressure or influence.
Look on the bright side. At least it isn’t a lifetime appointment, like the Supreme Court.
Anyway, in this 55th anniversary year of the MPAA ratings system we all either love or loathe, I thought it would be fun to mosey over to the media room and curate a top 10 collection of vintage ‘X’-rated movies that may not seem quite so ‘X-rated’ by today’s standards. That said, I strongly caution parents that none of these should be considered “family-friendly”!
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – In spite of the title, Russ Meyer’s campy, over-the-top 1970 backstage satire has little in common with Valley of the Dolls (1967). For one thing, the 1967 film had something resembling a coherent narrative. But if you’re familiar with the Russ Meyer oeuvre, you know that “story” is an afterthought. Meyer’s brand was more synonymous with a bevy of buxom babes who beckoned from lurid movie posters; we’ll just say he had a fetish for certain attributes in his leading ladies and leave it there.
It’s not difficult to glean how this entry has built a sizable cult audience over the decades. An all-female band (“The Carrie Nations”) makes the time-honored trek to La-La Land to become rock ‘n’ roll stars. They do make it “big”, but along the way, there’s enough back-stabbing, drug-taking, lovemaking, and heartbreaking to circle the Earth three times.
Roger Ebert (yes, the late film critic) co-wrote with Meyer. There are some memorable lines, like “You’re a groovy boy. I’d like to strap you on sometime” and “You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!” Ebert also co-wrote Meyer’s 1979 tongue-in-cheek sexploitation cheapie Beyond the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (wisely using a pseudonym).
A Clockwork Orange – A nightmarish vision of a dystopian England in the near-future. Malcolm McDowell leads an excellent cast as “Alex”, a charismatic psychopath who leads an ultra-violent youth gang. Alex and his “droogs” get their jollies terrorizing the citizenry and mixing it up with rivals. Alex ends up in prison, where he volunteers as a test subject for an experimental “cure” for antisocial behavior. After completing the program, a now docile Alex is let back into society, only to suffer much karmic payback.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ eponymous novel still lives up to its “ultra”-violent reputation, but one hopes that its intended anti-violence message is more obvious to modern audiences (who may also puzzle over its ‘X’-rating). Like many of Kubrick’s films, A Clockwork Orange becomes more prescient by the day. Watching the nightly news will tell you that we are currently living in the “dystopian near-future”.
The Groove Tube – While many of its pop culture references are now arcane, Ken Shapiro’s 1974 omnibus of irreverent comedy sketches still tickles the funny bone. Loosely framed as a programming sampler from an imagined TV channel, Shapiro and his most *definitely* not ready for prime-time players utilize this platform to skewer sitcoms, talk shows, local newscasts and commercials.
It’s lewd, crude, and guaranteed to offend just about everybody (especially now…oy), but in the fullness of time it’s been acknowledged as a tangible influence on Saturday Night Live (which went on the air the following year). Chevy Chase appears in several sketches, and even more tellingly, a news anchorman character signs off with “Good night…and have a pleasant tomorrow”, which later became a signature SNL catchphrase. Not for all tastes, but I think it’s a hoot. I should note that while contemporary DVD and Blu-ray reissues indicate an ‘R’ rating, the film was originally released as ‘X’ -rated due to male and female frontal nudity.
Henry and June – Fred Ward (who passed away in 2022) delivers one of his finest performances portraying gruff, libidinous literary icon Henry Miller. Writer-director Philip Kaufman’s 1990 drama is set in 1930s Paris, when Miller was working on his infamous novel Tropic of Cancer. The film concentrates on the complicated love triangle between Miller, his wife June (Uma Thurman) and erotic novelist Anais Nin (Maria de Medeiros). Despite the frequent nudity and eroticism, the film is curiously un-sexy, but still a well-acted character study. Richard E. Grant portrays Nin’s husband. Adapted from Nin’s writings. For better or for worse, the film holds the distinction of being the first recipient of the MPAA’s “NC-17” rating.
If…. – In this 1968 class struggle allegory, director Lindsay Anderson depicts the British public-school system as a microcosm of England’s sociopolitical upheaval at the time. It was also the star-making debut for a young Malcolm McDowall, who plays Mick Travis, one of the “lower sixth form” students at a boarding school (McDowall would return as the Travis character in Anderson’s two loose “sequels” O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital). Travis forms the nucleus of a trio of mates who foment armed insurrection against the abusive upperclassmen and oppressive headmasters.
Some critical reappraisals have drawn parallels with Columbine, but the film really has little to do with that and nearly everything to do with the revolutionary zeitgeist of 1968 (the uprisings in Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, etc.). That said, you can see how Anderson’s film could be read outside of original context as a pre-cursor to Massacre at Central High, Rock ’n’ Roll High School, Heathers, The Chocolate War and Rushmore. David Sherwin and John Howlett co-wrote the screenplay.
The film was eventually granted an ‘R’ but ran with an ‘X’ rating for its initial theatrical engagements in the U.S. (male and female frontal nudity).
Inserts – If I told you that Richard Dreyfuss, Veronica Cartwright, Bob Hoskins and Jessica Harper once co-starred in an X-rated movie, would you believe me? This largely forgotten 1976 film from director John Byrum was dismissed as pretentious dreck by critics at the time, but 47 years on, it begs reappraisal as a fascinating curio in the careers of all involved.
Dreyfuss plays “Wonder Boy”, a Hollywood whiz kid director who peaked early; now he’s a “has-been”, living in his bathrobe, drinking heavily and casting junkies and wannabe-starlets for pornos produced on the cheap in his crumbling mansion. Hoskins steals all his scenes as Wonder Boy’s producer, Big Mac (aptly named; as he has plans to open a chain of hamburger joints!). Set in 30s Hollywood, this decadent wallow in the squalid side of show biz is a perfect companion for The Day of the Locust.
While I wouldn’t consider the sex scenes in the film overly explicit (especially compared to what you now routinely encounter in any HBO or Showtime original series), my DVD copy (released in 2005 by MGM) indicates it earns contemporary assignation of ‘NC-17’.
Last Summer – This underrated 1969 gem (later re-cut to earn an R rating) is from husband-and-wife team Frank Perry (director) and Eleanor Perry (writer). Adapted from Evan Hunter’s novel, it is tough to summarize without possible spoilers. Initially, it’s a standard character study about three friends on the cusp of adulthood (Bruce Davison, Barbara Hershey and Richard Thomas) who develop a Jules and Jim-style relationship during an idyllic summer vacation on Fire Island. When a socially awkward stranger (Catherine Burns) enters this simmering cauldron of raging hormones and burgeoning sexuality, the lid blows off the pressure cooker, leading to unexpected twists. Think Summer of ’42 meets Lord of the Flies; I’ll leave it there. Beautifully acted and directed. By the way, if you’re a fan of the Netflix series Ozark, keep your eyes peeled for Davison and Thomas, who both give great supporting performances (although they don’t have any scenes together).
Last Tango in Paris –Bernardo Bertolucci’s dark and polarizing 1972-character study about a doomed affair between a middle-aged American ex-pat (Marlon Brando) and a young Parisian woman (Maria Schneider) sparked controversy with audiences, critics and censors from day one (although by today’s standards, it seems much ado about nothing).
Brando is grieving over the suicide of his wife; he and Schneider meet by pure chance when they both show up at the same time to view an apartment for rent. Minimal exposition leads to wild, spontaneous sex between the two strangers.
Whether the ensuing psychodrama makes a bold statement about life, death, social isolation, and the unfathomable mystery of sexual attraction, or plunges the hapless viewer into 2 long hours of histrionics, navel-gazing, and pretentious blather is up to you. Now that I’m older (and presumably wiser) I’ve come to appreciate Brando’s performance more that I did back in the day; there is a raw, unfiltered honesty and vulnerability I never saw in his other roles.
Medium Cool – What Haskell Wexler’s unique 1969 drama may lack in narrative cohesion is more than made up for by its importance as a sociopolitical document. Robert Forster stars as a TV news cameraman who is fired after he complains to station brass about their willingness to help the FBI build files on political agitators via access to raw news film footage and reporter’s notes.
He drifts into a relationship with a Vietnam War widow (Verna Bloom) and her 12-year-old son. They eventually find themselves embroiled in the mayhem surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention (in the film’s most memorable scene, the actors were sent in to improvise amidst one of the infamous “police riots” as it was happening). Many of the issues Wexler touches on (especially regarding media integrity and journalistic responsibility) would be extrapolated further in films like Network and Broadcast News.
The film was originally rated ‘X’; however, Paramount later appealed the ruling. In 1970 the MPAA overturned its initial appraisal and granted the film an ‘R’ rating (with no cuts).
Midnight Cowboy – Aside from its distinction as being the only X-rated film to earn Oscars, John Schlesinger’s groundbreaking, idiosyncratic character study Midnight Cowboy (1969) also ushered in an era of mature, gritty realism in American film that flourished from the early to mid-1970s. The film was Schlesinger’s first U.S.-based project; he had already made a name for himself in his native England with films like A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling, and Far From the Madding Crowd.
Dustin Hoffman has seldom matched his character work here as Ratso Rizzo, a homeless New York City con artist who adopts country bumpkin/aspiring male hustler Joe Buck (Jon Voight) as his “protégé”. The two leads are outstanding, as is the supporting cast, which includes John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Barnard Hughes and a teenage Bob Balaban. Also look for cameos from several of Andy Warhol’s “Factory” regulars, who can be spotted milling about here and there in a memorable party scene.
In hindsight, the location filming provides a fascinating historical document of the seedy milieu that was “classic” Times Square (New York “plays itself” very well here). Schlesinger won an Oscar for Best Director, as did Waldo Salt for his screenplay.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya might as well have warned a toddler in a highchair not to throw his spoon onto the floor … again.
During Donald Trump’s first court appearance Thursday on Jan. 6 conspiracy charges, Upadhyaya issued a stern (and unusual) warning to the accused before releasing him on bond:
“It is a crime to try to influence a juror or to threaten or attempt to bribe a witness or any other person who may have information about your case, or to retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice. Do you understand these warnings and consequences, sir?”
Trump replied in the affirmative, just as he had before the world on Jan. 20, 2017, when he swore to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” We know how that worked out.
Violation of those conditions could lead to Trump’s being held until trial and could add to his sentence if convicted, Upadhyaya warned.
The question now is, how many chances will Trump get?
Strike One!
That didn’t take long.
Upadhyaya issued that unusual warning because she knew who was standing before her. But by Friday afternoon , Trump was playing chicken with her warnings. (See his alt-Twitter/X post above.)
The special counsel just alerted the court to Trump's threat-tweet in a motion asking the court for a protective order so it can begin providing discovery. There would be serious consequences for Trump if he violates the order. If he keeps it up, he's got to end up in jail. pic.twitter.com/2e9FlrZEog
The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge overseeing the criminal case against former President Donald Trump in Washington to step in after he released a post online that appeared to promise revenge on anyone who goes after him.
Prosecutors asked U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to issue a protective order in the case a day after Trump pleaded not guilty to charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss and block the peaceful transition of power. The order — which is different from a so-called “gag order” — would limit what information Trump and his legal team could share publicly about the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
Such protective orders are common in criminal cases, but prosecutors said it’s “particularly important in this case” because Trump has posted on social media about “witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him.”
Prosecutors pointed specifically to a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform from earlier Friday in which Trump wrote, in all capital letters, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”
“A certain way of speaking”
But Trump is nothing if not wily. He quickly responded with a claim that his threat was not directed at jurors or prosecutors.
What, me threaten jurors or prosecutors? Not at all! No, he was exercising his free speech rights to threaten RINOs and the Koch Brothers and “Club for No Growth.”
As Marcy Wheeler observes as well, Trump is trying to reinforce the political defense already circulating among his defenders. He had a First Amendment right to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election.
As I’m writing this I keep thinking about the line from the indictment describing that Trump tweeted his implicit threat against Mike Pence during the riot at a moment his advisors left him alone in his Dining Room: “after advisors had left the Defendant alone in his dining room, the Defendant issued a Tweet intended to further delay and obstruct the certification.”
“The president has a certain way of speaking,” former chief of staff Mark Meadows told Michael Wolff, author of several books on Trump’s presidency. “And what he means — well, the sum can be greater or less than the whole.”
Trump operates “much like a mobster,” former Trump attorney Michael Cohen testified to Congress under oath. “He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders,” Cohen said. “He speaks in a code, and I understand the code because I’ve been around him for a decade.”
Code should be in quotes. Trump’s “certain way of speaking” is fooling no one except the rubes who lined up to be fooled since the inveterate huckster descended his golden escalator in 2015. That includes preachers and public officials from his party across the country.
How many more strikes before a judge locks up Trump until trial?
UPDATE: I’m appending Glenn Kirschner’s useful explanation of where Trump stands right now.
Just 24 hours after being told by the judge not to threaten witnesses, Trump appears to violate the judge's order. What now? Let's talk about the wonderful world of Show Cause Orders. Because #JusticeMattershttps://t.co/JDSrzMhWah
Get used to seeing this guy: John Lauro. (For a while anyway…)
This piece in the Bulwark takes a look at the two main defenses that Trump’s lawyers are likely to employ when it comes to a trial. (If it comes to a trial.) I don'[t know if this is correct but it’s interesting. I suppose we are all going to get an education in conspiracy law before this is over:
Broken down into their component parts, the conspiracy counts allege that Trump and his co-conspirators
-used knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislatures and election officials to subvert the legitimate election results;
-organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states to create the illusion that the election results were disputed in those states;
-attempted to use the power of the Department of Justice to conduct sham election-crime investigations and to inform certain state legislatures, falsely, that the DOJ had identified significant concerns about fraudulent activity that may have impacted the result of the election when, in fact, the DOJ had reached exactly the opposite conclusion;
-attempted to enlist the vice president to use his ceremonial role at the January 6, 2021 congressional certification proceedings to fraudulently alter the election results; and
-exploited a large, angry mob whom they had deceived into believing that the vice president could change the election results in order to obstruct and delay the certification of the election results.
It is crucial to understanding the indictment to observe that Smith has not charged Trump with separate criminal violations for each—or any—of the individual component parts listed above. He could have. For instance, the fake-electors scheme alone implicated a host of state and federal criminal statutes that could have been charged assuming, as the indictment strongly suggests, that Trump can be credibly linked to them.
But Smith went a different route. Rather than charging Trump with discrete crimes for specific acts, he charged Trump with broader conspiracies, using the specific acts as evidence of and support for the larger conspiracy charges.
Smith’s strategy makes sense. Since entering into a criminal conspiracy is by itself sufficient to support a criminal charge, the object of the conspiracy doesn’t have to be achieved.
That will shape the entire prosecution. For instance, while Trump attempted to coerce state legislatures to reverse the results of the election, he failed to convince them to do so. Similarly, he tried—but failed—to get the DOJ to send a letter to the states falsely claiming that it had determined that there had been significant election fraud. And Trump’s attempt to get Vice President Mike Pence to exceed his constitutional authority on January 6th also failed.
Fecklessness all around—yet all of these failures will be damning evidence against Trump at his trial on the conspiracy charges. It’s not so much what he accomplished (not much, unless you count undermining about half the nation’s belief in democracy). It’s more about what he tried to do. “But we couldn’t break into the vault” isn’t going to be much of a defense when you get caught robbing a bank.
THE NATURE OF SMITH’S CHARGES will also shape Trump’s defenses. Most of the political arguments made by Trump’s supporters in response to the indictment are just that: political, not legal, defenses. The claim that the indictment was designed to distract from “ongoing legal troubles” of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, for instance, may have ramifications for the 2024 presidential election, but it won’t mean anything in a criminal trial. The case will rise or fall on its merits, and Hunter Biden will have no role in it.
But Trump’s two stock legal defenses—that he sincerely believed he had won the 2020 election and that he relied on the advice of counsel in his post-election activities—will be very much in play.
Let’s take a look at how each of those defenses is likely to play out in court…
Convincing at least one juror that Trump sincerely believed he won the 2020 election could gain him some sympathy if the juror were already inclined to view him favorably and might even have won the day, at least partially, if each of the components of Smith’s conspiracy counts had been charged as standalone crimes. For instance, Trump’s attempts to convince state officials and legislators to revisit the election results in their respective states could be seen as an attempt to right a wrong, not to commit one, if Trump could convince jurors that he sincerely believed that there were substantial, outcome-determinative fraudulent votes to be found.
But Trump’s attempts to strong-arm state officials are not charged as standalone crimes. Rather, they are presented as examples of what lawyers refer to as “overt acts” taken by Trump and others in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the government. They are used to demonstrate that a conspiratorial agreement has advanced from mere talk to action, not to show that the conspirators committed additional crimes above and beyond the conspiracy itself.
Think, for instance, of a conspiracy to kidnap and hold a person for ransom. In furtherance of the scheme, the conspirators locate and rent a safe house, stock up to hold the hostage for a protracted period of time, buy ski masks, restraints and a telephone voice changer, and carefully observe the comings and goings in the target area. Not one of these acts taken in furtherance of the conspiracy is, standing alone, a crime. But individually and taken together, those overt acts are powerful evidence of a criminal conspiracy.
So it is with Trump. If he could convince a jury that he truly believed he had won the election, some of the overt acts alleged against him, standing alone, might look less sinister. But those acts do not stand alone. Rather, they are powerful evidence of the criminal conspiracy alleged in the indictment.
And while some of the overt acts alleged against Trump might look less damning if Trump could show he truly believed he won the election, others would not. Even a sincere, deeply held belief that the election had been stolen would not, for instance, give Trump license to participate in a fake-electors scheme. As I wrote over a year ago, none of Trump’s standard defenses can excuse this piece of dirty work. Trump can’t claim he didn’t know about it, and he can’t claim that forging election certificates and then attempting to pawn them off as official documents is just fine as long as you believe you won an election.
Think of it this way. You may be absolutely convinced that a charge on your credit card isn’t yours, but you can’t hack into the bank’s server to remove it. You may know with all your heart that your neighbor took your Rolex, but you can’t break into his house in the middle of the night to retrieve it (just ask O.J. Simpson about that one). You may hold it as an article of near-religious faith that the government is tyrannical, but you can’t blow up the federal building.
Believing you have a legitimate gripe—even if you’re right about it—doesn’t give you license to commit crimes. As the indictment concedes, Trump had a right, “like every American,” to speak publicly about the election “and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.”
But he didn’t have the right to attempt to redress that supposed grievance by defrauding the government and attempting to obstruct one of our democracy’s most sacred official proceedings.
TO SEE WHY TRUMP’S OTHER MAINSTAY DEFENSE—claiming he relied on the advice of counsel—won’t work this time around, ask yourself this: What legal advice did Trump supposedly rely upon, and from whom did he receive it?
There are only two potential areas of legal advice that could be advanced on Trump’s behalf in any meaningful sense: (1) that there was a level of fraud in the election that determined its outcome; and (2) that the vice president had the constitutional authority to reject the certified election results and throw the election to state legislatures who could overturn it in Trump’s favor.
How is Trump to convince a jury that he relied on such legal advice? If Trump doesn’t testify—which seems near-certain—who will supply the evidence of this? The attorneys on whom he might claim to have relied—Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell—are unlikely to testify because they are either named or unnamed co-conspirators with potential criminal liability of their own. If any of them do testify, they risk being exposed as liars and frauds who can be torn to shreds on the witness stand.
The attorneys who will testify, on the other hand, are credible professionals—many of whom, like Bill Barr and Pat Cipollone, were appointed by Trump himself—who will establish that Trump did not rely on the advice of counsel. Based on what they told the House January 6th Committee, we know they will testify that they advised Trump that they had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, and that the vice president did not have constitutional authority to reject singlehandedly the slates of electors that had been officially certified.
Trump didn’t rely on the advice of counsel, he rejected it. He then went and sought out a cohort of kooks and shameless conspiracy nuts who would say whatever he wanted to hear. That’s not reliance on the advice of counsel, that’s the opposite: that’s the client advising the lawyer of what he wants to hear.
Even so, suppose for a moment that Trump could convince a juror or two that he actually had relied on the advice of counsel. That still wouldn’t excuse the “use of deceit to get state officials to subvert the legitimate election results and change electoral votes,” the use of “dishonesty, fraud, and deceit” to “organize fraudulent states of electors and cause them to transmit false certificates to Congress,” the “attempt to leverage the Justice Department to use deceit to get state officials to replace legitimate electors and electoral votes with [Trump’s],” or the “exploitation of the violence and chaos at the Capitol” on January 6th—all as alleged in the indictment.
TRUMP AND HIS ATTORNEYS obviously know that neither a supposedly sincere belief that the election was stolen nor the claim that he relied on the advice of counsel will be an effective defense if it comes down to a criminal trial.
Trump’s ultimate defense will have nothing to do with the facts, the law or the judicial system.
It will revolve around only one thing: getting re-elected so that Trump can either pardon himself or, more likely, rely on a carefully chosen attorney general to drop the charges.
They will do everything in their power to delay the trial until after the election. It’s his best play. And I will not be surprised if he succeeds. So regardless of what happens with the trial, the most important thing is to ensure he does not become president again. Indeed, that it’s even possible at this point is jarring and disorienting.
The fact that Republican voters are eager to do that proves that it’s a cult. It ‘s not as if they don’t have other people who could do the job. There is a boatload of challengers and others who would run if he wasn’t in the race. This loyalty to him and his lies has nothing to do with politics. It’s a mass delusion. Jim Jones on steroids. And it’s profoundly dangerous.
The NY Times used to keep a running tally of his lies but I think it just became too hard after a while, but there is still analysis:
Running through the indictment charging former President Donald J. Trump with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election was a consistent theme: He is an inveterate and knowing liar.
The indictment laid out how, in the two months after Election Day, Mr. Trump “spread lies” about widespread election fraud even though he “knew that they were false.”
Mr. Trump “deliberately disregarded the truth” and relentlessly disseminated them anyway at a “prolific” pace, the indictment continued, “to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
Of course, Mr. Trump has never been known for fealty to truth.
Throughout his careers in business and politics, he has sought to bend reality to his own needs, with lies ranging from relatively small ones, like claiming he was of Swedish and not German descent when trying to rent to Jewish tenants in New York City, to proclaiming that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
If you repeat something enough, he has told confidants over time, people will believe it.
By and large, this trait has served him well, helping him bluster and bluff his way through bankruptcies and then to the White House and through crises once he was there: personal scandals, two impeachments and a special counsel’s investigation when he was in office.
But now he is being held to account in a way he never has been before for what a new special counsel, Jack Smith, is asserting was a campaign of falsehoods that undermined the foundations of democracy.
Already, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and allies are setting out the early stages of a legal strategy to counter the accusations, saying that Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights are under attack. They say Mr. Trump had every right to express views about election fraud that they say he believed, and still believes, to be true, and that the actions he took or proposed after the election were based on legal advice.
The indictment and his initial response set up a showdown between those two opposing assertions of principle: that what prosecutors in this case called “pervasive and destabilizing lies” from the highest office in the land can be integral to criminal plans, and that political speech enjoys broad protections, especially when conveying what Mr. Trump’s allies say are sincerely held beliefs.
While a judge and jury will ultimately decide how much weight to give each, Mr. Trump and his allies were already on the offensive after the indictment.
“So the First Amendment protects President Trump in this way: After 2020, he saw all these irregularities, he got affidavits from around the country, sworn testimony, he saw the rules being changed in the middle of the election process — as a president, he’s entitled to speak on those issues,” Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer in the case, John Lauro, said on Wednesday in an interview on CBS.
“What the government would have to prove in this case, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that speech is not protected by the First Amendment, and they’ll never be able to do that,” he said.
Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 Republican in the House, said in a statement that Mr. Trump had “every right under the First Amendment to correctly raise concerns about election integrity in 2020.”
Representative Gary Palmer of Alabama, the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, called the indictment a “criminalization of disinformation and misinformation, which raises serious concerns about the public’s right to speak openly in opposition to policies they oppose.”
Legal experts were skeptical about the strength of those claims as a defense. They pointed out that the indictment said on its second page that all Americans had the right to say what they wanted about the election — even if it was false. But, the indictment asserts, it is illegal to use those false claims to engage in criminal conduct, the experts said.
An individual’s free-speech rights essentially end as soon as those words become evidence of criminality, they said. In the case of the indictment against Mr. Trump, the prosecutors argue that Mr. Trump used his statements to persuade others to engage in criminal conduct with him, like signing fake slates of electors or pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay Electoral College certification of President Biden’s victory.
According to the indictment, Mr. Trump “knowingly” used “false claims of election fraud” to try to “convince the vice president to accept the defendant’s fraudulent electors, reject legitimate electoral votes or send legitimate electoral votes to state legislatures for review rather than counting them.”
The indictment goes on to say that when those efforts failed, Mr. Trump turned to using the crowd at the rally on the Ellipse “to pressure the vice president to fraudulently alter the election results.”
Samuel W. Buell, a professor of law at Duke University and a lead federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s prosecution of Enron, said that it “won’t work legally but it will have some appeal politically, which is why he is pushing it
“There is no First Amendment privilege to commit crimes just because you did it by speaking,” Mr. Buell said.
Referring to both public and private remarks, Mr. Buell said that “there is no First Amendment privilege for giving directions or suggestions to other people to engage in illegal acts.”
Referring to the fictional television mafia boss Tony Soprano, Mr. Buell added, “Tony Soprano can’t invoke the First Amendment for telling his crew he wants someone whacked.”
For decades, Mr. Trump’s penchant for falsehoods and exaggerations was well known in New York City. He was so distrusted by Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s that one of the mayor’s deputies, Alair Townsend, famously quipped, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.”
Mr. Trump spoke with journalists by phone while pretending to be a spokesman representing himself, in order to leak information about his business or his personal life. He claimed to have dated women who denied being involved with him. He claimed that he lived on the 66th through 68th floors of Trump Tower, which in fact has only 58 floors.
I just saw that 69% of Republicans believe that the election was stolen on the basis of no evidence and just his word. His willingness to repeatedly and relentlessly lie is his superpower.
Donald Trump will be arraigned in a Washington, D.C. court this afternoon on charges spelled out in the indictment a federal grand jury handed down on Tuesday. He and his defenders will googolplex down on lies and distortions about those charges. First up from his defense team is that Trump is being prosecuted for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. That is not a legal defense, but a political one for consumption and repetition by his supporters. They will do both.
The former president’s alleged crimes are spelled out on the cover page of the grand jury’s indictment: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD J. TRUMP, Defendant. And in paragraph four (pg. 2). And at the top of page 3 (COUNT ONE). And at the top of pages 43, 44 and 45 (COUNTS TWO, THREE and FOUR). Chapter and verse.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States; two counts of conspiracy to obstruct and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding; and a conspiracy against “the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured … by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” That is, Trump is charged with a sweeping conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election.
Trump is not charged with lying, although lie he did, repeatedly, knowingly, purposefully in furtherance of the alleged conspiracies.
Now let the gaslighting begin … um, continue. Trump teed up the stolen election lie long before November 3, 2020.
What special counsel Jack Smith spells out in the indictment is how Trump, never “known for fealty to truth,” as Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman put it, spewed lies for months following the 2020 election he lost.
The Lie is Trump’s hammer, the favorite tool in his toolbox. “Truthful hyperbole” is his euphemism (itself a lie). “My leverage came from confirming an impression [my marks] were already predisposed to believe,” Trump explains in “The Art of the Deal.” In this case, he and his followers wished to believe The Lie that he actually had won.
But he’d been robbed. He repeated that lie widely in the months following the election, the indictment states. “If you repeat something enough, he has told confidants over time, people will believe it,” write Schmidt and Haberman. Trump needed his followers to believe it so he could use them in a last-ditch effort to retain power. He and his co-conspirators would use the lies to coerce Republican electors in states he lost into submitting fraudulent elector documents to the government. They hoped thereby to gin up “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect” (para. 54).
“The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures,” the Smith indictment states.
No they f**king do not, @NYT. What the hell is going on with your headline writers? This is borderline Breitbart garbage. This is as irresponsible a headline as you've run–and you've been pulling some doozies lately. Seriously–who's writing this? pic.twitter.com/J3Zy9wE7af
“So the First Amendment protects President Trump in this way: After 2020, he saw all these irregularities, he got affidavits from around the country, sworn testimony, he saw the rules being changed in the middle of the election process — as a president, he’s entitled to speak on those issues,” Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer in the case, John Lauro, said on Wednesday in an interview on CBS.
“What the government would have to prove in this case, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that speech is not protected by the First Amendment, and they’ll never be able to do that,” he said.
Lauro claims Trump was only “relying on the advice of an attorney, John Eastman.” Eastman, one of the principal architects of the “fake” electoral votes scheme (para. 59), is the designated scapegoat.
Like Trump himself, his defense team is counting on his cult members not reading the actual indictment, and on the few who do not believing a word of it. They hope now to, as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon recommended, “flood the zone with shit” and somehow derail Trump’s prosecution and conviction. Meantime, Trump will attempt to win reelection to the Oval Office next year in a second last-ditch effort. To evade punishment for convictions and federal prosecution in outstanding cases, he’ll pardon himself for the former and quash the latter.
Pushing back on his defense’s narratives with facts won’t be effective. Establishing a simple, repeatable counter-message might.
“The meta-theme of Smith’s indictment might be described as ‘Trump lied; democracy nearly died,’ ” writes Ed Kilgore.
The meta-theme of Trump’s reelection campaign might be described as “Vote for me and I’ll pardon me.”
Ed Kilgore thinks the exposure of Trump’s lies in a trial might just penetrate more of the public’s consciousness. I’m not too optimistic but if it’s even a possibility, it’s a good thing:
When indicting a former president of the United States in the middle of his attempt to once again rule, you can’t just think about the laws, in their majestic complexity, that are being violated. Special counsel Jack Smith clearly understands the “court of public opinion” will have the final say on Donald Trump’s conduct, if only because he will pardon himself if the public disregards his malfeasance and returns him to the White House.
So in the indictment he secured involving Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat, Smith has pulled together a vast array of evidence on an extraordinary series of events with a reasonably simple theme: Trump’s self-conscious lies about what happened in that election.
Trump lied about the outcome; lied about a host of made-up fraud claims; lied about the authorized agents for certifying the results; lied about the identity of legitimate electors; lied about the vice-president’s powers in counting electoral votes; and, worst of all, lied to the crowd on January 6 that subsequently stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the election of his successor to the presidency.
Three of the four counts in the indictment allege Trump orchestrated a conspiracy, underlying the premeditated nature of his attempts to fraudulently interfere with the election and thus rob Joe Biden and his voters of their rights. Aside from the telltale moments that Trump betrayed self-awareness that he was lying through his teeth (most notably telling Mike Pence on January 1 “You’re too honest” when the vice-president denied he had the power to reject and accept electors at will), he was told over and over and over again by those he relied on for information that his general and specific claims about the election were lies.
Now to those of us who have been consciously or unconsciously fact-checking Trump for years, his incorrigible, incessant, and world-class mendacity is hardly breaking news. But to a depressing extent, his lies about 2020 remain credible to a broad swath of Americans, undermining faith in the institutions that supervise elections in a way that threatens democracy no matter what happens to Trump and his political career. But Smith’s prosecution of Trump in pursuance of this indictment will force a reckoning in great detail with the fundamental character trait that underlies all the other forms of his misconduct. So in addition to stitching together a strong criminal case covering an array of unfortunate events over an extended period of time, this indictment will lay the groundwork for public acceptance of a subsequent verdict against Trump, at least at a significantly greater level than we can currently expect.
The meta-theme of Smith’s indictment might be described as “Trump lied; democracy nearly died.” If nothing else, the former president’s power to bamboozle people could suffer a major blow as the facts of this case roll out.
During the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump repeatedly said that the electoral process was rigged. After losing the Iowa primary caucus he declared that Sen Ted Cruz had stolen it and tweeted, “based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.” That was just the beginning. Throughout the general election campaign he refused to say if he would accept the results , even in a televised presidential debate in October. He finally told his followers that he would accept the vote count — but only if he won — and they responded with rapturous adulation. Even when he won the electoral college he refused to accept the popular vote results and formed a commission to prove that the numbers were fraudulent. (It came up empty, of course.)
So, it was no surprise that he spent most of the 2020 election casting aspersions on mail-in voting and planting the suspicion that the election was going to be stolen from him.
It’s not like he kept it a secret. We always knew he would never accept the results of an election unless he was the victor. So when he came before the cameras in the wee hours after election day 2020, as the votes were still being counted, and declared that there was something wrong with the election and that he won in a landslide, it was almost anti-climactic.
What followed, however, was anything but predictable. We knew he would whine and cry and declare the election was rigged but I don’t think anyone knew how far he would go to manipulate the system and break the law to stay in office anyway.
Yesterday, Donald Trump was indicted by the Special Counsel investigating the January 6th insurrection on four felony charges: obstruction of an official proceeding (the certification of the presidential election on January 6th), and conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy to deny voting rights.
If you wonder what the significance of this indictment might be in contrast to the other cases pending in various venues throughout the country, Former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC:
This is a momentous legal event. It’s the most significant legal event of our lifetimes, one of the most significant legal events ever in the history of this country. It is up there with Marbury vs Madison, Brown vs Board of Education, Dred Scott as a defining case for the times… This indictment lays out a case that a guy who was president of the United States while he was president of the US leveraged his office, used his power to thwart the will of the people in the most solemn thing they do in our country, vote… this is the biggest constitutional crime in our history.
He was the only one indicted but six unnamed co-conspirators are accused of helping him do it, five of them lawyers and one a political operative. The five lawyers are assumed to be Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro. The identity of the political operative remains obscure.
Those of us who followed the January 6th Committee hearings and read its final report are familiar with the narrative laid out in the indictment. Trump and his henchmen cooked up several different plots to pressure local Republican election officials to change the vote count in his favor, create a fake set of electors from the close swing states, have the Justice Department send out letters erroneously suggesting the feds had found fraud and then strong arm the Vice President to defy the Constitution and refuse to count the legitimate electoral votes on January 6th.
The indictment has a few new details, such as the fact that even after the violence, as the congress was preparing to reconvene to certify the election near midnight, one of Trump’s co-conspirators emailed the Vice President, saying “I implore you to consider on more relatively minor violation [of the ECA] and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount o illegal activity that has occurred here.” After the violent insurrection in which Trump’s inflamed followers stormed the capitol during a joint session and chanted “hang Mike Pence” this person (assumed to be conservative constitutional scholar John Eastman) had the audacity to beg the VP to knowingly break the law — but just a little bit. (That plan, incidentally, was also pushed hard by Senator Ted Cruz.)
The assumption among the TV lawyers is that the co-conspirators were not indicted in order to move the case along more quickly and that some of them may well be indicted separately or are cooperating with the investigation. Giuliani appeared on television last night to defend his honor:
To be honest, Giuliani may not even know that he cooperated. He’s pretty far gone.
There is a lot of gnashing of teeth that federal trials aren’t televised and demands that someone do something about it so that the nation can watch the most important political trial in our history. That seems like an excellent idea but apparently it would come down to a decision by Chief Justice John Roberts so I wouldn’t get my hopes up. The good news is that we did have an excellent presentation of the facts and the narrative from the January 6th public hearings so it’s not as if we are fully dependent upon the press to report them from the court room.
Regardless of the outcome of this trial, even if they manage to get it done before the election next year, I think we may have to face a disappointing truth. In a normal, healthy democracy a candidate in this much trouble would drop out of the race, either because of a need to focus on the legal problems, pressure from the party or perhaps even a sense of shame. None of that applies to Donald Trump, the front runner for the Republican nomination who has vowed to stay in the race no matter what. Judging by the initial commentary from the right wing media, these charges aren’t going to make a bit of difference.
In the end, we are dealing with a great irony. Donald Trump is under indictment for trying to steal an election but he may very well be given absolution for his crimes by the free and fair electoral system he has demeaned and degraded ever since he entered politics. The half of the country that still believes in democracy and rule of law will be hard pressed to keep the faith if that happens. What would be the point?
Then-President Donald Trump (the Defendant) berated Vice President Mike Pence on a January 1, 2021 phone call for resisting his plan to seek a court ruling stating that “the Vice President had the authority to reject or return votes to the states under the Constitution.” So alleges special counsel Jack Smith’s 45-page indictment (gifted article) of Trump on three conspiracy charges and one for obstruction of an official proceeding.
18 USC 371 (conspiracy to defraud the US)
18 USC 1512(k) (conspiracy to obstruct the vote certification)
18 USC 1512(c)(2) (obstructing the vote certification)
18 USC 241( conspiracy to violate civil rights)
Along with Trump the indictment references six unnamed co-conspirators. Unnamed because they have not yet been charged, several are obvious from details in the indictment, Co-Conspirators 1 through 4 being Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, and Jeffrey Clark. The Washington Post identifies appellate attorney Kenneth Chesebro as Co-Conspirator 5. The sixth is described as a “political consultant” involved in helping implement Trump’s fake electors scheme.
The Smith indictment draws heavily on the work of the House January 6 Committee but includes more detail than was public previously. In particular, Pence’s contemporaneous notes taken during the period after Trump lost reelection to Joe Biden in November 2020 will be featured evidence in the trial. The indictment details how the conspiracy unfolded across several states Trump’s allies contested.
Trump lies reflexively. Everyone not in his thrall knows that. The “unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” Smith told reporters, was “fueled” by those lies. Smith’s indictment dials in on that behavior, stating that “for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
Thus was born the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election that resulted in hand-to-hand combat and death at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A violent insurrection. A failed coup.
But Smith’s strategic decision is not to charge Trump with the insurrection but with the conspiracy that led to it and his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and to disenfranchise voters. Trump will stand trial alone. Smith wants “a speedy trial so that our evidence can be tested in court and judged by a jury of citizens.” The six unnamed co-conspirators will face trial separately or together, once charged. Smith’s investigation into other individuals is ongoing.
Perhaps most shocking is evidence that then-Department of Justice official (Civil Division) Jeffrey Clark was prepared to accept violence in the streets if Trump remained in office, and for Trump to put it down with U.S. troops.
“Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Even in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol violence, co-conspirators attempted to keep the coup plans afloat (Para. 119). Giuliani left a voice message that evening urging a senator to slow down the certification proceedings. Eastman (Para. 122) at 11:44 p.m. “emailed the Vice President’s Counsel advocating that the Vice President violate the law and seek further delay of the certification.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes remarked on the magnitude of the alleged crimes Tuesday evening, describing them as “in the canon of American events” along with the Civil War.
“This is the greatest political crime since secession,” Hayes added. “And the gravest test, that Lincoln called on the battlefield in Gettysburg of whether a nation of, by, and for the people, that we are our own masters, whether that can long endure.”
“If the law is not for this, what is it for?”
What has endured is the bitterness of the Confederacy’s defeat. With the end of Reconstruction came the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Southern efforts to reduce freed Black people to serfdom, if not de facto slavery, included a reign of white terror and Jim Crow laws that endured for another century. Monuments to Confederate heroes planted across the land by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spread the myth of the Lost Cause. Their memorials to violent insurrection endured into the second decade of this century. Many still remain. Confederate battle flags feature prominently in Trump rallies and entered the Capitol with rioters on Jan. 6.
What endures in many “freedom-loving” conservative souls is a not-so-latent hunger for a monarch. Indeed, evangelicals are taught from childhood to yearn for the return of Christ to reign as king over the Earth. Every knee shall bow, etc. In Trump, they found one.
Woman at the Trump rally today says she supports “King Jesus and King Trump.” pic.twitter.com/fIrhe82Pn5
Karl Marx believed that the internal contradictions of capitalism would eventually destroy it. Perhaps what Lincoln saw in a Southern aristocracy willing to tear the country apart to preserve their medieval society was the latent tension between Americans’ monarchist impulses and their aspirations for democratic self-government. Trump’s attempted coup was the latest test of whether the latter might yet prevail. In an age of rising autocracy, that testing continues.
Do not expect that MAGA Republicans will not, as they have already begun, weave a new Lost Cause myth. They will paint prosecution of the coup conspirators, their foot soldiers, and “King Trump” as a betrayal as bitter and unjust as the War of Northern Aggression. One hundred years on, the ancestors of those who fought at the Capitol will romanticize them as true patriots.
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