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The Voting Rights Act lives

Published by digby on June 8, 2023

But it’s on life support

From Professor Melissa Murray:

Some initial thoughts on Allen v. Milligan.

Media is trumpeting this as a “victory” for the Voting Rights Act. And it is. And I don’t want to be a turd in the punchbowl… but this is pretty weak sauce from this Court. 

First, this doesn’t “strengthen” the VRA. It preserves the status quo. And the status quo is that this Court has done an A+ job of hobbling the VRA over the last 10 years. 

In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, it eviscerated the preclearance formula. The preclearance regime required states with a history of voting discrimination to first “preclear” any changes to their voting rules and regs with the DOJ or a three-judge federal court panel 

The Court invalidated the preclearance formula on the ground that progress had been made and minorities were voting and blah blah blah. 

This progress narrative prompted RBG to note in dissent that throwing out the preclearance formula was like throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you weren’t getting wet. She was right. 

SCOTUS didn’t invalidate the whole preclearance regime–just the formula. And Congress could have written a new preclearance formula… if it weren’t super-polarized and dysfunctional.

As it happened, Congress did not write a new formula. And the preclearance regime died. 

Which has led to an uptick in laws that seem aimed at suppressing the vote among certain constituencies.

When confronted with this possibility in Shelby County, CJ Roberts, who wrote for the 5-4 maj, assured us that Sec 2 of the VRA remained a viable path for dealing with this. 

Except that the Court was determined to hobble that too!

And it did in 2021’s Brnovich v. DNC, which made it harder for litigants to establish violations of Section 2. 

And that’s not all!

After the 2020 census Alabama drew its new Congressional map… and it seemed to many that the map was drawn for the purpose of diluting the electoral power of Black people, who comprise 27% of the state’s population 

Black voters, represented by the @NAACP_LDF and other groups, sued the state under Section 2, arguing that the map, as drawn, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 

A lower federal court agreed with the Black voters and said that the map was an impermissible gerrymander and that AL had to redraw its map before the midterm election. 

AL appealed the matter to SCOTUS on the shadow docket. SCOTUS, in a 5-4 decision, stayed the lower court’s ruling, allowing the map to go into effect and be used in the 2022 midterm election. 

You will recall that in the 2022 midterms, the Democrats lost control of the House. This was due to a lot of different factors, but many have noted the impact of gerrymandering and other democratic distortions in the outcome of the election. 

SCOTUS in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause said that federal courts could not review (and adjudicate) claims of partisan gerrymandering.

And in February 2022, it allowed AL’s map–the map it now agrees was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander–to go into effect. 

So, yes, today’s decision is a victory that maintains the status quo for Section 2 of the VRA.

But it is cold comfort when one considers the way this Court through its decisions has actively distorted the electoral landscape and made true representative government more elusive.

I think it’s “rule-washing.” Roberts and Kavanaugh are political animals and they know the reputation of the Court is shit. So they’re going to throw a few bones to take some of the heat off. It’s good, as far as it goes. But no on e should be comforted that they are actually moderating.

Tucker the Internet Troll

Published by digby on June 8, 2023

This is what he’s come to

I can’t tell you how much I love this:

Had it come from anyone else, the transition would have been amusing.

“The media lie,” the host says, looking into the camera for a video posted on Twitter. “They do. But mostly, they just ignore the stories that matter.”

Stories like what, you ask? Well, fast-forward a few seconds and you get your answer.

“Yesterday, for example,” he explains, “a former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft.”

Ah, okay. Everyone over the age of 13 can see where this is going.

But the speaker here wasn’t one of the unidentifiable talking phenomena that litter social media. It wasn’t even Alex Jones, who made a career out of elevating skepticism in authority so high that people might even believe that his nutritional supplements were worth the cost.

It was, instead, Tucker Carlson, booted from cable news and landing amongst the proletariat he so strenuously claims to love. Yes, the production value of his video was higher than most, but the argumentation very much was not.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we will note that there was, in fact, a report from a niche website, later picked up by the upstart cable channel NewsNation, in which a former military officer claims that the government is in possession of alien craft.

The website (which I, at least, had never heard of before) has a dedicated section for discussing UFOs and was co-founded by a guy who’s written books about UFOs. One would assume that its claims would be considered in that context; this is a site eager to elevate the idea that such craft exist. The story depends almost entirely on the credibility of the former military official.

Good enough for Carlson.

“It was clear he was telling the truth,” he said. “In other words, UFOs are actually real and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. Now we know. In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell, the story of the millennium. But in our country, it doesn’t.”

Well, yeah, because the bar for accepting sweeping allegations about government coverups is higher than the word of one guy. That’s particularly true when it comes to UFOs, perhaps the most stereotypical example of conspiratorial allegations by fringe actors.

We’ve been through this before with Carlson. When he was at Fox, he had an ancillary streaming show that wasn’t aired in prime time. There, he elevated similarly specious assertions, including a multipart investigation into mutilations of cattle that he suggested was linked to alien beings.

As made obvious in his new Twitter video, the intent was clear. Carlson, like Alex Jones, wants his audience to be skeptical of authority, in part because he himself is skeptical and in part, obviously, because it makes his audience more pliable and gives him more power.

Back then, though, the claims at least carried the imprimatur of Fox News, albeit through its “Fox Nation” streaming offshoot. Puck News analyst Julia Alexander made a useful point about that distinction after Carlson’s video was posted.

“There’s an air of cautious belief, especially amongst the core (dwindling) cable news audience — and doubly so Fox’s audience — that if it’s airing, there’s semblance of authenticity,” she wrote on Twitter. “Because it’s on TV, and it’s labeled news. On Twitter it’s more noise in a sea of endless noise.”

That’s true. There’s a reason that right-wing organizations like One America and Newsmax exist as cable-news channels: It lends a credibility that a generic, unheard-of website lacks. In November 2020, I wrote about the way Trump’s false election-fraud claims were being laundered through these news-source simulacra, with coifed anchors sitting at translucent desks as colors slipped slowly around on video screens behind them. It wasn’t news, much less objective news, but it sure did look like it was. Particularly among the oldest Americans — Carlson’s core audience — cable news is a much more trusted source of political information than social media.

But now that’s gone. Yes, Carlson can boast that, by Twitter’s metrics, the first “episode” of his new Twitter “show” — one with all of the visual-effect accoutrements of a dude recording his thoughts on the Burger King menu while sitting in his parking lot in his car — scooped up more than 73 million views in less than 18 hours. Unlike Fox News, though, where viewership is measured by an agreed-upon third party and tied to actual consumption of the product, Elon Musk’s Twitter counts almost any observation of the video as a “view.” How many people actually watched Carlson’s 10-minute video is impossible to determine.

Carlson will presumably press on. Perhaps his commentary will layer on more of the familiar visual cues of cable news over time. Maybe he will develop this response to his ouster into something differentiated from the thousands of other videos that offer commentary on Twitter on a given day.

For now, though, Carlson’s first offering — once the standard maybe-Russia-isn’t-that-bad stuff was out of the way — came down to one simple message: The media is lying to you and won’t tell you about UFOs.

It is fitting that this, the hoariest of conspiracy theories, should mark Carlson’s debut as a social-media commentator.

You should see his “set.” It’s pathetic

Breaking down #IndictmentWatch

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 8, 2023

Trump-DOJ news took some keeping up with on Wednesday

Luckily, Marcy Wheeler keeps up better than anybody.

GOP fringe leading the fringe

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 8, 2023

Election-rigging simplified

Breaking news of Donald Trump’s forever-imminent indictment on federal and state charges came so thick and fast on Wednesday that I missed this detailed New Yorker essay from Andrew Marantz until MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interviewed him on set last night.

“How a Fringe Legal Theory Became a Threat to Democracy” charts the journey of the independent-state-legislature theory (I.S.L.T.) from crank theory supporting the Bush v. Gore decision that settled the 2000 presidential election to one mainstream enough to reach the U.S. Supreme Court again. Marantz reviews this one, Moore v. Harper, from North Carolina:

In 2021, with Tim Moore as the speaker of the North Carolina House, the majority-Republican legislature drew gerrymandered congressional maps—that is, even more egregiously gerrymandered than usual. Several voters (one of them named Becky Harper) and a handful of nonprofits (including Common Cause, where [democracy activists Sailor]Jones works) sued to block the implementation of those maps, and the state Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The U.S. Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the legislature’s maps should stand—and, by extension, whether the state court had the power to review them at all.

I.S.L.T. advocates contend that the Constitution gives plenary power to state legislatures over the conduct of elections. Not even the courts may review their decisions for compliance with the state or federal constitution.

“That’s just not how it works,” said legal scholar Vikram Amar who, with his brother Akhil, published a law-review article last year entitled “Eradicating Bush-League Arguments Root and Branch” that took on I.S.L.T. another scholar called “right-wing fanfic.”

Harvard’s Laurence Tribe described the lack of historical support for the theory, saying, “This wasn’t something that had an organic development in the law. It was, frankly, something that was pulled out of somebody’s butt, because they thought it was a convenient way to fulfill a short-term partisan agenda.”

Like putting a thumb on the scale in a presidential election. The theory was an aside in 2000. In 2020, I.S.L.T. found its way into Team Trump’s efforts to overturn the election he lost by seven million votes.

A familiar cast of MAGA characters were involved in promoting I.S.L.T. for overturning the assignment of electoral votes in key states: Rudolph Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, Ginni Thomas.

The entire piece is worth the read.

Why I.S.L.T. has come to a head in North Carolina is familiar territory. The GOP has worked assiduously at rigging the political game here since taking control of the legislature after the 2010 REDMAP wipeout:

American activists of all stripes, paraphrasing Justice Louis Brandeis, have long referred to the states as laboratories of democracy. But the adage has started to reverse itself: in the past two years alone, there has been one book called “Laboratories Against Democracy” and another called “Laboratories of Autocracy.” North Carolina is often cited as a paradigmatic case. It’s a purple state—Barack Obama won it in 2008 and lost it in 2012—but in many recent years Republicans have enjoyed super-majorities in the legislature, and they have used this power to grant themselves more power. After the Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor, in 2012, the state passed what voting-rights advocates called the monster election law—a combination of voter-I.D. requirements, reduced access to polling sites, and other obstacles that made it, at the time, among the most suppressive laws of its kind in the country. (A court later overturned the law, ruling that it would “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”)

[…]

In 2016, the anti-democratic maneuvers grew more brazen. McCrory ran for reëlection and narrowly lost, but he didn’t concede to his Democratic successor, Roy Cooper, for nearly a month, citing “serious concerns of potential voter fraud.” This received less attention than it might have, given the Presidential election that happened at the same time. (McCrory recently told me that he now believes Cooper’s victory was legitimate, although he mentioned that the election had included some “bad things” and “unfortunate coincidences,” including faulty Dominion voting machines.) During McCrory’s remaining time in office, the legislature convened for a special session and stripped the incoming governor of a wide range of powers. “Partisanship, hardball politics—that we were familiar with,” Mike Woodard, a Democratic state senator, told me. “But not just pulling the rug out like that.”

N.C. Democrats fought battles in court over redistricting and newly restrictive voting laws since 2011. Much of that I’ve covered in past posts. What’s changed today is that Republicans have tired of losing in court. Now they want to cut the courts, including the state Supreme Court, entirely out of the review process.

“We can’t control who wins statewide office … and we can’t control who’s on the state Supreme Court,” Hayes commented last night [timestamp 42:40], speaking in the voice of the G.O.P. “The one thing we’re sure we can always control are two things in America: state legislature bodies (because we gerrymander them) and the federal judiciary which we pack with our people. And it just so happens that our constitutional theory gives these two entities the most power over how elections are run.”

“Such a strange coincidence,” snarked Marantz.

What could happen when SCOTUS rules on Moore v. Harper ?

The conventional wisdom was that the three liberal Justices would almost certainly reject I.S.L.T., and the three most conservative Justices almost certainly would not. This left the three Justices who currently pass for moderates—the three who worked for the Bush legal team in 2000—as the likely swing votes. Not long ago, I met up with Chris Shenton and his colleagues at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, in an office park on the outskirts of Durham, as they prepared potential arguments in Moore v. Harper. “There are a couple of ways to split the baby on this one, but not many,” Shenton told me. “You either think the whole concept of I.S.L.T. is coherent or you don’t.” In 2015, in a case called Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, the Court had rejected a version of I.S.L.T. Another coalition lawyer, Hilary Harris Klein, said that it would be highly unusual for the Court to reverse such a recent major precedent.

“They could probably find a way,” Shenton said.

“Well, sure,” Klein said, “they could do anything, if logic and principles go out the window.”

In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe? Don’t count on logic and principles.

Meantime, Republicans in Raleigh last week introduced a new set of election hurdles for voters to overcome (Senate Bill 747). Cleta Mitchell met with Republican leaders in Raleigh about the bill before it became public. They bristled at the idea that Cleta Mitchell influenced its drafting, reports WRAL:

A main focus of the bill is mail-in voting. It would add new obstacles to people seeking to vote by mail. It would enact an earlier deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive and still be counted. And it would make it easier for people to challenge the validity of others’ mail-in ballots. The bill also would ban outside grant funding for elections and enact more aggressive rules for removing people from the list of registered voters, among other changes.

That description is more anodyne than the actual implications. Election officials must maintain a record of anyone giving assistance to a voter inside the voting booth. The bill also requires “county boards of elections to use verification software to check the signatures of voters noted on executed absentee ballots before those ballots are accepted by the county boards.” How they manage that is their problem. Can you say, “unfunded mandate”?

“And here they go with advice from election deniers and fraud perpetrators,” Cooper tweeted last Thursday. “Don’t be fooled. This isn’t about protecting elections. It’s about rigging them to help Republicans.”

Marantz attended a bipartisan forum in Hickory last year meant to reassure voters about the integrity of North Carolina’s election. (I attended the same one when it came to Asheville.) Marantz writes:

The audience raised several stubborn narratives about voter fraud, familiar from Trump rallies and right-wing memes, and a series of election officials took turns patiently demystifying the process. Still, at least a few listeners were able to remain mystified. A local I.T. official started a sentence “When it comes to cybersecurity . . .” at which point he was interrupted by a heckler, who shouted, “No such thing as cybersecurity! Anything that’s hooked up to the Internet can be hacked.” The I.T. official did his best to explain that North Carolina’s voting machines were not—in fact, could not be—connected to the Internet, but this seemed to have no effect. Afterward, in the parking lot, I approached the heckler, identified myself as a journalist, and asked if anything he’d heard had changed his mind. “Go pound sand,” he said. He got in his car and slammed the door. Then, perhaps worried that he had been unclear, he rolled down his window, shouted, “Go fuck yourself,” and peeled off.

The GOP has cultivated a market for this stuff for decades. Trump shot the conspiracists full of adrenaline, just not in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

DeSantis made no splash

Published by digby on June 7, 2023

He’s going nowhere fast:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has seen his approval rating fall dramatically two weeks after announcing his 2024 presidential bid.

According to online polling company Civiqs’ dynamic approval rating graph, DeSantis currently has a net approval rating of negative 19 points, with an average of 55 percent of respondents disapproving of him, compared with 36 percent who have a favorable view of the Republican.

The data shows DeSantis has a major unfavorable rating from those aged 18-34 (63 percent), women (62 percent), as well as African Americans (85 percent), and the Hispanic/Latino population (68 percent). [I wonder why]m,

In comparison, the Florida Governor’s overall approval and disapproval rating was tied at 47 percent in early December.

Around this time, suggestions that DeSantis should be the one to lead the GOP in 2024 were gaining momentum after many—including those in the Republican Party—blamed Donald Trump for the party’s poor midterm performance. A number of candidates endorsed by the former president lost their races in elections across the country.

In the subsequent months, DeSantis’ approval rating has fallen 19 points, with polls continuing to suggest that Trump is the overwhelming favorite to clinch the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 despite his continuing legal difficulties.

These include Trump pleading not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a historic first for a former president in New York and being found liable in a civil trial of sexually abusing former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s.

DeSantis could take solace in the fact that Trump is currently recording a higher disapproval rating at 57 percent in Civiqs’ tracker, with the former president recording disapproval scores in the mid-50s for most of the year.

However, according to FiveThirtyEight’s collection of GOP primary polls, Trump has come out on top in all the most recent surveys dating back to March, with a recent Morning Consult poll published June 6 showing the former president 34 points ahead of the Florida Governor (56-22 percent).

The Morning Consult survey also showed that DeSantis is failing to chip into Trump’s lead in the polls since confirming he is running for president in a glitchy May 24 Twitter Space announcement.

DeSantis’ poll numbers have remained stagnant compared to the previous Morning Consult survey from May 20 (21 percent), and down from his high of 34 percent recorded in January.

The latest survey showed that a fourth of potential primary voters reported hearing something negative about DeSantis over the past week, the highest share since tracking began in late November.

His greatest liability is people getting to know him. That’s not a positive for a national politician.

One reason that it would be really great if he could crash and burn is that it might calm the “woke” jihad a little bit if people could see that it’s an electoral loser.

Uh oh…

Published by digby on June 7, 2023

The silver lining is the young women have become slightly more liberal during the same time period. Why? I think this is probably the best explanation:

Just remember kids. Many of the hated baby boomers were liberal at one time too.

Indictment watch

Published by digby on June 7, 2023

We have news that the head of the DOJ counter-espionage department is asking the questions at this Florida Grand Jury which seems … odd. They questioned Tayler Budowich, former a spokesman for Trump now running one of his Super Pacs today, so who knows what it all means?

This informative piece by Andrew Weissman and Ryan Goodman sheds some light on what we might expect:

If special counsel Jack Smith hands down an indictment, we will be keeping an eye on many open issues that might indicate how strong a case the government believes it has. Here is what is on our checklist of things to note:

Retention vs. dissemination

Look to see whether the charges include not just illegal “retention” of national defense information, but also a separate allegation of “dissemination.” Both charges are violations of the Espionage Act and are central to U.S. national security law and protecting the country’s most sensitive secrets. But a dissemination case is particularly egregious, as an illegal retention case deals only with the risk of improper dissemination, not the actuality. To date, what is in the public record does not indicate that charges for dissemination are warranted, but an indictment may be revelatory.

Obstruction only

Examine whether Smith decides to jettison all Espionage Act-related offenses and charge only obstruction offenses. Such a slimmed-down approach could be aimed at differentiating the Trump prosecution from the apparent facts in the Biden and now-closed Pence investigations. All three involve improper possession of government documents, but only Trump’s case raises the issue of obstruction of justice.

Wild card: If the Justice Department alleges that Trump or his aides were involved in tampering with Mar-a-Lago video surveillance footage, that is as acute a form of obstruction of justice as the allegedly false June certification that represented that a diligent search for responsive documents had been performed and all such documents returned.

A “speaking indictment”

An indictment does not have to spell out the alleged facts; it just needs to track the legal elements of a criminal charge. However, to explain to the American public why this is a righteous case, this indictment could (and should) be what is known as a “speaking indictment” and lay out specific obstruction evidence, such as former White House counsel and personal Trump lawyers advising the former president to return the documents; Trump’s reported efforts to hide documents at Mar-a-Lago (and elsewhere); and any specific lies Trump told or caused to be told to the National Archives and Records Administration, the Justice Department and even his own lawyers.

Strength of the evidence

Prosecutors often use a speaking indictment to show the strength of their case, sometimes to provoke a guilty plea, other times to induce people to cooperate and, in this instance, to gain public support for such a historic indictment. Look to see whether the indictment references “hard” evidence — such as audio recordings and written documents (e.g. emails, letters, and contemporaneous notes) — evidence from firsthand witnesses, and even co-conspirators who might have admitted their guilt already (as in a plea agreement).

Information already made public suggests this may be an overwhelming case, but a speaking indictment should provide chapter and verse on any alleged obstructive conduct.

Content of classified information

We will be keeping a close eye for how highly sensitive the information in the government documents Trump kept was. What subjects do the documents concern — Iran’s missile program, possible war plans, a foreign country’s nuclear capabilities, U.S. intelligence on China, etc.? Do they reveal information about U.S. surveillance capabilities, sources and other intelligence methods?

Recall that there are various levels of classification, up to top secret, with subcategories for particularly sensitive information. The government sometimes deliberately avoids basing charges on the most sensitive documents, so as not to have to reveal those publicly in court. For the information to be publicly charged, the intelligence community will presumably need to have agreed to its use in open court.

In the weeds: If highly sensitive documents do appear, it may be because the intelligence community believes that information has already been compromised, because the information was highly sensitive at the time but has lost significance — or because the government is prepared to risk exposure of some highly sensitive information to secure a conviction in such a serious case.

Motive

Although the government need not usually prove why a defendant committed a crime, motive evidence can be powerful to a jury. It helps jurors understand why a defendant would engage in unlawful conduct, producing a persuasive narrative — and can foreclose routes for defense counsel to raise reasonable doubt. Evidence of especially crass or illicit motives can also shape how jurors consider the case.

Does the indictment allege Trump used the classified information as a means of settling scores with perceived enemies (e.g. the audiotape about a potential Iran attack and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley), had a narcissistic belief that laws simply do not apply to him in or out of office (Trump’s statement to Sean Hannity) or something even more pernicious, such as potentially using them to court financial favor (Saudi Arabia financial deals).

Of course, Trump could have several motives, and different ones for different documents. Does the special counsel spell out his theory?

Conspiracy

Will Trump be the sole defendant or will others be charged? There are several implications if the special counsel charges a conspiracy. First, a coordinated scheme would make this case more egregious than the average case in which the DOJ has pursued charges under these national security statutes. Second, charging others would raise the prospect of flipping them into government cooperators. Finally, conspiracy charges can expand the choice of venue where the government can try the case.

Venue

Look for where the DOJ files charges — the District of Columbia, Florida or New Jersey. What’s at stake in this decision is the jury pool, with Florida being the most favorable turf for Trump. The Justice Department, by contrast, is likely to want to bring the case in the District.

Several of the issues identified above implicate where the prosecutors can file the case. If the charges included conspiracy, illegal removal of government records from the White House or obstructive activity that occurred in the District, the prosecutors’ hand would be strengthened in claiming that the nation’s capital is the appropriate jurisdiction.

If the case were one solely of illegal retention, then Trump has the best argument that such charges must be brought in Florida (or wherever else he kept the documents).

Classified documents charges

As many legal experts have been saying for months, the potential criminal law violations at the heart of the case — including the three crimes alleged in the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago — do not require proof that the documents were classified.

However, several important national security crimes do address only classified documents — 18 USC 798 and 1924. Look for whether the special counsel brings such charges. If he does, it is a show of force implying that prosecutors have a strong hand and won’t blink in the face of Trump’s and his attorneys’ implausible claims of “declassification.”

Bedminster

Look for whether the alleged facts include documents at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J. The presence of documents at that location would probably drive a hole through some of Trump’s main public defenses — especially his claim that the National Archives-Government Accountability Office is responsible for having brought the classified records to Mar-a-Lago. If Trump is alleged to have personally handled documents at Bedminster, it’s difficult to conceive how his claims about how the documents were brought to Florida have any relevance.

A key question is how fast the case will move toward a trial and verdict. That will turn a lot on the particular judge assigned to the case. Many judges will want to permit the electorate to know the outcome of this criminal case before casting a vote. And, of course, to afford the defendant his day in court in advance of the election.

The case against Trump involves alleged violations of national security laws that are core to keeping national secrets and our country safe. To win public acceptance for such charges, the Justice Department should do everything possible to be transparent about its proof — and about why Trump is being treated the same way anyone else would be who had behaved this way.

It’s called the rule of law.

I have no idea if this is going to happen. Everyone seems to think it’s a slam dunk but you never know. Trump has a habit of slipping the noose. But as we await the news, one way or the other, this seems like a good guide.

Update: Lots and lots of rumors and some reporting that the DOJ told Trump that he’s likely to be indicted under the Espionage Act. This is from John Solomon, right winger with a direct line to Trump:

Smith’s prosecutorial team informed Trump’s legal team in recent days that the charges against the former president could include a violation of 18 U.S. Code Chapter 37 Section 793 that outlaws the “gathering, transmitting or losing” of national defense information. Other charges being considered involve alleged false statements and obstruction of justice, all claims the president and his team have robustly contested in public and in private.

Trump’s reaction:

Stay tuned.

Sportwashing for billions

Published by digby on June 7, 2023

I don’t know what to say about the following. The person speaking gobbledygook may have had a few too many White Claws.

You hve to admit, defending the Saudi human rights record and giving them credit for their sportswashing is pretty bold.

Meanwhile, guess who else is going to benefit?

The surprising deal on Tuesday ending a civil war in the world of professional golf stands to produce benefits for former President Donald J. Trump’s family business by increasing the prospect of major tournaments continuing to be played at Trump-owned courses in the United States and perhaps abroad.

The outcome is the latest example of how the close relationship between Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and Saudi Arabia, whose sovereign wealth fund is the force behind the upheaval in the golf world, has proved beneficial to both sides even as it has prompted intense ethical scrutiny and political criticism.

Even as it has injected new money and competition into professional golf, Saudi Arabia has been accused of using its wealth to buff its global reputation and obscure its human rights record through sports. That campaign now seems to have yielded business opportunities and a higher profile in the golf world for Mr. Trump as he seeks another term in the White House.

Since the establishment of LIV Golf, the Saudi-funded breakaway professional golf circuit, Mr. Trump and his family have aligned themselves with LIV against the PGA Tour at a time when the golf establishment in the United States and Britain had moved to shut Trump courses out of major professional competitions, a trophy that the Trump family had long sought.

The turn away from Mr. Trump and his courses only accelerated after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Just days after the assault, P.G.A. of America announced it was canceling a planned 2022 tournament at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., which had been planned for years.

LIV soon became the Trump family’s ticket back into the rarefied world of global tournaments, with events last year at Bedminster and Trump National Doral, the family’s golf resort near Miami. This year LIV brought tournaments to three Trump courses, adding the Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia to the schedule.

The decision by professional golf in the United States to shun Mr. Trump had infuriated members of his family. Mr. Trump’s business had spent more than a decade buying up or developing golf courses around the world with the goal of hosting major tournaments, which help drive memberships by putting the courses in the spotlight and could confer a degree of sports-world legitimacy on Mr. Trump, an avid golfer.

Dating back to when Mr. Trump was in the White House, he and his family have had unusually close ties with Saudi Arabia and the royal family there. His first foreign trip as president was to Riyadh, where he received a lavish welcome.

Mr. Trump later downplayed the Saudi government’s role in the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist, and he defended while in office Saudi Arabia’s long-running military campaign in neighboring Yemen.

After Mr. Trump left office, that relationship continued in the form of a $2 billion commitment by the Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler — to an investment fund set up by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. The Saudi fund also put $1 billion into a firm run by Steven Mnuchin, who had been Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary.

LIV Golf is backed by the same Saudi fund. The head of the fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, an avid golfer who also took on the role overseeing LIV Golf, spent lavishly to recruit top professional players like Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka and big names like Phil Mickelson with $25 million purses and guaranteed contracts that sometimes amounted to $100 million or more.

But the new alliance between the PGA Tour and LIV will also only escalate questions about Mr. Trump and potential conflicts of interest, as he does business with foreign government entities while also running again for the White House.

Already, the Justice Department, as part of its investigation into the handling of classified documents by Mr. Trump, has subpoenaed the Trump Organization, seeking records pertaining to Mr. Trump’s dealings with LIV Golf.

Under the agreement announced Tuesday, Mr. al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, will join the board of the PGA Tour. Mr. al-Rumayyan also said on Tuesday that the Saudi investment fund is prepared to invest billions of dollars into the merged golf tournament effort.

On Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform and personal megaphone, he wrote: “Great news from LIV Golf. A big, beautiful, and glamorous deal for the wonderful world of golf.”

Mr. Trump’s son Eric Trump, in an interview on Tuesday, also welcomed the agreement, calling it “a wonderful thing for the game of golf,” adding that he expects tournaments to continue at Trump-owned courses once the merger is complete.

When asked if the Trump family had played a role in urging the PGA Tour and the wealth fund to join forces, Eric Trump declined to comment. But he did say that the family has developed close friends over many years in the golf world, including those associated with the PGA Tour and LIV.

The Trump family has sought to have more of its golf courses host LIV tournaments, including a club in Dubai and the Trump Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, venues it now hopes to see added in future years to a reunified golf industry.

This reflects the intense effort by the Trump family to bring events to its courses, including in Scotland, which the British Open, one of professional golf’s major tournaments, has repeatedly declined to do. While president, Mr. Trump enlisted the American ambassador to Britain to pressure the British government, unsuccessfully, to hold a tournament at Turnberry.

The payments from the LIV tournaments do not show up in Mr. Trump’s financial disclosure report, which he filed in May, suggesting that the fees are going directly to the individual golf clubs and are counted as part of their overall revenues. The Trump family has not said how much they are making from LIV.

“Look, it’s peanuts for me. This is peanuts,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with reporters last month at his golf club in Virginia during a LIV event, adding that “they pay a rental fee. They want to use my properties because they’re the best properties.”

In July, just before the first LIV tournament was played at Trump National Bedminster, Mr. Trump predicted that the rival golf tours would ultimately merge, and he suggested that players who stayed loyal to the PGA Tour were making a financial mistake.

“All of those golfers that remain ‘loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA, in all of its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social in July 2022. “If you don’t take the money now, you will get nothing after the merger takes place, and only say how smart the original signees were.”

In an interview last year at Trump National Doral, when the LIV tournament was taking place there, Mr. Trump added that he was confident the Saudis were going to win the dispute.

“You’re not going to beat these people,” Mr. Trump said in October. “These people have great spirit, they’re phenomenal people and they have unlimited money — unlimited.”

He never has a bad word to say about any human rights violators. And he just loves corrupt rich people who find themselves in the cross hairs of the American judicial system.

[…]

But his alliance with the Saudis holds some political risks for Mr. Trump as he campaigns to return to the White House.

The announcement of the LIV-PGA deal immediately generated protests from a group called 9/11 Families United, which has pushed for continued investigation into the origins of the 2001 terror attacks. The group called the efforts by Saudi Arabia to enter professional golf “sportswashing” as part of a plan to improve the country’s reputation related to human rights and allegations that there were links between the hijackers and the Saudi government.

The leaders of the PGA Tour, a spokesman for 9/11 Families United said in a statement, “appear to have become just more paid Saudi shills, taking billions of dollars to cleanse the Saudi reputation,” a claim that also brought demonstrators to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster last year when the LIV tournament was being played there.

Trump basically defended the Saudis, saying “nobody has gotten to the bottom of 9/11 unfortunately…” Actually, the world got to bottom of it a long time ago and he knows it. It’s just that Saudi Arabia has so much money (which means they are very smart) and their leader MBS is a harsh, bloodthirsty dictator which he loves. And they put money in his pocket which is the best thing of all.

Whither the badass Freedom Caucus?

Published by digby on June 7, 2023

Now that the debt ceiling has been raised and all the smoke has cleared, it’s worthwhile to step back as assess the political fallout from the first major test of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership — and the clout of the House Freedom Caucus. I certainly didn’t think it would end with a whimper, not a bang, but that’s exactly what happened.

Considering how nuts the MAGA Republicans are, it was fair for most of us to assume they would hold McCarthy’s speakership hostage if he capitulated on any of their demands. After all, that was the whole point of the speakership battle back in January — they wanted the ability to dictate what bills would be voted out of the rules committee and come to the floor. And they guaranteed that by loading the committee with Freedom Caucus members and demanding that any one member could file a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair and require Kevin McCarthy to endure another election.

As the negotiations proceeded (much to the chagrin of progressives who believed that it was a mistake to deal with government hijackers who were stating openly that they were willing to blow up the world economy) the Freedom Caucus members began to wail, led by their leader former president Donald Trump who appeared at a CNN town hall meeting and said:

I say to the Republicans out there — congressmen, senators — if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default … you might as well do it now, because you’ll do it later.

He added that defaulting was “really psychological more than anything else” and claimed that it could be nothing or maybe just a bad day or week. That’s a pretty big gamble and one that most experts believe would have been a daft one to take.

The Freedom Caucus didn’t listen to him and instead stood down and let McCarthy and Biden make a very unsatisfying deal from their perspective. In fact, it was a deal one might have expected from any House speaker playing a weak hand with a tiny majority, but not one you would think he would make if his right flank was as batshit crazy as they are. I assumed that in order to keep the country from going over the cliff, Kevin McCarthy would have to give up his speakership or, at the very least, face another painful round of votes, weakening him even further.

That did not happen. The Freedom Caucus members blew off some steam but one of their top members on the Rules Committee broke ranks and let the bill come to the floor and while most of them didn’t vote for it in the end it ended up with 2/3 of the Republicans voting for it. (Freedom Caucus member Lauren Boebert didn’t even vote saying she refused to even grant the “crap sandwich” her vote but video turned up later showing that she actually just missed it.)

As for the threat to de-throne McCarthy, a few made some noises but in the end they all seemed to agree that they didn’t need to send him to the political guillotine. At least not yet. The question is why?

Right after the deal was struck, The New Yorker published a report on how it all went down, focusing on Russell Vought, a big MAGA RINO-hunter and Freedom Caucus guru (profiled here in Salon a couple of weeks ago) and his plot to take down McCarthy if he compromised with Biden. It sounded as though he was pretty gobsmacked at the mild reaction among his acolytes, whom he had guided through the speaker battle in January with the expectation that they would be in the driver’s seat. He told the New Yorker, “There was a deal. If you want to go back on that, there are going to be consequences.”

I guess we are seeing what he meant by that and it’s hardly got anyone shaking in their boots. Yesterday, the House conservatives decided it was time to stand up to the speaker and play hardball so a dozen far right members voted against the procedural rule vote on the floor to show they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. The leadership was surprised and will have to regroup to bring up the bills again.

What were they voting on? The immensely important, vital legislation called the Save Our Gas Stoves Act and Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act. They really showed Kevin McCarthy who’s boss.

The question really is, why are they so lame? We know that small rump faction has the power to do some real damage to McCarthy and the rest of the GOP leadership, which is the goal of Vought and others like Steve Bannon. Are they really just paper tigers after all?

The best analysis I’ve seen on this question is from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in The Atlantic who noted a while back that House Republicans and the MAGA caucus in particular have actually lost interest in actual policy in favor of their crusade against democracy. After all, the fight over deficits, in particular, is extremely dull compared to dismantling the “deep state” and punishing their political enemies.

And it’s important to remember that their decades-long austerity campaigns were really just cover for culture war issues, racism in particular, as the notorious GOP strategist Lee Atwater confessed on his deathbed. Today, they’re no longer constrained by the need for dogwhistles or euphemisms so they don’t need to pretend they are concerned about government spending. The only fiscal issue they truly care about is ensuring that taxes for rich people are kept as low as possible and until they are once again in power they can rely on the courts to take care of rolling back regulations.

Right now, they’re really only interested in showy hearings and press conferences that will get them a hot hit on Newsmax or maybe Steve Bannon’s War Room. Here’s the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, who practically lives on Fox, insinuating that the FBI Director is going to be killed (or raped) in prison.

The document they’re talking about is some moldy old Burisma transcript from Rudy Giuliani’s bag of tricks.

What we know now is that Freedom Caucus and their MAGA compatriots aren’t interested in government at all. They are interested in partisan warfare, period. If Kevin McCarthy doesn’t get in the way of waging those battles he can cut as many deals as he wants. And McCarthy has no intention of doing that. He obviously knew from the beginning that if he gave them free rein to let their freak flags fly he would be perfectly safe.