Month: August 2023

Sunday Four-Play: Trump’s lawyers try to spin their incorrigible client’s latest indictment

Posted on by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

Well, it’s indictment week. Again. And that must mean it’s time for Sunday Four-Play—a new-ish feature in which we shine a spotlight on some of the Sunday show hijinks.

In last week’s installment, we talked about Donald Trump’s latest indictment. This week, we’ll be talking about Donald Trump’s latest indictment. Next week: An exclusive four-part interview with the first Kardashian to show up at my door with an ounce of OG Kush and a Hefty bag full of crullers. Unless Donald Trump is indicted again—but that’s just common sense.

So before this is all over, will we see more Trump indictment weeks or Trump infrastructure weeks? In other words, is Trump more dangerously criminal or dangerously incompetent? You make the call.

The hits keep coming, and Trump’s not doing himself any favors by continuing to post on social media with all the forbearance and dignity of a howler monkey with his balls caught in a saltwater taffy machine. He really needs to call his old cybersecurity adviser Rudy Giuliani and ask him how to get locked out of his own phone. 

But remember. They’re not coming after Trump, they’re coming after you. He’s just in the way. Like one of those impenetrable southern border wall sections you can cut through in six minutes with a pair of Play-Doh Fun Factory scissors and a Bic lighter. 

So let’s take a quick peep at all the witchy witch hunts and election interference and whatnot, shall we?

1.

John Lauro is one of the folks Donald Trump hired to represent him after Barry Zuckerkorn refused to take his calls. He’s already—somewhat hilariously—acknowledged Trump’s guilt in one of the charges brought against him. And he did it on national TV, because Trump isn’t trying to hide anything! Even those things that could land him in prison, with limited conjugal visits from whoever’s spanking him with Forbes magazine these days. 

Lauro appeared on “Meet the Press” with host Chuck Todd, who is leaving the show in September. (Not strictly relevant, I know; it just makes me happy.)

Judging from Lauro’s response, it’s fair to question whether he has any control over his client at all. The more Trump talks, the quaggier his legal quagmire gets. We should consider sending him an Adderall gift basket to hasten his trip to the exercise languidly-sitting-in-a-puddle-of-one’s-own-McRib-filth yard. 

WATCH: Fmr. Pres. Trump attacked Special Counsel Jack Smith, saying he's "deranged."@chucktodd: "Do innocent people attack prosectors?" Trump lawyer John Lauro: "My role is not to address anything about prosectors." pic.twitter.com/FhmotHNvi2

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) August 6, 2023

TRUMP (CLIP): “Deranged Jack Smith, he’s a deranged human being. You take a look at that face you say, ‘That guy is a sick man, there’s something wrong with him.’”

TODD: “Do you believe he’s deranged?”

LAURO: “President Biden in April of 2022 said he wanted President Trump prosecuted, and he wanted him out of the race. He repeated that in November of 2022. As a result, President Biden has put in motion a political prosecution in the middle of an election season, and obviously everything is open to politics. I’m not involved in politics, I’m just representing a client. I’m ensuring that justice is done in this case. President Trump is entitled to his day in court, and he’ll get it.”

TODD: “Do innocent people attack prosecutors?”

LAURO: “This is a political campaign right now. This prosecution was instituted by President Biden, and in the middle of that campaign, people are going to speak out. My role is not to address anything about prosecutors, but I will say this: There has been a history in the Justice Department of rogue prosecutions. They went after Arthur Andersen, a major accounting firm. Destroyed the company, and the DOJ lost 9-0. They went after the former governor of Virginia in a prosecution—a Republican governor who was convicted unfairly. Reversed 9-0. And now the Justice Department, the Biden Justice Department, is going after a former president for acts that he carried out in fulfillment of his oath and president of the United States.”

You know, when Lauro claimed President Biden said he wanted Trump prosecuted and out of the race, I thought to myself, “Hmm, that doesn’t sound anything like Biden. It sure sounds like something Trump would say, though.”

Well, I was right. And since this claim is at the heart of the Trump team’s public defense of their client—i.e., that this is nothing but a political prosecution launched by Trump’s political opponent—it’s important to take this head-on.

First of all, Trump is the one who continually tried to weaponize the DOJ. He wanted the department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI director James Comey, whom he corruptly fired in an attempt to stop an investigation. He also tried to use the department to overturn the 2020 election. And he continually attacked former Attorney General Jeff Sessions after Sessions recused himself in the Russian investigation—because he wanted “his” DOJ to act as his personal Roy Cohn. Oh, and he recently said he would seek to prosecute President Biden if he’s reelected. 

But Biden? He understands the White House’s traditional hands-off posture toward the DOJ in a way that Trump never did. And he’s continually resisted overstepping his authority. 

So what is Lauro talking about here?

Well, in April 2022, according to media reports, Biden privately mentioned to his inner circle that he thought Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, but he never mentioned this personal preference to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

And in November of last year, responding to a reporter’s question about how to reassure world leaders that the poo-flinging Putin puppet would never resume his tirade, Biden said, “Well, we just have to demonstrate that he will not take power by—if we—if he does run. I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.” 

In other words, he’s going to campaign against him.

But hey, why let facts and context get in the way of a fun narrative!?

2.

Oh, hey, Lauro was on “Face the Nation,” too! And “ABC This Week”! Not to mention “Fox News Sunday”! He may have appeared in hologram form on at least one of them. 

Here he was with CBS’ Major Garrett talking about the Trump team’s desire for a change of venue:

Trump lawyer John Lauro on CBS: "We would like a diverse venue, a diverse jury ... I think West Virginia will be an excellent venue to try this case. Close to DC and a much more diverse--" pic.twitter.com/ib6S2Mdd7l

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 6, 2023

GARRETT: “You’re still going to pursue a change of venue?”

LAURO: “Absolutely. We would like a diverse venue, a diverse jury ...”

GARRETT: “Do you have any expectation that will be granted?”

LAURO: “… that reflects the characteristics of the American people. It’s up to the judge. I think West Virginia would be an excellent venue to try this case.”

Yes, the famously diverse state of West Virginia, whose residents represent every color of the rainbow, from alabaster to ecru. Its population is 92.8% white and 3.7% Black. Maybe we could make the jury even more diverse by drawing its members exclusively from meth-fueled brawls in Charleston Cracker Barrel parking lots.

Hey, here’s a tip: If you don’t want to be tried in Washington, D.C., don’t commit crimes in Washington, D.C. It works every time!

3.

Alina Habba, another Trump attorney and apologist, appeared on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo. And this happened:

Habba: I think that realistically you have to remember that a lot of these cases deal with classified documents which mean that all the lawyers now have to apply for special clearance, right? You can’t just take a classified document and review it. You have to have scifs. pic.twitter.com/HDzaQzRgJS

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 6, 2023

BARTIROMO: “Let me ask you this, because typically when you have a case as complicated as the one we’re talking about, there is deposition, there is discovery—a whole discovery process where Trump’s lawyers will have to get access to the other side’s information, and vice versa. How long do you expect that process to take, because Jack Smith says he wants a speedy trial. We’re about a year away from an election. Obviously we’re just two weeks away from the first GOP primary debate, two months away from the Iowa Caucuses. Are you expecting to have a trial before election 2024?”

HABBA: “I think that that’s their goal. I think that realistically you have to remember that a lot of these cases deal with classified documents and classified records, which mean that all the lawyers now have to apply for special clearance, right? So it’s not a normal situation. You can’t just take a classified document and review it. You have to have SCIFs. You have to have certain procedures put in place. So while I appreciate Jack Smith trying to bleed us all dry and trying to have a speedy trial, perhaps he should have taken a case that didn’t involve classified documents that he now possesses, that we have to now repossess and review for discovery. It’s a poorly planned attack, frankly, because that’s what it is, it’s political lawfare, and he didn’t think it through. So I think these are going to take a lot longer. I think that once the judges get a [unintelligible] for how many years they’ve had this discovery—look at [Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney] Fani [Willis], two years. But she’s bringing this case now. Why? Because of election interference. They want to keep him tied up in trials, keep his lawyers tied up so that we’re distracted and not focused. It’s not going to work. He is a machine and he knows what he’s doing in a campaign. You know, he’s done this rodeo before.”

[Emphasis added]

Wait, Trump is a machine? Someone alert Mike Lindell!

Mike Lindell's speech announcing a class action lawsuit against all machines set over the Terminator 2 intro. pic.twitter.com/RUTylylbVv

— Matthew Highton (@MattHighton) March 6, 2022

But never mind Pillow Man. Here’s the real takeaway: “You can’t just take a classified document and review it. You have to have SCIFs. You have to have certain procedures put in place.”

Say, Alina. Go back to the transcript and read that part over again. Then ask yourself if it was appropriate for Trump to (allegedly!) wave classified battle plans around in front of a gaggle of randos. This is an easy one. We’ll progress to the alphabet song in next week’s lesson—and colors and shapes, if there’s still time. 

4.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead manager for Trump’s second impeachment, appeared on “Meet the Press” after Lauro spewed his pabulum all over Chuck Todd’s neatly pressed suit. 

It went a little something like this:

WATCH: Rep. Raskin (D-Md.) says Trump's lawyer claiming a "technical violation of the Constitution is not a violation of criminal law" is "deranged." "There are people who are in jail for several years for counterfeiting one vote. ... He tried to steal the entire election." pic.twitter.com/mdCsksjkY4

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) August 6, 2023

TODD: “Let me first start with a couple of things we heard from Mr. Lauro. You spent 25 years as a constitutional law professor, so I kind of want to get Professor Raskin’s take on this. Let me play one quick clip of something he said to me about the Constitution.”

LAURO (CLIP): “A technical violation of the Constitution is not a violation of criminal law. That’s just plain wrong.”

TODD: “Now, he added the word ‘criminal law’ there, but it was my understanding if you violated the Constitution, you’ve violated the law.”

RASKIN: “Well, first of all, a technical violation of the Constitution is a violation of the Constitution. The Constitution in six different places opposes insurrection. It makes that a grievous constitutional offense. So our Constitution is designed to stop people from trying to overthrow elections and trying to overthrow the government. But in any event, there’s a whole apparatus of criminal law which is in place to enforce this constitutional principle. That’s what Donald Trump is charged with violating. He conspired to defraud the American people out of our right to an honest election by substituting the real legal process we have under federal and state law with counterfeit electors. I mean, there are people who are in jail for several years for counterfeiting one vote, if they try to vote illegally once. He tried to steal the entire election, and his lawyer’s up there saying, oh, that’s just a matter of him expressing his First Amendment rights. That’s deranged. That is a deranged argument.”

Yes. Yes, it is. But with a client like this, a deranged argument is probably the best you can do, now isn’t it?

But wait! There’s more!

Some additional Sunday clips to help ease you into your week:

That’s all for now, friends. See you next week!

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.  

Raskin says Trump ‘met his match’ in special counsel Jack Smith

Posted on (Updated by Sarah Fortinsky

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Sunday he thinks former President Trump has “met his match” in special counsel Jack Smith, as Trump has managed to avoid facing repercussions for actions he’s taken in the past, including in the events surrounding Jan. 6.

“I think that he's met his match now in his special counsel, who is holding him to the letter of the criminal law,” Raskin said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Raskin pointed to Trump’s second impeachment, when all 50 Democrats and seven Republicans voted to convict the former president — falling short of the necessary threshold — as an example of Trump avoiding repercussions.

“It was a 57-43 vote to convict him of inciting a violent insurrection against the Union, which was the most widespread bipartisan vote in American history to convict a president. And of course, Trump is bragging about the fact that only 57 senators voted to convict him of that. He beat the constitutional spread in his way,” Raskin said. 

Raskin noted that many Republicans who voted against convicting Trump still believed that Trump was responsible for his actions, but they voted against conviction because he was a former president. 

Raskin said he was hopeful the former president would now be held accountable.

Smith led investigations that resulted in two federal indictments against the former president, one for his alleged mishandling of classified documents and another related to his efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. 

Trump is also seeking another term in the White House and is currently the front-runner among GOP presidential primary candidates.

‘The next entitlement program’? Public pools are disappearing, actually

Posted on (Updated by Laura Clawson

Some recent media coverage has drawn attention to the disappearance of public pools across the United States, and the deadly consequences of that disappearance. Right-wing media dude Erick Erickson sees an opening for outrage, because if you’re in the right-wing media, manufacturing outrage is your bread and butter.

“Starting to see more and more progressives demand public swimming pools,” Erickson tweeted. “Get ready for the next entitlement program.”

Erickson is clearly responding at least in part to a boomlet of media coverage of the decline of investment in public pools in the United States. CNN recently weighed in with some key facts: In 2015, there was one public pool per 34,000 people. That’s down to one per 38,000 people now. But that’s a very short time frame. Consider this: Around 20 years ago, Louisville, Kentucky, had 10 public pools for 550,000 people. Now it’s five for 640,000 people.

Much of the recent shift has been about disinvestment in public goods, things that benefit everyone, as Republicans push privatization of just about every possible government service. But if you go back a little further to the middle of the 20th century and desegregation, you get to some really ugly stuff. In some cities, there were full-on race riots as public pools were desegregated and Black people showed up to swim. In 1949 in St. Louis, for instance, a mob of thousands of white people showed up at the Fairground Park Pool as the first Black swimmers were allowed in. The pool was resegregated in response to the violence—Black people banned from swimming because of white people’s violence—and when it was integrated again the next year, white attendance plummeted. The pool closed six years later. Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., also had race riots over pool integration in the 1940s.

In some places, white people threw acid, bleach, or nails into pools to keep Black people out of them. Cities closed pools, filling them with concrete rather than countenancing integration. Swimming became a privatized activity, with the number of private swimming pools—at country clubs or at homes—soaring. Racism then fed into and combined with a pattern we see again and again: When rich people have access to something privately, public investment in it plummets.

When Erickson sneers about ”the next entitlement program,” he’s talking about something that has been in decline for decades as a direct result of two factors: racism and Republican economic policy.

The loss of public pools has deadly effects. In another of the pieces that likely spurred Erickson to try to manufacture outrage over the possibility of public pools, The New York Times’ Mara Gay recently wrote:

Drowning is the leading cause of death among 1- to 4-year-olds, the second-leading cause of accidental deaths by injury among children 5 to 14, and the third-leading cause of accidental death by injury for Americans 24 years and younger. Younger Black adolescents are more than three times as likely to drown as their white peers; Native American and Alaskan Native young adults are twice as likely to drown as white Americans. Eight in 10 drowning victims in the United States are male. Children with autism are 160 times as likely to drown or experience near-fatal drowning, a serious medical event that can cause severe and often permanent physical harm. The C.D.C. estimates that drowning costs the U.S. economy $53 billion each year.

That’s a lot of dead kids, and many of them are dead because there was nowhere safe for them to learn to swim. When it’s hot out—and thanks to climate change, it’s hotter and hotter—people tend to go in the water even if they don't know how to swim, and even if there are no safe options with qualified lifeguards. According to a 2017 study by the USA Swimming Foundation, 87% of people with no or low swimming ability nonetheless planned to go swimming that summer.

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The same study found that 40% of white kids had little or no swimming ability, but that was true of 64% of Black kids. Low-income kids were also dramatically more likely to have little or no swimming ability—something you can directly tie to the privatization of swimming. If it costs money to learn to swim, and requires traveling outside your neighborhood to get to the pool, swimming becomes a luxury and a class-based skill.

People calling out these ugly facts is what spurred Erickson to be all incensed about “progressives” agitating for “the next entitlement program.” According to him, something that the United States invested in during the 1930s, building hundreds of public pools during the New Deal, and which gave shape to a defining feature of life for decades is now some kind of loony new idea.

Do you live near a public pool? If you look at where the public pools in your area are located, do you see racial inequalities? In your experience, are public pools more or less available now or when you were a kid?

GOP statements on Trump indictment clash with initial Jan. 6 remarks

Posted on (Updated by Mychael Schnell

House Republicans flocked to former President Trump’s side following his indictment on charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, criticizing it as politically motivated and accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) of malpractice.

But some of their responses were notably different from what they were saying privately and publicly around the time of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot — which marked the culmination of Trump’s attempts to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win and keep himself in power.

The contrast between the reactions underscores the evolution of how GOP lawmakers talk about Jan. 6, which has been fueled in large part by Trump and the firm grip he continues to have on the Republican Party.

The epitome of that shift has been Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who said Trump bore responsibility for the riot shortly after the rampage before careening back to the former president’s corner in the weeks that followed. He cemented that position Tuesday, when he accused the DOJ using the indictment of trying to “distract” from investigations into President Biden and his family.

“[J]ust yesterday a new poll showed President Trump is without a doubt Biden’s leading political opponent. Everyone in America could see what was going to come next: DOJ’s attempt to distract from the news and attack the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, President Trump,” McCarthy wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

McCarthy also referenced a series of points Republicans have been citing in their investigations into the Biden family’s business dealings — which the White House has denied — but did not comment on the charges at hand, a strategy that has become the Speaker’s norm when discussing allegations against Trump.

Days after the Capitol riot, however, McCarthy did not mince words.

“The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” declared McCarthy, then the minority leader, on the House floor as lawmakers debated Trump’s impeachment. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.”

“These facts require immediate action by President Trump, accept his share of responsibility, quell the brewing unrest and ensure President-elect Biden is able to successfully begin his term,” he added.

Within a month of his floor speech, as it started becoming clear that the GOP would remain squarely behind Trump, McCarthy began softening his criticism of the former president, telling reporters he did not think Trump “provoked” the Capitol riot. Later that week, he said Trump “had some responsibility when it came to the response,” before adding “I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility.”

And days after, McCarthy visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence for a meeting largely focused on the upcoming midterm elections. But the gathering — and a photo of the two men standing side-by-side that circulated after — was perceived by many as an effort to mend the relationship between the two top Republicans as the party was fracturing amid fallout from Jan. 6.

Since then, McCarthy has remained a close ally of Trump on Capitol Hill, defending him amid his various legal troubles and going as far as to endorse an effort to expunge his impeachments — including the one that followed the Jan. 6 riot.

The dynamics reflect the strong influence Trump continues to wield with Republicans on the national stage and within the House GOP conference. Trump threw his support behind McCarthy’s bid to be Speaker, which helped him secure the gavel, and the former president has far more congressional endorsements in his 2024 bid than any other GOP candidate.

Poll after poll has shown Trump remains the unequivocal front-runner in the 2024 GOP primary for president. A New York Times/Siena College survey released this week found Trump more than 30 points ahead of his closest opponent.

Even Republicans who have endorsed one of Trump’s 2024 opponents and were critical of the former president following the Capitol riot are slamming this week’s indictment as an example of the “weaponization” of the federal government.  

In remarks on the House floor on Jan. 13, 2021, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) — who has endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for president over Trump — said Trump “deserves universal condemnation for what was clearly impeachable conduct, pressuring the vice president to violate his oath to the Constitution to count the electors.”

“His open and public pressure — courageously rejected by the vice president — purposefully seeded the false belief among the president's supporters, including those assembled on Jan. 6, that there was a legal path for the president to stay in power. It was foreseeable and reckless to sow such a false belief that could lead to violence and rioting by loyal supporters whipped into a frenzy,” he continued, before going on to criticize the impeachment articles as “flawed.”

But this week, Roy criticized the very indictment that penalized Trump for the actions he condemned in 2021 as “flimsy.” 

“If you profess to care about preserving the ‘Republic,’ you must firmly reject a flimsy political indictment of a former President & political challenger of a current President immersed in a bribery & corruption scandal,” Roy wrote on X.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), another DeSantis supporter, told The Dispatch days after the riot, “I think Trump is at fault here,” adding “people did mislead the folks that came here, and Trump was among them.”

“He insinuated that states wanted their electors thrown out, which was not true. I kept a spreadsheet of every document every state produced, and in no case did a majority of any legislature even put their name on the letter,” he added.

This week, however, Massie said it was shameful for Trump to be charged.

“As Gov. Ron DeSantis has repeatedly pointed out, the AG and DOJ work for the President as a fixture of the executive branch. They are not, nor have they ever been, an independent branch of govt. Biden has now shamefully criminally charged & indicted a political opponent twice,” he wrote on X.

There are also some Republicans who texted Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows amid the chaos of Jan. 6 asking to have the president quell the violence who spoke out about Trump’s indictment this week.

Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), texted Meadows “POTUS needs to calm this shit down,” according to messages obtained by CNN, but on Tuesday he said Trump  was “a victim of Biden’s weaponized government.” Similarly, Rep. Will Timmons (R-S.C.), who told Meadows, “The president needs to stop this ASAP” on Jan. 6, called the charges against Trump a “politically motivated indictment.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), an ardent Trump supporter, texted Meadows amid the riots, “Please tell the President to calm people,” and, “This isn’t the way to solve anything.” 

This week, she railed against the indictment, re-upped her calls to defund special counsel Jack Smith’s office and expunge Trump’s impeachments, and vowed to vote for Trump in the 2024 election even if he is behind bars by the time Election Day rolls around.

“I will still vote for Trump even if he’s in jail,” Greene wrote on X. “This is a communist attack on America’s first amendment to vote for who THE PEOPLE want for President by an attempt to take Trump off the ballots through a politically weaponized DOJ. People know exactly what this is.”

Moderate House Republicans: We’re ready to fight back. House Democrats: Sure, Jan

Posted on (Updated by Joan McCarter

This time they really mean it, swing district House Republicans tell Punchbowl News. They’re ready to start working on bipartisan issues and legislation and beat back the extremist Freedom Caucus so they don’t have to keep taking miserable, unpopular votes that will hurt them.

“There’s a lot of opportunities for bipartisanship,” said Rep. Nick LaLota of New York, Meanwhile, Rep. Mike Garcia of California said his group can have real leverage. “The majority is only five seats, so really every faction has the same amount of power, it’s just a matter of strategy and tactics we choose to deploy as a result of that,” the Republican said. “At some point, we need to ease up some of our positions to get to solutions.”

Both are among the 18 Republicans representing districts where a majority voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.

Moderate House Democrats will believe it when they see it.

“For 11 years I have worked in a bipartisan way on bipartisan bills on important issues,” Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, told Punchbowl News. “Now, I find it very difficult because if I try to approach them on a bill that I know we’ve worked on together for years, we get to committee and someone wants to throw a [controversial] amendment on there,” Kuster added.

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RELATED STORY: ‘Centrist’ House GOPers find their line in the sand: Tax cuts for wealthy homeowners

The part she didn’t say is that the so-called moderate Republicans don’t fight to keep those amendments out of bills—and worse: They vote for them.

Consider the traditionally bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act that passed in the House last month. It includes amendments to: ban books in military base school libraries; end the Pentagon’s policy of allowing service members leave to obtain abortions; ban gender-affirming health care for people serving in the military and their families; and ban race, gender, religion, political affiliations, or "any other ideological concepts" as the basis for personnel decisions. Those amendments all passed, with votes from most of these same GOP moderates, known as the Biden 18.

Moderates are also apparently shocked that the Freedom Caucus, the extremist Republican group currently running the show, is “selfish and short-sighted and only care about pushing their own agenda in the media instead of working with us to govern.” That quote is from Republican Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia. He’s mad that the extremists are “taking advantage” of the small Republican House majority to force their will on the rest of the conference.

And it only took him seven months to figure that out. By the time we get through August and Congress is back in session, he might have done the math to figure out 18 is bigger than five, so his team can do the same thing.

He and the rest of the Republican moderates will have a chance to put all that tough talk into action when they return in September. If they really want to help themselves and act like real representatives, they’ll figure out how to leverage that bipartisanship they long for and keep the government from shutting down.

It’s a joyous week in Wisconsin, where Janet Protasiewicz’s swearing-in means that the state Supreme Court now has its first liberal majority in 15 years. We’re talking about that monumental transition on this week’s episode of “The Downballot,” including a brand-new suit that voting rights advocates filed on Protasiewicz’s first full day on the job that asks the court to strike down the GOP’s legislative maps as illegal partisan gerrymanders.

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Two-thirds of Americans think Jan 6. charges are serious, less than half say Trump should drop out

Posted on by Joan McCarter

ABC News/Ipsos is the first outlet out of the gate with polling on Donald Trump’s latest indictment, this time for his 2020 election interference which culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The element that stands out most in the new polling is tribalism: Only a minority of Republicans think the Jan. 6 charges are serious and a tiny group of them thinks he should be charged.

While nearly two-thirds of the voters surveyed—65%—think the charges are serious, just 38% of Republicans think so, and just 14% of Republicans think he should be charged with a crime.

Discouragingly, only 52% of the total surveyed believe Trump should be facing criminal charges for everything he did leading up to and on Jan. 6. That’s down from a June 2022 ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted during the Jan. 6 committee hearings. In that survey, 58% agreed that, “Trump bears a good or great amount of responsibility for the events of Jan 6 and that he should be charged with a crime.”

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In addition, just under half of all voters in the new poll—49%—think that Trump should suspend his campaign. A similar number, 46%, think the charges against Trump are politically motivated. Republican talking points about the Biden administration targeting Trump are clearly permeating the populace. In contrast, 60% of those surveyed last year thought that the congressional committee was conducting a fair and impartial investigation.

That’s as much a condemnation of the narrative the national media has been pushing as anything, including the fact that the poll and the ABC News story that goes with it also include questions about President Joe Biden’s approval ratings and, more problematically, the Hunter Biden investigation.

About one-third of this story is about about Biden’s low approvals (33% to Trump’s 30%) and his son Hunter Biden, including whether Biden should be investigated for impeachment over it (39% say yes) and whether they have confidence that the “Justice Department is handling its ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden in a fair and nonpartisan manner”; 46% say they are not.

That poll and the accompanying story are effectively equating Hunter Biden’s legal problems with Trump’s. The article provides absolutely no context or explanation of the fact that House Republicans have come up with exactly nothing in their extensive and ridiculous investigation of Hunter Biden. The media is treating a conspiracy theory cooked up by Rudy Giuliani and his cohorts—that was proven to be bullshit even before the 2020 election—as equivalent to the very real allegations of a conspiracy by Donald Trump and his team to steal the election and violently overthrow the government.

This persistent reporting trend perpetuates a vicious cycle of both-sidesing the news that could end very badly for all of us.

Conservatives cried about how the “woke” (whatever that means) “Barbie” movie would fail. It didn’t. In fact, the film has struck a chord with American and international audiences. Daily Kos writer Laura Clawson joins Markos to talk about the film and the implications of the Republican Party’s fixation on mythical culture wars, which is failing them in bigger and bigger ways every day.

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Pelosi takes shot at ‘scared puppy’ Trump

Posted on (Updated by Miranda Nazzaro

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday said former President Trump had looked like a “scared puppy” a day earlier as he traveled to Washington, D.C., to appear in court in his arraignment on charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his efforts to remain in power.

“I wasn’t in the courtroom of course, but when I saw his coming out of his car and this or that, I saw a scared puppy,” Pelosi said in an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “He looked very, very, very concerned about the fate," adding she did not see any "bravado or confidence or anything like that" from Trump.

“He knows the truth, the truth that he lost the election,” she continued. “And now he’s got to face the music.” 

Trump appeared at Washington’s federal courthouse Thursday afternoon where he pleaded not guilty to four counts alleging he led a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and attempted to block the certification of votes Jan. 6, 2021. The Department of Justice’s 45-page indictment alleges Trump led a campaign of “dishonesty, fraud and conceit” to obstruct a “bedrock function” of a democracy. 

Pelosi appointed the nine members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, which investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and surrounding events and communications from those involved.

“Very proud of the Jan. 6 committee, which took us, laid the foundation, created a path or us to get to this place, to seek the truth," she said Friday.

When asked about Trump’s defense’s strategies to delay the trials until after the election if he is the Republican nominee, Pelosi said it’s because the former president is “afraid of the truth.” 

“Instead of having this back-and-forth publicly about delay and that, there are certain options that are available to a person who has been arraigned,” Pelosi said. “But that’s up to the judges to decide. But it’s not up to the arraigned person to say the justice system is not on the level.”

Senate’s endangered Dems take a pass on talking Trump

Posted on by By Anthony Adragna and Daniella Diaz

The Senate’s most vulnerable Democrats are steering clear of the week’s biggest news: the third indictment of former President Donald Trump.

POLITICO asked seven incumbents expected to face competitive reelections in 2024 to weigh in on the charges but heard nothing in response. Of Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), only Sinema’s team replied — with a no comment.

Their silence stands in contrast to many other Democrats — including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who quickly weighed in Tuesday with a joint statement alongside House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries calling the Jan. 6 Capitol riot “the culmination of a months-long criminal plot led by the former president.”

It's a tricky balancing act for the seven endangered lawmakers, all of whom need to win over independents and even Republicans to win their Senate races. However popular Trump’s indictments may be among Democrats, piling on the former president isn’t a winning strategy for incumbents who need to reach beyond the party base in order to keep their jobs. Manchin, Tester and Brown are all defending seats Trump carried in 2020: West Virginia (39 points); Montana (16 points); and Ohio (8 points). President Joe Biden did carry Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, but only narrowly.

Avoiding talk of Trump's indictment is mostly limited in the Senate to Democrats, a quirk of the 2024 campaign map that puts few of the chamber's Republican incumbents in truly competitive races. But in the House, the 18 GOP lawmakers representing House districts won by Biden have been relatively quiet on the indictment, too — more evidence that there’s little upside for frontline members in wading into the former president’s legal morass.

The kid-gloves treatment reflects the split public opinion on Trump’s behavior: 45 percent of adults surveyed in an AP-NORC poll conducted last month — before this latest indictment — said Trump had done something illegal related to the events of Jan. 6. A higher percentage, 53 percent, concluded he had done something illegal related to the handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

Unlike their incumbent opponents, the GOP candidates challenging vulnerable Senate incumbents are on mostly on offense with Trump's indictment. Not all of the Republicans running to unseat the Senate’s vulnerable Dems are weighing in on Trump, but those who have are firmly in the former president’s corner. “Joe Biden knows he can't beat Trump at the ballot box, so he's trying to throw him in prison,” wrote Tim Sheehy, who’s challenging Tester in Montana.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, who’s seeking Manchin’s Senate seat, told POLITICO in a statement that the indictments are part of a “witch hunt and the weaponization of the federal government,” while his primary rival, Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), also lambasted “unprecedented witch hunts from corrupt left-wing Democrats” and vowed to fight “DOJ’s disgusting abuse of power.”

Sam Brown, who’s seeking the Republican Senate nomination in Nevada, told POLITICO: “It is deeply concerning that we appear to be creating a two-tiered system of justice under the current administration where the rules don’t apply to everyone evenly.”

One prominent Republican, however, remained mum as Trump was arraigned: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who predicted criminal consequences for Trump in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, declined through his office to comment on the former president's legal troubles.

Posted in Uncategorized

Adam Schiff leads Democrat push to televise Trump trials: ‘Vitally important’

Posted on by Latest Political News on Fox News

Thirty-eight House Democrats led by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., are demanding that former President Trump’s federal criminal trials be televised for the public.

"We are writing to request the Judicial Conference explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump," they said in a Thursday night letter to federal officials.

"It is imperative the Conference ensures timely access to accurate and reliable information surrounding these cases and all of their proceedings, given the extraordinary national importance to our democratic institutions and the need for transparency," they wrote.

It was sent hours after Trump pleaded not guilty to four charges related to his and his allies’ alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

INDICTMENT OF DONALD TRUMP IS A 'TERRIBLY TRAGIC DAY' AND SHOWS SPEECH IS NOW 'CRIMINALIZED': TRUMP ATTORNEY

Trump was arraigned in a Washington, D.C., court on Thursday after Special Counsel Jack Smith announced the second of two federal grand jury indictments against the former president. He is also under an earlier criminal indictment in New York City.

Federal courts largely do not allow cameras, with a few exceptions.

Howerver, the dozens of Democrats who addressed the Judicial Conference, which guides federal court policy, insisted that putting Trump’s trials on TV is critical for Americans to "fully accept" their outcome.

TRUMP INDICTED ON CHARGES OUT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL PROBE INTO JAN 6

"As the policymaking body for the federal courts, the Judiciary Conference has historically supported increased transparency and public access to the courts’ activities. Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings," the lawmakers wrote.

"If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses," they wrote.

SPECIAL COUNSEL JACK SMITH SAYS JAN 6 ‘FUELED BY LIES’ FROM TRUMP, PRAISES ‘HEROES’ WHO DEFENDED CAPITOL

Schiff was censured this year for promoting claims, while chairing the Intelligence Committee last Congress, that the Trump 2016 campaign colluded with Russia to win the election.

He also played a central role in both of Trump’s impeachment proceedings by House Democrats. He was an impeachment manager during the first, and was a member of the January 6 select committee when the former president was being impeached over the Capitol riot.

Other members of the now-defunct Jan. 6 panel signed Schiff’s letter, including its chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., as well as Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Pete Aguilar of California, and Zoe Lofgren of California.

A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately return a request for comment.