Still at the top of Trump’s agenda: Sabotaging Ukraine to benefit Russia

Posted on July 31, 2023 (Updated August 1, 2023) by Hunter

Over the weekend Donald Trump held a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was noteworthy for a few reasons: It got Donald to actually leave his house, which was an impressive feat by his aides considering that Trump has been obsessively toilet-tweeting insults about his current indictments, expected future indictments, and everyone even tangentially involved with his indictments.

Also of note was his usual grifting podium sign, one telling the crowd to "Text PENNSYLVANIA -----" to give him money. This means Trump's campaign team genuinely believes Donald's rally crowds have the attention span to phone-thumb their way through all the letters of “Pennsylvania” without losing interest, so you can't say they've lost their optimism.

Then there was the part where he demanded all of the Republicans competing for the nomination besides him should drop out so that all the money they spent on their own campaigns could instead be given to him. Ah, classic Trump. I imagine he thinks he's being charitable by not demanding they all hand him the keys to their homes as well.

But the weirdest part was probably when Trump once again pressed his bizarre crusade against Ukraine, the same one he got impeached over the first time around, the same one that turned out to be a Rudy Giuliani snipehunt backed by crooked European oligarchs boosting crooked Russian disinformation. Trump once again really, really wants Republicans to block all military help to Ukraine—and this is apparently urgent enough that Trump doesn't think it can wait until his own theoretical second term. It's got to happen now.

"He's dragging into a global conflict on behalf of the very same country, Ukraine, that apparently paid his family all of these millions of dollars," Trump alleged. "In light of this information," Congress, he said, "should refuse to authorize a single additional payment of our depleted stockpiles ... the weapons stockpiles to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden crime family's corrupt business dealings."

Oh. My. God. See, what's amazing about Trump is that the man's brain is impervious to new information. It might be laziness, or he might just have too much grass and dirt lodged up there from all the holes he's knocked out of golf courses in his lifetime, but that could be a direct quote from any one of his speeches from his first two campaigns. It's only the fact that he's ranting about Joe Biden and not Hillary Clinton that gives it any context at all.

Trump was going on about "depleted stockpiles" throughout his 2016 campaign. It was his version of the Republican talking point that's been used without fail by each of their candidates of the past 40 years. Every time, the Republican says that our troops are suffering from a lack of readiness, or that the Navy doesn't have enough ships, or the Army doesn't have enough tanks, and it's because a stupid jerk not-Republican is in charge and only a Republican can fix the problem.

Then, if the Republican wins, the problem magically goes away and we don't hear about it again until the next time a Democratic president appears. Trump was very big on the "our troops have no bullets" nonsense. It vanished when he won, and we're possibly supposed to believe it was because he chipped in bullet money out of his own pockets or something. Eight years later, the problem has subtly changed: Now it’s that we're giving Ukraine all our bullets and missiles and phased-out stockpiled vehicles, which means we're not going to have any bullets or missiles or mothballed vehicles left over for ourselves, and our troops will have to train using water pistols and tactical assault bicycles.

What might be most on Trump's mind, however, is that he still really, really wants to build a new hotel in Moscow or God knows where, and it's very hard for him to suck up to Russian mob boss Vladimir Putin when he is unable to stop the United States from arming Ukraine.

So what does he do? Well, this is Donald we're talking about, so he repeats the same bullshit-premised propaganda Giuliani delivered to him the very first time around. It’s a theory about how Russia was completely innocent of both conducting espionage operations against the United States with the aim of making Trump president, and of attempting to seize control of Ukraine.

In the Giuliani-Russia retelling, it was Trump's political enemies who did the real "hacking," and they did it with the help of "Ukraine” (because sure why the f--k not), and Russia was framed for all the rest of it by Hillary Clinton. And, uh, then-Vice President Joe Biden's shiftless adult son. And the former comedian-turned-new-Ukrainian-president.

And Trump is still pushing this completely insane counternarrative, one in which the Democratic National Committee apparently hid (?) a secret server in Ukraine and leaked their own information to frame Russia. Then Hunter Biden got a consulting gig in Ukraine. He claims that unlike Paul Manafort and Giuliani's aggressive humping of European strongmen and criminals, that was actually the real scandal here. And when you say it all at once, it's so painfully stupid that you can see why the masterminds of these theories would find themselves accidentally booking press conferences in the Four Seasons Landscaping driveway just a few effing months later.

That is what Donald Trump has on offer as the seditionist coup leader scrapes together a post-treason, post-indictments second act: retreads. The man is still clinging to the original, Giuliani-authored plan that resulted in his damn impeachment!

Donate to help those escaping Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Top Republicans might be divided on Ukraine, but the party's activist base is united behind Russia

Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop’ looks more and more like a politically motivated criminal scheme

Ken Paxton is suddenly worried about ‘impartiality’ in his Texas impeachment trial

Posted on July 23, 2023 (Updated July 24, 2023) by Hunter

Suspended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton remains indicted on account of crimes, but his more urgent problem is his recent impeachment at the hands of his fellow Republicans. The state Legislature voted to impeach Paxton after his history of crookedness in the attorney general's office became impossible for even Texas Republicans to ignore. Paxton will now face an impeachment trial in the state Senate.

Paxton, however, remains an enormous whining baby and is still trying to stack the deck in his own favor with a new demand that not all of the Senate be allowed to vote in his trial. Paxton's lawyers are now asking Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to bar three Democratic state senators from the trial because those lawmakers have said very mean things about him and are therefore not impartial.

A basic principle of due process is that the accused is entitled to an unbiased jury. Like numerous courts around the country, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held for almost a century that potential jurors with a bias or prejudice against the accused are disqualified from serving on his jury as a matter of law. Jurors José Menendez, Roland Gutierrez, and Nathan Johnson have such a bias and have proclaimed it loudly, time and again. Gutierrez, for example, has said that the evidence against the Attorney General “could not be refuted.” But that is the purpose of a defense—to attempt to refute the prosecution’s evidence—and the function of a trial—to determine whether that evidence has proven charges beyond a reasonable doubt. No one who has publicly declared the charges against a defendant irrefutable can even play at impartiality, let alone serve in an impartial manner. And Menendez and Johnson are no better.

Blah blah, whine whine, blah blah blah.

Now, all of this is very interesting or whatever but Paxton's entire letter goes to great lengths to dodge the core point of the matter: Ken Paxton ain't facing the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. He may have forgotten, but right now he's facing an impeachment trial run by the Texas Senate, not a criminal trial in a criminal courtroom, and all this whining about how dare state senators have opinions about the evidence in his trial is nothing but a gigantic bullshit fountain premised on pretending that the two things are the same.

Did Paxton's lawyers write this up for Paxton's eventual upcoming criminal trial, but accidentally stick it in the wrong envelope? Since when did Republicans give a shit about enforcing "impartiality" in an impeachment trial?

Yeah, that's what we all remember most about Donald Trump's two separate impeachment trials—all of the Republicans refusing to render early judgment about Trump’s guilt because of the impartiality of the process. We can't even count all the Republicans who recused themselves from the proceedings due to their inability to be impartial except oh wait—we can, it was zero. Zero Republicans.

What's really going on here is that Ken Paxton is a uniquely gutless sack of corruption still looking to game the system however he can, and removing three Democratic senators from the voting pool would mean that the 21 votes for Paxton's removal from office would have to come from just 27 eligible senators instead of 31. That's a much tougher hurdle, even if a good chunk of Texas Republicans are finally sick enough of Paxton's crookedness to want to be rid of him.

As for evidence of how shallow Paxton’s alleged desire for fairness is, one of Paxton's activist buddies has filed a lawsuit demanding that Paxton's wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, be allowed to vote in the impeachment trial. That’s because the state Senate passed rules requiring her recusal due to her being married to the man being impeached for, among other things, arranging a cushy new job for a woman he had an affair with.

Oh no, three Democratic senators have expressed their belief that the evidence shows Ken Paxton to be a crooked sack of crookedness. However will the impeachment trial go on when such injustice is at play?

'Unmoored by disarray': AP investigation reveals that Texas AG Ken Paxton's office is a corrupt mess

A gutless Ken Paxton tries to preen after bravely fleeing from a court's process server

Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop’ looks more and more like a politically motivated criminal scheme

Posted on July 19, 2023 (Updated July 20, 2023) by Hunter

During the 2016 elections, Russian government agents hacked into the Democratic National Committee and into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, then dumped the stolen data in an effort to sabotage Donald Trump’s election opponent. The more we learn about the supposed “Hunter Biden laptop,” a scandal meant to roil the campaign of Donald Trump’s election opponent four years later, the more it looks like somebody was following the same hack-and-dump playbook.

Marcy Wheeler has a new post that breaks down some of the many, many known oddities of the supposed "laptop." When you consider that the whole premise of the story to begin with is that a "Hunter Biden" allegedly wandered into a random Delaware computer repair shop, handed over a damaged laptop, completely forgot about it afterward, and then somehow the computer dude and/or allies decided that Donald Trump ratf--ker Rudy freaking Giuliani was the person he needed to deliver the laptop's data to, dozens of other oddities piled on top of that begin to turn what started out as farce into a full three-ring circus of weird.

Marcy's post is, as usual, worth reading in full, but here’s the shortest version of it: Quite a lot of evidence suggests that in 2018 or 2019, Hunter Biden was the target of a successful phish or other hack that gave an outside party access to his iCloud account, his email accounts, and other data.

Of special note is a window of time during which Hunter was receiving addiction treatment (from the disgraced ex-Fox News talking head Dr. Keith Ablow, no less, just to put a nearly cartoonish spin on all this yet again) and appears to have had "limited" online communications. Despite those limited communications, somebody was using this period of time to make a hell of a lot of technical changes to Hunter's iCloud and email accounts, including:

Changed the password and related phone numbers to his rhb iCloud account

Installed and gave full access to his droidhunter gmail account a real app, called Hunter, that can send email on someone else’s behalf

Signed into that droidhunter account using a new device

Again changed emails and phone numbers associated with his rhb account

Asked for a full copy of his rhbdc iCloud account

Reset the password of that rhbdc iCloud account

Made droidhunter account the notification email for the rhbdc account

Downloaded all Hunter’s Apple Store purchases

…

Signed into the droidhunter account from a burner phone

Restored the prior trusted phone number

Added software that could record calls

Started erasing and then locked a laptop — probably the one that would eventually end up in Mac Isaac’s store

The list goes on, but the changes line up almost precisely with what you'd see in the aftermath of a successful phishing attack or other security breach. Passwords and security-related phone numbers were changed, access was granted to additional devices and burner phones, there was a "full copy" made of his iCloud account, some spyware or spyware-adjacent new tools were installed, and after a full data dump was made, some of the security changes were reverted so as to obfuscate what had just gone on.

The emails from Hunter around this time period don't suggest a man deep in the weeds of tweaking his own online security details, to put it mildly, so we're left wondering just who was doing all this fiddling.

The sheer number should have raised alarms that people had broken into Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts when the IRS asked Apple for Hunter Biden’s subscriber information in November 2019, in advance of writing a subpoena for the laptop in custody of John Paul Mac Isaac. Additionally, there were a bunch of attempts to get into Hunter Biden’s Venmo account, and the account added two new Remembered Devices within 12 minutes of each other in August 2018, one in the LA foothills and the other in Las Vegas. That and other details (including texts and emails) might have raised questions about whether sex workers from the very same escort service on which the IRS had predicated this entire investigation took steps to compromise Hunter Biden’s devices.

The evidence is very good, then, that Hunter Biden's online accounts were successfully hacked shortly before a "laptop" purportedly belonging to him mysteriously showed up in a Delaware computer repair shop, packed with seemingly legitimate data that then was handed over to Rudy freaking Giuliani, the man in Donald Trump's orbit most intimately involved in ginning up dirt, any dirt at all, about Hunter Biden during Trump's reelection bid.

A bunch of media outlets have previously breathlessly reported that the laptop had been "verified" as belonging to Hunter Biden while simultaneously fudging what that means. It means that the laptop, or at least its alleged hard drive, does indeed contain data from Hunter's email and iCloud accounts. There's another obvious scenario, though, and that's the exact hack-and-dump scheme that the FBI was warning Twitter and Facebook off of before the New York Post reported its original scoop revealing the alleged existence of the laptop.

Government disinformation specialists were warning, in the wake of Giuliani's already exposed anti-Biden ratf--king efforts based in part on hoaxes pushed by pro-Russian interests (see: Trump's impeachment, as in the first one and not the second one) that foreign disinformation aimed at bending the 2020 elections was still prevalent. Counterintelligence specialists were on watch, especially after Russian agents successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns in 2016, "dumping" the stolen information through multiple entities in an attempt to boost Trump's chances of winning.

What we have in the Hunter laptop case appears to be an uncannily similar series of events. Hunter's email, iCloud, Venmo, and other accounts appear to have been breached in 2018 and 2019. His data was copied, spyware was installed, and cursory attempts to cover up the breach were made.

And then, lo and behold, a laptop containing a copy of that data—one that showed clear evidence of the data being tampered with—gets dumped at a computer repair shop, never to be picked up again, while a copy of its data somehow makes it to Giuliani.

The only thing that would make all of this sketchier than it already is? A bizarre Russian link—and the joke’s on you if you thought there wouldn't be one because weirdly, very very weirdly, the escort service suspected of possibly being an origin point for hacks of Hunter's Venmo account appears to be tied to Russia.

Marcy's careful to leave out speculation beyond what seems obvious: The activity surrounding Hunter's online accounts seems to strongly suggest hackers successfully breached his accounts well before the laptop ever materialized. But we can speculate where she didn't: Was this yet another hack-and-dump operation aimed, quite specifically, at damaging Trump's election opponent?

How do we explain Giuliani's front-and-center appearance here?

From the beginning, few news outlets besides the New York Post were willing to touch this story because from the computer repairman himself to the specifics of what was allegedly found and how, all of it looked like a hack and dump. Republicans have bellowed in outrage at how little traction the story is getting in the media even now that the data is supposedly "confirmed" to be Hunter's. But that's not surprising either; it's almost certainly the result of criminal hacking.

Oh, and there also hasn't been much found on the laptop that wasn't already known: Hunter Biden has suffered through addiction, has spent substantial cash on drugs and sex workers, and has muddled through his troubled life slightly better than most addicts might due to his perceived closeness to his well-connected father. But it would be a hell of a thing if this episode turned out to be exactly the Giuliani-assisted foreign operation it appeared to be from the moment the New York Post wrote it up.

Hunter Biden is done staying quiet about the laptop-based smear campaign. He's suing

CNN: House Ethics Committee is interviewing witnesses in revived Matt Gaetz probe

Posted on July 13, 2023 by Hunter

There are new signs today that the House Ethics Committee investigation into Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz may not be as dead in the water as most of us assumed it was, with Republicans in control of the House and laser-focused on obstructing investigations into Republican corruption rather than furthering them.

Gaetz must have royally pissed someone off, because CNN is now reporting that Ethics Committee investigators "have begun reaching out to witnesses as part of a recently revived investigation" into the Florida man. The original investigation began in 2021, when Democrats were still in control of the House.

As for which House "ethics" Gaetz is accused of, breaching, the CNN story evades the details so that stray internet children don't get an eyeful of them, but Gaetz was caught up in the corruption scandal centered on ex-Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, who was sentenced last year to 11 years in prison for sex trafficking of a minor, wire fraud, bribery, and other crimes. That investigation resulted in accusations that Gaetz had, with Greenberg's assistance, paid at least 15 women for sex, including at least one who was underage at the time. Reporters soon found enough witnesses to report Gaetz's 2019 use of an Orlando hotel room for a cocaine-fueled sex party. Gaetz has also been caught in a bizarre bit of apparent campaign money laundering and, well, take your pick.

The Department of Justice originally asked the House Ethics Committee to suspend its own investigation while federal law enforcement investigated those and other charges, but eventually decided to close the investigation without charges. That frees House investigators to resume their work, and apparently they ... might actually be doing it now?

Before you get carried away, note that CNN reports House investigators focused their questions on "possible lobbying violations" in their interview with CNN's anonymous source. That doesn't necessarily mean that House Republicans are still holding off on investigating the charges that one of their most notorious members is a sex-trafficking cocaine fiend, but a cynic might point out that a Republican-neutered Ethics Committee might be more eager to launch a hard-nosed probe of financial violations than to poke the hornet's nest of who, in their House Republican ranks, is spending their off time attending conservative coke orgies.

We shall see. In the meantime, Gaetz himself seems quite eager to divert attention elsewhere. On Tuesday he appeared on conspiracy network Newsmax, where he engaged in another bit of Russian boosterism while sniffling at Ukraine's bid for NATO membership.

"Why would you pick Ukraine? Why not extend NATO to Russia and make it an anti-China alliance?" Gaetz asked stupidly. "Are we really thinking that we're more afraid of the broke-down tanks from Russia than the fact that China is building a secret military base on the island of Cuba, 90 miles away from the United States?"

I'm not sure he's going to win any Putin Points for mocking the Russian army as "broke-down," as accurate as that may be. But does Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida really not know why NATO might not be eager to add a kleptocratic mob state to the alliance's rosters? A kleptocratic dictatorship that is currently engaged in an attempted European war of conquest, no less?

Look, I think we can all understand why the alleged cocaine orgy guy still has a soft spot for Vladimir Freaking Putin, but he might want to rein it in a bit while his fellow Republicans are deciding what to do about him. It's still likely that Republicans will sweep every ethics allegation against Gaetz back under the rug, once they've done enough due diligence to assure themselves that his scandals remain sweepable, but Gaetz has clearly pissed enough of his colleagues off that it's not a sure thing.

It'd be a real hoot if House investigators decided to interview former Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn for his thoughts on Washington, D.C., cocaine orgies, while they're at it. Wouldn't you love to be a fly on that wall?

Matt Gaetz's associate Joel Greenberg sentenced to 11 years for sex trafficking and other crimes

Federal investigation into Matt Gaetz closes without any charges against far-right congressman

Republicans consider a novel way to obstruct investigations of Trump

Posted on July 10, 2023 (Updated July 11, 2023) by Hunter

Well, here we go again. House Republicans have been shrieking that they're going to impeach a whole passel of top officials in the Joe Biden administration for supposed crimes that include investigating seditionist Donald Trump too much and investigating Hunter Biden too little, but every once in a while one of them remembers that Congress also has the power to simply zero out the salaries of any executive branch employees they don't particularly like.

It's akin to a bill of attainder targeting a particular executive official's career. Frustrated congressional cornballs have been sporadically remembering the power for years now, especially whenever some government agency does something that they really super do not like but can't muster the legislative votes to actually change.

Politico reports that House Republican cranks are again threatening to use this power, probably after someone in the Freedom Caucus sobered up long enough to remember it existed. The possible targets reportedly include Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and "some are hoping to use the procedure on investigators working for special counsel Jack Smith."

That last part is another bit of nice, clean proof that at least "some" House Republicans are eager to use their positions as U.S. congresscreatures to interfere specifically with the ongoing investigations and criminal charges against the coup-attempting, document-stealing Donald Trump. As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's bag of deplorables prepare to begin impeachment proceedings against Garland for not finding anything except petty crimes to indict Hunter Biden on, yet again disrupting one of Rudy Giuliani and Republicanism's most grand pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine conspiracy theories, and enraging the petty fascists of the party beyond all hope of reason, there are at least some bozos in the caucus eager to target the Jack Smith investigation specifically.

It’s a simple enough strategy: Zero out the salaries of any Department of Justice or FBI official involved with prosecuting Trump for lying to federal officials about stolen national security documents, and you'll neatly empty out the offices of anyone willing to pursue Trump's crimes. It's a gleefully corrupt act, all premised on the House Republican insistence that the government must arrest their enemies for committing crimes they can't prove while letting powerful Republicans get away with crimes even if they're caught in the act.

And this is why it's perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Freedom Caucus and allies are not so much a political caucus as an organized crime ring. Not a well-organized crime ring, mind you, but organized enough.

Now that Politico has brought us this news, it's time for the usual caveats. Guess what? House Republicans won't actually be able to zero out salaries whether they "want" to or not, and that's because the whole scheme has the same flaw that supposed impeachment of federal officials does. The Democratic-held Senate would have to agree, and the Senate has no interest in helping Jim Jordan's crime spree along. A bill to do this would go nowhere.

It's also an arcane enough move that one imagines it wouldn't be worth all that much for House Republicans to try it for the sake of campaign trail bragging rights: "I tried to take away Merrick Garland's paycheck but it didn't work" isn't the best bullet point for a campaign flier. House Republicans will instead probably keep moving forward with a Garland impeachment "investigation," solely because it would be an opportunity for an extended, months-long spectacle. Jordan and other House Republicans are still clamoring for revenge against House Democrats who had the audacity to impeach Trump twice: once for attempting to extort the Ukrainian government for personal gain, and once for that whole "attempting to violently overthrow the United States government" thing.

Remember, too, that Jordan's been demanding state and federal prosecutors turn over their case materials to him in the cases where Trump has already been indicted. House Republicans aren't just interfering with the multiple criminal investigations of Trump, they're doing it repeatedly, continually, and as an explicit strategy. And why wouldn't they? They were willing to obstruct investigations of an attempted Republican coup, they're hardly going to recoil at this sort of old-school corruption.

House Republicans demanding Bragg's evidence against Trump have been coordinating with Trump himself

Republicans use House powers to protect Trump

Republicans use House powers to protect Trump

Posted on June 14, 2023 (Updated June 15, 2023) by Hunter

Every single time we have learned that sedition-backing Donald Trump likely committed a crime, it takes no more than a day for House Republicans to begin planning out how they will best defend him. Every single time, the chosen defense is not that Trump didn't do whatever astonishingly crooked thing investigators have uncovered; instead, they declare that whoever discovered the corruption is part of a vast conspiracy against the career con artist, and that the investigators are the ones who need to be punished and/or jailed.

And every damn time, a coatless Rep. Jim Jordan flings himself in front of the news cameras to be the loudest person whining about it.

Now the House Judiciary Chair, which is about as neat a summation of Republicanism's decline as you could ask for, Jordan is already leading the House Republican charge to sabotage the new federal indictment of Trump under Espionage Act charges. He and his fellow Republicans have settled into a pattern; Jordan is using his perch in Congress to demand that the Justice Department turn over documents about the active criminal case. CNN is now reporting that Jordan is "exploring ways to force [special counsel] Jack Smith to testify or provide information" about the criminal case, and that Jordan has declared that "all options are on the table" when it comes to forcing Smith and others to comply.

This is the now-standard means by which House Republicans look to undermine all investigations into Trump's various acts of corruption; Jordan and House Republicans turned to it immediately after Trump's indictment in New York for cooking Trump Organization books to hide hush money payments during his 2016 campaign. It quickly came to light that House Republicans were coordinating with Trump himself in their efforts to discredit the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

The reasons House Republicans have been demanding investigators turn over their evidence are, of course, obvious. The intent is to share that evidence with Trump, either directly or by leaking it to the general public, and to identify key witnesses against Trump so that they can be publicly marked and demonized, and to tease out the direction of any ongoing investigative threads so that those, too, can be leaked and Trump's team alerted. All while undermining federal prosecutors and the judicial system itself.

Campaign Action

The House Republican pattern is now rote, in fact. Rep. Devin Nunes made a name and career for himself before Jordan took the reins; this was the go-to Republican plan during the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian espionage and election interference and during Trump's first impeachment, as well as during every other lesser scandal.

The catch now, however, is that Jordan is not attempting to sabotage a federal probe or an impeachment trial. Jordan and his fellow House Republicans are attempting to sabotage state and federal criminal cases against Trump; in demanding that the indicting prosecutors turn over their notes, their witnesses, and their evidence, Trump's Republican allies are plainly attempting to obstruct prosecutors, not investigators. And that is usually something that is a really top-notch, prison-worthy crime for anyone who is not a sitting member of Congress.

There's really no question that the intent is obstruction, either. CNN also notes that sedition-backing House Republicans like Jordan and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are pushing colleagues to defund the special counsel's office and otherwise strip funding from the Justice Department in order to pressure the department into dropping the charges against Trump.

As for why attempting to obstruct an ongoing criminal probe and indictment isn't illegal if you're a member of Congress, that's a hell of a question. Republicans are relying on congressional speech and debate protections to blur the lines, but those protections wouldn't protect Matt Gaetz or the others if they were, say, indicted on federal drug charges or for participating in a sex-trafficking ring, or for taking bribes or punching reporters or any number of other actual crimes. Demanding prosecutors expose their case strategies, evidence, and path of their ongoing investigations isn't a criminal act of obstruction, though? We'll have to have the experts explain that one to us all.

It needs to be again emphasized, though, that Republicanism now defines itself around the notion that Republicans get to do crimes. The latest Trump indictment is the most serious charge against him so far; Trump was caught hoarding an array of classified documents describing some of the country's most closely guarded national security secrets and, when federal officials attempted to get them back, took repeated steps to hide the documents from the government and his own lawyers so that he could keep them. At Mar-a-Lago. In publicly accessible rooms.

This is an extraordinary crime no matter who was doing it; it is one thing to misplace such documents, but it is unquestionably a crime to intentionally attempt to keep them by lying to the federal government about their whereabouts. It's also a much more straightforward crime than "seditious conspiracy" might be, and is trivial to prove compared to charges that might revolve around "intent" when pressing state election officials to "find" new votes on Trump's behalf.

It is a big-boy crime, a big-boy federal crime that prosecutors appear to have caught Trump and his aide dead to rights on, and one that may very well be amended in the future with actual espionage charges, if Trump had the sheer audacity to share the documents not just with aides and ghostwriters but to Saudi or other foreign officials he was trying to impress. That is the investigation and indictment that House Republicans are attempting to obstruct.

They're not doing it for Trump. Nobody gives that much of a damn about Trump, not really. Jordan and the others leap to the same defenses and the same obstructive acts whenever any powerful or half-powerful Republican faces a new corruption scandal. House Republicans are devoted to the idea that Republicans get to commit crimes and get to charge their political opponents with false ones, and they've got an entire fascist movement egging them on with that.

House Republicans demanding Bragg's evidence against Trump have been coordinating with Trump himself

New York Times whitewashes Jim Jordan's part in wrestling scandal

Donald Trump is facing even more legal jeopardy and the sharks in the Republican Party seem to sense there is some blood in the water. Chris Christie has made his campaign all about going directly at Trump, and Ron DeSantis seems to be closer and closer to becoming completely isolated from the field.

Embedded Content

Republicans are too busy to read Trump indictment

Posted on June 13, 2023 (Updated June 13, 2023) by Hunter

House and Senate Republicans have been tying themselves in knots trying to defend Trump after his newest indictments revealed his extraordinary efforts to hide highly classified nuclear and national security documents inside his Mar-a-Lago club even as government officials were trying to get them back. But there's not much for Trump's defenders to rally around, given that prosecutors have a tape of Trump literally showing off one of the classified documents because he thought it'd score him points in a petty political fight, and so "trying to defend Trump" is competing with "sprinting away from reporters with Josh Hawley-like grace" when Republicans have to decide whether to even acknowledge the charges against him.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley might have topped all the others. Capitol Hill reporter Joe Perticone reports that Grassley "tells me he hasn't read the indictment because he's 'not a legal analyst.'"

Yes, no legal mumbo-jumbo for Grassley here. Not for Sen. Chuck Grassley, the (checks notes) previous Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Perticone also reports that Joni Ernst, Steve Daines, and Deb Fischer also claim they haven't read the newest indictment of the last Republican president of the United States, which is puzzling because it’s a very quick read, something that can easily be skimmed in the span of a half hour, and you would think that Senate Republicans still willing to stick their neck out to defend Trump after two impeachments, and an attempted violent coup, and a jury confirmation of sexual assault might want to at least glance at the indictment to learn why Donald now faces Espionage Act charges as well.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, by contrast, says he hasn't "read it all the way through. I read a lot of portions of it, though," which is considerably more than ex-Judiciary chair Grassley could muster, and McCarthy, if you haven't noticed, has a hell of a lot more on his plate these days, what with a good chunk of his own caucus willing to sabotage their entire party agenda for the sake of squeezing a few more drops of blood out of him.

McCarthy may have only skimmed the indictment, of course, but that doesn't mean he wasn't willing to make a total ass of himself on Trump's behalf. He's the one who solemnly noted that at least "a bathroom door locks," which sent much of the political internet into spasms of giggles, and then even more giggles as a handful of reporters tried to take the big goof seriously.

does the pulitzer have a category for excellence in bulleted lists because I have a nomination to submit pic.twitter.com/Y6zfh443ij
— elaine filadelfo (@ElaineF) June 13, 2023

A twice-impeached, twice-indicted, sedition-promoting, hoax-pushing former "president" of the United States was caught red-handed hoarding national defense documents in a ballroom, bathroom, and poolside storage room at his private for-profit resort, and the best McCarthy can do is note that one of those three locations is technically sort of locked, some of the time, specifically when Trump or anyone else with access was attempting to poop.

There are worse takes, of course. Sen. Lindsey Graham manages to be terrible at this every day, all the time, and is currently waffling between noting that Trump "believes" he had the right to put classified national defense secrets in his chandeliered pooproom and, previously, offering the defense that well it's not like Trump was in league with foreign spies so shut up.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) picked up the argument Sunday. “Espionage charges are absolutely ridiculous. Whether you like Trump or not, he did not commit espionage,” Graham said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “He did not disseminate, leak or provide information to a foreign power or to a news organization to damage this country. He is not a spy. He’s overcharged.”

Oh, Lindsey. For starters, the indictment doesn't charge Trump with disseminating the information, it only charges him with retaining it and attempting to conceal it when federal officials asked for it back—this is a case where Graham might have done himself some good to read the indictment before appearing on Sunday shows to once again make an ass of himself.

But Graham may want to put a pin in that one, because while federal prosecutors are not currently charging Trump with disseminating the documents to a foreign power, even we in the public now know that 1.) Trump had no compunctions against showing the documents to supplicants ranging from aides and ghostwriters to Kid Rock, for some reason, and 2.) not all of the classified documents Trump is believed to have made off yet have been found, including the one he was recorded waving around, and (3) Donald Trump and his family have done very well for themselves in their new partnerships with Saudi Arabian royalty, representatives of which have been in the same Bedminster, New Jersey, club that Trump is now known to have spirited some portion of the classified docs off to.

Sen. Marco Rubio took up the same line, whining that there's "no allegation that he sold it to a foreign power or that it was trafficked to somebody else or that anybody got access to it." Again, put a pin in that one. That is a very, very narrow limb to climb out on, when you're talking about a money-obsessed lifetime petty crook who just proved himself willing to overthrow the government rather than admit failure on his part. Do we really think—are we really quite sure—that he did not do that?

We'll see where this goes from here, but we can count on House and Senate Republicans to humiliate themselves over and over again on Trump's behalf before this is over. The short of it is that Trump has access to all of the party's deplorables, voters who themselves are quite fond of sedition and think that well maybe there should be violence to clean out their political enemies so that gun-owning malcontents can rule what's left, and nearly every Republican in the party has decided they need to support Trump through extortion, sedition, and even espionage if the alternative is losing those votes.

It will get worse. Count on it. There's no chance prosecutors are already telling us everything investigators have learned about Trump's hoard of classified documents—and there are still more indictments waiting in the wings.

Watch Kevin McCarthy's sad responses to Trump indictment questions

That time Kid Rock claimed Donald Trump showed him secret maps at the White House

We talk about the field of Republicans willing to go up against the MAGA monster that is Trump. It’s a veritable who cares of the Republican Party, but it is also indicative of the rot inside of the conservative world.

Embedded Content

Trump makes unconstitutional promise to racist base

Posted on May 31, 2023 (Updated June 1, 2023) by Hunter

Seditionist Donald Trump is again a Republican candidate for president. Unfortunately for Trump's new campaign staff, "President" Donald now has an actual White House record behind him, and that's been causing complications. Much of what Trump is now vowing he'll do if put back in the Oval Office is the same stuff he promised to do before—but couldn't or didn't actually deliver.

Most of Trump's new campaign promises, in fact, have been falling into two broad categories. Half of the promises are overtly authoritarian vows, like Trump's threat to pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who attacked Congress on his behalf; the other half are whining assertions that all that stuff he promised he'd do back during the first campaign are things he'll super-duper for sure do next time, just you wait.

The Trump campaign's latest ode de bullshitte combines fascist rhetoric, brazen lying, and a grubby chunk of base racism all into one alleged new promise: Trump says on his first day of office, he will sign an executive order nullifying the Constitution's grant of birthright citizenship to children born inside the United States.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. Trump very famously promised this during his last administration, making a big stink of it halfway through his term as a midterm campaign issue.

It didn't happen because the very idea is a goofy crank theory perpetuated by anti-immigrant and racist groups and one that's been widely scorned, if not laughed at, by every legal scholar who is not an outright far-right crank. What we call "birthright citizenship" is enshrined into the Constitution via the 14th Amendment; its validity has been settled law for over 120 years, and even the most fringe of conservative groups pin their hopes on Congress passing new legislation to theoretically strip those 14th Amendment protections.

Campaign Action

That, then, is why "President" Trump's previous vow to issue such an order resulted in absolutely nothing happening; not even his own fringe-right advisers thought he could get away with it. Much like Trump's propositions to nuke hurricanes or purchase the whole of Greenland, Trump's advisers jingled some keys in his face or showed him an especially flattering magazine article and, eventually, were able to redirect his attention. It's showing up again now only because Trump has even worse advisers than he did the first time around, and because it's campaign season. Donald Trump will lie to his base about everything, all the time, even if it means retelling 8-year-old lies in the hopes that his scatterbrained supporters have the memory retention of goldfish.

There is, however, one odd bit of phrasing that caught our eye, if only for its vague twinges of Lovecraftian horror.

In announcing the new campaign pledge, the Trump campaign asserts that Trump's newly promised Day-One executive order "will explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment."

Now there's a thought. Forget 120 years of settled law, forget the courts, forget the rest of government: On Day One, Donald Trump will Trumpsplain what the 14th Amendment to the Constitution actually means.

Forget your Draculas, your mummies, your Mothras, and your Cthulhus. You want to know true fear? Imagine a future in which Donald Trump is again "president" and his White House announces that the Constitution of the United States now means whatever the hell the person, woman, man, camera, TV dementia-test-acing Trump thinks it means.

If you want to truly stare into the abyss, pull up a chair and watch the man Trumpsplain that the Third Amendment's prohibition against "quartering troops" in your house doesn't apply if they're all carrying nickels instead.

The Republican presidential primary race looks like it will be shaping up exactly as expected. If you're a Republican presidential primary voter who's really into fascism and being lied to, you don’t need to look any further than Trump. He’s got you covered. And it's not like Republican voters who still support Trump even after four years, two impeachments, one insurrection, and a criminal indictment might draw the line at Trump repeating previous campaign lies.

We could still be in for a surprise or two, though. The man could always jet off to Moscow, set up his own television studio, and spend his waking days Trumpsplaining our Constitution to us from half a world away. It'd be a lot easier on him than dragging himself up and down the White House stairs again, and have very nearly the same results. You might consider it, Donald!

We have Rural Organizing’s Aftyn Behn. Markos and Aftyn talk about what has been happening in rural communities across the country and progressives’ efforts to engage those voters. Behn also gives the podcast a breakdown of which issues will make the difference in the coming elections.

Embedded Content

Trump's taint is scaring off Republican candidates

Trump's awful CNN town hall sounded alarm for 2024 election

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s plan to impeach everyone reaches Merrick Garland

Posted on May 18, 2023 (Updated May 19, 2023) by Hunter

A House Republican is now introducing articles of impeachment against Attorney General Merrick Garland, but before anyone gets too worked up about that, just know that the House Republican is walking medical-grade conspiracy theory dispensary Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that she's got a loooong history here, that it's just the warmup to her again vowing to write up similar articles against President Joe Biden, and that her "new" articles of impeachment are all plucked directly from of the Fox News Extended Universe of lore and characters and subplots.

You cannot understand any of Greene's documents unless you are nigh on addicted to Fox shows from the likes of Maria Bartiromo or The Artist Formerly Known As Tucker. Greene is that addicted, and she's going to make sure we're all going to hear about it.

Our story today comes to us from Fox News (link grumblingly provided).

"In a press release exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital, Greene accused Garland of"—all right, stop. Hold up right there.

How do you "exclusively obtain" a press release? Somebody want to explain that one? The "reporter" here is someone by the name of Houston Keene. Is Houston trying to breaking-news-story us about getting a press release?

Campaign Action

All right, fine, let's put that out of our heads. Never mind. Greene's office tried to make some cheap political hay out of filing her second attempt at "articles of impeachment" against Garland because reasons, called up Fox News to get it done, and is now waving around a document that looks like a AI bot's attempt at drafting a House resolution based solely around transcripts of Fox News primetime shows.

Greene's would-be resolution is premised on Garland "facilitating the weaponization and politicization of the United States justice system against the American people," a phrase that Jim Jordan spent two bucks to win out of a Dave & Buster's Arcade claw machine.

From there, all we get is Fox News crankery.

Garland "issued an October 2021 memorandum directing the targeting of parents by the Federal Bureau of Investigation," screams the document. She's referring there, yet again, to FBI investigations into a string of death threats against school board members from anti-maskers, "critical race theory" opponents, and other conservative sources.

That immediately ballooned into Fox News and House Republican outrage that the FBI was daring to investigate death threats, turning it into an attack on conservative parents. Because, of course, Greene and every other Republican is quite sure that if the FBI targets such death threats, they're going to find Republican supporters behind most of them, and how dare they target Republicans who threaten political violence.

The rest is all the same language. Greene wants to impeach Garland for not prosecuting "leftist extremists" who peacefully protested outside Supreme Court justice's homes. She's very mad that Garland is not "prosecuting Antifa and Black Lives Matters rioters that have desecrated American cities and caused billions of dollars worth" of damage, a confusing line that can only be interpreted when you remember that according to Fox News, numerous American cities have been razed to the ground and the reason none of the rest of us know about that is, uh, because Democrats are keeping it a secret from you.

"Attorney General Garland has refused to prosecute the Biden family and its associates for the crimes they have committed at the expense of the American people," she scrawls, with nobody to this day being able to come up with a damn bit of evidence for these supposed "crimes" or even explain what the actual "crimes" are supposed to be. Sure, impeach Garland for not taking Rudy Giuliani seriously. God help us all if we strip the government of anyone who doesn't take Rudy Giuliani's bug-eyed rants seriously; there wouldn't be anyone left to empty the House cafeteria trash cans.

There's also a bunch of generic rants that don't accuse Garland of anything at all, just some word salad thrown in so we can get to the only part of it that matters: The Fox News Extended Universe belief that the government is "persecuting" Donald J. Seditionboy Trump in allowing the government to go find and return classified government documents Trump stole from the White House after the failure of his coup attempt.

Or, as Greene would have it, "documents he legally declassified," which is yet another Fox News and Trump lawyer wackadoodle claim, based on Trump’s assertion that can and did automatically pre-declassify whatever classified documents the FBI might have discovered in his Mar-a-Lago resort. Oh, and that he did it without telling anyone, using only the powers of his mind.

It is May of 2023 and Trump's allies are still pushing this secret-mind-powers explanation, and the federal government is still having to explain to these puddingheads that no, actually, there's a very specific procedure for declassifying government documents, one Donald Trump himself knew about this whole time, and "I did it secretly when you weren't looking" is not an actual defense.

I do not know how many decades it will take to explain this to Greene and the other Republicans who believe a reality television host obtained fully autocratic powers upon sliding into the White House on his own slick film of lies, but it will still not be a thing even if Greene spends the next 40 years of her life not understanding it.

Again, this is all part of the same pattern from House Republicans, and the important part is that none of us living normal lives are supposed to understand it; if Greene's rantings look like a string of unconnected buzzwords plucked out of right-wing conspiracy circles it's because that is exactly what they are. She doesn't care if everyone in Washington, D.C., who is not Jim Jordan, James Comer, or an OAN host looks at her like she's grown two heads when she presents this stuff.

Everything Greene and her associated Republicans do is meant to appeal to the small set of Americans who live and breathe Fox News conspiracy claims. It's not the Biden administration, in her scribbled-up document, it's the Biden "regime." It's not an American writing a pro-choice message in chalk on a sidewalk near a Supreme Court justice's house, it's a "leftist extremist" who "harassed" the justice with her chalk-based opinions.

Garland "has declared war on American parents"! Garland has "weaponized" the justice system! How dare he prosecute those who violently attacked police officers in the U.S. Capitol, while not similarly prosecuting Black Lives Matter protesters who "desecrated" our cities!

And, above all, it is not that Donald Trump took boxes of classified and other government-owned documents from the White House and put them in a Mar-a-Lago storage room, or that he lied about it to investigators, or that he took steps to hide them from investigators, it is that Merrick Garland wants to "persecute" His Royal Highness as a means of "silencing" the Fox News base!

All of it is premised on the notion that the government should be focused on prosecuting conservatism's enemies more, and should be focused on prosecuting conservatives themselves not at all, not for death threats, or making off with classified documents, or an attempted coup, or anything else. Greene may simply not be bright enough to realize her beliefs align one-to-one with fascism's own, but it doesn't matter. She and Republicanism's other loudest voices have cribbed its major themes and techniques with precision.

Rep. Greene's 'bipartisan' visit to Jan. 6 insurrections in D.C. jail gets the response it deserves

Marjorie Taylor Greene again argues 'red states' should separate themselves from federal government

Jennifer Fernandez Ancona from Way to Win joins Markos and Kerry to talk about the new messaging the Democratic Party’s national candidates are employing going into 2024. Ancona was right about the messaging needed to win the midterms, and we think she’s right about 2024.

Embedded Content

DeSantis’ ‘Never Back Down’ PAC backs down hard because Republicans are just cowards now

Posted on May 17, 2023 (Updated May 18, 2023) by Hunter

It's really remarkable how gutless Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is at his core. The would-be Republican presidential candidate sure is quick to bully reporters, students wearing masks during a global pandemic, and anyone in Florida schools and universities who he has the slightest bit of so-called executive power over. But the man goes out of his way to avoid any public appearance where he might be exposed to potential critics. When it comes to actually fighting for the Republican nomination he so covets, DeSantis has continuously failed to find a spine when it comes to taking on the biggest obstacle standing between him and the nomination: Donald Trump.

How can a person who can barely muster the courage to even whisper the name “Trump” make a case to voters that he’s a strong candidate? DeSantis’ primary foe has given him a mountain of topics to unload on, from inciting an insurrection to multiple impeachments, and most recently a jury’s verdict finding him liable for sexually abusing columnist E. Jean Carroll.

This is a guy who thinks he could stand up to the rest of the world's leaders, both friendly and hostile? He'd get rolled by No. 10 Downing Street's resident cat before he ever made it through the front door.

The latest show of campaign cowardice by the Florida governor and his top supporters is an epic cave from the pro-DeSantis "Never Back Down" PAC, which sent a single tweet bashing his biggest competitor following a Trump-orchestrated free hour of publicity on CNN. How brave!

When it comes to pointing out the sheer odiousness of His Royal Pantload, that's a pretty reasonable campaign-themed rundown. How does any of that make America "great”? Why does any Republican call themselves a Trump supporter when supporting Trump means supporting violence against police, terminating the Constitution, sexual assault, and a stream of delusions based entirely around Trump's belief that whenever he's screwed up or lost a popularity contest, it's only because his enemies launched some sort of secret conspiracy against him? Who actually likes that stuff?

I know, I know: a Republican base made up of racist and misogynistic anti-American fascists likes that stuff. They've been vibrating in their chairs for years now, waiting for a boorish sleaze-bucket to come along and give it to them. Ah well.

In any event, Semafor's Shelby Talcott reports that after the tweet was sent, Never Back Down PAC’s leadership immediately regretted it and the whole thing was blamed on someone who had certainly not gotten the "approval of the PAC's senior communications team." Talcott also reports we probably won't be seeing any similar hard punches at Trump in the future. That's how shaken the pro-DeSantis PAC's team was after the organization premised on electing DeSantis actually referenced the sheer awfulness of the race's current poll leader.

Well, there's your problem. I'm not sure how DeSantis' campaign boosters are going to convince anyone he's a less dodgy character than the insurrection-launching, book-cooking sex pest if everybody linked to DeSantis is forbidden from mentioning all that stuff.

This is all just another example of the complete and utter gutlessness of the Republican Party, from the first moment Donald Trump bragged about his penis size and started slinging preschool-sized insults from within his oversized suit. The entire party lives in terror of Donald Trump becoming mad enough at someone to give them a nickname. From the debates onward, Republican officials, candidates, and their underlings will immediately cling to whatever stream-of-consciousness thoughts Donald last burped out, quickly abandoning whatever soft principles they held in the first place

The grounds for attacking Trump are fertile. Turning a profit from supplicants streaming in to pay you money while they wait for you to grant them an audience in the White House? No problem! Put the squeeze on another country's government to grant you some help with your election in exchange for that sweet, sweet military money Congress already allocated? There's not a single thing corrupt about that! We hate NATO now! Presidential son-in-laws should of course be able to scoop up a couple billion dollars from a foreign monarchy after doing it a series of important favors! We don't care about your damn pandemic, getting drunk in a barber shop is what our forefathers drove off British soldiers to achieve! We like Putin now! Well, mostly! It's okay to take classified documents if you're only using them for monetary gain! Who doesn't assault women in department store dressing rooms?

The level of sheer gutlessness necessary to meekly nod and claim that well, now you too stand behind whatever the last terrible awful thing the reality show con man said out loud is amazing.

Ted Cruz? Lindsey Graham? Mitch McConnell? Kevin McCarthy? Marco Rubio? Ron DeSantis? Your pro-Trump father or uncle or work buddy? Gutless. Every last one.

This bunch of cowards is willing to erase the whole history and platform of the party in order to keep from having to deal with Donald Trump calling them names or going off to start his own new party that values burping self-regard above "fiscal responsibility" or "family values" or any of the rest of it.

How can anyone even pretend that Ron "DeSanctimonious," of all people, is going to survive a Republican presidential primary long enough for his campaign bus to even need a second tank of gas? Even his own PAC withered under the slightest test. Until someone finds a spine strong enough to stand up to a bully like Trump, only cowards remain.

Wall Street turns from DeSantis because of his weird Disney obsession

DeSantis flops in Japan and Trump looks more inevitable

The data is in: Americans don’t like Republican policies on abortion. Kerry is joined by Drew Linzer, the director and co-founder of the well-regarded polling company Civiqs. Drew and Kerry do a deep dive into the polling around abortion and reproductive rights and the big problems conservative candidates face in the coming elections.

Embedded Content