Other democracies prosecute their ex-leaders. Trump should be no exception

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Charles Jay

Donald Trump believes he shouldn’t be held accountable for any crimes he’s been accused of before, during, or after his presidency. But on Monday, he found himself sitting in a courtroom as the first former U.S. president ever to go on trial for criminal charges. It’s the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accusing Trump of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.

But while this might be unprecedented in U.S. history, other democracies, including France, South Korea, and Israel have charged, convicted, and even jailed former presidents and prime ministers. So why are we having such a hard time wrapping our head around this as a country?

RELATED STORY: Donald Trump's first criminal trial, Day One

Two previous U.S. presidents were in danger of facing criminal charges. President Warren G. Harding died in office in August 1923 and thus avoided being implicated in the notorious Teapot Dome oil lease bribery scandal and other corruption cases involving top administration officials.

Harding was also a notorious womanizer who had a child born out of wedlock. During the 1920 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee gave Harding’s long-time mistress a monthly $2,000 stipend as hush money and paid $25,000 to send her on a cruise to Japan and China before the election.

President Richard Nixon came very close to being indicted for his role in the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation in August 1974. Nixon could have faced charges of bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and obstruction of a criminal investigation, CNN reported. But Nixon’s successor and vice president, Gerald Ford, granted Nixon a full pardon, justifying his decision by claiming that long drawn-out litigation would arouse “ugly passions” and “our people would again be polarized in their opinions.”

As The Washington Post wrote last week:

In the half-century since Ford announced that pardon, other nations have charted a different path, prosecuting former presidents or prime minsters in France, Brazil, South Korea, Israel and elsewhere for numerous alleged crimes, among them embezzlement, corruption, election interference and bribery.

Some cases have illustrated the virtues of trying to hold the most powerful political officials accountable under the rule of law — as well as the formidable challenges that arise when prosecuting such figures. These former leaders can rely on ample bully pulpits to assail the process, maintain influence, shore up support and, in some cases, reclaim power.

Trump has certainly used his “bully” pulpit to assail the process by attacking judges, prosecutors, and witnesses and claiming that putting him on trial would be ruinous for the country. Here’s what Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on the eve of the start of his trial in which prosecutors claim Trump paid hush money to Daniels to avoid a scandal that could have hurt his 2016 campaign:

Tomorrow morning I’ll be in Criminal Court, before a totally conflicted Judge, a Corrupt Prosecutor, a Legal System in CHAOS, a State being overrun by violent crime and corruption, and Crooked Joe Biden’s henchmen “Rigging the System” against his Political Opponent, ME! I will be fighting for myself but, much more importantly, I will be fighting for our Country. Election Interference like this has never happened in the USA before and, hopefully, will never happen again. We are now a Nation in serious Decline, a Failing Nation, but we will soon be a Great Nation Again. November 5th will be the most important day in the History of the United States. MAGA2024! SEE YOU TOMORROW.

Republicans seem to be in a certain state of denial regarding the upcoming trial. The Daily Beast conducted interviews with more than 20 Republican lawmakers over the past week. They made clear that they were supporting Trump even if he is a convicted felon.

“I don’t think that it matters to the American people, because they don’t believe it to be a fair trial,” North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd, a strong MAGA acolyte, told the Daily Beast. “They believe that all these trials are completely unfair against him to drain him of his resources and it’s completely done the opposite thing, it’s rallied the American people behind him.”

And Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a more establishment Republican who recently became chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said he will continue to support Trump even if he’s convicted.

“First of all, I don't think that’s going to happen,” Cole said. “But second, I think some of these prosecutions are simply ridiculous on their face, and some of them are clearly harassment.”

Trump is also trying to rebrand himself as the victim of political persecution, even having the temerity to compare himself to former South African President Nelson Mandela. Trump somehow connected the anti-apartheid icon’s 27 years spent in prison to the possibility that he could be jailed by Judge Juan Merchan for violating a gag order in the hush money case.

“If this Partisan Hack wants to put me in the ‘clink’ for speaking the open and obvious TRUTH, I will gladly become a Modern Day Nelson Mandela—It will be my GREAT HONOR,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Mandela’s grandson told the Times of London that Trump is “definitely delusional.”

Trump probably wishes that he could be like Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2020, Putin signed legislation that grants former presidents immunity from prosecution for any crimes committed during their lifetime. Trump has argued for presidential immunity repeatedly without success.

Trump also shares much in common with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has used a similar strategy of “delay, deny, deflect” after he was charged in 2019 with fraud, breach of trust, and bribery while still in office. Netanyahu has also accused prosecutors of waging a “witch hunt” against him.

Netanyahu left office in 2021 after losing a vote of confidence in the parliament, but returned to power in December 2022 as the head of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Netanyahu and his allies then tried to overhaul the judicial system to give ruling parties more power to override Supreme Court decisions and select judges. Under the proposed legislation, courts would no longer have been allowed to bar politicians convicted of crimes from holding top government posts. These proposals triggered mass protests, and may have helped distract the government from warning signs about Hamas’s plans for a major attack.

But two other Israeli leaders ended up serving prison sentences. Former President Moshe Katsav was sentenced in 2011 after being convicted of rape and other sexual offenses against subordinates, and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was convicted in 2015 of fraud, breach of trust, and tax evasion.

In France, two former presidents were convicted of criminal charges. Jacques Chirac was convicted in 2011 of influence peddling, breach of trust, and embezzlement during his time as the mayor of Paris and received a two-year suspended jail sentence. In 2021, former President Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted of corruption and influence peddling. An appeals court spared him from serving any time in prison. In a separate case, Sarkozy is to go on trial in 2025 on charges or corruption and illegal financing related to alleged Libyan funding of his successful 2007 presidential campaign.

South Korea remains one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies even though four ex-presidents have been jailed for corruption since the 1980s. Another ex-president committed suicide in 2009 while under investigation. Most recently, President Park Geun-hye was impeached in 2017, and convicted of abuse of power, bribery, and coercion the following year. She was sentenced to 22 years in prison, but received a presidential pardon in 2021 due to poor health.

South Koreans ousted a military dictatorship in the 1980s. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2023, South Korea is a top-tier democracy, ranked 22nd in the world—seven spots ahead of the United States, which was labeled a “flawed democracy.”

Trump has been charged with 88 criminal offenses in four criminal cases. But former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who died last year, also had quite the rap sheet. Berlusconi faced 35 criminal court cases since entering politics in 1994, but only one of his trials resulted in a conviction, Reuters reported. Berlusconi was convicted in 2013 for tax fraud, false accounting, and embezzlement related to his media empire, but what was originally a four-year prison sentence ended up being reduced to a year of community service.

And that brings us to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing populist known as the “Trump of the Tropics.” Bolsonaro cast doubts over the results of the 2022 presidential election which he narrowly lost to left-wing former leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, claiming without evidence that the country’s electronic voting machines were prone to fraud.

Then on Jan. 8, 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed the Congress and other government buildings in the capital Brasilia in a scene mirroring that of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Security forces regained control and arrested several hundred people.

Bolsonaro has been charged by Brazilian authorities with forging a coronavirus vaccine card before he traveled to Florida in late 2022 after his election loss. Authorities are also investigating whether Bolsonaro was involved in plotting a coup to remove Lula from power.

But last July, judges on Brazil’s highest electoral court barred Bolsonaro from running for office again until 2030, making it unlikely that he will ever return to the presidency.

That’s something the U.S. Senate could have done by convicting Trump in his second impeachment trial. At the time, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking” the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, but it was more appropriate for the former president to be held accountable by the criminal justice system and civil litigation. Maybe some GOP senators thought Trump would just go away, but he’s now their presumptive presidential nominee, and McConnell and most other GOP senators have bent the knee and endorsed Trump.

So now as Trump’s first trial begins, our country is rated a “flawed democracy.” Trump and his MAGA cultists have tried to undermine our justice system, the rule of law, and the public’s faith in democracy. The Washington Post reports:

“The notion that not just charges would be brought, but that a former president and possibly future president might be convicted and sent to jail is truly extraordinary,” said William Howell, an American politics professor at the University of Chicago. “How the system and how the American public will respond is going to be really revealing about the nature of our democratic commitments.”

If other democracies can hold their leaders accountable, there’s no reason why we can’t do the same.

RELATED STORY: Donald Trump's desperation is showing—more than usual

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The media gives Trump benefit of the doubt on abortion. He doesn’t deserve it

Posted on April 11, 2024 by Dartagnan

This was the week when the corporate media decided to mansplain Donald Trump to women and anyone else who might care about their reproductive rights.

“Don’t worry your pretty little heads about what he says,” we were told. “We’re going to tell you what he means.”

First, let’s tease out the most charitable take. The media always wants a ”story.” Thus, the thinking goes, Trump’s video statement this week describing his position on abortion must have been rooted in some political necessity. The Republican Party’s 2024 electoral hopes are obviously hemorrhaging on the issue of reproductive choice, so Trump must recognize his vulnerability on that issue, and must have felt it necessary to accommodate all of us by moderating his position. After all, it’s common for politicians to shape-shift on policy matters, even marginally. Those subtle changes in policy are eagerly picked up and parsed by the news media because they create conflict and drama that, in turn, provides a narrative for the press.

But Trump is not a “normal” political candidate. For Trump, to acknowledge any shift or change on his abortion position would have gone against every ingrained aspect of his personality. It would be an admission, in effect, that he had miscalculated, or done something wrong.

So when Trump issued his scripted video—because he clearly couldn’t handle the intense discomfort of a live press conference—it was carefully crafted to acknowledge no error on his part. There was no sense he felt he’d miscalculated the impact of his long-asserted intent to overrule Roe v. Wade through his appointment of three virulently anti-abortion Supreme Court justices.

Instead, he bragged about it, spewing a bunch of ambiguous verbiage deliberately designed to say nothing else. For someone incapable of owning up to his mistakes, on abortion or anything else, it really couldn’t be otherwise.

But nearly all the mainstream media—Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and CBS—wanted that “story,” that sensible, rational narrative to present to their viewers. So what they all did—every one of them, in fact—was invent a story out of whole cloth: that this was evidence that Trump was actually behaving like a normal political human being and moderating, ever-so-slightly, his position on abortion.

In doing so, they did all Americans a grotesque disservice, because Trump didn’t change a thing about his position. It was the media that did that for him, as astutely pointed out by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz:

Former President Donald Trump’s strategy of ducking questions on abortion requires mainstream reporters to let him off the hook and leave pro-choice swing voters with the false impression that he is more moderate than he actually is. So far, it’s working.

Major news outlets are falsely claiming that Trump said abortion “should be left to the states” in a video announcement Monday on his Truth Social platform. In fact, Trump said only that abortion “will” be left to the states, a statement of law that does not address how he would respond if Congress passed a federal abortion ban or how regulators would treat abortion under a second Trump administration.

Gertz has the receipts. As he posted on the social platform X, the media complicity in distorting what Trump said was as repetitive as it was egregious:

The inaccurate claim that Trump said abortion "should be left to the states" is everywhere in mainstream coverage. https://t.co/DZBs7IZ8pr pic.twitter.com/SUtH9Mzv13
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) April 8, 2024

This is not some minor quibble. What Gertz illustrates here is literally serial misinformation being spun by every recognized paladin of “mainstream” news. And that misinformation was dutifully picked up and disseminated by subsidiary outlets to foster and spread a phony narrative that Trump has somehow moderated his position on abortion. He hasn’t.

By reporting in headline after headline that Trump said abortion “should”—rather than “will”—be left to the states, the media have created the impression that for Trump, the abortion issue is now settled, and implicitly, that he won’t take abortion restrictions further should he be elected again in 2024.

So, to the casual reader of these headlines, which is as far as many readers go, that means he’s abandoned his intent, expressed just last month, to establish a national abortion ban, and It means no effort to outlaw mifepristone through the FDA. However, as Kaili Joy Gray and Kos have both written on this site, that is not what Trump said at all.

Anyone in the mainstream news who has followed Trump over the past eight years should have known that he does not ever acknowledge his own misjudgments. He didn’t do it for his disastrous COVID-19 response. He never gave the slightest indication that he erred in the heinous conduct that led to either of his impeachments.

So he wasn’t about to do it for an issue, such as abortion, for which he clearly has no personal sentiments. The problem here is that the media still continue to treat Trump as a normal politician, equivocating in a way that the media have come to expect. That conventional narrative may be a way to reassure themselves or their audience, but it’s false.

Trump is fundamentally incapable of making such an admission. There has not been a single instance in Trump’s public career where he has admitted any error in judgment, let alone admitted it to the news media. His past actions can’t be questioned, and if they are questioned his response, invariably, is to become angry and dismissive. This peculiarity of Trump’s personality was entrenched by his mentor, Roy Cohn, one of the most malignant and ruthless political operatives of the 20th century. Cohn had a singular rule that he hammered regularly into his young protege: Never, ever admit mistakes.

Gertz observes that Trump’s statement was simply a reiteration of what the existing law on abortion actually is: nothing more, nothing less. The media ran with that and assumed that Trump was “limiting” himself by those statements. As Gertz points out, he did no such thing:

Trump did not say whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if Congress passed it. Nor did he say whether federal regulators under his administration would move to ban medication abortions or restrict sending them through the mail, or how he will vote on the abortion referendum in his home state of Florida, or whether he will continue to appoint judges who will further curtail abortion rights.

So the media narrative as implied—and literally spelled out in many headlines—was wholly false. Instead, what we got were headlines that had the pernicious effect of minimizing the threat Trump actually represents, and more importantly, misrepresenting what he does or does not intend to do on abortion.

Nor did the situation improve on the nightly news. Gertz followed up by examining Monday’s broadcasts for ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Nightly News” and “Today Show,” and CBS’ “Evening News.” All of them reiterated that Trump said abortion “should” be left to the states. CBS’s broadcast put it in a chyron, while a reporter falsely intoned that Trump had “suggested today that the federal government should stay out of the abortion rights debate.”

Again, no such language appears anywhere in Trump’s video speech. As Gertz notes, ABC egregiously characterized Trump’s statements as a “reversal” of Trump’s prior statements regarding a national abortion ban. And, as Gertz observes, none of the networks addressed Trump’s ludicrous claim that Democrats support “infanticide.”

Viewed in the most charitable light, this is a massive, disturbing failure on the part of nearly every major news outlet in this country. The damage will reverberate well into the campaign season as voters are now going to have to reconcile what they they were told by their feckless media, whose misleading headlines are typically the solitary source of their information, with what is actually at stake for voters as the 2024 election approaches.

But it’s also difficult to reconcile the glaringly collective aspect of this. As Gertz points out, Trump is someone who habitually, routinely lies, to the point where very little he says can be given any credulity at all. It’s difficult to fathom why nearly every major news outlet leapt to the same erroneous conclusion about what he said, and pushed it to their viewers and readers in the exact same fashion. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow also pointed this out, while acknowledging her high regard for all of the sources involved.

And now it’s even harder to argue with those who suggest that the media has normalized Trump and his pathologies, that its fixation on the horse race aspect of the 2024 election has clouded its own ability to distinguish facts from fiction.

That doesn’t mean we need to cynically reject everything the corporate-owned media decides to report about Trump, but it also doesn’t make us conspiracy theorists for calling out such blatant and obvious failures. Again, to reiterate a common phrase, despite eight long years of Roy Cohn’s protege living rent-free in our heads, none of this is normal. It’s not normal for the American public, and it should never, ever be normalized for those whose job it is to keep that public informed.

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ICYMI: House GOP is sick of Marjorie, and RFK Jr.’s latest mess causes controversy

Posted on April 11, 2024 by Daily Kos Staff

House GOP is so over Marjorie Taylor Greene's antics

She might need to dust off her copy of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” because at the moment, she’s not doing either.

Trump thinks he ended the abortion conversation. Biden's just getting started

Biden sums it up in just three words: Trump did this.

RFK Jr. campaign consultant confirms it: He’s a spoiler for Trump

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Cartoon: Eclipse

A perfect break from your regularly scheduled outrage.

Right-wing fraudsters fined $1.25M for racist election robocall scheme

These two have hit the big leagues of dirtbaggery.

Abandoned GOP minority outreach center gets a sexy makeover

Frankly, it seems a much better use of the space.

House speaker delays doomed-to-fail impeachment trial

Poor Mike Johnson. Even his best-laid plans don’t work.

‘A disaster’: Vulnerable Arizona Republicans panic over abortion ruling

What a difference two years and a bunch of elections make.

Why the DCCC is using 'hybrid ads' to boost its favored candidate in Oregon

Democrats are using an unusual strategy pioneered by George W. Bush. Yes, that George W. Bush.

Click here to see more cartoons.

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GOP House digs for new Biden dirt as sawdust ‘cocaine’ and Russian moles fail

Posted on April 3, 2024 by Joan McCarter

The Biden impeachment resolution the House GOP unanimously approved last December has hilariously collapsed (Russian moles, sawdust “cocaine”), but that’s not stopping the utterly inept Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, from throwing spaghetti at the wall to make something stick. The chair of the House Oversight Committee made it clear that his intention is to amass as much “evidence” of alleged wrongdoing as he can, with an eye toward setting up criminal prosecutions for a hypothetical Trump presidency.

“Since January 2023, we’ve launched investigations into President Biden’s border crisis, energy crisis, federal pandemic spending, federal agency telework policies, abuse of power at the FTC, the Bidens’ corrupt influence peddling schemes, the federal government’s efforts to combat CCP influence, and more,” Comer told Politico.

Those investigations, he promised, “will culminate in reports with our findings and recommended solutions to prevent government waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.” Expect that to be as solid as all the previous work from him and his fellow MAGA zealot Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the Judiciary Committee.

The “and more” Comer referred to includes such burning questions as the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic (which occurred under Trump) and the administration’s use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Comer has made it clear that this volley of attacks is designed to generate criminal referrals.

“I want to hold the Biden family accountable. I believe the best way to hold the Biden family accountable is through criminal referrals. We’ve proven many crimes have been committed,” Comer told Fox News’ Trey Gowdy. “If the Merrick Garland Department of Justice will not hold this family accountable, then maybe if Trump is president, a Trey Gowdy Department of Justice can hold this family accountable.”

The Comer oversight overreach extends to a threat to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt if he doesn’t turn over the audio tapes of the interview special counsel Robert Hur conducted with President Biden in his classified documents probe. That’s after the disastrous hearing Jordan and Comer held last month, intended to show that Biden is too old and doddery to be trusted as commander in chief.

That backfired when the Justice Department released the transcript of the Biden interview, which showed that Biden’s memory was not failing, and in fact Hur remarked on Biden’s “photographic understanding and, and recall of the house” in Delaware where documents were found. But Comer and Jordan—who have been given free rein by GOP leadership to continue to embarrass them all—are sure that they can find some nugget of a cover-up on the part of Garland in all of this.

Mostly, though, they want to help Trump in his revenge plots. So they’re just going to keep burrowing into the hole they’ve dug. They could quit while they’re behind, but the need to avenge Trump just won’t let them.

GOP continues bogus ‘investigation’ after star witness turns out to be Russian mole

GOP seeks new way to attack Biden since impeachment scheme is a bust

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ICYMI: GOP heads may be rolling, Maddow’s McDaniel trolling

Posted on March 27, 2024 by Daily Kos Staff

RFK Jr. picks a veep as his campaign is drowning in embarrassment

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Texas AG Ken Paxton skirts the law—again

Oh to be a fly on the wall of the “legal ethics” class Paxton has to take.

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Texas AG Ken Paxton skirts the law—again

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Mark Sumner

Mere months after taking office in 2015, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton surrendered to authorities on three felony counts related to securities fraud. But after getting his mugshot taken and posting a $35,000 bond, Paxton spent the next nine or so years making sure that the law was a bludgeon to be used against other people. People who are not rich, white, politically empowered Republican men.

On Tuesday, weeks before that 2015 case was finally set to go to trial, the special prosecutors handling Paxton’s case announced a very special deal. Rather than facing a pair of first-degree felonies, each of which could have brought a minimum sentence of five years, and a third-degree felony that might have added at least two more, Paxton will face … zero years. Also zero months, zero days, and zero charges.

Instead, Paxton will agree to pay back the money he allegedly defrauded, attend a class on “legal ethics,” and do 100 hours of community service. He doesn’t have to pay a fine to the state. He doesn’t even have to plead guilty. Instead, all charges are dropped and Paxton can carry on with the vital work of threatening hospitals and protecting Texas’ right to drown children with razor wire.

Paxton’s get-out-of-felony-free deal comes six months after the state Senate acquitted him in an impeachment trial where he was clearly guilty. Paxton was overwhelmingly impeached in the Texas House in May 2023, on charges that included bribery, obstruction of justice, dereliction of duty, and misappropriation of public resources. In the middle of those charges was a scheme in which a wealthy donor reportedly provided a job to Paxton’s mistress and seven members of Paxton’s staff resigned.

But immediately following his impeachment, Donald Trump pressured Texas state senators to show their loyalty by acquitting Paxton, and in behind-the-scenes negotiations, none were willing to stand up and provide the critical vote that would have impeached the Texas AG.

Paxton was also allowed to skate by the state bar association, which said it couldn’t discipline Paxton for supporting false claims of election fraud. An almost four-year-old FBI investigation that began in relation to charges leveled by some of those who resigned from Paxton’s office has yet to result in any charges.

While benefiting from the immunity of the wealthy and politically connected, Paxton has continued to use the law as a club against those who aren’t so lucky. That includes his infamous war against Kate Cox, who sought to end a nonviable pregnancy that threatened her health and potentially her life. Cox was ultimately forced to leave the state to seek relief after Paxon appealed a district court decision that would have allowed her to obtain a medical abortion.

Paxton has also been on the forefront of claims about an immigrant invasion. That includes issuing a reply to a Supreme Court ruling in January, claiming that it “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America,” and seeking to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which can protect from deportation children who were brought into the country illegally. Paxton not only sued the federal government for cutting through barriers of razor wire, he also refused to consider removing that wire after a woman and two children drowned.

Like a lot of Republicans, Paxton seems to have a very strict view of the law when it is being used against someone else, and an absolute disdain for it when it’s turned his way.

But considering how many things he's gotten away with over so many years, Paxton has a right to feel like Texas law is a joke. And he always seems to get the last laugh.

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New GOP stunt hearing dresses up anti-abortion radicals as pro-child advocates

Posted on March 18, 2024 by Charles Jay

Republican lawmakers have been trying to dig themselves out of the ditch created when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization should be considered children. And former President Donald Trump has been trying to throw off the political albatross of near-total abortion bans imposed in red states post-Dobbs v. Jackson as he campaigns for a White House get-out-of-jail-free card.

But now Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has come along with a shovel to dig that ditch a little deeper. Greene was creepily enough all smiles when she announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that she would be conducting a hearing next Tuesday to investigate “the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting.” She also invited people to register on her congressional website for a livestream of the hearing.

Join me and special guests David Daleiden and Terrisa Bukovinac for a Hearing on Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting on Tuesday, March 19th at 2 PM ET. REGISTER NOW: https://t.co/tBNqeUyKJQ pic.twitter.com/BB9RO428dY
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) March 11, 2024

To be clear, there is no black market of baby organ harvesting. And there’s nothing to smile about regarding Greene’s latest political theater stunt.

Vice President Kamala Harris made history on Thursday when she became the first sitting president or vice president to visit a facility that provides abortions—a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota. Greene is trying to revive a malicious, debunked smear campaign against Planned Parenthood. Forced-birthers have falsely claimed that the health care provider has been profiting off of the illegal sale of aborted fetus parts to medical researchers.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee created a special web page and YouTube videos to debunk misinformation about Planned Parenthood, such as the claim that its clinics conduct late-term abortions to get body parts to sell. They do not.

Only a few Planned Parenthood clinics have donated fetal tissue for medical research, with the informed consent of the patient, the organization said. Clinics in the past did receive compensation from researchers to cover their costs for processing and transporting the material, but the policy was changed in 2015, and clinics no longer accept reimbursement for expenses related to tissue donation.

But the biggest tell about what Greene is up to are the two witnesses she has announced that will appear at her hearing: prominent anti-abortion activists David Daleiden and Terrisa Bukovinac.

Daleiden, who founded a group known as the Center for Medical Progress, was linked by the Southern Poverty Law Center to ”some of the country’s hardest-line anti-abortion extremists.”

In 2015, Daleiden’s group released a series of deceptively edited undercover videos that claimed to show Planned Parenthood employees involved in the for-profit sale of supposed “body parts from aborted fetuses,” which would have been illegal. That led to efforts in several Republican-controlled states to defund Planned Parenthood health centers.

At least 13 states conducted investigations of Planned Parenthood that found that the organization had not engaged in any wrongdoing. A similar investigation by the House Oversight Committee, pushed by Republican House Speaker John Boehner, reached the same conclusion.

Planned Parenthood, in turn, sued Daleiden’s group. In 2019, a jury ruled in Planned Parenthood’s favor, finding that Daleiden and his group had violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and engaged in fraud, trespass, breach of contract, and illegal secret recording.

The jury awarded Planned Parenthood compensatory and punitive damages totaling more than $2 million for the harm caused by Daleiden and his co-conspirators. In October 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Daleiden group’s appeal of a lower court’s decision upholding most of the damages awarded to Planned Parenthood, Reuters reported.

Bukovinac gained notoriety in March 2022 during a protest outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic in D.C. when she and another anti-abortion activist, Lauren Handy, claim to have obtained a box containing five fetuses and 110 smaller ones from a medical waste truck driver. The clinic is not affiliated with Planned Parenthood.

Police later said the fetuses were aborted in accordance with D.C. law. In 2022, police removed the fetuses from a refrigerator in Handy’s home after she and several other protesters were indicted on federal charges of blocking access to the Surgi-Clinic during an earlier 2020 protest. In August 2023, Handy and four co-defendants were convicted of illegally blockading the reproductive health clinic. Bukovinac was not among those charged.

Bukovinac founded a group known as Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, which demanded that the D.C. clinic be investigated for infanticide. In September 2023, Bukovinac, who identifies herself as a “pro-life progressive,” stood outside the Surgi-Clinic to announce that she was running for president in the Democratic primary (though she’s gotten virtually no traction)—a move that she hoped would enable her to run graphic anti-abortion ads, Michigan Advance reported.

Daleiden and Bukovinac have already telegraphed on X what Greene’s hearing will be about. Right-wing media outlets like The Federalist have picked up a report earlier this month from Daleiden’s group. This time, Daleiden’s group didn’t use undercover videos, but apparently cherry-picked documents obtained via a public records request. Daleiden’s group claimed that Planned Parenthood of San Diego (now known as Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest) had a contractual agreement “to supply aborted fetal body parts” to the University of California San Diego in exchange for “valuable consideration”—namely a share of intellectual property rights derived through their research.

“This new evidence shows Planned Parenthood sells late-term aborted baby body parts in violation of federal law, for far more money than has ever been discussed before,” Daleiden claims in the report.

But once you get past the sensational headlines, the report says the biological materials being referred to are actually “fetal and placental tissue.” Daleidin’s group also claims that the University of California’s total patent invention revenue for 2021-2022 was over $127 million, but the link is to a page referring to the entire U of C system, with no amount specified for patents derived from fetal tissue research at UCSD.

The website for Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest does not include any reference to the Daleidin group’s allegations. But there is something even more alarming about this hearing: the Alabama Supreme Court's ruling on frozen embryos, and efforts by the GOP to pass legislation that declares human life begins at conception.

And that is the impact on fetal tissue and embryonic stem cell research following the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed abortion rights nationwide.

Immediately after the ruling, medical researchers were already expressing worries that the ruling would result in new restrictions that “will decrease the availability of fetal tissues and embryonic stem cells,” or lead some states to pass laws banning such research entirely, according to The Scientist website.

In 2021, the Biden administration scrapped restrictions imposed by former President Donald Trump on federal funding for medical research using human fetal tissue from elective abortions. If Trump wins in November, even harsher restrictions could be imposed.

The Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights advocacy research group, wrote that these federal grants support research “on a wide range of conditions including diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injuries, hemophilia, leukemia, sickle cell anemia, ALS, and others.”

Back in 2016, when Daleidin’s group first went after Planned Parenthood, the Guttmacher Institute wrote in its report:

Fetal tissue research dates back to the 1930s, and has led to major advances in human health, including the virtual elimination of such childhood scourges as polio, measles and rubella in the United States. Today, fetal tissue is being used in the development of vaccines against Ebola and HIV, the study of human development, and efforts to treat and cure conditions and diseases that afflict millions of Americans.

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These former Trump voters are determined to stop him. Here’s how

Posted on March 15, 2024 by Charles Jay

President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their surrogates need to focus their time and resources on consolidating the Democratic base and touting the president’s accomplishments in office. Yet anti-Trump Republicans also have work to do when it comes to building support for Biden.

A group of anti-Trump Republicans are launching their second “Republican Voters Against Trump” campaign against the former president, planning to spend $50 million and use homemade testimonial videos from voters who supported Trump in one of both of his previous campaigns—but cannot vote for him in 2024.

Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday, despite his two impeachments and four criminal indictments. His true Achilles’ heel will be the significant number of Republican voters who refuse to support him.

Sarah Longwell, president and founder of the Republican Accountability PAC, issued this statement about the campaign:

“Former Republicans and Republican-leaning voters hold the key to 2024, and reaching them with credible, relatable messengers is essential to re-creating the anti-Trump coalition that made the difference in 2020.

“It establishes a permission structure that says that—whatever their complaints about Joe Biden—Donald Trump is too dangerous and too unhinged to ever be president again. Who better to make this case than the voters who used to support him?”

The campaign released this 67-second video accompanying the launch.

YouTube Video

A significant number of Republicans might be open to such a campaign. They include supporters of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, whose strongest performance came in cities, college towns, and suburbs, and particularly among college-educated voters, according to CNN.

Haley won Vermont (50%) and Washington, D.C. (63%), and received more than 30% of the vote in New Hampshire, Virginia, South Carolina, Utah, Colorado, and Massachusetts. Haley also got 570,000 votes in three key swing states: Nevada, North Carolina, and Michigan, Reuters reported.

Remember how close the 2020 election actually was? Although Biden received 7 million more votes, just a small shift in votes could have given Trump the Electoral College victory.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations report, if Trump had picked up 42,921 votes in Arizona (10,457), Georgia (11,779), and Wisconsin (20,682), plus the one electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which he lost to Biden by 22,091 votes, he would have won the Electoral College outright. If he’d lost Nebraska’s 2nd, the House would have then decided the election. Republicans held the majority of state delegations in the newly inaugurated Congress, and they undoubtedly would have chosen Trump.

However, Haley dropped out of the race last week, leaving no opposition for Trump. Yet in Tuesday’s primaries, she still received nearly 78,000 votes in Georgia—far more than the number of votes Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” in order to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Haley also got 21% of the vote in Washington state.

It’s not yet known how much of Tuesday’s Haley support came from early votes cast before she quit the race, but in Georgia, The New York Times estimates that “less than 5%” of Election Day votes were cast for her. Protest votes for sure—but the reality is that over 13% of Peach State voters chose Haley—when they had her as a choice and when they didn’t.

Haley declined to endorse Trump when she dropped out of the race, saying instead that “it is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond who did not support him.” She added that “politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away.”

And while Trump invited Haley supporters to join his right-wing MAGA movement, he also bashed many of her supporters as “Radical Left Democrats.”

Biden seized on the opportunity and commended Haley for being “willing to speak the truth about Donald Trump.”

“Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign,” Biden said in a statement. “I know there is a lot we won’t agree on. But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.”

Polls indicate that Biden could gain support among Haley voters. An Emerson College poll released after Haley quit the race found that 63% of her supporters back Biden and just 27% support Trump, with 10% undecided, The Hill reported.

A Washington Post/Quinnipiac University poll saw slightly different results.

Recent polling from Quinnipiac University found that about half of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who supported Haley would vote for Trump, while 37 percent would vote for Biden. Twelve percent said they would abstain, vote for someone else or hadn’t yet decided what to do.

It’s clear that there’s room for Republican Voters Against Trump to break through. Longwell said her PAC has already raised $20 million and hopes to raise another $30 million before the November election, Forbes reported. Major donors include several anti-Trump billionaires—Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic donor; Seth Klarman, who runs the Boston-based Baupost hedge fund, and John Pritzker, a member of the family that founded the Hyatt hotel brand.

The RVAT campaign plans to deploy ads on television, streaming, radio, billboards, and digital media in critical swing states, focusing on Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Longwell is a longtime Republican strategist and former national board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans, the conservative LGBTQ+ organization. She was among the early Never Trumpers, refusing to endorse him in 2016. In 2018, she became a co-founder of the anti-Trump conservative news and opinion website The Bulwark.

In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Longwell said Republican Voters Against Trump is building on experiences from the 2020 presidential race. In the 2022 midterms, the group also campaigned against MAGA extremists like gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.

In 2020, Longwell said the group first ran traditional attack ads that really beat up on Trump and went viral. But the ads actually turned off and failed to persuade the center-right Republican voters they were trying to reach.

They had more success running personal testimonials from former Trump supporters. Longwell said such testimonials created a “permission structure” which showed there was a community of people who identified themselves as Republicans but were also anti-Trump.

Longwell acknowledged that about 70% of the GOP has gone “full MAGA”—they believe the 2020 election was stolen, but the remaining 30% are persuadable. “Some of those people are going to go home to Trump … They are sort of always Republicans,” Longwell said on “Morning Joe.”

“There is another group in that 30% that I think has already been voting for Joe Biden,” she added.

Then Longwell described a third group of right-leaning independents, or soft GOP voters, who are “double doubters.”

“They have a tough time voting for Democrats, but also don’t think Donald Trump is a Republican, not like the kind of Republicans of (Ronald) Reagan or John McCain or of Mitt Romney that they like, ...

”We think about this less like building a pro-Joe Biden coalition — because a lot of these people they don’t love Joe Biden — but what you can do is build an anti-Trump coalition.” She added that the goal is to get as many of them as possible to come around and vote for Biden.

Watch Longwell’s full MSNBC interview below.

YouTube Video

The RVAT testimonials do not promote Biden’s record in office, and the issue of abortion rights isn’t raised. Instead, the videos focus entirely on attacking Trump.

There are a lot more ways to criticize Trump this time around than during the 2020 campaign: the Jan. 6 insurrection, the threat he poses to democracy as a wannabe dictator, his softness on Vladimir Putin and willingness to abandon Ukraine, his four criminal indictments, and his mental fitness to be president, just to name a few. That has led some of the Republican voters to say that Joe Biden is the first Democrat they’ve ever supported.

Here are two of the testimonials posted on X, formerly known as Twitter:

Ethan from Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump in 2020 but will support Joe Biden in 2024 because he believes Donald Trump is not fit to be president: “January 6 was the end of Donald Trump for me.” pic.twitter.com/O1WlStOec5
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) March 13, 2024

Eric from Louisiana is a former Trump voter who will never vote for him again: “Biden versus Trump 2.0. I don’t think that’s most people’s dream race, but it is the easiest choice I’ve ever had, and I was a long-time Republican who never considered voting Democrat.” pic.twitter.com/g5h9eYCpfj
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) March 13, 2024

Longwell, writing for The Bulwark, said what she’d like to see next is former Trump appointees step up and come out in force against him—beyond essays in elite news outlets like The Atlantic or in an occasional interview on CNN. These include Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House chief of staff John Kelly, Attorney General William Barr, national security adviser John Bolton, and even Vice President Mike Pence.

What we have here is a parade of high-level, serious people (whatever you think about their politics) who served the guy and all came to the same conclusion, independently: He’s nuts."

If we want to stop a Trump restoration and the promised MAGA dictatorship, it’s going to require building a coalition of people who understand the stakes. And there are no messengers better equipped to convey the peril of a Trump presidency than those who lived it firsthand, on the inside.

Longwell said that, based on focus groups she’s conducted of Republican voters, “the reason they seem unbothered by Trump’s autocratic tendencies is that a lot of them don’t know about them” (although some are “perfectly fine with it”).

The people who served Trump directly need to go on the record, as loudly and frequently as possible, about exactly why he should never get near the White House again. … They could call this project Trump Officials Against Trump.”

[…]

We need former Trump officials—people of conscience, who have not acquiesced to the authoritarianism of it all—to stand as one and to speak plainly to the American people. Again and again, until every voter has heard their voices. … It’s time to go to work. Your country needs you.

In the 1980 and 1984 campaigns, we heard a lot about so-called “Reagan Democrats.” It’s hard not to wonder: How many “Biden Republicans” might be out there in 2024?

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ICYMI: Trump wants to bleed RNC dry, GOP tries to give IVF framing another try

Posted on March 15, 2024 by Daily Kos Staff

Trump's RNC takeover is his latest attempt to bleed his party dry

Trump isn’t just a grifter, he’s a vampire.

Lauren Boebert: The ‘uniparty’ is trying to ‘rig the election’ against me

That’s right, Lauren. It’s all a conspiracy.

Cartoon: The unknown failures of Joe Biden

Sure you have the right guy?

Trump wants a VP pick who's not extreme on abortion. Good luck with that

We’d like a Republican nominee who is not a dictator-wannabe criminal, but you can’t have it all.

Republicans' self-inflicted IVF pain gets even worse

The only thing growing inside the GOP is more of a mess.

GOP seeks new way to attack Biden since impeachment scheme is a bust

If only Biden would do some of the 91 things that Trump has (allegedly) done, this would all be a lot easier.

State Freedom Caucuses are a thing now, and they're nuttier than the House is

Much like Moms for Liberty, these caucuses are spreading like a far-right fungus.

Watch Trump choke in this savage supercut of supercuts

Still can’t stop watching this.

Tide may be turning as Florida legislature kills multiple anti-LGBTQ+ bills

Well, at least it’s OK to say “gay” in Florida again.

House Republicans defy Trump to take down TikTok

What happens when the GOP goes against Honest Don’s wishes?

Click here to see more cartoons.

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GOP seeks new way to attack Biden since impeachment scheme is a bust

Posted on March 13, 2024 by Mark Sumner

Tuesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing with special counsel Robert Hur showcased Republican desperation to find some way to attack President Joe Biden.

Despite the release of a full transcript of the interview between Hur and Biden that showed complaints about the president’s memory to be exaggerated, if not outright lies, many Republicans continued to pursue the Biden-so-old route. Texas Rep. Nathaniel Moran went so far as to suggest that Biden should be placed under guardianship for diminished mental capabilities.

At the same time, committee Chair Jim Jordan was one of multiple Republican members who asked Hur to envision fantasy scenarios in which the president was 15 or 20 years younger. That was part of an extended, and sometimes laughably desperate, effort by Republicans to get Hur to say that somehow, somewhen, somewhere in the multiverse, he might have considered charging Biden. They did not succeed.

But the biggest reason for the Hur hearing wasn’t just to give a chance to alternate between asking whether Biden should be in a care facility or if he’s a criminal mastermind. The reason that the Republicans called in Hur is that their big impeachment scheme has fallen apart. Now they are madly searching for something, anything, that they can throw against the walls of the White House.

As Politico reported on Wednesday, the Republican plan to impeach Biden appears to be all but dead. That effort began as soon as Republicans had their hands on the machinery of the House, with Rep. James Comer chairing the House Oversight Committee running a parallel “investigation” with Jordan on the Judiciary Committee and Chairman Jason Smith on the Ways and Means Committee. It reached its ludicrous peak on Sep. 12, 2023, when then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy announced a formal impeachment inquiry in a blatant effort to hang onto his big office. That didn’t work.

By the time Hunter Biden made his way to a closed-door meeting of the inquiry on Feb. 28, 2024, it seemed clear Republicans were only spinning their wheels. Despite hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Republicans had produced nothing more than some truck payments, family loans, and a heavily debunked claim from an indicted foreign agent.

However, as the Politico article notes, Republicans see it as a high priority to “antagonize the White House.”

It might seem that getting some legislation passed after a session in which Republican infighting resulted in just 27 bills escaping the House (that includes renaming some Veterans Affairs clinics and issuing a commemorative coin). But Republicans are convinced that demonstrating competence in governing doesn’t matter to their voters.

So they are just going to throw crap against the walls of the Capitol in the hopes that some of it might stick.

Among the Republican Plan Bs under consideration are:

Sending criminal referrals for Hunter Biden to the Justice Department.
Keep investigating, but save any announcements for closer to Election Day.
Just keep investigating and making false claims—because that’s worked so well so far.

There’s also a plan to sue the Department of Justice, though it’s not clear why.

There’s even a suggestion that Republicans might do something that seems anathema to them so far—draft legislation. In this case, it would be legislation to tighten rules for financial reporting and foreign lobbying.

However, not only would this require them to break out a pencil stub and do the work they’ve resisted since taking control of the House in 2023, it would also mean drafting something that would pass the Senate. It could be exceedingly difficult to craft a bill on financial reporting that didn’t have a much bigger impact on Donald Trump than Biden. Ditto on issues of foreign lobbying.

The problem for Republicans is that Trump and his family did all the things they’ve been attributing to Biden and his family. Which would seem to make the legislative route difficult without netting the wrong fish.

Other options, like the idea of making a criminal referral on Hunter Biden, would be an obvious exercise in toothless grandstanding. But that hasn’t seemed to bother Republicans so far, so this is likely what they’ll do.

Republicans are reportedly so far away from mustering enough support for a Biden impeachment that even Speaker of the House Mike Johnson can see that such a move would fail. But they’re unwilling—and possibly incapable—of trying to dig their way back to respectability by passing legislation that addresses the nation’s needs.

So they’re going to sit among the ashes of their very fine impeachment inquiry and try to find something else ugly enough to please MAGA voters. So far, they’ve got nothing.

The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell joins Kerry to discuss the State of the Union and what President Biden needs to do to soundly defeat Donald Trump in Novembe.

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