Gordon Sondland sues government, Mike Pompeo for impeachment-related legal fees

Remember when it was conclusively proven that Donald Trump did a crime? No, not that one, the other one. No, between those two. We're talking about the confirmation, by multiple witnesses called before the House to testify on presidential acts, that Donald Trump slow-walked both military and diplomatic aid to Ukraine, which was fighting off a Russia-backed insurrection after Russian troops invaded and proclaimed ownership of Crimea, because Donald Trump was demanding the Ukrainian government do him specific favors to aid his upcoming campaign.

In a move eerily similar to the Trump campaign's 2016 dalliances with Russian espionage and propaganda campaigns, this time it was Rudy Giuliani, not Paul Manafort, who acted as courier looking to boost the effectiveness of Russian disinformation campaigns looking to damage Trump's most-feared Democratic election opponent. Pro-Russian Ukrainians laundered anti-Biden materials through Giuliani, who broadcast even the weirdest and most ridiculous ones (Secret servers! Russia was unfairly blamed for 2016 election hacking when actually it was Democrats hacking themselves the whole time!) into Donald Trump's own incomprehensibly hollow head; Donald Trump then insisted that Ukrainian government officials announce that they were investigating these very stupid claims, lending them official credence, in exchange for Trump (1) meeting with the Ukrainian president as show of support for the nation's battle against Russian occupation and (2) agreeing to release his hold on congressionally mandated military aid that Trump and his top officials had no legal authority to block in the first place.

During House impeachment investigations, Trump ally, donor, and ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified through only a little flopsweat that yes, there was a "quid pro quo" demand from the White House that the Ukrainian government promote the Trump-backed anti-Biden hoax before Trump would agree to meet with the Ukrainian president—a clear abuse of governmental powers to gain something of value to Trump personally. Sondland was one of the few pro-Trump witnesses to even agree to appear before Congress; other key witnesses to the events, including William Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, refused to testify or to produce subpoenaed documents.

Trump and his allies faced no repercussions, however. Senate Republicans near-unanimously refused to hear testimony or evidence in the resulting impeachment trial, because they are corrupt. Only days after those Republicans dismissed the impeachment trial against Trump, Trump fired Sondland and other witnesses who testified to his actions, beginning a large-scale purge of any government officials deemed to be unwilling to cover up future Trump corruption. It was a fascist act from a fascist administration backed, then and now, by a fascist party.

Trump once-ally Gordon Sondland is now suing both the U.S. government and Mike Pompeo. His claim? That Pompeo assured him that the U.S. State Department would cover the legal expenses he incurred in preparing for his congressional testimony, back when Pompeo (himself hiding from Congress) and other Trump allies still believed Sondland would refuse to acknowledge Trump's extortive would-be deal. When he came back from testifying, however, Pompeo demanded his immediate resignation, Trump fired him after he refused to give it, and Pompeo's State Department stiffed him, leaving him with $1.8 million in legal bills.

Or, in other words, the same thing happened to him that has happened to everyone else who ever tried to attach themselves to Trump. Who would have thunk it.

Pompeo, for his part, is scoffing at the lawsuit. Democrats have for some reason declined to enforce Pompeo's testimony now that Pompeo no longer has the whole of Trump's government stonewalling that testimony on his behalf, and Pompeo is currently preparing to jet off to Israel to attend a party honoring an Israeli intelligence official and, presumably, commit another crime or two while he has the chance. He remains of the belief that he is still a force to be reckoned with in Republican politics, despite being made to look like a chump throughout Trump's incompetent reign and despite newer-generation fascist blowhards like Ron DeSantis running circles around him when it comes to kissing Trump's ass and getting Americans pointlessly killed.

Will Sondland get his money back? Who knows. Not from Pompeo, that's for sure. We'll see whether the new Biden administration decides that a Pompeo promise ought to be honored even when Pompeo himself never intended to do so, or whether maybe all involved believe that if you staked nearly $2 million on a promise from Trump's crooked inner circle than maybe that's your problem and not ours.

Judge orders Betsy DeVos to sit for three-hour deposition to explain rejecting loan forgiveness

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been ordered to sit for a three-hour deposition for lawyers handling a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit, brought on behalf of around 160,000 student loan borrowers, came from the students defrauded by numerous for-profit colleges across the country. These were organizations like Trump University, where Trump settled a civil lawsuit for $25 million in November 2016. DeVos oversaw the 18-month delay and then rejection of student borrowers’ claims while she ran the Department of Education.

Judge William Alsup ruled that while it is very rare for a former Cabinet secretary to be deposed, “exceptional circumstances” in DeVos’ case—and the super shoddy and sketchy gaps in information—meant that she needed to be deposed. The judge agreed with the class-action lawsuit’s attorneys that DeVos had intimate involvement in the decision-making process surrounding these loans, and since there was “sparse” documentation left over from the previous administration, DeVos’ deposition was required.

This is an important decision because the previous administration, whether through incompetence or nefariousness, seems to have kept very weak records of their processes of running government. That’s unacceptable. In fact, that tends to be the reason that former Cabinet secretaries usually don’t get ordered into three-hour depositions—they usually can argue that the information they would be able to provide is documented and available. 

In February, Biden’s Department of Justice filed a defense of DeVos from deposition, citing of all things “harassment” and called the motion “part of a PR campaign that has been central to [the students’] litigation strategy from the outset. It should be rejected and the court should quash the subpoena.” The Department of Justice also put forth the argument that former Cabinet secretaries are generally immune from having to answer questions under oath about their official government work. Alsup did not agree with that assessment.

But Alsup maintained that Cabinet secretaries are still subject to the law. He cited a range of historical precedents for top executive branch officials being forced to respond to subpoenas, including President Richard Nixon having to turn over White House tapes as part of the Watergate scandal and President Bill Clinton having to sit for a deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit that ultimately led to his impeachment.

Under the Trump administration, DeVos’ Department of Education put a hold on loan forgiveness resolutions for 18 months. During that time, DeVos had to be told by a federal judge that over 150,000 fraud victims’ loan forgiveness was being held up by her and her Department of Education. Even after that order, DeVos continued to block making a decision until finally, DeVos’ Department of Education made sweeping rejections of 94% of the borrower claims being held in abeyance. 

Alsup was overseeing that issue at the time and was justifiably furious with DeVos’ actions and explanation. For months, DeVos and her Department of Education said they were stuck in a backlog, lamenting how hard the work was and how much work they were putting into it all. Then, seemingly with very little explanation according to Alsup at the time, DeVos “charged out of the gate, issuing perfunctory denial notices utterly devoid of meaningful explanation at a blistering pace.”

This led to Alsup squashing the deal between Trump’s Department of Education and the student borrower claimants, and letting their class-action lawsuit go forward. And now here we are. DeVos, like everyone in the Republican swamp, did it to herself.

Judge Alsup left a two week frame within which DeVos’s team can appeal the decision.

Republicans sink to new, amoral lows this week on everything that matters

Let's check in on this week in congressional Republicans, just a kind of check up to see how that revered institution of Joe Manchin's is doing vis-a-vis the GOP.

On Tuesday, the House passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, intended to address the rise of hate crimes against Asian American and Pacific Islander people during the pandemic. It directs the Department of Justice to facilitate the expedited review of hate crimes and reports of hate crimes and work with state, local, and tribal law enforcement to establish reporting and data collection procedures on hate crimes. There were 62 Republican "no" votes on that bill. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, said he voted against it because he didn't think it would work. "We can't legislate away hate," Roy said. Maybe that's why he's pro-hate of LGBTQ people.

In a related measure, 180 House Republicans refused to join Democrats in "Condemning the horrific shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 16, 2021, and reaffirming the House of Representative’s commitment to combating hate, bigotry, and violence against the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community." That was on Wednesday. "Some Republicans took issue with the resolution's mention of the coronavirus nicknames, and GOP leaders urged members to oppose it, according to a GOP source," reports Forbes. "Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.) said in a floor speech she had 'hoped' to support it but that it's 'just another vehicle for delivering cheap shots against our former president.'"

Speaking of seditionists, 175 of them voted against the bipartisan national commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol. Among those voting against the commission was Rep. Greg Pence. He's the Republican brother of former Vice President Mike Pence. Who the mob on Jan. 6 had come to the Capitol to kill. They put up a noose and everything.

Greg Pence said that his brother was a "hero" for doing his job of coming back to certify the election after the attack. This Pence voted to overturn the election results that night. This Pence is more beholden to Trump than his own brother. "I think the whole thing is to spend the summer impeaching, again, Donald Trump," he told HuffPost. "That's all we're doing. It's a dog-and-pony show. … It's another impeachment." That's also a hell of an admission about what happened on Jan. 6, that it was all at the instigation of Trump.

While we're talking Jan. 6, check this out:

Kevin McCarthy doesn't answer a question about whether he's absolutely sure that no House Republicans communicated with January 6 insurrectionists pic.twitter.com/pntSzt7mIJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 20, 2021

That's House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, refusing to answer whether he knows for certain that no House Republican was in contact with the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

While we're on the subject of seditionists, there’s Sen. Ron Johnson. On Thursday, the dumbest man in the Senate claimed that he was conducting his own investigation into Jan. 6. "I'm doing my own investigation to really accurately recreate what happened on January 6th but Nancy Pelosi's commission is not going to dig into this in any bipartisan fashion," the vacuous, dangerous idiot said on Fox News. "She gets to pick all of the staff members. This is a joke and should be voted down." That is not true. The House Republican who helped write the bill creating the commission says so. "The commission creates the rules as a team. They then hire as a team." Like facts are going to stop Johnson.

He says he "talked to people that were there," which suggests that Johnson is among those who needs to be subpoenaed about the events of that day. Anyway, he talked to them and they all said that nothing we saw in front of our very eyes that day happened. "By and large it was peaceful protests except for there were a number of people, basically agitators that whipped the crowd and breached the Capitol, and that's really the truth of what's happening here," Johnson said. Yeah. Agitators. Undoubtedly antifa and BLM. "This is all about a narrative that the left wants to continue to push and Republicans should not cooperate with them at all."

He just won't shut up. "The fact of the matter is even calling it insurrection—it wasn’t," Johnson insists. “I condemned the breach, I condemn the violence, but to say there were thousands of armed insurrectionists breaching the Capitol intent on overthrowing the government is just simply a false narrative."

The thing is, he's fundamentally speaking for the majority of the Senate Republicans. Starting at the top. Before the House voted Wednesday, Sen. Mitch McConnell announced that he will oppose the commission. Not one Republican senator, not even Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, has said they will vote for the commission. She sidestepped the question from reporters multiple times, but did say that "if" it happens, Trump should have to testify. Utah's Mitt Romney also avoided answering the question, but said that if it happens it needs to be limited in scope, that the "key thing that needs to be associated with this effort would be the attack on this building."

The reality is, Trump still owns the vast majority of Republicans. He is definitely calling the shots. Even with McConnell, who keeps pointing to the words he mouthed in defending his vote to acquit Trump for the crime of inciting the insurrection, but caved to pressure from Trump to oppose the commission.

This is what the Democrats who oppose filibuster reform—Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Tom Carper (he's been quieter about it)—are enabling. They're refusing to cut McConnell and Johnson and all the others who are afraid to buck Trump out of the process of governing. Which means they're effectively letting McConnell and crew call the shots.

If they're not stopped, they will use their violent, amoral insurrection to steal the vote in 2022 and 2024, and make absolutely sure that Democrats never win the House, Senate, or White House again.

Rep who scolded reporter for saying she ignored metal detector is fined for ignoring metal detector

Virginia Foxx is a U.S. representative from North Carolina and not, as you might suspect from her name, a now-bitter original member of Emmet Otter’s Jug Band

Honestly, I’d never heard of her before. Yes, I’m a politics nerd, but apparently she’s been hiding her light under a bushel basket all this time. Or maybe Matt Gaetz’s head was in the way. Who knows, really? Come out from behind Matt’s shadow, Ginny, and claim your place among the parthenon of perfidious putzes polluting the ‘Publican Party. 

Folks, I give you a play in four acts, starring Rep. Foxx. We pick up our story a week after the Capitol riot, a watershed historical event that happened earlier this year but which Republicans are trying to mash down the memory hole. Kind of like Don Jr. flushing burlap sacks full of cocaine after the room service he forgot he ordered finally shows up at the door. (Note: I don’t know that Junior’s actually done this. I don’t even know if he does cocaine. But people are saying. Many, many people.)

Behold!

Just gonna leave this whole thing here. pic.twitter.com/95WXBDySXw

— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) May 18, 2021

Let’s unpack that for the non-tweeters, shall we? Our story begins on the morning of Jan. 13, with an observation from The Daily Beast’s Matt Fuller.

This was exactly one week after the Capitol riot, when tensions were presumably at their highest and, for some reason, members of Congress—who were still recovering emotionally from being nearly murdered seven days earlier—were a bit on edge.

Foxx responded within hours: It was FAKE NEWS!

Pop quiz. If a reporter says something and then a Republican says something that directly contradicts the original statement, you should:

a) Believe the reporter

b) Believe the Republican

c) Does there have to be a fucking c)? 

d) Seriously, how did you even get past a)? Why are you still taking this quiz?

About 20 minutes later, Fuller defended his reporting in the strongest terms.

And that’s where these two left their online spat. Until yesterday, that is:

Of course, the Fascistic Ms. Foxx, who voted against both Trump impeachments, was being fined for a new violation, which occurred just a few days ago. But if she’s a scofflaw now, it stands to reason that the reporter who previously called her out was maybe, possibly telling the truth.

From USA Today:

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., is facing a $5,000 fine for failing to comply with a security screening before entering the House Chamber, a post-Jan. 6 security measure that other Republicans have also on occasion not followed.

On May 13, the congresswoman "ran through the magnetometer, triggering the alarm," and "threw her bag underneath the table" next to the screening device, according to a memorandum of the incident filed by U.S. Capitol Police. Foxx said she was late for a vote, according to a witness statement.

Foxx bypassed a USCP officer who attempted to stop her but returned to the screening area to complete screening procedures after casting her vote. An officer testified she said, "Good thing no one stopped me..." The incident was witnessed by an unknown reporter, according to the memorandum.

“A good thing,” huh? I imagine that’s just what the rioters Donald Trump sent to murder his vice president said, too. 

If Foxx wants the metal detectors to go away and decorum to return, maybe she should have helped excise the Tang-hued tumor that continues to metastasize out of control on our nation’s still-pulsating sphincter (i.e., “Florida”). 

But that would have required far more courage than it takes to blow through a metal detector at the Capitol, huh?

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Just $12.96 for the pack of 4! Or if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

Months after insurrection, America’s political journalists are back in their comfy safe space

It's hard to make the case that the American political press knows how to cover American politics. Time and time again we see stories stuffed into the same structural boxes: Democrats are in disarray; parties differ when describing color of sky; today is the day Donald Golfcheat truly became president. A fascist demand to throw out election results and simply appoint Donald Trump the true winner was both correctly pinned as insurrection and, both before and after its failure, put into its own box so that none of the elected officials who pushed forward fantastical, false claims to justify such demands would require new press treatment going forward—even with the new knowledge that these partisans proved willing to lie to the public, aggressively, in a manner intended to undermine public confidence in democracy itself.

Mere months after the United States passed half a million pandemic deaths due to willful public misinformation by elected officials and the attempted seizure of the U.S. Capitol so that the lawmakers within could be either forced into nullifying an election or executed for their unwillingness to do so, the new political story is “Democratic President In Crisis.” What crisis? Every crisis.

When the Republican president faced impeachment (twice), presided over inexplicable military about-faces endangering allies, instigated new trade wars that caused commodity chaos, demanded relaxations of pandemic warnings based on a belief that health experts were only attempting to damage him politically, lied about the path of a hurricane, lied to investigators about contacts between his campaign and Russian government agents, pushed for the deployment of the U.S. military against political demonstrators, and instigated a still-uncountable number of individual constitutional crises as his staff ran roughshod over congressional powers and executive restrictions while relying on party allies to nullify the attempted checks that would prevent it, it was all a crisis.

So now the new guy's got to be pinned with the crisis label too, and according to the agreed upon standards of journalism, former president Jimmy Carter must be mentioned at least once when doing so. To the headlines! Run, Shadowfax! Show us the meaning of haste!

CNN: Multiple crises at home and abroad provide a reality check for Biden's White House

NBC: Biden battles new crises as honeymoon fades

Fox: Battered Biden under siege as crises confound the White House

And what of this new president's management style? After four years of public belittling of staffers, time set aside in meetings for each participant to flatter Our Leader and compete for his favor, the dismissal of military generals as stupid, the erasure of the State Department and diplomatic corps in favor of transitory declarations via smartphone, and raw contempt for any American citizen who did not vote for him, what balancing character flaws can we highlight in his successor?

New York Times: Beneath Joe Biden’s Folksy Demeanor, a Short Fuse and an Obsession With Details

In that one, we learn that Mr. Biden demands "hours of detail-laden debate" from policy experts before coming to a final decision, and that he has "ire" for those who he believes are either snowing him with acronyms or wasting his time. If Trump's error was a seething contempt for all expertise and an unwillingness to read documents not principally focused around himself, it is possible that the New Guy is similarly unhinged in his desire to consult with "scores of policy experts" before making new policy decisions.

"It is a method of governing that can feel at odds with the urgency of a country still reeling from a pandemic and an economy struggling to recover."

Sure, there you go. Slap a stamp on it, ship it out. New Guy just doesn't feel quite as publicly decisive as Captain Crazythumbs. During the four days it might take New Guy to finalize a policy decision, Old Guy would have already decided five separate times, each decision in direct conflict with the others, and fired off 20 different tweets insulting anyone who objected to any of them.

So then, what are the new crises facing the country? Peculiarly, the ongoing pandemic is not among them. The public has been giving Biden top-tier marks on bringing the pandemic under control as Biden's team oversees drastic ramp-ups in vaccine distribution and the beginning of the pandemic's end begins to appear over the horizon.

One of the Biden Administration "crises" is that vaccinated Americans are now confused as to whether they are still required to wear masks or not. This one is rather easily solved by going to state and local government sites to learn what policies are in place for your own town, or by reading the signs regularly posted on the doors of each place of business informing customers of their current policies, which is precisely what everyone should already have been doing to begin with. This momentary frustration does not seem a good fit for the "crisis" word more often thrown around these days to describe hundreds of thousands of American deaths.

One of the "crises" is a Republican declaration that the southern border is in "crisis" because they say it is. Once justified by the same seasonal surge of border crossings that typically occur during Not Summer in a vast and deadly desert, it is now justified by a handful of Republican lawmakers staring at reeds during Rio Grande small boat tours.

One of the "crises" is that a major fuel pipeline company allowed itself to be breached in a ransomware attack, only to then prove unable to recover its own systems over the span of multiple days. Despite no actual fuel shortage, this caused runs on gas stations nationwide (including in places the pipeline never served to begin with) and several incidents in which patriotic Americans burned their own cars into molten lumps after stuffing their trunks and back seats with filled containers of gasoline so that other patriotic Americans wouldn't buy it first.

As it turns out—and after days of the company evading the question—it was the company’s billing computers that had been brought down in the attack. Pipeline operations were perfectly fine; there was just no way for the company to keep track of who bought their product and now owed them money. One solution, if the closure had extended long enough to seriously jeopardize supplies, might have been an emergency federal order to resume pipeline operations coupled with federal assurance that the government would pay whatever costs the company couldn’t manage to bill their actual customers for.

Unfortunately, that would in all likelihood have ushered in a new era in which fuel traders coordinated with cybercriminals to throw markets into turmoil on purpose, all to profit from the elevated prices the federal government would then pay in order to resolve it. (See: Enron.) It would probably have to have been followed up with a government takeover and restructuring of the "saved" Colonial Pipeline, so that turning off critical pieces of U.S. infrastructure in economy-shaking ways would not become a net profit producer for the company executives overseeing each failure.

One of the "crises" is a shortage of sauces at a chicken sandwich franchise. Sort of. At the moment, only scattered Republicans are pinning that one on the new president, hoping to make it stick. Again, it's probably best to nip this one in the bud through swift government takeover. America cannot be without its sauces, and if the U.S. military cannot swiftly get the sauces to the places the sauces need to be, nobody can. That seems the most "decisive" approach, if we are all getting angsty over the post-Trump president not visibly flailing his arms at each new national panic and our politics-watchers need a booster shot of that old strongman charm.

Then there is the ongoing violence between Israeli government forces and the Palestinians under occupation in annexed lands. Escalating violence does count as a genuine crisis. But it is also one in which the major debates are over how the United States should best put diplomatic pressure on each side, the same debates that have gone on for decades as the United States both acts as major guarantor of Israeli defense and, in doing so, allows hard-right Israeli governments to mete out violence that the state could almost certainly not get away with without U.S. protection.

There is no chance of U.S. military intervention here. Fear not, our government will at some point again thunder into the region with new edicts for How Things Must Be Resolved, only to again slink back off after each new attempt at empire-crafting is thwarted by the human beings who actually live there deciding they would rather not abide by the plans we announced for them. However, immediate options in this case are limited to phone calls and sternly worded public statements. It is a crying shame that real estate scion Jared Kushner was not able to bring peace to the region despite being mostly rich and having access to multiple books purchased off of Amazon, but here we are and here we will remain for some time to come. It will indeed be a test of Biden's abilities, exactly as it had tested every president of the modern era.

What we can gather from all these stories lumped together with the urgent language of crisis is that the press has very, very urgently wanted to return to normal themes and narratives, and mere months after the first nonpeaceful transfer of power since the Civil War we are going to have these narratives shoveled into our faces whether we want it or not. Is Joe Biden too surly? Will the spectacular banality of a pipeline company's IT department echo public memories of Carter-era energy crises if we in the press try very hard to mention those two things together? And what of Republican sniping over immigration or—wait, look there! It appears the national debt has emerged from long hibernation, and it has something to say!

During an entire presidency of incompetence, open corruption, brazen public lying, attempted extortions, and mass U.S. deaths, the press worked feverishly to present constitutional crises and history-shaking events within the standardized frames of partisan sniping, political gamesmanship, and questions being asked. Covering the same authoritarian actions here that have long been called out as authoritarian acts elsewhere, the brain of the national press ... broke. Editors could not stomach making the shift, and so demanded it all be sorted into the columns that past events had been sorted into so that nobody could claim they were treating orchestrated propaganda-peddling with any more hostility than the more truthful statements of past administrations and party leaders.

It was absolutely assured that the end of the Trump presidency—for now—would be treated as something of a class reunion for put-upon editors desperate to get back the political coverage that their networks and papers had been designed to produce. What are the polling implications of Latest New Event? How will this affect midterm voters? Can Leader project decisiveness? What gossip can be culled from the White House? Did somebody snap at someone? Oh, do tell.

To some extent it may be harmless—we all are very, very tired, after all, and individual reporters and pundits are likely as relieved as the rest of us to be able to tell stories that, shockingly, do not appear to threaten our constitutional foundations, or are likely to produce new international trade wars, or result in half a million deaths, or that hint that the sitting president and his closest allies are longtime petty criminals whose careers have been pockmarked with the sort of acts that would the less lawyered among us in prison for a decade or two. It is almost calming.

The problem, though, is that we are not in a new era. The lies of the insurrection are not past—they are continuing in places like Arizona and Georgia. Lawmakers who shouted in fear as violent coup-backing rioters broke through nearby windows are right now claiming that the same riots did not happen or were of no particular consequence. Republican leaders are still deciding, even today, how far they can go in sabotaging investigation of how the past administration's actions, and their own public statements, fomented the violence and caused the resulting deaths.

We are not back to normal, and scurrying back to journalism's safe spaces of four years ago for a bit of solace is doing the same disservice as always.

Is the Biden Administration facing "crisis," as we have come to define that term after the last four years of chaos? Aside from the increasingly ignored pandemic, there is no plausible way to claim so. The Biden team has so far been so irritatingly low-profile and workaday that partisan snipers are expressing exasperation at how little fodder they have been given to work with.

Killing half a million people through incompetence, ignoring congressional powers outright to block legislative probes of executive corruption, being recorded in conversation demanding personal political favors before executing governmental functions, engaging in a slew of pardons specifically rewarding allies who were found to have lied to federal law enforcement officials investigating a specific alleged crime undertaken for your own benefit—those are still crises.

Republicans being upset at border crossing numbers, a few days of public confusion after pandemic safety instructions shift into new transitory phases, or even a few days of irrational panic buying at local gas stations? Listen, buddy, we wish those were presidency-defining crises. I would pay double my current taxes to live in a country where those were the biggest new crises I might ever meet up with after walking out the front door.

A good chunk of Florida is going to be underwater in the next few decades, you know. That sounds like a crisis. Elevated temperatures are causing widespread drought, yet again, and fire season in the West is expected to again be horrific. There's a good chance that combinations of heat and humidity will render portions of the American South inhospitable to human life, and long-neglected infrastructure decisions are now ballooning into system failures with deadly results. In the coming year there is a good chance that a newly political Supreme Court will overturn laws that have underpinned governance for the last half century. There is a very good chance that the next election, the very next one, will feature races with official tallies that are simply nullified by hard-right antidemocratic lawmakers who object to the outcome—and that those lawmakers will succeed in their efforts. There is already a long list of truly existential crises to chose from, and many more are waiting in the wings.

Biff Hummerguy filling his backseat with leaking gas containers because he heard that the cryptocoin blockchain was going to NFT the oil pipes may be a hell of a story, but it's not the thing that is going to drive midterm elections. Unless, that is, political journalism itself is vapid enough to demand it.

Which, God help us all, isn't exactly an idea the rest of us can easily dismiss.

Rep. Matt Gaetz is out of friends, drugs, and pimps. Might be time to cut your losses, pal

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has long been a terrible, terrible person, which for the past 10 years has been a near-requirement for Republican officeholders in general. He made a name for himself as a rabid partisan of no particular values other than devoted sucking-up; his main contribution to his nation has been a vocal defending of Donald Trump each and every time Trump was caught in some new crookedness. That's it. He's known for that, for launching retaliatory strikes against Trump's enemies, for near-obsessive attempts to ingratiate himself with Dear Golfing Leader, and oh, would you look at that, living a not-so-secret life as a House Republican ultraperv now under investigation for drug-fueled sex trafficking. What are the odds: A man who fetishizes Donald Trump and is joined at the hip to Jim Jordan turned out to be a child rapist? Wow, go figure.

So we are absolutely allowed to enjoy his downfall, and if the man wants to drag this out in order to tarnish or implicate as many of his fellow House Republican sedition-backers as possible then by all means he should knock himself out with that. Do a backflip on the way down, buddy.

The latest humiliation, just so we are all gloriously up to date, is an expected one. Matt Gaetz evidently sought an urgent meeting with Donald Trump "after it was first revealed he was being investigated," says CNN, but was turned down by Trump's aides. Yes, the man who polished Dear Crooked Leader's boots to a shine in multiple impeachment investigations is being cut loose by the Mar-a-Lago crowd.

Now, just to put the proper emphasis on this: If there is any group in Florida that has their pulse on everything corrupt or worth corrupting, it is the denizens of Dear Golfing Leader's For-Profit Living Room and Covid Dispensarium, home of the all-you-can-eat Crime Buffet. The rapist and tax dodger Trump was carried into office by an assembly of small-time and mid-ranking conservative griftologists able to ingratiate themselves because they spoke the same two-bit language; once in office, he was treated as the Jesus of Petty Extortions. This crowd thinks the brown-nosing Matt Gaetz is cooked. This is the crowd that's cutting him loose.

Yeah, he's toast. Already, there's a robo-poll going around Gaetz's district testing names for who in Republicandom should run to replace him. Nobody's fessing up to paying for it, though.

The New York Times has our latest look at Joel Greenberg, the Florida Republican minor officeholder whose goings-on turned his friend Gaetz into a subject of a federal sex trafficking investigation, and the sheer scope of the man's seemingly compulsive crime-doing is ... yeesh. He may be the perfect Florida Republican, a lifetime screwup who spent just enough money to land himself a smalltime elected position in a state that doesn't give a damn about governing to begin with, a belligerent little hack who campaigned on swamp-draining but after taking office immediately seemed to fill his scorecard with every crime he could think of, both petty-ass and prison-worthy. As with every other crook in Florida, he latched onto the Gaetz and Trump crowd because go figure, it turns out sex crimes are one of the key Republican means of bonding, and now it seems he is a bit of a wreck because after f--king up everything else in his life he has a sudden fear of going to Big Boy Jail.

This is a child who would willingly burn every other conservative in Florida if it got him an extra pudding cup in prison lunchlines. He's going to cling to Gaetz's ankles so tenaciously Matt won't be able to board a plane without declaring him luggage.

Here's where things stand: House Republican Matt Gaetz is being probed for the possible sex trafficking of a 17-year-old. Along the way to answering that one last (?) question, people "familiar" with What Gaetz Was Doing have already confirmed to reporters that Gaetz has been openly bragging to his fellow House Republicans about his "conquests" (complete with videotapes); at least once accompanied Greenberg to Greenberg's fake-ID procurement office; "repeatedly" boasted to others about his antics with Greenberg; made at least one apparent sex trip to the Bahamas involving "female escorts" provided by another ally; appears to have assisted in procuring sex for other Republicans; and there are literally Venmo records of Gaetz paying at least three of the women through Greenberg. There's alleged drug use throughout, of course.

Oh, and he sought a "blanket" Trump pardon after he learned, in the last bits of Trump's time in office, that the feds were on to him. Oh, and his (other?) actions while in Congress were so continually grotesque his own staffers were sending videos to other Republicans.

That's not even all of it. That's just the highlights. And House Republicans knew about quite a bit of this, because Matt liked to "brag," and they did nothing because the party is a fascist cult now premised on letting their members get away with crimes.

Unfortunately for Matt Gaetz, he has failed to learn any of the basic lessons of Washington, D.C. Polishing Dear Leader's boots will get you absolutely nothing in return; there is no quid or quo among sociopaths and narcissists. When doing crimes, only do crimes that your associates can keep covered up. Attempt, if at all possible, not to be so universally hated in the nation that every last one of your Not Jim Jordan associates is putting out the popcorn and sitting themselves down on a couch to watch rigor mortis set in on your career.

If the man had an ounce of common sense he'd resign now, if only to make it not quite so spectacularly rewarding for national journalists to squeeze out new detail after new detail while he squirms. Instead, he's promoting seditionist conspiracies and being publicly dim. In times of trouble, some people retrench. Matt here is retrenching.

But Matt Gaetz has been a garbage human being ever since he first slithered out of the Florida swamps like an invasive python, he deserves every bit of it, everyone around him is a garbage human being for not ditching him long before this, and the sooner the Republican base figures out their party is just a crime-fueled sex cult with an advertising budget the better.

InfoWars mob terrorizes mothers and small children arriving at a Catholic Charities facility

Remember Alex Jones? He is the guy that runs InfoWars, the conspiracy-smothered, fact-free dreck-machine that people like Donald Trump and the Republican Party rely on to confuse and obfuscate reality for them. Unlike Fox News’ Tucker Carlson—who spews very similar BS—Jones comes in a repellent package that embodies the hedonism, corruption, and narcissism of the conservative movement in our country. 

On Wednesday, Jones and his InfoWars sociopaths decided to try and one-up the Republican Party’s anti-immigrant publicity stunts by staging one of their own. According to the Daily Dot both Jones and Drew Hernandez—a self-described investigative reporter who believes Black Lives Matter is a “Marxist terrorist organization”—released video of themselves stopping child trafficking! Whoa, that’s big news! Except it’s the opposite of that. What the two men and their film crews did was in essence terrorize three mothers and their children, along with a man driving them from the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in the city of McAllen, Texas, to the Human Respite Center, also in McAllen.

In video that was posted by Hernandez and subsequently taken down on many sites, Jones can be seen in the middle of the afternoon on a McAllen street, standing and screaming at the occupants of a white minivan. Jones calls for the police while Hernandez points out that the children aren’t wearing seat belts and don’t have car seats. “No car seats. What organization is this? I want to know who the hell this is,” he demands. The Daily Dot reports that later in the video, in classic charlatan nonsensical histrionics, Jones yells, “If I drove around with three of my kids in the back of the car, I’d get arrested.” That’s not the law in Texas, to be clear. Also, Alex Jones not being allowed to drive with children might be more related to the fact that he’s had questionable judgement when driving. 

Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande, released a statement to reporters saying the video misrepresented what was happening. These children were not being “smuggled” anywhere; they were being driven from one place to another to receive some help from an organization that works to ameliorate poverty conditions for families. Pimentel did, however, say that the children should have been wearing seatbelts, but “unfortunately, this was not the case.”

“I urge you to look past the fear-mongering and mischaracterizations,” said Pimentel. “Remember to actually see the human beings fleeing persecution and their need for human dignity, which mirrors our own.”

Jones has long wrestled with clear personal issues. He is a bad person who has frequently preyed upon families in order to make his money. In recent years he has lost lawsuits filed by parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School for promoting the truly horrific conspiracy theory that the whole thing was made up and the parents were “crisis actors” pretending for years and years to have lost their children. To be Alex Jones is to be lost in the heart of darkness. Donald Trump’s mediocre mind and his popularity among the conservative movement created fertile ground for Jones and others to exploit the more openly white supremacist members of the right wing.

The admission of Republican failure that hovers beneath every racist coronavirus slur

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Republicans, encouraged by the twice-impeached, former one-term president, have persisted in using the phrase “China virus” or “Wuhan virus” to describe the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these same Republicans have insisted, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary, that the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory as opposed to originating in an animal host. Last April, as the pandemic spread uncontrolled throughout the U.S., the GOP sent a detailed, 57-page internal memo to its 2020 election candidates, specifically urging them to blame China at every turn when faced with questions about the administration’s efforts to combat the pandemic.

Of course, the predictable result from repeating this theme was a marked upsurge in violence directed towards Asian Americans. The link between Trump and the GOP’s anti-China rhetoric and such violence prompted President Joe Biden, in one of his first official acts upon taking office, to ban such pejorative terminology from our federal agencies and their public documents. Still, despite the well-documented consequences to Asian Americans, elected Republican officials—such as Ohio Lt. Gov. John Husted only last week—continue to trot out the racist slur.

While the connection between this rhetoric and acts of violence is obvious, it’s important for Americans to remember why Trump and the GOP made this conscious, collective decision in the first place. Blaming China  was more than a deliberate attempt to shift the blame for the pandemic itself,; as employed almost exclusively by Republicans, it was a deliberate attempt to distract from the administration’s wholly botched response.

From the very start the “Chinese virus” appellation was intentionally amplified by American right-wing media. It’s a slur which almost revels in its senselessness. To be clear, even if the virus actually had man-made origins—even if the virus been created in Xi Jinping’s basement with a vintage Gilbert chemistry set—from a practical standpoint, the precise origin of the virus, be it bat, bald eagle or Beijing lab, is essentially irrelevant.  Whether the virus originated in China, Kenya, or Wyoming is distinct from the question of how the global community has responded to it, which is what ultimately matters.

Medical staff treating COVID-19 patients in Wuhan China, February, 2020.

That distinction is what Trump’s favorite slur tries to obfuscate. The tragic reality is that the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic was atrocious compared to nearly every other developed nation in the world. It was so bad it turned this country into a pariah nation, a cautionary tale of what not to do in a public health crisis.

And that abysmal response, whose ineptitude and human cost will doubtlessly fill the history books for the next hundred years as an example of what failed, indifferent government policies can lead to, was due almost entirely to an abdication of responsibility towards the American public by one of this country’s two major political parties. Republicans were the ones responsible for electing, abetting and encouraging an Executive uniquely and pathologically unsuited to addressing the catastrophic implications of a global pandemic. Republicans  were the ones who stood by silently, while our public health infrastructure and pandemic response capabilities were being gleefully dismantled by the the Trump administration. And Republicans of every stripe must bear the ultimate responsibility for the consequences of that failure, whether they choose to admit it or not.

Only recently, as the nation finally begins to extricate itself from this calamity, is a reckoning of sorts coming forth. The most up-to-date estimates place direct blame on Donald Trump for approximately 400,000 of the deaths that have occurred to date due to COVID-19. There is literally no president in American history whose malfeasance resulted in so many deaths of U.S. citizens.

But Trump didn’t act alone. The death toll was increased exponentially due to the sycophancy of a Republican establishment lined up behind him, adopting his cues as the pandemic’s impact continued to worsen. Every Republican  at the state and federal level who acquiesced to the former administration’s malfeasance either by parroting lethal anti-masking propaganda, forcefully advocating reopening businesses in the name of “personal freedom,” or hawking phony cures and ridiculous conspiracy theories is complicit.

The August 2020 Sturgis motorcycle rally, encouraged by South Dakota’s Republican Governor, Kristi Noem, was linked to 260,000 US COVID-19 infections, according to one study.

So the appeal of the slur to Republicans, however irrelevant to the actual harm caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is easy enough to understand, because it serves as an ready distraction from the blame they so richly deserve for allowing a public health crisis to become a calamity. The entire approach by the Trump administration was intended to abandon any leadership role of the federal government, and thereby escape blame for any failure to stop it. As pointed out by Josh Marshall, writing for Talking  Points Memo,  this exercise in blame avoidance was intentional, a key to the administration’s overall strategy when faced with its own ineptitude.

From the very start of the Pandemic in the first weeks of 2020 the Trump administration consistently sought to disclaim responsibility for things that would be genuinely difficult and could have challenging or bad outcomes. Push the tough tasks on to others and if it goes badly blame them. This frequently went to absurd lengths as when the White House insisted that states short on ventilators at the peak of the spring surge should have known to purchase them in advance of the pandemic. Over the course of the year Trump spun up an alternative reality in which the US was somehow still operating under the Articles of Confederation in which individual states were responsible for things that have been viewed as inherently federal responsibilities for decades or centuries.

But the impetus wasn’t ideological. It was mainly a means of self-protection and risk avoidance: arrange things so that the administration could take credit if things went well and blame states if they went bad. Nowhere was this more clear than in the months’ long crisis over testing capacity. Since the administration was actually hostile to testing in general and couldn’t solve the problem in any case they simply claimed it was a state responsibility.

As Marshall points out, the one constant during Trump’s entire botched handling of the COVID-19 pandemic—from the first warnings of an incipient health crisis through and including Trump’s final day in office—was “to put it off on someone else so the White House didn’t get the blame.”

Attributing the pandemic to China or Wuhan, or the rally staple “Kung flu?” That was always a calculated part of Trump’s attempt to avoid blame, one which immediately filtered down to the state level and was adopted by Republican officials equally eager to dodge blame. Even following a year of racially-motivated attacks on Asian Americans that resulted from this distraction campaign, most House Republicans still refused to condemn Trump’s rhetoric. 

As detailed by Alex Samuels, writing for FiveThirtyEight, the vilification of China had its desired effect among the Republican constituency.

Ultimately, blaming China for the pandemic didn’t help Trump win reelection in 2020, but unfavorable views of China are at a record high among Americans.1 And there are signs that Americans, especially Republicans, blame China for the spread of the coronavirus. A November Economist/YouGov poll found, for instance, that 64 percent of all registered voters and 86 percent of Republicans said it was definitely or probably true that China was responsible for the pandemic.

The key word for Republicans here was “responsible.” Republicans recognize that Donald Trump and those GOP officials that adopted his strategy throughout this crisis were ultimately responsible for the U.S. sustaining a higher death toll from this virus than any other country in the world. As Samuels notes, that fact practically compels them to find a scapegoat for their own failure, with any blowback inflicted on Asian-Americans a secondary consideration at best.

[T]he experts I’ve talked to think that if people uphold a specific worldview by delegitimizing another group, the framing of diseases will always be political — no matter how apolitical we think diseases are. That’s because racism itself is a disease, and as Roger Keil, a political scientist at York University, told me, “[I]t seems to spread sometimes like a virus.” Keil compared it to watching a video online: “For every video that links the disease to Chinese people, there will be 10 or 1,000 people watching, so it’s normalized,” he said. “It’s terrible, but that’s how racism spreads.”

The Trump administration knew the implications of COVID-19,from the outset and that it presented his prospects and those of his minions with a truly daunting, existential crisis. The China scapegoating began immediately and continued throughout the rest of Trump’s tenure, heedless of whatever harm such scapegoating would have on millions of Asian-Americans. Republican leaders willingly followed his lead and have continued to do so up to this day. But every time one of them utters the words “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus,” what they’re really doing is dodging their own responsibility for the worst response to a major public health crisis in this nation’s history.

Court rules that Summer Zervos’ defamation suit against Trump can proceed

The New York Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that former The Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos can proceed with her defamation lawsuit against our pustulant ex-POTUS. 

It’s not a comeuppance yet, but sometimes justice comes in dribs and drabs—like makeup slowly cascading off an ex-pr*sident’s blotchy horror-show of a face, transforming it from the spitting image of a Costco rotisserie chicken into the raw, muculent mien of half-thawed Butterball turkey.

The case has been on hold since March 2020. At the time, Donald Trump was still cosplaying as president and hiding behind that privilege like Saddam Hussein cowering in his spiderhole. Because Zervos filed in New York, Trump’s attorneys filed an appeal arguing that the Constitution does not authorize state courts to preside over cases against a current president.

Now?

“Motion to dismiss appeal granted and appeal dismissed, without costs, upon the ground that the issues presented have become moot,” the court’s new ruling says, according to NBC News.

The decision from the New York Court of Appeals puts back in motion the lawsuit from Summer Zervos, who says Trump defamed her in 2016 when he called her a liar after she accused him of sexually assaulting her years earlier.

“Now a private citizen, the defendant has no further excuse to delay justice for Ms. Zervos, and we are eager to get back to the trial court and prove her claims,” Zervos’ attorney Beth Wilkinson said in a statement.  

Zervos claims Trump groped her in a hotel room in 2007. Shortly after she went public with her allegations, Trump said the women who have made allegations of sexual misconduct against him are “liars,” and he has threatened to sue them.

So, yeah, while Trump faces a long list of legal entanglements, it nevertheless soothes my weary soul to dig my fingers into some of the more delicious death traps that await that fucking turd.

Of course, this deluge of civil suits and criminal probes doesn’t just make my heart burst with schadenfreude; it also makes it far less likely that Trump will have the time or appetite for another presidential run. Looking at it that way, Zervos, et al., are nothing less than American heroes.  

”This guy is a natural. Sometimes I laugh so hard I cry." — Bette Midler on author Aldous J. Pennyfarthing via TwitterNeed a thorough Trump cleanse? Thanks to Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, Dear F*cking Lunatic, Dear Pr*sident A**clown and Dear F*cking Moron, you can purge the Trump years from your soul sans the existential dread. Only laughs from here on out. Click those links, yo!

Yevgeny Vindman receives Army promotion after Pentagon wipes retaliatory Trump claims from record

During the first of what would become two distinct Donald Trump impeachment trials, Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman became an important witness for doing what none of Trump's surrounding Republican partisans could muster: giving a full, under-oath accounting of the events surrounding Trump's linkage of congressionally mandated military aid to an at-war Ukraine to a brazenly corrupt pressuring of that government to announce an investigation of Rudy Giuliani-pushed conspiracy theories against Trump's presidential election opponent.

For that testimony, both Alexander Vindman and his brother Yevgeny, also a lieutenant colonel, faced the retaliation of the crooked White House. Alexander chose early retirement after Trump and cronies booted him from his post, forcibly escorted from the White House, and blocked him from further military promotion. Yevgeny filed a complaint charging that the White House's identical retaliations against him were spurred not just for his own cooperation with impeachment investigators but his own whistleblower reports against previous episodes of administration crookedness, a complaint that was backed by House Democrats and which is still being probed by the Pentagon's office of inspector general.

There is now at least some small amount of good news to report. Now that conservatism's least-organized organized crime family has been expelled, Army. Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman has been selected for the promotion he was previously due, and will now become a full colonel.

It wasn't necessarily going to turn out this way. Trump's team of crooks retaliated against each of the witnesses against them, in the Vindmans' cases penning new performance reviews designed to squash any military attempt to promote them. While there has yet to be any consequences for those retaliation efforts, the Vindman promotion is a signal that the Pentagon powers-that-be do indeed consider those reviews to have been retaliatory, rather than accurate. And that's a ... surprising amount of common sense from inside the military bureaucracy.

Indeed, Politico reports that Army assistant deputy chief of staff Maj. Gen. Michel Russell determined the evaluations to be "not objective," and in January those retaliatory reviews were wiped from Vindman's record.

As for brother Alex, he remains retired. In a Monday op-ed endorsing defamation lawsuits against conservative media liars, he writes that he made a mistake when he "did not respond forcefully to the threats and defamation" against him by Trump proxies, and that he "should have sued those who amplified [Trump's] campaign of defamation."

"When Fox News stars and more fringe networks like Newsmax and One America News Network make baseless and outrageous claims about “stolen elections,” “communist Democrats,” and “fascist main-stream media,” they are building on lies about individuals,” Vindman wrote. “They are galvanizing extremism on the back of defamation. Too many of those defamed individuals, including myself, have allowed extremist claims to go unanswered."