Monday, August 14, 2023

While Out & About on Our "Virtual Route 66" This Week

As a new week dawns, we present the following snapshot on the week that was in our World:


Chris Christie on Newsmax, new “Worst person you know makes a great point” contender

The Justice Department has appointed another special counsel, but we think all of our federal prosecutors are special in their own way!
 

  • Attorney General Merrick Garland redesignated U.S. Attorney David Weiss—the federal prosecutor in Delaware who has been handling the Hunter BIden case—as a special counsel on Friday morning. This new designation will give Weiss an additional layer of independence from DOJ’s political appointees, though Weiss has testified that he’s experienced no interference from the department leadership. A chorus of deranged Republicans has demanded an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, whom they baselessly claim benefited from his son’s business ventures, and this seems like a move meant to appease them, even though nothing will appease them. Interesting that they don’t seem to care about a certain Supreme Court Justice using his public office for millions of dollars in private gain over decades, or Donald Trump appointing his children to senior administration jobs so they could solicit billion dollar bribes from foreign countries!
     

  • The official reason for naming Weiss special counsel is that Hunter plans to fight the charges against him. Back in June, the younger Biden struck a plea deal which would have required him to plead guilty to two charges of failing to pay taxes. Additionally, under a pretrial “diversion agreement” he would have admitted to unlawful gun possession and agreed to conditions such as not purchasing a firearm in the future, and not using drugs—in order to avoid actual charges of unlawful possession of a firearm. In July, the federal judge overseeing the case raised questions about the legality and nature of the agreement and refused to accept the deal, ordering the parties to resume negotiations. This week, those negotiations reached an impasse. 
     

  • With the plea deal upended, Hunter Biden pled not guilty to charges of failure to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018, and did not enter a plea in the separate felony firearms charge. The son of a sitting president facing criminal charges while his father campaigns for re-election, and the likely 2024 GOP nominee also facing a mountain of criminal charges is going to be…really something!

Speaking of disgraced former president Donald Trump…
 

  • As Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis wraps up her investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, there are indications that he may face felony charges in Georgia that are very different from the 78 (!!!) already filed against him. Specifically, Willis could charge Trump with violating the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The RICO Act is commonly known as a tool to fight organized crime, but it’s not difficult to see why it would also be applicable to a coordinated scheme to steal an election.
     

  • Presiding over her first hearing for the federal January 6 case against Trump, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed a limited protective order, prohibiting Trump from discussing most of the evidence in the case,, as is routine in criminal cases. But she also  warned Trump’s lawyers, “Your client’s defense is supposed to happen in this courtroom, not on the internet.” She added “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of the case,” and that if Trump keeps making “inflammatory” online statements, she will feel impelled to move the case to trial even more expeditiously, to limit witness intimidation or undue influence of the jury pool. 


Republicans love to respond to any mention of Donald Trump’s innumerable crimes with “Well what about Hunter Biden?” Hunter Biden has never held or sought public office, and even if a jury convicts him, Republicans have looked high and low and found no evidence that President Biden had anything to do with it. They openly admit their “impeachment inquiry” is meant to create the appearance of impropriety, settle scores for Trump’s impeachment, and leave the public confused as to which candidate is the more corrupt. Democrats should engage in that fight, because they hold the high ground of ethics, but the Republican plan to muddy the waters is working.

Have you ever worn a Black Lives Matter shirt to work? And what are the rules around bringing up Alabama Boat Brawl in your work Slack channel? In Work Appropriate’s most recent episode, host Anne Helen Peterson and guest Garrett Bucks answer questions from white listeners struggling to find the best ways to exert allyship around social justice issues at work. Listen to this interesting conversation, and more every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts.

The death toll from a wildfire on Hawaii’s Maui Island has reached 55 and is expected to rise as search teams begin to assess the wreckage. 

 

A federal judge revoked disgraced FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail over alleged witness tampering. Bankman-Fried—who has been out on $250 million bail since December—will be remanded to custody directly from his Friday court hearing. 

 

Trustees at the New College of Florida (led by Ron DeSantis ally Christopher Ruffo) voted 7-3 on Friday to abolish the college’s gender-studies program, which has been around for almost 30 years. Cool state! Love what the GOP has done with the place! Let us know how banning Romeo and Juliet goes for you, too! 

 

The Supreme Court temporarily blocked a bankruptcy deal for Purdue Pharma on Thursday that would have shielded members of the evil billionaire Sackler family from additional lawsuits over the opioid epidemic and limited the family’s personal liability to $6 billion. The delay was in response to a Justice Department objection to the deal, which the government said allowed the Sackler family to exploit legal protections meant for debtors in “financial distress,” not billionaires. 

 

Orange County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Ferguson, accused of killing his wife, admitted to it over texts to his court clerk and bailiff immediately after the fact

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired the heads of all of the country’s regional military-recruitment centers on Friday after a report detailed corruption in the recruitment system. 


The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on two Russian billionaires behind the prominent financial services firm Alfa Group on Friday.



As I try to cover the news tonight, I am struck by how completely the Republican Party, which began in the 1850s as a noble endeavor to keep the United States government intact and to rebuild it to work for ordinary people, has devolved into a group of chaos agents feeding voters a fantasy world. 

The big news today was the hearing in Washington, D.C., where Department of Justice prosecutors argued for a protective order to stop former president Trump from intimidating witnesses and tainting the jury pool in the case against him for trying to stop the counting of electoral votes that would decide the 2020 presidential election. 

Trump appears to have given up on winning the cases against him on the legal merits and is instead trying to win by whipping up a political base to reelect him, or even to fight for him. He has filled his Truth Social account with unhinged rants attacking the justice system and the president, and on Sunday his lawyer, John Lauro, echoed Trump as he made a tour of the Sunday talk shows, misleadingly suggesting that Trump had been indicted for free speech. In fact, the indictment says up front that even Trump’s lies are protected by the First Amendment, but what isn’t protected is a conspiracy that stops an official proceeding and deprives the rest of us of our right to vote and to have our votes counted. 

A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1; when he was arraigned on August 3, the magistrate judge warned him that it is a crime to “influence a juror or try to threaten or bribe a witness or retaliate against anyone" connected to the case. Trump said he understood. 

The next day, he posted on Truth Social: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” 

Justice Department lawyers promptly sought a protective order to limit what information Trump and his lawyers can release. Trump has a longstanding pattern of releasing misleading information to bolster his position among his base, and lawyers are concerned that he will continue to intimidate witnesses and try to taint the jury pool in hopes of getting the trial venue moved.

Days later, Trump told an audience in New Hampshire that he would not stop talking about the case, and called Special Counsel Jack Smith a “thug” and “deranged.” He has continued to post such messages on social media.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan reinforced that Trump’s focus on politics had no relevance in her court of law. Justice reporter for NBC News Ryan Reilly noted: “The word of the Trump hearing today: yield. Came up six times, as in: ‘the fact that he's running a political campaign currently has to yield to the orderly administration of justice.’”

Chutkan agreed to the protective order but agreed with Trump’s team that it would not include any material already in the public domain. She also prohibited Trump from reviewing materials with “any device capable of photocopying, recording, or otherwise replicating the Sensitive Materials, including a smart cellular device.”

Finally, she warned Trump’s lawyers: “I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements in this case…. I will take whatever measures are necessary to protect the integrity of these proceedings.” If Trump repeats “inflammatory” statements, she said, she will have to speed up his trial to protect witnesses and keep the jury pool untainted.

Just what that might mean was illustrated today when a judge revoked the bail of former FTX cryptocurrency chief executive officer Sam Bankman-Fried for witness tampering and sent him to jail. Prosecutors say Bankman-Fried was leaking the private diary entries of his former girlfriend to the New York Times to discredit her testimony against him.

In Ohio, where voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected the attempt of the Republicans in the legislature to stop a November vote on an amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights, Republicans tried to stop the inclusion of that amendment by challenging its form. Today the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously rejected that lawsuit. The proposed amendment will be on the ballot in November. 

After demanding that David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in charge of investigating and charging Hunter Biden, be named a special counsel and then charging that Weiss had asked for and been denied that status—both he and Attorney General Merrick Garland denied that allegation—Republicans are now angry that Garland today gave Weiss that status. 

Weiss requested that status for the first time earlier this week, and Garland granted it, although both Weiss and Garland had previously said Weiss had all the authority that status carries. Now House Republicans say appointing Weiss a special counsel is an attempt to obstruct Congress from investigating the Bidens. For all that Republicans are in front of the cameras every day insisting President Biden is corrupt, there is no evidence that President Biden has been party to any wrongdoing.

One of the things such behavior accomplishes is to distract from the party’s own troubles, including the inability of House Republicans to agree to measures to fund the government after September. Far-right extremists are still angry at the spending levels to which House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed in a deal to raise the debt ceiling last June, and are threatening to refuse to agree to any funding measures until they get cuts that the Senate will never accept. 

The House left for its August break after passing only one of the twelve bills it needs to pass, and when it gets back, it will have only twelve work days before the September 30 deadline. This chaos takes a toll: when the Fitch rating system downgraded the U.S. long-term rating last week, the first reason it cited was “a steady deterioration in standards of governance.” It explained: “The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management.” 

Another thing this chaos does is convince individuals that the entire government is corrupt. On Wednesday, as Biden was to visit Utah, FBI agents shot and killed an armed man there who made threats against him, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other officials who have been associated with Trump’s legal troubles: Attorney General Garland, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York attorney general Letitia James. Craig Deleeuw Robertson described himself as a “MAGA Trumper.”

It seems we are reaping the fruits of the political system planted in 1968, when the staff of Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon reworked American politics to package their leader for the election. “Voters are basically lazy,” one of Nixon’s media advisors wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

The confusion also takes up so much oxygen it’s hard for the Democrats, who are actually trying to govern in the usual ways, to get any attention. Today was the one-year anniversary of the PACT Act, officially known as the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022. The law improves access to healthcare and funding for veterans who were exposed to burn pits, the military’s waste disposal method for everything from tires to chemicals and jet fuel from the 1990s into the new century. 

According to Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the PACT Act has already enabled more than 4 million veterans to be screened for toxic exposure, more than 744,000 PACT Act claims have been filed, and hundreds of thousands of veterans have been approved for expanded benefits.

Biden spoke in Utah about the government’s protections for veterans and why they’re important. In addition to the PACT Act, he talked about his recent executive order moving the authority for addressing claims of sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, and murder outside the chain of command to a specialized independent military unit—a move long championed by survivors and members of Congress.  

Today the White House released a detailed explanation of “Bidenomics” along with resources explaining why the administration has focused on certain areas for public investment and how the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have supported that investment. That collection explains why the administration is overturning forty years of political economy to return to the system on which the U.S. relied from 1933 to 1981, and yet it got far less traction than the fight over the protective order designed to keep Trump from attacking witnesses.

Notes:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.28.0_5.pdf

https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/2023-ohio-2786.pdf

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/03/1191901829/trump-indictment-arraignment-news

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/doj-seeks-protective-order-after-trump-publishes-post-appearing-to-promise-revenge

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-indictment-campaign-election-interference-11cc4d1015c36e6ba078c00805d99838

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/11/us/politics/trump-judge-protective-order.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-largely-sides-with-trump-defense-on-protective-order-in-2020-election-case

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/11/1191362886/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-sbf-crypto-fraud

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-lawyer-john-lauro-indictment-defense-rcna98509

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2023/trump-criminal-investigations-cases-tracker-list/#jan-six

https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Hunter-Biden-Special-Counsel-Letter-FINAL-2.pdf

https://miller.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/miller.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Letter%20to%20AG%20Garland%20RE%20Hunter%20Biden[1].pdf

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4149061-house-gop-blasts-appointment-of-hunter-biden-special-counsel/

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4149931-hunter-biden-attorney-on-special-counsel-david-weiss/

https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/fitch-downgrades-united-states-long-term-ratings-to-aa-from-aaa-outlook-stable-01-08-2023

https://www.politico.com/minutes/congress/08-11-2023/gop-funding-meeting/

https://apnews.com/article/utah-biden-fbi-assassination-threat-f9b31d6cd8e432870e4f8949cdb45b92

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/08/10/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-one-year-anniversary-of-the-pact-act-salt-lake-city-ut/

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/28/politics/biden-executive-order-sexual-assault-military/index.ht

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-guy-who-threatened-to-assassinate-biden

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/11/judge-warns-trump-speed-trial-00110870

ml

Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President, 1968 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1970), pp. 36, 41–45.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/08/11/iia-resources/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/09/comer-biden-analysis/

Twitter (X):

Acyn/status/1689707334279319552

ryanjreilly/status/1690132326838149120

SenatorDurbin/status/1689634073864536064

A drought-hit fish farm in the village of Albu Mustafa in Hilla, Iraq. AFP
A drought-hit fish farm in the village of Albu Mustafa in Hilla, Iraq. AFP
 

IRAQ

Iraq has called on the US and Britain to extradite former officials accused of helping in the theft of $2.5 billion in public funds in one of the country's worst corruption cases.

Iraq's telecoms ministry has blocked the Telegram messaging app over national security concerns and users' personal data, which it said had been mishandled.

SAUDI ARABIA

A second meeting of global national security advisors concluded yesterday in Jeddah in an attempt to find a negotiated settlement to the Ukraine war.

ISRAEL

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would not pursue the full judicial overhaul planned by his government, working only to change the makeup of the judge selection committee while abandoning other steps.

PALESTINE

Three Palestinian militants were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank yesterday, the army said, in the latest violence rocking the occupied territory.

A military court in Gaza sentenced seven people to death for collaborating with Israel, the Hamas-ruled Interior Ministry said.

SYRIA

Four Syrian soldiers have been killed and four wounded in an overnight Israeli missile attack, according to state media.

LEBANON

The UAE reissued its advisory against citizens travelling to Lebanon, where a week of heavy fighting between armed factions in a Palestinian refugee camp has prompted similar notices from other nations in recent days.

LIBYA

Libya's Supreme Council of State elected a new leader yesterday, in a development that could further fracture a country already split between two rival administrations.

IRAN

British authorities believe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the greatest threat to national security, amid reports the group is increasing activities in the country.

JORDAN

Jordan's military has sent three helicopters to help put out fatal fires in Cyprus, where at least four people were killed in blazes on the island last month.

TUNISIA

About 34 migrants were winched to safety yesterday after being stranded on rocks by rough seas, with at least 30 still missing after two ships sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. The vessels are believed to have set off from Sfax in Tunisia on Thursday.

MOROCCO

Twenty-four people were killed in one of Morocco's worst road accidents after a minibus overturned en route to a weekly market in the central town of Demnat, authorities said.

EGYPT

The remains of an ancient sunken ship have been discovered in Mediterranean waters off the Egyptian coastal city of El Alamein.

By Marc Cooper

It’s taken a while but the orange chickies have come home to roost. Thanks to the weak-spined Merrick Garland this should have happened a year ago and not have to be shoe horned in before the coming primaries and election.

But we’ll take it. Here are my takeaways:

  1. Kudos to the January 6 Select Committee who made this possible. A tip of the hat to Ms. Liz Cheney who pushed this forward while Merrick Garland sat at his desk and played pick up sticks for months at a time.

  2. The indictment of Trump gives permission structure for even more indictments across the country of other seditionists and we are seing this now in Michigan and Georgia and maybe Arizona.

  3. Brilliant move by Jack Smith to not indict (yet) the six co-conspirators because he does not want to bog down any trial of Trump who will now stand alone as a defendant. And Smith is pushing hard for this trial to take place before the election and he wants it televised….something that Chief Justice Roberts can approve. And something we deserve to see before voting.

  4. Lots of talk this week about Biden and Trump being tied at 43%, Sorry, this means very little. I prefer Occam’s Razor interpretation. Any candidate facing four indictments and a possible conviction or two is NOT going to win the presidency. Period. Yes, with every indictment, Trumps’ dumbest, most desperate mouth-breathing fans escalate their support for them and get media attention. But for everyone of those morons, there are two other Republicans and Independents who are not going to be fooled a third time.

  5. Donald Trump 2016 was mostly a clown. Hilary Clinton was a perfect punching bag. Many voted for Trump as a lark, as a fuck u to the system, or on a whim to see what he would do. Trump 2024 is no clown. He’s a threat. And a lot of people know it. I don’t see a serial liar, a sexual abuser, a world class grifter, a visible psychopath, a wannabe dictator, an anti-democratic zealot, a probably convicted criminal and a raging asshole getting elected. If u were naive enough to read JD Vance’s celebration of his hillbilly roots maybe you had some sympathy for the poor bastards who went with Trump. But eight years later, after all we have seen, after it is clear that Trump runs his own crime family of grifters, takers and thugs, those who now support him deserve only scorn and denunciation. They are but a neo-fascist political base. Period. No quarter. No sympathy.

  6. Democrats seem to have landed on the slogan of Bidenomics! as their campaign slogan. Stupid jackasses. Presidents have but a marginal at best effect on the economy. Trump did not crash the economy. That was covid. Biden has performed no economic miracles. He is merely benefitting from the very natural recovery from the same pandemic. Presidential policy can affect the economy on the margins but cannot reach into the fundamentals. Who knows what the economy will look like come November 2024. Biden might deeply regret claiming authorship. This election is not between Biden and Trump. But rather a continuation of democratic rule of law against the anti-chamber of dictatorship.

  7. Trump may come to a nefarious end, though appeals will keep him free and around at least another 3-5 years, elected or not., But even if he were to disappear or die, we now have one of our political parties and tens of millions of Americans wholly committed to undermining democratic rule. We will be contending with these fascists for years or decades to come. They are fighting hard at the local and state level, overturning abortion laws, threatening gay rights, pandering to racists, taking over shcools boards, banning books and running aound on the weekends with their Go-bag, AR’s and militia uniforms. They ain’t going away anytime soon.

  8. In the titanic struggle before us to retain democratic rule, we need to be much better prepared and organized. While the extreme right is a minority they are much better at mobilization and organization than liberals and the left. And there are now scattered and rather alarming reports of extremists filling the ranks of Border Patol, DHS and other federal and local law enforcement. Somebody better take that a lot more seriously. We cannot depend on the Democrats to defend us. They are weak and feckless if not feeble. OTOH it is pure idiocy to write off all liberals and even moderate Dems as the enemy. The outrage of of the Twitter Left over Democrats not being socialists is ludicrous. We do not need left wing loons any more than right wing ones. We need to build a unified social political movement that unites liberals, radicals, progressives and democratic socialists in a fight to defend our democratic institutions and it must be based on class and socio economic position and not genitalia, race baiting and political correctness. And its dedication to democracy and free speech must be unimpeachable.

  9. All this said, with all these caveats, today must be celebrated as a great day for Rule of Law —the most single most important ingredient in the recipe for democracy. ++