Sunday, April 3, 2022

Last Call For Mick, Jagged

Late Show host Stephen Colbert welcomes former Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to the CBS family.

With a baseball bat.


 

Mulvaney was hired for his access to Trump and to the GOP, who at least one CBS News executive admits they'll need soon because Republicans will win the midterms and take over Congress.

Remember, this is the network where CEO Leslie Moonves infamously said in 2016 of Trump's WH run:


"It May Not Be Good for America, but It’s Damn Good for CBS"

 
We have to depend on Colbert to check the CBS News division these days, and frankly that's been true for years now.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorist Problem, Con't

I've groused about Attorney General Merrick Garland's stone-faced lack of comment on January 6th before, as you all well know. I know that Garland has to be perfect in his case to take down someone like Trump, where everyone involved in prosecuting and trying the case would be immediate targets of terrorists willing to kill, but like myself, Democrats are openly wondering if this is the perfect being the enemy of the good.


Immediately after Merrick B. Garland was sworn in as attorney general in March of last year, he summoned top Justice Department officials and the F.B.I. director to his office. He wanted a detailed briefing on the case that will, in all likelihood, come to define his legacy: the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

Even though hundreds of people had already been charged, Mr. Garland asked to go over the indictments in detail, according to two people familiar with the meeting. What were the charges? What evidence did they have? How had they built such a sprawling investigation, involving all 50 states, so fast? What was the plan now?

The attorney general’s deliberative approach has come to frustrate Democratic allies of the White House and, at times, President Biden himself. As recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments. And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Mr. Garland said that he and the career prosecutors working on the case felt only the pressure “to do the right thing,” which meant that they “follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead.”

Still, Democrats’ increasingly urgent calls for the Justice Department to take more aggressive action highlight the tension between the frenetic demands of politics and the methodical pace of one of the biggest prosecutions in the department’s history.

“The Department of Justice must move swiftly,” Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the House committee investigating the riot, said this past week. She and others on the panel want the department to charge Trump allies with contempt for refusing to comply with the committee’s subpoenas.

“Attorney General Garland,” Ms. Luria said during a committee hearing, “do your job so that we can do ours.”

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including officials in the Biden administration and people with knowledge of the president’s thinking, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations.

In a statement, Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said the president believed that Mr. Garland had “decisively restored” the independence of the Justice Department.

“President Biden is immensely proud of the attorney general’s service in this administration and has no role in investigative priorities or decisions,” Mr. Bates said.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. 
 
And while we know that Trump is a criminal, the hard reality is that the President's son is also under federal investigation, and has been for almost four years now. There's no good way out of this, no way the case can be perfect.

So how long can America afford to wait for the good?


Hundreds of Republican state legislators may have legal exposure stemming from Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, a former top GOP strategist explained on Friday.

Amanda Carpenter, a columnist at The Bulwark, drew attention to a text message sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 3, 2021. The message references a call with Trump and Peter Navarro the previous day.

"We focused a ton on Trump's call to Brad Raffensberger but the idea Trump was coordinating with potentially hundreds of state legislators to block Biden's certification is...major. We should talk about that a lot more," Carpenter said.

Carpenter noted a press release sent the day before the text message to Meadows that described a very similar call.

In the press release, the group "Got Freedom?" said it "conducted an exclusive national briefing."

"Nearly 300 state lawmakers and others participated in the briefing, which also featured an address by President Trump," the group said. "Also on the call were Rudy Giuliani; professor of law John Eastman; Peter Navarro, Assistant to the President for Trade and Manufacturing (appearing in his personal capacity), and John Lott, Senior Advisor, U.S. Department of Justice (also appearing in his personal capacity)."
 
We've been failed before, and while I still trust Garland to deliver in the end, it's going to come at a ruinous cost.

Sunday Long Read: To Suffer Enough

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from The New Yorker's Rachel Levy, with the story of Mackenzie Morrison, now Mackenzie Fierceton, who rose from the foster system to get a full ticket to Penn, only for Penn to turn on her for lying about her family status.




In the winter of her sophomore year of high school, Mackenzie Morrison sat in her bedroom closet and began a new diary. Using her phone to light the pages, she listed the “pros of telling”: “no more physical/emotional attacks,” “I get out of this dangerous house,” “the truth is finally out, I don’t have to lie or cover things up.” Under “cons of telling,” she wrote, “damaging mom’s life,” “could go into foster care,” “basically I would probably lose everything.” After she finished, she loosened the screws of a vent panel on the wall outside her closet and slipped the notebook behind it.

Mackenzie went to Whitfield, a private prep school in St. Louis, where the school’s wellness director, Ginny Fendell, called her the “queen of compartmentalization.” She got A’s, served in student government, played varsity soccer, managed the field-hockey team, and volunteered for the Special Olympics. She was five feet ten with long curly blond hair—“the picture of Americana,” as one friend described her. Mackenzie’s parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at St. Luke’s Hospital, in Chesterfield, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis. They liked to imagine themselves as the Gilmore Girls: the single mother and her precocious daughter, so close they were nearly fused. But Mackenzie’s friends and teachers noticed that in her mother’s presence Mackenzie physically recoiled. Lisa Smith, the mother of one of Mackenzie’s best friends at Whitfield, said that her daughter once asked why Mackenzie was always injured: “My daughter kind of looked at me funny, and I looked back at her and said, ‘What are you trying to say?’ ”

When Fendell asked Mackenzie about her bruises, Mackenzie offered vague comments about being clumsy. Fendell told her that, if she couldn’t talk about why she was injured, she should write it down. “I don’t ever want to cause her any pain or anything, which is why I’ll probably end up burning this,” Mackenzie wrote in the journal. “I wish that I had the courage to tell someone. Or even to write everything down in here. Because if I’m being honest, there are things that I’m too ashamed to even speak of.”

Mackenzie began documenting her life with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Henry Lovelace, Jr., a personal trainer who had won the Missouri Strongest Man Championship in his weight group. Two days after starting the journal, in March, 2014, she wrote an entry about a head injury she’d suffered three months earlier. She had been hospitalized for four days at St. Luke’s, where her mother worked. “Mom heard her tumble, thought maybe tripped going up the stairs,” the medical records said. Mackenzie told the hospital staff that she didn’t remember what had happened. A consulting physician said that Mackenzie “most likely fell down the steps at home and hit her head.” He observed, “She appears scared.”

In the months since her head injury, Mackenzie had regained memories from the weekend before her fall, and she recalled that she and her mom had been fighting about Lovelace. “Did she actually have something to do with it? God, I don’t know,” she wrote. Eventually, the theory became impossible to avoid. “If I look back at all the signs, at the days leading up to and proceeding my ‘accident,’ ” she wrote, “the signs all seem to point in the same direction. The one that I feared most.” She didn’t elaborate on the thought, because, she added, “I’m literally getting nauseous thinking about it.”

Her mother was a respected figure in the St. Louis medical community, and, when Mackenzie was injured, she saw doctors affiliated with her hospital. “She is brilliant and can charm anyone,” Mackenzie wrote. “She’s pretty much invincible.” Mackenzie felt certain that, if she shared details about her mom or Lovelace, her mother would convince people that she was lying, or crazy. “She is just so amazing at getting people to think, feel, and do what she wants,” she wrote. “She lies better than I can tell the truth.”

Amonth after beginning the journal, Mackenzie came to school with a black eye. She’d tried to cover it up with concealer, but her teachers noticed, and Fendell pulled Mackenzie out of her Spanish class. “I went with the story my mom told me to tell, which is that I was playing with my dogs in the living room and I tripped and fell into a table,” she wrote in her journal. Fendell did not accept the explanation, and she later told Mackenzie that she was legally obligated to notify Missouri’s Department of Social Services.

Mackenzie stayed at school late that night, rehearsing for a musical. When she got home, a caseworker was at her house, chatting with her mother. “They were talking about work and school and whatever else and having a great time just like they were old friends,” Mackenzie wrote. White, upper middle class, and in a position of power, Mackenzie’s mother was demographically dissimilar to most parents who come to the agency’s attention. Interviewed in her mother’s presence, Mackenzie repeated the story about falling into a table. Before leaving, the caseworker, who was white, explained that “she didn’t really need anything else from us and she was sorry to bother us, but was glad everything worked out,” Mackenzie wrote.

After the caseworker’s visit, Mackenzie was “on high alert, trying not to set anyone or anything off,” she wrote in her diary. During conversations with her mother in the kitchen, she made sure “to keep the kitchen island in between us,” while also “bracing for impact.” She thought about running away, but she didn’t have anywhere to go. She had become estranged from her father, a former soap-opera actor, against whom her mother had filed an order of protection, alleging that he posed a physical threat to Mackenzie; a guardian ad litem had been appointed to protect Mackenzie’s interests during the custody proceedings, which were prolonged and bitter. “Thinking about existing in a world where I had no parents just couldn’t be a possibility in my mind,” she told me.

After Lovelace bought Morrison a gun for her birthday, Mackenzie wrote, “If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m terrified.” She described an incident, a year earlier, when she had fallen asleep watching a movie in her mom’s bed and woke up to Lovelace on top of her, “feeling my boobs, running his hand around my inner thighs & exploring other places.” She got out from under him, ran into her own room, and eventually called her mother, who wasn’t home, and related what had happened. “She just bursts out laughing,” Mackenzie wrote. Her mother told her that it was an accident, saying, “I’m flattered that he got me mixed up with my 15-year-old daughter.” In the year since the episode, Mackenzie said, Lovelace had continued to sexually assault her. She felt as if her mother were both sanctioning his abuse—“offering me up to him on a silver platter,” as she later described it—and punishing her for attracting Lovelace’s attention. “I still just don’t understand why she won’t protect me,” Mackenzie wrote. “Did I do something wrong to make her not want to?”
 
What follows is a hard and ugly tale. Mackenzie says that she fought hard to get to Penn. Penn, in evaluating her Rhodes Scholar application, says that Mackenzie is lying and manipulating the story to get what she wants.
 
It's a pretty haunting read, because the thing is, we all know somebody exactly like her, and we have the same suspicions about someone who has clearly overcome serious issues to find success. The cost of that success, it seems, is very steep.