Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump is headed back to NYC, this time for NY AG Tish James's civil suit, as he must sit for yet another deposition involving the Trump Organization's tax fraud troubles.

Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to return to New York City Thursday to sit for a second deposition as part of New York Attorney General Letitia James' $250 million civil fraud lawsuit, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Trump previously sat for an hourslong deposition in August, prior to James filing her lawsuit that accused Trump, his eldest children and his company of fraudulently inflating the value of the Trump real estate portfolio and his net worth.

The attorney general's office has the right to depose relevant parties after the filing of the lawsuit as part of the discovery process.

Trump is expected to sit for this new deposition Thursday at the attorney general's downtown office. The former president has been seeking to delay the start of the trial in the civil case, but the judge has said the October start is firm "come hell or high water."

Trump did not answer many questions in the first deposition other than affirming he understood the ground rules and the procedures.

When Kevin Wallace, the attorney general's senior counsel, asked what Trump did to prepare for the deposition, he answered: "very little."

When asked questions about his finances, Trump repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment and continued to do so for the next several hours.

 

Expect more of the same, at least as far as Trump's answers are concerned.  The legal assault on Trump's fraud and criminal activity will continue, no matter what the GOP says.

 

 

Black Lives Still Matter In Gunmerica

A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds Black folk are twice as likely as white or Hispanic Americans to say they have had a family member hurt or killed by gun violence.

Black Americans are hit hardest by gun violence in the U.S., according to a new survey that highlights stark racial differences in who is personally impacted by the issue.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll, released Tuesday, found that Black adults were roughly twice as likely as white or Hispanic adults to report that they’ve had a family member killed by a gun, including by suicide, at 34 percent — compared to 17 and 18 percent of white and Hispanic adults.


About a third of Black and Hispanic adults together say they worry “daily” or “almost daily” that a family member could fall victim to gun violence, while just 10 percent of white adults report the same level of worry.

Seventeen percent of Black adults in the survey said they don’t feel “at all” safe in their neighborhoods, compared to 9 percent of Hispanic adults and just 2 percent of white adults.

The figures paint a bleak picture of how gun violence is impacting America. Fifty-four percent of Americans overall say they have or a family member has experienced a gun-related incident.

About one in five U.S. adults said they’ve been threatened with a gun, and roughly the same figure said a family member has been killed by a gun, including by suicide.

Forty-one percent of U.S. adults said there are guns in their household, and of that number, 75 percent say the guns “are stored in ways that don’t reflect some common ways gun-safety practices,” the report notes — like keeping the weapon loaded or in an unlocked location.

The survey’s release comes a day after a shooter killed at least four people in Louisville, Ky., and a few weeks after three nine-year-olds and three adults were shot dead at a school in Nashville, Tenn.

If availability of guns and police are supposed to protect neighborhoods, it's not working in Black ones. There's plenty of police interaction, and yet gun deaths are ludicrously higher.

Not that Republican lawmakers care.  

But Black Lives Still Matter.

Even in Gunmerica.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Leaving county school and election boards and other local offices to the MAGA CHUDs mean you don't get these offices, or the services they provide, back. The goal is to drive everyone with a brain cell out of local civil service until they control everything, and then shut all of the local services -- schools, libraries, and elections -- down for good. A perfect example is Buckingham County, Virginia:

 

Lindsey Taylor loved running elections here.

The previous registrar had spent nearly three decades in the job, and Taylor, 37, hoped to do the same when she was hired in 2019. She loved her staff and the volunteer poll workers, and she took pride in the detail-oriented work. She implemented dozens of new laws in 2020, ran elections through the pandemic and impressed many in the rural, conservative, tight-knit community of Buckingham County.

But then the voter fraud claims started.

In January, the GOP assumed control of the Buckingham County Electoral Board that oversees her office, and local Republicans began advancing baseless voter fraud claims that baffled her. The electoral board made it clear it wanted her out of the job.

“There were people saying that they had heard all these rumors — that the attorney general was going to indict me,” Taylor said, days after leaving the office for the last time. “Mentally, I just — I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Three weeks ago, frustrated and heartbroken, Taylor, along with two part-time staffers, quit. Their resignations followed a deputy registrar who left in February, citing the same conflict.

The four departures left residents without a functioning registrar’s office; there was no way to register to vote or certify candidate paperwork, at least temporarily.

A state elections worker arrived in town a week later to try to pick up the pieces, looking through drawers and opening the mail, as the two remaining members of the electoral board — both Republicans, because the one Democrat had also recently quit — began the difficult process of restaffing a completely barren department.

“It’s just sad that the big lie has come to Buckingham,” said Margaret Thomas, who worked as the general registrar in Buckingham County for more than 28 years before retiring. “And before it was never here.”

Years after former President Donald Trump began pushing his lies about stolen elections, communities like Buckingham County are grappling with the aftershocks: What happens when election denialism drives out the people needed to keep local democracy running?

“A lot of election officials I’ve talked to are asking themselves: Why am I doing this? Why am I getting paid like a civil servant to be constantly harassed?” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research that helps support election officials. “Whether it’s the intent or not, the effect is to drive a lot of these public servants — upon who we’ve relied for decades in some cases — out of the field, which will leave elections more vulnerable than they’ve been before.”

Which is, of course, the exact point of the exercise.

Republicans don't want any of these to exist outside of their total control of them.