Oh Ricky You're So...Gone?

Some guy at Mar-a-Lago named "Ricky" singed for Donald Trump's lawsuit paperwork in a suit filed by Democratic Rep. Bennie Johnson of Mississippi, and nobody seems to know where the lawsuit...or Ricky...went for that matter.

 

In February, “Ricky” signed for a federal lawsuit delivered to former President Trump and then vanished.

Since then, people in both Trump’s camp and the team pressing the lawsuit on behalf of Mississippi Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson have been left scratching their heads, about who, exactly, the mysterious “Ricky” is and why he accepted mail for the former president.

Over the past couple of weeks, typically knowledgeable sources on both sides have responded to The Daily Beast’s inquiries with their own questions, such as “Who the hell is Ricky?” and “Do YOU know who Ricky is?”

Now, the “Ricky”—just “Ricky,” no last name listed—mystery has spilled into federal court where Trump’s attorney Jesse Binnall asked the judge for more time to respond to Thompson’s lawsuit in part following the difficulty in identifying the unknown signator. In a motion filed late Thursday evening, Binnall wrote that a “Ricky” appeared to have signed for a lawsuit sent to Trump—and then this person didn’t actually deliver the papers to the twice-impeached former president yet.

“Plaintiff attempted to serve Mr. Trump by certified mail on February 23, 2021. That parcel was signed for by an unknown individual identified only as ‘Ricky,’” the court filing reads. Binnall also states, “Mr. Trump contests whether that service was legally effective.”

A return of service receipt filed in early March shows that someone named “Ricky” signed for the documents at Trump’s private club of Mar-a-Lago in Florida, according to the document.

However, Binnall also said that his client’s position that the service was potentially botched “is moot because the parties have decided to focus on the substantive disputes at hand and have agreed to an extension of time for Mr. Trump to respond to the complaint, up to and including April 26, 2021.”

Judge Amit Mehta and attorneys for Democratic Rep. Thompson agreed to the Trump team’s request for an extension and the former president now has until April 26 to file a response to the suit.

 

So Trump gets to delay his lawsuit for six weeks because "Ricky" lost the paperwork.

If you believe that the lawsuit was lost, I have an oceanside golf resort in Florida to sell you, too.  The judge should be dropping Trump's ass in jail for such an asinine "Ricky ate my homework" excuse, but Trump has been dodging lawsuits using tactics like this for decades now, and he'll keep doing it.

Cuomo's #MeToo Moment, Con't

NY Dem Gov. Andrew Cuomo says there's "no way" he will resign with "unproven" multiple sexual harassment allegations, saying calls for his resignation from state lawmakers are "undemocratic".

In a potentially crippling defection in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s efforts to maintain control amid a sexual harassment scandal, the powerful Democratic leader of the New York State Senate declared on Sunday that the governor should resign “for the good of the state.”

The stinging rebuke from the Senate leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins — along with a similar sentiment from the Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, who questioned the “governor’s ability to continue to lead this state” — suggested that Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, had lost his party’s support in the State Capitol, and cast doubt on his ability to withstand the political fallout.

Once hailed as a pandemic hero and potential presidential contender, the governor has seen his political future spiral downward over eight perilous days in the wake of a New York Times report about Charlotte Bennett, a former aide to Mr. Cuomo.

In a series of interviews with The Times, Ms. Bennett, 25, said that Mr. Cuomo, 63, had asked her invasive personal questions last spring about her sex life, including whether she had slept with older men, and whether she thought age made a difference in relationships.

Ms. Bennett is one of five women who have come forward in recent days with allegations of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior against Mr. Cuomo, with one predating his tenure as governor.

Mr. Cuomo, however, was adamantly resisting calls for his resignation, arguing he was elected by the people, not “by politicians.”

“I’m not going to resign because of allegations,” the governor said, calling the notion “anti-democratic,” and a violation of the due process clause of the Constitution. “There is no way I resign.”

The governor’s statements on Sunday afternoon came not long after Ms. Stewart-Cousins had informed Mr. Cuomo in a phone call that she was about to call for him to step down, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation; the governor then quickly convened his own news conference to pre-empt her announcement.

He told reporters that his remarks were directed at “some legislators who suggest that I resign.”

Undeterred, Ms. Stewart-Cousins fired back, releasing her statement not long after Mr. Cuomo concluded his news conference.

“We need to govern without daily distraction,” said Ms. Stewart-Cousins, citing the allegations of sexual harassment and a “toxic work environment,” and his handling of the state’s nursing homes during the pandemic. “Governor Cuomo must resign.”

Ms. Stewart-Cousins is the most prominent New York State official to call for Mr. Cuomo’s resignation, and her statement carries significance: Her Senate would be the jury for any impeachment trial of the governor, if such an action were passed by the Assembly.

It also carries symbolic weight: In 2008, when Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned during a prostitution scandal, his decision was partially precipitated by a loss of support from Albany’s legislative leaders.

Mr. Heastie did not call for Mr. Cuomo to resign, but suggested that it was time for him “to seriously consider whether he can effectively meet the needs of the people of New York.”

 

I don't think he can effectively meet the needs of anyone other than Andrew Cuomo.

 

Donald Trump decided to tough it out and he stayed in power after dozens of harassment claims, and then voters removed him. I'd hope New York voters would do the same, but frankly I think that should it become clear Cuomo will be impeached and removed, he'll step down well before an election.

We'll see what happens, but every day Cuomo stays in office is another day it becomes increasingly impossible to punish Republicans for their wrongdoing.

HoliDaze: Russian To Judgment, Feliz Novichok Edition

The enterprising folks over at Bellingcat have gotten their hands on a recording of a nearly 50-minute phone call between Russian dissident Alexey Navalny and the FSB, where Navalny pretends to be a Politburo aide asking about how the FSB poisoned Navalny in August, and the FSB just tells him on an open line exactly how they did it.

The phone call took place on the morning of 14 December 2020; several hours before Bellingcat and its partners would publish their investigation into the Navalny poisoning. Legal and journalistic standards obliged the co-publishing partners to confront the main subjects of the investigation and offer them the right of reply.

Prior to offering these rights-of-reply, Alexey Navalny requested the opportunity to confront, by telephone, members of the FSB squad implicated in his poisoning. Bellingcat agreed and arranged for its representatives to be present during the calls, for the purpose of obtaining any additional information that might be exchanged.

The calls were made beginning at 4:30 am CET (6:30 am Moscow time) from a location in Germany, where Navalny has been recuperating since his poisoning. In order to increase the chance of his calls being answered by the FSB operatives, Navalny used an IP telephony application which permits the custom-setting of a caller ID. In this case, the number that was selected for ID spoofing was that of an FSB landline which, call records showed, had been in regular communication with several of the squad members.

In the initial calls, which were made to the key members of the FSB squad and chemical weapons scientists who had been in contact with them during the operation, Navalny introduced himself and asked why the respective person had agreed to be involved in a plot to kill him. The called parties did not reply and hung up, with the exception of one of the contacted chemical-weapons scientists: Oleg Demidov — who said he had Covid-19 and couldn’t talk.

In addition to calling most of the FSB operatives on his own behalf (and failing to get a response), Navalny decided to call two members of the FSB squad, Mikhail Shvets and Konstantin Kudryavtsev, by impersonating a senior security official. To both of these officers, Navalny introduced himself as a fictional character: Maxim Ustinov, an “aide to [Chairman of Russia’s Security Council] Nikolai Patrushev”. The premise of the call was that Navalny — playing the role of “Maxim Ustinov” — would ask the officers for an oral report on the reasons for the failure of the Navalny poisoning operation.

The first call — to Mikhail Shvets, a member of the squad who had tailed Navalny during his July 2020 trip to Kaliningrad — was unsuccessful. Shvets listened to Navalny’s introduction as “Maxim Ustinov” and replied “I know exactly who you are”, before hanging up.

The second and last call was to Konstantin Kudryavtsev — a member of the FSB team who had graduated from the Military Biological-Chemical Academy and then worked in the 42nd (biological warfare defense) Institute of the Ministry of Defense, before joining the FSB. As we reported, Kudryavtsev traveled to Omsk twice in the aftermath of the poisoning: once on 25 August and a second time on 2 October 2020. His phone records had also shown that just before and during the suspected time-range of the poisoning, he had been in regular communication with Col. Stanislav Makshakov, the direct commander of the FSB squad and deputy director of FSB’s Criminalistics Institute.

This call was successful. Kudryavtsev initially thought he was receiving a call from Artyom Troyanov (his first line upon answering the phone was “Artyom, greetings…”), an FSB officer who — in Kudryavtsev’s own words — uses that landline number. “Maxim”, the non-existent aide to Nikolay Patrushev, told him that his call was routed via the FSB phone exchange, which might explain why it appears as someone else’s number, and Kudryavtsev appeared to believe this.

“Maxim” told Kudryavtsev that his boss had requested an urgent report from all members of the FSB team involved with the Navalny operation due the enormous problems this operation has led to. (Kudryavtsev implied that he understood what these problems were, saying “I also watch TV and read the Internet”). Kudryavtsev was initially hesitant to talk on an open line, and said he was not informed about all aspects of the operation due to compartmentalizing of information on a need-to-know basis. From his own subsequent account, it appears he was primarily involved with the evidence clean-up following the poisoning attempt and not the poisoning itself. However, “Maxim” was able to convince Kudryavtsev that his presumed boss needs every team member’s personal assessment of the operation, and furthermore, that the call had been authorized by Gen. Vladimir Bogdanov, director of FSB’s Special Technology Department. The latter piece of information appeared to persuade Kudryavtsev, and he agreed to answer detailed questions from Alexey Navalny, acting as the fictitious “Maxim”. This phone call was made before any publication on the FSB squad and their link to the Navalny poisoning operation, and without any of the operatives being publicly named. Thus Kudryavtsev’s decision to open up and share top-secret details seemed to be swayed by the detailed, non-public knowledge “Maxim” appeared to have about the composition of the FSB team that was involved in the operation.

The call lasted for 49 minutes. Navalny did not break character until the end.

 

If I'm the FSB, I offer Navalny a job. You know, for a number of reasons.

 

This is also a pretty good read, so give it a spin.

The Coup-Coup Birds Take Flight, Con't

We've reached the point where Trump's cultists are now openly calling for the end of American democracy and a martial law military coup that keeps Trump in power "as long as necessary". Not only are they confident in saying it, but they are increasingly confident that it will happen, and that Democrats will be rounded up and disposed of.

An 1807 law invoked only in the most violent circumstances is now a rallying cry for the MAGA-ites most committed to the fantasy that Donald Trump will never leave office.

The law, the Insurrection Act, allows the president to deploy troops to suppress domestic uprisings — not to overturn elections.

But that hasn’t stopped the act from becoming a buzzword and cure-all for prominent MAGA figures like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, two prominent pro-Trump attorneys leading efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and even one North Carolina state lawmaker. Others like Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who was recently pardoned for lying to the FBI, have made adjacent calls for Trump to impose martial law. The ideas have circulated in pro-Trump outlets and were being discussed over the weekend among the thousands of MAGA protesters who descended on state capitols and the Supreme Court to falsely claim Trump had won the election.

At its core, the Insurrection Act gives the president authority to send military and National Guard troops to quell local rebellions and violence, offering an exemption to prohibitions against using military personnel to enforce domestic laws. Historically, it has been used in moments of extreme national strife — the Civil War, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, violent labor disputes, desegregation battles, rioting following Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

Only once, however, has it been used in the wake of an election — and that was to stop a literal militia from seizing the Louisiana government on behalf of John McEnery, a former Confederate officer who had lost the 1872 governor’s race.

Nonetheless, in the minds of some authoritarian-leaning and conspiracy-minded Trump supporters, the Insurrection Act has become a needed step to prevent President-elect Joe Biden from assuming the presidency. Their evidence-deficient reasoning: Democrats illegally rigged the election and are attempting a coup, and Trump must send in the troops to undo this conspiracy.

The conviction shows how hard-edged MAGA ideology has become in the wake of Trump’s election loss. While scattered theories about a “deep state” arrayed against Trump have long circulated in MAGA circles, calls for troops to stop a democratically elected president from taking office have taken those ideas to a more conspiratorial and militaristic level. It also displays the exalted level to which Trump has been elevated among his most zealous fans as his departure looms.

“The central theme here is that there supposedly exists a network of nefarious actors trying to undermine Trump and destroy the United States, and that this is a tool that Trump could use to save the day,” said Jared Holt, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, who focuses on far-right extremism.

The Insurrection Act has been rarely invoked since the civil unrest of the 1960s — the last time was to quell violence during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And when it has been used over that period, it was always at the request of a state governor.

But over the past several years, it has gained popularity among the far-right fringes, mainly as a way for Trump to solve all their problems, from expelling undocumented migrants, to arresting generals and other “deep state” actors for allegedly plotting coups against Trump.

The idea has also become intertwined with the QAnon movement, the far-reaching and baseless conspiracy that Trump is secretly working to disrupt a cabal of pedophiliac, sex trafficking Democrats and global elite.

 

This is what they want, their fever dreams dark and rich with the blood of dead Black folks, brown folk, and "race traitor" whites, and they are waiting for Trump to give them permission to slaughter.  Republicans are terrified of losing 'their power' to anyone they deem inferior to them, and what they want is to be allowed to kill with impunity, to drag us out into the streets and empty their firearm clips into our bodies.

 

And yes, Trump is absolutely considering it. 

 

President Donald Trump convened a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Friday, including lawyer Sidney Powell and her client, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, two people familiar with the matter said, describing a session that began as an impromptu gathering but devolved and eventually broke out into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump's aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn's more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election. 

Flynn had suggested earlier this week that Trump could invoke martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election that he lost to President-elect Joe Biden -- an idea that arose again during the meeting in the Oval Office, one of the people said. It wasn't clear whether Trump endorsed the idea, but others in the room forcefully pushed back and shot it down. 

The meeting was first reported by the New York Times. 

White House aides who participated in the meeting, including White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and counsel Pat Cipollone, also pushed back intensely on the suggestion of naming Powell as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud allegations Trump's own administration has dismissed (or, as seems more feasible, hiring her in the administration for some kind of investigatory role). Powell has focused her conspiracies on voting machines and has floated the notion of having a special counsel inspect the machines for flaws. 

Another idea floated in the meeting was an executive order that would permit the government to access voting machines to inspect them. 

One person described the meeting as "ugly" as Powell and Flynn accused others of abandoning the President as he works to overturn the results of the election. 

"It was heated -- people were really fighting it out in the Oval, really forceful about it," one of the sources said. 

One of the sources described an escalating sense of concern among Trump's aides, even those who have weathered his previous controversies, about what steps he might take next as his term comes to an end. 

Shortly after that meeting, Trump's campaign staff received a memo from the campaign legal team on Saturday instructing them to preserve all documents related to Dominion Voting Systems and Powell in anticipation of potential litigation by the company against the pro-Trump attorney.  

They think Trump is going to give them that, and they are willing, some of them, to fight and die for him. And he very well might.

 

The answer of course is to treat seditious traitors like seditious traitors. 

New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen says elected representatives who refuse to accept the peaceful transition of power should be sanctioned. “These senators and members of Congress who have refused to acknowledge that we had a free and fair election in which Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by over 7 million votes, are bordering on sedition and treason in thinking that they are going to overturn a duly elected president,” she said.

Make the price for supporting Trump's sedition higher than accepting Biden's win.

BREAKING: He's Done, Barr None

Bill Barr is stepping down as Attorney General and will be replaced by Deputy AG Jeff Rosen.

 

Attorney General William Barr resigned on Monday, ending a tenure in which the President Donald Trump loyalist carried the administration's "law and order" message but ultimately dealt the most credible blow to Trump's unfounded claims that the 2020 election was littered with fraud. 

"Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job! As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family," Trump tweeted, announcing the news. 

"Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become Acting Attorney General. Highly respected Richard Donoghue will be taking over the duties of Deputy Attorney General. Thank you to all!" 

Barr repeatedly and unapologetically prioritized Trump's political goals while furthering his own vision of expansive presidential power. In his most notorious move, Barr delivered a misleading summary of special counsel Robert Mueller's report, essentially clearing Trump in the Russia probe, which drew a sharp rebuke from Mueller himself. 

He remained steadfast in his support of the President heading into Election Day, including by launching various operations across the country to combat violence and drug trafficking and reiterating Trump's message not to participate in mail-in voting prior to the presidential election. He also appointed a special counsel to continue investigating one of Trump's longtime infatuations, that intelligence and law enforcement violated the law in investigating the 2016 Trump campaign. 

But the decision from the former attorney general to rebuke the President's false claims of widespread fraud in his loss to Democrat Joe Biden represented a final failure of Trump's often successful attempt to weaponize the Justice Department as a personal and potent political weapon.

 

Whatever villainy Trump is planning next, Bill Barr doesn't want any part of it. And Trump fired Barr specifically today in order to kill the news that Joe Biden got the required 270 electoral college votes today and will be sworn in on January 20.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Once again, Attorney General Bill Barr is threatening to quit over Trump's antics, and once again, I believe him about as far as he can throw me.

Attorney General William P. Barr is considering stepping down before President Trump’s term ends next month, according to three people familiar with this thinking. One said Mr. Barr could announce his departure before the end of the year.

It was not clear whether the attorney general’s deliberations were influenced by Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede his election loss or his fury over Mr. Barr’s acknowledgment last week that the Justice Department uncovered no widespread voting fraud. In the ensuing days, the president refused to say whether he still had confidence in his attorney general.

One of the people insisted that Mr. Barr had been weighing his departure since before last week and that Mr. Trump had not affected the attorney general’s thinking. Another said Mr. Barr had concluded that he had completed the work that he set out to accomplish at the Justice Department.

But the president’s public complaints about the election, including a baseless allegation earlier last week that federal law enforcement had rigged the election against him, are certain to cast a cloud over any early departure by Mr. Barr. By leaving early, Mr. Barr could avoid a confrontation with the president over his refusal to advance Mr. Trump’s efforts to rewrite the election results.

Mr. Barr’s departure would also deprive the president of a cabinet officer who has wielded the power of the Justice Department more deeply in service of a president’s political agenda than any attorney general in a half-century. Conversely, it would please some Trump allies, who have called for Mr. Barr to step down over his refusal to wade further into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election outcome.

Mr. Barr has not made a final decision, and the prospect of him staying on through Jan. 20 remains a possibility, the people familiar with his thinking cautioned. Should Mr. Barr step down before the end of the Trump administration, the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, would be expected to lead the Justice Department until President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is sworn in.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. The White House had no comment. 

 

I actually don't care too much at this point what Barr does, this late in the game Trump really doesn't need him if he's going to pardon everybody and shit on the rug on the way out the door, I do care what Jeff Rosen, or whomever Trump appoints to replace Barr, will do under intense pressure to help Trump with his ongoing coup attempts.

 

That part worried me, yeah.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

We've finally reached the "Charlie Day from Always Sunny" stage of the Trump regime's collapse.

 

Forget Ross Perot's PowerPoint presentations, Donald Trump has gone absolutely crackers.

Increasingly detached from reality, President Donald Trump stood before a White House lectern and delivered a 46-minute diatribe against the election results that produced a win for Democrat Joe Biden, unspooling one misstatement after another to back his baseless claim that he really won.

Trump called his address, released Wednesday only on social media and delivered in front of no audience, perhaps “the most important speech” of his presidency. But it was largely a recycling of the same litany of misinformation and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud that he has been making for the past month.

Trump, who spoke from the Diplomatic Room, kept up his futile pushback against the election even as state after state certifies its results and as Biden presses ahead with shaping his Cabinet in advance of his inauguration on Jan. 20.

Biden received a record 81 million votes compared to 74 million for Trump. The Democrat also won 306 electoral votes compared to 232 for Trump. The Electoral College split matches Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton four years ago, which he described then as a “landslide.”

Trump dug further into his contention of a “rigged election” even though members of his own administration, including Attorney General William Barr, say that no proof of widespread voter fraud has been uncovered. Courts in multiple battleground states have thrown out a barrage of lawsuits filed on behalf of the president.

“This is not just about honoring the votes of 74 million Americans who voted for me,” Trump said. “It’s about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election. And in all future elections.”

In fact, his baseless claims are having the opposite effect — undermining public faith in the integrity of U.S. elections.

About an hour after it was posted, Trump’s video had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook and shared by more than 60,000 Facebook users. Both Facebook and Twitter flagged the president’s posting as problematic, with Twitter noting that Trump’s claims about election fraud are disputed.

Many of Trump’s claims have been debunked repeatedly in recent weeks.

His overarching claim: “This election is about great voter fraud, fraud that has never been seen like this before.”

In fact, Christopher Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, voiced confidence in the integrity of the election ahead of the November vote. And afterward, he knocked down allegations that the count was tainted by fraud.

Krebs was fired by Trump weeks ago.

 

Kudos to the Associated Press and reporters Aamer Madhani and Kevin Freking for both suffering through Trump's disassociative break and for calling it as such.

And things have now gotten so bad for Trump's mental breakdown that VP Mike Pence is heading for the lifeboats too.

Pardon My Destruction

Pardon me, everyone says to Donald Trump.

 

President Trump has discussed with advisers whether to grant pre-emptive pardons to his children, to his son-in-law and to his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and talked with Mr. Giuliani about pardoning him as recently as last week, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Trump has told others that he is concerned that a Biden Justice Department might seek retribution against the president by targeting the oldest three of his five children — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump — as well as Ms. Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser.

Donald Trump Jr. had been under investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for contacts that the younger Mr. Trump had had with Russians offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, but he was never charged. Mr. Kushner provided false information to federal authorities about his contacts with foreigners for his security clearance, but was given one anyway by the president.

The nature of Mr. Trump’s concern about any potential criminal exposure of Eric Trump or Ivanka Trump is unclear, although an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the Trump Organization has expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees by the company, some of which appear to have gone to Ms. Trump.

Presidential pardons, however, do not provide protection against state or local crimes.

Mr. Giuliani’s potential criminal exposure is also unclear, although he was under investigation as recently as this summer by federal prosecutors in Manhattan for his business dealings in Ukraine and his role in ousting the American ambassador there. The plot was at the heart of the impeachment of Mr. Trump.

The speculation about pardon activity at the White House is churning furiously, underscoring how much the Trump administration has been dominated by investigations and criminal prosecutions of people in the president’s orbit. Mr. Trump himself was singled out by federal prosecutors as “Individual 1” in a court filing in the case that sent Michael D. Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, to prison. 

 

Oh, but it gets much, much worse for the Trump regime. 

The Justice Department is investigating a potential crime related to funneling money to the White House or related political committee in exchange for a presidential pardon, according to court records unsealed Tuesday in federal court. 

The case is the latest legal twist in the waning days of President Donald Trump's administration after several of his top advisers have been convicted of federal criminal charges and as the possibility rises of Trump giving pardons to those who've been loyal to him. 

The disclosure is in 20 pages of partially redacted documents made public by the DC District Court on Tuesday afternoon. The records show Chief Judge Beryl Howell's review in August of a request from prosecutors to access documents obtained in a search as part of a bribery-for-pardon investigation. 

The filings don't reveal a timeline of the alleged scheme, or any names of people potentially involved, except that communications between people including at least one lawyer were seized from an office that was raided sometime before the end of this summer.
No one appears to have been publicly charged with a related crime to date. 

The White House declined to comment on the court filing. CNN has previously reported that associates of the President are making appeals to him in the hopes of obtaining pardons before he leaves office. There is no indication that any of those associates are being investigated by DOJ in relation to Tuesday's filing.

 

So somebody is being investigated for paying Trump for a pardon. And that's the kind of thing that Trump can't pardon himself for.  And also remember that the August timeline means Bill Barr sat on this for the full 90 days Judge Howell gave him to protect Trump during the election.

 

Of course, Trump is pissed that this is all coming out, and he's threatening to fire Barr again.

President Trump and his allies are piling extreme pressure on Attorney General Bill Barr to release a report that Trump believes could hurt perceived Obama-era enemies — and view Barr's designation of John Durham as special counsel as a stall tactic, sources familiar with the conversations tell Axios.

Why it matters: Speculation over Barr's fate grew on Tuesday, with just 49 days remaining in Trump's presidency, after Barr gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he said the Justice Department has not uncovered evidence of widespread fraud that could change the election's outcome. 

In the interview, Barr also revealed he'd appointed Durham, a veteran prosecutor, as special counsel on Oct. 19 to continue investigating the origins of the FBI's 2016 probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia no matter who won the presidential election.

Behind the scenes: Within Trump's orbit, sources told Axios, Tuesday's revelation was seen as a smokescreen to forestall the release of the so-called Durham report, which senior administration officials believe is already complete — and which Barr had ruled out issuing before the election. 

Another senior administration official disputed that assessment, saying: “The reason the Attorney General appointed John Durham as Special Counsel is because he’s not finished with his investigation," and that Barr "wanted to ensure that John Durham would be able to continue his work independently and unimpeded.” 

Trump has been ranting about the delay behind the scenes and mused privately about replacing Barr with somebody who will expedite the process. But it’s unclear whether he will follow through with that, per sources familiar with the conversations.

 

They are all corrupt as hell, and as many of them need to go to prison as possible.

Last Call For Elector Defector Detector Director

Axios games out the "new slate of electors/faithless electors" scenario that seems to be Trump's best chance of actively engineering an illegal coup to nullify the presidential election, and while I'm seriously infuriated that this appears to be happening, you can't say I wasn't warning folks around here that this was going to be a distinct possibility.

What we're watching: In this long-shot scenario, Trump and his team could try to block secretaries of state in contested states from certifying results. That could allow legislatures in those states to try to appoint new electors who favor Trump over Biden.

"It's basically hijacking the democracy," one lawyer familiar with the process tells Axios. "They've got nothing else; you'd be trying to deny Joe Biden 270." If Trump were to pursue this course, it likely would become apparent the week leading up to Thanksgiving, as states face deadlines to finalize election results.

Between the lines: Trump has not directly said he would pursue this strategy. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo each noted on Tuesday that the election results don't become official until electors cast their votes next month. To date, Biden's status as president-elect is rooted in media projections based on raw vote totals reported by individual states. 

Those totals don't become official, though, until states certify them. The Constitution prescribes that those official results will be used to apportion electors who officially pick the president.  “At some point here, we’ll find out finally who was certified (the winner) in each of these states, and the Electoral College will determine the winner and that person will be sworn in on January 20," McConnell said. "No reason for alarm.”

One Senate leadership aide said McConnell was not signaling an elector strategy and was simply noting that it's not uncommon for there to be litigation before the Electoral College results are complete. 

Pompeo, who raised eyebrows with a line about how there would be a "smooth transition to a second Trump administration," independently raised the Electoral College during a State Department news conference. “When the process is complete, there’s going to be electors selected," he said. "There’s a process; the Constitution lays it out pretty clearly.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

How it works: If a lawsuit successfully stops certification of results in a state, legislators there could step into the void and pick a pro-Trump slate of electors. The lawyer, who requested anonymity to speak about the scenario, said Trump's team now appears to be trying to throw enough dirt at the process for counting late ballots to argue that accurate results can't be ascertained.

The next step could be to try to get federal or state courts to enjoin secretaries of state from certifying results. Any move to provide an alternative slate of electors could force the first real test of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and could land before the Supreme Court. Among the key swing states, Arizona and Georgia have GOP governors and legislatures. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have Democratic governors but GOP legislatures.

"This is a horrible idea, one that should be morally repugnant to every American," elections law expert Edward B. Foley wrote recently in The Washington Post. "For a state legislature to reclaim this power after voters have already cast their own ballots would be an even more egregious intrusion into the democratic process."

 

Now this definitely sounds like Axios is laying scaffolding here for making mountains out of molehills, it's what they do. But at the same time, this is how the coup would play out.

It's why this particular Supreme Court hearing a case on state legislatures and appointing slates of electors is so very dangerous. We already know there's at least three votes on the court to embrace former Chief Justice William Rehnquist's crackpot theory that state legislatures get the final say in electors and elections.

If there's two more, who knows? We shouldn't be anywhere near this point, but here we are.

Last Call For Lowering The Barr, Con't

You knew Bill Barr had to make an appearance in this dangerous farce somewhere, and when he did, it was a classic example of authoritarian coup tactics.

Attorney General William P. Barr, wading into President Trump’s unfounded accusations of widespread election irregularities, told federal prosecutors on Monday that they were allowed to investigate “specific allegations” of voter fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified.

Mr. Barr’s authorization prompted the Justice Department official who oversees investigations of voter fraud, Richard Pilger, to step down from the post within hours, according to an email Mr. Pilger sent to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Barr said he had authorized “specific instances” of investigative steps in some cases. He made clear in a carefully worded memo that prosecutors had the authority to investigate, but he warned that “specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.”

Mr. Barr’s directive ignored the Justice Department’s longstanding policies intended to keep law enforcement from affecting the outcome of an election. And it followed a move weeks before the election in which the department lifted a prohibition on voter fraud investigations before an election.

“Given that voting in our current elections has now concluded, I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions,” Mr. Barr wrote.

A Justice Department official said that Mr. Barr had authorized scrutiny of allegations about ineligible voters in Nevada and backdated mail-in ballots Pennsylvania. Republicans have circulated both claims in recent days without any evidence emerging to back them.

Mr. Barr did not write the memo at the direction of Mr. Trump, the White House or any Republican lawmakers, the official said.

Mr. Barr has privately told department officials in the days since the election that any disputes should be resolved in court by the campaigns themselves, according to three people briefed on the conversations. He has said that he did not see massive fraud, and that most of the allegations of voter fraud were related to individual instances that did not point to a larger systemic problem, the people said.

But critics of Mr. Barr immediately condemned the memo as a political act that undermined the Justice Department’s typical independence from the White House.

 

The legal reasoning from Team Trump now, thanks to this horsecrap:

 

1. Because the Justice Department has authorized US attorneys to investigate fraud that doesn't actually exist, 
2. election results then can't be certified until the investigation by US attorneys is exhausted, 
3. and this will take as long as it takes, 
4. and if it takes so long that electors to the Electoral College can't give either candidate 270 votes,
5. because not enough state elections have been certified and for electors to be elected by the states,
6. or faithless electors vote for Trump,
7. then the Supreme Court has to step in and stop the election process for President,
   
8. then the Presidential contest has to go to the majority of House state delegations where Trump wins, or
9. state legislatures elect faithless electors anyway, and
10. enough faithless electors abandon Biden and give Trump 270 electoral votes,
11. and the Supreme Court orders all-new elections for the House and Senate races in disputed states,
12. which would simply be annulled by SCOTUS until enough Republicans win.
    

 

Now that is a 12-step program to hell, yes?

 

It would effectively be the end of free and fair elections in the US, which is kind of funny actually because America didn't have universal suffrage for roughly the first 180 years of its existence thanks to non-white folk not being able to vote, women not being able to vote, and Jim Crow laws, and the major mechanism for enforcing universal suffrage, the Voting Rights Act, was effectively dismantled by Chief Justice John Roberts seven years ago, and kept dismantled by Mitch McConnell.

 

Free and fair small "d" democratic elections in America are literally a younger concept than the Zandarparents. America has been an actual "symbol of freedom" for maybe six decades out of 25, and that's being amazingly generous.

And Bill Barr is helping Trump put an end to that.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As he all but promised to do on Twitter last week, Donald Trump held a 2 AM press conference and declared victory with millions of ballots still uncounted, and says his campaign will go to the Supreme Court to stop counting.

President Donald Trump early Wednesday morning kept up his tactic of characterizing counting all ballots as cheating.

“Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight,” he told gathered supporters at the White House. “And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it.”

It’s the same old story: Trump has argued for weeks that vote-counting should be stopped after Election Day — meaning, just throw out any ballots that take more than a few hours to count.

“We were getting ready for a big celebration,” he added. “We were winning everything, and all of the sudden it was just called off.”

“Frankly we did win this election,” he lied later.

 

It gets worse. Much much worse.

Shortly after Trump said “we’ll be going to the Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop,” MSNBC anchor Brian Williams abruptly cut in to call Trump out on his misleading claim that “frankly, we did win the election.”

“We are reluctant to step in, but duty bound to point out when he says we did win this election, we’ve already won, that’s not based in the facts at all,” Williams said.

 

We're now in a full-blown capital C Constitutional Crisis. 

 

We have been for a while now, frankly, but this is one where we don't come back from as a country without tremendous bloodshed if Trump is not stopped here. He is openly stating he will steal this election through the Supreme Court.

I've been warning about this scenario for months now.

 

It's finally here.

 

Only historically catastrophic things happen from this point on.

You're Vlad Marugov, The Sausage King Of Moscow?

Hey, it's not election news for once as the Sausage King of Moscow has been assassinated by crossbow bolt. Nope, serious. May even have not been Putin's fault, either.

 

A Russian oligarch, nicknamed The Sausage King, has been murdered with a crossbow, investigators say.

Vladimir Marugov and his partner were in an outdoor sauna when they were attacked, reportedly by two masked assailants.

The woman managed to escape through the window and call the police.

Detectives found the body of Mr Marugov, who owned some of Russia's largest meat-processing plants, in the sauna with a crossbow next to it.

The attack happened at Mr Marugov's countryside estate, about 40km (25 miles) outside the capital, Moscow, early on Monday morning, Russia's Investigative Committee (similar to the FBI in the US) reported.

It did not name the man, but local media identified him as Mr Marugov, the owner of the Ozyorsky and Meat Empire sausage factories.

The intruders demanded cash from Mr Marugov, before fleeing in a car, the Investigative Committee said.

The getaway car was later recovered on the outskirts of the town of Istra, outside Moscow.

 

This is twenty, thirty minutes of a good Guy Ritchie film right here.  Somebody get me Jason Statham, Peter Stormare, Rooney Mara and Dave Bautista.

Also, just kidding, everything having to do with Russian oligarchs dying is Putin's fault.

The Most Taxing Of Explanations

 Good morning.

The New York Times has Donald Trump's taxes. 

That's it, that's the whole story.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

In response to a letter summarizing The Times’s findings, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate” and requested the documents on which they were based. After The Times declined to provide the records, in order to protect its sources, Mr. Garten took direct issue only with the amount of taxes Mr. Trump had paid.

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.

With the term “personal taxes,” however, Mr. Garten appears to be conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Mr. Trump has paid — Social Security, Medicare and taxes for his household employees. Mr. Garten also asserted that some of what the president owed was “paid with tax credits,” a misleading characterization of credits, which reduce a business owner’s income-tax bill as a reward for various activities, like historic preservation.

The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

 

Donald Trump has fought tooth and nail to keep the American people from finding out about his tax returns. He has used his office to shield himself from their release for roughly 1400 days. 

Now we finally know why.

Donald Trump is broke and most likely committed massive tax fraud. He's nowhere close to being a billionaire, if anything he owes hundreds of millions. He took money from Putin and his cadre of Russian oligarchs and from money laundering international big banks like Deutsche Bank to stay afloat. He owes them everything, including his presidency, and is beholden to foreign interests like no other elected American official has ever been. 

The bills he has coming due are 100% contingent on him remaining in office, and he's using and abusing the power of his office to protect himself from nine-digit fines and years of prison time. And should God forbid he get a second term, he will be nearly a half-billion in debt as a national leader, making him completely compromised. The evidence is piling up that he used his family as part of his tax schemes, paying his own children massive sums and then writing it all off as campaign expenses.

Most of all, so far in his term, he has paid a grand total of $1500 in federal taxes, and the one major piece of legislation he has signed in his four years has been a massive tax giveaway to professional international corporate tax cheats like himself. He literally signed a bill whose entire purpose was to make people like him richer by making it even more legal to cheat Uncle Sam out of their fair share of taxes. Period.

That's it. That's the story. That has always been the story. He ran for President to enrich himself and he found out once he won that the entire GOP was gladly willing to help him get away with looting the place. You paid more in taxes than Donald Trump because Donald Trump signed a law to make sure he would always be able to pay less in taxes than you.

The best part? The NYT promises more articles are coming in the future.  Even if you believe this won't hurt his reelection chances, it will obliterate any chance of changing the narrative to a Trump comeback.

Dude is most likely toast. He's going to get his Supreme Court pick, but it's going to cost him everything.

Have a nice day, Donald.

Last Call For Going Postal, Con't

According to a major story in the Washington Post today, current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy committed felony campaign finance violations by pressuring his employees at his business in North Carolina to donate hundreds of thousands to his GOP fundraisers, then committing fraud by reimbursing the money back to his employees as year-end bonuses in order to hide the money.

Louis DeJoy’s prolific campaign fundraising, which helped position him as a top Republican power broker in North Carolina and ultimately as head of the U.S. Postal Service, was bolstered for more than a decade by a practice that left many employees feeling pressured to make political contributions to GOP candidates — money DeJoy later reimbursed through bonuses, former employees say.

Five people who worked for DeJoy’s former business, New Breed Logistics, say they were urged by DeJoy’s aides or by the chief executive himself to write checks and attend fundraisers at his 15,000-square-foot gated mansion beside a Greensboro, N.C., country club. There, events for Republicans running for the White House and Congress routinely fetched $100,000 or more apiece.

Two other employees familiar with New Breed’s financial and payroll systems said DeJoy would instruct that bonus payments to staffers be boosted to help defray the cost of their contributions, an arrangement that would be unlawful.

“Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” said David Young, DeJoy’s longtime director of human resources, who had access to payroll records at New Breed from the late 1990s to 2013 and is now retired. “When we got our bonuses, let’s just say they were bigger, they exceeded expectations — and that covered the tax and everything else.”

Another former employee with knowledge of the process described a similar series of events, saying DeJoy orchestrated additional compensation for employees who had made political contributions, instructing managers to award bonuses to specific individuals.

“He would ask employees to make contributions at the same time that he would say, ‘I’ll get it back to you down the road,’ ” said the former employee, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from DeJoy.

In response to a series of detailed questions from The Washington Post, Monty Hagler, a spokesman for DeJoy, said the former New Breed chief executive was not aware that any employees had felt pressured to make donations.

After repeatedly being asked, Hagler did not directly address the assertions that DeJoy reimbursed workers for making contributions, pointing to a statement in which he said DeJoy “believes that he has always followed campaign fundraising laws and regulations.”

Hagler said DeJoy “sought and received legal advice” from a former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission “to ensure that he, New Breed Logistics and any person affiliated with New Breed fully complied with any and all laws. Mr. DeJoy believes that all campaign fundraising laws and regulations should be complied with in all respects.”

It's easy enough to follow the money here, and in DeJoy's House hearing just a few weeks ago on his wrecking the USPS on Trump's orders, he was asked about these allegations by Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper of Nashville.

Cooper: (01:30:53)
Mr. DeJoy, here’s what your so-called reforms have done to my district in 70 days. A lady named Elena Roser paid $5 on July 22nd to send a certified letter to the Nashville, Tennessee social security office. The distance is 20 miles. The letter took 12 days to arrive. Just this morning, excellent reporting from Nashville’s Channel Five TV proves that Nashville’s mail trucks are being forced to leave on schedule even when completely empty. Imagine it: 53 foot trucks forced to travel hundreds of miles, completely empty, due to your so-called reforms. Here are the truck records. That’s not efficiency. That’s insanity. For anyone thinking of voting absentee, the effect of your policies is to unilaterally move up election day from November 3rd to something like October 27th. And if you force more empty trucks on the highway, you will be able to single-handedly move up election day even earlier.

Cooper: (01:32:06)
According to NPR, already 550,000 primary ballots, absentee ballots, were rejected in just 30 states, and one of the main reasons was late delivery. How dare you disenfranchise so many voters when you told the Senate committee just last week that you had a sacred duty to protect election mail. You know that it’s a felony for a postal service officer or employee to delay delivery of mail. A postal employee can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for delaying the mail. But somehow you can delay all the mail and get away with it? They can be prosecuted, but you can’t, even if your actions are a million times worse? Mr. DeJoy, do you have a duty to obey US law like every other American?

DeJoy: (01:32:58)
I do, sir.

Cooper: (01:33:00)
Well, previous postmasters general have been punished for much smaller conflicts of interests than yours. In 1997, the 70th postmaster general Marvin Runyon from Tennessee had to pay $27,000 because of a $350,000 conflict of interest. If your $30 million conflict of interest, a hundred times larger than Mr. Runyon’s, were treated like your predecessors, you would have to pay a $2.7 million fine and probably be ousted from being postmaster general. So Mr. DeJoy, are you above the law that applies to other postmasters general?

DeJoy: (01:33:45)
I don’t agree with the premise. I’m in full compliance with all ethical requirements that I need to have. And there’s an OIG investigation, and I welcome the result of that report.

Cooper: (01:33:59)
Well, Mr. DeJoy, as a mega donor for the Trump campaign, you were picked along with Michael Cohen and Elliott Broidy, two men who have already pled guilty to felonies, to be the three deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Did you pay back several of your top executives for contributing to Trump’s campaign by bonusing or rewarding them?

DeJoy: (01:34:25)
That’s an outrageous claim, sir, and I resent it.

Cooper: (01:34:29)
I’m just asking a question.

DeJoy: (01:34:30)
The answer is no.

Cooper: (01:34:32)
So you did not bonus or reward any of your executives-

DeJoy: (01:34:36)
No. No.

Cooper: (01:34:36)
Or anyone that you solicited for a contribution to the Trump campaign?

DeJoy: (01:34:39)
No, sir.

So on top of the finance violations and the fraud, he straight up lied to Congress under oath.

In any other administration, DeJoy would be made to resign over this and would lawyer up to face the numerous federal investigations that would almost certainly result in prison time and a hefty fine. We know this because a fundraiser for Al Gore was convicted in March 2000 over an extremely similar scheme.

Maria Hsia, a longtime political fund-raiser for Vice President Al Gore, was convicted today of all five felony counts against her for her role in arranging more than $100,000 in illegal donations to the Democratic Party and its candidates in 1996.

Of that amount, $55,000 was contributed to the Democratic National Committee in connection with the vice president's much-criticized visit to a Buddhist temple in the Los Angeles area. The event, at the Hsi Lai Temple in the community of Hacienda Heights, has shadowed Mr. Gore throughout the current political season, with a variety of his opponents referring to it in efforts to remind the public of the Clinton-Gore organization's fund-raising embarrassments.

As her federal jurors filed in today, Ms. Hsia (pronounced shaw), a 48-year-old Taiwan-born American citizen who works as an immigration counselor in Los Angeles, consulted a Chinese fortune-telling book to try to divine her fate. She then sat impassively as the jury delivered its verdicts for what the government had described as her masterminding an evasion of election laws by disguising the true source of campaign contributions.

The five counts against Ms. Hsia, who did not testify at her three-week-long trial, charged her with causing finance officials of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic campaigns to file false contribution statements with the Federal Election Commission. Although conviction on these counts can mean a years-long prison sentence, federal sentencing guidelines make it more likely that she will serve only a brief term, if any.

In the case of the Buddhist temple, Justice Department prosecutors charged that Ms. Hsia had arranged for nuns and monks there to write checks to make it appear that they were the donors to the Democratic National Committee. In reality, they were only ''straw donors,'' reimbursed by the temple itself, which, as a religious, tax-exempt institution, is prohibited from making political donations.

In other cases, the $1,000 limit on contributions to presidential campaigns was evaded by wealthy Chinese-Americans who testified at the trial that Ms. Hsia had helped them find straw donors for contributions to the Clinton-Gore re-election committee.

This is pretty much exactly what DeJoy is accused of doing. In the Trump regime, DeJoy will get kudos, will keep his job, won't be investigated at all, and would be pardoned anyway if he was actually convicted.

The Trump regime is intrinsically corrupt.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The Trump regime is telling governors to be ready to distribute a COVID-19 vaccine no later than November 1.  You know, 48 hours before the election.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has notified public health officials in all 50 states and five large cities to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to health care workers and other high-risk groups as soon as late October or early November.

The new C.D.C. guidance is the latest sign of an accelerating race for a vaccine against a disease that has killed more than 184,000 Americans. The documents were sent out last week, the same day that President Trump said in his speech to the Republican National Convention that a vaccine might arrive before the end of the year.

Over the past week, both Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Stephen Hahn, who heads the Food and Drug Administration, have said in interviews with news organizations that a vaccine could be available for certain groups before clinical trials have been completed, if the data were overwhelmingly positive.

Public health experts agree that agencies at all levels of government should urgently prepare for what will eventually be a vast, complex effort to vaccinate hundreds of millions of Americans. But the possibility of a rollout in late October or early November has also heightened concerns that the Trump administration is seeking to rush the distribution of a vaccine — or simply to suggest that one is possible — before Election Day on Nov. 3.

“This timeline of the initial deployment at the end of October is deeply worrisome for the politicization of public health and the potential safety ramifications,” said Saskia Popescu, an infection prevention epidemiologist in Arizona. “It’s hard not to see this as a push for a pre-election vaccine.”

Three documents were sent to public health officials in all states and territories as well as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and San Antonio on Aug. 27. They outlined detailed scenarios for distributing two unnamed vaccine candidates — each requiring two doses a few weeks apart — at hospitals, mobile clinics and other facilities offering easy access to the first targeted recipients.

The guidance noted that health care professionals, including long-term-care employees, would be among the first to receive the product, along with other essential workers and national security employees.

People aged 65 or older, as well as those from “racial and ethnic minority populations,” Native Americans and incarcerated individuals — all communities known to be at greater risk of contracting the virus and experiencing severe disease — were also prioritized in the documents.

This is, to put it quite frankly, 100% dangerous bullshit, and nobody should trust these vaccines without absolute proof from somebody well outside the regime. We're going to come to find out in January or so that the vaccine is "not as effective as initially thought" but by then thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans could be hospitalized.

There is no guarantee that a working vaccine would be ready by the election, and it's the height of outright danger to suggest that the nation prepare for a working vaccine.

Oh, and BLACK AMERICA WILL NOT BE YOUR GUINEA PIGS.

This is Trump trying to win by duping the American public, and it's reason #19,037 he should resign.

The Rocky Road To Republican Redemption

Hawaii Democrat (and former Republican) Beth Fukumoto explains her journey from the GOP to the Democratic Party, and unlike 99% of Never Trump Republicans, she actually is doing what it takes to earn a second chance.

I rehearsed the words over and over from the back of the black sedan, hired to take me from my red-eye flight to an event at the Republican National Committee headquarters: “We are committed to electing candidates who reflect the full diversity of our nation.”

It was June 2013. I had come from my home state to D.C., to do one job — announce a $6 million investment from the Republican Party to support candidates of color and women running at the state level.

This initiative was one of many meant to change the course of the GOP following its defeat in the 2012 presidential campaign and the subsequent release of its what-went-wrong report, known as the “Growth and Opportunity Project.”

Without a more inclusive message, better representation, less ideological rigidity, and compassionate immigration and economic policies, the report warned, Republicans would continue to lose national elections. It described a party I wanted to help build.

Over the next year, I recruited people to a party that promised diversity, dialogue and the chance to reimagine its foundation. I wanted a government that would be responsible with its power and judicious in its interventions, a leveler when our systems became unbalanced.

Instead, that party nominated a president who sends federal forces to tame American cities yet refuses to use the power of his office to coordinate an effective response to the novel coronavirus.

There are only so many ways to say, “I was wrong.” I’ve exhausted them all.

As the Republican leader in the Hawaii House, I made compromises that I regret. I spoke out when our presidential candidate said he might have supported Japanese American internment, but I couldn’t find the courage to question the implementation of voter identification laws that I should have understood weren’t designed to protect voters.

I made decisions out of political expediency, or hubris, or naivete. Republicans offered an inclusive vision of “Growth and Opportunity” for all; then we elected a man that didn’t even bother to fake it. I couldn’t make it right. I declined to endorse him and criticized his policies. Then, when he won, I continued to disagree with him in public, and my Republican colleagues said they would strip me of my leadership position unless I promised to stop speaking against him. So, I resigned from the party. A few months later, I joined the Democratic Party.

I drew my red line too late. I’ll answer for my choices publicly and privately for years to come. But admitting your mistakes is one of the best ways to keep from repeating them.

Fukumoto switched parties and was deservedly mauled in the primaries in 2018, coming in a distant 5th for the seat won by current HI-1 Democratic Rep Ed Case. She paid for her crimes with her career. She asked Hawaiian voters to give her a chance to redeem herself as a Democrat, and they told her to go straight to the nearest volcano and take a swan dive.

But at least Fukumoto, unlike 99.99% of Never Trump Republicans, isn't asking for absolution or even forgiveness. She deserves neither and has resigned herself correctly to the fact that she'll never receive either one.

Don't feel sorry for her, she's got a nice job at Harvard as a Kennedy School fellow. She's better off than the vast majority of Hawaii right now.  The point is, she correctly tried to earn a path to redemption, and was rightfully denied it.  She accepted it, and moved on, warning the remaining Republicans a similar fate awaits them this fall and in the years ahead.

I wish her well, actually.  But she can never be part of our political process like she was, and has lost the right to do so. She failed her constituents totally. She has to live with that, but so do her constituents. They are the ones we should reserve our empathy for. Not Beth Fukumoto.

We will not forgive. We will certainly not forget.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump is now publicly screaming at Dr. Anthony Fauci, because of course the fact that 150,000 plus Americans have died, the fact that Trump is losing, and the fact that he's going to prison can't be Donald Trump's fault.

President Donald Trump publicly rebuked Dr. Anthony Fauci on Saturday, forcefully rejecting the nation’s top infectious disease expert's testimony on why the U.S. has experienced a renewed surge in coronavirus cases.

“Wrong!” Trump wrote in a retweet of a video where Fauci explained to a House subcommittee that the U.S. has seen more cases than European countries because it only shut down a fraction of its economy amid the pandemic. “We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country, 60,000,000. If we tested less, there would be less cases,” the president added.
Fauci made the remarks during his Friday testimony on the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appearing with CDC Director Robert Redfield and Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brett Giroir, contended that the White House’s decision to leave shutdown decisions to states allowed the virus to run rampant.

“If you look at what happened in Europe when they shut down … they really did it to the tune of about 95-plus percent,” Fauci said in his testimony after panel chair Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) presented a chart contrasting Covid-19 cases in the U.S. and Europe.

“When you actually look at what [the U.S.] did — even though we shut down, even though it created a great deal of difficulty — we really functionally shut down only about 50 percent of the totality of the country.”

Tensions between Trump and Fauci have been simmering for months. The president has previously retweeted posts calling for Fauci’s firing and allies of Trump’s, including top trade adviser Peter Navarro, have publicly attacked him in a smear campaign. Both Trump and Fauci maintain relations between them are good.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. has a higher amount of cases because it tests more than any country, contradicting officials in his own administration and confounding public health experts. The president also said at a rally he had as such requested a slowdown in national testing — a claim White House officials later said was a joke.

The "we test more so we have more cases" theory is actually very sinister.

Trump believes that:

• The majority of COVID-19 tests are false positives.
• The majority of people sick from COVID-19 are sick for other reasons.
• The majority of the deaths from COVID-19 are from people who have high-risk factors.
• The CDC is recording the data to hurt him.
• The CDC data is not real and has been manufactured.
• Proof that Trump is the target is that the virus has been contained elsewhere.
• The virus was safely contained elsewhere because it's not lethal.
• All of this is a huge international conspiracy to deny him a second term.

In other words, Trump's malignant narcissism will ensure that the American people will never be allowed to take the steps needed in order to stop the virus, and that 30-40% of the population will openly refuse anyway, again ensuring that the virus can't be eradicated here, much less contained.

Trump attacking Fauci is all part of this.  Trump always needs an enemy to blame.

Always.

Last Call For Not Even The Ghost Of The Gipper

Not even Zombie Ronald Reagan wants anything to do with Der Trumpenfuhrer anymore.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which runs the 40th president’s library near Los Angeles, has demanded that President Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC) quit raising campaign money by using Ronald Reagan’s name and likeness.
“It was simply handled with a phone call mid-last week to the RNC, and they agreed to stop,” Reagan Foundation chief marketing officer Melissa Giller said in an email Saturday.

What came to the foundation’s attention — and compelled officials there to complain — was a fundraising email that went out July 19 with “Donald J. Trump” identified as the sender and a subject line that read: “Ronald Reagan and Yours Truly.”

The solicitation offered, for a donation of $45 or more, a “limited edition” commemorative set featuring two gold-colored coins, one each with an image of Reagan and Trump. The coins were mounted with a 1987 photograph of Reagan and Trump shaking hands in a White House receiving line — the type of fleeting contact that presidents have with thousands of people a year.

“Friend,” the fundraising email purportedly from Trump said, “I just saw our new Trump-Reagan Commemorative Coin Sets and WOW, these coins are beautiful - I took one look and immediately knew that I wanted YOU to have a set. These aren’t any ordinary coins. They symbolize an important time in our Nation. This year, in addition to being re-elected as YOUR President, it also marks the 40th anniversary of our Nation’s 40th President, Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, we already sold out of the first batch we had in stock. But I liked these coins so much that I asked my team to rush order another batch for my TOP SUPPORTERS ONLY.”

It cautioned: “I’ve authorized a very limited production of these iconic coins, which is why I’m ONLY offering them to our top supporters, like YOU. This offer is NOT available to the general public, so please, do NOT share this email with anyone.”

Proceeds from the coin sales went to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising operation that benefits both the Trump campaign and the RNC.

I keep thinking of Reagan's infamous "11th Commandment" -- Thou Shalt Not Disparage Another Republican -- and I laugh for a good fifteen minutes.

Not even Reagan wants anything to do with Trump the Nazi loser.

Last Call For Householder Of Cards

Things just got very interesting in Ohio politics this morning as GOP state House Speaker Larry Householder was busted by the FBI as part of a $60 million bribery case involving the $1.5 billion bailout of Ohio's two nuclear power plants that Householder made possible last year.

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder’s political operation accepted more than $60 million in bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. to secure the company a $1.3 billion public bailout, according to a federal complaint filed Thursday. 

Householder, chief political aide Jeff Longstreth, and lobbyists Matt Borges, Neil Clark, and Juan Cespedes used the bribe money to expand the speaker’s political power and enrich themselves by millions of dollars through a “web” of dark-money groups and bank accounts, including the 501(c)(4) Generation Now, according to the complaint.

Householder and the four others were charged with conspiracy to commit racketeering. Each could face up to 20 years in prison and a maximum $250,000 fine, court officials said Tuesday.

“(It) is likely the largest bribery, money-laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people in the state of Ohio,” said David DeVillers, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, during a news conference Tuesday.

In all, Householder received more than $500,000 for his personal benefit, according to DeVillers.

More than $100,000 of the bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. was used to pay costs associated with Householder’s Florida home, and at least $97,000 was used to pay expenses for Householder’s 2018 House campaign, the complaint stated.

The complaint does not mention FirstEnergy Corp. by name. Nor does it name FirstEnergy Solutions -- FirstEnergy Corp.‘s then-subsidiary which operated the Perry and Davis-Besse nuclear power plants (and continues to operate them under the name Energy Harbor after splitting from FirstEnergy earlier this year.

Instead, the complaint refers to them both under the collective name “Company A.” There are numerous giveaways that FirstEnergy is “Company A,” including that the complaint quotes public comments from former FirstEnergy Corp. President/CEO Charles Jones, labeling him “Company A Corp. president and CEO.”

DeVillers said there’s a “strong inference” in the complaint that Householder and his allies approached FirstEnergy, rather than the other way around.

“This enterprise went looking for someone to bribe them,” DeVillers said.

Borges, a former Ohio Republican Party chair, had $1.62 million transferred to his lobbying firm’s account, and he paid himself about $350,000, the complaint stated. Borges also allegedly offered someone on the pro-referendum side $15,000 to become a mole within the pro-referendum campaign and hired a private investigator, which the complaint states is consistent with efforts to investigate petition collectors.

Longstreth, Householder’s chief political strategist, transferred more than $10.5 million in bribe payments to his firm, JPL & Associates, as well as another $4.4 million through indirect means, according to the complaint. Longstreth also allegedly benefitted personally, receiving more than $5 million in bribe money, including at least $1 million transferred to his brokerage account in January 2020.

Cespedes, FirstEnergy’s main lobbyist for HB6, served as a “key middleman” for the operation, according to the complaint. He allegedly received about $600,000 from Team Householder and $227,000 from FirstEnergy.

Clark, a prominent Capitol Square lobbyist who described himself as Householder’s “hit man,” got $290,000, according to the complaint.

The bottom line is that FirstEnergy created a dark money PAC, Generation Now, for the specific purpose of hiding their transfer of $61 million to Householder and Republicans who would support him as Ohio's House Speaker.  Householder pocketed some of this money directly, and most of the rest was given out as bribes to Ohio Republicans to support House Bill 6 creating the bailout, to create ads supporting House Bill 6 to give the Republicans political cover, and to defeat the planned ballot initiative overturning House Bill 6 (which died because there weren't enough signatures by the October 2019 limit).

They spent $61 million to get twenty times that in taxpayer cash.

And it was so obvious, even the FBI was able to build a two-year case and nail Householder.  His squad of utterly corrupt officials took home millions, they were bought and paid for, and the FBI promises more arrests are coming.

Complete, cartoonish corruption, breathtaking in scope, and they believed they had gotten away with it from the start, money they would use to remain in power for years.

This is what happens when you put Republicans in charge.  They're all corrupt.  I guarantee you that Republicans in every state are running some version of this same 401(c)(4) dark money PAC scam.  They were specifically designed for it.

Vote them all out in November.