Last Call For Tales From The Trump Depression, Con't

Here's how bad unemployment got at the state level in April.

Minnesota and Connecticut weighed in at 8%, merely "the worst of the Great Recession years". The US as a whole was at 14.7%, nearly 50% worse than the height of the 2007-2008 meltdown's 9.9%.

Michigan is at 22.7%, and Nevada is at 28.2%.  These are catastrophic numbers.

We've seen another 10 million plus unemployment claims since May 1 nationwide, and will almost certainly see another 2 million plus on Thursday.

We will be above 20% when May's numbers hit in less than two weeks.

This could have been prevented.  Here in Kentucky, because the GOP refuses to help, the state now faces a $600 million shortfall and massive austerity cuts will be coming by the end of next month unless the Senate GOP gets off their asses.

Gov. Andy Beshear must slash $457 million from Kentucky’s General Fund and $161 million from its Road Fund for the current fiscal year that ends June 30, a panel of economists said Friday.

The Consensus Forecasting Group said the state’s economy has been wrecked by the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown of most businesses. With income, corporate, sales and gas tax collection falling, state government faces lean times in the immediate future.

The roughly $11 billion General Fund pays for most state services, including education, health care, environmental protection and public safety. The Consensus Forecasting Group initially considered a plan calling for $377 million in General Fund losses but rejected that because it wasn’t pessimistic enough given current economic conditions.

The General Assembly will need to return to Frankfort for “a short, targeted special session” to help write a budget reduction plan for the Road Fund, Beshear told reporters Friday evening. He did not give a specific time frame.

Any state revenue shortfall greater than 5 percent in the General Fund or Road Fund “shall require action by the General Assembly,” according to state law. Under the numbers released Friday, the Road Fund would shrink by 10.4 percent, while the General Fund would shrink by 4 percent.

“We’ve had initial conversations with (legislative) leadership,” Beshear said. “We’ll want to talk with them again, make sure we have it all hammered out. Make sure we do it in as short of a time as possible.”

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article242938091.html#storylink=c

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article242938091.html#storylink=c

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article242938091.html#storylink=cpy

Oh, and from now on, everything is going through the State Department, and not Health and Human Services.  Because pandemics are apparently now diplomatic and political problems, not health ones.

Aides to President Donald Trump are considering a plan to shift the government’s global response to future infectious disease outbreaks to a new unit inside the State Department, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

The proposal, discussed during a National Security Council deputies committee meeting on Thursday, already has set off a turf battle between the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID officials were surprised and perplexed by the idea, which could lead them to lose control of significant funds and authorities.

People familiar with the issue say Dr. Deborah Birx, a top official handling the administration’s response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, is likely to wind up in charge of the new unit if it becomes a reality. The proposal also could, to some degree, establish an alternative mechanism to some of the work done by the World Health Organization, whose U.S. funding Trump has threatened to permanently end.

The overall effort, first reported by the media platform Devex, is described as the President’s Response to Outbreaks, or PRO.

Donald Trump chose this.

And this is only the beginning, folks.

Mitch Heads Home

The House passed a $3 trillion COVID-19 package this month. As the NY Times Editorial Board lays out, the Senate GOP response was "absolutely nothing" and they've adjourned for Memorial Day recess for the week.

After three weeks in session, the United States Senate emptied out again on Friday, as lawmakers fled Washington for the Memorial Day recess. They left without even pretending to tackle the next round of coronavirus relief.

This is how the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, wants it. Many Republicans, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, are reluctant to embrace more government spending, so Mr. McConnell is taking a wait-and-see approach.

The Democratic-led House passed a $3 trillion relief package on May 15. That bill was imperfect but it was something. Mr. McConnell, on the other hand, has repeatedly said he’s in no hurry for the Senate to offer its own proposal. He has put talks on an indefinite pause, saying he wants to see how the economy responds to previous relief measures. The Senate may get around to putting together a plan when it reconvenes next month. Or perhaps it will in July.

This course of inaction is unsustainable. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, warned this week that the economic damage from the pandemic could stretch through the end of next year. Over the past nine weeks, new jobless claims have hit nearly 39 million, and the official unemployment rate is expected to approach 20 percent this month. Behind these numbers are real people suffering significant hardship. The Senate’s sluggish response in addressing this suffering has begun to discomfit even some of Mr. McConnell’s fellow Republicans.

“I think June doesn’t need to come and go without a phase four,” said Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi on Wednesday, referring to the next round of aid.

Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine — both facing tough re-election races — have been especially eager to assure constituents that they take their pain seriously. “Congress has a tremendous responsibility to help mitigate the impact of this crisis on our states and our local communities and on the families they serve,” Ms. Collins said in a floor speech on Wednesday. “We must not wait. We should act now.”

Republicans should keep the pressure on Mr. McConnell and prepare to intensify their push for action when the Senate reconvenes.

When the Senate reconvenes in June, the only thing on the agenda is Sen. Lindsey Graham's mass subpoenas of former Obama administration officials and FBI agents to spend the summer rehashing the "Obamagate" show.

There's no phase 4 coming. Graham made that clear at the beginning of the month.  "Over our dead bodies" would unemployment extensions pass, remember?

Mitch McConnell doesn't want to lose the Senate or the White House.  But he's willing to risk both to make sure Biden gets stuck with trying to recover from the worst depression in US history.

Sunday Long Read: Backlash To The Future

At The Atlantic, Cornell history professor Lawrence Glickman details that the major driving force in American politics as far as gatekeeping social progress is now and has always been the inevitable backlash of white moderates against too much government helping black and brown America.

The word backlash gained popularity in the summer of 1963, when, after dallying on the issue for the first two years of his presidency, President John F. Kennedy proposed significant civil-rights legislation. In response, the word, which had primarily denoted the recoil of a fishing line, was repurposed, usually as “white backlash,” to refer to opposition to the increased pace of African American civil-rights activism or the Kennedy (and, after his assassination in November 1963, the Lyndon B. Johnson) administration’s legislative proposals and executive actions, or both.

In 1966, a commentator, speaking of “the grand new word, backlash,” claimed without much exaggeration that “just about everything that happened could be (and was) attributed to some form of backlash.” The word came to stand for a topsy-turvy rebellion in which white people with relative societal power perceived themselves as victimized by what they described as overly aggressive African Americans demanding equal rights. Backlash, as the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote, “is nothing more nor less than white resentment of Negroes.”

Moving beyond an opposition to civil rights, the word backlash—less frequently qualified as “white”—quickly became a synonym for a new and growing conservative force, signifying a virulent counterreaction to all manner of social movements and cultural transformations that became central to American politics. Over time, observers noted manifestations of this reaction in a “Southern backlash,” a “male backlash,” a “heterosexual backlash,” a “property tax backlash” and a “backlash against environmentalists.” Just a month after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a journalist described the United States as being in the midst of “a multitude of backlashes.” But as one commentator pointed out, “The word which gave rise to all sorts of other ‘lashes’ was coined in reference to white opposition to Negro gains.”

Backlash may have burst onto the scene as “the word of the year in American politics” in 1964, but it described one of the oldest and deepest patterns in American politics, one that is once again playing out today in the right-wing campaign against social distancing. Backlashes appear as seemingly serial and discrete events—against the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, or the women’s movement in the ’70s, or the gay-rights movement in the ’90s. But this obscures an underlying continuity: These individual backlashes are all instances of a reactionary tradition, one that is deeply woven into American political culture and that extends back to the era of Reconstruction, at least. And the backlashes are powerful not only for the fury they represent, but in the fear they instill in political leaders, even progressives, who hesitate to push things “too far.”

During Reconstruction, opponents of the black-freedom struggle deployed preemptive, apocalyptic, slippery-slope arguments that have remained enduring features of backlash politics up to the present. They treated federal support for African American civil rights, economic and social equality—however delayed, reluctant, underfunded, and incomplete it may have been—as a cataclysmic overreaction and framed it as a far more dangerous threat to liberty than the injustice it was designed to address. In 1867, not even two years after ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle decried the placement of political power “in the hands of a property-less and ignorant class of the population,” and pronounced that “the pending Reconstruction scheme must be abandoned.”

Since then, such framing has done more than merely shape the politics of reaction in the United States; it has also constrained putatively supportive political leaders, who live in fear of setting off backlashes. Responding to a moderate plan to enfranchise only free blacks in Louisiana in 1864, the Union general Nathaniel P. Banks, worrying about a negative response from the state’s whites, who were being defeated in the Civil War, said, “Revolutions which are not controlled and held within reasonable limits produce counter-revolution.” That obeisance to a defeated group in 1864 was an extreme version of a general pattern that has remained a hallmark of backlashes ever since: solicitousness to white fears.

For many white backlashers in the 1960s, the era of what the historian C. Vann Woodward called the “second Reconstruction,” the first Reconstruction remained a negative model. They viewed its reform as overly fast-paced, and felt that it foregrounded black civil rights at the cost of white people’s peace of mind. They associated civil-rights activism with what popular historians and commentators of the day called the “excesses” of Reconstruction, by which they meant a combination of “militant” African American demands for basic equality with overweening, aggressive, and hasty federal action in support of interracial democracy. Thurman Sensing of the Southern States Industrial Council, a conservative business group, described the civil-rights movement in 1966 as an effort to force “the Reconstruction of American customs,” showing the degree to which the post–Civil War campaign for racial equality remained a central metaphor for white backlashers. The journalist in December 1963 who noted the political power of those opposed to “Negro pressure for equal opportunity and the Federal Government’s pace on the Civil Rights front,” could just as easily have been describing the origins of the counterrevolution of the 1870s.

There was, then, nothing particularly novel about the constituent elements of white backlash to the civil-rights movement: its smoldering resentment, its belief that the movement was proceeding “too fast,” its demands for emotional and psychological sympathy, and its displacement of African Americans’ struggles with its own claims of grievance.

What is particularly noteworthy is that the white backlash in this case was in place before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. The pattern is this: American reactionary politics is nearly always preemptive, predicting catastrophe and highlighting potential slippery slopes. “White backlash,” after all, got its name in 1963, just months after African Americans in Birmingham risked attacks from police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses in order to demand justice, and immediately after Kennedy mooted the idea of substantive legislation—both events taking place well before the Civil Rights Act became law. What one reporter called “white panic” was driven by fears of “favoritism” and “special privileges” for African Americans—that white “workers would be forced out of their jobs to make way for Negroes,” as one article put it that year, when Jim Crow still prevailed. “Many of my people think the Negroes want to take over the country,” a midwestern Republican politician said in a Wall Street Journal article published on April 10 of the following year, still months before the Act’s passage. “They think there are things in the bill that just aren’t there, like forced sales of housing to Negroes and stuff like that.” White backlashers imagined coercion where it did not exist. They embraced a lexicon and posture of victimization that hearkened back to the era of Reconstruction and anticipated the deceiving, self-pitying MAGA discourse that drives reactionary politics in Donald Trump’s America.

As Glickman notes, the very virulent campaign against social distancing (almost certainly getting a major assist from social media bots) is reactionary in nature.  Once the COVID-19 pandemic caused people to question why black and brown Americans had a higher fatality rate from the virus, and that front-line "essential" workers in the food service and health care sectors (also disproportionally black and brown) were the most at-risk, social distancing became "unnecessary" for white America.

Instead of tackling the racial disparities in America's health care system as a result of COVID-19, the virus became a "Democrat hoax" and the direct aid for those who needed it the most (also disproportionally black and brown) became "handouts" and "bribes". It was criminally easy to weaponize the response to the virus in the Trump era, and that's exactly what's happened.

The States Go Viral, Con't

The second COVID-19 wave is coming, right now, in almost half the US states.

The coronavirus may still be spreading at epidemic rates in 24 states, particularly in the South and Midwest, according to new research that highlights the risk of a second wave of infections in places that reopen too quickly or without sufficient precautions.

Researchers at Imperial College London created a model that incorporates cellphone data showing that people sharply reduced their movements after stay-at-home orders were broadly imposed in March. With restrictions now easing and mobility increasing with the approach of Memorial Day and the unofficial start of summer, the researchers developed an estimate of viral spread as of May 17.

It is a snapshot of a transitional moment in the pandemic and captures the patchwork nature across the country of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Some states have had little viral spread or “crushed the curve” to a great degree and have some wiggle room to reopen their economies without generating a new epidemic-level surge in cases. Others are nowhere near containing the virus.

The model, which has not been peer reviewed, shows that in the majority of states, a second wave looms if people abandon efforts to mitigate the viral spread.

“There’s evidence that the U.S. is not under control, as an entire country,” said Samir Bhatt, a senior lecturer in geostatistics at Imperial College.

The model shows potentially ominous scenarios if people move around as they did previously and do so without taking precautions. In California and Florida, the death rate could spike to roughly 1,000 a day by July without efforts to mitigate the spread, according to the report.

Other models released in recent days captured a similarly mixed picture. The PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia used county-level forecasts that found much of the country was in decent shape for reopening, but worrisome areas remain, including Houston, Dallas, South Florida and Alabama.

On this Memorial Day weekend, some people will visit areas that may not have had much exposure to the virus, said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab.

“This is the first test of the system,” Rubin said. “Those areas that succeed this weekend are going to succeed because they’ve developed strong regulations on how they’re going to do this.”

The Imperial College researchers estimated the virus’s reproduction number, known as R0, or R naught. This is the average number of infections generated by each infected person in a vulnerable population. The researchers found the reproduction number has dropped below 1 in the District and 26 states. In those places, as of May 17, the epidemic was waning.

In 24 states, however, the model shows a reproduction number over 1. Texas tops the list, followed by Arizona, Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, Alabama, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico, Missouri, Delaware, South Carolina, Massachusetts, North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Maryland.

With the notable exceptions of New York, New Jersey and Michigan, the other seven of the ten most populous states are still all in epidemic status: CA, IL, MA, FL, OH, NC and PA.  It's going to be a lethal Memorial Day weekend, and by mid-June it's going to be clear that reopening is going to come at a bloody cost.

America is bored of social distancing?

We're about to be bored to death of it.

Last Call For Tales Of The Trump Depression, Con't

The retail apocalypse continues unabated.

Hertz filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid rising debt and a sharp drop in demand for rental cars during the coronavirus pandemic. 

The company is the latest travel-related business to fall victim to the coronavirus, which has grounded travelers and tourists and led to a sharp drop in revenue. 

“The impact of COVID-19 on travel demand was sudden and dramatic, causing an abrupt decline in the Company's revenue and future bookings," the company said in a statement. "Hertz took immediate actions to prioritize the health and safety of employees and customers, eliminate all non-essential spending and preserve liquidity. 

“However, uncertainty remains as to when revenue will return and when the used-car market will fully re-open for sales, which necessitated today's action," it continued. "The financial reorganization will provide Hertz a path toward a more robust financial structure that best positions the Company for the future as it navigates what could be a prolonged travel and overall global economic recovery.”

The company says it has over $1 billion cash on hand to keep its sites up and running while it undergoes the bankruptcy process.

“Today's action will protect the value of our business, allow us to continue our operations and serve our customers, and provide the time to put in place a new, stronger financial foundation to move successfully through this pandemic and to better position us for the future," said Hertz President and CEO Paul Stone. "Our loyal customers have made us one of the world's most iconic brands, and we look forward to serving them now and on their future journeys."

Entire sectors of the economy are going to be gone for good, taking tens of millions of jobs with them.  And on the other side of that equation, because we refuse to subsidize universal childcare and because daycares are rightfully closed, millions of women are leaving the workforce to care for kids.

If day cares closed because of the novel coronavirus, Aimee Rae Hannaford expected her family to fare better than most. She worked full time as the chief executive of a tech company while her husband stayed home. He’d been taking some time off from his own tech career, managing a rental property while considering his options. He could look after their 3-year-old son, she thought — at least for a while.

“That lasted a grand total of three days,” Hannaford said.

Once her son was home full time, she realized they’d need a different solution. She was holed up in the guest room, wielding dual-monitors at her desk. Her husband was exhausted. “I can’t do it,” she remembers him saying: “I can’t watch him for this long.”

Hannaford, 46, had been logging 70-hour weeks for years — and she was proud of the work she’d done. When she started her career in San Francisco, she was one of two women at a video game company, buying nondescript jeans and hoodies so she could be “one of the guys.” Eventually she came to run a company she co-founded, building open-source websites for clients like Stanford University. Hannaford, who oversaw software development, co-led a diverse team of 13 employees. She was intentional about hiring women, minorities and others who challenged the stereotypes about Silicon Valley.

Hannaford had long been planning to take six weeks off. It would be a time free from computers and headphones, she’d promised her husband. She’d make bath bombs with her son and plant pumpkins in the backyard.

But it was never the right time. Her co-founder, busy with her own kids and aging parents, was able to help out less and less. Even outside work hours, Hannaford would field emails and take calls as her son, Ryan, climbed into her lap and tried to grab her phone. Her husband would plead with her to “get off the computer,” she said, teaching Ryan a trick to get her attention: When she wasn’t responding, her son would call her “Aimee” instead of “Mom.” (Hannaford’s husband declined to comment for this story.)

When the company lost a client because of the coronavirus, Hannaford realized she’d have to devote even more time to work. If she really pushed herself, she knew she could probably keep the company going even if day care closed. But could she ask her husband to handle 12-hour shifts of child care, with no help, no breaks and no clear end point? She wasn’t sure her family could survive that. She wasn’t sure he’d do it, even if she asked.

“I thought to myself, ‘I can carry this company forward, but I’m going to be so broken. My son will be so broken. My husband will be so broken.’ ”

Remember, it didn't have to be this way.  But Donald Trump was in charge and he blew it, and Mitch McConnell won't lift a finger.

The front page of The New York Times for May 24, 2020 pic.twitter.com/Mp4figjnQe

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 23, 2020

Never forget.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

The Barr Justice Department is starting to make its move against states with Democratic governors and lockdown orders, beginning with Illinois and Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

In a move that has long been threatened and long anticipated, the U.S. Department of Justice on Friday filed a “statement of interest” in a lawsuit against coronavirus-related executive orders issued by Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker, a Democrat. The plaintiff in the lawsuit against the governor is Darren Bailey, a Republican who serves a rural southeastern Illinois district in the state’s House of Representatives. 

The U.S. DOJ’s decision to join Bailey’s fight — coincidentally — came only two days after Bailey was thrown out of his own legislative chamber for failing to wear a mask. The bipartisan vote to temporarily eject him was 81-27, the Washington Post reported. “You’re silencing millions of voices of people who have had enough,” Bailey said of the Thursday vote. Bailey’s district contains closer to 107,000 people. 

The crux of the case has nothing to do with that little tidbit, however. According to the DOJ’s news release and several court documents obtained by Law&Crime, Bailey says his governor’s several coronavirus orders are illegal because they, when taken together, have lasted longer than thirty days. Bailey argues that the governor can only exercise emergency powers for 30 days under the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Act. 

In essence, Bailey seems to suggest that the governor cannot reissue new executive orders as time goes on to deal with continuing, changing events — it’s one and done in his apparent view. Bailey’s statements on the matter also indicate he wants the state health department’s pandemic response plan to rule the state’s response to the virus, not the governor’s executive order. The health department’s pandemic response plan would, Bailey says, empower local governments. 

Bailey filed the original case in Illinois state courts, but the governor removed it to federal court. Bailey has previously accused the governor of forum-shopping within the state’s own courts. 

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is reviewing the orders of local governments “to ensure that civil liberties are protected during the COVID-19 pandemic,” a press release said. Eric Dreiband, of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and Matthew Schneider, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, are spearheading the reviews. 

Buried at the bottom of the DOJ’s news release announcing its self-injection into the claim was the suggestion that states should bend to the whims and wills of federal policy — and, of course, federal law. 

“Even in the face of a pandemic, states must comply with their own laws in making these sensitive policy choices in a manner responsive to the people and, in doing so, both respect and serve the goals of our broader federal structure, including the guarantee of due process in the U.S. Constitution,” the DOJ’s news release said. 

“The Governor of Illinois owes it to the people of Illinois to allow his state’s courts to adjudicate the question of whether Illinois law authorizes orders he issued to respond to COVID-19,” said Dreiband in the statement. “The United States Constitution and state constitutions established a system of divided and limited governmental power, and they did so to secure the blessings of liberty to all people in our country. Under our system, all public officials, including governors, must comply with the law, especially during times of crisis.” 

“However well-intentioned they may be, the executive orders appear to reach far beyond the scope of the 30-day emergency authority granted to the Governor under Illinois law,” said Steven D. Weinhoeft, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois. He was slightly more cautious, however. “[W]hile the people of Illinois must be physically protected from the effects of this public health crisis, including by complying with CDC guidelines[,] their constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties must be safeguarded as well.” 

The DOJ’s statement of interest says the case belongs in state court. “[T]he complaint does not raise any federal constitutional claims,” the DOJ said.

The argument is Illinois specifically does have a limit on emergency orders, something that Califronia and other blue states do not, hence why Barr is starting with Illinois.

Make no mistake however, the Barr Justice Department is under direct orders to find a way to legally justify punishing states that issue (or re-issue) lockdown orders.

You and your family will be free to die for Dear Leader Trump, citizen.

Or else.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump's newest press flack is displaying exactly the level of competence we've come to expect in Trump hires. Only the best people, remember?

It’s a feel-good story that President Trump’s press secretaries have relished over the years: the quarterly announcement of which government agency Mr. Trump has selected to be the lucky recipient of his salary, an easy way to show the president sticking to his 2016 campaign pledge to forgo his $400,000 salary and donate it.

In the past, the $100,000 check from Mr. Trump has been made out to the Small Business Administration initiative to help veteran entrepreneurs, to the Office of the Surgeon General to fight the opioid epidemic, and to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, among other places.

But on Friday, Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, did not just reveal that the president was sending his salary to the Department of Health and Human Services to help “support the efforts being undertaken to confront, contain and combat the coronavirus.”

She also displayed the president’s private bank account and routing numbers.
The $100,000 check she held up like a prop appeared to be a real check from Capital One, complete with the relevant details. An administration official said mock checks were never used in the briefing.

A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, said in a statement, “Today his salary went to help advance new therapies to treat this virus, but leave it to the media to find a shameful reason not to simply report the facts, focusing instead on whether the check is real or not.”

For an average civilian, that information could be used to withdraw or deposit money, make online purchases or hack an account.

“It’s not a best practice to share that information publicly,” said Eva Velasquez, the president and chief executive of the Identity Theft Resource Center. “If you don’t have protections in place, there are sophisticated schemes and ways someone could access those funds knowing the account and routing number and the individual person it belongs to.”

These clowns can't even get a simple thing right like "Don't display a person's account and check routing numbers on national TV" right.  And we're supposed to believe they have a handle on classified intelligence?

Jesus, what morons these people be.

Reade, Between The Lines

Joe Biden sexual assault accuser Tara Reade just had what little remaining credibility she had destroyed this week, and it was made clear on Friday that Reade has been materially misrepresenting herself for an extraordinarily long time.

The lawyer for Tara Reade, the former Senate aide who has accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of sexual assault, said Friday that he was no longer representing her, just two weeks after taking her on as a client.

The lawyer, Douglas H. Wigdor, has been a leading plaintiff’s attorney of the #MeToo era. His firm is best known for bringing discrimination cases against Fox News — and its former star host Bill O’Reilly — and Harvey Weinstein, and his presence at Ms. Reade’s side gave her claims added legal heft.

His announced departure came a day after defense lawyers in California said they were reviewing criminal cases in which Ms. Reade served as an expert witness on domestic violence, concerned that she had misrepresented her educational credentials in court.
While not providing a reason for leaving, Mr. Wigdor said his decision was “by no means a reflection on whether then-Senator Biden sexually assaulted Ms. Reade,” adding that he was among the 55 percent of Americans who believe her, according to a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll.

Mr. Wigdor, a conservative Republican whose support for President Trump in 2016 did not preclude him from suing prominent Trump allies, had a parting shot for the news media, which he accused of applying a “double standard” to its coverage of accusations against the presumed Democratic nominee.

“Much of what has been written about Ms. Reade is not probative of whether then-Senator Biden sexually assaulted her, but rather is intended to victim-shame and attack her credibility on unrelated and irrelevant matters,” he said. “We have and will continue to represent survivors regardless of their alleged predator’s status or politics.”

Ms. Reade did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her lawyer’s departure.

He is leaving as her credibility is coming under harsh scrutiny. On Thursday in California, lawyers who had faced off against her in court began raising questions about the legitimacy of her testimony, and the verdicts that followed, after news reports that Antioch University had disputed her claim of receiving a bachelor’s degree from its Seattle campus.

Then known as Alexandra McCabe, Ms. Reade testified as a government witness in Monterey County courts for nearly a decade, describing herself as an expert in the dynamics of domestic violence who had counseled hundreds of victims.

The public defender’s office in Monterey County has begun scrutinizing cases involving Ms. Reade and compiling a list of clients who may have been affected by her testimony, according to Jeremy Dzubay, an assistant public defender in the office.

Roland Soltesz, a criminal defense lawyer, says he believes Ms. Reade’s testimony made a significant difference in the outcome of the 2018 trial of his client Victoria Ramirez. Both Ms. Ramirez and her co-defendant, Jennifer Vasquez, received life sentences for attempted murder, arson and armed robbery.

“People have been convicted based upon this, and that’s wrong,” said Mr. Soltesz, adding that he “could care less about the politics of this whole thing.”

Me Too and Believe Women doesn't mean "buy a con job from somebody who has made a career of being a con artist."  Reade is facing serious accusations of misrepresenting herself as professional expert witness with credentials of a degree that she apparently never had.

If your lawyer leaves you because they find your credibility lacking, then you have a problem.

The larger issue is "Did Joe Biden sexually assault Tara Reade?"

The people who know Biden and who vetted him say this never happened.  Biden said it never happened, and Biden freely says if you believe Reade, then you shouldn't vote for him. But as the above article mentions, a majority of Americans in at least one poll, some 55%, do believe Reade.

I believe Biden at this point.  It would mean that essentially every Democratic politician in the 21st century is lying to cover for him, and if that's the truth, then we really do deserve another four years of Trump.