Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorist Problem, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. 

 

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

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

To be fair, there's a lot of work to be done.

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

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

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

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

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

"Nearly 300 state lawmakers and others participated in the briefing, which also featured an address by President Trump," the group said. "Also on the call were Rudy Giuliani; professor of law John Eastman; Peter Navarro, Assistant to the President for Trade and Manufacturing (appearing in his personal capacity), and John Lott, Senior Advisor, U.S. Department of Justice (also appearing in his personal capacity)."

 

We've been failed before, and while I still trust Garland to deliver in the end, it's going to come at a ruinous cost.

Sunday Long Read: To Suffer Enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Lovelace bought Morrison a gun for her birthday, Mackenzie wrote, “If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m terrified.” She described an incident, a year earlier, when she had fallen asleep watching a movie in her mom’s bed and woke up to Lovelace on top of her, “feeling my boobs, running his hand around my inner thighs & exploring other places.” She got out from under him, ran into her own room, and eventually called her mother, who wasn’t home, and related what had happened. “She just bursts out laughing,” Mackenzie wrote. Her mother told her that it was an accident, saying, “I’m flattered that he got me mixed up with my 15-year-old daughter.” In the year since the episode, Mackenzie said, Lovelace had continued to sexually assault her. She felt as if her mother were both sanctioning his abuse—“offering me up to him on a silver platter,” as she later described it—and punishing her for attracting Lovelace’s attention. “I still just don’t understand why she won’t protect me,” Mackenzie wrote. “Did I do something wrong to make her not want to?”

 

What follows is a hard and ugly tale. Mackenzie says that she fought hard to get to Penn. Penn, in evaluating her Rhodes Scholar application, says that Mackenzie is lying and manipulating the story to get what she wants.

 

It's a pretty haunting read, because the thing is, we all know somebody exactly like her, and we have the same suspicions about someone who has clearly overcome serious issues to find success. The cost of that success, it seems, is very steep.

The Big Lie, Georgia Edition, Con't

As Greg Sargent notes, both of Trump's GOP primary picks in Georgia, former Sen. David Perdue for Governor, and Rep. Jody Hice for Secretary of State, are now openly running on annulling the 2020 Biden election win and doing so again in 2024 if Democrats win.

At first, Perdue kept this subtle, if that’s the word for it. He ran an ad featuring Trump, who intoned that Kemp had “let us down.” That implicitly criticized Kemp’s refusal to steal the election for Trump, but without saying so directly.

But now Perdue is all in, declaring outright this week that the 2020 election was indeed stolen. It was actually ratified by numerous audits and recounts, but as Steve Benen notes, this was plainly necessary to keep Trump happy with Perdue’s candidacy.

For good measure, at a rally this week Perdue visibly encouraged the crowd when it chanted “lock him up” about Kemp.

Perdue subsequently backtracked. But Perdue’s campaign promoted his “lock him up” moment, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, boosting the idea that Kemp should be imprisoned for disloyalty to Trump, in an effort to “gain ground” against Kemp among Trump voters.

On top of all this, Perdue has openly declared that he would not have certified Trump’s 2020 loss, as Kemp did. It’s reasonable to read this as an implicit vow not to certify a future loss on the basis of made-up voter fraud claims. It’s also fair to ask whether as governor Perdue would certify a fake slate of electors for Trump or an imitator in 2024, in defiance of the state’s popular vote, which could be counted by a GOP House.

But it gets even worse. Trump has endorsed Rep. Jody Hice’s (R-Ga.) primary challenge to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. One of Raffensperger’s chief transgressions? He rebuffed Trump’s pressure to literally manufacture votes out of thin air to reverse the outcome.

Hice, then, is not just a loyal devotee of Trump’s lies about 2020. He’s really running on an implicit willingness to do what Raffensperger would not, i.e., use his official powers to overturn a future loss. Indeed, this is partly why Trump endorsed him! Hice may still win, but this is proving much closer than observers expected. Trump’s lies are not proving as potent here, either.

This sort of mania is unfolding in many other states. To take just one other bonkers example: the Associated Press reports that a GOP candidate for secretary of state in Ohio who previously acknowledged Trump’s 2020 loss has now backflipped and declared the election stolen.

Why? Apparently because he’s facing primary challengers who full-throatedly embrace that lie, and he needed to keep pace.

At this point there are plenty of Republicans swearing loyalty not to America or the Constitution or even to their own constituents, they are swearing loyalty to Donald Trump, and vowing to overthrow the Biden administration through whatever means necessary. 

The sedition is no longer a conspiracy, it's an open political platform, with candidates openly running on toppling the current government and assisting in a coup. These are true believers, folks.

And this is what the GOP has become. It's not about gaining power, it's not about governing, it's not even about Trump. It's about fascist, permanent, total domination where the opposition is outlawed and the ruling class is the white supremacist theocracy.

They are conducting this right now in the open, and way too many of us accept this as normal, "both sides are bad, why should I bother" politics.

The GOP is coming for everything and everybody, they are openly telling us this. You need to start caring and start voting.

Last Call For Unions From A to Z

Workers in Staten Island have become the first Amazon distribution warehouse to unionize, despite a massive labor suppression campaign by the wealthiest company on Earth.

Amazon workers at a fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York, have voted to unionize, a first for Amazon, and a stunning win for a grassroots campaign led by former and current Amazon employees.

The historic vote was 2,654 for the union to 2,131 against.

Ballots were cast in person over five days starting last Friday. Roughly 8,000 workers were eligible to vote.

The workers, who pick and package items for customer orders at the facility will be represented by the Amazon Labor Union, an upstart group formed by Christian Smalls after he was fired from Amazon in March 2020. At the time a supervisor at the fulfillment center, he staged a walkout over the lack of worker protections against the coronavirus. Amazon says Smalls violated safety protocols by showing up after he'd been told to quarantine due to a COVID exposure.

Shortly after being fired, Smalls formed the Amazon Labor Union, relying on GoFundMe to finance the operation. The ALU is not affiliated with any national union, leading many to wonder early on whether it could even gather enough employee signatures to petition for a vote. Indeed, a first attempt failed, but Smalls persevered, eventually meeting the 30% threshold necessary to hold a vote.

Amazon mounted a robust anti-union campaign. Inside the warehouse, management hung "Vote No" banners and held mandatory meetings at which workers were urged to reject the ALU, which it referred to as a third party. The company has maintained that it prefers to work directly with its employees to make Amazon a great place to work.


Earlier this year, several union organizers, including Smalls, were arrested for trespassing as they delivered food and union materials to the Amazon parking lot.

Organizers have been calling for higher wages, longer breaks, paid sick leave and paid time off for injuries sustained on the job, among other demands. In Staten Island, Amazon wages start at $18.25 an hour, higher than many of its competitors. But Smalls has argued that in New York, that kind of wage is not high enough.

"Most of these workers do have a second job, or they still get government assistance," he told NPR last fall. "We need to raise the bar higher, especially when you're talking about one of the richest retailers in the world that can afford to do it."

In late April, workers at a second location on Staten Island, a sorting center across the street from the warehouse, will get their chance to vote on whether to join the ALU. Additionally, there are two other warehouses in the complex that Smalls says they are working to organize.

The Staten Island warehouse was only the second Amazon facility to hold a union election. The first, a mail ballot held last year at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, was invalidated by the National Labor Relations Board after it found that Amazon had improperly interfered in the election by having a mailbox installed in the facility's parking lot.

Votes in the do-over election were counted on Thursday, but the results were too close to call. 993 workers voted no, 875 voted yes, and more than 400 ballots were challenged by one side or the other. A hearing will be held in coming weeks to determine if any of the contested ballots will be opened and counted.

Turnout in the second Bessemer vote was 38.6%, down from last year's election when just over over half of Bessemer workers cast ballots, but the share of voters supporting the union grew. In the original election, workers rejected joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union by a more than 2-to-1 margin. Since then, the workforce has experienced large turnover, and organizers say door-knocking and other outreach was easier now that the pandemic has eased.

"This time around we were able to educate more about unions," said Amazon worker Jennifer Bates. "Last year, we weren't able to get as close to the employees to speak with them."

 

Two observations: One, Amazon warehouses are hell and these are exactly the workers being hurt the most by inflation and corporate greed. Good for them.

Two, they organized without the assistance or interference from national unions like the AFL-CIO or Teamsters. Considering how abysmal national unions have been in the last decade in actually improving worker conditions, the big national unions better ask themselves what they're doing wrong.

But I'm very happy to see this, and we need to have every Amazon warehouse with a union.

Meet Virginia

 

She doesn't own a dress, her hair is always a mess
If you catch her stealin', she won't confess
She's beautiful, she smokes a pack a day, wait that's me, but anyway
She doesn't care a thing about that, hey
She thinks I'm beautiful. 

Meet Virginia.

Years before she became one of then-President Donald Trump’s most prominent coup supporters, Ginni Thomas was already notorious in his West Wing for, among other things, ruining staffers’ afternoons by working Trump into fits of vengeful rage.

“We all knew that within minutes after Ginni left her meeting with the president, he would start yelling about firing people for being disloyal,” said a former senior Trump administration official. “When Ginni Thomas showed up, you knew your day was wrecked.”

Ever since she became a welcome guest at Trump’s residences, Thomas—an influential and longtime conservative activist, and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—had perfected a proven formula of enthralling and manipulating the president’s emotions and mood. On multiple occasions throughout the Trump era, Thomas would show up in the White House, sometimes for a private meeting or a luncheon with the president. She often came armed with written memos of who she and her allies believed Trump should hire for plum jobs—and who she thought Trump should promptly purge—that she distributed to Trump and other high-ranking government officials.

The fire lists were particularly problematic, as they were frequently based on pure conjecture, rumor, or score-settling, where even steadfastly MAGA aides were targeted for being part of the “Deep State” or some other supposedly anti-Trump coalition, according to people who saw them during the Trump administration. The hire lists were so often filled with infamous bigots and conspiracy theorists, woefully under-qualified names, and obvious close friends of Thomas that several senior Trump aides would laugh at them—that is, until Trump would force his staff to put certain names through the official vetting process, three sources familiar with the matter said.

During the Trump years, these memos would astonish various administration officials, including those working in the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO). Some of these officials noticed that as the Trump term went on, the Thomas lists would increasingly feature a disproportionate share of names more suited to an OAN guest line-up than any functional government. (To be fair, well before Ginni Thomas became a recurring visitor, Trump would routinely hire people because they had entertained or excited him, via Fox and other cable-news appearances.)

Officials in the PPO regularly annotated the margins of Thomas’ hire lists, usually including a single line for each rejected name, explaining why the prospective hires did not work out. Some failed background checks, or suffered from security-clearance hold-ups. Other annotations noted that a specific individual was offered a job in the Trump administration, but turned it down for whatever reason. 

Sometimes, the reason for the White House’s preemptive rejection, despite Thomas and Trump’s best efforts, were more outlandish. According to a person who reviewed one of the Thomas lists, one annotation for a MAGA job candidate noted that that individual had made too many extreme or offensive jokes on social media that were still visible.

Another of these annotations claimed that one recommendation for a Trump administration position was, in fact, a suspected foreign-intelligence asset, or spy.

Thomas did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Over the years, some of the specific names that Thomas had compiled and pushed to Trump and his West Wing have trickled out into the press. Among them were Fox News personality Dan Bongino, and the Trump-adulating Sheriff David Clarke.

And according to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Thomas had, unsuccessfully, advised the then-president to hire Frank Gaffney.

Gaffney, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, has spent the past two decades embracing some of the more absurd conspiracy theories circulating in the far right. He has accused conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist of being a secret agent for the Muslim Brotherhood and believes that American adversaries are working on secret electrical device-frying “electromagnetic pulse” weapons to zap America back to the pre-industrial age.

 
To recap, the wife of a sitting Supreme Court Justice was making hiring and firing decisions for the Trump regime, bigots, screwballs, racists, and crackpots all.

But sure, there was no way this was an influence on her husband's cases, right?

Well she wants to be the Queen
Then she thinks about her scene
Pulls her hair back as she screams
I don't really wanna be the queen

 

Meet Virginia.

Jobapalooza, Con't

More good news on the economic front as America added more than 430,000 jobs in March.

Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 431,000 for the month, while the unemployment rate was 3.6%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for 490,000 on payrolls and 3.7% for the jobless level.

An alternative measure of unemployment, which includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons fell to a seasonally adjusted 6.9%, down 0.3 percentage points from the previous month.

The moves in the jobless rates came as the labor force participation rate increased one-tenth of a percentage point to 62.4%, to within 1 point of its pre-pandemic level in February 2020. The labor force grew by 418,000 workers and is now within 174,000 of the pre-pandemic state.

Average hourly earnings, a closely watched inflation metric, increased 0.4% on the month, in line with expectations. On a 12-month basis, pay increased nearly 5.6%, just above the estimate. The average work week, which figures into productivity, edged down by 0.1 hour to 34.6 hours.

“All in all, nothing shocking about this report. There was nothing that was really surprising,” said Simona Mocuta, chief economist at State Street Global Advisors. “Even if this report came in at zero, I would still say this is a very healthy labor market.”

As has been the case through much of the pandemic era, leisure and hospitality led job creation with a gain of 112,000.

Professional and business services contributed 102,000 to the total, while retail was up 49,000 and manufacturing added 38,000. Other sectors reporting gains included social assistance (25,000), construction (19,000) and financial activities (16,000).

The survey of households painted an even more optimistic picture, showing a total employment gain of 736,000. That brought the total employment level within 408,000 of where it stood pre-pandemic.

Revisions from prior months also were strong. January’s total rose 23,000 to 504,000, while February was revised up to 750,000 compared to the initial count of 678,000. For the first quarter, job growth totaled 1.685 million, an average of nearly 562,000.

Among individual groups, the Black unemployment rate fell 0.4 percentage points to 6.2%, while the rate for Asians declined to 2.8% and to 4.2% for Hispanics.

 

Again, we're looking at explosive job growth where Biden will have dug us out of the Trump Depression in under 18 months, but this is "the worst economy of your lifetime" according to the people that cost us 22 million jobs in 2020. 

And we're going to put those assholes back in charge, apparently. That's the cruel April Fool's joke.

Last Call For Bad Medicine, Con't

House Democrats have successfully passed a bill capping insulin costs at $35 per month, but the measure faces heavy opposition in the Senate.

The House on Thursday passed a bill capping the monthly cost of insulin at $35 for insured patients, part of an election-year push by Democrats for price curbs on prescription drugs at a time of rising inflation.

Experts say the legislation, which passed 232-193, would provide significant relief for privately insured patients with skimpier plans and for Medicare enrollees facing rising out-of-pocket costs for their insulin. Some could save hundreds of dollars annually, and all insured patients would get the benefit of predictable monthly costs for insulin. The bill would not help the uninsured.

But the Affordable Insulin Now Act will serve as a political vehicle to rally Democrats and force Republicans who oppose it into uncomfortable votes ahead of the midterms. For the legislation to pass Congress, 10 Republican senators would have to vote in favor. Democrats acknowledge they don’t have an answer for how that’s going to happen.

“If 10 Republicans stand between the American people being able to get access to affordable insulin, that’s a good question for 10 Republicans to answer,” said Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., a cosponsor of the House bill. “Republicans get diabetes, too. Republicans die from diabetes.”

Public opinion polls have consistently shown support across party lines for congressional action to limit drug costs.

But Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., complained the legislation is only “a small piece of a larger package around government price controls for prescription drugs.” Critics say the bill would raise premiums and fails to target pharmaceutical middlemen seen as contributing to high list prices for insulin.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Democrats could have a deal on prescription drugs if they drop their bid to authorize Medicare to negotiate prices. “Do Democrats really want to help seniors, or would they rather have the campaign issue?” Grassley said.

The insulin bill, which would take effect in 2023, represents just one provision of a much broader prescription drug package in President Joe Biden’s social and climate legislation.

In addition to a similar $35 cap on insulin, the Biden bill would authorize Medicare to negotiate prices for a range of drugs, including insulin. It would penalize drugmakers who raise prices faster than inflation and overhaul the Medicare prescription drug benefit to limit out-of-pocket costs for enrollees.

Biden’s agenda passed the House only to stall in the Senate because Democrats could not reach consensus. Party leaders haven’t abandoned hope of getting the legislation moving again, and preserving its drug pricing curbs largely intact.

The idea of a $35 monthly cost cap for insulin actually has a bipartisan pedigree. The Trump administration had created a voluntary option for Medicare enrollees to get insulin for $35, and the Biden administration continued it.

In the Senate, Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire are working on a bipartisan insulin bill. Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has introduced legislation similar to the House bill, with the support of Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

Stung by criticism that Biden’s economic policies spur inflation, Democrats are redoubling efforts to show how they’d help people cope with costs. On Thursday, the Commerce Department reported a key inflation gauge jumped 6.4% in February compared with a year ago, the largest year-over-year rise since January 1982.

But experts say the House bill would not help uninsured people, who face the highest out-of-pocket costs for insulin. Also, people with diabetes often take other medications as well as insulin. That’s done to treat the diabetes itself, along with other serious health conditions often associated with the disease. The House legislation would not help with those costs, either. Collins says she’s looking for a way to help uninsured people through her bill.

 

And that's the rub, the bill does absolutely nothing for capping costs for the uninsured. It's better than nothing, but there are still millions who are going to suffer, and Republicans will just make everyone suffer, because it's what they do.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

A federal judge today struck down several provisions of the state GOP's nightmarish voter suppression law, ordering the state placed under the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance clause for blatantly unconstitutional acts.

 

In his decision issued Thursday, Judge Mark Walker ruled that the provisions in the law restricting drop boxes, creating new requirements for voter applications including vote-by-mail, and banning interactions with voters on line were unconstitutional and could not be enforced by the state. The law was a top priority of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The decision also put Florida under the “preclearance” provisions of the federal Voting Rights Act, a measure first used on mostly Southern states in the 1960s to prevent them from discriminating against minorities in the voting booth. Under it, the state would need federal court approval to make any revisions to its elections laws for the next 10 years.

Walker cited Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote about Americans not being “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” but added that a few years later King said, “some of the old optimism was a little superficial and now it must be tempered with a solid realism.”

“While this Court lauds the idealism of Dr. King’s dream in 1963, this Court is not so naïve to believe that the Florida Legislature would not pass an intentionally discriminatory law in 2021,” Walker wrote. “We do not live in a colorblind society— not that this was ever Dr. King’s point.

“For the past 20 years, the majority in the Florida Legislature has attacked the voting rights of its Black constituents,” Walker wrote. “They have done so not as, in the words of Dr. King, ‘vicious racists, with [the] governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification,’ but as part of a cynical effort to suppress turnout among their opponents’ supporters. That, the law does not permit.”

 

This is a big win, but I expect it will be quickly blocked by the 11th Circuit for being too close to the primary elections.  You know, the ones in late August.

We'll see if this holds. It is a major win for today.

I don't think it will last..

The Burned Bridges Of Madison Cawthorn, Con't

NC GOP Rep Madison Cawthorn can't help himself, it seems. The youngest member of the US House can't stop acting like your obnoxious Gen Z co-worker who knows everything (of course) but won't stop pissing off the management, and it looks like this time he's gotten dragged into Principal McCarthy's office for ratting out the big after-prom party, and now the football team wants him gone.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina is throwing his weight behind a primary opponent to freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn -- an extraordinary broadside against a fellow Republican from his home state, as internal frustration with the controversial MAGA firebrand reaches a boiling point. 

"It comes down to focus on the district, producing results for the district, and in my opinion, Mr. Cawthorn hasn't demonstrated much in the way of results over the last 18 months," Tillis told CNN, describing why he is backing state Sen. Chuck Edwards in his primary against Cawthorn. 

And Tillis may not be alone. Other GOP lawmakers who are at their wits' end with Cawthorn are considering endorsing one of his primary foes, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions, amid growing concerns that the North Carolina Republican is dragging down the entire party with his problematic behavior. The two most powerful North Carolina Republicans in the state legislature -- Senate leader Phil Berger and House speaker Tim Moore -- are headlining a fundraiser for Edwards on Thursday, according to the Edwards campaign. 

It's the latest sign of turmoil for the 26-year-old, who has angered and annoyed a wide swath of his colleagues with a steady stream of controversial antics and attempts to play political kingmaker in North Carolina and beyond. Most recently, Cawthorn sparked an uproar after claiming on a podcast that people in Washington have invited him to participate in orgies and used cocaine in front of him. Even fellow members of the House Freedom Caucus, a far-right crew with a penchant for controversy, have turned on Cawthorn: They've floated the idea of kicking him out of the group if he didn't clarify his wild accusations, according to GOP sources, though such a step seems unlikely. 

Amid complaints from members, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy hauled Cawthorn into his office Wednesday morning and pressed him on the unsettling allegations, which he said Cawthorn admitted were untrue, and told the freshman lawmaker he needs to get his act together or else he could face internal consequences. 

"He's got to turn himself around," McCarthy told reporters. "I just told him he's lost my trust, and he's going to have to earn it back. I laid out everything I find that's unbecoming. ... He's got a lot of members upset. You can't just make statements out there."

 

The whole Zack Morris/Principal Belding dynamic is fascinating on one level, but it just proves some people peaked in high school.

This is one example where a GOP primary fight may actually not produce a worse Republican, as the worse one is already in office.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Mind The Gap Edition, Con't

And this week's story on "possible" call records missing from the Trump WH call log on January 6th, 2021 just became actual calls missing as the Guardian's Hugo Lowell backs up the Washington Post story with information that GOP Utah Sen. Mike Lee's call should have been on that list, because Trump absolutely talked to him during the nearly 8-hour gap.

Donald Trump used an official White House phone to place at least one call during the Capitol attack on January 6 last year that should have been reflected in the internal presidential call log from that day but was not, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The former president called the phone of a Republican senator, Mike Lee, with a number recorded as 202-395-0000, a placeholder number that shows up when a call is incoming from a number of White House department phones, the sources said.

The number corresponds to an official White House phone and the call was placed by Donald Trump himself, which means the call should have been recorded in the internal presidential call log that was turned over to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.

Trump’s call to Lee was reported at the time, as well as its omission from the call log, by the Washington Post and CBS. But the origin of the call as coming from an official White House phone, which has not been previously reported, raises the prospect of tampering or deletion by Trump White House officials.

It also appears to mark perhaps the most serious violation of the Presidential Record Act – the statute that mandates preservation of White House records pertaining to a president’s official duties – by the Trump White House concerning January 6 records to date.

A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump called Lee at 2.26pm on January 6 through the official 202-395-0000 White House number, according to call detail records reviewed by the Guardian and confirmation by the two sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The call was notable as Trump mistakenly dialed Lee thinking it was the number for Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville. Lee passed the phone to Tuberville, who told Trump Mike Pence had just been removed from the Senate chamber as rioters stormed the Capitol.

But Trump’s call to Lee was not recorded in either the presidential daily diary or the presidential call log – a problem because even though entries in the daily diary are discretionary, according to several current and former White House officials, the call log is not.

The presidential daily diary is a retrospective record of the president’s day produced by aides in the Oval Office, who have some sway to determine whether a particular event was significant enough to warrant its inclusion, the officials said.

But the presidential call log, typically generated from data recorded when calls are placed by the White House operators, is supposed to be a comprehensive record of all incoming and outgoing calls involving the president through White House channels, the officials said.

The fact that Trump’s call to Lee was routed through an official White House phone with a 202-395 prefix – either through a landline in the West Wing, the White House residence or a “work” cellphone – means details of that call should have been on the call log.

The only instance where a call might not be reflected on the unclassified presidential call log, the officials said, would be if the call was classified, which would seem to be unlikely in the case of the call to Lee. The absence of Trump’s call to Lee suggests a serious breach in protocol and possible manipulation, the officials said.

 

As I said, we're at the "cover-up" part of this, on top of the crime being "seditious conspiracy to defraud the United States government".  January 6th Committee knows, Merrick Garland knows, the cases are being prepared.

The only question is time now.

The Tik-Tok GOP PNG Tech Wreck

Expecting Facebook to go after the hot mobile social media app of the moment Tik-Tok is normal, they're a direct competitor for social media clicks, ads, and eyeballs. But what Facebook actually did was far worse and far more frightening: it hired a GOP online disinformation factory to create fake controversy in order to bury the company and make it ripe for takeover.

Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.

Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.

Targeted Victory needs to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” a director for the firm wrote in a February email.

Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.

“Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren’t where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused,” a Targeted Victory staffer wrote.

The emails, which have not been previously reported, show the extent to which Meta and its partners will use opposition-research tactics on the Chinese-owned, multibillion-dollar rival that has become one of the most downloaded apps in the world, often outranking even Meta’s popular Facebook and Instagram apps. In an internal report last year leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, Facebook researchers said teens were spending “2-3X more time” on TikTok than Instagram, and that Facebook’s popularity among young people had plummeted.

Targeted Victory declined to respond to questions about the campaign, saying only that it has represented Meta for several years and is “proud of the work we have done.”

In one email, a Targeted Victory director asked for ideas on local political reporters who could serve as a “back channel” for anti-TikTok messages, saying the firm “would definitely want it to be hands off.”

In other emails, Targeted Victory urged partners to push stories to local media tying TikTok to dangerous teen trends in an effort to show the app’s purported harms. “Any local examples of bad TikTok trends/stories in your markets?” a Targeted Victory staffer asked.

“Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids,’ ” the staffer wrote.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone defended the campaign by saying, “We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success.”

 

And please note who Meta went to: a GOP firm, with GOP lobbying clients and direct connections to GOP members of Congress, to turn the national GOP disinformation machine against Tik-Tok in order to destroy it completely. 

They're doing it with complete disinformation, accusing Tik-Tok of starting "trends" that are "harmful to kids", trends that simply don't exist:

One trend Targeted Victory sought to enhance through its work was the “devious licks'' challenge, which showed students vandalizing school property. Through the “Bad TikTok Clips” document, the firm pushed stories about the “devious licks” challenge in local media across Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

That trend led Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) to write a letter in September calling on TikTok executives to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee, saying the app had been “repeatedly misused and abused to promote behavior and actions that encourage harmful and destructive acts.” But according to an investigation by Anna Foley at the podcast network Gimlet, rumors of the “devious licks” challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok.

In October, Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news, touting a local news report on the alleged challenge in Hawaii. In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok. Again, the rumor started on Facebook, according to a series of Facebook posts first documented by Insider.

 

Facebook really is a tremendously evil company, and of course they are paying the tremendously evil political party to user their propaganda and disinformation outlets.

Remember that in November.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

In the last 24 hours, Republicans have unleashed their plan to fully go after Joe Biden's son, Hunter, and make his prosecution the number one political issue heading into November. Donald Trump flat-out asked Vladimir Putin to release anything that Moscow happens to have on Hunter Biden.

 

In a new interview published Tuesday, former President Donald Trump called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release any damaging information he has about the Biden family, in a brazen request for domestic political assistance from America's top adversary. 

It's the latest example of Trump's willingness to solicit and embrace domestic political help from foreign powers -- even from Putin, who is currently overseeing a bloody war against Ukraine. 

In an interview with JustTheNews, Trump pushed an unproven claim about Hunter Biden's business dealings in Russia, and asked Putin to release any information that he might have about the situation. It's not clear that any material exists, or if the Kremlin has access to it. 

"I would think Putin would know the answer to that," Trump said, referring to Hunter Biden's potential dealings in Russia. "I think he should release it. I think we should know that answer." 

It is true that Hunter Biden was paid handsomely for consulting work he did in foreign countries, including Ukraine and China, while his father -- President Joe Biden -- was vice president. The Justice Department has an ongoing criminal investigation into these dealings and potential financial crimes. 

But no evidence has emerged to support Trump's claims that the Bidens engaged in corruption or influenced US policy for personal gain, and the President hasn't been implicated in the probe. Hunter Biden has denied wrongdoing and says he'll be cleared when the criminal probe is over.

 

Here stateside, Republicans in Congress are already trying to introduce "evidence" against Hunter Biden.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) entered a copy of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop hard drive into the Congressional record during a House cybersecurity meeting Tuesday.

The Florida Republican had earlier asked for unanimous consent to do so, but was denied after House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) objected.

Eventually, Gaetz received his wish as Nadler relented, meaning the notorious drive from the son of President Joe Biden is a matter of Congressional record.

Gaetz celebrated on his Twitter account and shared a video of the moment.

“Moments ago, I successfully entered the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s laptop into the Congressional Record. SUBPOENA HUNTER BIDEN!” he tweeted.

 

Gaetz, by the way, still facing his own Justice Department bribery and sexual assault of minors investigation, so his "hard drive" could, you know, have anything on it. But Gaetz is almost certainly headed for federal indictment soon, why not go for broke with fake evidence?

 

The clown show continues.

 

 

 

 

Last Call For Rand's Way

As President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law today, understand that while this is a huge win for us Black folk, as we've been fighting for centuries in otrder to get lynching classified as a federal crime, Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul is also claiming victory by limiting the bill's additions to federal hate crimes to just lynching, as Paul has blocked the legislation like this for his entire Senate career until now. Earlier this month, Morgan Watkins at the Louisville Courier-Journal explained why.

Nearly two years after he received intense criticism for pumping the brakes on the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, Sen. Rand Paul is co-sponsoring a new version of that legislation and told The Courier Journal he expects the Senate will unanimously pass it.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., introduced the bipartisan legislation this week. Paul, R-Ky., said he’ll be cosponsoring it, too.

The bill would classify lynching as a federal hate crime and is named in honor of Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 and whose horrific death catalyzed the civil rights movement.

"I think it's great to have the legislation, you know, to remember Emmett Till but also to remember a terrible time in our history and to know that we're a better place and a better people now," Paul told The Courier Journal in an exclusive interview Monday.

After a year or so of impasse over the legislation, Paul said staff from his office and Booker's started negotiating closely a couple of weeks ago about how to get a compromise done. He also said he was pleased to have worked with both Booker and Scott on strengthening this proposal.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed its own updated version of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, sponsored by Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois, Monday night. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., was one of just three lawmakers who voted against it.

Massie, who also voted against the original Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2020, tweeted Monday about his reasons for doing so again, including concerns about expanding federal hate crime laws.

"A crime is a crime, and all victims deserve equal justice. Adding enhanced penalties for “hate” tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech," Massie said.

Paul noted he got a lot of grief in the summer of 2020 for his handling of the initial anti-lynching bill, as racial justice protests emerged across the nation after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.

"It wasn't a popular stand to slow this bill down, but I wanted to do it because, you know, I thought it was the right thing to do," he told The Courier Journal. "And in the end, I think the compromise language will hopefully keep us from incarcerating somebody for some kind of crime that's not lynching.

"We just wanted to make sure that the punishment was proportional to the crime, and I guess it's just good news that it finally worked out," he added.

The new bill would add lynching to the federal hate crimes statute and would subject someone to up to 30 years in prison if their actions result in the death or serious bodily harm of another person or result in the attempted or actual kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse or killing of another person because of that individual's race or another protected characteristic.

The 2020 version of the bill also would have classified lynching as a federal hate crime, but it would have included certain crimes under that classification that involved defacing religious property or preventing someone from exercising their religious beliefs or engaging in other federally protected activities, such as voting.

 

And that's the thing that Paul objected to: causing grievous bodily harm to somebody for being Black is a hate crime (and even that took years to talk him into) but defacing a Black church or stopping someone Black from engaging in voting for being Black is too much and we can't punish that as a hate crime.

Better than Thomas Massie, who wants hate crimes done away with completely because it's free speech to shoot a ni-CLANG.

NKY is the most racist area in the country at times, I swear.

Orange Meltdown, Mind The Gap Edition

Hey, it worked for Nixon, right?

 

Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in President Donald Trump’s phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 – from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. – means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.

The 11 pages of records, which consist of the president’s official daily diary and the White House switchboard call logs, were turned over by the National Archives earlier this year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

The records show that Trump was active on the phone for part of the day, documenting conversations that he had with at least eight people in the morning and 11 people that evening. The seven-hour gap also stands in stark contrast to the extensive public reporting about phone conversations he had with allies during the attack, such as a call Trump made to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) — seeking to talk to Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) — and a phone conversation he had with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

The House panel is now investigating whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, known as “burner phones,” according to two people with knowledge of the probe, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. The committee is also scrutinizing whether it received the full logs from that day.

One lawmaker on the panel said the committee is investigating a “possible coverup” of the official White House record from that day. Another person close to the committee said the large gap in the records is of “intense interest” to some lawmakers on the committee, many of whom have reviewed copies of the documents. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal committee deliberations.

The records show that former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon – who said on his Jan. 5 podcast that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow” – spoke with Trump twice on Jan. 6. In a call that morning, Bannon urged Trump to continue to pressure Pence to block congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, according to people familiar with the exchange.

Trump was known for using different phones when he was in the White House, according to people familiar with his activities. Occasionally, when he made outbound calls, the number would show up as the White House switchboard’s number, according to a former Trump Cabinet official. Other times, he would call from different numbers – or no number would appear on the recipient’s phone, the official said.

A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.

In a statement Monday night, Trump said, "I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term."

A Trump spokeswoman said that Trump had nothing to do with the records and had assumed any and all of his phone calls were recorded and preserved.

 

We have now officially reached the "cover-up" part of "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up" although the crime is, you know, seditious conspiracy.  Trump has been dodging presidential record keeping since the beginning of his term, and now it's caught up with him.

 

Look, I'm betting that there's several phone calls missing from the Trump WH record, and that the January 6th committee already has some of those records from the other side. If they don't have them all from mobile carriers themselves, they soon will. 

It also explains why House GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy was threatening mobile carriers back in September over cooperating with the January 6th Committee.

This is just bad, bad criming in 2022. Everything's data now, and it will be found.

This does explain why the Justice Department wants to start gearing up with scores of new prosecutors for January 6th cases. 

The Justice Department wants to hire 131 additional lawyers to help with the hundreds of prosecutions stemming from the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, according to the Biden administration's budget request for the upcoming fiscal year.

Rolling out the Justice Department's portion of that request Monday, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco emphasized the scope of the January 6 investigation, which law enforcement officials have repeatedly described as unprecedented.

In the nearly 15 months since a pro-mob stormed the Capitol, the Justice Department has brought more than 770 prosecutions, including cases charging members of far-right groups with seditious conspiracy.

"The January 6 investigation is among the most wide-ranging and most complex that this department has ever undertaken. It reaches nearly every US attorney's office, nearly every FBI field office," Monaco said.

You don't do that when you're winding down, you do that when you're getting ready to go hunting big game.

Big, orange, stupid game.

All Aboard The Trump Fraud Train

Donald Trump's Republicans wrote the COVID-19 relief package legislation and told Democrats to take them or else, so they did in order to help the economy. The reality is that the Trump COVID packages ended up being hundreds of billions for fraudsters across the board, fraud that the Republican party took advantage of time and time again. Now a new report finds that the total fraud among all the Trump COVID-19 bills could be more than a half-trillion dollars. 

They bought Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys.

And Teslas, of course. Lots of Teslas.

Many who participated in what prosecutors are calling the largest fraud in American history—the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the pandemic — couldn’t resist purchasing luxury automobiles. Also mansions, private jet flights and swanky vacations.

They came into their riches by participating in what experts say is the theft of as much as $80 billion — or about 10 percent — of the $800 billion handed out in a Covid relief plan known as the Paycheck Protection Program. That’s on top of the $90 billion to $400 billion believed to have been stolen from the $900 billion Covid unemployment relief program — at least half taken by international fraudsters — as NBC News reported last year. And another $80 billion potentially pilfered from a separate Covid disaster relief program.

The prevalence of Covid relief fraud has been known for some time, but the enormous scope and its disturbing implications are only now becoming clear.

Even if the highest estimates are inflated, the total fraud on all Covid relief funds amounts to a mind-boggling sum of taxpayer money that could rival the $579 billion in federal funds included in President Joe Biden’s massive, 10-year infrastructure spending plan, according to prosecutors, government watchdogs and private experts who are trying to plug the leaks.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” said Matthew Schneider, a former U.S. attorney from Michigan now with Honigman LLP. “It is the biggest fraud in a generation.”

Most of the losses are considered unrecoverable, but there is still a chance to stanch the bleeding, because federal officials say $600 billion is still waiting to go out the door. The Biden administration imposed new verification rules in 2021 that administration officials say appear to have made a difference in curbing fraud. But they acknowledge that programs in 2020 sacrificed security for speed, needlessly.

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who oversees Covid relief spending, told "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt in an exclusive interview that Covid relief programs were structured in ways that made them ripe for plunder.

“The Small Business Administration, in sending that money out, basically said to people, ‘Apply, and sign, and tell us that you're really entitled to the money,’” said Horowitz, who chairs the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. “And, of course, for fraudsters, that's an invitation…what didn't happen was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time.”

The criminal methodology varied, depending on the program. The epic swindle of Covid unemployment relief has been carried out by individual criminals or organized crime groups using stolen identities to claim jobless benefits from state workforce agencies disbursing federal funds. Each identity could be worth up to $30,000 in benefits, according to Horowitz.

The looting of the Paycheck Protection Program worked differently — and could be far more lucrative. That program authorized banks and other financial institutions to make government-backed loans to businesses — loans that were to be forgiven if the companies spent the money on business expenses. Nearly 10 million of these loans have already been forgiven. Many of these loans-turned-grants were for millions of dollars, public records show.

Experts say millions of borrowers inflated the number of employees or created companies out of whole cloth. For much of 2020, lenders did little to verify the applications, prosecutors and experts say, in part because Congress required the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), which ran the program, to issue explicit guidance that in the interest of getting the money out fast, lenders “will be held harmless for borrowers’ failure to comply with program criteria.” The Government Accountability Office warned of fraud risk, but the program continued under that rule.

“The government spent approximately $800 billion and provided 21 million loans to individuals,” said Haywood Talcove, CEO of Lexis Nexis, which works with the government to verify identities.

No one is sure exactly how much was stolen. An academic paper released last year estimated at least $76 billion in potential fraud, and the authors said that was conservative.

The SBA’s Inspector General has identified $78.1 billion in potentially fraudulent Economic Injury Disaster Loans, another Covid relief program for businesses. The Secret Service has its own estimate: $100 billion.

The basic scheme, Talcove said, was “really simple.” People went on state websites and took the names of existing businesses or registered new, fake ones.

“There's absolutely no security on there. There's no validation of any information,” Talcove said. “And voila, you have company ABC with 40 employees and a payroll of $10 million. And you go and apply for a PPP loan. It was a piece of cake.”

 

And just like that, thousands of fake companies looted billions of dollars. Rich Republican lawmakers made sure that their businesses got huge cash payout, the loans free of charge. It was a pinata stuffed with billions, and everyone got a piece.

 

You and me, well, we all got screwed, didn't we?