Orange Meltdown, Con't

To recap, Donald Trump kept scores of classified, top secret, and TS/SCI documents that never should have been removed, that were stored improperly in his damn pool closet, that were actively sought by subpoena and by other means, and still kept illegally for months before last week's FBI search of the place.

 

The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.

In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.

The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.

And the extent to which such a large number of highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought the return of all material that should have been left in government custody when Mr. Trump left office, suggested to officials that the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling it, not fully forthcoming with investigators, or both.

The specific nature of the sensitive material that Mr. Trump took from the White House remains unclear. But the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.

The highly sensitive nature of some of the material in the boxes prompted archives officials to refer the matter to the Justice Department, which within months had convened a grand jury investigation.

Aides to Mr. Trump turned over a few dozen additional sensitive documents during a visit to Mar-a-Lago by Justice Department officials in early June. At the conclusion of the search this month, officials left with 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified, comprising scores of additional documents. One set had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.

The Justice Department investigation is continuing, suggesting that officials are not certain whether they have recovered all the presidential records that Mr. Trump took with him from the White House.

 

Observations:

 

First, if you or I did even a fraction of this, we'd already be in prison.

 

Second, Trump may still have classified documents...or he's already sold them.

Third, everyone in Trump's team here who has interacted with those documents faces prison as well, and they're going to rat him out in order to save themselves.

Graham, Crackers, Con't

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham has successfully stalled his impending subpoena from Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis over the county's election interference case against Donald Trump.

A federal appeals court gave Sen. Lindsey Graham a temporary win early Sunday, ruling that he doesn’t have to comply for now with a subpoena from an Atlanta grand jury demanding that he testify Tuesday about his role in an effort to pressure Georgia officials to change the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the subpoena at Graham’s request Sunday, after a federal district court judge in Atlanta turned down the South Carolina Republican’s bid to avoid testifying on the grounds that the local grand jury is intruding on legal protections he enjoys as a federal lawmaker.

The appeals court said in a two-page order that Graham’s attorneys and prosecutors for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis needed to flesh out arguments about whether Graham is entitled to have the federal courts place legal guardrails on the questioning Graham could face. The 11th Circuit panel’s order said that those arguments should be presented first to U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May, who issued a ruling last week rejecting the arguments Graham’s team raised under the Constitution’s speech or debate clause — which immunizes lawmakers from most legal consequences for actions relating to their lawmaking responsibilities.

Investigators have said they want to query Graham about two phone calls he had with Georgia election officials in late 2020, at the same time Trump was attempting to subvert his defeat. Graham has acknowledged discussing with the officials the state’s process for counting absentee ballots.

His attorneys have argued that those conversations pertained to his official duties as a senator, but May ruled there were indications that the exchanges went beyond “legislative fact-finding.”

“Senator Graham has unique personal knowledge about the substance and circumstances of the phone calls with Georgia election officials, as well as the logistics of setting them up and his actions afterward,” May wrote in her decision last Monday.

“And though other Georgia election officials were allegedly present on these calls and have made public statements about the substance of those conversations, Senator Graham has largely (and indeed publicly) disputed their characterizations of the nature of the calls and what was said and implied. Accordingly, Senator Graham’s potential testimony on these issues … are unique to Senator Graham.”

The appeals court called its Sunday morning action a “limited remand” and said the subpoena would essentially be put on hold while the possibility of constraints on the scope of questioning of Graham is hashed out at the district court.

It’s unclear whether the appeals court’s order will lead to further oral arguments in front of May or only to the filing of additional legal briefs, but the appeals court instructed her not to dawdle.

“The district court shall expedite the parties’ briefing in a manner that it deems appropriate,” the 11th Circuit’s order said.

Graham’s stay request was handled by a three-judge panel at the conservative-leaning, Atlanta-based appeals court: Judges Charles Wilson, Kevin Newsom and Britt Grant. Wilson is an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, while Newsom and Grant are both Trump appointees. It is likely they will hang on to the case when it returns to the appeals court, at least for any urgent proceedings.

 

While the ruling last week indicates that DA Willis's case is moving forward quickly towards the indictment phase, the reality is that there's little chance that the court will hear from Graham. I practically guarantee you that no matter what the 11th Circuit panel finally rules, there's five votes on the Roberts Court, possibly six, to say that Graham's efforts to lobby Georgia Republicans to empanel a fraudulent slate of electors and award the state to Donald Trump will be deemed "legislative fact-finding" and the subpoena quashed.

 

However Willis gets to her endgame, she's most likely not going to have any of Graham's sworn testimony to go with it.  However, Rudy Giuliani did testify last week. She may not need Graham's testimony to make her case before the grand jury.

We'll see.

 

You won't hear a word from him under oath in Atlanta.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Sore Losers Edition

So, yeah, turns out the Trump regime was absolutely at the head of the "grassroots movement" conspiracy to defraud the US with fraudily fraud fraudulent electors, and coordinated the effort with the GOP's cadre of election deniers in key swing states by sharing stolen election data and absolutely breaking the law.

Sensitive election system files obtained by attorneys working to overturn President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat were shared with election deniers, conspiracy theorists and right-wing commentators, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.

A Georgia computer forensics firm hired by the attorneys placed the files on a server, where company records show they were downloaded dozens of times. Among the downloaders were accounts associated with a Texas meteorologist who has appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show; a podcaster who suggested political enemies should be executed; a former pro-surfer who pushed disproved theories that the 2020 election was manipulated; and a self-described former “seduction and pickup coach” who claims to also have been a hacker.

Plaintiffs in a long-running federal lawsuit over the security of Georgia’s voting systems obtained the new records from the company, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, under a subpoena to one of its executives. The records include contracts between the firm and the Trump-allied attorneys, notably Sidney Powell. The data files are described as copies of components from election systems in Coffee County, Ga., and Antrim County, Mich.

A series of data leaks and alleged breaches of local elections offices since 2020 has prompted criminal investigations and fueled concerns among some security experts that public disclosure of information collected from voting systems could be exploited by hackers and others people seeking to manipulate future elections.

Access to U.S. voting system software and other components is tightly regulated, and the government classifies those systems as “critical infrastructure.” The new batch of records shows for the first time how the files copied from election systems were distributed to people in multiple states.

Marilyn Marks, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, which is one of the plaintiffs in the Georgia lawsuit, said the records appeared to show the files were handled recklessly. “The implications go far beyond Coffee County or Georgia,” Marks said.

In a statement to The Post, SullivanStrickler said the attorneys who hired the firm directed it “to contact county officials to obtain access to certain data” from Dominion Voting machines in Georgia and Michigan.

“Likewise, the firm was directed by attorneys to distribute that data to certain individuals,” the statement said. The firm said that it “had [and has] no reason to believe that, as officers of the court, these attorneys would ask or direct SullivanStrickler to do anything either improper or illegal.”

Dominion Voting Systems has been the target of baseless claims from Trump, his advisers and allied news organizations that its machines were hacked and were programmed to flip votes from one candidate to another. The Colorado-based company has filed a host of defamation lawsuits over the statements.

Dominion declined to comment on ongoing investigations but in a statement said: “What is important is that nearly two years after the 2020 election, no credible evidence has ever been presented to any court or authority that voting machines did anything other than count votes accurately and reliably in all states.”

The Post reported on Aug. 15 that an earlier set of records released in response to the subpoena showed SullivanStrickler was hired in late November 2020 to conduct a multistate effort to copy software and other data from county election systems. The effort was more successful than previously known, accessing equipment in Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.

That same day, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) opened “a computer trespass investigation” regarding an elections server in Coffee County, bureau spokeswoman Nelly Miles said. Under Georgia law, knowingly using a computer or network without authority and with the intention of deleting, altering or interfering with programs or data is computer trespass, a felony.

 

Not that it was ever in doubt as the Trump regime crack squad of legal eagles said on multiple occasions that they were in fact coordinating to share data in order to "prove election fraud", but we now know that they coordinated the sharing of illegally obtained election data, which makes this a giant goddamn criminal conspiracy to boot. 

On top of all that, they defamed Dominion Voting Systems and they are going to take these clowns for every dollar they have. Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, all of these bozos are going to prison, flipping evidence on Trump, or both.

It's going to get amazing in the weeks ahead.

BREAKING: Dr. Anthony Fauci Announces Retirement

Pandemic expert and government response chief Dr. Anthony Fauci will retire as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the end of this year.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who played a critical role in steering humanity through the two pandemics of our time, AIDS and COVID-19, announced Monday he is stepping down from his role in the federal government.

As of December, he will leave the position he's held for 38 years as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as his job as chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and his role as Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden.

The straight-talking scientist and physician was the government's top infectious disease doctor for decades, and one of the few scientists that many Americans knew by name.

Fauci served under seven U.S. presidents and helped lead the country through numerous health crises. He was instrumental in combatting the AIDS epidemic, starting as the youthful director of the National Institute of Allery and Infectious Diseases in the early 1980s. He also took center stage in a politically fraught response to the nation's COVID-19 pandemic, and he was both praised and assailed for his tell-it-like-it-is philosophy.


Department of Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra, who took leadership of the agency a year into the COVID pandemic, said he relied on Fauci's counsel and praised him for "his ability to break down complex science in simple terms to the American people to save lives."

Fauci's actions during the AIDS epidemic helped marshal a scientific and government response that saved millions of lives. His approach to engaging AIDS activists also transformed the way patients and activists interacted with medical science for many diseases.

"Tony Fauci is a really interesting character in the history of the AIDS epidemic," says Jon Cohen, a journalist at Science magazine who wrote a book about Fauci's passionate but ultimately unsuccessful effort to develop an AIDS vaccine. "He becomes the voice of science, he can translate science into English better than anyone, and he can speak to every president, every congressperson, every world leader, and he can speak to patients," Cohen said in an interview.

Those abilities emerged during the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic, when the Reagan administration tried to downplay or ignore the deadly disease afflicting particularly gay men and users of drugs by injection, as well as people with hemophilia who died because their medication was derived from contaminated blood products.

Part of Fauci's strategy was to engage the patients and activists who were demanding not only answers but a rapid federal response.

"He was one of the few [powerful people in Washington] that opened his doors early to us to listen and to hear us out," said Peter Staley, one of the founding members of Act Up New York, a prominent AIDS activist group. "And he was one of the few that wasn't afraid of us, and thought we had something to bring to the table."

Staley recalls regular dinners that Fauci held in the home of a gay man who worked in his office. Those dinners "would last for many hours over many bottles of wine, and we debated these issues, and it would sometimes get very heated," Staley said. They didn't always agree, "but I came to respect the man intensely during that period."

The AIDS activists pushed for being part of the research and having a seat at the table, as scientists and government officials figured out how to develop drugs and test vaccines to control the AIDS epidemic.

Fauci also oversaw a laboratory at the NIH and saw patients throughout his long career, keeping connected to the science as well as the human dimensions of infectious disease.

"Tony won the respect of the angriest, most frustrated people because they saw him as an ally and because he listened to them and he incorporated them — he made them part of finding solutions," Cohen said. And that approach "radically overhauled how we think about disease and research and patients, not just AIDS." Breast cancer activists adopted this cooperative approach and many other disease advocates followed suit.

Dr. Fauci served America for most of my lifetime. I'm surprised politically that he wasn't run out of town years ago, but it's clear that Republicans were going to target him is they got the House back, and almost certainly they'll be after him for the rest of his days. It's a shame the hyenas will win in the end, but they got their wish.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As a new NBC News poll finds some 57% of Americans want Donald Trump investigated for various criminal activity while occupying the White House, former conservative writer Damon Linker warns that there's no silver lining in the weeks and months ahead for America as we decide how to deal with the orange menace.

 

Debate about the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence has settled into well-worn grooves. Mr. Trump and many Republicans have denounced the act as illegitimate. Attorney General Merrick Garland is staying mostly mum. And Democrats are struggling to contain their enthusiasm.

Liberal excitement is understandable. Mr. Trump faces potential legal jeopardy from the Jan. 6 investigation in Congress and the Mar-a-Lago search. They anticipate fulfilling a dream going back to the earliest days of the Trump administration: to see him frog-marched to jail before the country and the world.

But this is a fantasy. There is no scenario following from the present that culminates in a happy ending for anyone, even for Democrats.

Down one path is the prosecution of the former president. This would be a Democratic administration putting the previous occupant of the White House, the ostensible head of the Republican Party and the current favorite to be the G.O.P. presidential nominee in 2024, on trial. That would set an incredibly dangerous precedent. Imagine, each time the presidency is handed from one party to the other, an investigation by the new administration’s Justice Department leads toward the investigation and possible indictment of its predecessor.

Some will say that Mr. Trump nonetheless deserves it — and he does. If Mr. Garland does not press charges against him for Jan. 6 or the potential mishandling of classified government documents, Mr. Trump will have learned that becoming president has effectively immunized him from prosecution. That means the country would be facing a potential second term for Mr. Trump in which he is convinced that he can do whatever he wants with complete impunity.

That seems to point to the need to push forward with a case, despite the risk of turning it into a regular occurrence. As many of Mr. Trump’s detractors argue, the rule of law demands it — and failing to fulfill that demand could end up being extremely dangerous.

But we’ve been through a version of the turbulent Trump experience before. During the Trump years, the system passed its stress test. We have reason to think it would do so again, especially with reforms to the Electoral Count Act likely to pass during the lame duck session following the upcoming midterm elections, if not before. Having to combat an emboldened Mr. Trump or another bad actor would certainly be unnerving and risky. But the alternatives would be too.

We caught a glimpse of those alternative risks as soon as the Mar-a-Lago raid was announced. Within hours, leading Republicans had issued inflammatory statements, and these statements would likely grow louder and more incendiary through any trial, both from Mr. Trump himself and from members of his party and its media rabble-rousers. (Though at a federal judge’s order a redacted version of the warrant affidavit may soon be released, so Mr. Trump and the rest of his party would have to contend with the government’s actual justification of the raid itself.)

If the matter culminates in an indictment and trial of Mr. Trump, the Republican argument would be more of what we heard day in and day out through his administration. His defenders would claim that every person ostensibly committed to the dispassionate upholding of the rule of law is in fact motivated by rank partisanship and a drive to self-aggrandizement. This would be directed at the attorney general, the F.B.I., the Justice Department and other branches of the so-called deep state. The spectacle would be corrosive, in effect convincing most Republican voters that appeals to the rule of law are invariably a sham.

But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it? It would be a risible claim, but potentially a politically effective one. And he might well continue this campaign even if convicted, possibly running for president from a jail cell. It would be Mr. Trump versus the System. He would be reviving an old American archetype: the folk-hero outlaw who takes on and seeks to take down the powerful in the name of the people.

We wouldn’t even avoid potentially calamitous consequences if Mr. Trump somehow ended up barred from running or his party opted for another candidate to be its nominee in 2024 — say, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. How long do you think it would take for a freshly inaugurated President DeSantis to pardon a convicted and jailed Donald Trump? Hours? Minutes? And that move would probably be combined with a promise to investigate and indict Joe Biden for the various “crimes” he allegedly committed in office.

The instinct of Democrats is to angrily dismiss such concerns. But that doesn’t mean these consequences wouldn’t happen. Even if Mr. Garland’s motives and methods are models of judiciousness and restraint, the act of an attorney general of one party seeking to indict and convict a former and possibly future president of the other party is the ringing of a bell that cannot be unrung. It is guaranteed to be undertaken again, regardless of whether present and future accusations are justified.

 

I have said this before and I will say it again: doing the right thing has a cost. The right thing is to indict Trump. We're not ready as a nation to even begin to discuss the consequences of that. Allowing Trump to escape consequences would be the end of America as we know it.

 

But prosecuting him would be ruinous as well, and very few people are even willing to entertain the notion that there's no way out of this hell that doesn't include a steep price for the vast majority of Americans and a disastrous one for those of us already marginalized.

Keep that in mind going forward.

Last Call For Full Court Press, Con't

Departing the Washington Post for Duke University, media critic Margaret Sullivan's final column focuses on being a stern warning for her colleagues on how to deal with Donald Trump in the months and years ahead.

Here’s the good news: The media has come a long, long way in figuring out how to cover the democracy-threatening ways of Donald Trump and his allies, including his stalwart helpers in right-wing media. It is now common to see headlines and stories that plainly refer to some politicians as “election deniers,” and journalists are far less hesitant to use the blunt and clarifying word “lie” to describe Trump’s false statements. That includes, of course, the former president’s near-constant campaign to claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to prevent him from keeping the White House.

What’s more, the media seems finally to have absorbed what should have been blindingly obvious from the beginning: Trump is by no means a normal political figure, and he will never reform into some kind of responsible statesman. (Who can forget the perennial predictions that he was becoming “presidential” every time he read from a teleprompter instead of veering off on an insulting rant?)

Another encouraging development is the decision by a number of major media organizations, including The Post, to form democracy teams or beats, concentrating on efforts to limit voting access, the politicization of election systems and the insidious efforts to instill doubt in the public about legitimate voting results.

And yet, I worry that it’s not nearly enough. I don’t mean to suggest that journalists can address the threats to democracy all by themselves — but they must do more.

I’m often reminded of the troubling questions posed by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in multiple interviews late last year about what it would mean to cover Trump if and when he runs for president again. He deemed it perhaps the greatest challenge American political reporters will ever face.

“How do you cover a candidate who is effectively anti-democratic? How do you cover a candidate who is running both against whoever the Democratic candidate is but also running against the very democratic system that makes all of this possible?” wondered Karl, a former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. His questions hit hard, the more so because of his reputation in the political press corps as a straight shooter.

The deeper question is whether news organizations can break free of their hidebound practices — the love of political conflict, the addiction to elections as a horse race — to address those concerns effectively.

For the sake of democracy, they must.

Journalists certainly shouldn’t shill for Trump’s 2024 rivals — whoever they may be — but they have to be willing to show their readers, viewers and listeners that electing him again would be dangerous. That’s a tricky tightrope to walk.

One thing is certain. News outlets can’t continue to do speech, rally and debate coverage — the heart of campaign reporting — in the same old way. They will need to lean less on knee-jerk live coverage and more on reporting that relentlessly provides meaningful context.

Real-time fact checking is of limited usefulness, in my view. Better to wait until these live events have occurred and then present them packaged with plenty of truthful reporting around them.

Journalists simply can’t allow themselves to be megaphones or stenographers. They have to be dedicated truth-tellers, using clear language, plenty of context and thoughtful framing to get that truth across. 

Unfortunately, as Sullivan's voluntary departure from the Post (and Brian Stetler's involuntary departure as the host of CNN's Reliable Sources) heralds, ratings, circulation, and access to a presumed Republican majority in Congress is the only thing that matters to the news industry, that and the coverage of Trump's inevitable 2024 run...and a second term in the White House at the cost of American democracy itself.

Sullivan's warnings will fall on deaf ears, even as she finally sees the light after her decades in Beltway journalism.

We didn't get Trump in a vacuum, folks.

Bad Religion, Con't

Pennsylvania's Senate race between Republican and professional quack Mehmet Oz and Democratic Lt. Gov Democrat John Fetterman is certainly important, but there needs to be focus on the gubernatorial clash as well. State Democratic AG Josh Shapiro is running against arguably the biggest Trumpian jackass so far, or at least in a tie with Arizona's Kari Lake in Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a man so far off the map that he's got his own religious praetorian guard that of course is made up of white supremacist domestic terrorist militia.

Doug Mastriano is running an unconventional campaign for governor. He’s not raising a lot of money. He prefers to attend closed-door events with his base or campaign at public events where reporters are often kept at arm's length.

But the Republican nominee’s campaign is also notable for another reason: Mastriano has surrounded himself with a non-professional, armed security team whose members include at least one person with direct ties to a militia group.

Mastriano’s detail includes several members of a relatively new evangelical church near Elizabethtown, LifeGate, whose leaders have spoken openly about electing Christians to office to advance biblical principles in government.

Perhaps the most visible member of the security team is James Emery, an Elizabethtown Area School Board member who has been photographed providing security to Mastriano at numerous events over the past year, sometimes armed. Earlier this month, Emery blocked members of the news media from entering a room in Erie where Mastriano was scheduled to speak to local business leaders.

Emery is an active and visible member of the congregation at LifeGate Church. A November 2021 post to the church’s Facebook page refers to him as a licensed minister and congratulates him for completing the LifeGate Leadership Development School.

At a LifeGate meeting in May, Emery described himself as one of Mastraino’s “lead” security members. During an Easter Sunday testimonial, he revealed the names of four other congregants who work on Mastriano’s security team.

“I just want to ask for prayers while there’s a few in this congregation that have joined the (Mastriano) team: Scott and Skip and Dan, myself, and Carl,” Emery said. “We’re doing security for Mastriano and it comes with a lot of weight these days.”

The “Scott” mentioned by Emery is fellow LifeGate member Scott Nagle, who until recently was listed as a regional leader for the Oath Keepers, a militia group founded in 2009.

A photo from an early April event in Mercer County, which was reviewed by LNP|LancasterOnline, showed Nagle posing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mastriano. Also in the photo were Dan Slade and Carl Runkle, two other LifeGate members, along with Emery, Franklin County Constable Dom Brown and three other unidentified members of the security detail.

Emery said his security work for Mastriano is done as a private citizen expressing his First and Second Amendment rights. Nagle did not respond.

 

It gets worse.

In 2020, Emery’s son, Jay, helped lead a group whose members attended a Black Lives Matter protest in Elizabethtown. At least one member was armed, and they stood alongside members of another militia group, the Carlisle Light Infantry.

The two groups have at least one overlapping member and appeared to be coordinating their actions at the protest.

At the time, a man who identified himself to an LNP reporter only as Jay, a 30-year-old Elizabethtown resident, said he was with the “Domestic Terrorism Response Organization,” which he said was “dedicated to protecting businesses, citizens and homes.”


An archived version of the now deleted Facebook page for the group, provided to LNP|LancasterOnline, shows Jay Emery as an administrator. The LNP reporter who covered the 2020 Elizabethtown protest, shown a photo of James Emery-Shea, confirmed he is the same “Jay” the reporter spoke with.

James Emery-Shea, in an interview this week, denied the group was a militia and said “the whole premise (of coming to the Elizabethtown event) was if there are more numbers there no one will try anything stupid.”

His father, James Emery, was also a member of the Facebook group, the archived records show. Photos and video show him attending the Elizabethtown protest and speaking with members of the militia group.

James Emery said he was there to pray with the Black Lives Matter leaders for everyone's safety, and has “never had any affiliation with any kind of militia.”

Nagle, meanwhile, was the Lancaster County chapter leader for the Pennsylvania Oath Keepers as recently as January of this year, but his name was removed from the group’s website after LNP | LancasterOnline contacted him at the time for a story on a pre-Jan. 6, 2021, meeting of militia groups in Quarryville.

 

Let's remember Mastriano himself was a January 6th terrorist who refuses to cooperate with the investigation into whether or not he should be cooling his heels in a federal prison right now as part of the state's Republican conspiracy to defraud the United States with an "alternate slate" of electors.

Let's also remember that there's no doubt in the fact that Mastriano is a theocratic fascist and he will attempt to rule the state as one.

 

As state budget talks went into overtime last month, a dozen or so Republican lawmakers gathered in front of a seated crowd in the state Capitol rotunda. They spoke about Pennsylvania’s founding father, William Penn, and signed a proclamation celebrating his legacy.

They talked about how religion influenced the 17th-century Quaker – and that they believe he wanted Christianity and government to mix. People like state Sen. Cris Dush (R-Cameron) referenced the Pennsylvania Great Law, Penn’s frame of government written in 1682.

“It shows clearly that Penn intended to carry his religion into his government and to give the greatest possible measure of freedom to the people,” Dush said.

Each time the point was raised, the crowd of about a hundred applauded.

They cheered the loudest when state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin) got up to speak. As the GOP’s candidate for governor, Mastriano has melded his religious beliefs into his campaign messaging.

He underscored the connection as he spoke. Mastriano said he sees parallels between Penn’s life and his own, claiming both have been persecuted for their faith.

“William Penn landed in jail many times for his faith. He was mocked in the media, ridiculed, castigated, as we’re seeing today,” Mastriano said.

Penn was arrested and acquitted in 1670 for preaching about Quakerism in a London street. Many in the English government looked down on Quakers at the time, believing their tenets violated social norms.

Mastriano has never been arrested or jailed – but his amplification of false claims about the 2020 election and his movement past police lines during the January 6th attack have come under scrutiny.

Mastriano then weaved in his campaign slogan “Walk as Free People,” as he criticized media outlets for “castigating” his supporters’ belief system. He offered no evidence for his claim.

“They give us adjectives that are not fitting for people who are just living as they see fit. They want to walk as free men and women. That was William Penn’s dream,” he said.

The state senator did not take questions from reporters following the event and has not responded to a separate request for comment.

 

Walk free from under federal laws. Walk free under Christian laws. Everyone else need not apply for citizenship in Mastriano's Pennsylvania.

Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.

Sunday Long Read: Af-Gone-Istan

Afghan journalist and writer Bushra Seddique details her escape from Afghanistan one year ago in The Atlantic in today's Sunday Long Read, as she recounts leaving her parents and best friend behind in order to leave the country with her sister during the fall of Kabul to the Taliban.

The text message came a little before 5 p.m. It was August 26, 2021. Eleven days earlier, the Taliban had overthrown the Afghan government. My friend—a German writer and academic—had been trying to help my family flee the country. Now she told me she had gotten my two younger sisters and me on the list for a flight to Frankfurt, a last-minute evacuation negotiated by the German government and a nonprofit group.

“What about my mom?” I asked. She didn’t reply for a moment. “I was not able to get her on this flight,” she answered. Please, I begged her: “My brothers are gone and my father is living with his second wife. She just has us, no one else, for God’s sake please do something.”

But there was nothing she could do. “These are the names that they offered me,” she wrote. “I know it’s a terrible choice.”

She said we had 20 minutes to decide whether to stay or go. We would need to pack, then take a taxi to a secret location, where we’d meet the buses that would drive the evacuees to the airport.

Just a few weeks earlier, my life had been relatively normal. We knew the Afghan National Army was getting weaker—on the battlefield, scores of soldiers were dying—and the front lines kept getting closer to Kabul. And yet, inside the city, schools, offices, and cafés were still open. People were going out to sing and dance; music played in restaurants and taxis. I was 21 and had recently started working for a newspaper, which had me traveling around the city reporting. I loved writing about people, especially the poor, whose voices were rarely heard. I wrote about how they lived, the problems they faced, the joy they experienced regardless.

My father is from Tolak, a remote district in Ghor province, where, even after the fall of the Taliban 20 years ago, women were still flogged and stoned to death. As far as I know, there has never been a journalist from Tolak, certainly not a female one. I knew that the life I was living would not have been possible if my father hadn’t worked hard to bring our family to Kabul. I knew it would not have been possible if the Taliban had remained in power.

But now the Taliban were back. On August 15, the government collapsed, the security forces disintegrated, and the president, Ashraf Ghani, fled. Once he’d left his people behind, Europe and the United States abandoned us too. If I could meet Ghani today, I would have nothing to say to him. I would silently stare into his eyes so that he could feel the homelessness of a young woman.

I had heard about the Taliban all my life. But I had never actually seen a Talib before. Suddenly they were everywhere, patrolling the streets of Kabul. My family gathered in my mother’s apartment, near the U.S. embassy: me, my younger sisters, and our mother, as well as our father and stepmother and their five kids. When the government disappeared, my job at the newspaper disappeared too. It wasn’t safe to commute to work anymore, anyway; none of us left the apartment except to go to the food shop just downstairs. The apartment was crowded. But we were together.

Now, suddenly, I had to choose between my loved ones. How could I leave my mother alone? If one of us girls stayed behind, which one should it be? What if the sister who stayed was killed? What if the sister who tried to escape was killed?

We sat on the floor of my small bedroom with its red-and-white curtains and tried to talk about what to do—me; our mom; my youngest sister, Sara; and another sister, Asman. I knew that my family would be targeted—I had two older brothers who had worked for the Americans and had already been evacuated, and I was a woman with a job. But I didn’t want to leave, especially when I looked at my mother’s face, at the lines across her forehead, her white hair that made her look older than her five decades—proof of how hard the life of an Afghan wife and mother is.

In the end, she decided for all of us. “You and Sara go,” she said to me. “Asman and I will stay.”

Sara was only 16 then—she’s a dreamy girl who likes adventure and wants to be a pilot when she grows up. My mother felt she wasn’t brave enough to adapt to the oppressions of life under the Taliban. Asman was 19. She is the quietest of us sisters but also the kindest. We’re two years apart but grew up like twins. She’s more than a sister to me—my all-time secret keeper. My mother knew she would be strong enough to withstand whatever came next. It was the best choice she could have made.

But what about me? I didn’t know how I would take care of Sara on my own. And how could I leave my best friend? (Asman, for the record, is a pseudonym; because she remains in Afghanistan, it is not safe to use her real name here.)

Sara and I packed a bag each, and my mother handed us some snacks—cakes and cookies—and water. We put on long black dresses and veils over our hair. I couldn’t look Asman in the eye. I didn’t have the courage to tell her goodbye. All of us were crying. As Sara and I walked out the door, my mother sprinkled water on our backs—an Afghan tradition to wish someone a safe trip. It all happened so fast. My father was sleeping in the other room. Instead of waking him, I just opened the door and looked at him—this brave man who had worked for years in the most dangerous provinces to support us and make it possible for us to go to school and have a better life. And then we were gone.

 

America's choices in Afghanistan over four administrations had real-world consequences for millions of people over two decades. It was never just a series of anodyne, clinical decisions made in the halls of power or on the campaign trail. Real lives were always at stake, millions of them.

Most of America just washed our hands of it, and we moved on to the next big conflict in Ukraine.

Not everyone had that luxury.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

If I didn't know better, I'd say Maggie Haberman and the NY Times was trying to construct a defense for Donald Trump's document-keeping woes.

Four days before the end of the Trump presidency, a White House aide peered into the Oval Office and was startled, if not exactly surprised, to see all of the president’s personal photos still arrayed behind the Resolute Desk as if nothing had changed — guaranteeing the final hours would be a frantic dash mirroring the prior four years.

In the area known as the outer Oval Office, boxes had been brought in to pack up desks used by President Donald J. Trump’s assistant and personal aides. But documents were strewn about, and the boxes stood nearly empty. Mr. Trump’s private dining room table off the Oval Office was stacked high with papers until the end, as it had been for his entire term.

Upstairs in the White House residence, there were, however, a few signs that Mr. Trump finally realized his time was up. Papers he had accumulated in his last several months in office had been dropped into boxes, roughly two dozen of them, and not sent back to the National Archives. Aides had even retrieved letters from the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and given them to him in the final weeks, according to notes described to The New York Times.

Where all of that material ended up is not clear. What is plain, though, is that Mr. Trump’s haphazard handling of government documents — a chronic problem — contributed to the chaos he created after he refused to accept his loss in November, unleashed a mob on Congress and set the stage for his second impeachment. His unwillingness to let go of power, including refusing to return government documents collected while he was in office, has led to a potentially damaging, and entirely avoidable, legal battle that threatens to engulf the former president and some of his aides.

Although the White House counsel’s office had told Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, that the roughly two dozen boxes worth of material in the residence needed to be turned back to the archives, at least some of those boxes, including those with the Kim letters and some documents marked highly classified, were shipped to Florida. There they were stored at various points over the past 19 months in different locations inside Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s members-only club, home and office, according to several people briefed on the events.

Those actions, along with Mr. Trump’s protracted refusal to return the documents in Florida to the National Archives, prompted the Justice Department to review the matter early this year. This month, prosecutors obtained a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago for remaining materials, including some related to sensitive national security matters. The investigation is active and expanding, according to recent court filings, as prosecutors look into potentially serious violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.

Many questions about the mishandling of the documents lead to Mr. Trump, who often treated the presidency as a private business. But people in his orbit also highlight the role of Mr. Meadows, who oversaw what there was of a presidential transition. Mr. Meadows assured aides that the harried packing up of the White House would follow requirements about the preservation of documents, and he said he would make efforts to ensure that the administration complied with the Presidential Records Act, according to people familiar with those conversations.

But as the clock ticked down, Mr. Trump focused on pushing through last-minute pardons and largely ignoring the transition he had tried to forestall.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Trump himself has denounced the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago as a “witch hunt.” His office has said he had a “standing order” that materials removed from the Oval Office and taken to the White House residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them, although none of the three potential crimes cited in the F.B.I. search warrant depend on whether removed documents are classified.

A lawyer for Mr. Meadows declined to comment.

 

Now, this in and of itself is a useful, informative article. We know the fingers are being pointed at Mark Meadows.  We know Trumplandia is currently on a mole hunt, for somebody who had significant knowledge of Trump's documents at Mar-a-Lago.  We know the January 6th Committee is after Trump's WH documents too. 

 

But we also know that Haberman herself has gone out of her way to suggest that Trump may be innocent.

Well, they’ve done a number of interviews with current Trump aides who would have some visibility into whether documents were still at the property and what he was doing with them. But also former senior Trump White House officials who had direct knowledge of how documents were handled. And they’ve clearly tried gleaning insight into what was going on with Trump and these documents over a long period of time. So the Justice Department was clearly afraid that Trump could do exactly what you just said, share them, let somebody access them through carelessness, put the federal government at risk by doing so, and that it could be with some knowledge of what he was doing. But to be fair, Trump is somebody, as I told you last time we talked about this, who has a long history of loving tchotchkes and showing them off to people. So there is a world where these were things he took as some kind of personal keepsake because he refuses to see them as the government’s property, and that it was less nefarious than it was obstinate. But for the federal government, that doesn’t matter that much.

I know I've played Devil's advocate and made plenty of use of the "To be fair/having said that" writing device to bring up additional information over the last 14 years, but my God, not when it comes to both sidesing the most obvious case of Trump's guilt yet, folks.

Haberman needs to be shown the door. She's a threat.

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Last Call For Batboy: The Dark Money Rises (And Falls)

Normally late August in a midterm election year is where the minority party revs up to take multiple Senate seats from a party where the opposing party's President is unpopular, salivating over big gains in the upper chamber.

This year, however, the Senate GOP's campaign arm, the NRSC, is in a complete tailspin, having already burned through most of its cash and now behind in several races they thought were shoo-ins just two-months ago. 

The recriminations and finger-pointing are already underway, and the biggest target is Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott, the NRSC's current chair and moderately eldritch comic book villain whose biggest contribution to America so far has been his record of being the largest Medicare fraudster in US history at the time in 1999.

Republican Senate hopefuls are getting crushed on airwaves across the country while their national campaign fund is pulling ads and running low on cash — leading some campaign advisers to ask where all the money went and to demand an audit of the committee’s finances, according to Republican strategists involved in the discussions.

In a highly unusual move, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week canceled bookings worth about $10 million, including in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. A spokesman said the NRSC is not abandoning those races but prioritizing ad spots that are shared with campaigns and benefit from discounted rates. Still, the cancellations forfeit cheaper prices that came from booking early, and better budgeting could have covered both.

“The fact that they canceled these reservations was a huge problem — you can’t get them back,” said one Senate Republican strategist, who like others spokes on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “You can’t win elections if you don’t have money to run ads.”

The NRSC’s retreat came after months of touting record fundraising, topping $173 million so far this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures. But the committee has burned through nearly all of it, with the NRSC’s cash on hand dwindling to $28.4 million by the end of June.

As of that month, the committee disclosed spending just $23 million on ads, with more than $21 million going into text messages and more than $12 million to American Express credit card payments, whose ultimate purpose isn’t clear from the filings. The committee also spent at least $13 million on consultants, $9 million on debt payments and more than $7.9 million renting mailing lists, campaign finance data show.

“If they were a corporation, the CEO would be fired and investigated,” said a national Republican consultant working on Senate races. “The way this money has been burned, there needs to be an audit or investigation because we’re not gonna take the Senate now and this money has been squandered. It’s a rip-off.”

The NRSC’s chairman, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, has already taken heat from fellow Republicans for running ads featuring him on camera and releasing his own policy agenda that became a Democratic punching bag — leading to jokes that “NRSC” stood for “National Rick Scott Committee” in a bid to fuel his own presumed presidential ambitions.

Other spending decisions, such as putting about $1 million total into reliably blue Colorado and Washington earlier this month sparked fresh questions after the committee turned around and canceled buys in core battlegrounds.

The NRSC invested heavily in expanding its digital fundraising and building up its database of small-dollar donors. But online giving to Republicans, not just the NRSC, sagged earlier this year from what consultants said was a combination of inflation, changes to Facebook advertising policies, concerns about emails caught in spam filters, and complacency with an anticipated Republican wave. Some Republicans also suspect former president Donald Trump’s relentless fundraising pitches and cash hoarding has exhausted the party’s online donor base.

 

Democrats are doing everything right currently in order to keep the Senate, and the Senate GOP is doing everything they can to help them. It's not just that Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Blake Masters and J.D. Vance are terrible candidates, they are abysmal ones. But the NRSC has no money to help them, just when they need to be doing so.

Now, it's still a tough road to keeping the Senate as there's plenty of dark money out there to help GOP candidates across the country and that's starting to kick in in earnest with under three months to go. But if this keeps up, Dems are going to not only pull this off, they may actually gain a seat or three.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Simon Rosenberg at liberal think tank NDN finds that even right-wing 2022 polls are showing a significant shift towards the Democrats over the last two months.

This data is from their polls - Dems with big generic leads and/or big movement towards Democrats. This is what they are seeing, and this is why McConnell and others are now admitting we are in an entirely new election. Because we are.

The 2.3 point Dem lead in our post-Roe average is significant for it's believed that Democrats will need at least a 2 point national win to keep the House. A new TargetSmart report finds big increases in women registering to vote since the end of Roe.

All this data suggests that the Democrats have a bit of wind at their back and a real shot at keeping both chambers this fall. Senate polling remains very strong for Democrats, as our candidates in AZ, GA, NH and NV continue to lead in every poll taken in these states. Republicans Oz in PA and Johnson in WI have-lose-their-election kind of numbers. Vance continues to trail in OH in most polls, and while Dems are not ahead in FL and NC neither Republican is at 50. A new WI poll has Barnes up 51-44 over Ron Johnson.

In retrospect, the big Dem overperformance in the NE House special on June 28th appears to have been a harbinger that a new, bluer election was at hand, and should not have been treated as some weird outlier. It was after all actual voters voting, not a poll. Same goes for the stunning results from Kansas and another big overperformance in the MN-1 House special this past week. Three key elections with actual voters, three big overperformances by anti-extremist electorates, two in very red states.

The new climate and health care reconciliation bill should be a big boost to Democrats. It will make our closing argument stronger; lift Joe Biden's approval rating; bring the party together for the home stretch; and give us a powerful tool to reach young voters who are overwhelming Democratic but also are the most likely not to vote this year. It would be as Joe Biden likes to say "a big fucking deal." Republicans, on the other hand, are closing this election out in ways which give new meaning to dumpster fire.

Our current 2022 election toplines: The race has moved 4-5 points towards Democrats in recent weeks. The anti-MAGA majority has been awakened

• Dems have significantly overperformed expectations in 3 post Roe elections – NE and MN House specials, Kansas ballot initiative
• The Senate is leaning Dem, chances of keeping the House rising
• Lots of signs of GOP underperformance now, and the landscape is likely to get worse for GOP in coming months
• Democratic candidates have a huge cash advantage heading into the final 4 months

In November of 2021, we published a memo, Memo: 3 Reasons Why 2022 Won’t Be 2010, that posited the GOP's embrace of MAGA would make it likely that 2022 would not be a traditional midterm and Democrats could end up overperforming expectations. In May we predicted that the combination of a return of mass shootings, the ending of Roe, and the fallout from the Jan 6th Committee would reawaken the anti-MAGA majority and make this election much closer than many thought possible. In mid-June, we released an election analysis which argued we were already looking at a competitive not a wave election - that there were signs of what we call the MAGA hangover (GOP underperformance) even before Roe ended. Then Roe ended, and NDN has been at the national forefront of charting what is now clearly a new, bluer election.

 

This may be a very rosy prediction for Team Blue, and I won't be convinced until Dems win enough House seats that the inevitable efforts by the GOP to try to annul elections in order to steal the House and maybe the Senate fail, but Dems are doing what they need to be doing in order to set up wins, and Republicans are not.

 

Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.

The Drop Trou Now Ladies Party

What a shocker that everyone who warned that Republican states banning transgender women and girls from sports would be used against all girls and women in sports were correct all along.

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

David Spatafore, the UHSAA’s legislative representative, addressing the Utah Legislature’s Education Interim Committee on Wednesday, said the association — without informing the student or family members about the inquiry — asked the student’s school to investigate.

The school examined the students’ enrollment records.

“The school went back to kindergarten and she’d always been a female,” he said.

To protect the student’s identity, Spatafore said he would not reveal the sport, the classification of play nor the school the student attended.

He told committee members about the events in response to their questions of whether the UHSAA, which sanctions and oversees high school activities, receives such complaints and how they are handled.

Spatafore said the association has received other complaints, some that said “that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”

The association took “every one of those complaints seriously. We followed up on all of those complaints with the school and the school system,” he said during an update on HB11, a ban on transgender girls from participating in female school sports, which was passed during the final hours of 2022 General Session.

“We didn’t get to the parents or the student simply because if all of the questions about eligibility were answered by the school or the feeder system schools, there was no reason to make it a personal situation with a family or that athlete.”

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Kera Birkeland, R-Morgan, bans transgender girls from competing in girls sports. In the event of a lawsuit, however, the bill defaults to a commission that would evaluate transgender students’ eligibility to play.

 

So now millions of girls live in states where if they don't meet "standards of femininity" and they are excellent athletes, they will be accused of being transgender and have their bodies investigated again and again to "prove they are women".

 

And millions of voters in these states are not only okay with this, they think it's 100% necessary in order to "protect girls". Note that the event happened last year, before the law was passed. We had parents so hateful that they went back to accuse a girl of breaking a law last year in order to use it against her.

 

We must beat the mantra of second-class citizenship early into women, that their bodies are uniquely subject to the state's whims, so they get used to the idea that states can mandate what those bodies are to be used for.

This is the GOP present and future.

Lact Call For Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron Desantis's election police are doing exactly what I said he would do with them: turning them into his personal election Gestapo to terrorize Black and brown voters in the state.

 

In a made-for-TV spectacle Thursday focused on the work of his new “election crimes” state law enforcement office, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) declared that 20 out of 11.1 million votes cast in the 2020 election in the state had been submitted by people allegedly voting illegally.

The event included all of the necessary law-and-order dress-up: Held in the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, DeSantis spoke in front of a wall of uniformed law enforcement officers and behind a podium labeled “ELECTION INTEGRITY.”

The governor’s remarks were punctuated by the cheers of an audience in the courtroom’s jury box and public gallery, which held up signs, distributed minutes earlier, that read “MY VOTE COUNTS.”

The Washington Post reported that a volunteer with the Palm Beach County Republican Party monitored who entered the room, and that the Democratic vice mayor of Fort Lauderdale — where the event was held – was denied entry.

Joe Scott, Broward County’s supervisor of elections, told The Miami Herald his office hadn’t received any advanced notice on the substance of the press event; rumors swirled ahead of time that DeSantis was coming down to announce Scott’s suspension.

“They were very mysterious about it, with everybody. Nobody really knew what it was about,” Scott told the Herald. “You’re making an election-related announcement in my backyard, and they didn’t tell me anything about it.”

During Thursday’s event, Peter Antonacci, the DeSantis-appointed director of the Election Crimes office, claimed without evidence that illegal voting may have swayed a 2021 special congressional election — though the race he referred to was a Democratic primary in a single congressional district, not a statewide general election.

“You may think that 20 voters is not a lot. But you’re in Broward County and you know that you just elected a person to Congress here this year by five votes,” Antonacci said, adding: “I’m certain that in that tranche of voters, there were plenty of illegal ballots cast, and it is just awfully unfair to the supporters of political candidates, to the candidates and to the public at large.”

DeSantis didn’t go into detail about the alleged offenders, except to say that they had at some point been convicted of either murder or sexual assault, and then, at some time after that, “they went ahead and voted anyways.”

People with those convictions aren’t eligible to have their voting rights restored in Florida. But, as the Herald noted, the Florida Division of Elections is required to inform county supervisors of their findings of voter eligibility, and it’s not clear whether that occurred in these cases.

Though DeSantis said 20 people were being charged, a press release listed only 17 people, most in their 50s or 60s: The other three, Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesperson Gretl Plessinger told TPM, have not yet been taken into custody.

It’s not clear yet, because Plessinger did not make charging documents available, how much the defendants knew about their alleged criminal activity; in another recent case of alleged election crimes in Florida, an Alachua County election official registered several people in government custody to vote even though they were allegedly not eligible. The election official was cleared of wrongdoing, while the incarcerated would-be voters now face charges.

“They actually helped us fill out the voter rights registration forms,” one of the defendants in that case, John Rivers, told Fresh Take Florida. “They came in and recruited us to vote, and then you know, told us that we could vote and now they’re charging us for voting.”

“I don’t understand how I can be charged with voter misconduct,” said another defendant, Dedrick De’Ron Baldwin. “All I was doing was what they told me I had a right to do.”

On Thursday, DeSantis said the 20 voters he announced were facing charges had committed “election fraud.” But the Florida Department of Law Enforcement press release actually listed two alleged violations: “false affirmation – voting or elections,” and “voting as an unqualified elector,” both third-degree felonies.

More important than the details of the alleged violations, apparently, was praising Ron DeSantis. Ashley Moody, Florida’s attorney general, commended “our very detail-oriented governor.” And DeSantis himself paused at one point to note the source of all the hubbub.

“This was my idea!” the governor exclaimed.

 

So they hunted down people with prior convictions and will almost certainly send them back to state prison for decades, even though they had served their time and even worse, they were told they were allowed to vote by state voting officials and registered by them.

Three Orange County residents with felony convictions accused by Florida’s new elections police force of illegally voting told agents they believed their civil rights had been restored before they cast ballots in 2020, according to affidavits released Friday.

“They did not go through any process. They did not get their voting rights restored, and yet they went ahead and voted anyway,” DeSantis said at the news conference. “That is against the law and now they will pay the price.”

But state Sen. Jeff Brandes, who wrote the bill implementing Amendment 4, said it was lawmakers’ intent that ineligible people would be “granted some grace” by the state if they registered to vote without the intent to commit fraud.

“Some of the individuals did check with [Supervisors of Elections] and believed they could register,” the St. Petersburg Republican said on Twitter.

The three Orange residents accused of voter fraud told investigators they thought they could vote and had received voter ID cards, according to affidavits. All of them affirmed on voting applications that their rights had been restored.

Stribling, who was convicted of second-degree murder in 1993, told an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that she had “served her time in prison and was no longer a convicted felon,” an affidavit said. She also said she believed that her rights were restored at a clemency hearing but could not provide paperwork backing that up.

“Stribling believed that her rights were restored because she completed the voter registration application and received a voter registration card,” Special Agent Ryan Bliss wrote in the affidavit. “[Special Agent] McGinley asked Stribling if she had the right to own a firearm restored and Stribling answered in the negative because she is a felon.”

Washington, who was convicted of attempted sexual battery, told agents a probation officer told him that his civil rights would be “automatically restored upon his release from prison,” according to another affidavit.

 

Given the Byzantine mess that Florida's system to restore voting eligibility for released felons requires, a system that demands thousands of dollars in court fees and no way to track down exactly how much people owe, it's a system ripe for criminal justice abuse. DeSantis of course will ride it all the way to higher office if he gets the chance.

These folks were victimized by the system, and Ron DeSantis wants to crucify them on his hill of "voter integrity".

Absolute bastard of a man.

The Return Of The Revenge Of Mueller Time

Meanwhile, in other Trump legal catastrophe news:

A federal appeals court has ordered the release of a secret Justice Department memo discussing whether President Donald Trump obstructed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The unanimous panel decision issued Friday echoes that of a lower court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, who last year accused the Justice Department of dishonesty in its justifications for keeping the memo hidden.

Department officials argued that the document was protected because it concerned internal deliberations over whether to charge Trump with obstructing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of the 2016 Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. But the judges agreed with Jackson that the record clearly showed that Mueller had already concluded that a sitting president could not be charged with a crime.

Instead, the panel ruled, the March 2019 memorandum concerned what then-attorney general William P. Barr would say to Congress in advance of the Mueller report’s release about the evidence of obstruction.

“A charging decision concededly was off the table and the agency failed to invoke an alternative rationale that might well have justified its invocation of the privilege,” the judges wrote.

The court said that if the government had accurately described to Jackson the motivations behind the memo, the ruling might be different. But “any notion that the memorandum concerned whether to say something to the public went entirely unargued — and even unmentioned” until the appeal.

Barr ultimately told lawmakers that since Mueller had declined to reach a conclusion, he and his deputy made their own determination that the evidence was lacking. When the full report was released weeks later, it said there was “substantial evidence” that Trump obstructed justice.

The memo was written by two senior Justice Department officials who argued that the evidence gathered by Mueller’s team did not rise to the level of a prosecutable case, even if Trump were not president. A redacted version was released last year but left under seal the actual analysis of that question.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that sued for the document’s release, celebrated the ruling on Twitter.

“We’re going to get the secret memo Barr used to undercut the Mueller Report and claim it was insufficient to find Trump obstructed justice,” the ethics watchdog wrote. “And we’re going to make it public.”

 

The Justice Department I guess kind of thought this would go away, and it's entirely possible that the DoJ might actually not appeal the ruling now that it has become pretty clear that Donald Trump will be indicted by at least one of the four investigations into his criminality: the Georgia election interference, the Manhattan Trump Organization tax fraud, the Mar-a-Lago document mess, and the NY state Trump property civil case.

On the other hand, the DoJ may have to sit on it given the ongoing investigations. 

We'll see where this goes, but the DoJ is going to have to act quickly either way, or CREW will be able to make the Barr memo on the Mueller report public.

Black Lives Still Matter, Redlined Edition

Racism has been a tax on Blackness in America for centuries, and even with laws supposedly protecting us, being Black in America always has an unspoken and very real price.

Last summer, Nathan Connolly and his wife, Shani Mott, welcomed an appraiser into their house in Baltimore, hoping to take advantage of historically low interest rates and refinance their mortgage.

They believed that their house — improved with a new $5,000 tankless water heater and $35,000 in other renovations — was worth much more than the $450,000 that they paid for it in 2017. Home prices have been on the rise nationwide since the pandemic; in Baltimore, they have gone up 42 percent in the past five years, according to Zillow.com.

But 20/20 Valuations, a Maryland appraisal company, put the home’s value at $472,000, and in turn, loanDepot, a mortgage lender, denied the couple a refinance loan.

Dr. Connolly said he knew why: He, his wife and three children, aged 15, 12 and 9, are Black. A professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Connolly is an expert on redlining and the legacy of white supremacy in American cities, and much of his research focuses on the role of race in the housing market.

Months after that first appraisal, the couple applied for another refinance loan, removed family photos and had a white male colleague — another Johns Hopkins professor — stand in for them. The second appraiser valued the house at $750,000.

This week, Dr. Connolly and Dr. Mott sued loanDepot, which is based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., as well as 20/20 Valuations and Shane Lanham, the owner of 20/20 Valuations. Mr. Lanham is the appraiser who conducted the first appraisal.

“We were clearly aware of appraisal discrimination,” said Dr. Connolly, 44. “But to be told in so many words that our presence and the life we’ve built in our home brings the property value down? It’s an absolute gut punch.”

The home appraisal industry, which relies partly on subjective opinions to translate home values into dollars and cents, has faced a firestorm of criticism over the past two years.

More than 97 percent of home appraisers are white, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and since the summer of 2020, when conversations on race and discrimination in America rose to the forefront following the murder of George Floyd, dozens of Black homeowners have alleged discrimination in the home valuations they received. Some have filed lawsuits, and the Biden administration in March announced a set of planned reforms to overhaul the appraisal industry and dismantle systemic bias.

Dr. Connolly and Dr. Mott live in the North Baltimore neighborhood of Homeland, known for its strong public schools and colonial architecture, which has earned it a place on the National Register of Historic Places. A majority of their neighbors are white. According to their complaint, which was filed in Maryland District Court on Monday, the couple applied to refinance their mortgage with loanDepot in May 2021. The lender approved a loan at a rate of 2.25 percent and, according to the complaint, told the couple that their home was likely now worth $550,000 or more.

 

Being Black cost this family hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth.

 

Folks, discrimination in America isn't "I'm not going to offer you my services because you're Black." It's "I'm going to short-change you, charge you more, and give white folk better deals because you're Black."

 

The Black Tax is real. It costs us millions in a generation, billions in a lifetime, trillions over the course of America's existence.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.