Daughter Of Darkness, Defeated Decisively

I have to admit, I was wrong about GOP Rep. Liz Cheney's Wyoming primary. I thought she was going to lose by 15-20 points in an embarrassing collapse of her political career, crucified by Wyoming GOP voters and Donald Trump as revenge for her role in his impeachment and as co-chair of the House January 6th Committee. But I was wrong.

 

She lost by 37 points instead. 

Trump and his allies have spent the spring and summer turning Republican primaries across the political map into bitter fights in which loyalty to the former President was the central factor.

He lost some high-profile battles, including in Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger held off Trump-back challengers. 

But in most open-seat races, Trump's candidates triumphed. And on Tuesday in Wyoming, Trump, who had endorsed Hageman on the day she entered the race against Cheney, claimed his biggest victory yet. 

Cheney is now the eighth of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol to exit the House. Four have opted not to seek reelection, and four more have lost GOP primaries. 

In the lead-up to Tuesday's primary, Cheney insisted she was trying to win. 

But her strategy -- attempting to convince the Republican electorate in a state the former President won by a margin of 43 percentage points in 2020 to turn on him -- suggests she'd made a different choice: to go down swinging. 

She infuriated Republicans by urging Wyoming Democrats and unaffiliated voters to switch their party registration and vote in Tuesday's GOP primary. 

Surrounded by US Capitol Police officers on the campaign trail, Cheney opted for small, private events over rallies. She lambasted Trump in television interviews. 

Her campaign's closing message was a TV ad featuring her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, calling Trump a "coward" who lies to his supporters and "tried to steal the last election" using violence. 

Her election night event, on a ranch in Jackson Hole with the sun setting over the Grand Tetons in the background, didn't feature any television screens for supporters to watch results tabulated in a race Cheney was all but certain to lose. 

She told supporters that she could have cozied up to Trump and did what she'd done in the primary two years earlier: win with 73% of the vote. 

"That was a path I could not and would not take," Cheney said. "No House seat, no office in this land, is more important than the principles that we are all sworn to protect. And I well understood the potential political consequences of abiding by my duty." 

 

She went down swinging, she stuck to her guns, yes. But as I said last night on Twitter:

 

The lesson from Wyoming tonight is that Republican primary voters, given a choice between the lesser of two evils, jammed on the “Greater Evil” button like it dispensed cocaine and shrimp pad thai.

— Miscellaneous Top Zandar Documents (@ZandarVTS) August 17, 2022

 

She refused to go along with Trump's lie and was butchered for it. But the GOP primary voters in Wyoming were more than happy to break out the long knives. Republicans don't want principles, or duty, or anything of the sort. They want bloody vengeance against Democrats and their voters, and they want to elect people who will destroy their "enemies" and who will permit them to join in the lynchings. 

There were never "good" Republicans left.  Hell, there aren't even sane ones left. Trying to "save" this party is a fool's errand because there's no saving it. Last night proved that. There are no good Republicans left.

Just inchoate rage goblins.

That includes Liz Cheney.

 

The three-term congresswoman has not said what her next political move will be -- including whether she'll run for president in 2024 as a foil for Trump. 

But she used her speech to preview a continued fight against Trump, without laying out exactly what that means. 

"I have said since January 6 that I will do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office, and I mean it. This is a fight for all of us, together," she said. 

"I'm a conservative Republican. ... But I love my country more. So I ask you tonight to join me: As we leave here, let us resolve that we will stand together, Republicans, Democrats and independents, against those who would destroy our republic." 

As she left the stage, Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" blared over the event's speakers.

 

Stopping Trump would mean electing Democrats, not finding Republican alternatives who will be purged from the party and left in piles of politically irrelevant smoking wreckage, conning the rubes into giving them money.

 

Guess which road  Cheney will take?

No, don't feel bad for her. The answer, as it has always been in the last several decades, is vote Blue.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump is telling us his exact authoritarian GOP plans that will destroy the country piece by piece, and he's outlined them publicly in his hate rallies across the country over the summer.

For the first time since leaving office, former president Donald Trump has started getting specific about what he would do if he wins a second term in the White House.

The pitches he’s made onstage over the past month in speeches from D.C. to Dallas to Las Vegas are a stark contrast from ordinary stump speeches. He promises a break from American history if elected, with a federal government stacked with loyalists and unleashed to harm his perceived enemies.

There has never been a potential candidate like Trump: a defeated former president whose followers attacked the Capitol, who still insists he never lost, and who openly pledges revenge on those he views as having wronged him.

As his 2016 campaign and administration showed time and again, from the border wall to the Muslim ban, he and his aides worked furiously to translate rally slogans into official policy — whether or not there were legal or political barriers to overcome. And if Trump does return to the White House in 2025, this time he will be surrounded by fewer advisers interested in moderating or restraining his impulses.

Instead, his administration would probably be staffed by dedicated loyalists, and would have the advantage of an emboldened conservative majority on the Supreme Court. He and his advisers would also have more experience in how to exert power inside the federal bureaucracy and exploit vulnerabilities in institutions and laws.

Trump has strongly hinted that he wants to run for president again and has been considering an early announcement ahead of the November midterms. Last week’s search of his Mar-a-Lago residence and club added urgency for those of his advisers who favor an early launch, a person with direct knowledge told The Washington Post, but Trump hasn’t committed to a timeline.

 

What are his plans?

 

1. Federal death penalty for drug dealers.
2. Round up homeless into massive tent cities and leave them there.
3. Use the DC National Guard or even the US military against political protesters.
4. Fire tens of thousands of federal civil service workers.
5. Eliminate the Department of Education and run all schools from state and local school boards.
6. Eliminate early, mail, and absentee voting.
   

It's nuts across the board, and very, very fascist.

And pay attention, because whoever wins the 2024 GOP nomination will be pushing on all of these plans and more.

The Road To Gilead Goes Through Louisiana

Louisiana's Supreme Court allowed the Republican near-total post-Dobbs ban on abortion to take effect on Friday, and as a result, the state's last three remaining abortion clinics are leaving the state, saying legally they have no choice. 

“I'm just not ready to walk away,” Kathaleen Pittman, the administrator of Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, told New Orleans Public Radio of the decision to relocate.

Hope, Women’s Health Care Center in New Orleans and Delta Clinic of Baton Rouge are all in the process of moving to states where abortions remain legal, though staff for those clinics declined to say where they would relocate to.

The Shreveport clinic has been the plaintiff, along with Medical Students for Choice, in a challenge against the state’s near-total ban since the days immediately following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. A spokesperson for the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is part of the team representing the clinic, said litigation against the ban is still ongoing despite the state Supreme Court’s ruling Friday.

Pittman called the Louisiana’s Supreme Court’s decision to keep the law in effect, “devastating, when I think of the women who are now going to be denied care.”

Louisiana’s law bans abortions except in rare cases to save a pregnant person’s life or when the fetus wouldn’t survive birth. The law has no exceptions for rape or incest.

Louisiana’s ban has caused uncertainty and fear inside hospitals, where doctors fear prosecution for providing reproductive health care. A woman who was 16 weeks pregnant when her water broke was denied an abortion because of the law, and was forced to deliver a non-viable fetus.

Staff said the New Orleans and Baton Rouge clinics – which have the same owner – expect to move within the next three months. Pittman did not provide a timeline for the Shreveport clinic’s move.

In a statement, Pittman said Louisiana’s near-total ban has made it “impossible” for Hope to keep its doors open. Clinic employees shifted their duties to answering phones and helping Louisiana women find abortion clinics by directing them to abortionfinder.org and ineedana.com.

“I feel as if I'm in the Twilight Zone, and this dimension where nothing really makes sense,” Pittman said.

Supporters of the Hope clinic, which opened in 1980, have launched a $100,000 GoFundMe campaign to help with the clinic’s moving costs.

 

And so women in ed states will be made to suffer. In some cases, laws like these will kill them.

 

That's the entire point, of course.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

More and more MAGA CHUDs are choosing to throw their lives away in the name of their dark messiah, like this cement-head in Pennsylvania.

A Mercer County man threatened online to murder FBI agents after the bureau's search of former president Donald Trump's Florida estate last week, saying "come and get me you piece of [expletive] feds" and "I am going to [expletive] slaughter you," according to a federal complaint filed Monday in Pittsburgh.

Adam Bies, 46, is charged in U.S. District Court with influencing, impeding or retaliating against federal law officers.

He appeared briefly by video before a federal magistrate judge on Monday afternoon and will remain in U.S. custody pending a detention hearing Thursday. The judge said she'd likely appoint a lawyer for him after she had a chance to review his financial records.

According to an FBI affidavit, Mr. Bies issued a variety of threats on Gab after the Aug. 8 search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago complex in which agents removed boxes of classified documents.

According to records unsealed after the search, federal authorities are investigating Mr. Trump for potential violations of the Espionage Act.

The FBI's action has prompted a flood of violent rhetoric and threats from far-right extremists.

In the affidavit for Mr. Bies, the FBI said he compared bureau agents to the Nazi SS of World War II and the Soviet-era KGB and said everyone at the FBI, from agents to janitors, deserves to die.

"My only goal is to kill more of them before I drop," Mr. Bies wrote on Thursday. "I will not spend one second of my life in their custody."

The case began when an FBI national threat team received a tip from a domestic terrorism tracking group that someone calling himself "BlankFocus" was issuing threats on Gab.

"If you work for the FBI then you deserve to die," the poster wrote.

 

The FBI doesn't exactly take threats like this lightly after their Cincy field office was attacked last week. 

 

Enjoy prison, sucker.

 

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Two major developments in the Fulton County, Georgia case against Trump for election interference, first, a federal judge in Atlanta has ruled that Sen. Lindsey Graham must testify under oath about his role in the possible GOP interference in the 2020 Georgia elections.

A federal judge in Atlanta has denied GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham's motion to quash a subpoena, ruling that he must testify before a Fulton County grand jury investigating former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. 

In her written decision on Monday, US District Judge Leigh Martin May sent the case to the Superior Court of Fulton County to hear further proceedings on the US Constitution's "Speech or Debate" clause, the centerpiece that Graham's attorneys argued immunized the US senator from South Carolina from having to testify in this case. 

"Because the record must be more fully developed before the Court can address the applicability of the 'Speech or Debate' clause to specific questions or lines of inquiry, and because Senator Graham's only request in removing the subpoena to this Court was to quash the subpoena in its entirety, the Case is REMANDED to the Superior Court of Fulton County for further proceedings," May wrote in the ruling. 

The South Carolina Republican is scheduled to appear as a witness in Atlanta in front of the special grand jury on August 23. 

In her ruling, May wrote that there are "considerable areas of inquiry" that are not "legislative in nature" and said that the District Attorney's office has shown "extraordinary circumstances and a special need for Senator Graham's testimony on issues relating to alleged attempts to influence or disrupt the lawful administration of Georgia's 2020 elections." 

Five other attorneys who worked with Trump and spoke with Georgia election officials in the aftermath of the 2020 election have also received subpoenas to testify before the special purpose grand jury, and at least three of the lawyers are trying to fight their subpoenas in state courts this week. 

 

A federal judge absolutely believes ol' Huckleberry Graham here has testimony germane to a grand jury and this case is moving quickly. 

The second major development is that Rudy Giuliani and several other Trump/GOP officials are now direct targets of the Georgia investigation.

Former President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has been informed that he is considered a "target" of the Georgia criminal investigation probing the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election in that state, according to sources familiar with the matter.

An attorney for Giuliani received a call Monday informing them that he is a "target" of the investigation, the sources said.

The move comes just two days before Giuliani is set to testify before the Fulton Country special grand jury probing the case, as the investigation appears to be ramping up.

Giuliani is still expected to testify on Wednesday, the sources said.

Last week, an attorney for Giuliani said in court that Giuliani's legal team had been asked the district attorney "whether or not Mr. Giuliani is a target of this investigation," but had "not yet received a response."

The judge in the case, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, said he "would implore" the DA to "at least address that before [Giuliani] gets here."

Earlier, 16 so-called "alternate electors" in the state were informed that they are also considered "targets" of the probe.

 

So yes, we're liable to see Giuliani indicted and soon.

The Big Lie, Con't

At this point, all the actual election fraud in 2020 was apparently committed by Trump partisans looking for "election fraud".

A team of computer experts directed by lawyers allied with President Donald Trump copied sensitive data from election systems in Georgia as part of a secretive, multistate effort to access voting equipment that was broader, more organized and more successful than previously reported, according to emails and other records obtained by The Washington Post.

As they worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the lawyers asked a forensic data firm to access county election systems in at least three battleground states, according to the documents and interviews. The firm charged an upfront retainer fee for each job, which in one case was $26,000.

Attorney Sidney Powell sent the team to Michigan to copy a rural county’s election data and later helped arrange for them to do the same in the Detroit area, according to the records. A Trump campaign attorney engaged the team to travel to Nevada. And the day after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol the team was in southern Georgia, copying data from a Dominion voting system in rural Coffee County.

The emails and other records were collected through a subpoena issued to the forensics firm, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, by plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit in federal court over the security of Georgia’s voting systems. The documents provide the first confirmation that data from Georgia’s election system was copied. Indications of a breach there were first raised by plaintiffs in the case in February, and state officials have said they are investigating.

“The breach is way beyond what we thought,” said David D. Cross, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, who include voting-security activists and Georgia voters. “The scope of it is mind-blowing.”

A drumbeat of revelations about alleged security breaches in local elections offices has grown louder during the nearly two years since the 2020 election. There is growing concern among experts that officials sympathetic to Trump’s claims of vote-rigging could undermine election security in the name of protecting it.

The federal government classifies voting systems as “critical infrastructure,” important to national security, and access to their software and other components is tightly regulated. In several instances since 2020, officials have taken machines out of service after their chains of custody were disrupted.

State authorities have opened criminal investigations into alleged improper breaches of equipment in Michigan, a case that involves several people who appear in the new records. In Mesa County, Colo., a local elections official, Republican Tina Peters, was indicted on felony charges including conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and attempting to influence a public servant.

In two counties, SullivanStrickler’s examinations were permitted by courts, though many details surrounding those efforts have not been public. The records show how Powell’s group discussed, exchanged and paid for elections-system data. The plaintiffs intend to bring them to the attention of the judge in the case and provide them to the FBI as well as state and local elections authorities in Georgia, Cross told The Post.

 

This isn't "we hacked into the network in order to find vulnerabilities because we didn't believe the network admins", this is "We robbed the banks in order to prove the money was still there" kind of criminality, the completely self-serving kind.

 

Hopefully this means the disbarrment and arrest of multiple Trump lawyers and several state elections officials that enabled this massive data theft.

 

Oh, and if you believe 2022 and especially 2024 elections will actually be safe, fair and secure, understand that more than half of Republicans running for statewide office in 2022 are on-the-record Trump Big Lie election deniers. If elected, they will simply nullify any Democratic party wins.

 

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

 

Necessary Evil But Not Believeable

The White House response to the Mar-a-Lago search last week, led by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, is that of strict neutrality towards the Justice Department, and even I have a hard time believing it.

The White House continues to stress they had no private knowledge of last week's FBI raid on former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate or the status of the ongoing Department of Justice investigation, citing the "complete independence" of the DOJ from politicization.

"We do not interfere. We do not get briefed. We do not get involved," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl in an exclusive interview on Sunday.

Pressed repeatedly by Karl, Jean-Pierre repeatedly declined to comment on any aspect of the federal investigation into Trump, including whether President Joe Biden is concerned about national security implications of the highly classified materials that federal agents said they found in Trump's possession. (Through a spokesperson, Trump claimed the files were declassified.)

"I hear your question, but it would be inappropriate for me as the press secretary to comment on this. It would be inappropriate for any of us, including the president or anyone in the administration, to comment on this," Jean-Pierre said. "This is a law enforcement matter. And the Department of Justice is going to move forward as they see fit."

Responding to Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik's contention that "the FBI raid of President Trump is a complete abuse and overreach of its authority," Jean-Pierre said that is "not true."

"This is not about politicizing anything. ... I would remind our folks on the other side that the FBI director [Christopher Wray] was appointed by the president's predecessor. I would remind the folks on the other side that when Merrick Garland was indeed confirmed, it was a bipartisan fashion," she said.

She told Karl that Biden had not even "discussed" the raid with law enforcement and that the White House had been learning of updates in the investigation through media reports.

 

Observations:

 

One, after a rocky start to her tenure, Karine Jean-Pierre is shaping up to be on the Jen Psaki side of things. That's good. 

Two, KJP's answer here is 100% correct, if not technically perfect.

Three, I don't believe a word of it.

Look, I know in a vacuum of neutrality that the White House wasn't going to be informed because it's the DoJ's play here and not Biden's. But it strains credulity to believe that sending an FBI team to recover stolen nuclear TS/SCI documents from Trump's fucking pool closet doesn't warrant a highly unofficial White House heads up hours if not days ahead of time.

I truly do believe that Joe Biden had no part in the decision process for the Mar-a-Lago search. But I don't believe for a moment that the White House didn't know it was coming. This is arguably the most politically consequential search warrant issued in my lifetime, and yeah, Biden knew.

I understand why we're seeing this kabuki play. I don't agree with it. Even a simple "The White House was informed only after the warrant was being executed" would suffice. But "not even discussed" by the White House, given the stakes that Trump had stolen nuclear classified materials, when the FBI had been there before with a subpoena?

I call bullshit, and it pains me to do so.  We'll find out this truth in a couple weeks or so, but it's just a dumb, unforced error. The White House wasn't blind on this. Being honest, given the scope of Trump's little collection and the extant threat to national security it represented, was the way to proceed, I'm sorry.

This was a bad call. Disagree with me in the comments and make your case, but I think this was the wrong move even if it had to be done.

Last Call For What Real Censorship Looks Like

A horrific reminder this weekend to the whiny incel neckbeard kids on the right: having a death sentence over your head for three decades because of your writings and being stabbed and critically wounded on stage is what actual persecution of your free speech looks like.

“The Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie was taken off a ventilator and able to talk Saturday, a day after he was stabbed as he prepared to give a lecture in upstate New York.

Rushdie remained hospitalized with serious injuries, but fellow author Aatish Taseer tweeted in the evening that he was “off the ventilator and talking (and joking).” Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, confirmed that information without offering further details.

Earlier in the day, the man accused of attacking him Friday at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat center, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges in what a prosecutor called a “preplanned” crime.

An attorney for Hadi Matar entered the plea on his behalf during an arraignment in western New York. The suspect appeared in court wearing a black and white jumpsuit and a white face mask, with his hands cuffed in front of him.

A judge ordered him held without bail after District Attorney Jason Schmidt told her Matar, 24, took steps to purposely put himself in position to harm Rushdie, getting an advance pass to the event where the author was speaking and arriving a day early bearing a fake ID.

“This was a targeted, unprovoked, preplanned attack on Mr. Rushdie,” Schmidt said.

Public defender Nathaniel Barone complained that authorities had taken too long to get Matar in front of a judge while leaving him “hooked up to a bench at the state police barracks.”

“He has that constitutional right of presumed innocence,” Barone added.

Rushdie, 75, suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye, Wylie said Friday evening. He was likely to lose the injured eye.

The attack was met with shock and outrage from much of the world, along with tributes and praise for the award-winning author who for more than 30 years has faced death threats for “The Satanic Verses.”

Authors, activists and government officials cited Rushdie’s courage and longtime advocacy of free speech despite the risks to his own safety. Writer and longtime friend Ian McEwan called Rushdie “an inspirational defender of persecuted writers and journalists across the world,” and actor-author Kal Penn cited him as a role model “for an entire generation of artists, especially many of us in the South Asian diaspora toward whom he’s shown incredible warmth.”

 

I hope Mr. Rushdie is able to recover and it looks promising, but he's also a 75-year-old man who suffered grievous injury and has been man wanted dead by Iran for a third of a century now.  Your Trumpian bleating about how everyone is mean to you because the civilized universe thinks you're a fart in the wind is not "persecution". This is.

An Elegy For Hillbilly Elegy

For the right-leaning Cincinnati Enquirer to even publish this op-ed from former Rob Portland aide John Bridgeland on why Democratic US Senate candidate Rep. Tim Ryan should be Ohio's next senator over Republican author JD Vance is a hell of a thing, but the op-ed itself makes a pretty good case as to why nobody should be voting Republican in 2022 in the Buckeye State.

The 2022 election for U.S. Senate in Ohio calls the question on what kind of representatives we seek and nation we want to be. I have the privilege of knowing both candidates and am forming “Republicans for Tim Ryan.”

I’m a Republican because I believe in big citizenship rather than big government, in respecting individual rights as well as responsibilities, and in tapping the goodness and entrepreneurial spirit of Americans to solve problems rather than relying on distant government bureaucracies.

It has been the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and many others who served in times of national crisis. The party has had leaders who both represent the American people and inspire the better angels of our nature. Many Democrats and independents also share these values.

Over the last 20 years, I have worked to address the high school dropout crisis. In the process, a U.S. congressman from Ohio I didn’t know called my cellphone and spent 45 minutes talking about how we could improve outcomes for children in low-performing schools. He listened, probed for evidence of effective reforms and remains a national champion for boosting the life prospects of children. I was struck by this congressman’s character, intelligence and passion for helping people. His name is Tim Ryan.

In recent years, dear friends of mine joined forces with the author of a book called "Hillbilly Elegy" to boost entrepreneurship across America. I was interested because my father grew up in poverty in Akron and Bellville, Ohio. I invited the author to join me as a keynote speaker at a national conference with the country’s public media stations. He was smart and shared thoughtful insights. His name is JD Vance.

Since then, as I have followed Ohio’s Senate race, I have been alarmed that Vance has become unrecognizable to me and many who know him much better. After calling candidate Donald Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot” and comparing Trumpism to opioid addiction, he reversed course when running for the Republican nomination for Senate.

Vance then promoted the myth that Trump won the presidential election, even though Republican reviews of court cases show no consequential evidence of fraud.

Vance also said that he did not care one way or another what happened to Ukraine as millions suffered. I know of the suffering, because we organized the Ukrainian-American community to help find sponsors for those fleeing Ukraine.

Vance went on to do anything to win an endorsement from a former president who incited an insurrection to overthrow the will of the people and undercut our democracy. Lives were lost, including police officers who defended our Capitol.

The test of our character is found not in times of comfort, but in times of challenge. Running for public office is such a test.

If Vance is willing to undermine his own integrity and character for public office, imagine what he might do if he were a U.S. senator – I fear whatever it took to remain in office.

Vance’s campaign has also been anemic, lacking the energy of the U.S. senator he is trying to replace – Rob Portman, who worked hard in every county in Ohio and brought people together instead of tearing them apart.

In contrast, I have been impressed by Ryan’s energy on the campaign trail, his love of our democracy, many of his policies and his good character. The same man who reached out to a Republican like me 10 years ago is reaching out to Ohioans across politics and other divisions – to farmers, small-business leaders, veterans, parents, teachers, students and people in heavily Republican counties – to understand their concerns.

 

Ohio Republicans don't do this. The Ohio GOP has become one of the most corrupt, lawless, greedy, hateful and bigoted state parties in America, more than happy to lock in their own power regardless of the law and the state's constitution, and to use that ill-gotten power against Black, brown, and Asian folk and everyone else in-between. 

 

Even more so than Florida or Texas, Ohio's Republican party is deliberately breaking the law every day and getting away with it because they have near-supermajorities in both chambers and can do whatever they want without any accountability.

And yet here we have a legitimate argument that JD Vance is a step too far. He's a parsec too far, frankly, but Tim Ryan picking up this seat would be massive.

Here's hoping.

Sunday Long Read: Separation But Unequal

Make some time for this week's Sunday Long Read, The Atlantic's Caitlin Dickerson investigation of the Trump regime's vile family separation policy at the border, ripping away kids from families and caging them like animals. It was hell, a hell that the Biden administration is still struggling to fix, and a hell that will be exponentially worse if Trump or DeSantis or any Republican claims the White House in 2025.

As a therapist for children who are being processed through the American immigration system, Cynthia Quintana has a routine that she repeats each time she meets a new patient in her office in Grand Rapids, Michigan: She calls the parents or closest relatives to let them know the child is safe and well cared for, and provides 24-hour contact information.

This process usually plays out within hours of when the children arrive. Most are teens who have memorized or written down their relatives’ phone numbers in notebooks they carried with them across the border. By the time of that initial call, their families are typically worried, waiting anxiously for news after having—in an act of desperation—sent their children into another country alone in pursuit of safety and the hope of a future.

But in the summer of 2017, Quintana encountered a curious case. A 3-year-old Guatemalan boy with a toothy smile and bowl-cut black hair sat down at her desk. He was far too little to have made the journey on his own. He had no phone numbers with him, and when she asked where he was headed or whom he’d been with, the boy stared back blankly. Quintana scoured his file for more information but found nothing. She asked for help from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, who came back several days later with something unusual: information indicating that the boy’s father was in federal custody.

At their next session, the boy squirmed in his chair as Quintana dialed the detention center, getting his father on the line. At first the dad was quiet, she told me. “Finally we said, ‘Your child is here. He can hear you. You can speak now.’ And you could just tell that his voice was breaking—he couldn’t.”

The boy cried out for his father. Suddenly, both of them were screaming and sobbing so loudly that several of Quintana’s colleagues ran to her office.

Eventually, the man calmed down enough to address Quintana directly. “I’m so sorry, who are you? Where is my child? They came in the middle of the night and took him,” he said. “What do I tell his mother?”

that same summer, Quintana was also assigned to work with a 3-year-old Honduran girl who gave no indication of how she’d gotten to the United States or where she was supposed to be going. During their first several sessions, the girl refused to speak at all. The muscles on her face were slack and expressionless. Quintana surmised that the girl had severe detachment disorder, often the result of a sudden and recent trauma.

Across her organization—Bethany Christian Services, one of several companies contracted by the American government to care for newly arrived immigrant children—Quintana’s colleagues were having similar experiences. Jennifer Leon, a teacher at Bethany, was at the office one day when the private company that transports children from the border delivered a baby girl “like an Amazon package.” The baby was wearing a dirty diaper; her face was crusted with mucus. “They gave the baby to the case manager with a diaper bag, we signed, that was it,” Leon recalled. (Leon rushed the baby to the hospital for an evaluation.)

Mateo Salazar, a Bethany therapist, went to his office in the middle of the night to meet a newly arrived 5-year-old Honduran girl. At first, the girl was stoic, but when the transportation-company employees started to leave, the girl ran after them, banging on the glass doors and crying as she fell to the ground. Salazar sat with her for two hours until she was calm enough to explain that her mother had made her promise—as Border Patrol agents were pulling them apart—to stay with the adults who took her no matter what, because they would keep her safe.

For more than a year, Quintana and her colleagues encountered cases like this repeatedly. To track down the parents of children in their care, they would scour American prisons and immigration detention centers, using clues from social media or tips from friends inside the government. They would struggle to explain to parents why their kids had been taken away or how to get them back. The therapists, teachers, and caseworkers would try to maintain their composure at work, but they would later break down in their cars and in front of their families. Many debated quitting their job. Though they were experts in caring for severely traumatized children, this was a challenge to which they did not know how to respond.

“I started questioning myself,” Quintana said. “Am I doing the correct thing by serving these kids, or am I contributing to the harm that’s being done?”

“It just seemed unreal to me,” she said of the moment she understood that these were not one-off cases. “Something that was not humane.”

during the year and a half in which the U.S. government separated thousands of children from their parents, the Trump administration’s explanations for what was happening were deeply confusing, and on many occasions—it was clear even then—patently untrue. I’m one of the many reporters who covered this story in real time. Despite the flurry of work that we produced to fill the void of information, we knew that the full truth about how our government had reached this point still eluded us.

Trump-administration officials insisted for a whole year that family separations weren’t happening. Finally, in the spring of 2018, they announced the implementation of a separation policy with great fanfare—as if one had not already been under way for months. Then they declared that separating families was not the goal of the policy, but an unfortunate result of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally with their children. Yet a mountain of evidence shows that this is explicitly false: Separating children was not just a side effect, but the intent. Instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them apart for longer.

Over the past year and a half, I have conducted more than 150 interviews and reviewed thousands of pages of internal government documents, some of which were turned over to me only after a multiyear lawsuit. These records show that as officials were developing the policy that would ultimately tear thousands of families apart, they minimized its implications so as to obscure what they were doing. Many of these officials now insist that there had been no way to foresee all that would go wrong. But this is not true. The policy’s worst outcomes were all anticipated, and repeated internal and external warnings were ignored. Indeed, the records show that almost no logistical planning took place before the policy was initiated.

It’s been said of other Trump-era projects that the administration’s incompetence mitigated its malevolence; here, the opposite happened. A flagrant failure to prepare meant that courts, detention centers, and children’s shelters became dangerously overwhelmed; that parents and children were lost to each other, sometimes many states apart; that four years later, some families are still separated—and that even many of those who have been reunited have suffered irreparable harm.

 

Heartbreaking doesn't begin to describe this account, and those that follow.  These were human rights violations of the most hideous nature, and the people behind these policies need to rot in the hot sun in a metal box. But I believe we all have to face it, that this has to be taught to future generations the way we teach the Trail of Tears today.

Well, in most states, anyway. And should Trump and/or the GOP get hold of the country again, your kids won't learn about this, either.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Not even the NY Times can ignore the escalation of deadly political terrorist violence this week after the FBI served a warrant on Trump, galvanizing his right-wing minions to "declare war" against the Biden administration and tens of millions of American voters.

The armed attack this week on an F.B.I. office in Ohio by a supporter of former President Donald J. Trump who was enraged by the bureau’s search of Mr. Trump’s private residence in Florida was one of the most disturbing episodes of right-wing political violence in recent months.

But it was hardly the only one.

In the year and a half since a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, threats of political violence and actual attacks have become a steady reality of American life, affecting school board officials, election workers, flight attendants, librarians and even members of Congress, often with few headlines and little reaction from politicians.

In late June, a former Marine stepped down as the grand marshal of a July 4 parade in Houston after a deluge of threats that focused on her support of transgender rights. A few weeks later, the gay mayor of an Oklahoma city quit his job after what he described as a series of “threats and attacks bordering on violence.”

Even the federal judge who authorized the warrant to search for classified material at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s beachfront home and club, became a target. On pro-Trump message boards, several threats were issued against him and his family, with one person writing, “I see a rope around his neck.”

While this welter of events may feel disparate, occurring at different times and places and to different types of people, scholars who study political violence point to a common thread: the heightened use of bellicose, dehumanizing and apocalyptic language, particularly by prominent figures in right-wing politics and media.

Several right-wing or Republican figures reacted to the search of Mar-a-Lago not only with demands to dismantle the F.B.I., but also with warnings that the action had triggered “war.”

“This just shows everyone what many of us have been saying for a very long time,” Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington State, said on a podcast run by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief political strategist. “We’re at war.”

On Thursday, a 42-year-old Ohio man, identified as Ricky W. Shiffer, showed up at the Cincinnati field office of the F.B.I. with an AR-15-style rifle and was subsequently shot to death after firing multiple times at the police during a standoff. There is no evidence of what prompted Mr. Shiffer to act. But Mr. Shiffer’s social media posts later revealed that he was full of rage about, among other things, the search at Mar-a-Lago — and that he wanted revenge.

“Violence is not (all) terrorism,” he wrote — on Mr. Trump’s own social media app, Truth Social. “Kill the F.B.I. on sight.”

Despite that threat, one day later, when the right-wing media outlet Breitbart News published the warrant underlying the Mar-a-Lago search, it did not redact the names of the F.B.I. agents on the document. Almost immediately afterward, posts on a pro-Trump chat board referred to them as “traitors.”

According to the F.B.I., there are now about 2,700 open domestic terrorism investigations — a number that has doubled since the spring of 2020 — and that does not include lesser but still serious incidents that do not rise to the level of federal inquiry. Last year, threats against members of Congress reached a record high of 9,600, according to data provided by the Capitol Police.

Nonetheless, it is exceptionally rare for most adults to willfully inflict harm on other people, especially for political reasons, said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Still, Ms. Kleinfeld said, there are ways of lowering the average person’s tolerance for violence.

If political aggression is set in the context of a war, she suggested, ordinary people with no prior history of violence are more likely to accept it. Political violence can also be made more palatable by couching it as defensive action against a belligerent enemy. That is particularly true if an adversary is persistently described as irredeemably evil or less than human.

“The right, at this point, is doing all three of these things at once,” Ms. Kleinfeld said.

There is little evidence that Republicans and right-wing media figures have tempered their rhetoric, even as Congress and the Justice Department investigate the Jan. 6 attack. Several defendants charged in the riot have said they were moved to act by Mr. Trump’s words. Still, many Republicans have sought to minimize his role.

Even before the search at Mar-a-Lago this week, some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters had been casting the political stakes as existential, suggesting that the country was already embroiled in an end-of-times clash between irreconcilable foes.

“This is truly a battle between those who want to save America and those who want to destroy her,” Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for the governor of Arizona, told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas in early August. “That’s where we are at the moment. My question to you is: Are you in this fight with us?"

 

They want blood in the weeks and months ahead.

 

They are going to most certainly get it.

 

As a country we need to deal with this. We're still not even close to being ready for it. 

 

Be careful out there.

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Ridin' With Biden, Con't

With all the screaming about Trump stealing classified documents and hiding them in his pool closet, it's easy to forget that on Friday, Democrats passed the most impactful piece of climate change legislation in US history.

 

The House of Representatives voted Friday to pass Democrats' $750 billion health care, energy and climate bill, in a significant victory for President Joe Biden and his party. 

The final vote was 220-207, along party lines. Four Republicans did not vote.
Now that the Democratic-controlled House has approved the bill, it will next go to Biden to be signed into law. 

Final passage of the bill marks a milestone for Democrats and gives the party a chance to achieve long-sought policy objectives ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. It comes at a critical time as Democrats are fighting to retain control of narrow majorities in Congress. 

The sweeping bill -- named the Inflation Reduction Act -- would represent the largest climate investment in US history and make major changes to health policy by giving Medicare the power for the first time to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs and extending expiring health care subsidies for three years. The legislation would reduce the deficit, be paid for through new taxes -- including a 15% minimum tax on large corporations and a 1% tax on stock buybacks -- and boost the Internal Revenue Service's ability to collect. 

It would raise over $700 billion in government revenue over 10 years and spend over $430 billion to reduce carbon emissions and extend subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and use the rest of the new revenue to reduce the deficit.

 

Of course it has several other parts to it, but the climate change component is the largest.

 

The deal would be the biggest climate investment in US history. It would slash US greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's office said.
The new agreement spans everything from electric vehicle tax credits to clean energy manufacturing to investments in environmental justice communities. 

Extending tax credits for electric vehicles made it in, after previous opposition from Manchin. The tax credits would continue at their current levels, up to $4,000 for a used electric vehicle and $7,500 for a new one. However, the income threshold for eligibility would be lowered -- a key demand of Manchin's. 

The bill also contains 10-year consumer tax credits to bring down the cost of heat pumps, rooftop solar, electric HVAC and water heaters. It includes $60 billion of funding for environmental justice communities and for the reduction of legacy pollution. 

And it puts $60 billion towards domestic clean energy manufacturing and $30 billion for a production credit tax credit for wind, solar and battery storage. 

The bill provides $4 billion in additional drought funding -- a key negotiation point for Sinema amid the multi-year drought in the Southwest. 

The tax credits will be technology neutral -- meaning they won't favor renewables over fossil fuels outfitted with carbon-reducing measures. However, they are designed to reward those who reduce their emissions the most, according to Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. 

The deal also includes major provisions like a methane program that would levy a fee on oil and gas producers that emit methane above a certain threshold. It also includes $27 billion for a so-called clean energy accelerator -- essentially a green bank that will leverage public and private funding to expand more green projects.

 

It's a good bill, folks.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Last night after news broke that top secret level documents involving America's nuclear arsenal were part of the trove recovered from Trump's Florida resort on Monday by the FBI, the Trump regime leaked the warrant on contents to friendly news outlets like the WSJ, Fox News, and Breitbart on Friday in order to set up a coordinated defense.

FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the “President of France,” according to the three-page list. The list is contained in a seven-page document that also includes the warrant to search the premises which was granted by a federal magistrate judge in Florida.

The list includes references to one set of documents marked as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers argue that the former president used his authority to declassify the material before he left office. While a president has the power to declassify documents, there are federal regulations that lay out a process for doing so.

“The Biden administration is in obvious damage control after their botched raid where they seized the President’s picture books, a ‘hand written note,’ and declassified documents,” said Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich. “This raid of President Trump’s home was not just unprecedented, but unnecessary.” 

 

And as far as Trump, the GOP, and the right-wing press is concerned, it's all over but Trump's revenge.  It was all declassified, they can't do anything to Trump at all, and Democrats will get exterminated at the polls by angry Trump voters for years to come. 

 

Look at how those awful, corrupt federal agents leaked this warrant to the press! Trump certainly had nothing to do with that, and how embarrassing for them that there was nothing in the warrant that could have possibly justified this kind of jackbooted thug treatment! You and your family are next under Biden's fascist rule!

 

It's all bullshit of course. Trump himself signed the law that made what he did an actual federal crime. 

 

Breitbart has it: "Attachment B to the warrant delineates the three statutes which agents are pursuing evidence under. They are: 18 U.S.C. § § 793, 2071, and 1519."

— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic) August 12, 2022

 

Yes, Trump is 100% under federal investigation and has been for some time. But as I've said before, America isn't even ready to begin to discuss the price that will have to be paid in order to indict and prosecute Trump.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Local Edition

Following up on this story from yesterday, the man who apparently attacked the FBI field office in Cincinnati with a nail gun and who then brandished an AR-15 and fled the scene was cornered in suburban Wilmington, Ohio and was apparently killed after a six-hour standoff with police.

And yes, he was a January 6th suspect on top of everything else.

A man identified by two law enforcement sources as Ricky Shiffer, who died in a confrontation with police after he fired a nail gun at a Cincinnati FBI building, appeared to post online in recent days about his desire to kill FBI agents shortly after former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was searched.

Two law enforcement officials confirmed Shiffer’s name. Shiffer was at the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, according to three people aiding law enforcement who saw him in photos taken from the day of the attack; however, it’s unclear whether he went inside the building. Shiffer frequently posted about his attendance at the Capitol on social media.

On Truth Social, a social media platform founded by Trump’s media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, Shiffer appeared to have posted a message detailing his failed attempt to gain entry to the FBI building.

“Well, I thought I had a way through bullet proof glass, and I didn’t. If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I., and it’ll mean either I was taken off the internet, the F.B.I. got me, or they sent the regular cops while,” the account @RickyWShifferJr wrote at 9:29 a.m. ET, shortly after police allege the shooting occurred.

Shiffer posted to Truth Social multiple times in the days after the FBI searched Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida, about wanting to engage in violence. One post called for people to arm themselves and be ready for “combat.”

“We must not tolerate this one,” he wrote.

Shiffer's Truth Social account, which was seen by NBC News on Thursday evening, has since become unavailable.

After another user responded that his photo and information had been forwarded to the FBI, Shiffer’s account responded: “Bring them on.”

In response to another user who asked whether Shiffer was advocating for terrorism, Shiffer’s account responded that users should kill FBI agents “on sight” and also target a vague list of enemies who try to stop the slayings.

In reply to another user Tuesday, the account responded, “You’re a fool if you think there’s a nonviolent solution.”

On May 7, Shiffer’s account replied to a post by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., on Twitter, in which she wrote, “I know they are trying 1984, but I’m feeling 2016 vibes.”

“Congresswoman Greene, they got away with fixing elections in plain sight,” Shiffer’s account wrote. “It’s over. The next step is the one we used in 1775.”

On the same day, responding to a post by Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter imploring users to “Get ready” because “the midterm variant (of COVID-19) is coming and it’s going to be really scary,” referring to conspiracy theories that Covid-19 is manufactured or not dangerous, the account responded, “Do not comply.”

Pro-Trump internet forums erupted with violent threats and calls for civil war in the hours and days after the Mar-a-Lago search, at least one of them from a person who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

 

This is exactly the type of person I have been warning you about for years now, people willing to die for fucking Donald Trump.

 

There will be more, possibly a lot more, in the weeks and months ahead.

 

Not all of them will flame out spectacularly and get swept up by the feds or even end up dead in cornfields after standoffs.

 

Some of them will take others with them when they go.

 

For the love of God, be careful out there, folks.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

This afternoon, US Attorney General Merrick Garland stepped up to a podium at the Justice Department and completely ruined Donald Trump's week. Marcy Wheeler explains:

 

Merrick Garland just announced that the government has moved to unseal limited parts of the search warrant used to search Mar-a-Lago, pending giving Trump an opportunity to object.

Garland cited the public interest, but also Trump’s disclosure of the search himself.

Although the government initially asked, and this Court agreed, to file the warrant and Attachments A and B under seal, releasing those documents at this time would not “impair court functions,” including the government’s ability to execute the warrant, given that the warrant has already been executed. See Romero, 480 F.3d at 1246. Furthermore, on the day that the search was executed, former President Trump issued a public statement that provided the first public confirmation that the search had occurred. Subsequently, the former President’s representatives have given additional statements to the press concerning the search, including public characterizations of the materials sought.

But he’s not asking to unseal the whole warrant.

On the contrary. He’s only unsealing precisely the documents that Trump already has in his possession: the cover page and Appendices A (describing this house) and B (describing what can be seized). Indeed, the motion notes that the FBI gave Trump these documents.

In these circumstances involving a search of the residence of a former President, the government hereby requests that the Court unseal the Notice of Filing and its attachment (Docket Entry 17), absent objection by former President Trump. The attachment to that Notice consists of:

• The search warrant signed and approved by the Court on August 5, 2022, including Attachments A and B; and

• The redacted Property Receipt listing items seized pursuant to the search, filed with the Court on August 11, 2022.
  

The government will respond to the direction of the Court to provide further briefing as to additional entries on the docket, pursuant to the schedule set by the Court.

Consistent with standard practice in this Court, the search warrant and attachments were each filed under seal in Case No. 22-mj-8332-BER prior to the search; the Property Receipt was filed under seal today. Former President Trump, through counsel, was provided copies of each of these documents on August 8, 2022, as part of the execution of the search.

These documents are precisely the ones that Trump could have released all by himself, but chose not to. He could object now. But if he did, it would make clear — as if all the refusals to release it to journalists hasn’t already — that it’s really damning.

And now — in a short announcement where he took no questions, but where Garland made a fierce defense of DOJ and the FBI — Garland is calling Trump’s bluff.

 

And we know now this morning from the NY Times that Trump indeed did get a subpoena for these classified documents he was keeping in Mar-a-Lago back in June, and Trump ignored it.

Former President Donald J. Trump received a subpoena this spring in search of documents that federal investigators believed he had failed to turn over earlier in the year, when he returned boxes of material he had improperly taken with him upon moving out of the White House, three people familiar with the matter said.

The existence of the subpoena helps to flesh out the sequence of events that led to the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home on Monday by F.B.I. agents seeking classified material they believed might still be there, even after efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to ensure that it had been returned.

The subpoena suggests that the Justice Department tried methods short of a search warrant to account for the material before taking the politically explosive step of sending F.B.I. agents unannounced to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and members-only club.

Two people briefed on the classified documents that investigators believe remained at Mar-a-Lago indicated that they were so sensitive in nature, and related to national security, that the Justice Department had to act.

The subpoena was first disclosed by John Solomon, a conservative journalist who has also been designated by Mr. Trump as one of his representatives to the National Archives.

The existence of the subpoena is being used by allies of Mr. Trump to make a case that the former president and his team were cooperating with the Justice Department in identifying and returning the documents in question and that the search was unjustified.

The Justice Department declined to comment. Christina Bobb, a lawyer working for Mr. Trump, did not respond to messages. It is not clear what precise materials the subpoena sought or what documents the former president might have provided in response.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Thursday confirmed that he personally signed off on a search warrant that was executed on Monday. He did not address a subpoena, but said that “where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means,” indicating that other measures were tried before a search took place.

The subpoena factored into a visit that Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, made with a small group of other federal officials to Mar-a-Lago weeks later, in early June, one of the people said.

 

What Trump did not do was cooperate fully with the subpoena. The feds believed Trump still had classified documents in Mar-a-Lago, documents of such sensitive nature that the feds showed up on Monday to get them personally.

 

Thanks to the Washington Post, we know what these documents were and why they were so important to recover.

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation. Nor did they say if such documents were recovered as part of the search. A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Justice Department and FBI declined to comment.

Again, if the documents were harmless, we absolutely would have seen Trump release the warrant and appendices that he got and scream WITCH HUNT at the top of his lungs over being UNFAIRLY PERSECUTED LIKE NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY over classified White House cookie recipes.

But Trump didn't do that.  And now Garland is giving him the business: either this list gets out, or he has to object in court, proving he has something to hide.

My theory is again that he has to. Just the list of what was taken out of there would end him, and everyone knows it.

We'll see what Trump does.