The Quiet Fall Of Paris

Black conservative pundit Paris Dennard has been through quite the journey as Trump's "Black voice" in America. After getting fired from CNN in 2018 over sexual misconduct allegations while he was among the faculty as Arizona State University, Dennard remained Trump's loudest Black supporter, joining the RNC in 2020 as national spokesman and Black affairs director.

Thing is, when you're Black and work for racist assholes, eventually you outlive your usefulness.

 

The Republican National Committee has fired Paris Dennard as its national spokesman, according to two people familiar with the move.

Dennard had been serving as a national spokesman and director of Black media affairs for the committee. He started working for the RNC in March 2020.

“Paris Dennard no longer works for the RNC. We don’t comment on personnel matters,” RNC chief of staff Mike Reed said in a statement.

One person familiar with the firing said it took place earlier this week. Dennard did not respond to a request for comment.

Dennard, a veteran of the George W. Bush White House, was a high-profile on-air surrogate for former President Donald Trump. Dennard served on Trump’s commission on White House Fellowships, and during the 2020 campaign he was on the advisory board of Black Voices for Trump, an initiative aimed at helping the former president expand his share of the Black vote.

 

You'd think Dennard would have been a vital tool for Trump right now, as far as coordinating his message through the RNC with campaign season underway, and with the message to Black voters that if Trump can be "targeted by the FBI" then we certainly have a lot to worry about.

 

But the message I'm seeing is Dennard got tossed out like the trash, no reason given, and a passing mention in Politico is all that stands as memorial to him even being employed by the RNC for two years.

There's a lesson here for those who choose to learn it.

.

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Ohio Republicans sure like their white supremacist domestic terrorism to be plainly visible, so that their symbolism of hatred can be used as both a weapon and a rallying cry.

Two Ohio Republicans want to make it illegal for landlords, homeowner associations and others to ban the flying of "thin blue line" flags after the father of a fallen officer was told to take his down.

House Bill 712, introduced by Reps. Tim Ginter, R-Salem, and Kevin Miller, R-Newark, would add thin blue line flags to the list of flags Ohio prohibits landlords, mobile home park operators, and HOAs from prohibiting. The flags on the current list are the U.S., State of Ohio, service flags belonging to "the immediate family of an individual serving in the armed forces," those honoring prisoners of war and those missing in action.

"For me, it’s about public safety," Miller said. "It’s for those that serve us on a daily basis."

But an HOA in Miller's district saw things differently.

Tom DiSario, the father of Kirkersville Police Chief Steven "Eric" DiSario, told The Newark Advocate in May that his homeowner's association sent him a letter saying his "political sign in the form of a flag" violated neighborhood deed restrictions.

"To be honest, when I saw the letter that people are fighting me over something very valuable to me and personal, I broke down and cried," Tom DiSario said. "That's how much it meant to me."

His son was killed five years ago while responding to a shooting at a nursing home, and he told The Newark Advocate that he sees the black and white American flag with a bright blue stripe as a way to honor his son's sacrifice and those made by other officers across the country.

But the flag has also become controversially associated with white supremacy movements and those who opposed policing reforms. In 2021, University of Wisconsin-Madison's police chief banned officers from displaying the flag while on duty, saying the flag had been "co-opted" by people who perpetuated "hateful ideologies."

Miller, who retired from the Ohio State Highway Patrol when he joined the legislature, said that's not how he sees the thin blue line flags.

"The police protect everybody; Whatever race, whatever nationally, whatever creed," he said.

Sure. They'll protect you. They may have to kill your Black ass in order to do it, but they will protect Ohio, dammit.

Look, I can understand flying a POW-MIA or military flag if you served and the state protecting your right to do it. But there's no positive meaning in the "blue line" flag. It's a deliberate perversion of the American flag, one that puts the police above the rest of the American people, enshrining their right to treat the rest of us as an opposing force that they occasionally have to put a few bullets in to control us.

And it is definitely a symbol of white supremacist hatred and police fascism in Ohio.

In Columbus, embrace of the thin blue line flag by CPD led local attorney Nick Pasquarello to register a complaint with the department in October 2020 after he photographed the flag on display in the window at the substation located at 950 E. Main St. Though Pasquarello, who also worked as a legal observer during last summer’s Black lives matter protests, said he directed his complaint at all instances in which CPD officers displayed the thin blue line flag, when he received a letter earlier this month rendering judgment, it addressed only the flag in the window at the substation in dismissing his claim.

Replying to an interview request from Alive to discuss how CPD views the thin blue line flag, spokesman James Fuqua wrote, “I’m not sure we would be able to comment on a theoretical symbol,” adding, “There is no specific department stance on it.” Asked if not having a specific department stance on the symbol could be interpreted as a tacit endorsement of the flag, since it continues to be displayed by CPD officers, Fuqua wrote, “I must state again that we cannot comment on something that is theory based with no factual background to support it.” Fuqua did not respond to a third email sent in follow-up.

“At some point, there has to be some messaging out that bridges the gap between the police and the community, and the silence [from CPD] on it is worse than saying almost anything at all, whether you say you agree with [critics of the flag], or you say, ‘We’re going to fly this no matter what,’” said Anthony Wilson, who added that he continues to honor law enforcement by lighting his front porch with a blue bulb even as he refuses to fly the thin blue line flag. “I’m going to keep saying this, but you have to find ways to bring people together, because that’s the only way police are going to be truly successful, is to be in real partnership with the community. And the only way you’re going to see a reduction in crime is for the community to be in real partnership with police. So when you have a symbol that has become so divisive, that creates such a gulf, a divide in the community, my hope is the Powers That Be see that and say, ‘Hey, is this something we maybe need to rethink?’”

More recently, the symbol has even spread outside of CPD, with Attorney General Yost making a social media post featuring a photo of the thin blue line flag, which drew a range of critical responses on both Twitter and Facebook. “This flag is not some Rorschach test upon which every person gets to project some imagined meaning,” Yost said in an emailed statement to Alive in which he described the flag as one that “honors those who have died in the line of duty on behalf of the community.” “I embrace both the voices that honor police and those who call for accountability and racial justice — and I reject those who draw their identity from further dividing us.”

“What [Yost’s social media post] shows is just how embedded systemic racism is, because that’s really what we’re talking about,” said attorney Sean Walton. “What we’re talking about is a movement for racial justice, and a movement to put an end to constitutional violations that seem to occur disproportionately against communities of color. And so in pushing for a movement toward simple rights, toward fairness and equity, we again have public officials, elected officials and people who represent systems of government speaking out in opposition to justice. … It shows how intertwined these systems are, and how much of an uphill battle social justice is going to be.”

Both Walton and Jones acknowledged that barring CPD officers from publicly displaying the thin blue line flag wouldn’t solve the larger issues with policing, but both positioned it as an important step in beginning efforts to improve police-community relations.

“Banning the thin blue line flag is low-hanging fruit,” said Jones, who would also like to see CPD address its use-of-force policies, along with providing officers additional training on de-escalation without lethal use of force. “Banning the flag is not going to repair all of the issues in the Columbus Division of Police. It’s not going to completely repair trust, or enhance respect. But what it could do is remove a barrier to engaging in the community. Because people see that flag and they will pause. And it can deter them from even wanting to interact with the police.”

Along with dropping the thin blue line flag, Walton said he would like to see police departments begin to challenge and eradicate the mindset that has helped give rise to the symbol, one in which police view themselves as engaged in a perpetual battle against a community of which they should be a part.

“But they’re making it clear they’re not a part of the community, that they are their own separate entity. And you have to change that culture. You have to change that us-against-them mentality,” said Walton, who saw this mindset on view during the Black lives matter protests that unfolded in the city last summer, where police responded to protesters with such force that a federal judge recently described officers as having “run amok” in a decision restricting future police use of force against peaceful demonstrators. “And part of doing that is making commitments like banning the thin blue line imagery. But then it’s also really challenging that culture and digging into it, because we're not going to get the change that we seek unless officers understand that it's not us against them. We're all in this together.”

 

But now, Ohio Republicans want to make it illegal to ban a symbol of hatred.

 

This is being done for a reason folks.

 

None of those reasons are good ones.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump's camp demanded the release of the affidavit supporting the search warrant served at his Florida resort earlier this month, and a judge agreed to a heavily redacted version of the document being made public. I don't know what Trump was thinking however, because the document absolutely shows that he was an unprecedented national security threat to the nation.

Federal investigators obtained a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month by pointing to a raft of highly classified material they’d already obtained from there, according to a legal affidavit unsealed Friday.

Records the FBI obtained from Trump’s Florida home in advance of the Aug. 8 search bore indications they contained human source intelligence, intercepts under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and signals intelligence, as well as other tags indicating high sensitivity. Several of those tightly-controlled documents contained Trump’s “handwritten notes,” the partially-redacted affidavit detailing the Justice Department investigation says.

In those boxes, agents found 184 unique documents, 25 of which were marked “top secret,” 92 of which were marked “secret,” and 67 of which were marked “confidential”–the lowest level of national security classification. According to the affidavit, NARA officials found some of those “highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified.”

Prosecutors also added in another court filing unsealed Friday that the ongoing criminal probe into government records stashed at Trump’s Florida home has involved “a significant number of civilian witnesses” whose safety could be jeopardized if their identities were revealed.

The court filings unsealed Friday also revealed that the magistrate judge who issued the warrant for the search of Trump’s residence received legal arguments from Trump’s attorneys before doing so.

Those arguments came in the form of a three-page, May 25 letter from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran. In the letter, Corcoran sought to discourage the Justice Department from proceeding with a criminal investigation or potential criminal charges over the presence of classified records at Mar-a-Lago.

“Public trust in the government is low. At such times, adherence to the rules and long-standing policies is essential,” Corcoran wrote. “President Donald J. Trump is a leader of the Republican Party. The Department of Justice (DOJ), as part of the Executive Branch, is under the control of a President from the opposite party. It is critical, given that dynamic, that every effort is made to ensure that actions by DOJ that may touch upon the former President, or his close associates, do not involve Politics.”

Notably, the letter came before a June 3 meeting between Trump, his attorneys and DOJ officials at Mar-a-Lago, where the department’s counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt and FBI agents viewed parts of the premises. Trump has repeatedly described his interactions with DOJ as cordial, with aides noting that he shook hands with Bratt during the meeting. But those accounts didn’t mention the heightened tensions reflected in Corcoran’s letter.

Similarly, Trump has described that DOJ asked him to install a lock on his storage facility after the June 3 meeting. But DOJ revealed in the affidavit that this request was delivered with far more alarm than Trump conveyed.

“As I previously indicated to you, Mar-a-Lago does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information,” DOJ wrote in a letter to Corcoran at the time. “As such, it appears that since the time classified documents [redacted] were removed from the secure facilities at the White House and moved to Mar-a-Lago on or around January 20, 2021, they have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location.”

Corcoran, in his May 25 letter, also argued that presidents have “absolute authority” to declassify documents, although he did not explicitly say that Trump had done so.

Some Trump allies have asserted that he explicitly or implicitly declassified materials by taking them from the Oval Office to the White House residence or other locations, though no evidence has emerged of a formal declassification order.

Indeed, the affidavit unsealed Friday contains a reference to former Trump adviser Kash Patel — one of Trump’s authorized representatives to the National Archives — claiming in a Breitbart News article that Trump had declassified many of the records at issue.

In a post on his social media site, Trump lashed out shortly after the affidavit was unsealed, complaining of heavy redactions and noting that the word “nuclear” wasn’t mentioned despite reports that documents related to America’s nuclear secrets were among the cache held at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, notably, didn’t say whether or not such documents were in fact among them, only that there was no reference to them.

 

Trump believes that he's won this round too. "See, there's nothing about nuclear secrets in that affidavit! The lying press was giving you FAKE NEWS!" That the documents were stolen by Trump of course isn't the fight Trump's having in the press. He'll shrug this off too. He's been doing it for years now.

Then his supporters in the press will move the goalposts again, and we'll fight this battle again next week, where Trump will invent a battle out of whole cloth and win it too.

 

He'll keep winning those battles that he's allowed to frame, too.

 

Right up until he's indicted and loses everything.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

President Biden kicked off his midterm campaign schedule this week in Maryland after delivering on his promise to help millions of Americans deal with student loan debt. Gone was bipartisan fetishization Biden, and out came Dark Brandon.

President Biden on Thursday night launched a push toward the midterm elections with a fiery speech in Rockville, Md., in which he cast the Republican Party as one that was dangerously consumed with anti-democratic forces that had turned toward “semi-fascism.”

It was some of the strongest language used by Biden, a politician long known — and at times criticized for — his willingness to work with members of the opposite party.

“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security,” Biden said, referencing former president Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. “They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace — embrace — political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”

“This is why in this moment, those of you who love this country — Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans — we must be stronger,” he added.

As if on cue, the rally was interrupted by a heckler yelling, “You stole the election!” The crowd booed as the man was escorted out, holding his two fingers up like President Richard M. Nixon and taking a brief bow.

Earlier in the evening, speaking at a reception that helped raise $1 million for Democratic campaigns, Biden more pointedly raised concerns about American democracy and the Republicans he views as a threat.

“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden said. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.”

Bringing up Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his frequent interactions with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden also criticized his predecessor for weakening the United States on the global stage.

“I underestimated how much damage the previous four years had done in terms of America’s reputation in the world,” the president said.

The rhetoric was an escalation for Biden and an indication that he views the threat as greater than just Trump and an ideology that shows little sign of abating. It marked a transition as well, as the president turned more pointedly toward the midterm elections and attempted not only to tout his own record but to create a sharper contrast with the opposing party.

“I want to be crystal-clear about what’s on the ballot this year,” he said near the start of his remarks, during which he removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. “Your right to choose is on the ballot this year. The Social Security you paid for from the time you had a job is on the ballot. The safety of our kids from gun violence is on the ballot.”

“The very survival of our planet is on the ballot,” he added. “Your right to vote is on the ballot. Even democracy. Are you ready to fight for these things now?”

 

Turns out the Biden I voted for in both the primary and in the general was Dark Brandon all along, and the Village Denizens are having collective strokes over him.

Much, much more of this, please.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

We are nothing but sport to be hunted and killed by California cops.

The day after Torrance police shot Christopher DeAndre Mitchell in 2018, his mother and a dozen of his loved ones staged a protest outside the department’s headquarters.

At the same time, a group of officers — including the two who had killed Mitchell — were discussing the situation via text message.

“Was going to tell you all those [N-word] family members are all pissed off in front of the station,” one wrote, according to court documents recently reviewed by The Times.

Court records show the officers later mused about what might happen once the identities of those who shot the 23-year-old became public.

“Gun cleaning Party at my house when they release my name??” one asked.

Yes absolutely let’s all just post in your yard with lawn chairs in a [firing] squad,” another replied.

Eight months ago, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed portions of racist and homophobic text messages exchanged by at least a dozen Torrance police officers, a scandal that sparked an investigation by the California attorney general’s office.

Criminal cases in which the officers were involved continue to be dismissed, and at least one man has been released from prison. Lawsuits filed against officers involved have already cost Torrance more than $10 million. Still, most of the officers implicated remain employed by the city.

The state attorney general’s office filed a subpoena in May for thousands of pages of Torrance police records, but officials have declined to provide updates on the state investigation. Despite critics’ calls for a civilian board to oversee the Police Department — as Los Angeles has — there’s little evidence that Torrance officials have taken tangible steps toward reform since the scandal exploded.

And earlier this year, another trove of offensive texts came to light.

In response to a court filing from officers implicated in the scandal, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office submitted an exhibit containing all 390 “anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic or transphobic remarks” allegedly made by the officers between 2018 and 2020. The documents, which were heavily redacted, included the comments about Mitchell’s loved ones and contained racist cartoons of Black and Latino residents as well as remarks about lynching suspects and killing Black children.

Officers have long been trying to suppress evidence of the texts, which were found last year shortly before prosecutors charged former Torrance police officers Christopher Tomsic and Cody Weldin with spray-painting a swastika inside a car.

A search warrant executed as part of that case found Tomsic, Weldin and at least 15 other officers had been exchanging racist, violent and homophobic messages for years, court records show. The officers’ attorneys argued the search went way beyond the scope of the criminal investigation, so most of the texts should be barred from use in prosecutions or internal disciplinary hearings.

Ironically, it was that move to suppress the texts that made them available, after the district attorney’s office filed its report on the messages in court.

 

Racist cops cost taxpayer billions in lawsuits and kill thousands every year, and yet we continue to put up with these state-sanctioned murder gangs.

We should do much, much less of that.

Black Lives Still Matter.

 

A Major Case Of Diary Mens Rea

The Florida couple that stole Ashley Biden's diary to use as opposition research against her father Joe Biden in 2020 have plead guilty to a federal charge of interstate trafficking in stolen goods.

 

Two Florida residents pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to trafficking in stolen goods for selling a diary and other personal effects of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden, the Justice Department said.

The criminal charges are the first to emerge from a federal investigation into how, prior to the 2020 presidential election, the journal reached the conservative video outlet, Project Veritas. The group has said it paid for rights to the publish the diary, but never did so because it couldn’t authenticate it. Contents from the diary later emerged on a more obscure right-wing site.

Last November, the FBI carried out search warrants at the home of the founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe, and two of his colleagues, in connection with the investigation. None of those individuals have been charged, but O’Keefe has denounced the raids as an attack on press freedom.

In a Manhattan federal court hearing Thursday, Aimee Harris, 40, of Palm Beach and Jonathan Kurlander, 58, of Jupiter each pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy charge stemming from their involvement in selling the journal, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan said in a statement.

“Harris and Kurlander stole personal property from an immediate family member of a candidate for national political office,” Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. “They sold the property to an organization in New York for $40,000 and even returned to take more of the victim’s property when asked to do so. Harris and Kurlander sought to profit from their theft of another person’s personal property, and they now stand convicted of a federal felony as a result.”

Both defendants pleaded guilty as part of agreements with prosecutors. Kurlander has agreed to cooperate with investigators as part of his deal, Williams’ office said. Details of the plea agreement were not immediately available. Each defendant faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison, but defendants are typically sentenced under federal guidelines that usually call for a sentence well below the maximum.

A White House spokesperson referred a request for comment on the charges to the Justice Department. A lawyer for Ashley Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the developments.

 

And while O'Keefe and his merry miscreants at Project Veritas continue to scream about "jounalistic protections" keep in mind that it's not the Biden administration or liberals who want to get rid of those protections.

No, that would be Justice Clarence Thomas and the conservatives on the Roberts Court.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Hair Trumpenfuror wants Mitch McConnell put out to pasture again, but given the half-dozen other times he's called for McConnell's ouster, I really don't think anyone cares.

Former President Trump on Wednesday called on Republicans to boot Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) from his post as Senate minority leader, accusing the senator of being a “pawn for the Democrats.”

In a statement, Trump cited a Wednesday story from The Federalist about McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao’s alleged ties to China in calling for the senator’s ouster from his longtime leadership post.

“Mitch McConnell is not an Opposition Leader, he is a pawn for the Democrats to get whatever they want,” Trump said in his statement. “He is afraid of them, and will not do what has to be done. A new Republican Leader in the Senate should be picked immediately!”

Trump has feuded with McConnell, who he has dubbed “Old Crow,” since the Senate leader denounced the former president in Congress for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Over the weekend, the former president slammed McConnell for making remarks last week about “candidate quality,” in a reference to Republicans running for Senate, a number of whom were hand-picked by Trump. McConnell has said the race for Senate control in November will be close.

Trump also took a dig at Chao, his former Transportation secretary who resigned from office one day after the Jan. 6 attack, calling her McConnell’s “crazy wife.” In Wednesday’s message, he called her “Coco.”

Last year, Trump also called for Republicans to select a new Senate leader to boost the party’s chances of retaking Congress in 2022.

 

Honestly, McConnell's successfully evil manipulations of federal judiciary nominations during the Trump regime and brazen denial of Merrick Garland's SCOTUS seat are among reasons why the GOP want to keep Mitch in charge. The rest of the Senate GOP are...well...Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio? Nobody actually wants the job.

 

As much as I'd love to see a dipstick like Joni Ernst or Tommy Tuberville get the post and crash into the ground like a Yeager-era USAF test jet with missing bolts, he's not going anywhere, no matter how angry Trump gets at him.

 

You know, unless the underworld comes a-callin' for him.

Last Call For Lowering The Barr, Con't

To my absolute surprise, the Justice Department agreed to the court-ordered release of the Barr memo on the Mueller Report, the document explaining the reasoning behind why former Trump AG Bill Barr refused to act on the Mueller Report's conclusions.

The Justice Department has released a long-sought legal memo arguing that then-President Donald Trump’s actions during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation did not warrant prosecution for obstruction of justice, even if a president was susceptible to criminal charges while in office.

In the nine-page memo disclosed Wednesday, two of the most senior officials in the Justice Department advised then-Attorney General William Barr that Trump’s threats to fire Mueller and his various public and private outbursts against witnesses he viewed as hostile or unhelpful to him didn’t amount to the sort of case prosecutors would bring under their established standards.

“Having reviewed the Report in light of the governing legal principles, and the Principles of Federal Prosecution, we conclude that none of those instances would warrant a prosecution for obstruction of justice, without regard to the constitutional constraint on bringing such an action against a sitting president,” the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Engel, and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Edward O’Callaghan wrote in the March 24, 2019, memo.

The Justice Department fought release of the memo for years, arguing that it was part of a deliberative process advising Barr on what to do in response to Mueller’s report. However, judges concluded that at the time the memo was written, Barr had already decided not to charge Trump, so the issues hashed out in the memo were theoretical and not linked to any pending decision.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal watchdog group, filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act three years ago in an effort to make the memo public.

The Justice Department lost the first round in the access case in front of a District Court judge, who ruled that the agency’s claims that the memo was part of some kind of charging decision was “disingenuous” because that decision had already been made.

On appeal, department lawyers changed course and argued that the memo helped shape the public statements Barr would give to explain why he concluded the evidence was insufficient to support a criminal charge — even if Trump were not president.

However, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled last week that argument about the memo being part of deliberations around a communications effort was surfaced too belatedly to be considered.

The Justice Department had the option to ask the full bench of the D.C. Circuit to rehear the case or to seek review at the Supreme Court, but officials indicated Wednesday that they’d decided to pass up those options.

In the memo that triggered the disclosure fight, Engel and O’Callaghan concluded that Trump’s conduct primarily reflected a frustration with the Mueller probe and what he perceived to be the politics behind it, as well as news reports they said Trump genuinely believed were flawed. They also suggested that Trump’s exhortations to some of his top allies against “flipping” were meant to prevent them from delivering false testimony — not to conceal the truth.

The officials repeatedly underscored that Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to charge any underlying crime, which they said weighed against the possibility that Trump had violated the obstruction statutes.

“In the absence of an underlying offense, the most compelling inference in evaluating the President’s conduct is that he reasonably believed that the Special Counsel’s investigation was interfering with his governing agenda,” Engel and O’Callaghan wrote.

Engel would later become a key point of resistance to Trump’s effort to use the Justice Department to help subvert the 2020 election. Engel was one of three Trump-era Justice Department witnesses to testify at a public hearing of the Jan. 6 select committee and discussed his threat to resign, along with other top department officials, if Trump had gone through with a plan to replace the department’s leadership with figures who would support his attempts to stay in power.

 

Engel of course testified before the January 6th Committee publicly in June.

Engel was a key witness at a pivotal meeting on Jan. 3, 2021, at the White House where Trump held a reality TV-show style contest over whether to fire acting attorney general Jeffery Rosen and install someone more amenable to run the Justice Department to support his election fraud claims. Rosen replaced former Attorney General William Barr.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, in an earlier investigation, found Engel told Trump at the meeting that he and other top officials would resign if he fired Rosen.

Some context: In a series of emails released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee earlier this month, Richard Donoghue, the former deputy attorney general, told Engel that he wanted to meet with him "about some antics that could potentially end up on your radar," signaling there was at least some concern that the Office of Legal Counsel would have to weigh in on potential issues.

The emails also included correspondence with Jeffery Clark, a Justice Department lawyer who tried to convince Trump to remove Rosen and use the DOJ to undo Georgia's election results, which The New York Times reported in January. In the Jan. 1 email, Meadows asked Rosen to have Clark look into the alleged signature issues in Georgia, ahead of a meeting on Jan. 3 in which Trump heard directly from Clark and Rosen before ultimately choosing not to remove Rosen.

 

Given Engel's cooperation with the Committee, for the DoJ to continue to protect the memo Engels wrote declaring that Trump committed no criminal activity as "internal deliberation material" was both legally and morally indefensible.

We'll see.

California's Emissions Mission

California environmental regulators are expected to put into place new vehicle rules that would reduce the sales of gasoline-powered vehicles in the state over the next decade and end sales completely by 2035.

California is expected to put into effect on Thursday its sweeping plan to prohibit the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, a groundbreaking move that could have major effects on the effort to fight climate change and accelerate a global transition toward electric vehicles.

“This is huge,” said Margo Oge, an electric vehicles expert who headed the Environmental Protection Agency’s transportation emissions program under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “California will now be the only government in the world that mandates zero-emission vehicles. It is unique.”

The rule, issued by the California Air Resources Board, will require that 100 percent of all new cars sold in the state by 2035 be free of the fossil fuel emissions chiefly responsible for warming the planet, up from 12 percent today. It sets interim targets requiring that 35 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the state by 2026 produce zero emissions. That would climb to 68 percent by 2030.

The restrictions are important because not only is California the largest auto market in the United States, but more than a dozen other states typically follow California’s lead when setting their own auto emissions standards.

“The climate crisis is solvable if we focus on the big, bold steps necessary to stem the tide of carbon pollution,” Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, said in a statement.

California’s action comes on top of an expansive new climate law that President Biden signed last week. The law will invest $370 billion in spending and tax credits on clean energy programs, the largest action ever taken by the federal government to combat climate change. Enactment of that law is projected to help the United States cut its emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade. Still, it will not be enough to eliminate U.S. emissions by 2050, the target that climate scientists say all major economies must reach if the world is to avert the most catastrophic and deadly impacts of climate change.

To help close the gap, White House officials have vowed to couple the bill with new regulations, including on automobile tailpipe emissions. They have also said that reducing emissions enough to stay in line with the science also will require aggressive state policies.

Experts said the new California rule, in both its stringency and reach, could stand alongside the Washington law as one of the world’s most important climate change policies, and could help take another significant bite out of the nation’s emissions of carbon dioxide. The new rule is also expected to influence new policies in Washington and around the world to promote electric vehicles and cut auto pollution.

At least 12 other states could potentially adopt the new California zero-emissions vehicle mandate relatively soon; another five states, which follow California’s broader vehicle pollution reduction program, are expected to adopt the rule in a year or so. If those states follow through, the restrictions on gasoline-vehicle sales would apply to about one-third of the United States’ auto market.

That would have a major effect on addressing climate change, since emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles are the nation’s top source of planet-warming greenhouse-gas pollution.

John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents large U.S. and foreign automakers, said California’s new electric vehicle sale mandates would be “extremely challenging” to meet. “Whether or not these requirements are realistic or achievable is directly linked to external factors like inflation, charging and fuel infrastructure, supply chains, labor, critical mineral availability and pricing, and the ongoing semiconductor shortage,” Mr. Bozzella said by email.

He said automakers wanted to see more electric vehicles on the roads, but called on the state and the federal government to do more to address issues such as the ability to mine critical minerals like lithium and cobalt in the United States, the affordability of electric vehicles and equitable access to fast charging.

The governments of Canada, Britain and at least nine other European countries — including France, Spain and Denmark — have set goals of phasing out the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles between 2030 and 2040. But none have concrete mandates or regulations like the California rule.

“This regulation will set the global high-water mark for the accelerated transition to electric vehicles,” said Drew Kodjak, executive director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, a research organization.

 

A reminder then that California is now the fifth largest economy on planet Earth, behind the rest of the US, China, Japan, and Germany. This is a monumental environmental move, and considering a third of America would follow suit, the effects of this would effectively be the end of gas-powered cars and trucks in one-third to one-half of the country.

Sadly, I expect Texas to ban electric vehicles of all types and actually force people to drive coal-burning monster trucks.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

It was a big night for primaries in New York and Florida, and Dems scored a major upset in NY-19's special election as Democrat Pat Ryan got the win, and it was because of the death of Roe.

 

Pat Ryan, a Democratic county executive in New York’s Hudson Valley, has won a special House election on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, in a contest that was seen as a potential test of the impact that the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion might have on the midterm elections.

The result in the closely watched race, which was considered a tossup, will keep the swing-district seat, formerly held by Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, under Democratic control.

Mr. Ryan was able to keep his early lead, ultimately winning 52 percent of the vote to Mr. Molinaro’s 48 percent, with nearly 95 percent of votes cast.

Mr. Ryan sought to highlight abortion as the predominant issue in his campaign and contrast his support for protecting abortion access nationwide with the position of his Republican opponent, Marc Molinaro, who believes that the decision ought to rest with states.

In speeches and campaign ads, Mr. Ryan, the Ulster County executive and a combat veteran, urged voters in the 19th District to see the election as a crucial opportunity to send a message decrying attacks on abortion access, voting rights and, more broadly, democratic principles.

“Choice was on the ballot. Freedom was on the ballot, and tonight choice and freedom won,” Mr. Ryan said on Twitter early Wednesday. “We voted like our democracy was on the line because it is.”

Though polls show that a majority of voters support some access to abortion, Democrats have been wrestling with how best to translate that into support for the party.

Mr. Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive, largely avoided the topic of abortion, focusing instead on day-to-day voter anxieties, from crime and inflation to the price of baby formula.

 

Molinaro, the Republican, should have won. All the polling showed that he was going to. "Voters don't care about abortion, they care about inflation!"

He lost though, because voters do care.

Vote like your country depends on it.

Last Call For Ridin' With Biden: Loan Arranger Edition

President Joe Biden continues to help average Americans struggling with debt, in this case, onerous student loans for those who can least afford paying them back.

President Biden will announce a decision on Wednesday about his plans for student loan debt relief, a highly anticipated moment that could affect about 45 million borrowers nationwide, according to people familiar with the matter.

Although details of the plan were still being finalized, White House aides have said Mr. Biden was weighing a targeted plan that would provide $10,000 of debt relief for borrowers who make below a certain level of income.

Mr. Biden also is expected to extend a pause on loan payments for all borrowers, a Trump-era program that has been in effect since the start of the pandemic

The federal government, the main lender for Americans who borrow to fund their higher education, holds $1.6 trillion in student debt. Mr. Biden has faced calls throughout his presidency to cancel a chunk of it, driven by borrowers and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He backed the idea of some relief on the campaign trail in 2020, saying: “I’m going to make sure that everybody in this generation gets $10,000 knocked off of their student debt as we try to get out of this godawful pandemic.”

But White House aides say the president has agonized over the decision, questioning whether cancellation should apply to students of both public and private universities and saying he does not want the relief to apply to those earning high incomes.

The decision will add fuel to debates raging in Washington — and within the Democratic Party — about economic fairness and the potential to exacerbate an inflation rate that has reached a 40-year high.

Mr. Biden had promised a decision by the end of the month, but he is expected to return to the White House on Wednesday from Delaware, where he is on vacation with his family.

“The president will have more to say on this before Aug. 31,” said Abdullah Hasan, a White House spokesman. “No one with a federally-held loan has had to pay a single dime in student loans since President Biden took office.”

Mr. Hasan also noted that the Biden administration has “already canceled about $32 billion in debt for more than 1.6 million Americans,” a reference to actions to revive and expand targeted relief programs that had all but stopped functioning during the Trump administration.

 

And while this would cancel as much as $450 billion in debt, I don't see how this will survive the Roberts Court. Not that it's actually unconstitutional, it's just that the Roberts Court will deem it so. Expect this to get tied up in the courts immediately before the executive order can take effect, only Congress has the power, etc.

This is a good plan, but don't expect Biden the Loan Arranger to be ridin' for long at all on this horse. Republicans are going to put a storm of lead into the ol' gal.

We'll see. If you get the chance to take advantage of the program before it's blocked by the GOP, do it.

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.