Last Call For Seven Nutjob Army

Our old friend Mike Flynn is recruiting military veterans to serve as the GOP's heavily armed poll worker "task force" to "secure" polling locations on Election Day.

 

Military planes dropping bombs, battleships at the ready, scores of soldiers marching in the streets -- and across the screen flashes the words, "Your country needs you once again."

"Beat the cheat," the video urges viewers.

The footage is from a new recruitment video released by The America Project, an organization led by prominent election deniers Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO, and retired general Michael Flynn, a former Trump national security adviser, who have joined forces in the final weeks leading up to the midterm elections to recruit ex-military and first responders to staff polling locations around the country.

The operation, fueled by false election claims and using recruitment material featuring images of war, has been dubbed "One Last Mission" by Byrne and Flynn, who emerged as leading figures in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

"The America Project has spun up the coup de grâce on the enemy," Byrne said in a separate video announcing the campaign, telling viewers he believes the "bad guys are going to come at us with another rig"-- despite there being no evidence that the 2020 election was rigged or stolen.

Poll workers, who set up voting equipment, sign-in and process voters, and report results, are typically apolitical positions for which applicants must affirm that they won't act for the benefit of any candidate or party.

"AMERICA NEEDS YOU NOW MORE THAN EVER," read an October post on the group's Instagram account. "You took an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution. And defending it means ensuring election integrity."

 

Thousands of these armed and dangerous assholes are going to show up and "patrol" polling places in key battleground states, in what amounts to a conspiracy to coordinate mass voter intimidation.

 

"This is the most important thing I think going on in America right now," Byrne said in a recent interview promoting the effort on a conservative internet show. "We're asking you to save the country again."

He said in another interview that the recruiting campaign has been "going like gangbusters" after launching in September.

The "One Last Mission" campaign is the latest effort launched by The America Project, which has announced a slate of programs aimed at impacting future elections, many fueled by baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

The group has also conducted poll worker "training" around the county, called "Operation Eagle's Wings," which is targeting key battleground states including Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The America Project has so far trained almost 6,000 poll workers in just Pennsylvania alone, according to Flynn's brother Michael Flynn, who is the group's president. The training is separate and additional to training from election officials.

"They won't be able to steal this election the same way they stole 2020!" he tweeted. 

 

If you're not white, these guys are going to challenge your right to vote at gunpoint. I'm telling you, this is going to be an absolute disaster. Voter intimidation all over the TV on Election Day? Maybe you decide to stay home. 

We're nowhere near ready for this.

It will be far worse in 2024.

 

Ukraine In The Membrane, Brainless Edition

The House Democratic Progressive Caucus strikes again, and not in a good way, as Josh Marshall analyzes.

Yesterday thirty members of the House Progressive Caucus signed a letter urging President Biden to pursue direct negotiations with Russia and a diplomatic settlement to the Russo-Ukraine war. Given the fairly united support for Ukraine in the US political class and fairly broad support among the public in general, the letter was bound to spur some controversy. But the letter itself was an incoherent mass of contradictions. It pressed for immediate negotiations and a ceasefire while also insisting on defending Ukraine and not taking any steps without Ukraine’s support. For the moment at least these are irreconcilable positions. Ukraine’s war aim is to drive Russia from most and likely all of its territory. Russia’s position is to annex large parts of Ukraine and force it into a permanently subordinate position to Russia. One side or another has to substantially shift its demands or there’s little to talk about. The letter could have said, ‘The threat of escalation and the danger to the global economy is so great that US needs to make Ukraine shift its goals.’ But it didn’t. It stated two irreconcilable positions at once.

Then things got weird.

Soon the leader of the Progressive Caucus Pramila Jayapal put out a statement “reaffirming support for Ukraine and clarifying the position of a letter to President Biden. Her clarification amounted to a recantation of the initial letter: “We are united as Democrats in our unequivocal commitment to supporting Ukraine in their fight for their democracy and freedom in the face of the illegal and outrageous Russian invasion, and nothing in the letter advocates for a change in that support.” Another signer, Rep. Mark Takano, put out a statement again basically recanting or disavowing the letter.

Next Rep. Mark Pocan went on Twitter and said that the letter was being misinterpreted and wasn’t sure why it was dated 10/24 “as it was July.” What? Responding to criticism he said told one person on Twitter, Pocan said “I agree the timing makes little sense. It was from July.” In other comment he appeared to suggest that he wasn’t even aware in advance that the letter was being released.

Clearly the whole episode had become something of a debacle as at least three of the signers, including the head of the Progressive Caucus, were distancing themselves from it or recanting its contents within hours of its appearance. But Pocan’s comments raised real questions about whether the signatories had actually read the letter or even knew in advance that it was going to be released. Again, Pocan suggested it was something he and his colleagues had done in July – in other words, three or four months ago.

Rep. Ro Khanna defended the letter and suggested that the reaction to the letter was an effort to “silence or shout down debate.”

My own initial read of the letter was that one group of signatories had worked with the outside group Quincy Institute on a letter calling for a push for a ceasefire. Others among the signatories weren’t really prepared to do that and insisted on adding various commitments to Ukraine’s independence and no actions not supported by Ukraine. Unable to agree on these points they piled both conflicting positions into one letter and signed it. More generally, I think there are people in the Progressive Caucus who simply weren’t comfortable with a position indistinguishable from the rest of their party and indeed from many more mainstream Republicans. But the fallout from the release of the letter shows a clumsiness and obtuseness I would not have expected from members like Rep. Jayapal or Jamie Raskin or Ro Khanna. And here I want to distinguish between positions I might disagree with versus position statements that are simply logical contradictions or ones that need to be recanted or explained or abandoned within hours.

The truth is that Biden administration has and continues to pursue diplomacy. There are no public negotiations because the two sides are simply two far apart for them to make any sense. Taken on its face the letter calls on the administration to do what it’s actually already doing (using diplomacy to find a settlement) while not doing what the letter says it shouldn’t do (act without Ukraine’s support) and has actually not done.

 

There are serious questions about whether or not the Progressive Caucus members even read the letter, as incoherent and contradictory as it is, as Marshall points out.

 

Personally, this smells like deliberate application of the coital functions of the common rattus rattus to me. Somebody in the Caucus sure seems like they are trying to cause trouble two weeks before the damn midterms and doing so on purpose.

 

Jayapal scrambled today to retract the letter completely.

The about-face comes as some Democratic lawmakers vent their fury that the letter backing talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin — originally drafted and signed in June — wasn’t recirculated before its public release on Monday. That release made it appear that the 30 House Democrats who signed on, all lawmakers in the roughly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, were urging the Biden administration to push for diplomacy immediately despite Russia’s engagement in war crimes and indications of a military escalation against Ukraine.

Making the timing of the letter even more politically perilous: Ukraine is not ready for negotiations at this point, especially because its months-long counteroffensive has been successful to date, and there’s no indication Putin is ready to deal either.

“The Congressional Progressive Caucus hereby withdraws its recent letter to the White House regarding Ukraine,” the caucus’ chair, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), said in a statement after POLITICO first reported that the retraction was imminent. “The letter was drafted several months ago, but unfortunately was released by staff without vetting.”

Jayapal said she accepts “responsibility” for the embarrassing flub, adding that the timing of the letter caused a “distraction” and was “conflated” with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s recent suggestion that Republicans might pull back on Ukraine funding if they win control of the House.

“The proximity of these statements created the unfortunate appearance that Democrats, who have strongly and unanimously supported and voted for every package of military, strategic, and economic assistance to the Ukrainian people, are somehow aligned with Republicans who seek to pull the plug on American support for President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian forces,” Jayapal added.

I'm disappointed the most in Pramila Jayapal, who handled both the Democrats' infrastructure bill and budget negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin so well earlier this year only to walk directly into the jet intake and look like a fool. If she can't handle it then maybe somebody else should be running this circus.

I mean we've already got the clowns, kids.

Sunak Sunak Fun

The UK Tories have elected a new leader, Rishi Sunak, who will be Britain's third PM in less than 60 days and the first non-white PM in British history.

Rishi Sunak’s campaign had a simple slogan when he ran for prime minister of Britain earlier this year: “Ready for Rishi.”

The answer was: No, sorry.

He competed against Liz Truss to lead Britain’s Conservative Party after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his scandal-induced resignation in July.

With Truss out, it appears Britain’s Conservatives are indeed ready for Sunak — or at least any chance of a reprieve from the chaos at 10 Downing Street.

Sunak won the Conservative Party’s leadership contest Monday, making him the country’s third leader in less than two months and Britain’s first prime minister of South Asian descent.

The 42-year-old former finance minister is one of Britain’s wealthiest politicians. He was born in Southampton, England, to parents of Indian origin who had emigrated from East Africa.

Educated at one of Britain’s most prestigious private schools, as was his former boss Boris Johnson, he has a glittering résumé, with degrees from the University of Oxford and Stanford University and a stint at the Goldman Sachs investment bank. Sunak is married to the Indian tech heiress Akshata Murty, whose tax affairs caused the former finance minister some political discomfort during his leadership campaign in the summer.

A video clip from a 2007 BBC documentary, in which Sunak suggests he doesn’t have any “working-class friends,” is recirculating online as some Britons frown upon the array of upper-class Conservative contenders.

Nonetheless, he remains popular among politicians of his own party, although he fares less well among the Conservative Party’s national membership, who favored Truss in September by 57.4 percent to 42.6 percent.

 

This is the guy that lost to Liz Truss., and by 15 points, because he was literally a Goldman Sachs economist married to a tech millionaire in an era of unprecedented austerity in post-Brexit Britain.

It'll be a miracle if he makes it to the end of the year as PM still.

Last Call For Defending Democracy, Con't

The Biden administration says it is "tracking multiple threats" from China, Russia, and "non-state actors" to US midterm elections.

Top Biden national security officials are tracking multiple threats to the nation’s election security infrastructure ahead of the midterms and are set to issue warnings, including in an internal intelligence bulletin this week, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The bulletin will lay out details of cyber threats posed by China and Russia, as well as other non-state actors, and potential physical threats to election officials in jurisdictions across the country, the people said. The warnings come as the midterm elections near and amid increasing reports of intimidation at ballot drop boxes. The people requested anonymity to talk freely about sensitive national security and election matters.

Elsewhere on Monday, the Department of Justice addressed several malign influence schemes and alleged criminal activity by non-state actors. While those charges were unrelated to the intelligence bulletin warning, FBI Director Christopher Wray acknowledged during a press conference that foreign governments continue to pose a major threat to U.S. elections.

“Malign foreign influence — whether it’s from the Chinese government, the Russian government or other governments — is not just an election-cycle issue, but a 365-day-a-year problem,” Wray said.

The internal administration concerns about election threats come days after a call was held between federal officials and local law enforcement personnel about the midterms, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. Those on the call discussed the potential for violence in response to the spread of false narratives regarding the election process. Officials said election workers, including those working at polling stations, are likely to face threats and harassment from extrements both online and offline, the person familiar with the matter said.

“We are now hearing reports of people surrounding ballot drop boxes, some even wearing tactical gear, and questioning people,” said John Cohen, the former counterterrorism chief at DHS. “Are the police prepared for that? They need to be. All of this is being driven by the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen.”

The FBI, DHS and DOJ did not respond to requests for comment. 

 

Spoilers: "Non-state actors" here means white supremacist domestic terrorism groups, driven by the Big Lie, to stake out early voting drop boxes in overt, heavily armed voter intimidation efforts in Arizona.

Arizona officials on Saturday sounded alarms about voter safety after two armed individuals deemed “vigilantes” dressed in tactical gear were found outside a Maricopa County ballot drop box Friday evening.

“We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box. Uninformed vigilantes outside Maricopa County’s drop boxes are not increasing election integrity. Instead they are leading to voter intimidation complaints,” said Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer in a joint statement.

“Although monitoring and transparency in our elections is critical, voter intimidation is unlawful. For those who want to be involved in election integrity, become a poll worker or an official observer with your political party. Don’t dress in body armor to intimidate voters as they are legally returning their ballots,” the statement continued.

The two armed individuals left the Mesa ballot drop box after Maricopa County law enforcement responded, according to the elections officials.

The incident comes after the Arizona secretary of state last week referred a case of possible voter intimidation to the Justice Department and the state’s attorney general after a voter attempting to cast their ballot in Maricopa County was reportedly “approached and followed by a group of individuals.”

 

Expect a lot more of this in the days to come, with two weeks to go.

Be careful out there when you vote.

The Clarence And Huckleberry Show

The most corrupt six conservatives in Supreme Court in US history continue apace, this time starring Clarence Thomas.

 

Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday agreed to temporarily freeze a lower court order requiring the testimony of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham in front of an Atlanta-area special grand jury that is investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state.

Thomas acted alone because he has jurisdiction of the lower court that issued the original order.

Thomas’ move is an administrative stay that was most likely issued Monday to give the Supreme Court justices more time to consider the dispute.

The court has asked for a response from the Georgia investigators by Thursday.

 

At this point, I fully expect five votes to rule that sitting members of Congress cannot be subpoenaed for any reason as they are above the law. Understand that this will not apply to Democrats when they are dragged into state investigations over 2020 voter fraud, I'm sure those are coming soon, especially if any of the GOP election denier crackpots running for governor, secretary of state, or AG win.

And Clarence Thomas is blocking this to stop Lindsey Graham from being questioned under oath about Thomas's right-wing seditionist leader wife Ginni, and in turn, himself.

That's some quality corruption right there.

Angry Angry Voters

Voters are angry, motivated, and wary of the 2022 midterms, and both Republicans and Democrats say that they are ready to vote in order to prevent the other party from being in charge.

Less than three weeks before Election Day, voter interest has now reached an all-time high for a midterm election, with a majority of registered voters saying that this election is “more important” to them than past midterms.

What’s more, some 80% of Democrats and Republicans believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.

And two-thirds of reliable Democratic and Republican voters say they’d still support their party’s political candidate, even if that person had a moral failing that wasn’t consistent with their own values.

These are some of the major findings of a brand-new national NBC News poll, which also shows a competitive contest for November and offers positive signs for both major political parties.

For Democrats, President Joe Biden’s approval rating remains steady at 45%; congressional preference continues to be relatively even (with 47% of registered voters preferring Democrats to control Congress, versus 46% who want Republicans in charge); and “threats to democracy” is voters’ No. 1 issue for the third-straight NBC News poll.

For Republicans, the positive signs are that Biden’s approval with independents and swing-state voters is in the 30s and low 40s; that the GOP once again holds the enthusiasm advantage; and that Republicans lead in congressional preference among the smaller set of likely voters, 48% to 47%, though that’s well within the survey’s margin of error.

Yet beyond the horserace numbers and the high interest in the upcoming election, what stands out in the NBC News poll is the bipartisan anger from Democratic and Republican voters when they were asked which one message they’d like to send with their vote.

“Tell Biden to resign,” said a Republican male respondent from Missouri.

“Save this country,” answered a Republican female from New York state.

“Democracy is in jeopardy,” replied a Democratic male from Massachusetts.

“Don’t mess with reproductive rights,” said a Democratic female from California

“We know that many voters will be casting ballots with anger on their minds,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted this survey with Republican Bill McInturff and his team at Public Opinion Strategies.

“We just don’t know who which side will be angrier,” Horwitt added.

 

Record early voting numbers from states like Georgia and Michigan confirm this scenario. We're looking at turnout that may even surpass 2018's record numbers. That means it will take longer to count the votes, and that's where Republicans are already planning to attack the 2022 vote as fraudulent, starring Donald Trump.

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, Donald Trump welcomed a handful of Republican allies to Manhattan’s Trump Tower with an urgent message: He saw a “scam” happening with midterm election voting in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, and he wanted conservatives to do something about it.

“During our briefing, he was concerned that 2020 is going to happen again in 2022,” says former senior Trump administration official Michael Caputo, referencing Trump’s debunked assertion that voter fraud in Philadelphia helped win Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. Caputo — who attended the meeting alongside Bradford County Commissioner Doug McLinko and retired CIA officer Sam Faddis — says they had a message back to the former president: “Our team encouraged him to be concerned … [Furthermore], I’m advising Republicans to recruit and train election observers and a team of attorneys to oversee historically problematic precincts.”

But it’s not just one meeting, and it’s not just Philly.

In recent months, Trump has convened a series of in-person meetings and conference calls to discuss laying the groundwork to challenge the 2022 midterm election results, four people familiar with the conversations tell Rolling Stone. In these conversations, pro-Trump groups, attorneys, Republican Party activists, and MAGA diehards often discuss the type of scorched-earth legal tactics they could deploy.

And they’ve gamed out scenarios for how to aggressively challenge elections, particularly ones in which a winner is not declared on Election Night. If there’s any hint of doubt about the winners, the teams plan to wage aggressive court campaigns and launch a media blitz. Trump himself set the blueprint for this on Election Night 2020, when — with the race far from decided — he went on national television to declare: “Frankly, we did win this election.”

Trump has been briefed on plans in multiple states and critical races — including in Georgia. But Pennsylvania has grabbed his interest most keenly, including in the Senate contest between Democrat John Fetterman and the Trump-endorsed GOP contender Mehmet Oz. If the Republican does not win by a wide enough margin to trigger a speedy concession from Fetterman — or if the vote tally is close on or after Election Night in November — Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the “election integrity” of Democratic strongholds such as the Philly area.

Trump’s focus on Pennsylvania, however, seems to be more about his own political future than about party allegiance or fealty to his celebrity endorsee. As he hosts meetings on possible 2022 election challenges, he’s also been laying the groundwork for a run in 2024 — where Pennsylvania again promises to be critical and competitive. As one source who has spoken to Trump several times about a potential post-election-day legal battle over the Oz-Fetterman race puts it, Trump views a potential midterm challenge as a “dress rehearsal for Trump 2024.”

 

As I've said before on several occasions, the country is just not ready for the GOP lying blitz that's going to take place around the country. Like Steve M., I'm not worried about Trump declaring Dr. Oz to be the winner in November, for example. I *am* worried about Pennsylvania's GOP state legislature doing so, and what may follow as a result.

I'm worried about Republican crackpot Kari Lake refusing to accept a loss in Arizona's governor's race, or Adam Laxalt doing the same in Nevada's.

In an interview on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake would not explicitly commit to accepting the outcome of her upcoming election if she loses to her Democratic opponent.

"Let me ask you why it is that you have not said -- or maybe you'll do it now -- you have not said that you will accept the certified results of this election, even if you lose this election?" ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Lake in the interview.

"I will accept the results of this election if we have a fair, honest and transparent election. Absolutely, 100%," said Lake, a former TV anchor who has become one of the Republican Party's most prominent election deniers this cycle. "As long as it's fair, honest and transparent."

In a previous interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Lake only said she would accept the results if she won, after being asked three times whether she would accept the election's outcome.

"If you lose, will you accept that?" Bash ultimately asked, to which Lake replied again: "I'm going to win the election, and I will accept that result."

 

And as Republicans all over the country have made very clear, any election that doesn't result in a Republican win cannot be fair, honest, or transparent.  They've been telling us they will steal as many elections as possible in 2022 as a test run for doing the same with the electoral college in 2024.

Vote in numbers too big to manipulate.

Sundar Long Read: Less Is Moore

Our Sunday Long Read this week is M.H. Miller's GQ interview with absolute comic industry legend Alan Moore, the genius behind Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and more, whose works elevated comics from mere four-color adventures to critical works on life and culture itself, his ur-heroes asking the questions about what humanity would do if given powers and abilities far beyond mortal men, and how superheroes are the most flawed of us all. 

 

Alan Moore, who is perhaps the greatest comic book writer to ever live, does not give many interviews. “No offense, but I am unused to publicizing my own work,” he told me from his home in Northampton, in England’s East Midlands, during one of two Zoom interviews in September, around the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. He was dressed, both times, in a red sweater, and occasionally dragged on an enormous rolled cigarette that smoked up the screen. Behind the couch he was sitting on were reproductions of the Enochian Tables, texts from a 16th century form of magic founded by the occultist John Dee. “Whereby,” Moore said, “he was convinced that he was capable of speaking to a range of entities that he had to describe as angels, because describing them as anything else would have probably got him burned.”

When Moore made his debut in the American comics industry in the early ’80s, taking over the little-read Swamp Thing for DC Comics, he instantly made the medium more literary and expressive, injecting it with postmodern techniques that offered a self-awareness and seriousness that previously didn’t exist in the realm of superheroes. Over the following years, he created some of the most enduring works to ever grace the comics form: Miracleman, which took an obscure British knock-off of DC’s Captain Marvel from the 1950s, and transposed him, convincingly, onto Thatcher’s England; Watchmen, a nightmarish parable that imagines how a group of masked vigilantes would actually function in the real world (not very well, it turns out); V for Vendetta, about London after a nuclear war has plunged the government into outright fascism, and the anarchist revolution that emerges as a result (a series that, among other things, popularized the Guy Fawkes mask as a contemporary symbol of dissent); From Hell, a meticulously researched account of Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders; and the late-period masterpieces Neonomicon and Providence, which posit that the Cthulhu Mythos, the universe in which H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction was set, was not altogether fictional.

Moore will likely always be best remembered for these works, but he has since abandoned comics. Long before superhero stories became the bread and butter of Hollywood, studio executives were exploiting Moore’s writing. The 2001 film of From Hell, starring Johnny Depp, was especially derided, but Moore purists would argue all adaptations of his work—including the critically acclaimed, Emmy-winning Watchmen limited series from HBO, which diverges rather boldly from its source material—are at best reductive misinterpretations and at worst offensively awful. Not only has Moore had nothing to do with these adaptations—he famously hasn’t watched any of them. It’s no wonder, then, that Moore has been a tireless advocate for creators’ rights. After failing to maintain ownership of the characters and stories he created for mainstream comics publishers (predominantly DC) he’s disowned much of his most beloved material.

But he remains a prolific author. His 2016 novel Jerusalem, largely set in Northampton’s Boroughs neighborhood, where Moore was born and raised and where he’s spent the majority of his life, is over 1,200 pages of shifting perspectives, styles, and timeframes. It is both a kind of cosmic autobiography and, taking inspiration from William Burroughs, an attempt by Moore to write his way around death. A collection of stories, Illuminations, was released this month, and includes the novel-length “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” a vicious satire of the comics industry, dedicated to Kevin O’Neill, Moore’s collaborator on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, another classic comic with a disastrous adaptation (Sean Connery, its star, never acted in a feature film again).

The times Moore has talked to the press, he has been outspoken, railing against the absurdities of superhero fandom and the rapaciousness of the comics industry. “When I first protested having my intellectual properties stolen,” Moore says, “the reaction from a lot of the fans was, ‘He’s a crazy, angry guy.’ He’s just inexplicably angry about absolutely everything. He wakes up in the morning, angry with his pillow. He eats his breakfast cereal while being angry with it. He’s angry about everything, so, therefore, nothing that he seems to be upset about is of any consequence. This is just an angry person. Alan Moore says, ‘Get off my lawn.’”

 

And that's really the point. More than anyone else on Earth, Alan Moore hates superheroes and breaks them down into their component foibles, follies and all too human failures. Heroes have been a cautionary tale to him, tales worth reading if only to armor ourselves against the world we live in now.

 

I enjoyed this one immensely.

 

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Russian missile strikes in Ukraine on Saturday knocked out power to 1.5 million people as Moscow is warning civilians in occupied Kherson to leave or face consequences.

 

Ukraine said it defended itself against a “barrage” of 36 rockets that Russian forces fired at areas including Kyiv, Volyn, Kirovograd and Odessa on Saturday, wiping out power for almost 1.5 million people. Its air force said it had shot down at least 18 Russian cruise missiles. Odessa regional governor Maksym Marchenko said two rockets hit energy infrastructure, wiping out power in some areas, while Ukraine’s electricity company Ukrenergo said repair crews were working to restore power to networks in the west of the country. In Kyiv, air raid sirens sounded in the capital as Mayor Vitali Klitschko urged civilians to stay indoors and seek shelter. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba decried the “barrage of Russian missiles aimed at critical civilian infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, Russian authorities in illegally annexed Kherson urged civilians to leave the city “immediately” Saturday afternoon in an effort to portray Kyiv as an aggressor in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian troops have been pushing out Russian forces in the country’s south and east, with clashes in cities it seeks to liberate.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Moscow of seeking to blow up a major hydroelectric dam in Nova Kakhovka near Kherson, potentially flooding southern areas. “Destroying the dam would mean a large-scale disaster,” he warned in a television address, urging the West to act “powerfully and quickly” to prevent such an outcome. Russia has denied the accusations.

There's a lot going onas nighttime temperatures are dropping below freezing and millions remain without power or heat thanks to Russian missile strikes on power plants and substations.

Concern is growing about the Kakhovka dam this weekend as a potential target. Earlier in the week, Zelensky accused Russian forces of mining the hydroelectric plant, one of Ukraine’s largest power facilities, in preparation for a “false flag” attack. He did not provide evidence of the Russian plot but told European Council leaders that the infrastructure attack could lead to flooding in 80 settlements and destroy much of southern Ukraine’s water supply. Kremlin-backed officials have instead claimed that Ukraine is planning to blow up the 1956 dam on the Dnieper River to flood Russian-occupied Kherson and has evacuated thousands of people from the city in preparation. The Washington Post could not independently verify the claims.

Occupying Russian authorities told residents to flee Kherson Saturday afternoon, urging them to take “documents, money, valuables and clothes.” Ukrainian troops have been advancing toward the city in an effort to upend the Russian-backed administration that was installed there under an orchestrated annexation violating international law. In an effort to lure Kherson residents into places with stronger Kremlin footholds, Russian cities and the occupied Crimean region were offering incentives such as payments and housing assistance, according to Moscow-backed authorities’ Telegram accounts.

Washington sees no evidence of Moscow ending the war soon, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Friday alongside his French counterpart. Instead, he said the Kremlin was “doubling and tripling down” on its aggression in Ukraine. “Every indication is that far from being willing to engage in meaningful diplomacy, President [Vladimir] Putin continues to push in the opposite direction,” Blinken said.

A bipartisan congressional delegation met Zelensky in Kyiv, including Reps. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), Jim Himes (D-Conn.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). The group “talked about financial support, about our political interaction, about what new anti-European and anti-democratic steps to expect from Russia,” Zelensky said. The visit came after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) this week signaled that the GOP would oppose more aid to Ukraine. President Biden said this week said he was worried that Republicans may cut aid to Ukraine if they win back the House.

 

Another 30 or 40 Republicans in the House would not only give the GOP control, it would certainly give them the votes to defund everything Biden has accomplished and hold the country hostage, causing tremendous damage to the economy while doing it.

Putin is counting on a GOP win.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

As many have suspected, the stolen classified documents Trump kept in his Mar-a-Lago pool closet contained sensitive national security information about both Iran and China.

Some of the classified documents recovered by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club included highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China, according to people familiar with the matter. If shared with others, the people said, such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world.

At least one of the documents seized by the FBI describes Iran’s missile program, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Other documents described highly sensitive intelligence work aimed at China, they said.

Unauthorized disclosures of specific information in the documents would pose multiple risks, experts say. People aiding U.S. intelligence efforts could be endangered, and collection methods could be compromised. In addition, other countries or U.S. adversaries could retaliate against the United States for actions it has taken in secret.

The classified documents about Iran and China are considered among the most sensitive the FBI has recovered to date in its investigation of Trump and his aides for possible mishandling of classified information, obstruction and destruction of government records, the people said. The criminal probe is unfolding even as the Justice Department and a district attorney in Georgia investigate alleged efforts by Trump and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and as a House select committee has subpoenaed the former president seeking documents and testimony related to those allegations.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in having the documents at Mar-a-Lago, claiming in a recent television interview that he declassified any documents in his possession, and that a president can declassify information “even by thinking about it.” National security lawyers have derided those claims.

A spokesman for the former president did not respond to requests for comment Friday morning. But after this article published online, Trump posted on social media, decrying what he called leaks “on the Document Hoax” and suggesting that the FBI and the National Archives and Records Administration were trying to frame him.

“Who could ever trust corrupt, weaponized agencies, and that includes NARA,” Trump wrote. “ … Also who knows what NARA and the FBI plant into documents, or subtract from documents — we will never know, will we?”

 

Foreign agents certainly have seen these documents. There's no way they were kept secure with known Chinese, Russian, and Saudi nationals running around the place as Trump's guests, and probably even more infiltrating the resort as staff.

Even if Trump didn't sell these documents to the highest bidder, he almost certainly showed them off to brag. Trying to blame this on the FBI is just silly.

Trump is in real trouble, and even he knows it.

Bannon Bonked Badly

The human racism factory is going to federal prison for four months for contempt of Congress.

 

A federal judge on Friday sentenced Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump who aided in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, to four months in prison for disobeying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Mr. Bannon, 68, was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress this summer after Judge Carl J. Nichols rejected an array of arguments offered by Mr. Bannon’s defense team, including that he was protected from being compelled to testify by executive privilege.

Mr. Bannon will remain free pending his appeal. 

The sentence, coming a year after Mr. Bannon was held in contempt by the House, is two months short of what federal prosecutors had requested this week. They had accused Mr. Bannon, the onetime editor of the right-wing news outlet Breitbart, of having “pursued a bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt” from the moment he received the subpoena seeking information about his knowledge of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his electoral defeat.

“Others must be deterred from committing similar crimes,” said Judge Nichols, a Trump appointee, who also imposed a fine of $6,500 on Mr. Bannon.

In a contentious exchange with the defense team before announcing a sentence, he said Mr. Bannon had shown “no remorse for his actions” and had yet to “demonstrate he has any intention of complying with the subpoena.”

In issuing the sentence, Judge Nichols dismissed Mr. Bannon’s claims that his refusal to testify was protected by executive privilege. But he also cited Mr. Bannon’s belated effort to reach an agreement with the committee, his service in the Navy, his lack of a criminal history and the unsettled judicial status of executive privilege as factors mitigating against a longer sentence.

Mr. Bannon, a rapid-talking provocateur who has used his daily internet radio show to skewer the government for prosecuting him, approached his sentencing with the same defiance that has characterized his attitude toward the congressional summons that prompted the case. He told reporters that he viewed President Biden as “illegitimate” as he entered Federal District Court in Washington, flanked by his lawyers.

After thanking reporters for showing up, he went on to claim that Democrats would face their “judgment day” in the coming midterm elections and urged all within earshot to oppose the Chinese Communist Party.

He sat impassively in a dark military-style jacket and an untucked blue shirt as the sentence was issued.

 

Bannon, as mentioned, will remain free on appeal, thanks to the Trump-appointed judge. no doubt shilling for his legal fees and martyring himself, or trying to. Bannon was never going away, anyway. He is 100% the face of the Republican party, and 100% of the racist voters in the party who remain in the post-Trump era. 

We'll see if he actually goes to prison. The appeals process could take years.

Legal Eagles, Con't

Not a good day for the GOP in the arena of the federal courts, as the 11th Circuit and SCOTUS handed down big L's to Sen. Lindsey Graham and GOP attorneys general, respectively. First, Graham lost his bid to quash the subpoena in the Trump election fraud investigation by Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Wilson.

A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected Sen. Lindsey Graham’s emergency request that it halt a subpoena for his testimony from the Atlanta-area grand jury investigating efforts to undermine the 2020 election in Georgia.

The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court judge in ruling that the South Carolina Republican senator may be questioned about certain topics.

“(C)ommunications and coordination with the Trump campaign regarding its post-election efforts in Georgia, public statements regarding the 2020 election, and efforts to ‘cajole’ or ‘exhort’ Georgia election officials” are not legislative activities protected by the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution, the three-judge panel ruled.

With its new ruling, the appeals court lifted the temporary hold it had placed on the subpoena while it was considering Graham’s case.

However, Graham may not be questioned about conduct related to any fact-finding he was doing about whether to vote to certify the 2020 election results, the court ruled, okaying the approach taken by the lower court.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the investigation, has indicated that she wants to question Graham about his phone calls with Georgia election officials as former President Donald Trump and his allies were seeking to reverse his defeat in the state.

The appeals court said if there was a dispute over whether investigators’ questions about those calls related to the fact-finding he was doing for the certification vote, Graham could raise those issues when he is testifying. But the new ruling makes clear that the three other categories of conduct fall outside of the protections of the Speech and Debate Clause, which shields legislators from certain law enforcement activities connected to their duties as lawmakers.

The 11th Circuit order was unanimous and came from a panel made up of two Trump appointees and a Clinton appointee.

 

Meanwhile, the courts refused to block President Biden's college debt relief program, not once, but twice.

Federal courts on Thursday delivered two wins for President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected a challenge to the program brought by a Wisconsin taxpayers group. And on the same day, a federal district court judge rejected a separate lawsuit brought by six Republican-led states.

Student loan cancellations, worth up to $20,000 per eligible borrower, could begin on Sunday.

The appeal at issue in the Supreme Court case was considered an uphill battle because lower courts had ruled that the group, the Brown County Taxpayers Association, did not have the legal right or “standing” to bring the challenge. Under normal circumstances, taxpayers don’t have a general right to sue the government over how it uses taxpayer funds.

Barrett acted alone because she has jurisdiction over the lower court that ruled on the case. She declined to refer the matter to the full court. Her denial appeared as a single sentence on the court’s docket.

A federal judge in Missouri, US District Judge Henry Edward Autrey, rejected the lawsuit from the GOP-led states also because the plaintiffs did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.

As I said before, the issue is standing: who is harmed by the student debt relief program, and what harm needs to be redressed? The courts' answer at both the appeals and SCOTUS level is that there is no harm. I'm shocked, personally. I figured Justice Barrett would go along but she 100% did not.

Too nuts even for her. 

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

As Arit John at the LA Times reminds us, your access to vote depends entirely on where you live, as the red/blue divide increasingly defines how, when, where and even if you can vote at all.

For a brief time in 2020, it seemed as though the vote-by-mail movement was having a bipartisan moment.

Red and blue states that had offered the option only to a relatively small number of residents were suddenly scrambling to expand mail voting to as many people as possible to prevent the spread of COVID-19 at polling places. Voting rights advocates saw it as a chance to educate lawmakers and voters about the long-term benefits of moving away from casting ballots in person.

Then came President Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread mail ballot fraud.

Two years later, access to mail voting looks radically different from state to state, mirroring a broad partisan divide in voting policies.

Republican-led states, echoing the former president’s unfounded fraud claims, have passed laws restricting access to ballot drop boxes, created new requirements for verifying voters, limited who can return a voter’s ballot and made it harder to correct mistakes on mail ballots. Democratic states have moved in the opposite direction — or attempted to do so. Legal challenges, failed ballot initiatives and constitutional hurdles have hampered efforts to make mail voting easier, particularly in the Northeast.

Voting rights advocates say mail voting makes the process easier for people who have difficulties traveling to polling places and helps blunt the impact of policies that suppress voter turnout, such as polling location closures that have a disproportionately negative effect on Black and Latino communities, leading to longer lines. They have raised concerns that the policies Republicans have enacted to prevent mail ballot fraud — despite existing safeguards such as signature verification and ballot tracking — are discriminatory and disenfranchise people of color and low-income voters.

“It’s getting to the point where, really, we’re seeing these two democracies emerge,” said Liz Avore, a senior policy advisor at the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan advocacy group that tracks state election laws. “Your ZIP Code really determines what kind of access you have to the ballot, which is concerning.”

During the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly attempted to cast doubt on the security of mail ballots, though he has used the practice himself, claiming without evidence that the general election would be “rigged.” After he lost, his campaign filed more than five dozen election lawsuits that failed to turn up proof of widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election.

The lasting impact of his claims has led to stark differences between how Democrats and Republicans view mail voting. Democratic voters were nearly twice as likely to support allowing voters to request an absentee ballot without a documented excuse or vote early in person as Republicans were, according to a June 2020 Pew Research Center poll. Several Republican nominees for secretary of state across the U.S. have campaigned against mail voting, including Arizona candidate Mark Finchem, who has denied the results of the 2020 election and, like the former president, has himself voted by mail.

Vote-by-mail policies exist on a spectrum. Eight states, including California, offer universal mail voting, which means registered voters automatically receive a ballot for elections. About a dozen states offer mail voting in smaller counties or in state and local elections.

In 15 states including Texas, voters can request an absentee ballot only if they provide an approved reason for voting by mail, such as being outside of one’s voting jurisdiction, working as a poll worker or having an illness or disability that prevents in-person voting.

Conversely, 27 states and the District of Columbia allow voters to request a mail ballot without providing a reason. Some of those states allow eligible voters to sign up to receive an absentee ballot on an ongoing basis.

Within those states, there are varying rules dictating how ballots are verified, when and how ballots should be returned, and what happens if a voter’s signature doesn’t match the one on file or they don’t properly fill out their ballot.

 

Increasingly in red states, voter ID laws are designed to eliminate marginalized, Democratic-leaning groups from the electorate altogether, laws selectively applied to intimidate potential voters, while making voting as easy as possible for white, rural precincts. 

No wonder then that Republicans vehemently fought against a national voting legislation rather than letting the patchwork of state laws proliferate into a confusing mess. 

They are destroying the country on purpose, and they know it.

All Trussed Up, Con't

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, drowning in the Tory budget mess that nearly sank the British pound, announced her resignation this morning.

 

Liz Truss is continuing her statement outside Number 10.

In front of dozens of reporters she says she came into office at a time of "great economic and international instability".

She added: "I recognise... given the situation I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party."

Liz Truss goes on to say that she met with 1922 Committee chairman Sir Graham Brady today.

They agreed there will be a leadership election within the next week, adding that she will remain as prime minister until a successor is chosen.

The shortest government in modern British history, 44 days, and I'm not sure that the Tories can prevent a new general election, where Labour now has something like a 30-point lead in the polls and a government itself notable only for presiding over the death of QE II. BBC's Nick Eardley:

 

I've never seen anything like this. Let's be clear what's happened: yesterday Truss told us she was a fighter.

But the level of chaos in government, Parliament and the Conservative Party has led Truss to a point where she knows she can't continue.

What happens now is the quickest turnover of power we have seen in modern times.

This is a lightning speed change. The question is whether the Conservative Party can coalesce around a new leader and whether the party can avoid a general election.

In October we are going to have our third PM of the year.

This is an unprecedented situation and an unprecedented short tenure as PM and an unprecedented crisis in British politics.

 

Nobody's seen anything like this. Hic sunt dracones.

 

 

Last Call For These Disunited States, Con't

Democrats have finally figured out, after some ten years, that state legislatures are where the real action is as far as what rights Americans in those states are actually afforded. Likewise, they're pouring $20 million into state legislative races in key states like Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.

With the battle for state legislatures taking on an elevated importance during this midterm cycle, a Democratic super PAC is investing more than $20 million in state legislative races, with about 70 percent of the funds going to support candidates in 25 districts across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona.

The investment is from Forward Majority, the super PAC, as Democrats across the country are pouring significant resources into state legislative races. Last month, the States Project, another Democratic super PAC, pledged to spend $60 million in legislative races in five states. And Tech + Campaigns, another Democratic group, has pledged to spend $8 million on such races.

State legislatures have long been dominated by Republicans, who have excelled at motivating their voters to engage beyond federal races. The party made a concerted effort to win state legislatures ahead of the 2010 redistricting cycle and then proceeded to draw gerrymandered legislative maps to help shore up their control. As a result, Republicans have complete control of 29 state legislatures.

But with the Supreme Court set to rule in a case that could give state legislatures nearly unchecked authority over federal elections, Democratic groups have been aggressively playing catch-up, reaching parity with Republicans in television ad spending this year.

Forward Majority, however, is focusing more of its spending on the detailed aspects of campaigning, like voter registration and a tactic known as “boosted news,” or the practice of paying to promote news articles on social media newsfeeds.

The group has been targeting suburban and exurban districts that are split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats with a push to register new Democrats, who may be voters who have moved or who haven’t been engaged in a while, and encourage them to vote on the whole ballot instead of just the top of the ticket.

“Even as we see Joe Biden, Mark Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer win at the top of the ticket, we are still losing those races down-ballot,” said Vicky Hausman, a co-founder of Forward Majority. “So we have been obsessed with finding ways to add additional margin and add additional votes in these races.”

Republicans have noticed the increased investments of Democrats in state legislative races and have sounded the alarm to donors.

“We don’t have the luxury of relying on reinforcements to come save us,” Dee Duncan, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, wrote to donors last month. “We are the cavalry.”

The path for Democrats in Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania is narrow, but Ms. Hausman pointed to the thin margins in recent state legislative battles as an encouraging sign.

“The Virginia House was decided by about 600 votes in 2021,” she said. “The Arizona House came down to about 3,000 votes in two districts in 2020. So it is going to be a dogfight.”

 

I'm glad Democrats are finally playing hardball, but the time for this was in 2010.  Democrats gave away a dozen state legislatures to the GOP to be locked in through permanent gerrymandering in states like Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and if SCOTUS sides on the plenary state legislature theory, you may never see a Democrat win a statewide race or even a House race in those states again, they'll simply be overturned by Republican supermajorities in each state legislature.

We've got one more chance to decide before SCOTUS weighs in.

Vote like your country depends on it.

That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

I'm no polling expert, I just call them how I see them. Having said that, UVA's Kayle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman are such polling experts, and what they are seeing is polls being all over the place, with possible major upsets in a number of sleeper races as polling outfits change from registered voters to likely voters, and likely voter models are favoring the GOP.

With 3 weeks to go until Election Day, there are a few signs that some of the usual midterm dynamics — which push such elections to break against the White House — are reasserting themselves.

President Biden remains unpopular, and House generic ballot polling — probably the best polling catch-all we have for the overall political environment — has gotten a little bit better for Republicans as of late. The headline-grabber was a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday that showed Republicans moving into a 49%-45% lead on the generic ballot. As of this writing, the Democratic edge in the FiveThirtyEight generic ballot tracker is down to half a point, and the Republicans are up a couple of points in the RealClearPolitics tracker (the latter uses fewer polls and is also more sensitive to short-term changes).

It would not surprise us if the numbers improve a bit for Republicans down the stretch. Despite Democratic improvements after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and some candidate and image problems for Republicans, the usual midterm headwinds remain for Democrats. It’s just tough for a party to thrive with an unpopular president and with the public having significant concerns about issues, like the economy and inflation, that the opposition can pin on the party in power. This is why the House remains very likely to flip to the Republicans and why, despite the aforementioned challenges, Republican chances to win the Senate remain no worse than a coin flip.

With that out of the way, we’ll also say this: There are some weird things going on out there. And there probably will be races that upset our expectations. If in fact Republicans end up doing better down the stretch, that’ll involve races where Democrats appear favored flipping to the GOP. But there are also some opportunities for Democrats to potentially play spoiler, or at least come closer than expected in certain places.

Those following the day-to-day churn of the polls could cherry-pick their way to telling very different stories about the election. For instance, some closer-than-expected polls in the New York gubernatorial race, where Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) is trying to win her first full elected term against Rep. Lee Zeldin (R, NY-1), might indicate that we’re in a clear Republican wave environment.

Likewise, a series of polls showing Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) tied or trailing state Superintendent of Education Joy Hofmeister (D) might indicate the opposite.

It may be that these particular gubernatorial races don’t tell us much about the environment. Maybe it’s a classic case of the dominant party in a given state being underestimated in polls for one reason or another. Or maybe there are localized reasons that both races will end up being close in the same election. It’s hard to know.

 

These are all long shots, but if any of them pan out, it could be a sign of not just a wave election, but a tsunami.

Don't be surprised, is the warning.  And hey, we've seen it all in the last couple of cycles.

And The Meek Shall Inherit A Raid

A very bizarre story from Rolling Stone's Tatiana Siegel today, detailing the disappearance of former ABC News national security producer James Meek. The FBI raided his apartment in Virginia in April, and apparently he has dropped off the grid for the last six months as nobody seems to know where he went.

AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.”

The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their combat strategy in real time. The interchange illustrated the interplay between the national-security community and those who cover it. And no one straddled both worlds quite like Meek, an Emmy-winning deep-dive journalist who also was a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee. To his detractors within ABC, Meek was something of a “military fanboy.” But his track record of exclusives was undeniable, breaking the news of foiled terrorist plots in New York City and the Army’s coverup of the fratricidal death of Pfc. Dave Sharrett II in Iraq, a bombshell that earned Meek a face-to-face meeting with President Obama. With nine years at ABC under his belt, a buzzy Hulu documentary poised for Emmy attention, and an upcoming book on the military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 52-year-old bear of a man seemed to be at the height of his powers and the pinnacle of his profession.

Outside his Arlington, Virginia, apartment, a surreal scene was unfolding, and his storied career was about to come crashing down. Meek’s tweet marked the last time he’s posted on the social media platform.

The first thing Meek’s neighbor John Antonelli noticed that morning was the black utility vehicle with blacked out windows blocking traffic in both directions on Columbia Pike. It was just before dawn on that brisk April day, and self-described police-vehicle historian Antonelli was about to grab a coffee at a Starbucks before embarking on his daily three-mile walk. He inched closer to get a better vantage, when he saw an olive-green Lenco BearCat G2, an armored tactical vehicle often employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other law-enforcement agencies. A few Arlington County cruisers surrounded the jaw-dropping scene, but all of the other vehicles were unmarked, including the BearCat. Antonelli counted at least 10 heavily armed personnel in the group. None bore anything identifying which agency was conducting the raid. After just 10 minutes, the operation inside the Siena Park apartment complex — a six-story, upscale building for D.C. professionals, with rents fetching about $2,000 to $3,000 a month — was over.

“They didn’t stick around. They took off pretty quickly and headed west on Columbia Pike towards Fairfax County,” Antonelli recalls. “Most people seeing that green vehicle would think it’s some kind of tank. But I knew it was the Lenco BearCat. That vehicle is designed to be jumped out of so they can do a raid in that kind of time. It can return fire if they’re being fired upon.”

Multiple sources familiar with the matter say Meek was the target of an FBI raid at the Siena Park apartments, where he had been living on the top floor for more than a decade. An FBI representative told Rolling Stone its agents were present on the morning of April 27 “at the 2300 block of Columbia Pike, Arlington, Virginia, conducting court-authorized law-enforcement activity. The FBI cannot comment further due to an ongoing investigation.”

Meek has been charged with no crime. But independent observers believe the raid is among the first — and quite possibly, the first — to be carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration. A federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court signed off on the search warrant the day before the raid. If the raid was for Meek’s records, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco would have had to give her blessing; a new policy enacted last year prohibits federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ documents. Any exception requires the deputy AG’s approval. (Gabe Rottman at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says, “To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a case [since January 2021].”)

In the raid’s aftermath, Meek, who frequently collaborated with ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir, has made himself scarce. None of his Siena Park neighbors with whom Rolling Stone spoke have seen him since, with his apartment appearing to be vacant. Siena Park management declined to confirm that their longtime tenant was gone, citing “privacy policies.” Similarly, several ABC News colleagues — who are accustomed to unraveling mysteries and cracking investigative stories — tell Rolling Stone that they have no idea what happened to Meek.

“He fell off the face of the Earth,” says one. “And people asked, but no one knew the answer.”

An ABC representative tells Rolling Stone, “He resigned very abruptly and hasn’t worked for us for months.”

Sources familiar with the matter say federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid. One investigative journalist who worked with Meek says it would be highly unusual for a reporter or producer to keep any classified information on a computer.

“Mr. Meek is unaware of what allegations anonymous sources are making about his possession of classified documents,” his lawyer, Eugene Gorokhov, said in a statement. “If such documents exist, as claimed, this would be within the scope of his long career as an investigative journalist covering government wrongdoing. The allegations in your inquiry are troubling for a different reason: they appear to come from a source inside the government. It is highly inappropriate, and illegal, for individuals in the government to leak information about an ongoing investigation. We hope that the DOJ [Department of Justice] promptly investigates the source of this leak.”

 

This story is extremely weird on its face and it get more strange by the minute. This guy was a well-known national security journalist and producer, he's worked in print, TV, and online. For someone like that to vanish and nobody really saying anything about it for six months, when he had ongoing book and Emmy campaign activities going on?

All of this smells like a head cheese, limburger and durian sandwich.

The other observation is "If you or I had classified documents in our homes" argument about Trump's Mar-a-Lago trove of stolen classified material. Meek apparently did. The FBI showed up as a result.

There's a hell of a lot more to this story, and I'd want to see what it is, but I don't like any of this. All of it sets off my alarm bells, the timing of the story, the disappearance of a national security journalist, the raid, the whole thing just doesn't make much sense without additional context and this story raises more questions than answers.

Keep an eye on this one.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

It took less than 10 hours for a jury in Special Counsel John Durham's case against Steele dossier informant Igor Danchenko to acquit him of all charges, in a final failure of the entire case against the "Russia hoax".

A jury on Tuesday found Igor Danchenko — a private researcher who was a primary source for a 2016 dossier of allegations about former president Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — not guilty of lying to the FBI about where he got his information.

The verdict in federal court in Alexandria, Va., is another blow for special counsel John Durham, who has now lost both cases that have gone to trial as part of his nearly 3½-year investigation. Durham, who was asked by Attorney General William P. Barr in 2019 to review the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, is sure to face renewed pressure to wrap up his work following the verdict.

Trump predicted Durham would uncover “the crime of the century” inside the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies that investigated his campaign’s links to Russia. But so far, no one charged by the special counsel has gone to prison, and only one government employee has pleaded guilty to a criminal offense. In both trials this year, Durham argued that people deceived FBI agents, not that investigators corruptly targeted Trump.

The jury in Danchenko’s case deliberated for about nine hours over two days. Juror Joel Greene said in an interview that there were no holdouts in the deliberations and that the decision was “pretty unanimous.”

“We looked at everything really closely,” said Greene, who declined to comment on the politics of the case. “The conclusion we reached was the conclusion we all were able to reach.”

Durham, a longtime federal prosecutor who was U.S. attorney in Connecticut during the Trump administration, personally argued much of the government’s case against Danchenko. The special counsel alleged that Danchenko misled the FBI officials asking in 2017 about his sources, after the agency determined the researcher was the unnamed person behind some of the most explosive allegations about Trump in reports compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

The trial could be Durham’s last. A grand jury that the special counsel had been using in Alexandria is now inactive, people familiar with the matter have told The Washington Post, though the status of a similar panel in D.C. was not immediately clear. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment when asked whether Durham would continue as special counsel in the wake of the Danchenko acquittal.

Barr, reached by phone Tuesday afternoon after the jury announced its verdict, declined to comment. In a statement released by the Justice Department after the verdict, Durham said, “While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.”

A representative for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.

 

And with that, given four years and endless resources, Durham couldn't find a damn thing. The fabled conspiracy to get Trump was just that, a conspiracy. Meanwhile, Trump now faces multiple cases in multiple jurisdictions and at least one of them will nail him to the wall for good.

 

This was all Bill Barr's idiocy, a convenient smokescreen that petered out because it was bullshit all along. Unlike the Mueller probe, Durham's bag of turds dropped off the Empire State Building landed with a splat and no convictions. 

It should be the end of his career. Of course like Barr, Durham will be fine, having done his job in damaging American democracy for years to come.

Maybe fatally.

 

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

More that 70% of all voters in this week's NY Times/Siena College poll agree that American democracy is under threat, but in 2022 that simply means "The other political party".

 

Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.

The doubts about elections that have infected American politics since the 2020 contest show every sign of persisting well into the future, the poll suggested: Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, said they had little to no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections.

Political disagreements appear to be seeping into the fabric of everyday life. Fourteen percent of voters said political views revealed a lot about whether someone is a good person, while 34 percent said it revealed a little. Nearly one in five said political disagreements had hurt relationships with friends or family.

“I do agree that the biggest threat is survival of our democracy, but it’s the divisiveness that is creating this threat,” said Ben Johnson, 33, a filmmaker from New Orleans and a Democrat. “It feels like on both sides, people aren’t agreeing on facts anymore. We can’t meet in the middle if we can’t agree on simple facts. You’re not going to be able to move forward and continue as a country if you can’t agree on facts.”

The poll showed that voters filtered their faith in democracy through a deeply partisan lens. A majority of voters in both parties identified the opposing party as a “major threat to democracy.”

Most Republicans said the dangers included President Biden, the mainstream media, the federal government and voting by mail. Most Democrats named Donald J. Trump, while large shares of the party’s voters also said the Supreme Court and the Electoral College were threats to democracy.

Seventy-one percent of all voters said democracy was at risk — but just 7 percent identified that as the most important problem facing the country.

These ostensibly conflicting views — that voters could be so deeply suspicious of one another and of the bedrock institutions of American democracy, while also expressing little urgency to address those concerns — may in part reflect longstanding frustrations and cynicism toward government.

 

We've spent two generations calling the federal government a threat, and when we get to the point where we're on the knife's edge looking into the abyss, most Americans want to jump. 

I take that back. Most Americans want permission to push the most marginalized among us off the edge in order to "improve" their own lives. A third of a billion bastards, we've become.

I have to hope we can overcome this, but it'll take a miracle.

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