Editors’ Blog

A DC lawyer reader is dismayed by the coverage of today’s Supreme Court decision on the Texas abortion ban:

The press coverage of this decision is all wrong. 

Sure, the 5-justice majority permitted a narrow route into federal court.  But it will be easy for Texas and other states to close that route and block all access to federal court – because the majority makes clear that is permissible.

As is often the case with Trump crimes and Trump adjacent crimes, it’s easy to get distracted by the cloud of nonsense and not focus on the specifics. A few days ago I wrote up Bart Gellman’s new piece on the insurrection in The Atlantic. The best part of Gellman’s piece is how he captures the time urgency going into January 6th. That was the point of no return that even the coup plotters recognized. They needed to stop that clock. In this boffo story and video of Kanye’s “director of operations” threatening this election worker and trying to force her to admit to a plot the deadline for her to come clean is January 6th.

This is the best thing you’ll read on the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the soon-to-be landmark Mississippi abortion case.

Here is yet another story from the range of conspiracies and criminal plots that were afoot last winter to overthrow the government of the United States and keep Donald Trump in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman was one of those innocent bystanders who became the target of death threats and harassment tied to a conspiracy theory that she had helped steal the presidential election in Georgia for Joe Biden.

On January 4th 2021 – two days before the Capitol insurrection – a woman named Trevian Kutti knocked on Freeman’s door and told her she was in danger. If Freeman didn’t confess to the truth of Trump’s election rigging charges within 48 hours unidentified persons would come to her home and Freeman along with members of her family would be sent to jail.

Kutti is a publicist and head of Trevian Worldwide, a PR firm. As of 2018 she is also the “Director of Operations” for Kanye West, a friend and political ally of Trump. (Just before signing on with West Kutti had been PR Director for R Kelly. But she quit that job as sex trafficking and assault accusations piled up.) She was there as West’s employee but only identified herself as the emissary of a “high profile” individual with an urgent message and an offer of help.

I could read and write all day every day about those days in late September 2020 when Trump became the superspreader-in-chief. It almost feels like an obligation to do so, that we may inoculate ourselves against the potential claims of future historians that we were a blind, gullible, clueless people. Yes, we were, but not nearly as much as this episode suggests. We knew. We got it. The White House COVID outbreak with Trump at its center was very, very bad, and we understood that much in real time, not only in retrospect.

But now we have a new or more precisely an updated account of the shitshow, from someone who was neck deep in the shit at the time. Poor Chris Christie. He was done wrong so many times by Trump. He was the toadiest toady. There was the hostage video. There was this unforgettable headline: “Trump Uses Chris Christie As ‘Manservant’ To Fetch His McDonald’s.” There was Christie being unceremoniously dumped as the head of the transition. But in none of those episodes did Trump try to kill Christie.

Federal appeals court finds Trump’s claims of executive privilege to block a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee to be utterly without merit.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss Congress finally being on the verge of getting a filibuster carveout… but not for what you think.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

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OAKLAND is trying to bolster and expand its police force. The city just approved two more police academies as it struggles to attract officers amidst a spike in homicides. Another article looks at community support for Mayor Libby Schaaf’s plan to add 60 new officer’s to the city’s police force. (The SF Chronicle has a paywall.)

A NEW study out of Israel published in The New England Journal of Medicine shows a 90% reduction of mortality among those who received booster at least 5 months after initial vaccination compared to those who had only two shots. Israel uses the Pfizer vaccine almost exclusively.

“Even with your adversaries, I do think that you have to have the capacity to put yourself in their shoes,” Barack Obama told The New York Times in 2015 in explaining his overture to Iran. The Biden administration needs to do this in its negotiations over Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin.