Welp, Turns Out Police ARE Investigating Trump’s Arlington Cemetery Fiasco

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Not Done Yet!

Despite the Army declaring the “case closed,” a police investigation is underway into the Arlington National Cemetery fracas involving a cemetery staffer and two Trump campaign staffers, ABC News reports.

The police department at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, where the cemetery staffer filed a report, is apparently conducting its own investigation that is technically outside of the Army chain of command.

Among the things we learned from ABC News:

• An investigator with the base’s police department has sought in recent days to contact Trump campaign officials about the incident in order to interview the campaign staffers involved.
• Attorney Stanley Woodward is representing the Trump campaign staffers.
• The base’s police department is administered by the Army but is staffed by federal law enforcement officers, not military police.
• In a related development, the Army declined to release documents pertaining to the incident because “those documents are part of an open investigation,” ABC News said.

An unnamed Defense Department official confirmed the essence of the ABC News report, saying in a statement: “The investigation is ongoing at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall by base authorities.”

The Foiled Assassination Attempt Against Trump

New details emerged about the Florida golf course incident Sunday that marked the second apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump since July:

• Federal firearms charges were filed against the suspect, 58-year-old Ryan W. Routh. Additional criminal charges may be forthcoming.
• Routh may have been lying in wait for more than 11 hours before he was detected by Secret Service.
• Routh never got off a shot in the encounter with the Secret Service.

Secret Service Under Renewed Scrutiny

• The Secret Service conceded it did not do a full sweep of the golf course before Trump arrival in what was an unplanned outing.
• Experts called the incident a security failure even though the gunman was caught and Trump was uninjured.
• Trump’s golf outings have long been a concern for the Secret Service, but Trump himself largely dismissed those concerns.

The Suspect

• WSJ: U.S. Authorities Were Warned About Suspected Trump Gunman
• NYT: Suspect in Apparent Trump Assassination Plot Crusaded for Many Causes
• Reuters: The Erratic Life of a Struggling Roofing Contractor

The World’s Richest Moron Is Dangerous

Elon Musk deleted his own post on his platform X that wondered aloud why no one was trying to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

Trump-Vance In Action

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) deployed 36 state troopers to Springfield to guard 17 schools after the Trump-Vance ticket made the small city the centerpiece of its racist jihad against immigrants, specifically targeting the local Haitian immigrant community.

Dehumanization Alert

Portage County (Ohio) Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski posted on Facebook that local residents should keep a list of homes displaying Kamala Harris yard signs “Sooo…when the Illegal human ‘Locust’ (which she supports!) Need places to live…We’ll already have the addresses of the their New families…who supported their arrival!” 

Oopsie!

Brian Beutler with an important catch from JD Vance’s Meet the Press interview Sunday: Trump-Vance is coming for Obamacare, and Vance tipped it off in a way that might be lost on most journalists and lay persons.

2024 Ephemera

• Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, plans to boot the Russian state TV network RT from its platforms.
• TPM’s Hunter Walker: Before He Hated Her, Donald Trump Thought Taylor Swift Was ‘Terrific’ 
• Scientific American makes a presidential endorsement for just the second time in the magazine’s 179-year history: Kamala Harris. The first time was when it endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, making Donald Trump the common theme here.

No Funny Business

A bipartisan group of nearly 20 ex-governors is sending a letter to their sitting successors urging them to certify the November election results by the Dec. 11 deadline prescribed by federal law.

Mark Meadows Loses In Arizona

A federal judge rejected Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ effort to remove the fake electors case against him in Arizona from state court.

The Supreme Court Isn’t Going To Fix Itself

If you can’t get enough of the NYT’s groundbreaking report over the weekend on the Supreme Court’s last term, I highly recommend Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck’s latest piece. A sample:

All of this leads to a discomfiting conclusion: This is a Court that is well aware of the political storms surrounding it (and, in some cases, for which it is responsible), and is not simply pulling in its oars. No one in Kantor and Liptak’s reporting is arguing for even a modicum of judicial restraint; and none of the justices to the right of Justice Barrett seem at all worried about the institutional impact of continuing to divide so transparently along partisan and ideological lines in the Court’s highest-profile (and themselves politically charged) rulings. What all of that suggests is that this is all going to get worse before it gets better—and that any arguments that the Court has somehow gotten past the nasty, bitter, and highly charged infighting that has characterized the past few terms are wanting for any basis in reality. This Court isn’t going to fix itself; perhaps we ought not to sit around waiting.

Vladeck’s full piece is here.

It Was Only A Matter Of Time Before This Happened

ProPublica: Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.

Kilauea Resumes Erupting

Magmatic movement over the weekend culminated in a small eruption on the flanks of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano Sunday night. The eruption paused most of Monday but resumed late in the day and continued after darkness fell. Here’s an overflight of the two new rifts that opened overnight Sunday:

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