With yesterday’s DOJ stunt over ballots in Philadelphia and the latest revelations about the so-called “Durham investigation”, we can see again the sheer degree to which Bill Barr has prostituted the Department of Justice into an arm of the Trump campaign. The DOJ has never been and should never be entirely disconnected from the results of elections. There are basic policy decisions and law enforcement strategies that are properly made by the appointees of an elected President. The involvement of high level political appointees is in many case essential to accountability. But Barr is unique in his sustained and more or less open use of the DOJ as a tool to protect the President’s friends, persecute enemies and make the entire organization a tool of the President’s campaign. Yesterday’s stunt just confirms what we’ve suspected, that Barr will use these final weeks of the campaign to seed bogus “fraud” or voting irregularities stories to support the President’s attacks against the election itself. These will then be immediately picked up by the President and his surrogates as though they were dropped into a slipstream for just that purpose, because of course they were. In a democratic government there is really no greater level of corruption than this. The executive branch – and especially the Justice Department – needs an audit.
Judge Dismisses Suit Against Fox News By Citing Tucker Carlson’s ‘Rhetorical Hyperbole’
A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a defamation suit brought against Fox News by former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who alleged having an affair with Donald Trump before he became president.
Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil ruled against McDougal on grounds that Tucker Carlson regularly engages in “rhetorical hyperbole” and “opinion commentary” — essentially arguing that Carlson’s comments on the show cannot be genuinely considered hard, factual news.
“The statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate, and, as such, are not actionable as defamation,” Vyskocil wrote.
In reaching her decision, Vyskocil borrowed in part from an argument “persuasively” made by Fox News in Carlson’s defense, saying that the “general tenor” of Carlson’s program suggests to viewers that Carlson is “engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘nonliteral commentary.’”
“Given Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’” about the Fox News host’s claims, the judge added.
McDougal disputed Carlson’s effort to represent opinion as fact in an email to the Associate Press, saying,”I believe reporting something you know is a lie as ‘news’ or ‘undisputed facts’ is the very definition of malicious.”
Fox News meanwhile hailed the decision — which largely undermines the factual integrity of its primetime host — as a victory for “defenders of the First Amendment.”
The news network said in a statement: “Karen McDougal’s lawsuit attempted to silence spirited opinion commentary on matters of public concern. The court today held that the First Amendment plainly prohibits such efforts to stifle free speech.”
Report: Pentagon Brass Privately Discussing What To Do If Trump Invokes Insurrection Act
Top military brass have spoken privately about what to do should President Donald Trump order them into the streets as election results are tallied, The New York Times reported Friday.
Meadows Attacks Wray After His Testimony Refuting Trump’s Bogus Election Fraud Claims
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows lashed out at FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony to Congress in which the FBI leader rejected President Donald Trump’s bogus conspiracy theory that mail-in voting can and will lead to election fraud that would rig the election against him.
Ginsburg Becomes First Woman To Lie In State At The Capitol
WASHINGTON (AP) — Capping days of commemorations of her extraordinary life, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes the first woman in American history to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol.
Ginsburg, who died last week at age 87, also will be the first Jewish-American to lie in state and just the second Supreme Court justice. The first, Chief Justice William Howard Taft, also had been president.
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Mary Trump Warns That President Is Not Bluffing About Potential Refusal To Accept Election Results
Mary Trump, President Donald Trump’s niece, warned late Thursday that the President’s threat to potentially not accept a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the November election should not be taken lightly.
When asked by HuffPost during a virtual fundraiser for an LGTBQ political group how far she thinks her uncle would be willing to go to remain president, Mary Trump replied, “farther than you can possibly imagine.”
On Wednesday, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition from power if he is not reelected in November.
“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump told reporters during a White House briefing when asked if he would accept the results.
Many Republican lawmakers — without naming the President’s remarks directly — have sought to brush away the comments, Sen. John Thune (R-SD), and others, affirmed that Republicans “believe in the Constitution.” Others have suggested that the President is known to say “crazy stuff,” but is not always meant to be taken seriously.
“To over-dramatize it, is to over-dramatize it,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told a CNN reporter when asked about Trump’s remarks on Thursday.
Making light of Trump’s comments, Cramer said that “the President speaks in very extreme manners, occasionally.”
“I didn’t find what he said last night to be overly extreme, quite honestly,” he added.
But Mary Trump, a vocal critic of the president said at the LPAC fundraiser, that the comments should be taken as a clear warning.
She named a series of challenges that await President Trump when he is no longer commander-in-chief, including charges for various wrongdoings, among them potential tax fraud. There’s also a host of allies who the President has shielded while in office who risk exposure when he’s stripped of presidential power.
“He’s cheating. He’s been cheating for a while now,” Mary Trump told HuffPost. “He’s cheating when he tells people that mail-in ballots are fraudulent somehow. He’s cheating when he started calling into question the legitimacy of the election before a vote was even cast. He’s cheating when he says if Joe Biden wins, it’s rigged.”
“We need to be clear about what we’re potentially facing here,” she added.
Federal Judge Rules That Census Must Continue For Another Month
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge has stopped the 2020 census from finishing at the end of September and ordered the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident to continue for another month through the end of October, saying a shortened schedule likely would produce inaccurate results.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in California made her ruling late Thursday, two days after hearing arguments from attorneys for the Census Bureau, and attorneys for civil rights groups and local governments that had sued the Census Bureau in an effort to halt the 2020 census from stopping at the end of the month. Attorneys for the civil rights groups and local governments said the shortened schedule would undercount residents in minority and hard-to-count communities.
Koh said inaccuracies produced from a shortened schedule would affect the distribution of federal funding and political representation. The census is used to determine how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed each year and how many congressional seats each state gets.
Government attorneys had argued that the census must finish by the end of September to meet a Dec. 31 deadline for turning over numbers used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets.
Koh’s preliminary injunction suspends that end-of-the-year deadline, too. The San Jose, California-based judge had previously issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Census Bureau from winding down field operations until she made a ruling in the lawsuit.
Attorneys for the Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce, which oversees the agency, had said during the hearing they would likely appeal.
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Trump Blows Up At GOP Guv For Rebuking POTUS’ ‘Outrageous’ Potential Refusal To Leave Office
President Donald Trump attacked Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) on Friday morning after the Republican governor chided Trump’s comments about potentially rejecting the election results if Democratic candidate Joe Biden wins in November.
Trump Claims There Is A Secret Plot To Delay COVID Vaccine
In an ongoing effort to politicize the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that unnamed officials had plotted a “political hit” and were conspiring to slow vaccine development to hinder his reelection bid.
“They are trying to do a little bit of a political hit. ‘Let’s delay the vaccine just a little bit.’ Did you notice that?” Trump told supporters at a rally in Jacksonville, Florida.
The comments are a kind of vague conspiracy about unnamed detractors, that appears to suggest officials in his own government are meddling in a process over which they have no purview — or to suggest that an agency committed to science is overrun by officials with a political agenda to take down the President.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’s made such a suggestion.
The comments extend an effort by Trump to undermine science amid a pressure campaign to deliver a vaccine victory before the election following an ongoing attack on the Food and Drug Administration, which he suggested last month was part of a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his re-election chances.
Even if a vaccine makes an early debut, leading infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday said that a “large proportion” of the U.S. population will not be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus this year.
His comments during a Facebook Live event pushed back on President Trump’s repeated rosy claims about a timeline about a safe and effective vaccine release and wide distribution.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield has also testified to Congress that it is unlikely that a vaccine will be widely available before next spring or summer. In testimony last week, Redfield said that any vaccine finalized this year will be in “very limited supply and will have to be prioritized” for particularly vulnerable groups.
Trump contradicted Redfield’s estimate for the widespread release of a vaccine, saying that it would happen before the end of the year. Trump has also said that “every American” will have access to a vaccine by April.
On Wednesday, Trump made similar accusations of a “political move” being made by health experts at the FDA following reported efforts to issue stricter guidelines for evaluating a coronavirus vaccine, suggesting that stricter guidelines needed to first be “approved by the White House.”
“I think that was a political move more than anything else,” Trump said.
WH Plans Potential Transition Even As Trump Doubles Down On Possible Refusal To Accept Defeat
The White House’s prep work for a potential transition should Democratic candidate Joe Biden emerge victorious in the November elections is reportedly underway, despite President Donald Trump refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power.