Doesn’t require much commentary.
Quiet, Boys: Where Are the Proud Boys?
Donald Trump has spent years talking a big game about crowd sizes. His 2016 rallies could draw tens of thousands of people, numbers he often inflated by an additional several thousand when boasting of them after the fact; his administration heralded its arrival in 2017 by trotting out press secretary Sean Spicer to loudly and falsely claim that his Trump inauguration crowd was larger than Obama’s.
Continue reading “Quiet, Boys: Where Are the Proud Boys?”GOP Cranks Out Whole New Disinfo Shitstorm After Hunter Biden Conviction
Ed. Note: Nicole Lafond will be back to helming Where Things Stand soon.
You might think tacking his son’s scalp above the door would calm for at least a moment the GOP’s venomous attacks, sinister insinuations, and relentless disinformation campaign against Joe Biden.
You would be so wrong.
The sad, poignant, and troubled life of Hunter Biden played out in his trial for all to see, a story of addiction, self destruction, and family dysfunction twisted into a criminal prosecution by Special Counsel David Weiss that won a quick conviction today on federal gun charges.
There was no doubt that Hunter Biden was guilty as charged, just as there was no doubt that he never would have been charged were he not Joe Biden’s son. Let that sit for a moment. The gun charges Hunter Biden faced are rarely brought as a standalone case absent a causally related crime, such as shooting someone with the illegally acquired gun. But it got worse from there.
The original resolution of the case and a companion tax case via a plea agreement was a reasonably just outcome to a case that arose during the dark days of the Trump Justice Department. But Republicans on the Hill howled in outrage over that outcome, and the special counsel quickly retreated, wrecking Hunter Biden’s plea agreement so he could pursue additional allegations against the Bidens by an FBI informant. It turned out the informant was spreading lies about the Bidens, which Weiss ended up charging criminally in a new case. That left Hunter Biden hung out to dry as Weiss pushed the gun and tax cases to trials on opposite coasts.
Donald Trump has long seen Hunter Biden as the key to getting to Joe Biden. While Joe Biden is above reproach, Hunter Biden is not. Trump’s first impeachment was rooted in his attempts to extract dirt on Hunter Biden from Ukraine, even if that meant feeding the U.S. ally to the Russian wolf. From that initial conceit – you take down Joe Biden by taking down Hunter Biden – grew the preposterous GOP disinformation campaign with the implausible title of “Biden Crime Family.”
The investigative capacity of the House GOP majority since January 2023 has nearly exclusively focused on Hunter Biden and various arcane allegations, half truths, misleading juxtapositions, and outright falsehoods. Like QAnon and other elaborate right-wing conspiracies, the “Biden Crime Family” has its own cast of characters, jargon, and intricate subplots that double back upon themselves in a labyrinth that facts cannot penetrate. Adherents recite its catechisms without regard to truth or evidence or anything that might contradict or undermine its premises.
For the House GOP in particular, it’s been a nonstop 18 months of the chronic abuse of power in pursuit of political advantage in the 2024 election. Hunter Biden is merely a means to an end, a pawn, collateral damage in the quest to take down his father. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that having achieved the undoing of Hunter Biden today, Republicans would not pause or flinch, let alone reflect.
While Democrats debated in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s recent conviction whether to make a big deal about it, Republicans today doubled down, claiming — get this — that the conviction of the president’s son was a giant distraction aimed at protecting Joe Biden himself. The Trump campaign itself — not a surrogate, not a proxy, not at arm’s length — issued this ghastly statement from Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt:
This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine. Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit.
Since this morning, the ghoulish Trump White House aide Stephen Miller has tweeted or retweeted at least eight times some variation of “DOJ is Joe’s election protection racket.” The Hunter Biden conviction, in Miller’s words, is “a giant misdirection.” As a mark of his ferocity, Miller tweeted more about how convicting Hunter Biden was a Deep State “op” to take the heat off President Biden than he did about the migrant “INVASION.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY), a more-demented-than-Ahab character pursuing his great white whale has become a pathetic figure in recent months even in right-wing media appearances for failing to come up with the goods on Biden that he keeps promising. But Comer found renewed vigor in the Hunter Biden conviction, releasing a statement that said:
Today’s verdict is a step toward accountability but until the Department of Justice investigates everyone involved in the Bidens’ corrupt influence peddling schemes that generated over $18 million in foreign payments to the Biden family, it will be clear department officials continue to cover for the Big Guy, Joe Biden.
It’s madness, but these people aren’t crazy. It’s a tactical relentlessness in service of a clear and consistent strategy of flooding American public life with an unending stream of disinformation to achieve their own political ends, primarily the acquisition of official power to further entrench themselves.
Joe Biden is the proximate target at the moment, but whoever is perceived as an “enemy” may have the withering fire of disinformation trained on them next. And we are all at risk of being collateral damage, just like Hunter Biden.
The Best Of TPM Today
Mesa County is Still Reeling From Election-Denying County Clerk Tina Peters – Khaya Himmelman
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Rudy G Gets Big Guffaws At Far-Right Confab For Calling Fani Willis A ‘Ho’ – David Kurtz
What We Are Reading
How Joe Biden Can Improve Perceptions Of The Economy – Brian Beutler
Judge Strikes Down Florida’s Ban on Transgender Care for Minors – NYT
Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end – Merrick Garland
Resilience Part 2 (or Thoughts on Sam Alito’s DGAF Justicehood)
I think a lot about resilience. It’s actually an underlying concern that forms a lot of my political opinions. Not about policy, though perhaps that too in some way, but politics in the sense of elections and how coalitions and individuals operate politically, how they sustain themselves. I thought about this when I heard these new recordings of Sam Alito, telling us in his own words what we’ve been learning in recent years from his actions. It was interesting to contrast Alito’s remarks with those from the parallel recordings of John Roberts. Roberts at least said the right things when pushed on these questions about polarization and the role of justices and the Court. I doubt the difference in the two responses is just about Roberts being more circumspect. While being part of the same corruption as Alito, he is at least concerned with public perceptions of the Court’s legitimacy and the historical reputation of the Court under his chief justiceship. He is concerned with the constraint of legitimacy, which is defined by public perceptions of the Court. It’s a low bar, but still a quite significant one.
The thing with Sam Alito is that he doesn’t give a fuck. He is a seventy-something Fox News watcher and religious fundamentalist who happens to find himself in a position of immense and almost incomparable power over all of American society and he’s going to take that power to the limit to advance his own political preferences. He’s not even going to go through the motions of pretending that’s not the case. You don’t like it? Well, tough shit. You should have thought of that in 2006. And he’s not the only one in this mode. Thomas is right there with him. The remaining four are functionally in the same place. They’re just more attuned to appearances and willing to pass up at least a few goodies in the interest of maintaining some patina of legitimacy and thus entrenching and confirming their illegitimate power.
So, resilience.
Continue reading “Resilience Part 2 (or Thoughts on Sam Alito’s DGAF Justicehood)”Mesa County is Still Reeling From Election-Denying County Clerk Tina Peters
It’s been nearly four years since Tina Peters, the elections administrator of Mesa County, Colorado, went rogue, allegedly breaching her office’s own equipment in a bid to investigate Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. She was indicted on state charges in 2022.
Continue reading “Mesa County is Still Reeling From Election-Denying County Clerk Tina Peters”Resilience Part 1 (or a First Look at the 538 Model for 2024)
538 just released its official 2024 forecast model. It shows a toss-up. (Technically, out of a thousand simulations, Biden wins 53% of the times and Trump wins 47% of the times.) This is significant, but not perhaps in the way you think.
First, while poll averages are helpful to making sense of the current state of the race, forecasts are like predicting the future. In fact, they are literally about predicting the future. And predicting the future is hard — a basic life lesson if you haven’t come across it yet. To me, the 538 modeling is the gold standard. But I see it still as half a novelty. That’s no criticism of the people who put it together, incredibly smart folks. It’s just that there are a lot of factors that can’t be reduced to formulas and data inputs and the data that can be put into the model come with their own clouds of uncertainty. To me it’s a helpful data exercise which takes a knowledgable person’s range of factors, adds a bunch more and looks at them in a systematic and consistent-over-time fashion, stripped of wishful thinking. That’s helpful. It’s just not the be all and end all.
But here’s why it’s significant.
Continue reading “Resilience Part 1 (or a First Look at the 538 Model for 2024)”Aileen Cannon Slaps Around Jack Smith Yet Again
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Form Over Substance
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon pulled another one of her trademark moves in the Mar-a-Lago case, batting down Special Counsel Jack Smith with a contemptuous hand wave on a relatively minor point while mostly siding with him in rejecting a Trump motion.
The big picture: Cannon denied a Trump motion to dismiss some counts of the indictment on the grounds that they weren’t sufficiently pleaded.
But in doing so, Cannon did toss Trump a bone, ordering that one paragraph from the indictment be struck because it was irrelevant to the underlying charges.
To be clear, no charges were dismissed, no counts eliminated, and no substantive damage was done to the prosecution’s case — at least not yet.
At issue was an episode described in the indictment at Trump’s Bedminster club where he showed a representative of his PAC — widely reported to be Susie Wiles, who is now a Trump campaign adviser — a classified map:
The conducted alleged in that incident is not charged as a separate crime in the indictment, and Cannon determined it was extraneous and unnecessary to the charges and risked being prejudicial to Trump.
At a certain level, no harm no foul. But a few points of concern:
(1) Cannon suggested this is the kind of evidence that should come in later — if at all — under federal rules that govern prior bad acts, and she sounded a bit skeptical that it would meet that test, which is odd.
(2) Cannon’s tone is still high-handed and dismissive. She’s certainly not the first federal judge to adopt that tone as a default, and woman judges often get unfairly criticized for the same brusque tone that men judges routinely exhibit. But given the high-profile nature of the case, its historic significance, and her own bumbling handling of it, it suggests a lack of self awareness.
(3) Cannon’s move is another example of her lack of proportion. She can’t keep the case on track, hasn’t set a trial date, keeps devoting court resources to extraneous matters and avoids devoting them to the issues at the heart of the case — but she’s going to highhandedly nitpick one episode in an extended indictment and then opine about her skepticism that “speaking indictments” are appropriate. Not a good sign.
The public discourse around Cannon’s handling of the case often focuses on her bias, corruption, inexperience, and incompetence. I’ve raised some of those issues here. But I keep going back to last week’s CNN profile of Cannon co-authored by my former colleague Tierney Sneed. It paints Cannon as a stickler for form and procedure:
Those tendencies include a penchant for letting irrelevant legal questions distract from core issues, a zero-tolerance approach to any technical defects in filings, and a struggle with docket management that allows the type of pretrial disputes that other judges would decide in weeks go unresolved for months.
Favoring form over substance is often a crutch for people who don’t feel comfortable with the material or who lack confidence in their own abilities or who struggle to see the forest for the trees. Inexperience, lack of competence, and fear of making mistakes are classic triggers for this kind of nitpicking behavior. The high-handed tone is similarly a defense mechanism to disguise the underlying insecurity.
I’m not trying to psychoanalyze Cannon here, just make the point that her motives are probably more complicated that wanting to let her patron Trump off the hook or to secure herself a promotion to an appeals court seat.
About Those Secret Recordings Of The Alitos
I’m not a big fan of journalists misrepresenting or disguising who they are and surreptitiously recording people, so I was inclined not to focus on yesterday’s disclosure by Lauren Windsor that she had recorded Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, his wife, and Chief Justice John Roberts last week at an event of the Supreme Court Historical Society.
But the episode has gotten considerable pickup by other news outlets and is widely circulating now in the public sphere so let me at least flag it to your attention:
- Politico: Alito and his wife are captured in audio recordings talking about abortion leak, flag controversy
- NYT: In Secret Recordings, Alito Endorses Nation of ‘Godliness.’ Roberts Talks of Pluralism.
- NYT: Justice Alito’s Wife, in Secretly Recorded Conversation, Complains About Pride Flag
Speaking Of The Pride Flag …
While Martha Alito was complaining about having to look at the Pride flag this month, the aggressively far-right Colorado Republican Party was urging its members to burn it:
Burn all the #pride flags this June. https://t.co/AqwnudUpYq pic.twitter.com/lLeJMtrhR1
— Colorado Republican Party (@cologop) June 3, 2024
More from Michelle Goldberg.
Hopeless
A whopping 80% of Republicans believe President Biden was behind Donald Trump’s conviction in state court in Manhattan.
More evidence that the people who claim to be most animated by “federalism” don’t understand it.
Standing By For Hunter Biden Verdict …
The jury in Hunter Biden’s federal trial in Delaware on gun charges began deliberating Monday and will resume its work today.
How The Mighty Have Fallen
Rudy’s Giuliani’s mug shot in the Arizona fake electors case was released:
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Schumer Tees Up A Vote On IVF To Make GOP Squirm Some More
Ed. Note: Nicole Lafond will be back to helming Where Things Stand soon.
Abortion politics was a minefield for Republicans even before the Alabama Supreme Court granted full legal status to frozen embryos, but in the aftermath of that decision the fault lines within the GOP have become more visible.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is aiming to exploit and highlight those divisions with a vote as soon as Thursday on a bill protecting IVF nationwide. The Democratic bill — sponsored by Sens. Tammy Duckworth (IL), Patty Murray (WA), and Cory Booker (NJ) — is an amalgam of three other previously introduced bills on reproductive health.
The IVF vote comes on the heels of last week’s Senate vote on protecting access to contraception nationwide, another instance of Senate Democrats forcing awkward votes for Republicans in advance of the election. Awkward because Republican positions on reproductive health are broadly unpopular but remain a key litmus test internally, especially with the religious right.
The contraception bill failed due to lack of Republican support, and the IVF bill is expected to meet a similar fate. But setting aside the parliamentary maneuvering and election year positioning, the issue of IVF has Republicans genuinely scrambling.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who is running for re-election this year, has a new campaign ad out revealing that his youngest daughter is undergoing IVF treatment and promising to “always protect IVF.” Scott’s ad tries to paper over the issue by claiming it’s just all part of Democrats’ “ridiculous” attacks that Republicans “hate women, birth control, even IVF.” In the spirit of papering it all over, Scott is also sponsoring a “non-binding” Senate resolution in support of IVF.
In another sign of the internal tensions, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Katie Britt (R-AL) last month introduced a bill that would deny Medicaid funding to states that ban IVF. Punchbowl reports that Republicans may maneuver this week to use some combination of their own pending measures to blunt the Democratic effort to hold them over a barrel on IVF, but there remains considerable division within the conference on this.
This comes against a backdrop of conservative and religious groups rallying to oppose IVF. The Heritage Foundation took strident issue with the Cruz-Britt bill, accusing the two Republicans senators of cheerleading for “Big Fertility.”
Meanwhile, the Southern Baptist Convention meets in Indianapolis beginning tomorrow where it will vote on whether to oppose IVF, a position being pushed by Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mohler spoke today to a group of several hundred uber-conservative Southern Baptists who are trying to drag the convention farther to the right.
While condemning the conviction of Donald Trump, whom he said was more aligned with SBC values, Mohler said: “But if we believe in the sanctity and dignity of every single human life from the point of fertilization, we need to recognize any intervention by an embryo, any commodification of the embryo, any turn of the embryo into a consumer product is an assault upon human dignity.”
It’s not clear whether the SBC will approve the resolution opposing IVF. The Senate is likely to take up the issue on Thursday.
The Best Of TPM Today
The Trump Campaign Has Made A Deal With An Online ‘Propaganda’ Network – Hunter Walker
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Becoming The Swamp – TPM Staff
What We Are Reading
Part I: Fascism in America? – Thomas Zimmer
Part II: The Anti-Liberal Left Has a Fascism Problem – Thomas Zimmer
Finding Your Role in the Climate Fight – Jeff Seidman et al.
Seeing the Commonalities: EU Election Edition
You’ve likely seen the news of the new European Union elections in which the far-right — particularly in France and Germany — have made big gains. Those gains in turn spurred French President Macron to call snap elections for the national parliament, an extremely high stakes gamble. European politics are complicated and different from those of the U.S. in numerous ways. Each country, notwithstanding the centralizing force of europeanization, remains its own microcosm. But it’s worth taking a moment to focus on their essential similarity.
Take the example of France.
Continue reading “Seeing the Commonalities: EU Election Edition”The Trump Campaign Has Made A Deal With An Online ‘Propaganda’ Network
On May 31, Vanessa Broussard lost her cool. She was reporting live as an anchor for Right Side Broadcasting Network and President Trump was set to hold a press conference to discuss the previous day’s guilty verdict against him or, as Broussard put it, the “horrific outcome in the bogus hush money trial.” To hear Broussard tell it, the gravity of the moment overtook her.
“This is not how I usually start a broadcast — but today’s different, so I’m unapologetic today for this side of me that you’ve never seen before,” Broussard declared to the more than 136,000 viewers. “Today, I am tired, I’m fed up, I’m disgusted, and I’m mad — and you should be too.”
Broussard’s blend of blatant Trump boosterism coupled with a gesture toward some more traditional journalistic separation exemplifies the approach that has helped Right Side Broadcasting go from a small independent operation to one with over 1.65 million subscribers on YouTube. These viewers are generally treated to unedited footage of Trump’s regular rallies and events that is sometimes bookended with supportive introductions from RSBN’s anchors and hosts. The company also re-airs a show featuring Trump’s daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee chairwoman Lara Trump. But explicit Trump partisanship isn’t the only way RSBN is different from other broadcasters. They are also doing business directly with Trump’s campaign.
Campaign finance reports filed by the Trump campaign show it made eight payments to RSBN between April 2023 and last month totaling $59,000. The company’s leaders, founder and CEO Joe Seales and his wife, Bridgette Seales, explained the reason for the payments in a conversation with TPM last Friday afternoon. According to Bridgette, the campaign paid RSBN for some of the footage that its cameras have obtained from their consistent coverage of Trump’s rallies — and that relationship is ongoing.
“We would give raw video feeds that we sell,” Bridgette explained. “We sell those to anybody, anybody can buy them, so the Trump campaign did buy them from us that they used for rebroadcasting purposes and they still do buy them from us.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung also confirmed the arrangement in an email to TPM.
“RSBN has made available the option to purchase their broadcast feed so the campaign can use it to stream out to various social and video channels,” Cheung said.
It’s quite natural that the Trump campaign might turn to a supportive organization that reliably has cameras filming the former president’s events for footage. However, the deal is also somewhat at odds with the veneer of independence that RSBN has sought to maintain.
The story of how the company grew along with Trump’s political career has been well told in a series of articles published over the years. In general, the narrative of RSBN’s rise started with the (often false) assertion Trump made at many of his signature rallies during the 2016 campaign that the mainstream press never showed the size of his crowds. During that race, Seales began to set up cameras to film Trump’s events. The operation, which officially incorporated in the Seales’ home state of Alabama a few days after Trump took office in January 2017, eventually grew to its seven figure audience. However, in all of the tellings of RSBN’s origin story, Seales has framed it as some kind of independent voice. That includes an extensive profile of the company published by the Associated Press last month where Seales denied being any kind of official campaign surrogate.
“We aren’t affiliated with them,” Seales told the Associated Press. “We just cover Donald Trump. Our goal has never been to be an extension or a cheerleader for the Trump campaign.”
Asked how taking payments from the Trump campaign squared with his comments, Bridgette Seales insisted selling raw footage does not constitute an affiliation.
“We are not affiliated. They buy them for their rebroadcasting services,” Bridgette said.
It’s a delicate distinction — and one the Seales’ argue includes editorial independence. The Associated Press article (also published by the Washington Post) included a quote from an academic expert who described RSBN as “a pro-Trump propaganda channel, not an objective news source.” In his conversation with TPM, Joe Seales bristled at that and described it as an unfair characterization.
“I think sometimes my hosts have sort of — if you’re watching from home, it might seem like they’re more cheerleaders for the Trump campaign, but my original idea for this network was just not to provide a whole lot of commentary at all, and just kind of show up, and cover a live event, and let people decide for themselves what they want to believe,” Joe said.
Joe further described his objective for the operation as a desire to ensure Trump wasn’t taken “out of context” by the mainstream press.
“I am conservative myself and I just felt the need to show up and document some of the stuff that was going on so that we could have a record of it,” he explained.
While Seales might not appreciate how his network or Trump are characterized by other media outlets, RSBN’s mix of MAGA boosterism and supposed objectivity has fueled explosive growth. Along with selling footage, the company brings in donations. Its broadcasts also include sales pitches.
Moments after expressing her anger at Trump’s conviction, Broussard, the RSBN achor, offered some financial advice pegged to the verdict.
“Before we start, we want to remind you that Democrats are in control,” Broussard said, adding, “It’s now crystal clear that they will go to any depth to hurt Americans any chance they get, so don’t let them control you and don’t let them control your finances. That’s why we encourage you to contact the Birch Gold Group. Highly recommended by RSBN, the Birch Gold Group can be trusted with your financial future.”
RSBN has also expanded beyond airing Trump’s events into a broader online media operation. The company hosts articles on its home page and shows featuring its personalities. In early March, just ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries, former RSBN director of programming Brian Glenn taped a special interview with Trump at the former president’s Florida beach club. RSBN also rebroadcasts shows from other conservative personalities, including a podcast talk show hosted by Trump’s daughter-in-law-slash-Republican National Committee chairwoman, Lara Trump.
To recap, that means Trump’s relative, who has become a top figure in his party, has her own online show, which is running on a pro-Trump network that also has a deal with the campaign. Mapping these connections reveals the connections and often blurred boundaries between Trump, the official GOP, and the world of right wing MAGA influencers — if there are any boundaries at all.
RSBN’s unique place in the pro-Trump influencer ecosystem has led to growing pains along with the growth. Last month, Glenn, who is reportedly the boyfriend of far right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and widely seen as a rising star in MAGA media, revealed he was leaving the network. Glenn ultimately announced a move to the far-right cable network Real America’s Voice on June 3.
“Brian really wanted to do shows — long form show production — which is something that we don’t do here,” Joe Seales told TPM. “We weren’t able to offer him that opportunity. And so, yeah, he moved on to Real America’s Voice, and we split amicably, and so, we wish him the best.”
Along with facing competition for its talent, RSBN’s close ties to Trump raise larger questions about where it might be headed after the election. In his conversation with the Associated Press, Joe Seales described the company’s business model and continued existence as relying on Trump. He similarly told TPM that he has no long-term plans for the broadcaster, and that RSBN’s future could depend on “the outcome of the election.”
Whatever is next, Seales might not be along for the ride. Like so many of us, the founder of RSBN feels the politically charged landscape of the past few years has taken a toll.
“I personally don’t plan to be a part of the company in terms of anything operational. I’m ready to get out of politics,” Seales said. “Too much vitriol in it for me. Eight years is enough.”