Rudy G Gets Big Guffaws At Far-Right Confab For Calling Fani Willis A ‘Ho’

Posted on by David Kurtz

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

Who He Really Is

If you came of age in the crime wave of the ’80s and ’90s, you were witness to the national debate over whether former federal prosecutor turned New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was a racist targeting people of color or a no-nonsense crimefighter applying a tough hand to a difficult situation. Those aren’t mutually exclusive, by the way. Both can be true.

We can settle the racist part of the debate now (was any doubt left?) — and throw in misogynist as a special bonus — after Giuliani’s sexualized rant Friday directed at Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis.

In video of his appearance at former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn’s far-right Reawaken America conference posted by Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer, Giuliani played to the crowd in the most base and craven way:

Recall how we got to this point: It was Giuliani who famously smeared Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, both Black women. That seems to have been a catalyzing reason that Willis undertook to bring the sprawling RICO case against Giuliani, Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants. Freeman and Moss subsequently won a nearly $150 million defamation judgment forcing Giuliani into bankruptcy. But he still didn’t stop, continuing to defame them regularly even after losing that lawsuit, until he finally agreed in recent days to cease and desist as part of the bankruptcy settlement.

With Freeman and Moss no longer viable targets, Giuliani has turned his ire to another Black woman. Contrast that with the situation in Arizona, where Giuliani is also facing criminal charges brought by Attorney General Kris Mayes for his effort to subvert the 2020 election. No “ho” comments from Rudy for Mayes, who is a white woman.

Perhaps we’ll eventually get to see whether the criminal justice system will come down as hard on a white man for calling his Black prosecutor a “ho” as we might expect if it were a Black man in the dock.

What Trump’s Revenge Really Means

Greg Sargent:

In the media, this story tends to be framed as follows: Will Trump seek “revenge” for his legal travails, or won’t he? But that framing unwittingly lets Trump set the terms of this debate. It implies that he is vowing to do to Democrats what was done to him.

But that’s not what Trump is actually threatening. Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.

Trump Sits For Probation Office Interview Today

Former President Donald Trump is scheduled today sit for a virtual pre-sentencing interview with a probation officer in the New York hush money case.

Keep An Eye On This …

The judge in the hush-money case alerted Trump’s attorneys and prosecutors Friday to a commenter who posted on the court system’s Facebook page claiming to be a cousin of a juror and possess inside knowledge of the jury’s deliberations before it rendered a verdict. Initial indication are that it’s probably a troll and not a real compromise of jury proceedings.

Clarence Thomas Fesses Up … Sorta

The freebies given to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas by billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow that were first unearthed by ProPublica have now been officially reported by Thomas in an amended 2019 financial disclosure report. Thomas claims the gifts were “inadvertently omitted.” 

More On Russ Vought And Trump II

The WaPo has its own version of the story on the shadow cabinet being assembled by pro-Trumpers in anticipation of a Trump II encore. This version also fronts Russ Vought, the OMB director in Trump I, as a central figure and touts him as a possible Trump II White House chief of staff. For the moment, Vought is the policy director for the 2024 platform committee of the RNC.

Failing Upward

Ed Martin, a former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party who was big supporter of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort in 2020, has been hired by the RNC to help shape the party’s 2024 platform, Sahil Kapur and Ryan J. Reilly report for NBC News.

Hard To Figure What’s Going On Here

Cause …

  • WaPo: Republicans pitch tax cuts for corporations, the wealthy in 2025
  • WSJ: At End of Trump Tax Cuts, Progressives See Leverage to Target the Rich

Effect…

  • Politico: Wall Street titans shake off qualms and embrace Trump

I Can’t Get Enough Of These Stories

Politico: How vulnerable GOP lawmakers are taking credit for an infrastructure law they opposed

The Jury Could Get The Hunter Biden Case Today

Expected today in the trial of the president’s son on federal gun charges in Delaware: A spare defense case by Hunter Biden attorney Abbe Lowell, closing arguments, and then the jury gets the case.

Biden Admin. Sets New MPG Standards

The new fuel efficiency standards for the U.S. auto and light truck fleet are weaker than initially proposed but still raise the targets for passenger cars from 48.7 mpg to 65 mpg and for light trucks (including SUVs) from 35.1 mpg to 45 mpg by 2031.

Carbon Dioxide Levels Surge Faster Than Ever

NOAA, last week: “Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever — accelerating on a steep rise to levels far above any experienced during human existence …”

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Becoming The Swamp

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

In this week’s episode of The Insurrectionists Are Running The Show, NBC News reported on Friday that the RNC recently hired a big time supporter of the “Stop the Steal” movement to work on the party’s policy platform-writing committee.

Continue reading “Becoming The Swamp” →

Just Posting Endlessly

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I wanted to share another thought on the Post’s travails. I’m chagrined that a friend had to make the point for me since it’s a point I should know as well as anyone. It’s not like there’s not a ton of money to be made on journalism in DC. The fact that it’s one of the few spaces in the U.S. that has spawned a series of successful media startups over the last fifteen years testifies to that — Politico, Axios, Punchbowl and more. Indeed, it was veterans of the Post who branched off and launched the first two and in many ways ate the Post’s launch before Bezos came into the picture.

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Justice Clarence Thomas Acknowledges He Should Have Disclosed Free Trips From Billionaire Donor

Posted on by John Light

This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation’s highest court.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged for the first time in a new financial disclosure filing that he should have publicly reported two free vacations he received from billionaire Harlan Crow.

The pair of 2019 trips, one to Indonesia and the other to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California, were first revealed by ProPublica. Last year, Thomas argued that he did not need to disclose such gifts. “Justice Thomas’s critics allege that he failed to report gifts from wealthy friends,” his lawyer previously said in a statement issued on the justice’s behalf. “Untrue.”

In the new filing released Friday, however, Thomas amended his financial disclosure for 2019, writing that he “inadvertently omitted” the trips on his previous reports.

Last year, ProPublica documented an array of undisclosed luxury vacations and other gifts Thomas has received over the years from several billionaires, including Crow. ProPublica revealed Crow had treated Thomas to numerous private jet flights and international yacht cruises, covered private school tuition for Thomas’ relative, and paid Thomas money in an undisclosed 2014 real estate deal.

Legal ethics experts said that Thomas appeared to have violated the law by failing to disclose the trips and gifts.

The Thomas revelations helped plunge the Supreme Court into its biggest ethical crisis in the modern era. Justice Samuel Alito also failed to disclose a luxury fishing trip that was paid for by wealthy political donors, one of whom had cases before the court. In recent weeks, Alito has faced criticism for politicized flags that flew at two of his homes. The public’s approval of the court has plummeted in the last few years, polls show.

In response, the court last year adopted a code of conduct for the first time in its history. The code, however, has no enforcement mechanism.

This is not the first time that Thomas has responded to public controversy about his disclosure practices by amending an old form. The forms are required by a federal law passed after Watergate that says justices must annually report income, assets and most gifts. At least twice before, Thomas has similarly defended his failure to make required disclosures as an unintentional error or a misunderstanding of the rules.

Last summer, Thomas amended his 2014 disclosure to include the real estate deal with Crow after ProPublica reported on the transaction. At the time, he wrote that he “inadvertently failed to realize” that the deal needed to be publicly reported and said he “continues to work” with judiciary staff to determine “whether he should further amend his reports from any prior years.”

Thomas engaged an outside lawyer last year to review his past filings. The new filing does not make clear whether that review is finished. The justice and his attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a statement last year, Thomas’ attorney, Elliot Berke, said that “after reviewing Justice Thomas’s records, I am confident there has been no willful ethics transgression.”

A committee of judges of the Judicial Conference, the principal policymaking body for federal courts, also said last year it had launched a review of the allegations against Thomas. By law, if there is “reasonable cause” to believe a justice intentionally omitted information from a report, the conference is supposed to refer the matter to the attorney general. Such a referral would be unprecedented. A judiciary spokesperson told ProPublica on Friday there is no update on that review.

Even after the new amendments, there are many gifts Thomas received that he has still not disclosed.

As ProPublica previously reported, in 2019, Thomas flew to Indonesia on Crow’s private jet for an extended island cruise on Crow’s superyacht. If Thomas had chartered the plane and the yacht himself, it could have cost more than half a million dollars. Seven ethics-law experts said that Thomas appeared to have violated federal law by failing to disclose the free travel.

Thomas did not mention the flight to Indonesia or the yacht trip in his new filing. However, he disclosed a previously unknown detail about the trip: that Crow and his wife paid for Thomas’ stay at a hotel in Bali. Thomas acknowledged that he should have reported that.

ProPublica also reported that Thomas had taken at least six undisclosed trips with Crow to the Bohemian Grove. Thomas’ amendments to his reports include only one of those trips. Members typically must pay thousands of dollars to bring a guest to the retreat.

In his new filing, Thomas disclosed receiving one gift last year: photo albums that he valued at $2,000 from Terrence and Barbara Giroux. Terrence Giroux was the executive director of the Horatio Alger Association, a nonprofit that provides college scholarships to low-income students. Thomas is an honorary board member of the nonprofit.

Thomas reported no free trips last year, which would make 2023 an anomaly. Thomas received undisclosed vacations from Crow and other wealthy benefactors virtually every year for more than two decades.

In the disclosure forms released Friday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only other Supreme Court justice to report receiving a gift in 2023. Jackson said she received $12,500 worth of artwork for her chambers at the court, as well as a gift from Beyoncé of four concert tickets, which she valued at $3,711.84.

Alito, who has said he did not need to disclose his fishing trip, received a 90-day extension for filing his disclosure form for last year.

Yet More Posting

Posted on by Josh Marshall

From TPM Reader RJ, who has a somewhat less generous view of the Post. This is a case where I should remind people that on some topics I post a range of views from readers. That doesn’t mean I endorse them. That said, there are some points here that ring true to me. As the dominant paper in what is an inherently political town, politics and government is inevitably the Post’s big thing. And as we’ve discussed in other posts, it’s hard to make it as one of the very few financially viable national papers if that’s your big and dominant thing.

Continue reading “Yet More Posting” →

Trump Claims He Has Every Right To Prosecute His Enemies

Posted on by David Kurtz

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

‘I Would Have Every Right To Go After Them’

Surveying the news of the past 24 hours, we’re presented with a particularly sobering reflection of our current state of affairs. I will lay it out brick by brick in the items below, but first I want to circle back to Donald Trump’s appearance two nights ago on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program.

Hannity asked a leading question, clearly trying to throw Trump a softball that will let him deny his intention to use the office of the presidency to exact retribution against his political foes – even though Trump has spent many months now promising to do precisely that.

At first, Trump took the easy swing and suggested that he won’t perpetuate what he implies is a cycle of retribution he’s already been victimized by. But then he launched into an extended justification of doing exactly what he had just disclaimed and asserting that he has “every right to go after them”:

Don’t be confused by the two-step shuffle Trump just did there. Disclaiming his intent to commit a bad act that he says he has the right to commit is not reassuring in the slightest. Committing or threatening to commit bad acts is the classic strongman move, but so is promising to forbear from committing a bad act.

Reserving to himself the power to decide whether to transgress is no less a strongman flex than actual transgression. It’s all part of the same dance of threat, intimidation, bullying, and aggression. To draw from the domestic abuse context: Don’t make me hurt you.

David Corn efficiently runs through the history of Trump’s promises of revenge, their inextricable connection to his obsession with violence, and how easily they flow from his preferred posture of victim. The bully as victim, the oppressor as oppressed, the abuser as abused.

Former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade has a new essay on Trump’s threats of revenage and their consequences. After running through all the checks and balances that would limit the president’s ability to use the justice system as a tool of political reprisal, McQuade then asks what the point of it all really is. This part of her answer is spot on:

Even if politically motivated prosecutions ultimately fail, just bringing charges would be enough to tilt the playing field. If the public can be convinced that all prosecutors are corrupt partisan actors, then their work may be disregarded as mere political gamesmanship, and Trump’s convictions and impeachments will no longer matter. The result is to give Trump — and other political actors — license to commit all manner of crimes in the future.

It goes back to the classic strongman targets: judges, legislators, the press, the education system, even artists. Any power centers that are beyond the strongman’s control are a threat to him. Delegitimizing them serves the same purpose as more direct attacks. It undermines their power over him.

With that in mind, let’s survey the day’s news.

A GOP Election Clerk v. MAGA In A World Of Lies

An exceptional NYT piece on the plight of Cindy Elgan, the Republican election official in Esmeralda County, Nevada, who faced a recall attempt – in a county that went 82% for Trump in 2020 – because some conspiracy-minded residents thought he should have won by a larger margin.

The Grim New Reality

TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: Add Fentanyl-Laced Mail-In Ballots To The List Of Threats Election Officials Must Guard Against In The Fall

Capitol Police Jeered By GOP Legislators

Some Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives jeered, booed, and walked out when two former Capitol Police officers who defended against the Jan. 6 attack were introduced on the floor chamber Wednesday.

Trump II Will Assert Sweeping Powers Over Federal Spending

WaPo: Donald Trump is vowing to wrest key spending powers from Congress if elected this November, promising to assert more control over the federal budget than any president in U.S. history.

Does Trump Have A Deal With Putin?

Chris Hayes places Trump’s outrageous cooptation of the case of WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich for his political ends into some dreary historical context:

Bannon Ordered To Report To Prison

Absent intervention by a federal appeals court, MAGA world figure Steve Bannon must report to prison by July 1 to begin serving his four-month sentence for contempt of Congress for rebuffing the House Jan. 6 committee.

‘Isolated and Inexperienced’

Former TPMer and Ft. Pierce, Florida native Tierney Sneed co-authors an in-depth profile of Ft. Pierce’s only federal judge: Aileen Cannon.

What To Make Of The Hunter Biden Case

With President Biden promising not to pardon his son Hunter, Ankush Khardori has a thoughtful look at the Delaware gun case brought by Special Counsel David Weiss and what makes it so unusual.

Stolen Valor

NOTUS: House Republicans are accusing fellow Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) of stolen valor for continuing to wear a Combat Infantryman Badge pin from Afghanistan that he was awarded by mistake.

I’m Not Crying. Nope. Not Me.

Have A Splendid Weekend!

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More Posting

Posted on by Josh Marshall

An interesting perspective from TPM Reader CB on the unfolding Post drama …

We moved to the DC area – Maryland suburbs – straight from Northwestern Law in 1968 and have subscribed to the Post daily and Sunday ever since. From the elixir of the morning Woodward and Bernstein exclusives that chronicled  the unraveling of the Nixon presidency, to a daily paper thinner than a half used yellow legal pad in the dying days of the Graham family ownership, we have stuck with the Post. 

Continue reading “More Posting” →

Pucking and Bluffing

Posted on by Josh Marshall

A bit more on my love/hate relationship with Puck. As I said in today’s Backchannel, it’s a curious mix of the very best and the very worst. But as I also noted, it’s helpful to keep an eye on the worst because they can have a lot of influence. Occasionally you can even learn something. Which brings me to Tara Palmeri of Puck. Her dispatch on Trump’s conviction is just drenched in the contempt in which she holds all Democrats. After listing off Republicans’ absolute and total unity behind Trump she says this: “Ironically, it’s the Democrats who seem confused about how to handle Trump’s newly minted felon designation.”

Let’s go back a few more days to our earlier discussion of this. The roar of rage and total confidence in Trump has two purposes. The one is to keep Republicans on side. The other is to make Democrats doubt the obvious: that Trump’s new first name, “convicted felon,” is bad news for his campaign. And the more it’s flogged and made his official first name, the worse it is. We don’t know how bad it is. We don’t know how many voters it will move. But it’s definitely not good. So saying it over and over again and putting it at the heart of the campaign against him is certainly a good thing. Again, that’s most of the goal of the Republican fusillade: to raise doubt about that completely obvious point.

D-Day

Posted on by Josh Marshall

The news pages are filled today with D-Day anniversary messages and accounts. It’s 80 years ago. So we’re at the outer rim of time where anyone there that day must be in their late 90s at the youngest. The thing that seems most important to remember is that it was not clear that it would work. The death, the fear, the terror, the sacrifice all take on a certain hue and logic because we know it was a success that would open the door for the reconquest of Europe. But that wasn’t clear at the time. You’ve probably seen references in the anniversary stories to the message Ike prepared to announce the landing’s failure.

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The First Point Of Trump’s Abortion Policy: Do Not Talk About Abortion Policy

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

Donald Trump admitted Wednesday that Republicans have hurt themselves with how they’ve been talking about abortion this election cycle and in years past.

Continue reading “The First Point Of Trump’s Abortion Policy: Do Not Talk About Abortion Policy” →