Press release just out from Durbin’s office tonight …
Continue reading “Durbin Having a Caffeinated Beverage? Possibly?”DURBIN: JUSTICE ALITO MUST RECUSE HIMSELF FROM CASES RELATED TO THE 2020 ELECTION AFTER ‘APPEAL TO HEAVEN’ FLAG WAS FLOWN AT HIS HOME
Durbin also called for the passage of the SCERT Act, legislation that requires Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of ethics
Donald Trump has been fixated on non-citizen voting for years. Back in 2016, he insisted falsely that he would’ve won the popular vote if it hadn’t been for millions of undocumented immigrants voting for Hillary Clinton.
Continue reading “Republicans Take Trump’s Planned 2024 Election Denialism To The House Floor”You may have noticed that we have a series of new controversies or set pieces in the ongoing public conversation about AI. One of them has to do with Google search. Google recently rolled out, or in some regions is in the process of rolling out, a new AI-enabled version of search. You may have seen it already without noticing it was something new. On some searches you’ll now see that the top of your search has text under a small rubric that says “AI Overview.” This is potentially a very big deal for search and the whole ecosystem of the web.
Search, which has been dominated by Google for more than 20 years, has long been ruled by a mutually beneficial exchange between Google and websites. Google makes huge profits by running ads against its search results. It also copies small portions of other sites’ text and photographs under its theory of fair use. The justification for the profit and its use of sites’ content is that Google makes the web navigable, and it can send massive audiences to the sites that make up the web. In the first years of this century, various rights holders contested aspects of Google’s fair use policies. But they tended to lose those challenges and it became largely accepted that search, very much part of the open web, was actually good for the indexed websites.
In principle, at least, this understanding came to undergird the successful fair use arguments. Broadly, fair use says you can reproduce limited portions of a rights holder’s content if you don’t damage their ability to make money from it.
Continue reading “Will Google Eat Everything?”We have a new set of swing state polls out this morning from Bloomberg/Morning Consult. They show a number of things, which we’ll get to in a moment. But at a meta or media amplification level they also help us again see the massive megaphone tied to the NYT/Siena poll, notwithstanding the fact that its results were questionable in the 2022 cycle and have been big (Trump-favorable) outliers for much of this cycle. There are lots of polls. But the NYT-Siena poll’s outsized impact on news headlines extends even beyond the Times own brand and reach.
So let’s look at this new set of polls.
Continue reading “Clarifying Polls”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has screwed up the Mar-a-Lago case in so many ways it defies easy categorization. Her slow rolling of the trial is obviously her single gravest sin. But there’s another layer of malfeasance going on here that came more clearly into view yesterday.
Over the objection of Special Counsel Jack Smith, Cannon ordered the unsealing of previous filings in the case. In some of those filings, it’s becoming apparent, Trump has tucked in information about the case that he wants to seed in the public imagination and use as fodder for his presidential campaign and for fighting the criminal charges outside of court.
Cannon has given him a green light to do so, and the results became apparent yesterday.
In one of the filings, Trump drew attention to the FBI’s deadly force policy, which was in effect during the search of Mar-a-Lago, as it is in every FBI field operation. As soon as the filing was unsealed, right-wing news outlets seized on it and accused Biden of being responsible for gunning for Trump.
Trump himself later in the day amplified these bogus attacks on social media:
Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE—25TH AMENDMENT!
It became a campaign fundraising email, too: “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!”
Of course none of this is true. The same deadly force policy that is in effect for every FBI operation was in effect for the Mar-a-Lago search. The FBI doesn’t need special authority to use deadly force; it has standing authority to use deadly force when circumstances warrant it. This is a standard operating policy, and Biden had nothing to do with its promulgation in general or its application in the Mar-a-Lago search in particular.
But you can see the dynamic plainly from what I just had to do to explain this to you: Trump wants to use the criminal justice process to generate more disinformation, Cannon facilitates him doing so with her rulings, right-wing media go apeshit, Trump gooses the reaction some more, and then a day later I come along and try to unpack it all for you, including the underlying falsity, with a put-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube futility. The FBI issued an unusual statement in similarly futile fashion.
This is all bad enough, but there’s another even darker layer here: It feeds the right-wing animosity toward federal law enforcement that has already led to two attacks on FBI field offices in the past two years. As former FBI agent Asha Rangappa points out:
Cannon’s unsealing of court filings in the Mar-a-Lago case is a blunt instrument, and that means it’s doesn’t yield only good things for Trump.
Among the new revelations yesterday was a dramatic March 17, 2023 decision from U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell that came during the investigative phase of the Mar-a-Lago case. The 87-page decision, attached as an exhibit to one of Trump’s motions, offered new evidence of Trump’s obstruction of the effort to retrieve the classified documents that he unlawfully withheld and stowed at Mar-a-Lago.
So along with the bogus FBI deadly force headlines, Trump got these headlines, too:
The jury is not supposed to draw any inference from the defendant not testifying in their own defense, but that doesn’t mean we can’t – especially when the defendant is running for president.
From a legal strategy point of view, testifying would have been a disaster. But from a political point of view, not testifying should by all rights be its own disaster.
Trump bragged that he would testify, but we knew he wouldn’t and he didn’t and now the question is whether he will be held to account for it.
I hate the framing of “imagine what the reaction would be if [insert name of prior, usually Democratic, president] did this thing Trump did.” But his failure to testify is exactly the kind of thing that would rightly be hung around the neck of any other presidential candidate from now until Election Day.
In the meantime, closing arguments are scheduled for Tuesday.
An unrepresented Rudy Giuliani appeared via video at his arraignment in the Arizona fake electors scheme and pleaded not guilty. Because he had dodged service of the indictment for weeks, Giuliani was required to post a cash bond of $10,000, the only defendant in the case forced to do so.
In a new filing in Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, he has reached an agreement with Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss to cease serially defaming them even after they won a $148 million defamation judgment against him, forcing him into bankruptcy.
Bloomberg’s Josh Green:
As far-fetched as it may sound, the prospect of Trump overriding or simply ignoring the constitutional provision that limits a president to serving two terms seems to be pushing some undecided voters toward Biden, despite significant reservations about the incumbent’s age, turmoil in the Middle East and high inflation. Now strategists in both parties are probing to see how widely this sentiment has spread, particularly among the undecided voters likely to sway the election.
Law Dork Chris Geidner found an interesting detail in Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s Federal Judicial Financial Disclosure report: Last August, at the peak of the Bud Light faux controversy ginned up by the right wing over a trans influencer touting the watery beer, Alito sold some of his Anheuser-Busch stock and on the same day bought Molson Coors stock:
Was that Alito’s personal participation in the Bud Light boycott? It’s not clear, but it is curious.
Among the best, most-detailed videos of a tornado ever captured. This was yesterday afternoon in Iowa via a drone. This tornado went on to cause severe damage in Greenfield, where there were an unconfirmed number of casualties.
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After he admitted during a Pittsburgh television interview earlier today that he is “looking at” restrictions on contraceptives and will soon unveil “something that you’ll find interesting,” Donald Trump reversed course and made an all-caps post on Truth Social walking it back entirely.
Continue reading “Really Dumb Even For Trump”The judge and lawyers are meeting this afternoon to sort out jury instructions.
Follow along with us.
Let me follow up about the comment TPM Reader HS got when she called the office of her state’s senior senator, Alex Padilla. She called insisting there should be some kind of investigation into the Justice Alito flag controversy. When HS got through to Padilla’s office on the second try, a staffer told her they hadn’t yet been briefed yet on whether Padilla had a position on the issue. In response to that piece, another reader pointed me to this article from this morning in Politico.
Continue reading “Low Energy, Part 2”For all the endlessly merited outrage about Justice Alito being outed as the second pro-insurrection Justice (I mean, more evidence, no surprise), it seems like the response on Capitol Hill is truly low energy.
From TPM Reader HS …
I’ve been a reader since the 2000 election and live in San Francisco. When the story on Alito came out last week, I called Senator Padilla, a Judiciary committee member, and left a message about how outrageous it was and hoped that as a member of the committee, he would call for hearings and investigations (no one answered). I also called Senator Durban’s office (picked up on first ring) and communicated the same.
Today, I called my Senator again. His staff person said “I haven’t been briefed on his position and I will be happy to pass on your message” That’s it. No response at all. CALIFORNIA!
Indeed, that’s the best a senator from California can do?
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Senate Democrats? Fellow justices? Anyone?
Is the Alito household’s protest of Joe Biden’s election by flying an upside down American flag in the period between the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and Inauguration Day going to just recede into oblivion? That’s it? We’re done with that? Time to move on?
Have the Republican Party’s sustained attacks on the court system and the rule of law become just more background noise to our national politics? Just par for the course here in 2024?
Elected Republicans keep showing up to support the insurrectionist former president at his criminal trial as a defiant workaround to the gag order imposed on him. It’s a jarring sight, but not as remarkable as a sitting Supreme Court justice sending out a distress signal that the government has been illegitimately taken over by Joe Biden:
Alito’s own admission to the episode was mere hand-wave toward his wife and their “very political” neighbors as if he knew it would all blow over soon enough. No Senate hearings. Not even a sustained drumbeat from Democratic electeds.
Robert Costello looks to be the primary defense witness for Trump, and things did not go well, as he quickly ran afoul of the judge, who took the unusual step of throwing nearly everyone not a litigant out of the courtroom and closing it while he read Costello the riot act.
We didn’t know what was said behind closed doors until later in the day when the transcript was released:
TPM’s Josh Kovensky is back at it this morning. Follow along on what could be another unpredictable day in court.
Today: Trump’s defense case isn’t expected to last long – unless we get surprise testimony from Trump himself in his own defense. After testimony concludes, probably this morning, attention will shift this afternoon to preparing jury instructions and arguments to the judge about what they should say. Joyce Vance runs through that process so you can familiarize yourself.
Wednesday: Off Day/No Trial
Thursday: Partial trial day (if needed)
Friday: Off Day/No Trial
Monday: Memorial Day/No Trial
Tuesday: Closing Arguments
AP: “The word ‘Reich’ is often largely associated with Nazi Germany’s Third Reich, though the references in the video Trump shared appear to be a reference to the formation of the modern pan-German nation, unifying smaller states into a single Reich, or empire, in 1871.”
The far-right coup plotters who wanted to violently overthrow the German government and install an obscure aristocrat as chancellor went on trial Tuesday in Frankfurt.
Mr. Trump’s economic and foreign policy nationalism would subvert the preponderance of power that America has enjoyed since 1945 and that he has promised to bolster. It has been threatened from without but never from within. As he vows to upend America’s relations with the rest of the globe, the danger is not that Mr. Trump would fail to live up to his principles. It’s that he would.
WaPo: How Rudy Giuliani tried, and failed, to avoid his latest indictment
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