If you are an Inside member, you’re familiar with the Inside Briefings we’ve done over the years. We’re launching a new kind of briefing: Inside TPM. This will be a series of monthly interviews with TPM staffers (and down the road, potentially alumni and friends-of-site) to help readers and viewers and listeners better understand TPM and the people who work here.
In the first episode, I spoke with Josh Kovensky about covering the Trump hush money trial, what he learned from his time in Ukraine, and much more. I hope you enjoy and we’ll be back next month with another video.
Jan. 6 Prisoners Recorded A Podcast From Jail With A Camera Someone ‘Accidentally’ Gave Them
Some of the people who were convicted for their actions during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol have insisted the unit where they were held before sentencing in the Washington D.C. jail is an abusive “gulag.” It’s also ground zero for a burgeoning media empire that appears to violate jail policy and features broadcasts starring people who were convicted for their role in storming the Capitol as former President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was being certified.
Continue reading “Jan. 6 Prisoners Recorded A Podcast From Jail With A Camera Someone ‘Accidentally’ Gave Them”The Nevada Fake Electors Prosecution May Be Fatally Flawed
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Nevada Fake Electors Case Dismissed
The criminal prosecution of the 2020 fake electors scheme in Nevada was undertaken in the wrong county, a state judge ruled Friday. The criminal case was filed in Clark County (Las Vegas) but the proper venue was Douglas County (Carson City, the state capital).
Normally this is not that big of a deal: The prosecutor, in this case the state attorney general, merely refiles the case in the right county.
The problem here: The statute of limitations has already run out, meaning it can’t simply be refiled in a different county.
Attorney General Aaron Ford plans to appeal the venue decision.
Do Yourself A Favor
Ignore all the expectations-setting “journalism” ahead of Thursday’s presidential debate. It’s pablum.
2024 Ephemera
- Democrats, including the Biden campaign, are rolling out a day full of abortion-related messaging pegged to today’s two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
- North Carolina: Biden Is Pouring Millions Into a State Democrats Haven’t Won Since 2008
- The Trump campaign is keeping a tight leash on things in the run up to the GOP convention in Milwaukee, via NBC News:
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign moved [last] week to quash a potential disturbance at next month’s GOP convention in Milwaukee by seeking to replace six delegates to the convention who they thought were potentially going to initiate “unnecessary distractions” on the floor. …
Days later, however, the Trump campaign abandoned efforts to replace the delegates, saying it “cleared the air” with the delegates who sparked the concerns after days of deliberation.
Playing The Long Game
Politico’s Alice Ollstein reports on a new 10-year $100 million national campaign by a coalition of abortion rights groups to restore federal protections for the procedure.
Tell Me More …
New reporting from ABC News this morning about an unusual trip that Donald Trump took to Mar-a-Lago in the summer of 2022 that raised the suspicions of investigators in the classified documents case:
The previously unreported visit, which allegedly took place July 10-12 in the summer of 2022, was raised in several interviews with witnesses, sources familiar with the matter said, as investigators sought to determine whether it was part of Trump’s broader alleged effort to withhold the documents after receiving a subpoena demanding their return.
At least one witness who worked closely with the former president recalled being told at the time of the trip that Trump was there “checking on the boxes,” according to sources familiar with what the witness told investigators.
Mar-a-Lago Miscellany
- U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon spent much of Friday hearing arguments on whether Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel was constitutionally valid.
- The hearing resumes today with separate arguments over whether the funding of Smith’s office has been proper.
- Your occasional reminder that neither of these arguments are particularly novel nor have judges in other cases found them persuasive. But here we are on Day 2 of pretending otherwise.
- Over the weekend, Special Counsel Jack Smith submitted a new filing in connection with his effort to persuade Cannon to modify the conditions of Trump’s release so he will stop his rhetorical attacks on law enforcement. He cited the attack on the FBI field office in Cincinnati in 2022 and the recent charges against a man who allegedly threatened an FBI agent in the Hunter Biden case.
Gag Order Update
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is asking the judge in Trump’s hush money case to leave the gag order against him mostly intact for the time being.
Good Read
NYT: Michael Flynn Has Turned His Trump-World Celebrity Into a Family Business
This Is Not Normal
An eloquent reaction to being targeted by MAGA from former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe:
Pelosi’s Husband’s Attacker Convicted On State Charges
Already facing a 30-year federal prison sentence for the attack on Paul Pelosi in his San Francisco home, David DePape was convicted Friday in state court of first-degree burglary, false imprisonment of an elder, threatening the family of a public official, kidnapping for ransom that resulted in bodily harm, and dissuading a witness by force or threat.
For Your Radar
Graham Allison and Michael J. Morell: The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again
Historic Court-Martial Struggles To Find Jurors
Air Force Maj. Gen. Phillip Stewart is being court-martialed for alleged sexual assault, conduct unbecoming an officer, and controlling an aircraft within 12 hours of consuming alcohol, but the military is struggling to find a sufficient number of jurors holding either a higher rank or the same rank for longer than the accused. Stewart is only the second Air Force general to ever face a court-martial.
Life Imitating Art
Historian Kevin Kruse recounts how the precedent Louisiana is citing for requiring the 10 Commandments to be displayed in every classroom is at least partly rooted in Hollywood’s promotional campaign for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic of the same name starring Charlton Heston.
Messiah Complex Much?
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A Different Take On Jamaal Bowman, Israel & NY-16
I wanted to share a few thoughts on Tuesday’s primary in New York’s 16th congressional district, which pits Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D) against Westchester County Executive George Latimer. It is apparently going to be the most expensive congressional primary ever. The headlines are that AIPAC itself, and a number of AIPAC adjacent pro-Israel groups, are pouring money into the race and Bowman is being wildly outspent. And that’s true. Limited polling suggests Latimer is a strong favorite. But this headline version misses a lot of the story. Or, more specifically, it mistakes cause and effect.
Continue reading “A Different Take On Jamaal Bowman, Israel & NY-16”Trump Ally Gets A Taste Of MAGA’s Medicine
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕
That’ll Do It
The attorney general in the state of Missouri, Andrew Bailey, is making a bunch of headlines for announcing on his podcast Thursday that he intends to sue the amorphous state of New York and officials there for what he describes as “their direct attack on our democratic process through unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump.”
Continue reading “Trump Ally Gets A Taste Of MAGA’s Medicine”5th Circuit Panel Accuses Right-Wing Judge Of ‘Abuse Of Discretion’ In Obamacare Case
While it upheld the crux of a right-wing district judge’s ruling on a major Affordable Care Act case Friday, a panel of judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals accused that district judge of abusing his discretion by letting insurers nationwide stop offering free preventative care.
Continue reading “5th Circuit Panel Accuses Right-Wing Judge Of ‘Abuse Of Discretion’ In Obamacare Case”Listen To This: Cheap Fake Takes
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the proliferation of deceptively edited videos of Joe Biden, the finalization of rules for the first debate and the Biden campaign’s new ads.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Don’t Worry: Good Decisions Like These Don’t Make the Court Any Less Corrupt
There’s a wrongheaded tendency to think the Court isn’t quite as bad or corrupt when it hands down one of these “good” decisions as it did today in the domestic abusers gun case. Resist the urge. One of the many things I’ve learned from my podcast colleague Kate Riga in our many podcast discussions is that we get a lot of these cases lately because, in addition to taking many fewer cases in general, the Court is now basically open season for culture-war cases. Even in relative terms there are many fewer of the cases that are on some obscure dimension of the tax code or other important-but-to-most-people-obscure questions that don’t obviously line up with hot-button political issues.
This case was one of those cases on a few different levels. The fact that the plaintiff succeeded at the circuit court level is astonishing and scandalous in itself. But let’s start with some basics. The landmark Heller decision in 2008 did not uphold the kind of absolute 2nd Amendment “gun rights” advocates have long claimed. It was terrible, but it didn’t do that. What it did was for the first time find an individual right to own and possess firearms. Like all rights, any regulation of that must be justified by and balanced against some legitimate public interest or need.
Continue reading “Don’t Worry: Good Decisions Like These Don’t Make the Court Any Less Corrupt”Only Clarence Thomas Would Let Domestic Abusers Keep Their Guns In New Ruling
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that individuals who pose a “credible threat to the physical safety of another” may be stripped of their guns, showing that even its extremely expansive reading of the Second Amendment stops short of letting a proven domestic abuser carry arms.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, joined by every justice except — shockingly — Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Sonia Sotomayor also wrote a concurrence, joined by Justice Elena Kagan. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson all wrote separate concurring decisions.
Roberts put some, if very modest, guardrails on the Bruen decision from 2022, when Thomas, writing for the majority, knocked down a century-old New York gun licensing law because it lacked a historical analogue from the country’s founding. Taking that logic to its natural conclusion, Zackey Rahimi argued that there was certainly no founding-era analogue to stripping domestic abusers like him of their firearms — an obvious truth in a time when the most powerful and wealthy white women were considered far less than full citizens.
“The Second Amendment permits more than just regulations identical to those existing in 1791,” Roberts wrote, saying that “the Court’s conclusion in Bruen that regulations like the surety laws are not a proper historical analogue for a broad gun licensing regime does not mean that they cannot be an appropriate analogue for a narrow one.”
“Holding otherwise would be as mistaken as applying the protections of the right only to muskets and sabers,” he added.
The ruling was yet another smack on the wrist for the Fifth Circuit, as Roberts took pains to explain the twofold way the circuit court had erred. The Supreme Court reversing the Fifth Circuit has been a theme this term — less a sign of the high court’s moderation, and more of the Fifth’s right-wing extremity.
“For its part, the Fifth Circuit made two errors. First, like the dissent, it read Bruen to require a ‘historical twin’ rather than a ‘historical analogue,’” Roberts wrote. “Second, it did not correctly apply our precedents governing facial challenges.”
In his lone dissent, Thomas chastises the rest of the Court, including the conservatives who joined him in Bruen: They all read his decision wrong, he wrote, which does require something closer to a historical twin than a cousin in upholding gun regulations.
He spent pages railing against the government’s interpretation that all unfit or dangerous people should be stripped of their guns, equating it to a tyrannical stomping on a sanctified right.
“While Congress cannot revive disarmament laws based on race, one can easily imagine a world where political minorities or those with disfavored cultural views are deemed the next ‘dangers’ to society,” he wrote, clearly imagining, with a shudder, his MAGA allies being disarmed.
Sotomayor, joined by Kagan, wrote to both cheer the Chief’s looser approach to Bruen and to make explicit that Thomas’ approach to gun regulations would moot nearly all of them if they lack a beat-for-beat founding-era predecessor.
She also made a concise liberal argument against originalism: How can our interpretation of the Constitution and statutory regimes be guided by a philosophy grounded in a time when only certain white men were entitled to their protections?
“History has a role to play in Second Amendment analysis, but a rigid adherence to history, (particularly history predating the inclusion of women and people of color as full members of the polity), impoverishes constitutional interpretation and hamstrings our democracy,” Sotomayor argued.
Barrett more anxiously seconds the majority’s wider approach to historical analogues, though added that “harder level-of-generality problems can await another day.”
Gorsuch wrote essentially a rebuttal to Sotomayor and Kagan, a glowing endorsement of originalism as the gold standard in constitutional interpretation: “Faithful adherence to the Constitution’s original meaning may be an imperfect guide, but I can think of no more perfect one for us to follow,” he simpered.
Kavanaugh joined in in his own concurrence, waxing that “the Constitution is a document of majestic specificity with ‘strikingly clean prose.’”
Gorsuch also emphasized the narrowness of the decision, leaving the door open to future rulings on whether the government can disarm someone without a judicial finding that he poses a credible threat, whether someone can be disarmed permanently or whether someone can be punished for using his gun in self defense (this last, he claims ominously, has historical roots indicating that even someone shown to be a credible threat can use his guns for self defense).
This Court, he made clear, is not giving up its radicalism on gun rights just because this case made the justices squeamish.
Buried in Kavanaugh’s pages-long ode to originalism — peppered with sucking up to various conservative justices, including Roberts — is a worrying contention that heightened scrutiny is a fairly recent invention that doesn’t hold much weight and should not be expanded. Strict scrutiny, the highest of these, is often invoked in equal protection claims, and meant to guard against laws that infringe on fundamental rights, or that involve classifications like race or national origin.
Jackson wrote to criticize all of the Court’s recent Second Amendment decisions, and to point out that forcing lower courts — who lack expertise and time — to cobble together historical analogues has proven unworkable and chaotic.
“The message that lower courts are sending now in Second Amendment cases could not be clearer,” she wrote. “They say there is little method to Bruen’s madness.”
She added that legislatures deserve to know whether their gun regulations will pass constitutional muster, and to be able to depend on consistent rulings that point the way.
Read the ruling here:
Aileen Cannon Refused To Step Aside Even After Other Judges Urged Her To Do So
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Weird Day In Mar-A-Lago Case
An unusual all-day hearing is scheduled today down in Florida in the Mar-a-Lago case on whether Jack Smith was lawfully appointed as special counsel. That’s weird enough on its own (more on that in a moment), but it comes a day after the NYT published an exceedingly strange article revealing that two federal judges in the Southern District of Florida, including Chief Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga, had previously approached U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon about relinquishing the case when it was first assigned to her. She refused.
Don’t get me wrong: The NYT article is very good. What’s strange about it is that anyone involved would have spilled the tea to anyone else and that it eventually made its way, one way or another, into print. Here’s how the article obliquely describes that pathway:
… word of the early efforts by her colleagues on the bench to persuade her to step aside — and the significance of her decision not to do so — has spread among other federal judges and the people who know them. …
The two people who discussed the efforts to persuade her to hand off the case spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Each had been told about it by different federal judges in the Southern District of Florida, including Judge Altonaga.
Deviating from the random assignment of cases is an extremely sensitive matter under any circumstance, even more so in a case involving the former president and national security secrets. But it’s even more sensitive than normal given the circumstances, or shall we say, reasons the judges sought to intervene here.
Implicit in the story is that Cannon’s inexperience was a factor. According to the NYT account, the other unnamed judge first reached out urging her to let a judge in Miami take the case because the bigger courthouse was better equipped to handle it. When she declined, the chief judge reached out on her own. That’s where it gets spicy:
The chief judge — an appointee of former President George W. Bush — is said to have made a more pointed argument: It would be bad optics for Judge Cannon to oversee the trial because of what had happened during the criminal investigation that led to Mr. Trump’s indictment on charges of illegally retaining national security documents after leaving office and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them.
To sharpen the point, Cannon’s bungling of the civil case Trump brought to try to thwart the criminal investigation was grounds in the chief judge’s mind for Cannon to relinquish the case, especially after she was slapped around by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for how she mishandled the case. Stunning news, really.
The only caution I would add here is that the account of what two judges said to Cannon comes down to one unidentified source.
The Day Ahead In The MAL Case
Devoting a day+ to the argument over whether Jack Smith is legally appointed is bizarre in its own right given that this question has been raised and dispensed within other courts before now. It’s another way in which Cannon is delaying the case, in addition to failing to set a trial date.
We won’t have live coverage from Florida today because of the court restrictions on press coverage. In the meantime, Roger Parloff posted a few days ago a good rundown on the legal arguments in play today, in case you missed it.
Bannon Loses Again
Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon lost his emergency effort to get the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to delay his prison sentence, which is set to begin July 1. Next stop: Supreme Court.
Can’t Believe We’re Even Talking About This Possibility
An effort to give Jan. 6 rioters a prominent role at the Republican National Convention doesn’t seem to be going anywhere … at least not yet.
On the other hand, when a Jan. 6 defendant is your nominee, who needs to use rioters as props. It speaks for itself.
2024 Ephemera
- Since his conviction, Trump has quickly closed his fundraising gap with Biden.
- Reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon gives $50 million to back Trump.
- Michael Bloomberg gives $20 million to back Biden.
Another Shakeup At The WaPo
The British journalist slated to take over as the top editor at the WaPo after the November election is not going to make the jump after all. Weirdly, the news that Robert Winnett will remain at the Daily Telegraph was reported by the WaPo based on an internal Daily Telegraph memo.
Global Fossil Fuel Use Reached Record High In 2023
The growth in renewables is not outpacing the growth in overall energy demand.
My Washingtonian Problem
Last month I mentioned my EV in a Morning Memo item on America’s lagging public charging infrastructure. Two weeks later, it was totaled while parked on the street here in DC. So you’re probably not going to get as much EV news in Morning Memo for a while (since I drove so seldom in my very walkable neighborhood, I’m going to try the carless urban lifestyle for a while and see how it goes, which might yield its own posts).
It was how I found out about the collision that still has me shaking my head. I had finished up my TPM work day and was getting ready to go work out when I happened to check Instagram. The top post was from a popular DC account that offers a buzzy and usually funny snapshot of urban life here … pause … wait, that’s MY car.
By the time I learned of it … on Instagram four hours later … the scene of the accident had been cleared. But piecing it together from the police report and the damage on my vehicle, it appears the flipped SUV used the left front tire of my parked Kia like a ramp, launching it into the air. How the Benz was going that fast in a one-block stretch between two stop signs remains a mystery. The impact drove my car into the curb and into the parked car behind it, neatly damaging all four sides of a previously pristine car with under 20,000 miles on it. Totaled. Sigh.
Speaking Of Wrecks …
NYT: Ancient Shipwreck Preserves a Deep Bronze Age Time Capsule
Preach, Reggie
I try not to inflict sports on you too often, but there’s a lot here for the non-sports fan, so stick with me.
This is a season of reconciliation and recognition in Major League Baseball. For the first time, MLB officially recognized Negro League stats and merged them with its own, elevating decades of segregated baseball to the highest professional tier.
Last night, in that same spirt, a major league game between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants was played at Birmingham, Alabama’s Rickwood Field, which was built in 1910, making it the oldest professional baseball park in America. For those keeping track, that’s two years older than Boston’s Fenway Park.
Rickwood was for a time the home field of the Negro League’s Black Barons, who shared the stadium with the minor league white team, known simply as the Barons. The radio announcer for the white Barons back in the 1930s was Bull Connor. Yes, that Bull Connor. In another historical irony, all-time great Willie Mays played for the Black Barons at Rickwood while he was still in high school, before being signed by the New York Giants in 1950. Mays died two days before the game, which became part a commemoration of Negro League players and part memorial for Mays.
Into this feel-good story stepped Reggie Jackson, the famous slugger from my childhood. Mr. October was, by his own admission, hot-headed, tempestuous, quick to anger, and ready to brawl as a player. Often an asshole, frankly. At 78, he’s mellowed a bit but not entirely. He was on the Fox Sports pregame broadcast and was asked what it was like to return to Birmingham, where he was a minor leaguer some 20 years after Mays. Give this a watch (YouTube version):
Now keep in mind this is Fox Sports, which is more aggressive in wrapping its game broadcasts in ostentatious patriotism — bunting, anthems, flyovers, and troops as visual props — than the other networks, which is saying a lot. So credit the broadcast crew for sticking with this extended answer from Jackson. (For what it’s worth, there are other versions online which don’t bleep the N-word, and Jackson’s words land even harder.)
Maybe it takes a blunt, not-very-subtle, sometimes-asshole like Jackson to cut through the feel-goodism of our “post-racial” yearnings. But I wonder if there’s something else at play, too. Jackson, of mixed Black and Hispanic heritage, wasn’t from the South. He grew up in Pennsylvania. What he encountered in Alabama was different and new to him. Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in baseball, was born in Georgia but he grew up in California. We know they both encountered racism outside the South; it’d be ridiculous to think otherwise. But the South was different.
A few years ago, I had the great pleasure of visiting with a friend of a friend who was a Black major leaguer back in the 1960s, and had spent part of the 1950s and 1960s in the minor leagues, both in the South and other areas of the country. As I snuck glances at his enormous hands, as if his arms had sprouted catchers mitts at their tips, he spoke eloquently but matter of factly about segregation and racism during his minor league days. But here’s the thing: He was from the South. The racism was deeply familiar to him, so in a way he was more struck by the less severe treatment he received outside of the South than what he had grown up with and was accustomed to back home.
It’s not either/or. Jackson’s personality is part of it, where he grew up was part it, and there are other factors at play, too. It was hard for Jackson to return almost 60 years later, despite all of his success and accolades. And he gave voice to it, an aggrieved voice. Not papering it over with a Chamber of Commerce sheen. Respect.
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