A new Tennessee law undercuts the Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark, closely divided decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, and marks a significant victory for a resurgent conservative movement to restrict LGBTQ rights.
Continue reading “New Tennessee Marriage Law Takes Aim At Obergefell”Trump’s Ridiculous Attempt To Escape The MAL Charges
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo, coming to you today from Manhattan. Sign up for the email version.
Trump: You Can’t Touch Me
Donald Trump filed a slew of motions Thursday seeking to dismiss the charges against him in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Not all of the motions are public, but for our purposes the most important is probably the one arguing for presidential immunity. It makes the preposterous claim that magically deeming government records “personal” under the Presidential Records Act makes it an “official” act that is immune from prosecution.
Setting aside the extreme dubiousness of that proposition, the immunity claim gives Trump a chance to delay the MAL proceedings the same way he has used another similar presidential immunity claim to forestall the Jan. 6 trial in DC. Recall that he if loses on immunity at the trial court level, like he did in DC, he has a right to appeal that decision and the case will likely grind to a halt.
We are still awaiting a Supreme Court decision on whether to take up the immunity appeal in the DC case. I would be surprised if we don’t hear from the Supreme Court today on that. It’s not clear how or if the two immunity claims will impact each other or the Supreme Court’s thinking on how to handle it.
Never Seen Anything Like It
I don’t recall ever seeing criminal defendants released from custody by federal judges and then immediately rearrested in the same case. It happened twice this week.
First, the case of former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, accused of a long-running smear campaign against the Bidens and being in bed with foreign intel, including Russia. A federal magistrate judge in Nevada granted his release Wednesday over the objections of prosecutors, who immediately appealed that decision to a federal judge in Nevada. But rather than wait for that judge to decide, prosecutors seem to have obtained a separate arrest warrant from the federal judge in California overseeing the case. (Smirnov was arrested in Nevada but the case is charged in California.) Rather than escaping, Smirnov went to his lawyer’s office to confer, where the feds found him and rearrested him.
Second, the case of violent white supremacist leader Robert Rondo (a.k.a. Robert Rundo). As I mentioned yesterday, Rondo was released from custody after a federal judge in California dismissed his indictment on selective prosecution grounds, making the insane claim that “Antifa” and left-wing activists haven’t been charged for similar behavior. Prosecutors raced to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seeking an emergency stay, which was granted. Another arrest warrant was issued yesterday, and Rondo self-surrendered to authorities.
Truly unusual developments in each case.
Consider Yourself Warned
HuffPost’s Matt Shuham: Federal Judge Ominously Warns That Trump Won’t Accept Defeat In 2024
Quote Of The Week
He said at some point he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Well, I think he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and the conservative media wouldn’t even report on it.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Donald Trump
A Valuable Skeptic
I often direct you to the work of Philip Bump because he’s an even-keeled fellow in the current maelstrom, seeing the Trump threat clearly for what it is but maintaining a skepticism that is valuable in helping navigate the current moment.
He offers not one but two correctives today. They don’t dramatically change the shape of the coverage, but they do nudge things a degree or two closer to the true course:
- Don’t confuse the baseless GOP impeachment push with the debunked one
- What might happen after another inauguration of Donald Trump
GOP: Less Sex, More Babies – But Not IVF Babies
- TPM’s Nicole Lafond: Republicans Have No Effing Clue What To Do With The Alabama IVF Ruling
- NYT: Alabama IVF Ruling Opens New Front in Election-Year Abortion Battles
It’s TPM Reader Survey Time!
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For Your Weekend
Our little shared obsession with politics only gets us so far. We need to get out in the world: breathe outside air, stub a toe, sweat, make something with our hands, relish music, absorb art. Make it real for a bit.
When I need a jolt to get me out of the politics bubble, I will sometimes turn to the music of Nick Cave. It’s often angry, always poetic, and has a primal urgency that strips away the pretense and fluff we surround and cushion ourselves with. You may know his work even if you’re not familiar with his name. His signature “Red Right Hand” is the theme song for the British TV series Peaky Blinders.
This is all by way of an introduction to The Red Hand Files, a newsletter Cave has been putting out for several years that has turned into a long-running conversation between him and his fans. It’s quirky as fuck, but often striking, occasionally memorable, and somehow feels quite real in its honesty and directness.
It usually takes the form of a letter from a fan, often framed as a question, and Cave’s response. Today’s installment is the kind of funky back and forth that makes the entire experiment delightful.
A subtext of the newsletter is Cave alternatively shrugging off the mantle of celebrity or guru or wiseman and yet dispensing the truth bombs, poetic prose, and glaring insight that draw people to him in the first place. I’m not your Yoda, Padawan. The one-man tug of war creates an underlying tension that makes the thing pop.
Cave’s teenage son died in a tragic accident almost a decade ago and that has made him a icon of sorts for people in mourning, suffering loss, or enduring trauma. I do not tend toward fandom. Too much skepticism and suspicion in my bones. I don’t need artists (or actors or athletes or billionaires) to be oracles or prophets. But with my own teenage son narrowly escaping death not once but twice in the last two years, I have drawn on Cave’s experience as proof of a kind that it’s possible to continue to create, to do public-facing work, and to be thoughtful even when nothing makes any sense to you.
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Republicans Have No Effing Clue What To Do With The Alabama IVF Ruling
The Republican response to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that found embryos are considered children in wrongful death lawsuits — a finding that has thrown into question the future of IVF in the state — has been weird. Republican senators, governors and presidential candidate Nikki Haley are all trying to toe some imaginary line between declaring they believe embryos are, in fact, “babies” while still maintaining their support for the procedure as a good tool for helping adults conceive children. Most of them also mention all of this with the caveat that they haven’t actually read the ruling.
Continue reading “Republicans Have No Effing Clue What To Do With The Alabama IVF Ruling”Can DC Reporters Overcome Their Trumper Shock-Training?
As I noted yesterday, the Alexander Smirnov news is either confirmation of what we already knew or else spurs a kind of mass outburst of incredulity about how it is we’re still as a country, as a media, as a national political conversation getting led around by the nose by these same transparent scams?
Let’s stipulate that these are rhetorical questions.
But let me note a tendency I’m already seeing in a lot of coverage. House Republicans seems surprisingly candid that their holy grail of Biden impeachment isn’t going to happen. Quite a few press reports are taking a different tack. Some are playing this as “the Smirnov news may undermine the whole Biden investigation.” (Who’s gonna tell ’em?) To others it’s like a hot start up that failed. It just didn’t pan out. Oh well.
Continue reading “Can DC Reporters Overcome Their Trumper Shock-Training?”Help us out!
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Russian Disinformation Op Against Biden Blows Up In GOP’s Face
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Run for Them Hills!
What a marvelous day of watching Republicans and their media enablers react in dramatic fashion to the explosive revelation that a key source – their main source, no less – of the bogus Biden bribery allegations underlying their impeachment push made it all up and was in bed with foreign intel services, including the Russians.
The bumbling response from the primary traffickers of the Biden misinformation campaign stretched from morning into late in the evening. The indictment of Alexander Smirnov last week on charges he fabricated the Biden claims was turbocharged by government filings this week that alleged Smirnov had “extensive and extremely recent” contacts with foreign intel services, including Russia.
The day started with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) claiming “it doesn’t change the … fundamental facts.” Like hell it doesn’t. By last evening Rep. James Comer (R-KY) was crawfishing hard:
As committee chairs – Oversight and Judiciary, no less! – Comer and Jordan were the dynamic duo who spearheaded dissemination of the Smirnov disinformation, but they were hardly alone. Aaron Blake identifies 10 Republicans who treated the Biden bribery claim like gospel.
Sean Hannity Is A Special Case
After spending months touting the false claims that originated with former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, Fox News’ Sean Hannity was on the air last night complaining about the FBI not having better informants. Poor, Sean. Victimized by the FBI:
On a related side note, Hannity is struggling mightily with the revelation that the government’s claim that Hunter Biden had a photo of lines of cocaine was actually a photo of sawdust.
Can’t Get Enough
More on the Smirnov disinformation operation:
- Josh Marshall: A Bigger Story Than You Can Possibly Imagine
- Philip Bump: A new lens into the ongoing folly of Republican ‘Russia hoax’ rhetoric
- Aaron Blake: Another GOP Biden ‘informant.’ Another indictment and link to Russia.
- NYT: Who is Alexander Smirnow?
On A More Serious Note …
A federal magistrate judge in Nevada, where Alexander Smirnov was arrested, inexplicably allowed his release from custody this week. The Justice Department Wednesday appealed that decision to a district judge, arguing that Smirnov has the means, resources, and foreign contacts to be a very real flight risk.
Hate To See It
The massive civil fraud judgment against Donald Trump in New York is slowly starting to take a bite:
- In what looked more like a delay tactic than an actual legal argument, Trump’s lawyers asked for a 30-day pause in enforcing the judgment against him. State Judge Arthur Engoron seemed unmoved by the argument.
- Trump is racking up $87,502 per day in post-judgment interest until he pays the judgment, ABC News calculated.
Trump Doubles Down On NATO Bashing
Don’t forget that this is fundamentally a pro-Russia position:
How Biden Saved Brazil From Its Own Jan. 6
In a Foreign Policy article titled “How U.S. Pressure Helped Save Brazil’s Democracy,” Oliver Stuenkel argues: “Not only was Brazil’s democracy closer to the brink than initially understood, but targeted U.S. pressure on key Brazilian officials was likely decisive in guaranteeing the eventual outcome: a largely peaceful transition of power in the country after its October 2022 presidential election.”
Trump’s Government In Waiting
The NYT goes deep on the Conservative Partnership Institute: A Nerve Center for the Right Wing Rises in Washington.
CPAC Ain’t What It Used To Be
Dave Weigel on the MAGAfication of CPAC under alleged groper Matt Schlapp
LOLOL
My Pillow Guy Mike Lindell must cough up $5 million to the guy who won the “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge by debunking Lindell’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
Totally Crazy
A federal judge in California has for a second time dismissed an indictment against violent white supremacists, ruling that they were selectively prosecuted for their ideological beliefs while “far-left extremist groups, such as Antifa, that went to the same protests and rallies and engaged in the same violent acts as alleged against the Defendants in this case” went un-prosecuted.
U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney (appointed by Bush II) ordered Robert Rondo immediately released from custody, which prompted the Justice Department to race to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals with an emergency motion to stay his release and continue to detain him pending a full appeal.
Federal authorities consider Rondo a flight risk. He was extradited from Romania to face the current indictment; he was tracked down in Central America back in 2018 to face the first indictment.
Excellent reporting on this by Meghann Cuniff.
IVF Is In The Right-Wing Crosshairs
The fallout continues over last week’s Alabama Supreme Court decision that frozen embryos are legally children:
- Politico: Major Alabama hospital stops IVF treatment after court rules embryos are children
- WaPo: At least two of Alabama’s eight IVF clinics paused some parts of IVF treatment.
- Mark Joseph Stern: Alabama’s Assault on IVF Is Even Worse Than It Sounds
- Joyce Vance unpacks the strange origin story of the Alabama ruling: “In Alabama, women can now be forced to have babies they don’t want and can’t have babies that they do.”
- Alice Ollstein: Alabama’s IVF ruling risks political, legal backlash
- Media Matters: Alabama Supreme Court chief justice spreads Christian nationalist rhetoric on QAnon conspiracy theorist’s show
- Charles Blow: Alabama’s IVF Ruling Shows Our Slide Toward Theocracy
The Post-Dobbs World
NYT: Doctors in six states where abortion is legal are using new laws to send abortion pills to tens of thousands of women in states where it is illegal.
2024 Ephemera
- Quinnipiac University poll: Biden leads Trump nationally among registered voters 49%-45%.
- Nikki Haley: Russia, Russia, Russia
- Also, Nikki Haley: “Embryos, to me, are babies.”
He Said It
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Nikki Haley’s Befuddling Pivot
Nikki Haley had appeared to pick up on the reality of abortion politics that Democrats have been harnessing to win elections since the Dobbs ruling on the campaign trail thus far. She’s maintained a semblance of rhetorical neutrality on the issue since the first Republican primary debate when she argued a national ban on abortion likely would not have the votes to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster and that Republicans must be realistic about finding “consensus” on the procedure if they hoped to run a winning campaign.
Continue reading “Nikki Haley’s Befuddling Pivot”What You Might See If You Spent A Year In The NASA Mars Simulator
Last week NASA announced it is searching for individuals to participate in ongoing Crew Health and Performance Analog (CHAPEA) experiments that are part of the plan to establish human presence on Mars. This phase of experiments includes a year-long stay in a Mars simulator where participants will experience a realistic Martian existence including “resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and other environmental stressors.”
We don’t know for sure what the experience will be like but we can share some recent images of Mars that will give you a taste of what you might see during your stay on the simulated planet.
HiRISE Catches an avalanche on Mars
A Greenwich Observatory on Mars
Jezero Crater as seen by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter
Perseverance is roving on Mars
Mars mound from Ingenuity Helicopter’s perspective
Whirling dust devil
A mysterious fractured depression on Mars
Icy, patterned ground on Mars
Terra Sirenum
Mawrth Vallis
Listen To This: The Fraud Father
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the verdict in Donald Trump’s civil fraud case, the ongoing Fani Willis drama and the latest, Ezra-Klein-sparked round of fretting over Joe Biden’s age.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
A Bigger Story Than You Can Possibly Imagine
I know that’s a big headline that promises a lot. But I think it’s true. David has a good rundown of the events in the Morning Memo. But I want to do my best to set them out on a larger canvas that goes back to the “Hunter Biden laptop” and really all the way back to 2015, a continuing Russian information operation that has been ongoing for almost a decade.
Let’s review recent events. First came the news that prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss’s office had decided that the confidential FBI informant who had been one of Biden’s top accusers had been lying and that they were charging him for lying to the FBI. That next step is critical. Informants lie to prosecutors all the time. They seldom get charged. It’s one standard to decide your informant isn’t telling the truth and/or won’t hold up at trial. It’s an entirely different one to think that you can prove they knowingly lied beyond a reasonable doubt. Clearly investigators felt they had caught Alexander Smirnov dead to rights. Yesterday came news that Smirnov has admitted that he got his false stories from Russian intelligence officers. Smirnov isn’t just at the center of the DOJ investigation, he’s at the center of what we have to generously call James Comer’s House inquiry, the premise for Joe Biden’s increasingly wobbly impeachment.
Continue reading “A Bigger Story Than You Can Possibly Imagine”