Don’t tempt Donald Trump into getting himself impeached again.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who is among a handful of Trump allies believed to be vying for a potential Trump 2.0 Veepship, put out a memo Monday that makes several convoluted leaps in logic to pitch his colleagues on why the passage of a foreign aid bill could be harmful to a second Trump presidency.
Continue reading “JD Vance’s Convoluted Pitch For Why Republicans Should Just Stop Legislating Until Trump’s President Again”This note from TPM Reader JS more or less summarizes my thoughts.
Continue reading “Pre-Loading ‘I Told You So’”The Boat in the Atlantic. Great metaphor. I don’t know Jon Alter, but I get the feeling that many of the “he’s too old” crowd are just pre-loading “I told you so” ammunition if he loses. There’s no downside to saying what everyone else is saying. I think so many people can’t contemplate a Trump restoration that they have to have some explanation why it happened. Biden was too old. The kids hate Israel. Whatever. Those explanations make sense to these people in a way that “more voters liked Trump” does not. I think they are then living in that world where things will happen as they forecast and it’s more comfortable than just getting your shit together and holding the course on the boat we have.
Today we’re launching the first installment of a three-part series reporting never-before-published details on the failed Trump coup attempt which unfolded in the final days of 2020 and climaxed on January 6th, when a mob of feral Trumpers stormed the United States Capitol building. These stories are based on a trove of documents from co-conspirator Ken Chesebro. You can read our introduction to the series here, which outlines the overall findings, gives details about the document trove we worked with, and more. In the first installment, we report the plan to have January 6th essentially never end, or rather continue up to inauguration day, January 20th. The plan wasn’t so much to directly achieve the goal of installing Trump as President as to create so much spectacle and chaos with no end in sight that the Supreme Court would feel compelled to step in and, Trump’s lawyers hoped, install Donald Trump as President, much as it did 20 years earlier in the disputed election which ended with Bush v Gore.
Continue reading “TPM AT WORK: Never-Before-Published Details on the Trump Coup”Donald Trump’s months-long effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election culminated on a single, now-infamous day: Jan. 6.
But there was an alternate scenario gamed out by Trump’s lawyers — one that would have expanded the hours of indecision caused by the Trump campaign’s efforts and stretched out the process for weeks, all the way until Jan. 20, 2021, the Constitution’s ironclad deadline for the transfer of power. If their scheme succeeded, these lawyers hoped, Joe Biden would never take office.
The details of this scheme are being revealed here for the first time. They are drawn from a trove of documents provided to Michigan prosecutors by Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, including thousands of pages of emails among Trump’s lawyers, some containing information that has never before been published.
The plan would have seen the Trump campaign pushing Republican lawmakers to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win not just on Jan. 6, but for days afterwards. GOP legislators would have feigned confusion over competing slates of electors, paralyzing Congress as the Trump campaign brought increasing pressure on the Supreme Court to step in and resolve the election in their favor.
To do this, Chesebro formulated various ways to invalidate the Electoral Count Act, the law laying out the procedures for Congress to certify the election on Jan. 6. Critically, the law places tight limits on how long individual lawmakers can debate disputed electoral votes — nullifying or inflating those limits, capped at five minutes per member and two hours total, could make Jan. 6 go on indefinitely.
Chesebro wondered at one point whether “legal giants like [Sen. Ted] Cruz and [Sen. Mike] Lee would back” the effort and speculated that delay would finally “force serious review” in Congress of election fraud allegations; John Eastman suggested in talking points aimed at members of Congress that senators could, as a “fallback,” filibuster the five-minutes-per-member rule, turning the possibility of limited debate over several states into a process that could stretch out for an eternity.
TPM obtained the trove of documents after Michigan prosecutors with Attorney General Dana Nessel’s (D) office sent attorneys a tranche of records provided by Chesebro as part of his cooperation with their investigation into the fake electors. Chesebro supplied the documents, which include emails, texts, a 4.5 hour interview, and legal memos, to prosecutors. The records do not provide a comprehensive accounting of the Trump campaign’s entire effort to reverse the President’s loss; they reflect what Chesebro provided as he sought to avoid further prosecution.
On a normal Jan. 6, the Vice President opens the electoral votes submitted by the states. Before a 2022 reform to the Electoral Count Act went into effect, one senator and one representative objecting to a particular state’s results would lead to time-limited debate.
By discarding the Electoral Count Act, Trump campaign lawyers suggested, Republicans in Congress could halt the certification and bring forth endless claims of election fraud in swing states, a process that, according to the documents, Chesebro hoped would create a spectacle, revealing the GOP-friendly Supreme Court as the only rational, functioning actor left standing.
It was a Rube Goldberg device of a plan, and one that sought to use chaos as the invisible force drawing the high court — and whoever else the Trump campaign attorneys believed could resolve the election — into the mess. The hours of violence that ultimately emerged on Jan. 6 as Congress met to certify Biden’s win offer a glimpse of the potential consequences that might have accompanied weeks of delay in formalizing a winner. But for a Trump campaign desperate for a win, extending Jan. 6 to Jan. 20 would allow the high court to serve as a kind of deus ex machina as Congress — and the country — remained mired in strife over the failure to complete the legal formalities around Joe Biden’s election.
Delaying certification of the President for that long may have led to some strange consequences, from the standpoint of the Trump diehards who pushed it: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi becoming “acting president” if the election could not be certified, or the Senate electing Mike Pence in Trump’s stead.
“Through delay or chaos they were setting up a constitutional crisis,” said David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who now works on election security with local officials at the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Reacting to the prospect that delay could throw the presidency to Nancy Pelosi, Becker added that “although this was incredibly dangerous and sparked violence, it was also a Keystone Cops operation.”
The nature of exactly what kind of chaos lay at the heart of Chesebro’s plan remains unclear to this day, including whether he envisioned protests or endless procedural delays — or if he had thought through that element of the plan at all. And in the end, Pence did not cooperate, and congressional Republicans only went so far as to object to state electoral slates — not move to overthrow the legal structure underpinning how Congress certified the election.
In a wide-ranging interview with TPM in June 2022 — the only time Chesebro has spoken with the press on the record about his role in the Trump legal strategy — Chesebro disavowed the violence of Jan. 6, saying that it was “the worst possible thing that could have happened” for “lawyers that had serious concerns about the election in several states.” He cast his involvement as “what lawyers do.”
Attorneys for Chesebro downplayed his involvement to TPM, casting him as a lover of legal theory who lacked both the influence and understanding to impact the Trump campaign’s plans. “If you meet him and ask one straightforward question you’ll get 12 different ways it could be,” Chesebro attorney Manny Arora said.
Chesebro, emails show, sought to take the myth of fraud that Trump had created to its logical conclusion: a stalemate in Congress over the result, and a country without a president-elect. If Congress couldn’t act, the theory went, the Supreme Court would have no choice but to decide the election.
During that critical Jan. 6 to Jan. 20 period, Chesebro envisioned the Trump campaign presenting supposed evidence of voter fraud over and over again, capitalizing on the chaos to make its case while proving that Congress was “unable to act.”
That meant ensuring that the Jan. 6 certification session in Congress essentially never ended. As Chesebro put it to another attorney, “Jan 6 is the real deadline” for certifying the election result. By extension, Chesebro suggested, the Trump campaign could keep the election result up in the air if Congress kept debating the 2020 election result on Jan. 6 without certifying it.
The Electoral Count Act and its time limits were the main obstacle to that. It capped debate at two hours per state, and with seven swing states having submitted fake electors per Chesebro’s plan, that left a relatively measly legal maximum of 14 hours of debate — enough to get the campaign, potentially, into the early hours of Jan. 7, but not enough to reach the acme of a pressure campaign which might take the country to the brink of Jan. 20.
Chesebro argued in a previously unreported Dec. 8, 2020 email to Jim Troupis, a former Wisconsin judge and Trump attorney who had brought Chesebro in to work for Trump, that the Electoral Count Act was a “weapon” for Democrats because it would deny Trump and Pence “the opportunity for the presentation of any evidence (for example, live testimony) regarding the fraud in the election — only limited debate would be allowed.”
“Of course, preventing any sustained public inquiry into the election is key for the Democrats,” he added.
After weeks of failure, Chesebro suggested in early December, the Trump campaign would need an extra potential 14 days in early January to “force serious review in Congress of election fraud in various states.”
Sure, Chesebro conceded in the email, people would complain (“Any effort to extend scrutiny of the election returns past January 6 would be met with the objection that the process of electing the President might not be complete before January 20”), but there was no need to worry: if the “dispute dragged on, on January 20, Nancy Pelosi (upon resigning as Speaker) would become the Acting President — unless, of course, the Senate decided to resolve the impasse by electing Pence as Vice President, so that on January 20 he would become Acting President.”
Troupis replied in the morning that he had mentioned the “Pence angle” to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) to “take his temperature,” and praised the email as an “excellent summary of the end game.”
So, how to turn the Jan. 6 joint session from one day into 14?
In emails and texts to several members of the Trump campaign, Chesebro proposed multiple options for how to bulldoze the ECA and achieve the goal of an extra 14 days without a certified President:
Each option involved extending Jan. 6 which, Chesebro argued, would allow Republican senators to present evidence of fraud.
The point of the delay and the fraud discussions, he argued, was not just to draw attention to the Trump campaign’s voter fraud claims, but also to make “clear” to the Supreme Court “that Congress will be unable to act unless either the Court or the state legislature addresses claims re the state,” as he wrote to another attorney in a Jan. 1, 2021 email.
The Pence option was the most straightforward of the three, and the one which Trump, eventually, pursued: Mike Pence would decline to open the votes of states where the fake electors had convened.
Chesebro, Eastman, and Trump’s understanding of the plans for Pence all appear to differ somewhat. But Chesebro articulated his view of how Pence could buy time for the Trump campaign post-Jan. 6 in a Dec. 13 text message to Boris Epshteyn, the Trump attorney.
Pence, per the plan Chesebro proposed, would do what he ultimately refused to do: assert that he had the power to both open and count the votes, and could choose which states not to count — in this case, any state for which the Trump campaign had organized a slate of fake electors. From there, Pence could “force hearings in the States.” (Chesebro did not explain in the documents obtained by TPM how this might work). With time running out in the days before Jan. 20, “the state legislatures would have to appoint electors if they wanted to be counted and avoid the election being thrown to the House,” Chesebro wrote, adding, “if Nancy then refused to hold a vote, Senate would reelect Pence Vice President, and he would become acting president on Jan 20.”
Epshteyn did not immediately reply to the lengthy text from Chesebro that laid out the plan. Hours later, Chesebro followed up to say that he had accidentally deleted a memo further explaining the idea on his hotel computer.
When Chesebro finally sent the memo later that evening, Epshteyn was initially confused: he had received nothing. It then became clear: Chesebro had accidentally sent the memo to Rudy Giuliani, and not Epshteyn.
“Oh…so sorry. My mistake; I mislabeled your texts as his!” Chesebro wrote. “Which is why I addressed email to him; I mistakenly thought he was asking!!”
Epshteyn wasn’t available for comment.
Failing Pence, Chesebro had another plan to get the ECA invalidated: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). As president pro tempore, the duty of presiding over the Senate would have fallen to Grassley in Pence’s absence.
Chesebro argued that Pence should recuse because of a conflict of interest — he was involved in the election.
In a separate, Dec. 12 text exchange with Epshteyn and Trump operative Mike Roman, Chesebro argued that Grassley should do exactly what he wanted Pence to do, but then be “ready to file a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the Act as soon as Dems assert the House and Senate do the counting.”
“At minimum lawsuit would buy time and rivet attention,” he added. “I’d love to know if legal giants like [Sen. Ted] Cruz and [Sen. Mike] Lee would back that.”
That option would tee up a Supreme Court “test case,” as Chesebro put it elsewhere in the exchange, forcing the court to rule whether the ECA was constitutional.
In the meantime, congressional Republicans would benefit from the attention that the spectacle attracted via further examinations of supposed fraud in the 2020 election.
Chesebro prepared the memo, sending it to the person he thought was Epshteyn but was, in fact, Giuliani. It’s not clear how far the idea went after that. John Eastman, when asked during his disbarment proceeding whether there were discussions about having Grassley step in for Pence on Jan. 6, cited attorney-client privilege in declining to respond.
The last option was the filibuster. Renowned for its ability to gum up the works of the Senate, emails from the trove show that Chesebro and Eastman advocated using it at different points to create mammoth delay.
Chesebro regarded it, according to the document trove, as a means to bulldoze the ECA and get to the legal gray zone of endless delay after Jan. 6. He proposed another aggressive strategy: a senator would withhold unanimous consent to the Concurrent Resolution adopted by the Senate on Jan. 3, which includes the ECA.
He laid out the argument in a Jan. 1 email with “KEY: Critical that a senator object to the concurrent resolution on Jan. 3” as the subject line sent to Epshteyn and Eastman.
“After all, the main REASON to oppose adoption of the Concurrent Resolution, limiting debate to just 2 hours on each state, is that THERE IS SO MUCH TO DEBATE!” Chesebro wrote. “And the way to make that case is to lay out evidence of all the problems in these various states.”
He argued that removing the ECA would then clear the way for indefinite filibusters on Jan. 6, or free up Pence to follow their other instructions. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Cruz, Lee, and others could, Chesebro theorized, lead an open-ended debate highlighting the Trump campaign’s claims of fraud.
After Epshteyn asked for the argument in a “short, bullet point format,” Eastman followed up with his own synthesis of what Chesebro had written. That omitted Chesebro’s Jan. 3 Concurrent Resolution spitballing, but included the filibuster proposal: that senators should take opportunities to filibuster during the count itself “as a much less enviable fallback.”
It’s not clear from the trove how far the Trump campaign went in entertaining these proposals. Epshteyn asked if the filibuster emails were “talkers for Congress and Pence,” while Justin Clark, a Trump campaign official, briefly entertained a version of Chesebro’s idea in another thread, writing on Dec. 24 that “it also sounds like Jan 6 is a hard deadline for legal recourse unless congress doesn’t count the votes one way or another.”
Troupis, the former Wisconsin judge who initially brought Chesebro into the Trump legal effort, had maintained a direct line to senior Trump White House officials and to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).
Troupis came back to Chesebro two days after he pitched the Jan. 20 delay plan with exciting news: Sen. Johnson would hold a hearing on Trump’s voter fraud claims later that week — on Dec. 16. There would likely be a photo op with President Trump afterwards; would Ken like to come?
Chesebro traveled to Washington to meet with Trump on Dec. 16 alongside a coterie of other Trump campaign attorneys.
Three years later, in the interview with Michigan prosecutors, Chesebro recalled the meeting with Trump: “The marching orders were, don’t say anything that would make [Trump] feel more positive than he did at the beginning of the meeting.”
He did not follow that advice. Chesebro told prosecutors that he began to speak with Trump after listening to the President talk on speakerphone with Newt Gingrich about something to do with Georgia voting machines. Then, the conversation turned to Trump’s chances in Arizona.
Chesebro did exactly what he had been told not to do: give Trump a sense of hope. He recalled telling Trump that the “real deadline” was Jan. 6. He was later admonished by former White House chief of staff Reince Preibus because, as Chesebro put it later to prosecutors, “the vibe that I had given him was some ground for optimism.”
Chesebro himself compared the meeting to a widely reported and infamous late-night encounter, two days later on Dec. 18, between Trump, Sidney Powell, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and the White House counsel’s office, saying that it was “sort of unauthorized.”
In late 2020, a group of conservative movement attorneys set out to build a legal pathway by which Donald Trump could stay in power, having lost the election.
We’ve known about the outcome of their work for three years now: how it led to the violence of Jan. 6, and fed the dream of Trump’s supporters that he might continue to serve after Jan. 20, 2021.
But TPM can now reveal the ways in which their theorizing, in early stages, went even further than previously known, imagining a Jan. 6 that lasted for not hours but days, an intervention by Supreme Court justices that they presumed to be loyal to President Trump, and a vice president who upended his constitutional duties, allowing the U.S. to descend into chaos.
A trove of documents obtained by TPM details many of the conversations among Trump campaign lawyers, and, in particular, the theories offered by Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who worked with the campaign in the months leading up to Jan. 6.
Within weeks of Trump denouncing the election itself and claiming that he had won, Chesebro and Trump campaign attorneys around him began to explore more exotic legal theories in which endless chaos in Congress would prove that the legislature could not certify a winner. That stalemate, they theorized, would force the Supreme Court to act.
Chesebro, an appellate lawyer, provided a legal framework in which, he contended, Trump could still win — or at least cause enough confusion and chaos that the conservative Supreme Court would have to get involved in picking the president. His plan envisioned several gambits which have now become familiar building blocks of the legal portion of the coup attempt, and the basis for criminal charges across the country: creating slates of fake electors, having Mike Pence refuse to count Biden’s electoral votes on Jan. 6, and ultimately tossing the whole issue to the high court.
TPM obtained the trove of documents after Ken Chesebro supplied emails, texts, and memos from his time with the Trump campaign to Michigan prosecutors in Attorney General Dana Nessel (D)’s office, which has been investigating the fake electors scheme. Multiple defense attorneys for already-charged fake electors told TPM that they had received the documents as part of the discovery process in that case. After Michigan prosecutors sent out the documents, CNN and the Detroit News reported on his Oval Office encounter with Trump and the fake electors scheme using records from the same trove obtained by TPM.
The thousands of emails, memos, and texts only represent what Chesebro experienced directly and what he chose to share. Other emails and texts among Trump lawyers from which Chesebro was excluded are not included here. The records are not comprehensive of the Trump campaign’s entire effort to reverse the President’s loss; they reflect what Chesebro provided as he sought to avoid further prosecution, and what reached TPM.
Specifically, some of the documents not in the trove obtained by TPM include a portion of Chesebro’s communications with another Trump attorney. Chesebro also sat for a 4 and a half hour long interview with Michigan prosecutors in December 2023 as part of his cooperation and recounted his actions from three years before. He told prosecutors in the interview that many of his communications with Boris Epshteyn, the Trump surrogate and attorney who reportedly appears in Jack Smith’s D.C. Jan. 6 indictment as co-conspirator 6, took place via Signal. Those were deleted automatically, he said.
Overall, the trove of documents details how Chesebro gave the Trump campaign what it desperately wanted: procedurally and substantively radical ideas which would allow the President to exert maximum leverage on any body or person in the country that might conceivably have the power to keep him in office. TPM provided Chesebro’s attorneys with a list of questions; in an interview, they offered broad responses characterizing their client as someone who loved to theorize, and who was convenient for a Trump campaign which had already decided that it was going to try to keep the election unresolved as long as possible. “He’s the only one that could validate what he was saying through facts and law, versus talking about space lasers and Hugo Chavez,” Chesebro attorney Manny Arora told TPM.
The trove includes encounters that, in typically Trumpian fashion, range from the showy to the menacing to the bizarre. At one point, Chesebro infuriates former chief of staff Reince Preibus by telling Trump in December 2020 that he still has a chance at winning on Jan. 6; at another, John Eastman speculates that Chief Justice John Roberts might be on their side if not for fear of how “to account for the riots angle” should the Supreme Court declare Trump the winner. Chesebro at one point referred to Pence declining to open electoral votes from Georgia as a “fairly boss move;” at another, he forgets that Biden, and not Pence, was Vice President in 2016 while asking a Pence attorney about his plans for Jan. 6, 2021.
The trove provides a definitive account of how a small group of attorneys, dedicated to Trump, designed and tried to implement the portion of the coup attempt which unfolded via legal arguments. They burnished the former president’s efforts with a veneer of respectability that at times masked their radicalism: This portion of the effort to reverse Trump’s loss did not proceed via loud claims of voter fraud or through Sidney Powell’s promise of a “Kraken” lawsuit that would wipe her enemies away, nor did it move forward through the actions of mobs and street thugs primed to seize the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Rather, the attorneys involved all had extensive experience in the practice of law. Chesebro is a Harvard Law graduate who spent much of his early career working on appellate cases with liberal commentator and Harvard Law professor Larry Tribe. John Eastman was a longtime conservative movement attorney who had been dean of Chapman University Law School. Others, like Pennsylvania attorney Bruce Marks, had built careers out of an extensive civil practice.
TPM is beginning this series with an exclusive story examining the plan to extend Jan. 6 for weeks — until Congress, the Supreme Court, or, in Eastman’s view, state legislatures filled the void by declaring Trump the winner. It’s shockingly congruent when matched up with the reality of what ultimately took place through violence, not legal maneuvering: as Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along with one version of the plan, an angry mob forced a partial delay by storming the Capitol.
Overall, what the Trump attorneys developed was an elaborate fantasy of epic proportions. Chesebro emerges as an attorney willing to push the bounds of the law, but who is unmoored from a basic sense of proportion. He seems, in the documents TPM obtained, to lack an understanding of the import of his proposals, and also of some professional faux pas: many long memos examining various theoretical scenarios appear to go unanswered, before Chesebro follows up with more lengthy memos further elaborating on his theories.
During the interview with prosecutors, Chesebro cast himself as the latest in a long line of attorneys to be victimized by Trump and those around him. He blamed the campaign for throwing him under the bus in the years after the Capitol insurrection, suggesting that the campaign ordered him to stay quiet, while also casting him to the Jan. 6 Committee as a rogue attorney, all while refusing to pay his legal bills.
“It’s been a real lesson in not working with people that you don’t know and are not sure you can trust. It really went south for me,” Chesebro told prosecutors. “I had a wonderful apartment in NYC that I had to sell for a $2 million dollar loss, and lost almost all my net worth because of the attorney bill.”
While much of Trump’s effort to reverse his loss unfolded in full public view, with Trump publicly announcing his plans and threatening Pence and others to cooperate, the Chesebro documents offer a look at the portion of the coup attempt which proceeded behind closed doors: how elements of the legal strategy were devised, including both the longshot bids to throw an elephant-sized wrench in the gears of Congress and more mundane but telling examples of how the Trump campaign chose which lawsuits to bring before the Supreme Court. That includes calculations from Eastman about how many states needed to have their results contested in order for the Supreme Court to be able to overcome Trump’s electoral vote gap.
In late 2022, TPM brought you The Meadows Texts: a definitive, comprehensive look at how the White House chief of staff coordinated the scheme to subvert the 2020 election. Now, with the Chesebro documents, we have a view into how one of the main legal architects of the coup advocated for his ideas — which were far more successful than anyone could have predicted, and included discussions of unrealized, theoretical possibilities that were far more radical than we knew. It’s the anatomy of a legal coup, but also something else: an attempt to twist the law in order to instigate a constitutional crisis.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
When the national political conversation becomes so dumb that I want to remove myself from it, I try to remember that it will soon pass. The conversation might not get appreciably smarter, but it will change to something else. Just give it time.
So while we wait out the latest stupidstorm over the Hur report and President Biden’s age, take some solace that this is happening in February, instead of October, when the Clinton emails stupidstorm reached its peak.
Part of the reason that the political coverage can spawn so many stories about the same stupid thing in such short order is that there are so many ready-made templates for those stories that editors love and reporters are familiar with.
Notice that none of these criticisms are directed at stories about Biden’s bungled handling of the classified information, the larger problems with the classification system, the nuances of the decision not to prosecute, or the contrast between the Biden and Trump cases. Those stories, done in moderation, are legitimate stories that require independent news judgment and expertise. “Biden is old” requires neither.
Some recommended reading if you’re avoiding the “Biden is old” chorus:
Just another normal post-Super Bowl night in the Trump household …
NATO allies scrambled to shore up the alliance and back Russia off after Trump all but gave up the farm over the weekend:
But sure, go ahead and write about how old Biden is.
Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer argues that the right wing keeps fantasizing about secession and civil war because it will not accept pluralism under any circumstances:
The American Right is fully devoted to a fundamentally anti-pluralistic political project. They steadfastly refuse to accept the complex, complicated process of balancing interests, of reconciling different ideas, values, and aspirations that a pluralistic society necessarily depends on. They believe they shouldn’t have to, because they regard it as their prerogative, as the sole proponents of “real” (read: white Christian patriarchal) America, to shape the nation in their image and to define the boundaries of what does and does not count as “American.” If they don’t get to dominate America, then America as they conceive it is no more; they will rule – or might as well ruin.
Abraham Lincoln was born on this day 215 years ago.
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Thursday:
Friday
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon pulled a bait and switch late last week. First, she allowed Special Counsel Jack Smith to file under seal and ex parte (meaning Trump couldn’t see it) information about an ongoing criminal investigation into social media threats against a possible witness in the case. Then, after she reviewed the information, she ordered Smith to provide it to Trump, which is not typically what a federal judge would do. It wasn’t clear if Smith would comply or appeal to block her order, but it was confirmed that he did comply and turn it over to Trump as ordered.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Chris Christie, after a campaign that was, at least as I understood it, focused on blocking the danger of a second Trump presidency, says he probably would just not vote for President at all. He’ll leave that part of the ballot blank. “I can’t see myself voting for [Biden] because I don’t agree with his policies.” Marco Rubio meanwhile says he has “zero concerns” about Trump’s claim that he’ll encourage Russia to invade NATO allies if they don’t up their defense budgets.
My friend Jon Alter has a piece up about how Biden and his campaign can defuse and limit the damage from concerns about his age and mental acuity. Every point he makes is so on the mark I want you to go read it. The gist is the Biden’s age and occasional brain freezes are obviously a political liability. Jon has known and been interviewing Biden for 35+ years and he says he’s always been that way.
Sure Biden’s slower than he was even a decade ago. But the verbal missteps are same old same old for him. How you address that is leaning into it, getting Biden out in front of the public a lot. Yes, he will swap one name out for another or mangle words sometimes. It is what it is. Even though right wing media will seize on every goof viewers will also see a President who is basically fine, addressing complex issues in able and sophisticated ways. They’re already seizing on every awkward moment. If you keep Biden under wraps that’s all anyone will see.
Continue reading “Jon Alter is Right On Joe Biden”I wanted to share a note I received from TPM Reader JR and my reply. Helps me refine my understanding of what we see in both Biden and Trump and how they are both perceived.
From TPM Reader JR …
Continue reading “Interesting Note on Cognition and Anger”I’m a practicing psychiatrist who has evaluated many people over the years for dementia.
Based on my experience, Josh M is on to something when he wrote about how Trump’s anger makes him seem less cognitively impaired than Biden.
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.
Despite the blaring siren from a security guard’s phone, Rogelio Ramon was still half asleep just after 6 on a January morning, sitting where he’d slept on a red chair in an East Flatbush, Brooklyn, church. Across from him in the crowded sanctuary, a half-dozen West African men recited the Quran on the chancel and a man from China talked with a woman on WhatsApp. Ramon, who is from Venezuela, put on the snug-fitting winter parka he’d found in a donation bin and walked out into the biting cold to figure out where to pass the day. It would be nearly 14 hours until another church, an hour and a half away by subway in Harlem, would take him in.
Ramon had already spent a week crisscrossing the city in search of a safe place to lay his head. During his first month in New York he lived in a shelter, but he couldn’t stay. The city recently began limiting single adult migrants to a 30-day stay with an option to reapply for another 30 days, though the wait to get back in can be lengthy. New York hastily launched its new migrant reception system in the spring of 2022, and since then more than 170,000 people have passed through it. As with Ramon, some of them came on free buses from Texas, ending up in New York not because it was their chosen destination but because they had no other option. Many were part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s initiative to funnel people entering the country into liberal cities and to export the stresses and tensions of the southern border into farflung parts of the country. New York is an attractive landing place because it is the only major U.S. city that’s required, pursuant to a four-decade-old consent decree, to provide a shelter to anyone in need.
But the arrival of more and more newcomers, often with no family or community waiting to absorb them, has taxed its shelter system, and it has forced a conflict over the future of the long-contested right-to-shelter rule, raising questions about how generous the city can and should be as migrants continue to arrive.
“The unfortunate reality is that we’ve been getting hundreds of people a day every day for nearly two years,” Kayla Mamelak, a spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams, said. “We’re out of space and we’re out of money.” Officials recently estimated that the arrival of migrants will cost the city more than $10 billion over three years, and Adams has repeatedly called on the state and federal government to send more aid. The 30-day limits on an initial stay (60 days for families) have been a “success story,” Mamelak says, as a way to “nudge people into the next phase of their journey.” She said that only about a quarter of people who reach the shelter limit end up reapplying. “The goal is always self-sufficiency.”
But immigration and housing advocates say the system has left people waiting in untenable conditions for a new bed.
“The city is using the 30-day-limit and the reticketing process to make people miserable and hope they go away,” said Kathryn Kliff, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Rights Project, which is in mediation with the city over the shelter requirement. Kliff acknowledges that the spike in recent arrivals has created new challenges for the city. But in years of city efforts to modify the requirements of the consent decree, single adults have never before been subjected to 30-day limits or left to wait for days on end in chairs or church pews to be assigned another bed. According to the city, the average wait time for single adults to be reassigned a shelter bed is eight days. Some wait weeks.
New York City has taken measures to limit the number of people who end up sleeping on the streets and in trains while they wait for a bed, subcontracting a handful of churches and mosques to provide floor space or a pew to hundreds of people each night. Ramon slept in four different houses of worship, scattered on the edges of the vast city. He says that because he now spends his days waiting to be told where he can sleep that night, looking for food and riding the train from one church to another, he hasn’t had time to find work. “I can’t get a job because I have to go to the place to find out where to sleep,” Ramon said of his daily cycle. “You can’t get out of it.”
Ramon had arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in early December. His niece and her children, who’d crossed with him into El Paso, Texas, took a bus to Chicago, where they had a friend. Ramon told border authorities that he, too, would be going to Chicago, and they assigned him a court date there in September. But the only free bus he was able to board in Texas was to New York. The city has offered to pay the costs to transport migrants elsewhere. But Ramon has come to realize that Chicago might be worse. “I can’t get to Chicago because I wouldn’t have a place to live there,” Ramon said. “Here at least there’s something.”
To reapply for a stay in a shelter, migrants travel to a city building in Manhattan’s East Village. The processing center issues each person a number that’s written on a wristband. When their number comes up, they’re supposed to get a bed. One night during a snowstorm, soon after he’d reached the 30-day limit, Ramon tried to sneak back into the shelter after a fight at a church left him rattled. But, he says, the shelter told him that he had to leave. Ramon tipped over an orange road construction drum and pushed his long, skinny torso in as far as he could. He stayed there until morning.
On his fourth night out of the shelter, Ramon left the processing center carrying a small drawstring bag packed with a blanket, an extra T-shirt, a toothbrush and a worn manila envelope of immigration papers. Though he knew the next church wouldn’t accept anyone until 8 p.m., he didn’t know what else to do after riding the train aimlessly for hours, so he tried the church anyway. He plodded along the snowy sidewalk, climbed up a flight of stone church stairs and peered through the padlocked metal gate into a row of cloisters. Nobody was there or at the next gate that led into an old cemetery. He decided to ride the train for a few more hours.
Ramon returned just before 8 p.m. Behind him in line, a Guinean man named Omar who’d spent 30 days in shelter and 11 nights in churches and mosques, said in French: “We don’t really bathe. We get to these churches at 8 p.m. and we stay until 6 a.m. when they kick us out, and we don’t wash.” A 64-year-old Peruvian man said sleeping on the hard floor made his back hurt but was better than sleeping on the train or on the street, which he’d done for several nights. Ramon found a spot on the floor and lay on the blue blanket that a man at the Randall’s Island shelter had given him a few weeks before.
In the morning, after the church turned the lights on and as he prepared to leave again, Ramon met another Venezuelan man, a 46-year-old former customs officer named Giovanni Larez, who seemed to have a handle on how to get food and find a place to shower.
The two men left the church before sunrise. Ramon followed Larez to the Port Authority bus terminal, where Larez had learned they could wash in a bathroom. They sat on the floor against the wall in the terminal for an hour until an officer started telling others sitting nearby to leave, so they rode the train downtown to the city’s processing center in the East Village. The worker gave them the address of a different church, the one in East Flatbush. They walked in circles and then rode the train for several more hours until they arrived at the new church.
Larez, who has braces from the days when he had money and time for an orthodontist, showed me a video of himself riding on top of a Mexican freight train, passing through the desert on his way north, and a photo of his hands and knees covered in bandages from when he jumped off a train to run from Mexican authorities who chased him and others off the trains. “This is not the hardest thing I’ve been through,” he said of his shuffle through the shelters and churches. He explained that he expects to be able to pay rent soon, when it warms up and he can get some real employment (he worked two days clearing debris on a construction site but hasn’t found anything since). He also said he plans to get through his court date in June and then move to Phoenix with a work permit.
On a Sunday morning, the two men rode the train to a corner in central Brooklyn where someone from a church drops a bag of sandwiches on the sidewalk every afternoon. Then they went in search of the next church where they’d sleep.
The following Wednesday afternoon, the men returned to the East Village processing center. The city had still not reached the numbers written on their wristbands. They stood in the rain in the park with a hundred or so other men and women, many wearing cheap plastic ponchos they’d gotten inside. Someone from a nearby bakery delivered a paper bag of end-of-the-day baguettes and other baked goods. Men bounded toward the bag and took what they could. As they did, the bag broke, wet from the rain, and cookies and pastries fell to the ground. The men backed up, most returning to the lampposts and trees they rested on. And then, one after another stepped forward to pick up the cookies from the ground.
By Thursday, Ramon and Larez’s numbers had reached the front of the queue, but they were told there were no available shelter beds. They came back the next day and were told the same thing. They went back to the corner for sandwiches and then to a church to sleep. They came back to the processing center on Saturday and Sunday and were again told there were no beds. Though city officials say that wait times for adult men seeking readmission to shelters for migrants averaged around eight days, it had already been 13 days for Ramon and 12 for Larez.
On Sunday afternoon, nine days after they started traveling the city together, Ramon and Larez got separated on the train. Larez looked for Ramon at the East Village center but didn’t find him. “I guess he decided to go his own way,” Larez said.
Three days later, the city’s processing center finally assigned Ramon a new bed for 30 more days. He put his winter coat back on and rode the train to a shelter.
