A DC federal jury just awarded $148 million in total damages against Rudy Giuliani for defaming Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman.
$148 million.
Jury Holds Rudy Liable For $148 Million For Defaming Election Workers Freeman and Moss
A D.C. federal jury on Friday slapped Rudy Giuliani with $148 million in damages for defaming two Georgia election workers.
Continue reading “Jury Holds Rudy Liable For $148 Million For Defaming Election Workers Freeman and Moss”Listen To This: Where Goes Ukraine Goes Democracy
Kate and TPM’s Josh Kovensky talk with Serhiiy Plokhy, director of Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, about the Russia-Ukraine war at an inflection point as support for Ukraine fades within the Republican Party’s right flank and future aid is imperiled.
Belaboring The Point is now on YouTube! Check out the latest video episode of the podcast here.
Continue reading “Listen To This: Where Goes Ukraine Goes Democracy”Leveraged Buyout? Is Christian Ziegler Looking for Cash to Put the FL GOP Out of Its Misery?
News comes this morning that Christian Ziegler, embattled chair of the Florida GOP, accused rapist and one half (or perhaps one third) of the threesoming Zieglers, wants a buyout. Yes, a buyout. Usually we think of a buyout as a cash offer in exchange for some property interest in something, or a job in which someone has something akin to a property interest. It’s not usually something you get when you agree to relinquish an elected political office. But as we noted earlier, the bylaws of the Florida GOP don’t appear to contain any process for firing a party chair. The party can ask him to leave. They can investigate him. But they can’t fire him. So far Ziegler has been adamant in his refusal to resign.
Continue reading “Leveraged Buyout? Is Christian Ziegler Looking for Cash to Put the FL GOP Out of Its Misery?”How Sam Alito Masterminded Overturning Roe
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Behind The Scenes Of The Dobbs Decision
The NYT has a expansive new inside look at how the Supreme Court came to overturn Roe v. Wade with last year’s Dobbs decision. Drawing on interviews with court insiders and unusual access to internal court documents, Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak pull back the velvet curtain on the justices’ deliberations:
To dismantle that decision, Justice Alito and others had to push hard, the records and interviews show. Some steps, like his apparent selective preview of the draft opinion, were time-honored ones. But in overturning Roe, the court set aside more than precedent: It tested the boundaries of how cases are decided.
The leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion was not the only behind-the-scenes machinations going on in the months that the case was pending. The NYT describes a public-relations-style effort by the conservative justices to “create the appearance of distance” between the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and taking up Dobbs in order not to look as unseemly as they in fact were. (For a shorter version of the story, here are five takeaways.)
As for the leak itself, the story leaves the strong impression that it was more beneficial than harmful to the court majority that opposed abortion, effectively putting an end to a joint effort by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Stephen Breyer to win over one of the conservatives to a more restrained approach on abortion law.
Through it all, Alito emerges as the implacable foe of Roe.
Seems Like A Big Problem
CNN:
A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. …
In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.
The binder wasn’t found at Mar-a-Lago and doesn’t figure in the charges against Trump in the case.
Jury Gets Rudy Giuliani Defamation Case
In the end, Rudy Giuliani balked at testifying in the trial of the defamation claims brought by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The end result was that Giuliani put on no witnesses in his defense and the case quickly moved to closing arguments.
The jury got the case sooner yesterday than expected and was able to get in three hours or so of deliberations before calling it day. Keep a close eye on the jury today. It’s a Friday. Juries like to finish their work before the weekend and not drag the case into another week. Plus, all this jury must decide is the size of the damage award since Giuliani has already been deemed liable. I’m expecting them to come up with a BIG number. Stay tuned.
See The Parallels?
In his closing argument, the attorney for plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss told the jury of Rudy Giuliani: “He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob.”
I initially saw the quote out of context and assumed it was from the fight over the gag order against Trump in his civil fraud trial in New York, where he has repeatedly attacked the judge’s law clerk. It’s the same modus operandi. Take a low-level public employee, demonize them, sic MAGA extremists on them, then disavow any responsibility for what transpires.
Incidentally, an appeals court yesterday rejected Trump’s challenge of the gag order in the New York case.
About Those Apology Letters …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained the apology letters written by Trump co-defendants Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Scott Hall as part of their plea deals in the Georgia RICO case.
Chesebro’s and Powell’s apologies were notably short: one sentence apiece.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, to be honest, but Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis by her own account got exactly what she was looking for:
“If you do something wrong that impacts the community … then there needs to be real contrition. The contrition doesn’t have to be some poetic melody. It doesn’t have to be pages and pages. Sometimes you just need ‘I’m sorry.’ And if you get ‘I’m sorry,’ then we can move on and move past (it) if it’s a sincere apology. … It doesn’t need to be very long. In fact, all I would rather is a sentence. But I think it’s important.”
Mark Meadows Case Back In Court
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments today on whether Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows can remove the Georgia RICO case to federal court. Meadows lost at the district court.
Jack Smith Is Still Interested In John Eastman
Special Counsel Jack Smith has obtained certified copies of the transcripts of former Trump attorney John Eastman’s testimony in his California disbarment proceedings, according to new reporting from Politico. Eastman was charged in the Georgia RICO case and is Co-conspirator No. 2 in the Jan. 6 indictment of Donald Trump. It’s not clear whether Smith plans to charge Eastman, eventually use him as a witness, or what exactly is going on.
No. 3 At DOJ Is Set To Leave Her Post
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, a former civil rights lawyer, is planning to leave the Justice Department early next year.
Former Senior FBI Official Gets Jail Time
Charles McGonigal, the former FBI counterintelligence official who pleaded guilty to helping sanctioned Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska manipulate the sanctions regime, was sentenced to 50 months in prison. The judge said she showed some leniency because of McGonigal’s “long, distinguished career as a law enforcement professional.” Ummm …
Senate Delays Its Holiday Recess
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is planning to keep the Senate in session next week while negotiations continue on a border proposal that can be packaged with Ukraine aid – even though its unclear if any deal eventually reached in the Senate would pass the House.
For Your Radar …
A federal judge in Baltimore declined for now to block the Naval Academy from using race in admissions in a case brought by the same group that persuaded the Supreme Court to knock down race-conscious admissions in higher education. The Supreme Court ruling did not apply to the service academies, which is the next front in the battle over affirmative action.
Assessing COP
- Elizabeth Kolbert: “Three decades after agreeing to avoid ‘dangerous’ warming, the nations of the world today acknowledged that this would involve ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels.’ … Depending on how you look at things, the statement represents either a genuine breakthrough that will allow the globe to avert catastrophe or a point so obvious that what it really reveals is how far offtrack things have veered.”
- Emily Atkin: “The final deal at COP28 is technically historic, in that it is the first deal that specifically calls on all nations to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. The problem with these quotes and headlines is that they convey almost zero meaning. Because when you leave a massive problem like climate change unaddressed for decades, almost anything you do represents ‘historic’ progress.
Have A Good Weekend!
See you back here on Monday.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
These Are Really Sorry Letters – The Georgia Coup Apology Letters
We finally have access to the apology letters written by Sidney Powell and Ken Chesebro that they agreed to write as part of their plea deals in the Fulton County election subversion case. There’s another from a guy named Scott Hall. But you’ve never heard of him. So we’re not going to discuss his other than to say his letter was pretty good and ran five paragraphs.
Here’s Sidney Powell’s.
Continue reading “These Are Really Sorry Letters – The Georgia Coup Apology Letters”What Is an Attack?
As I reread my post below about staying on the attack, I realized I hadn’t defined what it means to “attack,” perhaps not even entirely to myself. Attacking isn’t saying mean things or criticizing someone or calling them out. An attack is something that compels a response. If it doesn’t do that it wasn’t an attack or not one that mattered. Don’t hold me to a universal definition. Some attacks are designed to overawe an adversary to the point they’re unable or afraid to respond. But this basic definition helps us understand what counts and what doesn’t.
In politics today we spend a lot of time doing things that don’t matter. Criticizing Trump, insisting how outrageous the latest statement is — none of that matters. It’s true. It doesn’t compel a response. A big part of Trumpism is driving cries of outrage. Those cries may be good for other things. It’s not an attack. It’s not an action in any political context.
Kevin: Hashtag No Regrets
Ousted-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) exited Congress today, opting to retire early rather than finish his term after an utterly humiliating and unsuccessful eight months as speaker.
Continue reading “Kevin: Hashtag No Regrets”Listen To This: Supreme Court To Hear Biggest Abortion Case Since Dobbs
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss some major abortion developments.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Always Attack! Some Thoughts On Politics in a Time of Trumpism
Back in August 2015, based on a TPM Reader making the connection, I described how a concept from the world of military intellectuals — the OODA Loop — helped explain the uncanny power of Donald Trump’s impulsive and thoroughly un-theorized way of engaging in political fights. It’s not the point of this discussion, but I need to explain the basic OODA Loop concept to have it. So I’ll summarize it quickly: In any fight or combat, each side is in a process of seeing what’s happening, understanding it, making a decision how to react based on it and then attacking. John Boyd, the military theorist who devised the concept, called this Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — OODA. If you move fast enough, you can act and thus change the observed reality to something new while your opponent is still in the process of making sense of and reacting to the old one. Conventional military theory captured the same insight, albeit in a less analytic way, in its emphasis on taking and maintaining the initiative. Act and make your adversary react to you, not vice versa.
Continue reading “Always Attack! Some Thoughts On Politics in a Time of Trumpism”