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”Russia’s Staggering Success In Duping Willing Republicans And Right Wing Media
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Plot Thickens
The former FBI informant charged with fabricating the Burisma bribery story about President Biden and his son Hunter had “extensive and extremely recent” contacts with foreign intel services, prosecutors alleged Tuesday in a court filing.
Yes, including Russian intel.
The revelation came in arguments that Special Counsel David Weiss, who is also prosecuting Hunter Biden, made for detaining Alexander Smirnov pending his trial. (Smirnov was ultimately released under conditions yesterday.)
The implications of this Russian operation are staggering, especially for the willing Republicans and right-wing media stooges who were the useful idiots propagating the disinformation for years. The James Comers, Chuck Grassleys, Jim Jordans of the world have been trafficking in this stuff as the purported basis for a Biden impeachment, which is itself tightly yoked to Trump’s campaign for re-election. Right-wing outlets, most notably Fox News, have been amplifying the claims not dozens or hundreds but thousands of times over the past several months.
Everywhere you turn, it’s Russia either helping Trump directly or indirectly by damaging Trump’s foes. The pattern is clear and persistent but also so sweeping and far-reaching that it really requires taking a step back to grasp the full scope of it all. It has dominated right-wing media, become an accepted “fact” among MAGA adherents, and allowed elected Republicans to play mainstream media like a cheap fiddle. All those breathless Biden impeachment process stories? They’re an outgrowth of this disinformation campaign.
Not to get too meta about it, but in some ways today’s Morning Memo is itself an indirect result of Russian disinfo: the effort to unpack it, explain it, draw the lines connecting the dots, and distinguish between what is real and not is an exhaustive, time-consuming, resource-intensive process, which is partly why these efforts are so effective and difficult to counter.
To make it even more meta, we’re reliant on Weiss as a narrator here, which is not a great place to be considering his flawed prosecution of Hunter Biden and the apparent fact that at least for a time he seemed to find Smirnov’s allegations credible. It’s a colossal mess.
We’re nearly a decade into Putin’s sustained, unrelenting attack on American democracy through misinformation and mischief. Among other things, the Republican Party and its standard bearer have been successfully enmeshed in it and thoroughly compromised. When this all began, Putin in his wildest imagination could not have conceived of this level of success.
Yup
A sampling of some of the reactions:
Cocaine? No, Sawdust
Hunter Biden lit into Weiss in the Delaware prosecution on gun charges, accusing Weiss of falsely claiming in a previous filing that what was merely a photo of sawdust depicted lines of cocaine.
“Mistaking sawdust for cocaine sounds more like a storyline from one of the 1980’s Police Academy comedies than what should be expected in a high-profile prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice,” Biden’s attorneys wrote.
The Biden allegation seems to be supported by the surrounding context and documents.
A fun kicker: Biden cites Marcy Wheeler (a.k.a emptywheel) in the filing for being all over the cocaine/sawdust beat.
It’s All Connected
The interplay between Special Counsel David Weiss’ prosecutions of Hunter Biden and Alexander Smirnov is going to take a lot of unpacking. Biden’s attorneys began to do some of that in filings yesterday, claiming that it had been Smirnov’s bogus allegations that undid the plea deal Biden had agreed to last summer.
The suggestion from the Biden camp is that Weiss seized on Smirnov’s claims well after the fact and hoped to use them to prosecute Biden, which is why prosecutors suddenly could no longer promise that the plea deal would extinguish all of Biden’s outstanding criminal liabilities.
Eventually Smirnov’s claims proved false, but Biden is still facing criminal charges on both coasts that would have been resolved but for Weiss being initially duped by Smirnov. At least that’s the argument.
Ukraine War Status Report
- Bloomberg: War in Ukraine Is Turning in Putin’s Favor After Months of Stalemate
- NYT: Russian Forces Press On With Attacks in Southern Ukraine
- A Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in August was found dead in Spain last week, his body riddled with bullets and run over by a vehicle.
Good Read
WaPo: Trump and allies plotting militarized mass deportations, detention camps
Peter Navarro Threatened With Contempt Of Court
The Trump White House official already convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to four months in prison for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee is facing the prospect of contempt of court if he doesn’t promptly return government documents he took with him at the end of Trump’s presidency, a federal judge warned him Tuesday.
Flying Under The Radar
The Alabama Supreme Court case giving frozen embryos legal status as children caught nearly everyone by surprise:
- WaPo: Shock, anger, confusion grip Alabama after court ruling on embryos
- NYT: Alabama Rules Frozen Embryos Are Children, Raising Questions About Fertility Care
- WaPo: What to know about the Alabama embryo ruling and its IVF implications
COVID Was Financial Boon For Anti-Vax Groups
WaPo:
Four major nonprofits that rose to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic by capitalizing on the spread of medical misinformation collectively gained more than $118 million between 2020 and 2022, enabling the organizations to deepen their influence in statehouses, courtrooms and communities across the country, a Washington Post analysis of tax records shows.
2024 Ephemera
- CA-Sen: The final debate before the March 5 open primary was mostly a clash between Democrats Katie Porter and Adam Schiff. A new Emerson College poll of likely voters shows Schiff at 28%, Republican Steve Garvey at 22%, Porter at 16%, and Rep. Barbara Lee (D) at 9%.
- SC-Pres: Nikki Haley asserts she will stay in the race against Trump even after her expected loss this weekend in her home state primary.
- Trump’s leadership PAC spent nearly $3 million on legal bills in January.
Trump: I Am Navalny
What a compromised and complicit buffoon:
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The Latest MAGA Truckers Protest Dud Lasted Mere Hours
The New York Post, Breitbart and others in the right-wing media sphere seized on a video that went viral on TikTok over the weekend to eagerly declare that truck drivers across the nation planned to boycott delivering goods to New York City following the verdict in the Donald Trump civil fraud case here last week.
While Alex Jones and Donald Trump himself have since elevated talk of a NYC-focused truckers protest in the days since the original video was posted to Twitter, the man who initially recorded and shared the video has since downplayed the purported “boycott” and distanced himself from the “movement” generally.
Let me unpack.
Continue reading “The Latest MAGA Truckers Protest Dud Lasted Mere Hours”