Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) spent years after his unrelated last prosecution brazenly taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes while doling out favors to a foreign government and criminal defendants in exchange, Manhattan federal prosecutors alleged in a Friday indictment.
Continue reading “Kilos of Gold Bars, A Benz, and a Halal Meat Monopoly: The Bribery Case Against Bob Menendez”Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated In Koch Network Donor Events
This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation’s highest court.
Continue reading “Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated In Koch Network Donor Events”Clarence Thomas Caught Playing Footsies With The Koch Brothers
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Oy vey, Oy vey, Oy vey
ProPublica has yet another big new reveal on the ethically challenged Clarence Thomas.
In the latest installment in its Thomas series, ProPublica unearths evidence of the Supreme Court justice playing footsies with the Koch brothers and their donor network at its annual winter conference in California in 2018.
Combine that with an earlier previously reported incident of Thomas doing a “brief drop-by” at the 2008 Koch network annual conference, and we’re left with at least two documented instances of Thomas being used as a draw for wealthy conservative donors to one of the most influential political and legal advocacy operations of the last quarter century.
The details of this particular Thomas entanglement echo the other reporting by the relentless ProPublica on his cozy relationship with the billionaire conservative donor class:
- Thomas flew to and from the Koch conference aboard a private Gulfstream G200, but he didn’t report the trip on his financial disclosure form and it’s not clear who paid for the flight. The Koch network said it didn’t pay for it.
- Leonard Leo, who was at the time of the 2018 conference still a top official at the Federalist Society (a big recipient of Koch network money), was the “conduit” between Thomas and the Koch network.
In a particularly telling response, Leo told ProPublica (emphasis mine):
Justice Thomas attends events all over the country, as do all the Justices, and I was privileged to join him. Justice Thomas has been a dear friend, and I would never pass up an opportunity to help him share, in his own words, his lifetime of accomplishment and judicial philosophy with new audiences. All the necessary due diligence was performed to ensure the Justice’s attendance at the events was compliant with all ethics requirements.
Read that again. Aside from the obvious chummy tone, does that sound like Leo repping himself, his orgs, the Koch network … or Thomas? It’s an extraordinary defense of Thomas in that it suggests Leo is speaking for him, kinda. The passive voice in that last sentence from Leo is doing yeoman’s work.
Perhaps the sharpest edge of the new ProPublica report is in how it ties the Koch brothers’ decades long effort to overturn the 1980s Chevron case to Thomas’ own change of heart on whether that case remains good precedent. Chevron, which is a legal cornerstone of what conservatives derisively call the “administrative state,” has been a white whale of conservative legal activists on par with Roe and stacking the Supreme Court. Thomas was not on board originally, but eventually came around. (Read all the way to the bottom of the ProPublica piece for a wonderful kicker on this point.)
Finally, ProPublica dumps a whole bunch of string on Thomas and the Kochs frequenting the Bohemian Grove together, along with Harlan Crow, the billionaire conservative donor who – and I can’t emphasis this enough – owns the house Thomas’ mother lives in.
Congrats all around. It’s a tour de force of investigative reporting by ProPublica and of boldly breaking through new ethical frontiers by a sitting justice. Bravo!
House GOP In Total And Utter Chaos
The GOP-controlled House left town yesterday with no path forward on government funding and a shutdown looming when the fiscal year ends a week from tomorrow.
That Freedom Caucus-friendly continuing resolution that was supposed to give them everything they wanted? It didn’t even get a vote as there wasn’t enough GOP support for it either.
- WSJ: McCarthy Sends Republicans Home After Losing ‘Shock’ Vote in House
- Dana Milbank: In a leaderless House, the ‘clowns’ stumble toward a shutdown
- CNN: McCarthy visibly frustrated after GOP hardliners put his plan to avoid a shutdown on ice
‘Dead On Departure’
TPM’s Kate Riga and Emine Yücel captured this marvelous riff by two Democratic senators on McCarthy’s ill-fated continuing resolution:
“I don’t know how much clearer we can make it to McCarthy that what he’s looking at is dead on arrival,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told TPM of the new bill.
“I don’t think it’s even going to arrive — dead on departure,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) added.
Zing.
What A Concept!
Intrepid reporter ventures into the wilds of suburbia in search of the elusive Republican Biden voter:
Big Trouble For Rudy G
Every day it’s something else with Rudy Giuliani.
This time he’s allegedly failed to comply with a court-ordered sanctions against him in the defamation case brought by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
Giuliani was supposed to pay a total of $132,856 in attorney fees for his failure to turn over discovery. He’s neither paid them by the Sept. 20 deadline nor furnished them with the discovery that got him in hot water to begin with, they told the federal court in DC on Thursday.
Rupert Murdoch Relinquishes The Reins Of His Empire
The man who has done more damage to American civic life than anyone else this century is stepping down from the leading roles of Fox Corp. and News Corp.
Off Message
TPM alum Brian Beutler today launched his new independent publication Off Message. Make it part of your news diet. It may seem like a scramble among like-minded journalists for the remaining crumbs of the collapsing news industry would lead to competitive pressures to ignore each other’s work. But love is not a pie. We need more indy news outlets at every level and with a variety of business models.
David Brooks Is At It Again
The dunking on David Brooks over this tweet damn near broke the internet:
(Note that even Elon Musk’s Twitter added a user fact check to the tweet.)
A sample of the dunking here, here, and here. But the prize goes to the Newark airport restaurant that Brooks’ complained about:
Enjoy your weekend! 🥃
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Trump Openly Calculating His Abortion Messaging
After Donald Trump’s disdain for Ron DeSantis prompted him to declare that he thinks the six-week Florida abortion ban is “terrible,” lots of speculative pieces were written on whether Trump — the man who stocked the Supreme Court with enough uber-conservative, anti-abortion justices to overturn Roe — might actually be moderating on the procedure. My colleague Josh Marshall wrote a handful of ed-blogs unpacking just how silly this news cycle was, and he and Kate Riga got into it on the Josh Marshall Podcast, as well.
Continue reading “Trump Openly Calculating His Abortion Messaging”Listen To This: Ups and (Shut)Downs
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the looming government shutdown, Donald Trump’s abortion politics and the Senate’s dress code.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Connecticut Mayoral Candidate Is Hoping Voters Can Look Beyond His Participation In Jan. 6
The chaos of Jan. 6 has spawned several political candidates and right wing influencers who have sought to capitalize on their roles in the attempt to reverse the 2020 election. Gino DiGiovanni Jr. is different. The Republican mayoral candidate in the city of Derby, Connecticut was one of the Trump supporters who surged into the U.S. Capitol that day and he’s facing multiple federal charges. However, rather than embracing MAGA infamy or martyrdom, DiGiovanni has sought a degree of distance from the dead ender movement that erupted in the wake of former President Trump’s loss.
Continue reading “Connecticut Mayoral Candidate Is Hoping Voters Can Look Beyond His Participation In Jan. 6”‘Dead on Departure’: Shutdown Odds Skyrocket As House Republicans Flail
TPM’s Emine Yücel contributed reporting from Capitol Hill.
House Republicans worked late into the night Wednesday to craft a short-term spending bill that has a chance of passing through the chamber.
What they emerged with seems unlikely — at best — to garner enough support. And even if it does, it’s dead on arrival in the Senate, making a shutdown all but inevitable.
Continue reading “‘Dead on Departure’: Shutdown Odds Skyrocket As House Republicans Flail “Israel-Saudi Peace Deal: What The F… Is in It for the US?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, essentially frozen out by President Biden, is back in laudatory mode. In a long withheld sit-down with the President yesterday Netanyahu told Biden, “Under your leadership, Mr. President, we can forge a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia.” Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s longtime chief agit-prop guy and hype man, says it could be a “reverse 9/11” for the U.S. That sounds kind of weird frankly and not necessarily something you’d want, given that 9/11 and everything that happened after it kinda sucked. But what he means is that whereas 9/11 led to one disaster after another for the U.S. in the region, this Israel-Saudi peace deal would make everything in the region suddenly awesome for the U.S.
But who are we kidding here exactly?
Continue reading “Israel-Saudi Peace Deal: What The F… Is in It for the US?”GOP Contingent Throws Up Sound And Fury To More Ukraine Aid As Zelensky Visits
As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visits Washington to seek more military aid to help fend off Russia’s invasion, a key bloc of Republicans stopped just short of preemptively saying no.
Continue reading “GOP Contingent Throws Up Sound And Fury To More Ukraine Aid As Zelensky Visits”House GOP Launders Disinformation Through Its Public Hearings
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
No Good Solutions To This Problem
Back in the day, no one enjoyed a good congressional hearing as much as TPM. The team would get fired up, we’d often have a reporter in the committee room and a cluster of colleagues monitoring via TV. We could rock ‘n’ roll as fast as anyone in sussing out news, calling out bullshit, and bemoaning how repetitive and ineffective the members’ questions often were.
Alas, there is no joy left in Mudville these days.
I want to be clear that committee hearings were never some democratic ideal. They sucked in a lot of ways. But over the past few years congressional hearings have become little disinformation factories, with GOP members using them to launder right-wing conspiracies, personal smears, and Fox News talking points.
Yesterday two separate hearings featuring Biden cabinet officials Merrick Garland and Pete Buttigieg crystalized for me what these hearings have become. They’re no longer about oversight in any meaningful way and they’re not, as the NYT put it today, about scoring partisan political points (that was the old days). Instead, the committee hearings give members the chance to inject the worst of the conspiracizing and crazy talk directly into the public record and into widespread media coverage – and the media still acts as if its powerless to stop participating in it.
I could share with you the inane questions that Garland faced, where his face would contort with confusion over what whack-a-doodle premise was framing the question. Or Buttigieg’s exasperation with having to unpack all the lies and presumptions built into the questions he faced about EVs or his personal travel. But to do so would be to further mainline the disinformation. You get it.
GOP members often used the bulk of their questioning time to make unsupported, false, and misleading statements, culminating with a leading question that was practically rhetorical. There was no way for the witness to clean up the bullshit deposited on the dais, and they were often cut off if they tried.
But I don’t think this is merely a media criticism issue. Biden administration officials aren’t just pinatas in these farce events. They’re props, and they’re being used for nefarious purposes. Because of constitutional checks and balances and the legitimate oversight imperative, it’s not as simple as refusing to attend committee hearings and stiffing congressional subpoenas. But participating in this way on these terms needs a broad rethink because it’s doing real damage to go along with the farce.
McCarthy Locks Arms With Freedom Caucus To Jump Off Cliff
It appears that Speaker McCarthy has decided to push ahead with a continuing resolution that only right-wingers could love. It sets up the possibility of rare Friday and Saturday votes in the House, but more importantly it puts the House in direct conflict with the Senate and White House with no obvious path forward for how to fund the government past the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30.
To reiterate, this proposed CR is a grab bag of draconian spending cuts and pet messaging vehicles, a Freedom Caucus wish list, if you will. It’s not even clear it will pass the House, let alone go anywhere after that.
Meanwhile, Democrats are reveling in the GOP chaos.
Quote Of The Week
Morning Memo has spared you the Fox News-driven, right-wing outrage cycle around the loosening of the Senate dress code. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who has been shouldering most of the blame for the collapse of civilization the business suit standard, decided to make a one-time deal: “If those jagoffs in the House stop trying to shut our government down, and fully support Ukraine, then I will save democracy by wearing a suit on the Senate floor next week.”
Minnesota Disqualification Clause Case Gets Rolling
The Minnesota Supreme Court set a briefing and argument schedule for the case attempting to disqualify Donald Trump from the GOP primary ballot under the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause. Oral arguments are set for Nov. 2.
One note: The state Supreme Court is largely proceeding as if this will be a legal argument, not a factual one, but it did ask the parties to identify any “genuine issue of material fact that is in dispute.” It’s hard to imagine there not being factual disputes here, so stay tuned for whether the Supreme Court ultimately modifies the schedule to include some sort of evidentiary hearing.
The Impact Of ‘Trump Employee 2’
Harry Litman: What Trump’s assistant told investigators about classified records — and why it’s so damning
Oh Noes!
Rolling Stone: Trump Privately Frets He Could Be Headed to Prison
Cassidy Hutchinson: Giuliani Groped Me On Jan. 6
In her upcoming new book, former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson alleges that Rudy Giuliani groped her backstage at the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse:
I feel his frozen fingers trail up my thigh. He tilts his chin up. The whites of his eyes look jaundiced. My eyes dart to John Eastman, who flashes a leering grin.
A Giuliani spokesperson called Hutchinson’s allegation “a disgusting lie.”
Rudy G Defamation Trial Set For Dec. 11
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell set the trial of the defamation case against Rudy Giuliani by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss for Dec. 11 and ordered the parties to be present in the courtroom for the duration of the trial.
Confirmed
Nora Dannehy, who for a time was the No. 2 in Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators, has publicly confirmed that she resigned from Durham’s team because of:
- concerns then-Attorney General Bill Barr was violating DOJ guidelines with his public remarks about the investigation; and
- her strong disagreement with the contents of interim report that was considered for release before the 2020 election.
Dannehy is a longtime prosecutor who is now a nominee to the Connecticut Supreme Court. She confirmed her misgivings about the Durham probe during her confirmation hearing yesterday.
Culprit AND Victim
Ray Epps, the man who became the target of a smear campaign by Tucker Carlson and other right-wing provocateurs, who falsely alleged that he was a government agent, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for the Jan. 6 attack.
Hunter Biden Must Appear For Arraignment
Morning Memo had a slightly raised eyebrow yesterday about prosecutors opposing Hunter Biden’s request for his arraignment to be via video conference, but the judge who subsequently denied the request noted that outside of COVID circumstances, he had never allowed an arraignment other than in person.
Project Veritas Suspends All Operations
Amid financial ruin and with its founder deposed, the right-wing propaganda outfit Project Veritas suspended all operations Wednesday following another round of layoffs, Mediaite reports.
A Primer On Redistricting And Race
The NYT offers a primer on GOP efforts to discriminate against Black voters: “In Three Southern States, a Legal Battle Over Political Maps”
2024 Ephemera
- Ron DeSantis’ support collapses in a new poll of the New Hampshire GOP primary.
- ABC News: If elected president, DeSantis wouldn’t provide federal funding for COVID vaccines.
- Nate Cohn: Donald Trump is polling about as well as any candidate in the modern history of contested presidential primaries.
More On Property Insurance And Climate Risk
Insurance on some 39 million U.S. homes – roughly one-quarter – is underpriced compared to the climate risk those properties face, according to a new report from First Street Foundation.
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