For years, faced with civil, congressional, and criminal investigations, Trump has returned to one strategy: delay.
Now, because of the nature of the charges he faces in the federal Mar-a-Lago indictment, he’ll have ample opportunity to employ those tactics again, likely pushing his trial beyond the November 2024 election.
Continue reading “Trump Has Lots Of Ways To Delay His Trial Until The ’24 Election”Now that Miami Mayor Francis X. Suarez has filed paperwork to seek the Republican presidential nomination, I’m finally going to write about something that’s been bugging me and making me laugh for a few weeks. Just to keep up on things, I subscribe to a number of papers in swing or swingish states around the country. One of those is the Miami Herald. For several weeks the Herald has been advancing a story about Mayor Suarez and his relationship with one of the city’s rising real estate developers, Rishi Kapoor. In these cases “relationship” usually means a shadowy and uncertain series of ties. But in this case it’s not shadowy: the mayor is literally on Kapoor’s payroll. It’s started with people raising questions about the fact that Kapoor had been working to get a series of accommodations from the city for a major development project and had also been paying Suarez $10,000 a month for vaguely defined consulting services.
Continue reading “Miami, It’s a Whole ‘Nother Country”We’re approaching a key milestone: halfway to our goal in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We started this year’s drive on Wednesday June 7th. Today, one week later, we are coming up on $250,000, halfway to our critical goal of raising $500,000. As of this moment we are at $243,034. That total is made up of contributions from fully 2,172 TPM readers and supporters. We’re just $6,966 from the halfway point.
If you’ve been considering doing so please take a moment to make your contribution today by clicking right here. Thank you.
Late Update: Now $3,432 to go!
A judge this week ordered the Michigan Republican Party Chairwoman Kristina Karamo and six others to pay more than $58,000 in legal fees racked up by the Detroit clerk’s office as it fought a lawsuit filed by the party last year claiming — without evidence — that there was wrongdoing in Detroit’s election.
Continue reading “Judge Imposes Sanctions On Michigan GOP Chair Karamo After Baseless Election Lawsuit”Even after months of asking nicely, the issuance of a grand jury subpoena, searches executed by FBI agents, and a federal indictment of Donald Trump, it’s far from clear that the government knows the location of all of the records that the former president took after leaving office.
Continue reading “The Mystery Of The Bedminster Documents”For now I’ll put this out there simply as an impression, an intuitive or atmospheric one. I think Donald Trump is going to have trouble keeping up the unified support and defense facing these indictments. To be clear, I’m still very confident that Trump will be the nominee. The basic dynamics are the same. The indictments all but seal the nomination for him; they hurt him in the general. But look close and the ship is taking on water, hemorrhaging a bit at the seams.
In the upside-down world of Trump the day he gets indicted, gets called into court and taken, albeit briefly, into custody is the high point. It’s the day of maximum unity.
But it wasn’t quite perfect.
Continue reading “Maybe It Wasn’t the Greatest Booking Rally Ever?”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Imagine being one of the thousands of DOJ attorneys slogging away on criminal, civil and appeals cases over the last, say, five years:
And after all that came the whiplash of Donald Trump sitting in a federal court yesterday being arraigned on Espionage Act charges, with Special Counsel Jack Smith observing him from the front row.
These people have been through a lot, y’all.
LawFare’s Anna Bower waited in line for 27 hours to get a seat in the courtroom for Trump’s arraignment. Read her report.
As you listen to the continuous GOP uproar over the unfair, disparate, and unequal treatment Trump is receiving, remember that it’s true … but in the completely opposite direction:
In January of last year, in response to a subpoena, Trump returned 197 classified documents to the federal government. Despite his willfully retaining those documents for months, the federal indictment released last week does not charge Trump in connection with any of them — which is to say, the DOJ gave Trump a pass on 197 potential counts of willful retention of national defense information. Instead, it charged him with only 31 counts corresponding with the number of highly classified documents Trump knowingly withheld from the government in January 2022 and the FBI later obtained.
The point isn’t to knock DOJ. These are arguably appropriate measures of deference to the Trump’s unusual status as a former president. But they give lie to the Deep State nonsense Trump World is spouting.
On occasion it’s worth your while to check in on what Trump is saying in these long, rambling, self-indulgent speeches of his. Aaron is so good at putting these video threads together. It makes it quick and easy to get a taste:
Last night’s speech — carried live by FOX but not by MSNBC or CNN — included:
Just another day at the office.
Former Trump White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on Trump’s public bravado in the face of criminal charges:
He’s scared s—less. This is the way he compensates for that. He gives people the appearance he doesn’t care by doing this. For the first time in his life, it looks like he’s being held accountable. Up until this point in his life, it’s like, I’m not going to pay you, take me to court. He’s never been held accountable before.
Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann: Donald Trump was indicted in Florida. Could he also face charges in New Jersey?
While Trump was being arraigned in Miami, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation kept cruising along. Spotted in the area of the DC federal courthouse where Smith’s Jan. 6 grand jury meets: two Nevada fake electors.
The two men were Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald and Vice Chair Jim DeGraffenreid.
I’m sorry but in this instance Fox News fomenting civil war actually made me laugh:
The marvel of the moment for me is how Joe Biden can simultaneously be:
This Biden guy is pretty amazing when you think about it.
The now-notorious CNN “townhall” with Trump that hastened the end of Chris Licht’s tenure as CEO of the cable news net has also led to a new defamation claim against Trump by E. Jean Carroll.
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Carroll can amend her original defamation lawsuit to include remarks made during the televised CNN event.
Amid all the judicial sanctions being handed out for frivolous lawsuits over the 2020 election, what jumps out about this case is that the judge is sanctioning the Michigan GOP chair and the party’s lawyer for a bogus lawsuit about the 2022 election. Way to distinguish yourselves!
David Dayen catches us up on the House GOP’s internecine budget battle:
The important thing here is that the goals of reducing spending below the non-defense caps, above the defense caps, and having that be something Senate Democrats will pass and the president will sign are irreconcilable. McCarthy is being implicitly threatened with his speakership if he doesn’t hold to lower spending. McConnell, meanwhile, is getting enormous pressure from the lobbying blob to plus-up military budgets.
All of that points to stopgap funding to prevent an October 1 government shutdown, if the votes can be found. That would render all the work on the debt ceiling spending caps rather meaningless, especially if a continuing resolution to fund the government were to persist. That said, a shutdown is a definite possibility given all the chaos.
The first 40 seconds are mesmerizing, then it gets really cool:
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The Supreme Court asked for an additional round of briefings on what it should do with a major, potentially mooted election law case out of North Carolina over a month ago. Since then, crickets.
Continue reading “Decoding The Supreme Court’s Silence On The Independent State Legislature Theory”While former President Donald Trump makes plans to excise the so-called “deep state” that supposedly formed in the bowels of the DOJ before he took the White House in 2016, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is vowing to act against it with a blunter instrument.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: A Dark Turn In DeSantis’ MAGA Grievance-Focused Campaign Strategy”President Trump didn’t speak at his arraignment on Tuesday.
Instead, attorney Todd Blanche entered a plea on his behalf to the 37 counts facing the President.
Continue reading “Trump Enters Not Guilty Plea”
