Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced Wednesday that he had bussed a group of migrants to Los Angeles for the first time, adding yet another blue state destination to the stunt he and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) have been using to out-MAGA one another and score political points — all at the expense of vulnerable migrants.
Continue reading “Abbott Busses Migrants To Los Angeles, Continuing Effort To Out-MAGA DeSantis”Hero Or Goat? Meet Trump’s Chief Enabler In The Mar-a-Lago Case
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
We Have So Much To Thank Tom Fitton For
Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton is widely credited with waltzing Donald Trump straight into criminal charges by advising him that he was legally entitled to keep the documents he had squirreled away at Mar-a-Lago.
Fitton, who heads up the conservative legal activist group but is not himself a lawyer, offered Trump misguided advice about the law, the precedent, and the issues involved in the Mar-a-Lago case.
The irony for those old enough to remember the Clinton years is that Fitton was mistakenly drawing on a case Judicial Watch was involved in back in the day when it was among the leading right-wing nemeses of Bill Clinton. Remember Larry Klayman?
The kicker to all this is that despite Fitton’s horrendous advice and Trump’s subsequent indictment, Trump still holds him close. Fitton had dinner with Trump and Nauta and their lawyers Monday night at a steakhouse at Trump’s Miami club.
Trump’s Lawyers Tried … They Really Did
It’s important not to reduce Trump’s mess of his own making to bad advice from Tom Fitton. It’s just an amusing addendum to the Trump train wreck.
The truth is that multiple Trump lawyers (reminder: Fitton is not a lawyer) advised him of his legal peril if he did not surrender the documents in his possession. Self-interested accounts from lawyers now caught in bad situations? Sure, but this is no-brainer legal advice. You don’t have to be a high-powered superlawyer to reach the conclusion that Trump was facing a world of hurt if he persisted on his defiant course.
Trump did what Trump wanted to do, as he always does. He ignored the advice he didn’t like, and proceeded as he saw fit.
And here we are.
The Biggest Question Of All
As TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports, the chances of getting the Mar-a-Lago case wrapped up before Election Day 2024 seems super remote. You can’t rule it out, but it’s really hard to see it happening.
Tack on any indictments of Trump and his inner circle in the Jan. 6 investigation, the looming Georgia indictments, and the ongoing hush money case in New York, and you have a million reasons why these cases are all going to be tied up in pre-trial wrangling for months or even years.
And yet …
Not to engage in magical thinking, but it’s feels like we might be underestimating Attorney General Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith if we expect them to be undertaking these massive, historic, unprecedented prosecutions involving a former president without taking into account the election calendar in a strategic way.
They know their federal cases will go away if Trump is re-elected. I don’t know how they’ve accounted for it. Maybe they haven’t. But I doubt it.
The timing – the crunch between now and the 2024 election – is what has me perched on the edge of my seat, more so than the pre-trial fights themselves, or the difficulty of proving this or that charge, or the jury pool in Miami.
The window is tight and it’s closing. The stakes could not be higher.
Love Seeing ‘Radical’ In NYT Headline
NYT: The Radical Strategy Behind Trump’s Promise to ‘Go After’ Biden
Aileen Cannon Is A Real Wild Card
The judge in the Mar-a-Lago case tried very few cases as a prosecutor and has presided over a similarly small number of criminal trials since taking the bench in 2020.
All The President’s Men
One thing worth mentioning about the conditions of Donald Trump’s pre-trial release. The Justice Department was willing to let Trump continue to have contact with witnesses in the case without restriction, an unusual accommodation in a criminal case. The magistrate judge was displeased with that much leniency and imposed the condition that Trump could interact with witnesses but not talk to to them about the case.
Now, if you know Trump or anyone like him, setting a boundary of any kind is the equivalent of an invitation for them to cross that boundary. It’s like waving a red cape in front of a bull. The existence of the boundary is itself an irresistible attraction.
Add to that the extraordinary number of witnesses who are Trump lawyers, former lawyers, employees, former employees, aides, former aides, and assorted hangers-on, and you have a recipe for witness-tampering disaster.
What A Fine Paragraph
Premium use of the verb “toggle,” too:
Nauta — who spent Tuesday bizarrely toggling between the roles of co-defendant, equal under the law to Trump, and dutiful “body man,” subservient to the former president — has showed no signs that his loyalty to Trump is waning.
And, no, Nauta does not seem poised to cooperate with prosecutors.
Fani Willis Is Undeterred
The Atlanta DA’s office says the Mar-a-Lago indictments “will not have any impact on the Fulton County election investigation.”
Hate To See It
Smooth, Guys, Real Smooth
Marine Arrested In Abortion Clinic Firebombing
Two men, including an active-duty marine stationed at Camp Pendleton, have been arrested in last year’s firebombing of an abortion clinic in California.
Ya Don’t Say?
Between South Carolina And Me
Judd Legum: Why a South Carolina high school decided to censor Ta-Nehisi Coates
What’s Your Idiot-Detection System?
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Trump Has Lots Of Ways To Delay His Trial Until The ’24 Election
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”Miami, It’s a Whole ‘Nother Country
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”Help Us Keep This Moving
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Judge Imposes Sanctions On Michigan GOP Chair Karamo After Baseless Election Lawsuit
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”The Mystery Of The Bedminster Documents
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”Maybe It Wasn’t the Greatest Booking Rally Ever?
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?”Trump’s Arraignment Caps A Wild Ride For DOJ
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Whiplash
Imagine being one of the thousands of DOJ attorneys slogging away on criminal, civil and appeals cases over the last, say, five years:
- You’ve had Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr as your ultimate boss.
- You narrowly avoided a decapitation event where one Jeffrey Clark — “You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill.” — became attorney general.
- You went to work knowing Bill Barr was meddling in criminal cases, even in ones that had already won convictions.
- You had run-amok Special Counsel John Durham at Barr’s behest targeting DOJ itself.
- You knew in your bones that the usual firewall between DOJ and the White House was in ruins.
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.
A Dispatch From Inside The Courtroom
LawFare’s Anna Bower waited in line for 27 hours to get a seat in the courtroom for Trump’s arraignment. Read her report.
DOJ Is Actually Taking It Easy On Trump
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:
- NY Mag: The DOJ Tried to Give Trump a Pass. He Wouldn’t Take It.
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.
- DOJ recommended extraordinarily lenient conditions for Trump’s pre-trial release from custody: no bail, no travel restrictions (including no surrender of his passport), and he may still interact and communicate with witnesses in the case (though the judge ordered that he may not discuss the case itself with them …).
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.
Dip Into The Madness For A Moment
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:
- Trump again vowing to appoint a “real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden and the entire Biden crime family.”
- Trump again attacking Special Counsel Jack Smith’s wife;
- Trump accusing the FBI of staging the photos in the indictment;
- Trump again declaring the documents to be his own under the Presidential Records Act.
Just another day at the office.
Scared Shitless
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.
Keep An Eye On Bedminster
Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann: Donald Trump was indicted in Florida. Could he also face charges in New Jersey?
Meanwhile …
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.
Fox News Is Unchastened And Unbowed
I’m sorry but in this instance Fox News fomenting civil war actually made me laugh:
Biden Is So Inside Their Heads
The marvel of the moment for me is how Joe Biden can simultaneously be:
- A doddering old man but also running the most corrupt crime family in the history of the universe;
- Barely able to stay upright on his own two feet but an evil genius who has orchestrated a vast conspiracy with the Deep State to take down his chief political rival;
- Inept and bungling but somehow managed to defeat the incumbent MAGA president, haul the United States into Marxism, and seize dictatorial powers.
This Biden guy is pretty amazing when you think about it.
Thanks, Chris Licht!
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.
Michigan GOP Chair Sanctioned By Judge
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!
Republicans in Disarray
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.
*Snicker*
WHOA …
The first 40 seconds are mesmerizing, then it gets really cool:
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Decoding The Supreme Court’s Silence On The Independent State Legislature Theory
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”