Did you see the latest Clarence Thomas bombshell? To head off any misunderstanding, let me state that I know with a perfect certainty that Thomas will never be removed from the Court. And while it is theoretically possible he could resign, the odds of that happening are roughly equivalent of finding sentient life on Mars. But that doesn’t take any of the punch away from the news that Thomas had a child (a grandnephew for whom the Thomases became legal guardians) at private school and Harlan Crow picked up the tab for the tuition.
I want to take a moment to chart the trajectory of these revelations.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”
Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.
The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.
“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.
Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
“You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows “are among our dearest friends” and that he understood he didn’t have to disclose the trips.
ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.
“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth,” the statement said. “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.” The statement added that Crow and his wife have “supported many young Americans” at a “variety of schools, including his alma mater.” Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow’s office responded, “No.”
Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas’ mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.
“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.
Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”
A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.
Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children. The law’s definition of dependent child is narrow, however, and likely would not apply to Martin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his parent. The best case for not disclosing Crow’s tuition payments would be to argue the gifts were to Martin, not Thomas, experts said.
But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child’s education.
“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”
Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.
Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.
Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. “During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico,” the billionaire said.
The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin’s situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in “under very similar circumstances.”
Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn’t have children of their own. They pitched Martin’s parents on taking the boy in.
“Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything — his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities,” journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.
Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.
Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.
Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows “at least once a year” throughout his childhood.
That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow’s superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.
Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin’s murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas’ trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)
Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system’s lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazine reported.
For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.
Randolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire’s family.
Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.
The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition. The wire is marked “Mark Martin” in the ledger.
Crow’s office said in its statement that Crow’s funding of students’ tuition has “always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business.”
Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin’s tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.
Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.
In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the court, Ginni Thomas’ pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice’s memoir.
It appears that at some point in Martin’s childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remember when that occurred.
In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s education. Thomas’ disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.
“At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation,” Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. “He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark.” In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an “education gift to Mark Martin.”
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
A rock ’em sock ’em trio of big scoops overnight: Mar-a-Lago, Herschel Walker, Clarence Thomas. Let’s get after it!
‘Obstruction On Steroids’
Special Counsel Jack Smith is probing whether surveillance video at Mar-a-Lago subpoenaed by a federal grand jury was tampered with, CNN reports.
Smith appears to be focused on what, if anything, happened to the surveillance video after it was subpoenaed by investigators last summer. The surveillance video was subpoenaed in June 2022 because investigators already had suspicions about whether Trump had fully complied with a May 22 subpoena for government documents.
Among the new developments via CNN:
“Longtime Trump Organization executives Matthew Calamari Sr. and his son Matthew Calamari Jr. are expected to appear Thursday before the grand jury investigating possible mishandling of classified documents brought to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, sources said.”
“Prosecutors are expected to ask them about the handling of the surveillance footage and Trump employees’ conversations following the subpoena, according to the sources.”
“Investigators also have previously asked about a text message from [Trump aide Walt] Nauta to Calamari Sr. and subsequent conversations about the surveillance footage, according to two of the sources.”
NYU law professor Ryan Goodman said any tampering with the subpoenaed surveillance video would be “obstruction on steroids”:
Herschel Walker Did WHAT?
Just an amazing scoop by The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger showing then-Senate candidate Herschel Walker (R-GA) soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars from a billionaire donor who believed he was giving to Walker’s campaign – but the money ended up going to Walker’s personal company:
“Emails obtained by The Daily Beast—and verified as authentic by a person with knowledge of the exchanges—show that Walker asked [Dennis] Washington to wire $535,200 directly to that undisclosed company, HR Talent, LLC.
“In the best possible circumstances, legal experts told The Daily Beast, the emails suggest violations of federal fundraising rules; in the worst case, they could be an indication of more serious crimes, such as wire fraud.”
“According to the legal experts who spoke to The Daily Beast for this article, this scheme appears to not just be illegal—it appears to be unparalleled in its audacity and scope. The transactions raise questions about a slew of possible violations. In fact, these experts all said, the scheme was so brazen that it appears to defy explanation, ranking it among the most egregious campaign finance violations in modern history.”
Things Just Got Worse For Clarence Thomas
ProPublica with the third big overnight scoop: Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition.
Smith Sat In On Pence Grand Jury Testimony
Special Counsel Jack Smith personally attended the grand jury testimony of former Vice President Mike Pence, the first known time that Smith has sat in on grand jury proceedings in the Jan. 6 investigation, CNN reports.
Fani Willis Speaks
“I haven’t made any decisions regarding charging, at all, at least none that I’m willing to make public at this time,” Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis said Tuesday.
Judge Tosses Trump Lawsuit Against NYT
A state judge in New York threw out the lawsuit former President Donald Trump filed against the NYT over its 2018 Pulitzer-Prize-winning series on his taxes. Trump was also ordered to pay attorney fees and court costs.
Trump To Offer No Defense In Carroll Trial
Donald Trump will not take the stand or call any witnesses to defend against’s E. Jean Carroll’s defamation and rape claims, his lawyer told the court Wednesday. The judge expects the jury to get the case Tuesday.
No Fucks Left To Give
Dahlia Lithwick: “[P]erhaps the era of the wan, ruined, long suffering victim may be well and truly behind us.”
Jaw Dropping
Jared L. Wise, the former FBI agent charged for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, was … get this … the supervisory special agent in charge of Homegrown Violent Extremism for the FBI New York Field Office’s Joint Terrorism Task Force from 2014-17, NBC reports.
After Wise left the FBI, he joined … get this again! … Project Veritas, the NYT reports:
“Mr. Wise later joined the conservative group Project Veritas under the supervision of a former British spy, Richard Seddon, who had been recruited by the security contractor Erik Prince to train operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets.”
“At Project Veritas, according to a former employee with direct knowledge of his employment, Mr. Wise used the code name Bendghazi and trained at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming with other recruits.”
Mr. Wise was among a group of Project Veritas operatives who were assigned to infiltrate teacher unions in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Kentucky, according to the former employee.
Wise’s time with Project Veritas was short-lived. He left in mid-2018, Project Veritas told the NYT.
Deep Dive
WaPo: Behind Trump’s musical tribute to some of the most violent Jan. 6 rioters
That is a jaw-dropping sentence — as empirically ludicrous as it is ideologically loaded. A glance at American history — taking in night riders, lynch mobs, the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 and the killings of Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins in New York in the 1980s, to say nothing of Jan. 6 itself — suggests that this is exactly how white men fight. Not all white men, of course, and not only white men, but white men precisely when they perceive the symbolic and material prerogatives of their whiteness to be under attack.
Yesterday was the day elected Republicans in DC went all in on impeaching Joe Biden on the basis of spurious, unsubstantiated claims that the FBI has records of his corruption as vice president. I won’t burden you by making you read the supposed details of this particular nonsense or watch the multiple Fox News segments touting it, but to give you some sense of the saturation coverage, it included:
That’s not a full list. That’s just some of the elected Republicans on TV yesterday about this manufactured non-scandal. The GOP sickness is not just Trump.
Montana Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr — who is the only transgender lawmaker in the state — and her legal team are weighing appealing to the state Supreme Court after a district court judge ruled denying Zephyr’s request to return to the House floor she was banned from.
Yesterday, the Times published an article reporting that Biden administration officials have an active discussion about whether the debt-ceiling law is unconstitutional and thus whether President Biden has the right and the duty to disregard it rather than default on the government’s debt and spending obligations. That along with Secretary Yellen’s June 1 announcement hit like a thunderclap against D.C.’s conventional wisdom about how this drama plays out. On a dime the insider newsletters decided that this probably isn’t going to be settled by a simple negotiation, or maybe any negotiation. The extraordinary measures a lot of us have been talking about for some time suddenly started to seem real to them too. The addition of the June 1 quasi-deadline signaled to still others that there probably isn’t time for a negotiated settlement even if the administration decided to negotiate.
Put that together and we seem to be in a new place on this just in the last day or so.
I’m a member of a team of economists studying the social safety net and work. Because the rationale for work requirements is that they encourage adults who are able to work to earn more money and become more economically self-sufficient, we wanted to determine whether this policy boosts employment and earnings. We also looked into whether SNAP work requirements lead low-income adults to lose their benefits.
We found that the policy doesn’t make people more likely to find a job or make more money, but it does make Americans who could use help buying groceries less likely to get it.
Tracing a similar case study
Adults with SNAP benefits who are subject to work requirements must document at least 80 hours per month of paid work, job training or volunteering. Otherwise, they can get the benefits for only three months within a three-year period.
Before the pandemic, these rules applied to most so-called “able-bodied” adults without children who were under 50, and that policy will again apply in July. There are some exceptions, such as if the person with benefits is caring for kids younger than 6, has disabilities incompatible with holding a steady job or is in a drug or alcohol rehabilitation program.
To determine this policy’s impact, we studied SNAP, employment and earnings data in Virginia from both the period of the state’s previous suspension of work requirements and afterward.
Virginia, like many other states, suspended work requirements for several years beginning in the Great Recession. During this period, adults could enroll in the program and continue to receive benefits regardless of their employment status.
In October 2013, however, Virginia reinstated work requirements, and they remained in effect in most counties for several years. In those areas, adults under the age of 50 without dependents who were considered able to work needed to either satisfy work requirements or receive an individual exemption to keep their SNAP benefits, while similar adults over the age of 50 did not.
We followed both age groups over time, comparing whether they worked and were getting SNAP benefits both before and after work requirements returned.
No employment boost
By comparing older and younger adults previously getting SNAP benefits, we found that work requirements did not increase employment or earnings 18 months after their reinstatement.
We also detected nearly identical patterns of employment before and after work requirements were reinstated for people in both age groups.
Adults without dependents, whether or not they lost their SNAP benefits to the resumption of work requirements, were earning at most an additional US$28 per month.
Many lost their benefits
But we did find that work requirements dramatically reduced the number of people enrolled in SNAP. Among the adults subject to work requirements once they were restored in 2013, over half lost their benefits because of the policy.
We also found that work requirements disproportionately led people who had faced great economic hardships, such as those without housing or earned income, to lose benefits.
Only 44% of the currently or formerly homeless people getting benefits remained enrolled in SNAP 18 months after work requirements were reinstated, compared with 64% of everyone else, our estimates suggest. Similarly, only 59% of those with no earned income remained enrolled, relative to 73% of those with prior earnings.
Because they are likely to qualify for an individual exemption to work requirements, adults with a history of a disability were more likely to retain benefits compared with others.
Adults kicked out of SNAP because of work requirements typically stood to lose $189 in benefits per month – the most a single person could obtain at the time. It also amounted to about two-thirds of their gross income.
We studied work requirements in Virginia because of the availability of detailed data on both earnings and SNAP benefits.
Although work requirements enforcement varies across states, we believe that our results are likely to be representative of the impacts of this policy, since SNAP recipients in Virginia look similar to nationwide averages on most demographic characteristics except race.
Our findings do suggest that work requirements restrain federal spending by reducing the number of people getting SNAP benefits.
But our work also indicates that in today’s context, these savings would be at the expense of already vulnerable people facing additional economic hardship at a time when a new recession could be around the corner.
Newly minted Twitter CEO Elon Musk threatened to reassign National Public Radio’s official account — which uses the @NPR handle — to “another company” on Tuesday, weeks after the non-profit media organization announced it will no longer post content on Twitter.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
‘It’s Not How White Men Fight’
What to make of the latest Tucker Carlson revelation, a Jan. 7, 2021 text showing him in full racist froth over the beating of a Antifa protestor in DC?
We are to believe, based on the NYT reporting, that this Carlson text “set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox.” Coming as it did on the eve of the scheduled trial of the Dominion defamation case against Fox, we can perhaps attribute some of the so-called panic to the timing. Perhaps.
But after years of Carlson going on the air every weeknight to espouse white nationalism, foment racial hatred, and demean people of color with racist tropes and stereotypes, we’re supposed to accept that the Fox board somehow came to its senses when confronted with a single 18-month-old text?
The key part of the text (emphasis mine):
A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.
To be fair, the NYT story couches the text not as a smoking gun per se, but reports that it “contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s firing.” That leaves a fair bit for interpretation of how much the text contributed and what other things also contributed to the firing.
There’s also this bit of new reporting from the WaPo which seems relevant:
After seeing the message, the board alerted Fox executives that it planned to retain a law firm to investigate Carlson’s behavior, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.
We’re not in a position to know, with so many of the Carlson internal communications either still private or redacted in court documents, what combination of revelations or notifications to the board prompted it to act finally. But it’s simply way too credulous to pretend this text somehow represents a greater display of racism from Carlson than he displayed on air in front of million of viewers night after night for years, in plain view of the Fox board.
Scavino Sighting At DC Federal Courthouse
NOW: Trump aide Dan Scavino and his legal team have left the federal courthouse in DC where a grand jury is hearing evidence in special counsel Jack Smith's investigations. Scavino arrived shortly before 9am and had been inside all day.
Donald Trump will not testify in his own defense in the E. Jean Carroll trial. Trump’s team may still decide to do a videotaped deposition of Trump in the case at trial.
In the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial, a couple of new jury notes Tuesday suggested that it is being diligent and may be deadlocked on at least one of the charges.
Ex-FBI Supervisor Arrested On Jan. 6 Charges
A former FBI supervisory special agent was arrested in Oregon this week in connection with the Jan. 6 attack and accused of encouraging rioters to kill police officers protecting the Capitol:
“I’m former—I’m former law enforcement. You’re disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo. You can’t see it. … Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!” federal authorities say he told officers before he entered the Capitol. “Yeah, f— them! Yeah, kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!”
Notable
A Big Lie-touting elections official in Michigan has been voted out in a recall election in conservative Hillsdale County.
Zooey Zephyr Loses In Court
A state court declined to intervene on behalf of transgender state Rep. Zooey Zephyr after the GOP-controlled House banned her from the floor of the chamber for the rest of the current session:
Judge Mike Menahan, who served in the House as a Democrat before being elected to the state’s First District Court a decade ago, said in a five-page order issued late Tuesday that he did not have the authority to intervene in the legislative dispute.
The current session ends Friday.
Where Things Stand On The Debt Ceiling
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) started the long-shot process of using a “discharge petition” to force a vote on a clean debt ceiling increase.
One way out of this seeming logjam – with the Speaker of the House taking the world economy hostage and the President refusing to deal with terrorists – has been obvious all along: Each of them asserts that a final package consisting of some spending cuts and a debt ceiling hike to be true to their own values, declares victory and walks away. We’ll see.
Noted
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is pressing charges against a woman who allegedly threw a glass of wine at him over the weekend back home in Florida.
Ethics Rules For SCOTUS? Gasp!
Senate Judiciary Democrats tried to make a go of elevating the Clarence Thomas scandal and other recent SCOTUS revelations. TPM’s Kate Riga was there.
One highlight of the hearing was former Attorney General Michael Mukasey being 100% on brand:
Mukasey: If I were a district judge and somebody wanted to fly me on his private plane on a vacation with his family, I were friendly with that person, would I have refused and endangered the friendship? I’m not sure that I would’ve pic.twitter.com/nKNg1wfnuA
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) could return to DC as soon as next week, according to … notes Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was holding that reporters spied.
(My own read, since these were notes Schumer prepared for a press conference, is that “We are both hopeful she can return next week” is buying time.)
Nice Little Public Radio Network You Got There …
After NPR stopped using Twitter, Elon Musk emailed an NPR reporter the following threat: “So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?”
Abortion Rights Alert
North Carolina: After months of closed-door deliberations, statehouse Republicans unveiled a new proposal for a 12-week abortion ban. In a sign of the evolving politics of abortion rights post-Dobbs, the ban is being pitched by Republican women lawmakers as a less-harsh compromise than stricter bans in other Southern states.
…Just take a look at this promo video for the town hall. Looks more like a time capsule from 2015 than, for example, anything presenting even remote awareness of every scandal and crime Trump is implicated in.https://t.co/lplkj7ICP6
Democrats are more likely than ever to harshly criticize judge shopping, the practice where almost exclusively right-wing litigants seek out court divisions with one or two Donald Trump appointees who they can count on for a favorable decision.
