Former Vice President Mike Pence hinted on Wednesday that he may stop fighting a subpoena for his testimony in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Continue reading “Pence Hints He May Not Fight Order To Testify Against Trump In DOJ Jan 6 Probe”Reports: Grand Jury For Hush Money Probe Set To Break For A Month
The Manhattan grand jury investigating former President Donald Trump’s role in the $130,000 hush money payment made to Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign is scheduled to take a break in April, according to reports.
Continue reading “Reports: Grand Jury For Hush Money Probe Set To Break For A Month”On Far Right Radicalism and Terror #2
In response to the Waco Trump rally, TPM Reader MD, an Alabaman, wrote in to flag a note he’d sent in 18+ months ago. “I’m so glad to see your ed blog calling for more focus on the right-wing radicalism of the Trump campaign — not being desensitized to it. Last year I sent in the note below on the absolute shock I had — even for Trump — going into a tiny town with an outsized reputation for radical violence and intimidation. “
Here’s the email from August 3rd, 2021 …
Continue reading “On Far Right Radicalism and Terror #2”On Far Right Radicalism and Terror #1
From TPM Reader JO …
Continue reading “On Far Right Radicalism and Terror #1”I appreciated your post yesterday about the increasingly close connection between the modern GOP and the growth of right wing radicalism and domestic terrorism over the decades since the Waco tragedies (and going back slightly earlier to the Ruby Ridge standoff — though I guess a campaign rally there would have been a bit too transparent even for Trump). The line from Waco to OKC to the Bundys to January 6 is clear and frightening — and your attention to it is why I’ve been following TPM from the start.
Trump Shares An Appreciation Post For Grand Jury Amid Reports It Won’t Vote On Indictment This Week
Former President Donald Trump seems to be changing his tone towards the grand jury investigating the $130,000 hush money payment made to Stormy Daniels during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to keep her quiet about an affair they had years before.
Continue reading “Trump Shares An Appreciation Post For Grand Jury Amid Reports It Won’t Vote On Indictment This Week”Anastasia Of Arizona: The GOP Has Become Haunted By Pretenders To The Throne
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Kari Lake, the Republican who lost the gubernatorial election in Arizona last November, has, four months later, still not given up the electoral ghost. Lake continues to be a softly spectral presence, haunting the Internet and airwaves while claiming to be the rightful ruler of Arizona and all its possessions. Encouraged by perhaps not-entirely-on-the-level supporters such as fascisty podcaster Steve Bannon, Lake insists that she is the “real governor, the duly elected governor” of a state that is pretty convincingly governed by someone else.
As Lake, Donald Trump and other troubled pretenders to other thrones populate the political landscape, with no apparent limits to their very public desperation, the need for historically grounded analysis is evident. Where on earth did all these creepy people come from anyway?
Scholars of history and political science generally locate the origins of the current Republican distemper near to home. It all goes back to the racial aggression of the Tea Party, some say; the Black guy in the White House was more than the old white rascals could bear. No, no, say others. The madness and dishonesty that consume the party are but the long, spooky chemtrail of Newt Gingrich. If you were to outfit Newt’s 1990s cohort with Jewish Space Lasers and the all-you-can-espionage bar at Mar-a-Lago, you would have today’s GOP.
Both theories are supported by ample evidence, from gobsmacking hypocrisy (Gingrich) to pernicious lies (Gingrich), partisan extremism (Gingrich) and wanton corruption (Gingrich). Yet they fail to tap the deep and gnarled roots of MAGA. If you think about it, the antecedent of the madness has been obvious all along: It’s Russia, Russia, Russia.
For what is Kari Lake but an American Anastasia, the young Romanov tsarina alleged, in a series of revanchist scams, to have escaped the 1918 massacre of her family? Anastasia waits, forever young, to be returned to her rightful place upon the throne. True, Anastasia would be well into her second century if she were alive today. But if QAnon can bring JFK Jr. back to be Trump’s running mate, an Arizona Anastasia hardly seems out of reach.
A century before MAGA royalty began relieving rubes of rubles, Romanov imposters initiated a similar cycle of grief-‘n’-grift in the wake of White (Russian) political loss. After the Romanov massacre, a bevy of mysterious Anastasias preyed on Russian marks who longed for the old, dysfunctional ways of empire. In the 1920s, Anastasia sightings were as commonplace as swing-state suitcases bulging with discarded Trump ballots.
Rasputin, a slightly more hirsute, old-world, version of Bannon, was already dead by the time the royal family was shot. But Rasputin’s son-in-law, Boris Soloviev, who had studied mysticism, possessed a Bannonesque eye for the main chance. Soloviev convened seances to communicate with the dead, who sometimes touted Soloviev’s schemes. Soloviev, who seems to have misplaced some Romanov jewels entrusted to him for safekeeping, promised White Russians that their money would aid the escape from Russia of a surviving Romanov. If Soloviev had had access to email and the Trump campaign’s small-donor list, he would have been soliciting monthly contributions of $19.18 or you won’t have a country anymore.
Soloviev’s wife, Maria, Rasputin’s daughter, eventually went her own way, dancing in cabarets and ending up in the U.S. working in a circus. (Insert your own MAGA joke here.) America, as it happens, figured prominently in the Romanov imposter tour; the most famous of all imposters also made it to the land of grifter dreams, and eventually settled here.
Anna Anderson, to choose her American moniker, appears to have been a Polish factory worker with a history of mental instability. After having made her way to the U.S., Anderson lived in 1929 at the home of a Park Avenue benefactrice whose social cachet briefly ratcheted upward due to her tsarina roommate. After a series of unfortunate events, including a dead parakeet and a naked foray on a rooftop, the tsarina was committed.
Still, all the grifters aboard the MAGA imposter train should take heart: The Romanov ride never really ended. Anderson emerged from the sanitorium and traveled to Germany, where rumors of her royal lineage preceded her. German royalists, like Park Avenue matrons, enjoyed the company of the magical Romanov in their midst. Everyone got to play make-believe, and no one had to run an actual empire or any such drudgery.
You can see a similar process playing out across the U.S. A March CNN poll showed MAGA-allied voters holding fast to the fantasy of Dark Brandon’s election theft while increasing numbers of them acknowledge that the evidentiary case is less than airtight. As Aaron Blake wrote in The Washington Post, Republicans are gradually coming around to the notion that the Great Election Heist of 2020 (and the lesser, more idiosyncratic, heists of 2022) is largely a phenomenon of “vibes.” Evidence of theft is lacking, Republicans increasingly admit to pollsters. But it sure feels like their pockets were picked.
Kari Lake, who recently lost another court case, isn’t quite ready to surrender to the vibes yet. Using the kind of violent cliches that pervade MAGA rhetoric, she recently compared her state’s largest county to a “house of cards” and promised to “burn it to the ground.” With time, however, she may see the wisdom of going less MAGA, more Romanov. The tsarina Anderson eventually tired of her royal obligations and settled down to a long, eccentric life in Virginia. There’s no reason that Anastasia of Arizona can’t obtain similar comforts. After all, you can’t fool all the people all the time, and, after a while, the effort truly is exhausting.
The House GOP’s Newly Revealed Backchannel Comms With Trump
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Paging Trump
I wrote last week about the one-size-fits-all quality Donald Trump brings to his conspiracy theories, offering those who are trying to use their congressional powers to do his dirty work for him, like Jim Jordan, an easy template to latch onto.
This was illustrated as Jordan and other House GOPers sent the Manhattan DA’s office a series of letters demanding testimony from DA Alvin Bragg about supposed shady coordination between the DAs office and the Biden DOJ — an assertion that traced neatly back to Trump. Jordan sent the letter less than 24 hours after Trump posted on Truth Social, elevating some Deep State conspiracy theory about the Biden DOJ planting anti-Trumpers in the DA’s office.
Of course, there’s no evidence of this at all — but it gave House Republicans an easy narrative to seize and act upon. (The letter was so over-the-top misleading that Bragg’s office, which rarely speaks about this case publicly, responded to the letter with a statement saying it wouldn’t be “intimidated” by the House GOP’s various attempts to run interference for Trump.)
At the time, Democrats like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) were openly disturbed about what looked like direct coordination between the Trump team and House Republicans’ investigative priorities. Raskin told WaPo’s Greg Sargent this:
“This is an extreme move to use the resources of Congress to interfere with a criminal investigation at the state and local level and block an indictment,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told me. He likened the aggressive GOP enforcement of absolute “impunity” for Trump to “the kind of political culture you find in authoritarian dictatorships.”
Then the New York Times reported last week that the coordination between Trump’s legal team and House Republicans might run even deeper than previously reported:
Mr. Trump’s lawyers have quietly pushed the Republican-led House to intervene. Last month, a Trump lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, wrote to Mr. Jordan calling on Congress to investigate the “egregious abuse of power” by what he called a “rogue local district attorney,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.
That leads us to Tuesday, when CNN published an in-depth look at the extensive coordination between Trump’s team and top Republican members of Congress on issues not just tied to the House GOP’s latest attempt to probe Bragg’s investigation into Trump and the Stormy Daniels hush money payments. Donald Trump himself is not only in direct communications with influential members of the new House majority, like House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, but some House Republicans are taking it upon themselves to keep Trump personally apprised of the status of their investigations.
This bit from CNN is worth the read:
Stefanik and Trump spoke several times last week alone, where she walked him through the GOP’s plans for an aggressive response to Bragg.
GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who serves on the House Oversight Committee, which is conducting a number of investigations into President Joe Biden, also speaks to Trump on a frequent basis. Both she and Stefanik have endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential bid and are said to be interested in serving as his running mate.
“I keep him up on everything that we’re doing,” Greene told CNN. “He seems very plugged in at all times. Sometimes I’m shocked at how he knows all these things. I’m like, ‘How do you know all this stuff?’”
Multiple sources tell CNN that Trump and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan speak regularly but declined to divulge whether those conversations included Jordan’s investigative efforts.
Indictment Watch
Take The Stand
Dominion indicated in a court filing this week that it wants some of Fox News’ most well-known figures to testify in person when the voting machine company’s defamation case goes to trial. Among those Dominion is interested in grilling IRL: hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham, and Bret Baier, as well as Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott and Fox News president Jay Wallace.
The company also said that it wants to hear from Abby Grossberg, the Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo show producer who sued Fox News last week arguing her employer’s attorneys tried to force her to take the blame for the network repeatedly surfacing lies about the 2020 election.
RELATED: Fox tries to stop Rupert Murdoch from testifying in person at the Dominion trial.
The supposed reason for why Murdoch can’t testify in person? The 92-year-old just got engaged and is going to be traveling more in the coming year.
ALSO: Barack Obama lays into Murdoch’s polarization of society.
Pence Must Testify
While the former Veep was granted an exemption from providing records and testifying about his official duties as president of the Senate, D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg ruled that Pence must testify about conversations he had with Trump leading up to the insurrection.
Bannon Trolls East Palestine
Just when you thought he couldn’t get grosser!
Steve Bannon brought his grifting game to East Palestine, Ohio on Tuesday, apparently using his appearance at a town hall to go after the Biden administration, praise Trump and offer people coupons for $80 off water filtration systems from My Patriot Supply.
‘We’re Not Gonna Fix It’
This nihilistic take is brought to you by none other than Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) in response to the school shooting in his state Monday. Burchett argued that there’s nothing the government can do to stop school shootings because “criminals are gonna be criminals.”
“It’s a horrible, horrible situation,” Burchett told reporters. “And we’re not gonna fix it.”
“My daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me … ‘Buddy, if somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it,’” he added.
Burchett also argued there’s not “any real role” for Congress to play in addressing gun violence, other than to “mess things up.”
RELATED: Fear pervades Tennessee’s trans community amid focus on Nashville shooter’s gender identity
- “You don’t know if (the shooter’s gender identity) is going to trigger a community of people who already hated us to come and try to shoot us to prove a point,” one trans drag performer told NBC News. “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of hurt going on, there’s a lot of anger going on, there’s a lot of confusion going on.”
- “We were already fearing for our lives. Now, it’s even worse,” a trans activist said.
Disturbing Deets
A juror who participated in the Oath Keeper’s trial, where four defendants were convicted of obstructing Congress last week, shared some disturbing details from the court room, including claiming that a defense attorney pushed his client, William Isaacs, who has autism, to have a breakdown on the stand.
“His defense attorney tried to get him to fall apart by yelling at him and not letting him wear his headset,” Ellen recalled. “He was torturing his client to get us to feel sympathy.”
More here.
Layers Of Nonsense
My colleague Kate Riga unpacks McCarthy’s latest bad-faith attempt to somehow pin the blame for his party’s debt ceiling hijacking on President Biden:
It’s McCarthy, not Biden, who is determined not to let the impending debt limit deadline pass without using it as leverage to get political concessions from the President. The White House has maintained that the time for such negotiations is when Congress has to pass a budget — as it did last year, and will do later this year — not when it must raise the debt ceiling to avoid sending the country into default on its debts.
Banned For Life Unless Youngkin Likes You
Gov. Glenn Youngkin quietly announced in a letter to state lawmakers last week that he is, essentially, giving himself the power to pick and choose who gets to vote and who doesn’t in Virginia moving forward. The move applies specifically to previously incarcerated individuals.
Youngkin told lawmakers that he plans to rescind former Democratic Gov. Ralph Norman’s policy of restoring voting rights to people with felony convictions once they’re released from prison and said that previously incarcerated people will only have their right to vote restored if Youngkin decides they are worthy. He said he will evaluate individuals on a case-by-case basis.
New Attack On Abortion In Idaho
Republicans in the state have come up with a new term, “abortion trafficking,” to justify the latest anti-abortion bill GOPers are pushing through the state legislature, which would ban certain residents from traveling outside of the state to receive abortion care.
House Bill 242, which passed through the state House and is likely to move quickly through the Senate, seeks to limit minors’ ability to travel for abortion care without parental consent. The legislation would create a whole new crime — dubbed “abortion trafficking” — which is defined in the bill as an “adult who, with the intent to conceal an abortion from the parents or guardian of a pregnant, unemancipated minor, either procures an abortion … or obtains an abortion-inducing drug” for the minor. “Recruiting, harboring, or transporting the pregnant minor within this state commits the crime of abortion trafficking,” the legislation adds.
Empowering The Reactionary Minority
New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie offers one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive takes yet on what the GOP’s push for “parents’ rights” really means and who it is designed to embolden.
The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.
Where’s Sarah Koenig?
Adnan Syed’s conviction reinstated by Maryland appellate court panel.
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Ken Paxton Calls For Texas To ‘Test’ Key SCOTUS Immigration Ruling By Flouting It
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) told Texas legislators that they should position the state to “test” a 2012 Supreme Court decision affirming that only the federal government can conduct immigration enforcement.
Continue reading “Ken Paxton Calls For Texas To ‘Test’ Key SCOTUS Immigration Ruling By Flouting It”Where Things Stand: Eastman Helpfully Explains Why A Fringe Legal Theory Before SCOTUS Is So Dangerous
The Supreme Court, you’ll know from TPM, is currently considering a case in which Republican legislators from North Carolina argue that they, and no one else, have absolute authority over that state’s federal elections. The state courts don’t, the state governor doesn’t. Only the legislators do, they claim.
For this reason, the legislators argue, they can go ahead and gerrymander to their hearts’ content.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Eastman Helpfully Explains Why A Fringe Legal Theory Before SCOTUS Is So Dangerous”Judge Eviscerates Peter Navarro’s Argument To Keep Encrypted Emails
Peter Navarro, Trump’s former trade adviser and a notable Big Lie evangelist, has been trying to hold onto hundreds of emails from his White House career. A federal judge just shut down his argument—again.
Continue reading “Judge Eviscerates Peter Navarro’s Argument To Keep Encrypted Emails”