Wow, Rupert Murdoch Is Fox News’ Own Worst Witness

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Pass The Effing Popcorn

Dominion Voting Systems is absolutely going to town on Fox News in its billion-dollar defamation suit, and it’s using the network’s 91-year-old billionaire mogul as cannon fodder in the effort.

Rupert Murdoch’s own recent deposition testimony turned out to be absolutely devastating for the crown jewel of his media empire.

In a new filing in the case yesterday that mirrored but also expanded upon some of Dominion’s most eye-popping revelations from a week and a half ago, Murdoch emerges as making one damning admission after another. Let’s run through the best bits:

Did Murdoch Believe The Bogus Claims Against Dominion? No, He Did Not

Murdoch Gave Jared Kushner Sneak Peek At Biden Ads!

Murdoch Admits Fox News Hosts ‘Endorsed’ Bogus Dominion Claims

This admission undermines Fox News neutral report defense:

Murdoch Is All About That Green

Fox Board Member Paul Ryan Warned The Murdochs

The Dominion case really is starting to look like not just a landmark legal case but perhaps a watershed historical moment. The American descent towards authoritarianism, minority rule, and insurrection doesn’t happen without Fox News. It doesn’t happen only because of Fox News, but it’s been a critical ingredient in the toxic stew of misinformation, grievance, and division.

Didn’t See This Coming

Signs emerged yesterday that House Republicans as a whole aren’t completely onboard with Speaker McCarthy’s wholesale turning over of the Jan. 6 surveillance footage to Tucker Carlson.

I want to be careful about not overstating what’s going on here, because it’s subtle.

On the surface, some House GOPers seem concerned about the security implications, or at least the public perceptions involved. You can see that new wobbliness even from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA):

Another dynamic, which I find more amusing than telling, is that some astute House GOPers are concerned about another round of extensive media coverage of footage showing the violent attack on the Capitol, according to CNN. You might say there’s only so much laundering and manipulating of the footage that Tucker Carlson can do. The insurrection is still a bad look for Republicans! Laugh or cry. Your choice.

A final dynamic here is the issue of Carlson being the only one with access. Many major media outlets have been clamoring for access to all the footage for years now. Some House Republicans seem to favor a wider release than the one McCarthy has orchestrated so far. Just keep in mind, though, that may not be as much about opening up the footage to more mainstream news outlets, but also to the news and propaganda operations to the right of Fox News.

Santos Wannabe Kinda Sorta Comes Clean

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) copped to some but not all of his falsehoods about his resume and background in a new statement Monday.

DeSantis Completes Takeover Of Disney

This remains such a wild story on so many levels. Disney with its own special taxing district in Florida that it controlled singlehandedly for decades. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) asserting his own power over the district to punish Disney in a performative way for its “wokeness” sins in opposing his “Don’t Say Gay” law. Now DeSantis appointing conservative firebrands and his own donors to the board overseeing the district and making noises about having a say in Disney content.

Blast From The Past

The Senate is working towards repealing the AUMFs for Iraq from 1991 and 2002, Punchbowl reports. The measure is expected to win majority support in the House, too. But rather than representing some kind of historic reckoning, it just reinforces Congress’ self-imposed irrelevance in matters of war and peace. Congress finally acting now just shows it’s an ongoing problem, not some moment of epiphany.

SCOTUS Takes Up Biden Student Debt Relief Plan

Oral arguments today before a conservative Supreme Court generally considered hostile to President Biden’s student loan debt relief plan.

2024 Ephemera

Fox News Being Fox News

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House Chief Counsel Douglas Letter On The Biggest Battles Of The Trump Administration

Posted on by John Light

This article 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.

As chief U.S. House counsel for four years, Douglas Letter advised then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi through tense legal standoffs with the Trump administration. He helped shape strategy for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, leading to contempt of Congress charges against Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro and subpoenas for five sitting members of Congress.

Now, Letter, a Justice Department attorney for 40 years, has begun a new role as legal counsel for the Brady campaign, defending victims of gun violence and taking on gun laws, such as a local statute in Highland Park, Illinois, that restricts assault weapons like one used in a July 4 parade massacre. Letter said he carries with him lessons learned counseling House Democrats as they faced growing partisan hostilities and concerns for their safety.

In recent interviews, Letter talked about the highlights of his years as House general counsel and his reasons for joining forces with Brady. These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

You led the court fight for release of President Trump’s tax returns and served as counsel on the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election. Which of the many cases you handled do you consider the most legally significant?

You’re asking me to choose among my children? One is the census case. The Trump administration illegally attempted to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. And during litigation, lots of evidence was put in the record that they were doing so for a very bad purpose, which was to keep down the count of Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans. So we joined a batch of states and others who were challenging the validity of that. I argued before the Supreme Court, and it’s an interesting opinion. The Supreme Court ruled in our favor, upholding the lower courts, and wrote a fairly narrow opinion but one that is quite meaningful. This was the first time that the Supreme Court had ruled that it did not trust the explanation given by the executive branch. The lower courts had held that the executive branch had acted in bad faith in making it seem like there was a valid justification for doing this. And the evidence showed that that was not true — that the Commerce Department folks who are in charge had asked the Justice Department to basically cook up a rationale. The Supreme Court affirmed and said that the citizenship question had to be stricken. I was very proud of that.

What about Trump v. Mazars, the fight by the House Ways and Means Committee to win the release of six years of President Trump’s personal and business tax returns? That litigation began in 2019 and dragged on until late 2022, just before Congress changed hands.

That’s where we sought private financial information about the president through his accountants and through his bankers. He argued that the House absolutely could not do that. The Supreme Court rejected that argument and said, “That’s absolutely wrong.” The Supreme Court then set a new test that the House had to meet in order to get these materials but did not say we couldn’t get them. Remember, we’re talking about the personal information of the president, and we ended up getting much of the material we wanted. So for us, that was a major victory. The problem was it just took too long.

After Trump left office, you guided legal strategy for the Jan. 6 select committee. What lessons did you learn fighting Trump supporters for documents and testimony?

After the Trump administration ended, the Jan. 6 committee asked the National Archives for the official records of the Trump White House. A federal law passed during Richard Nixon’s time said that those records belong to the people of the United States. President Biden determined that much of the Trump material in the archives was not protected by executive privilege or any other privileges. President Trump disagreed. His argument was completely rejected by the D.C. Circuit Court, a very fast, very thoughtful opinion. And again, the Supreme Court in its shadow docket refused to issue a stay. So all sorts of extremely relevant material was then made available in tranches to the Jan. 6 committee over the next couple of months. That reconfirmed what we already knew, which was that these papers belong to the people of the United States.

You defended Pelosi in a lawsuit brought by three GOP members who were fined for failing to pass through a magnetometer at the House entrance. What did that case — which was thrown out but is now being appealed — reveal about partisan tensions in the House?

Well, It scares me that some members apparently think that it’s okay to bring guns onto the floor of the chamber of the House. If you’re in the House chamber, with all sorts of safety restrictions, you shouldn’t have a major need for self-defense. On more than one occasion, I saw what looked like some members who might go after each other, including during the recent election of Speaker McCarthy. But people intervened, and cooler heads prevailed.

I successfully defended the magnetometer case. But then the new Republican leadership of the House decided to change the policy. That’s their call. We live in a democracy. But Speaker Pelosi, I thought very justifiably, put those measures in place for the protection of other members and staff and security people.

What convinced you to join the Brady campaign?

I was talking to my daughter one morning, and she said she was terrified to send her kids to preschool. Now there are a number of reasons schools can be scary to kids — social reasons — but to be scared because they could get murdered? I’d be stunned if there are many parents in the United States today who don’t have that feeling at one time or another.

And one thing that Brady has pointed out is that Jan. 6 taught us that gun laws work. Some of the crowd were not just people who got carried away by the moment. These were people who had a definite plan set when they came to Washington. And they knew that D.C. had significant gun restrictions. These people cached their weapons in Virginia, across the river. What that meant was that these groups, heavily armed people with very dangerous weaponry, their guns were not at hand because of D.C.’s restrictions. So think about how much worse Jan. 6 — which was horrible — could have been if these people had had their substantial weaponry nearby.

Were you surprised by the catcalls from some Republican members in the House gallery during President Biden’s State of the Union address?

I’m appalled that this is the way the president of the United States would be treated by certain members of Congress as he is speaking. There are rules of decorum, right? I don’t want to sound like some old curmudgeon, you know, “the kids these days.” It seems to me that there are rules of decorum that are to be followed, just as in the military. The Joint Chiefs behave themselves, and, overwhelmingly, the Supreme Court justices behave themselves during the State of the Union. I would expect the members of Congress to do so as well.

Murdoch Passed Confidential Biden Info To Kushner

Posted on by Josh Marshall

There’s lots of coverage, quite properly, of Rupert Murdoch admitting that he knew from the beginning that all the Big Lie claims were bogus while allowing numerous Fox hosts to repeat the lies for months. But there’s been less, though some, focus on the revelation that he personally gave Jared Kushner confidential information about Biden campaign ads and debate strategy. Here’s the passage from the court filing (emphasis added).

During Trump’s campaign, Rupert provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy. Ex.600, R.Murdoch 210:6-9; 213:17-20; Ex.603 (providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public). But, on election night, Rupert would not help with the Arizona call. As Rupert described it: “My friend Jared Kushner called me saying, ‘This is terrible,’ and I could hear Trump’s voice in the background shouting.” Ex.600, R.Murdoch 65:6-8. But Rupert refused to budge: “And I said, ‘Well, the numbers are the numbers.’”

I don’t find any of this shocking. But it’s notable to get it admitted officially and formally in court.

Does This “Bipartisan” Group Include No Democrats?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I am very curious about this. Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig reports that what the article calls a “bipartisan group” of senators is working a plan for various cuts to Social Security including raising the retirement age and changing the cost of living formula to phase in mounting benefit cuts over time. (They also have the idea of creating a sovereign wealth fund to put excess Social Security taxes into.) But the only senators mentioned in the article are Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Mike Rounds (South Dakota), both Republicans, and Angus King (Maine), who is an independent.

Now King does caucus with the Democrats. So he is part of their 51 seat majority. But this is a still a pretty strange definition of “bipartisan” since the article at least includes no Democrats.

Continue reading “Does This “Bipartisan” Group Include No Democrats?” →

Where Things Stand: The Only One Of DeSantis’ Stunt Voter Fraud Cases To Make It To Trial Ends In Probation

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

While it’s been clear ever since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the creation of his political-stunt election-crimes task force almost a year ago that the entire endeavor was designed to curry favor with voters who are all-in on election denialism, we’ve been tracking what’s come out of each of the “voter fraud” cases rather closely.

Nearly every single one of the cases tried thus far have gone nowhere, adding to the rather solid hypothesis that the arrests and creation of the task force were all done in service of DeSantis and his 2024 bid — which he hasn’t yet announced.

Continue reading “Where Things Stand: The Only One Of DeSantis’ Stunt Voter Fraud Cases To Make It To Trial Ends In Probation” →

Greg Craig’s Hopelessly, Inexplicably, Unbelievably Stupid OpEd in the Times

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Greg Craig, impeachment lawyer for Bill Clinton and briefly the White House counsel for Barack Obama, has fallen a lot in standing among Democrats over the last decade. But there’s always further to fall. Today he has a piece in the Times arguing that to take account of his age, Joe Biden should announce that he is going to leave the choice of his vice presidential nominee in 2024 up to Democratic voters. In other words, a contested primary for vice president. I should give you this context: I’m not a big Kamala Harris partisan. I started off as one but her performance in the 2020 primaries — before she got the veep nod — made me question her political and campaign instincts. But this is such a spectacularly bad idea that it’s barely possible for me to understand how this piece even got published let alone how Craig came up with the idea.

Continue reading “Greg Craig’s Hopelessly, Inexplicably, Unbelievably Stupid OpEd in the Times” →

GOP Rep. Ogles Admits He Misrepresented His College Major

Posted on by Emine Yücel

Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-TN) acknowledged for the first time on Monday that he did not receive an international relations degree from Middle Tennessee State University. 

Continue reading “GOP Rep. Ogles Admits He Misrepresented His College Major” →

Bring it The F**K on ….

Posted on by Josh Marshall

In recent days I’ve seen every major paper write a version of the How Did This Tragic Train Derailment Become a New Culture War story. I didn’t need to ask myself whether any of them gave the actual answer, which I think most of us know. How is it that a train derailment caused by a major GOP-donating corporation, in a state run by a Republican governor, caused at least in part by regulations rolled back by Republican President Donald Trump … well, how exactly is that a story about Democrats not caring about people in “flyover country”? The Republican crackpot investigations complex is even now prepping to hold hearings about it.

Continue reading “Bring it The F**K on ….” →

Slotkin Announces Bid For Michigan Senate Seat in 2024

Posted on by Emine Yücel

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) announced on Monday she will be running for Senate, entering a race expected to be a key battleground in the fight to control the chamber in 2024.

Continue reading “Slotkin Announces Bid For Michigan Senate Seat in 2024” →

Fox News Holds Its Own Media Reporter Hostage As Defamation Case Plays Out

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Howard Kurtz’s Cry For Help

For anyone who’s observed Fox News media reporter Howard Kurtz (no relation) over the years, this is a comedy-rich situation.

His network is facing what could be a historic, billion dollar defamation case by Dominion Voting Systems. The case has already revealed the corrosive, corrupt, self-serving, and deeply compromised inner workings of the Fox News operations. It puts the network at the center of promulgating the Big Lie that culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection, produced a second impeachment of Donald Trump, and may yet lead to criminal charges against the former president. In other words, it’s the biggest story of our time — and Howie has been sidelined by his Fox News bosses, he revealed Sunday:

What’s On Scott Perry’s Phone???

We finally got to see the judge’s order allowing the Justice Department to access most of the records on the phone of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA). Unsealed late Friday, but still partially redacted, the Dec. 28 order by the chief district judge in D.C. gave DOJ the go-ahead to review more than 2,000 records.

But, as you’ll recall, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals put that order on hold while it considered Perry’s appeal. Perry argues that the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause bars the executive branch from accessing his phone as part of its criminal investigation. Oral arguments were held on the appeal Thursday. The case is being closely watched in part because former Vice President Mike Pence is also expected to use the Speech or Debate Clause to avoid complying with a grand jury subpoena in the Jan. 6 investigation.

Howell ordered Perry to turn over 2,055 text messages, emails and attachments. She sided with him on some 161 other records on the phone, which DOJ was denied access to.

“What is plain is that the Clause does not shield Rep. Perry’s random musings with private individuals touting an expertise in cybersecurity or political discussions with attorneys from a presidential campaign, or with state legislators concerning hearings before them about possible local election fraud or actions they could take to challenge election results in Pennsylvania,” Howell wrote in her order.

The extent of the public reveals during Perry’s appeal seems to have prompted Chief Judge Beryl Howell to release the previously secret order. Howell last week had turned away media requests to make public some of the still-secret grand jury proceedings around claims of executive privilege raised by former President Trump.

Perry’s phone was seized by the FBI back in August. So we’re now six months into the legal battle over accessing its contents, just one of many threads of the investigation into the 2020 election subversion effort.

Will This Be Indictment Week In Georgia?

Joyce Vance tees up what could be a historic week, with a chance of a Trump indictment out of Georgia.

Katie Hobbs Goes After Former AG For Big Lie

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has asked the state bar to examine whether former state Attorney General Mark Brnovich violated ethics rules when he buried findings from his office that debunked the Big Lie in the 2020 election.

Leonard Leo of Federalist Society Fame Targets ESG

WSJ:

A conservative nonprofit called Marble Freedom Trust and its consulting firm, CRC Advisors, are leading the anti-ESG push and have spent more than $10 million on the effort so far, mostly through the group Consumers’ Research, people familiar with the spending said.

The trust is overseen by Leonard Leo, a longtime leader at the Federalist Society, a network of lawyers that grooms conservative scholars, officials and judges. Mr. Leo helped former President Donald Trump choose conservative Supreme Court justices.

Dilbert Dumped After Scott Adams’ Racist Screed

Publishers raced to drop the long-running comic strip after Scott Adams’ offensive comments last week on his YouTube show about Black people being a “hate group.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk raced to Adams’ defense.

Energy Dept. Shifts Its Assessment Of COVID Origins

The U.S. intel community has long been divided over and unsure of the origins of the COVID virus. The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that one component of the IC — the Energy Department — has now shifted its assessment from the origins of COVID being uncertain to the pandemic originating with an accidental leak from a Chinese lab.

Until DOE made this shift, the FBI was the only IC component to conclude that a lab leak was the origin of COVID. The FBI is moderately confident of its assessment. DOE has low confidence in its own assessment. The remaining components of the IC are either undecided or have assessed that COVID arose from natural origins.

This was a highly contentious debate in the early days of the pandemic, with China hardliners, MAGA World and the Trump administration keen to pin the outbreak on China.

Scientific uncertainty is the norm, but that doesn’t always fit well in the current political moment.

Hang MTG On Them Every Time

Make Republicans own her:

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