The Manhattan district attorney’s office has hired a former senior Justice Department official to join the office’s criminal probe into former president Donald Trump.
The new hire is another sign that District Attorney Alvin Bragg is taking decisive action to kickstart the inquiry that had previously seemed stalled out. What exactly has prompted the rejuvenation of the DA’s investigation remains unclear.
Continue reading “Manhattan DA’s Case Against Trump Heats Up After Stalling Out”We know that before the pandemic there were political fringes on the right and left which opposed vaccination. But the idea that politics would have anything to do with whether you got your flu shot would have seemed strange. Now, however, we’re seeing another concrete downstream effect of anti-vaccine activism on the right.
We’re now in the midst of a pretty bad flu season. That appears mostly due to the fact that the population has been relatively insulated from contagious respiratory diseases for going on three years. Our immune systems are out of practice. But it’s not only that. Vaccination rates are also down. New data show that vaccination rates among US children are down 4.8% compared to before the pandemic. But the details tell a more specific story. Vaccination rates among Black and Hispanic children are still slightly behind where they were pre-pandemic. Among white children however, the rates are down more than 7%.
Continue reading “Flu Shots Drop Dramatically Among White Kids”Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani spent much of Monday defending his efforts to reverse the result of the 2020 election before an attorneys disciplinary committee, flailing and muttering as he attempted to elide questions about his conduct.
Continue reading “Giuliani Dissembles And Defends 2020 Plots As He Fights To Keep DC Law License”Former Miami Congressman David Rivera (R-FL) arrested on federal charges tied to a consulting contract with a Venezuelan oil company. The charges contained in the indictment are yet to be unsealed.
Ronna McDaniel has now served three terms as head of the RNC, almost entirely on the basis of being the choice of Donald Trump. Her loyalty was so great she agreed to change her name for him. Professionally known as Ronna Romney McDaniel until 2017, she dropped her middle-family name reportedly to please Trump. Now she has drawn what appears to be her first serious challenger for a close to unprecedented fourth term, Harmeet Dhillon. (MyPillow guy Mike Lindell is running. But that’s a longshot.)
Continue reading “Loyalty Is A One Way Street”TPM Reader JB has this just right …
Continue reading “Everyone On the Record”I appreciated your latest piece about how to use Trump’s latest insane outburst against him. I wonder if it would be useful to have the House and Senate individually pass resolutions affirming the Constitution and condemning Trump’s outburst. If they vote against it, I could see adds in 2 years about how so-and-so Republican voted against the Constitution and effectively for its “termination.”
Over the weekend, apparently in response to Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” nothingburger, ex-President Donald Trump demanded that the U.S. Constitution be “terminated” and he be reinstalled in the presidential office. A number of you have written in to say, isn’t this a big deal? Shouldn’t you be making a bigger deal of it?
There are many ways to respond to this question, one of which is: here I am writing about it. But on a very basic level, what’s new? Talk is cheap. Trump actually launched an unsuccessful coup attempt two years ago. In the subsequent two years he has repeatedly demanded that he be illegally and unconstitutionally restored to power. My point is not to say this is no big deal but to keep our feet firmly planted on the ground recognizing that this is the political world we’ve been operating in for two years. It is, as far as I know, new that Trump has specifically said the Constitution should be done away with once and for all. But it really just puts the bow on an already wrapped present.
Continue reading “Hang it Around Their Necks”House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) warned on Sunday that the small but mighty chorus of MAGA-aligned holdouts opposing his speakership bid could squander the slim majority House Republicans have if they don’t come together with the rest of the caucus and support him.
Continue reading “McCarthy Finally Pulls Slim-Majority Card To Get MAGA Holdouts In Line”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
It was a crazy news weekend, but nothing topped this.
The ousted former president called for terminating the Constitution and reinstalling himself as chief executive. This is the United States circa 2022.
The reaction to Trump’s jihad against the rule of law was immediate and widespread except where it’s needed most: “GOP lawmakers largely silent after Trump suggests ‘termination’ of Constitution”
If you’re looking for a silver lining, it’s Trump’s admission of intent for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election:
Apparent attacks on two electrical substations Saturday evening have left tens of thousands of residents of Moore County, North Carolina without power.
“Authorities have confirmed that at least two substations were damaged by gunfire on Saturday night,” the local newspaper reported.
The FBI has joined the investigation into what law enforcement is calling an “intentional” and “targeted” attack.
The whole county was under a curfew Sunday night, and schools were closed Monday.
The power outage occurred during a local drag show that had attracted protestors, but authorities were not connecting the two events yet.
Former TPMer Nick Martin has a thread on why those who monitor extremist activity are watching the Moore County case closely:
Where to even start? The weekend’s worst collision of bad faith, narcissism, conspiracizing, and navel-gazing was largely contained to Twitter, so if you missed it, be grateful.
If you’re trying to catch up on how Elon Musk enlisted Matt Taibbi do to what they billed independent autopsy of sorts on Twitter’s moderation of the Hunter Biden laptop story (I feel icky having just typed that), then do NOT use this “media” story in the NYT. Mainstream media continues to be unable to grapple with bad faith actors engaged in media manipulation.
There is almost zero value in narrating this fiasco for you, so I won’t even try. You have my permission to ignore this story (I know that counts for very little). If you must delve into the Hunter Biden laptop sludge, here’s a good, grounding article from earlier this year to check off that box.
The 25-year-old niece of former New Jersey Gov. Christie (R) was pulled off a plane in New Orleans on Thanksgiving Day after she allegedly asked a family onboard that she perceived to be Latino if they were “smuggling cocaine,” law enforcement said.
Shannon Epstein then proceeded to allegedly bite, kick, and spit at sheriffs deputies who arrived to arrest her.
In the scuffle, she injured six deputies, biting one on the arm and breaking the skin, and kicking another in the groin, Rivarde said. They were treated there by paramedics. …
Seven deputies were needed to handcuff Epstein to a wheelchair, so that she could be moved to the airport security office, Rivarde said. She continued to shout vulgarities and try to bite deputies, he added.
Here’s the kicker:
All the while, Epstein shouted that the deputies were going to lose their jobs or end up in jail, boasting that she was related to powerful people and that her uncle is a friend of former President Donald Trump …
Early voting in the Georgia Senate runoff ended Friday but not before the state twice broke its own single-day record for early voting. Election Day is tomorrow. CNN’s closing poll showed Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) leading Republican nominee Herschel Walker 52-48 among likely voters.
Alan Dershowitz was among the lawyers for losing GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake who were sanctioned by a federal judge for making false and unsupported claims in her pre-election lawsuit seeking to change Arizona’s voting mechanisms.
Big changes afoot in the schedule of Democrats’ presidential primaries.
Moving up: South Carolina
Moving down: Iowa
Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been fired from the informal 2024 presidential campaign of Ye, the music star formerly known as Kanye West.
Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, whose April speech defending herself against a right-wing smear went viral, was a hit at Saturday’s Gridiron Club dinner:
The weekend’s pyroclastic flows came a year to the day after a previous eruption killed 50 people:
Longtime Sesame Street mainstay Bob McGrath has died at 90.
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I really hope Raphael Warnock wins the runoff election in Georgia this week. That’s an understatement. It’s hard for me to imagine what Herschel Walker winning would even be like. But set that aside. There’s an important dimension of this and the Kelly race in Arizona. If Warnock wins, both of these guys will have won two successive Senate contests in two years in states that have been considered off limits for Democrats for years. One cycle can be a fluke. But these are two successive cycles under dramatically different political conditions.
Continue reading “These Are Two Strong Candidates”
