The FBI and DHS put out a bulletin last week announcing that the agencies were fielding a significant uptick in violent threats being made against federal law enforcement, courts and government employees and buildings in general. Some of those targeted by the “unprecedented” surge in threats were the agents and officials listed in court records as being involved in the raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence a week ago.
Names of at least two agents who signed off on warrant-related paperwork have been circulating online for several days, adding to the specificity of the uptick in threats against the bureau as a whole. That, of course, could’ve been prevented if someone — presumably Donald Trump — hadn’t leaked unredacted versions of the warrant before it was officially unsealed, with names redacted, on Friday.
Fascinating report here from the Times’ Shane Goldmacher. The national GOP — meaning the top DC party committees and leadership PACs — appears to be significantly ramping back support for Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona and even Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Here’s the Times story and here’s Goldmacher’s Twitter thread, which I at least found easier to follow.
These stories are always a bit hard to interpret and everyone wants to jump forward with tendentious interpretations. Basically the top Senate party committee canceled a bunch of ad buy reservations in these states. Some of it is an effort to redeploy spending to less regulated parts of the campaign finance ecosystem, away from joint campaigns and hybrid spends. Some of these spending channels require the campaign to put up a minimum percentage of the spend in hard money. But the campaigns themselves are struggling financially. So they can’t afford their part.
Releasing supporting materials that convinced a judge to allow a search warrant to be executed on Mar-a-Lago last week would imperil multiple witnesses and the DOJ’s investigation, federal prosecutors said on Monday.
The scandal that erupted last week over former President Trump taking, secreting, and refusing to hand Presidential and classified records back to the government was based in a dispute that had been ongoing since he left office.
Former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann has reportedly been subpoenaed for documents and testimony by a federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, a person familiar with the matter told Politico.
Prosecutors with the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney’s office told attorneys for Rudy Giuliani that he is a target in their criminal investigation into election interference, an attorney for Giuliani told TPM.
Jack Goldsmith has a lengthy discussion at the Lawfare Blog of whether Attorney General Garland was right to seek a search warrant to search and seize records from ex-President Trump’s Florida estate. It is a good discussion, though one might say the very brazenness of Trump’s indifference to the law has a way of rendering precious or quaint any serious and deliberate discussion of potential consequences. Most of Goldsmith’s discussion can be boiled down to this: it all depends on what’s in the documents, just how secret they needed to be and what Trump was planning to do with them. And it’s hard to disagree with that — of course it does. But Goldsmith’s analysis is missing something.
A federal judge in Atlanta on Monday rejected Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) attempt to quash a subpoena to testify before a special grand jury in Fulton County, investigating former President Trump and his allies’ efforts to subvert the 2020 election results in Georgia.
John Bolton, who served as former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser for 17 months, is joining others in the national security community who are pushing back against Trump’s insistence that the classified material he unlawfully took to his Mar-a-Lago resort had been declassified.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Finders Keepers!
The ex-president took to his fake Twitter app, TRUTH Social, on Sunday to demand that the feds return the White House records he’d stashed away at his Mar-a-Lago resort that the FBI tookback in a raid last week:
(Screenshot: TRUTH Social)
Trump’s likely referring to this Fox News report claiming that some of the documents the FBI took were, in Fox’s terms, “covered by attorney-client privilege and potentially executive privilege.”
The ex-president’s dumbass request (“By copy of this TRUTH” lol) is almost certainly inspired by Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy, but you gotta love the “Oh great!” opener. Oh bother, the classified records I pilfered that the FBI seized seems to have been privileged and I want it back! Ah jeez!
House Dems Demand DNI Assess Damage Caused By Trump’s Doc Hoarding
House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) and House Oversight and Reform Committee chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) sent a request to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines on Saturday pushing for an “immediate review and damage assessment” after it was discovered that Trump was keeping classified records at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Schiff on Sunday bluntly rejectedTrump’s “absurd” claim to have retroactively declassified the documents (which definitely isn’t a thing).
Trump Lawyer Claimed In June That MAL Didn’t Have Any More Classified Docs
One of Trump’s attorneys signed a document in June claiming (falsely) that there weren’t any more classified materials stashed at the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to the New York Times, CNN and CBS News.
The written declaration came after Justice Department officials went to Mar-a-Lago on June 3 to meet with two of the ex-president’s attorneys and collect classified documents there, the Times and CBS News report. Those lawyers were M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, but we don’t know which Trump attorney signed the reported declaration (and those two aren’t Trump’s only lawyers).
The FBI seized 11 sets of classified documents in the Mar-a-Lago raid last week.
House Passes Historic Climate And Health Care Bill
The House voted to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, aka Democrats’ sweeping reconciliation bill on climate investment, Medicare drug pricing and taxes on Friday among party lines, as expected (and House Republicans ultimately abandoned a scheme to jeopardize the bill with a potential constitutional challenge brought on by them voting by proxy).
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who’s running in the 12th Congressional District Democratic primary, has been all over the place with the question of whether Biden is running for reelection in 2024, but she sounded pretty definitive in an Aug. 1 interview with the New York Times editorial board that was published on Saturday.
“Off the record, he’s not running again,” Maloney told the board when asked if Biden should go for a second term.
“On the record? No, he should not run again,” the New York congresswoman said whenone of the board members told her, “Not off the record. On the record.”
Maloney’s NYT interview was held before she publicly asserted during a primary debate that Biden wasn’t running, then awkwardly walked that back and said it was just her “own personal belief” the President wasn’t going to run again.
FWIW, Biden has maintained that he’s running again.
Iran Denies Involvement In Salman Rushdie’s Stabbing
Responding to the horrific stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie, the Iranian government on Monday denied accusations of being behind the attack, and blamed it on Rushdie himself and his supporters.
Rushdie has been taken off the ventilator and is now able to speak, the author’s agent said on Sunday.
The suspected assailant, 24-year-old Hadi Matar of New Jersey, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault on Saturday.
Man Fatally Shoots Self After Crashing Car Into Barrier Near Supreme Court
An armed man whom authorities have identified as Richard Aaron York drove a car into a barrier about 300 feet away from the Supreme Court early Sunday morning, got out of the car, fired a gun into the air several times then fatally shot himself as the U.S. Capitol Police approached him, according to law enforcement.
Nobody else was hurt, a spokesperson for the USCP reported.
A motive has not been established, according to authorities.
