MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s been in legal hot water for a while now, with voting tech firms Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic both suing him earlier this year for defamation over his ceaseless lies about voter fraud.
And things just got even worse for the pillow pitchman.
Continue reading “Alright, What’s Going On With Pillow Man?”Former President Trump finally articulated clearly in a Wednesday night interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity an argument that he and his attorneys have been suggesting for a long time: that Trump, by virtue of being President, had unlimited powers to declassify, and that he could do so instantaneously.
Continue reading “Trump Knew The Right Way To Declassify Documents”Hardline conservative activist Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has agreed to give testimony in front of the House Jan. 6 Committee in the coming weeks, according to her attorney.
Continue reading “Ginni Thomas Agrees To Testify In Front Of Jan. 6 Committee”There was a scramble at Delaware Coastal Airport near Georgetown, Delware Tuesday as state authorities and immigrant support organizations rushed to be ready to receive a plane filled with migrants from Texas. The DeSantis administration leaked word to reporters in Florida about the flight. There was no official word from anyone in Delaware but rumors abounded that such a flight was on its way from Texas and would arrive by 1:30 p.m. But the plane never showed. Courtesy of TPM Reader DC we have a report on the commotion here. Later, DeSantis spokesperson Christine Pushaw tweeted that the whole flight rumor was “disinformation.” But it wasn’t. Venezuelan migrants in San Antonio had been recruited. A charter flight had been booked.
Continue reading “‘Perla’ Behind Another Flight and Stranded Migrants”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
A three-judge panel of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled unanimously yesterday to temporarily block Judge Aileen Cannon’s shocking order in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, allowing Justice Department investigators to access the classified material the FBI seized from Trump’s Florida resort.
Yesterday dealt Trump perhaps the worst one-two legal punch that he’s ever endured, with the New York state lawsuit against his companies on top of the setback at the 11th Circuit. So much to digest:
Just you wait until Trump blows judicial minds with this new argument he made during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity last night:
Don’t focus on the crazy start of this. Focus on the end.
“If you’re the President of the US, you can declassify just by saying, it’s declassified, even by thinking about it. Because you’re sending it to MAL, *or to wherever you’re sending it.*
The House Jan. 6 Committee on Tuesday reached an agreement with far-right activist Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, for her to testify in a voluntary interview sometime in the coming weeks.
New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) on Wednesday slapped Trump and his three adult children who helped him run the Trump Organization–Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric Trump–with a massive lawsuit accusing the ex-president of engaging in years of fraud with his businesses.
The Presidential Elections Reform Act, aka the House Jan. 6 Committee’s proposed guardrails to keep Trump from triggering another Jan. 6, passed 229-203 in the House yesterday. All the “no” votes were Republicans; just nine voted “yes.”
“‘Death to the dictator’: Videos show growing protests in Iran” – The Washington Post
House Jan. 6 Committee member Pete Aguilar (D-CA) told Politico yesterday that the panel has received new information on what then-Vice President Mike Pence was doing as Trump tried to pressure him into stealing the 2020 election.
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Big trouble. Pillow capo Mike Lindell is under federal investigation for identity theft and damaging a protected computer tied to that the big voting equipment breach in Colorado.
A three judge panel of the 11th circuit has granted the Justice Department motion to stay a key part of Judge Cannon’s recent special master ruling. Cannon ruled that they could not continue using the classified documents in their criminal investigation while the special master, Judge Dearie, is doing his work. This three judge panel has overruled Cannon on that point. It’s an important win for the DOJ, though it is perhaps slightly less consequential since Judge Dearie has signaled he plans to move rapidly to do his review. Two of the three judges are Trump appointees.
Continue reading “Circuit Court Gives Feds Partial Stay of Judge Cannon Order”Politico just put out data from a new poll it conducted a few months back and the results are worth flagging: While most Republicans believe that the idea of Christian nationalism is unconstitutional, most also support declaring the U.S. a Christian nation.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Most Republicans Are Down To Declare US A Christian Nation”The public got a sneak peak at what appeared to be House Republicans’ “Commitment to America,” a party platform to be unveiled Friday, when the plan briefly went live online Wednesday before being pushed behind a password.
Continue reading “Leaked House GOP Platform Uses Shorthand For Extreme Anti-Abortion Position”The long shadow of January 6th stretches far beyond the Capitol complex: As we’ve known for some time, right before the riot, conservative lawyer John Eastman tried to harness the vague 135-year-old Electoral Count Act (ECA) to help Trump steal the election.
That effort ultimately failed to keep Trump in power, but the Big Lie gave the far-right plenty of room to push baseless conspiracy theories about the nation’s electoral system, allowing election denialism to become somewhat of a campaign platform for Trump loyalists running in the midterms.
That’s why two separate bills have popped up in Congress in recent months, as lawmakers attempt to plug holes in the parts of the statute that Trump’s cronies tried to exploit two years ago.
On Monday, House Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced the Presidential Elections Reform Act, which aims to overhaul the existing ECA and clarify what roles legislators are supposed to play in the vote certification process. The bill was passed on Wednesday evening 229-203, with just nine Republicans joining Democrats to support the measure.
This bipartisan proposal follows the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, a similar effort proposed by the Senate back in July, which currently has the GOP support needed to overcome the filibuster in the upper chamber.
The ECA became a political focus in 2021, when it was revealed that former Trump lawyer Eastman authored a memo sent to at least one Republican senator thatoutlined a six-point plan on how to use the statute to commandeer the vote certification process.
He asserted that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to choose which electors to certify “without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court.”
His theory — which has since been debunked to hell — rests on the fact that the century-old ECA consists of vague language that leaves unclear what role the vice president plays and renders the vote certification process vulnerable to bad-faith objections.
Since the violent Capitol insurrection, lawmakers in both chambers have vowed to study reforms that might prevent the next Jan. 6. The revelations following the attack about Eastman’s memo and then-DOJ official Jeffrey Clark’s fake electors scheme have only bolstered reform efforts.
Since at least November 2021, there has been talk on the Hill of looking at changes to the ECA, and around February this year, a bipartisan group of senators began seriously looking at rectifying the law, resulting in the proposal the group put forward in July.
The House and Senate bills are similar in scope: Not only do they clarify that the vice president’s role is purely ministerial, they try to circumvent what legal scholar and ECA expert Matthew Seligman calls a “Rogue Governor scenario,” in which a governor in a swing state submits fake electors to support the losing candidate the way Clark and other Trump allies tried to do in a bid to change the outcome of the 2020 election.
“Both bills provide for judicial review in federal court, so the aggrieved candidate can challenge the governor’s certification,” Seligman explained. “Both bills attempt to bind Congress to count electoral votes cast by those electors, and only those electors, who are blessed by that federal court adjudication.”
Both the House and Senate bills would edit the parts of the that law permit states to appoint electors after Election Day if the state fails to do so, clarifying that the exception only applies to “catastrophic events.” The bills also aim to prevent legislators from appointing electors after Election Day despite extenuating circumstances.
The House bill goes a step further by clarifying that if the rogue governor tries to defy a court order on electors, the court can designate another state official to submit a legitimate certificate.
“It tries to make it clear that the chief executive has a responsibility to certify the vote totals, and that there can be a lawsuit if [they] fail to do that, especially the governor,” Josh Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky, told TPM. “I think the goal is to streamline and make it clear that you can’t have competing officials in a state refusing to certify election results.”
Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania has already been eyed as a potential rogue governor. A devout supporter of the Big Lie who has run his campaign almost entirely on Trump’s 2020 election grievances, Mastriano attended the Trump rally on January 6—along thousands of others he shepherded to the Capitol on buses. If elected, he’d have the power to choose Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, who’s in charge of certifying vote tallies.
Seligman argues that neither bill addresses the amount or complication of litigation that will arise if a governor triggers this kind of court battle over electors. “Both bills provide for federal court review in certain circumstances—but even under current law, lawsuits challenging,” for example, “a rogue governor, will happen.”
While there is risk of a prolonged legal battle over the election results in 2024, “that litigation would be much more orderly and provide sounder adjudication under either bill than under current law,” he said.
