September 6, 2022

Afternoon Update:

Massachusetts is holding primary elections today. The New York Times has a what-to-watch-for blog.

Hannah Rabinowitz, et al., of CNN: "A New Mexico judge on Tuesday removed January 6 rioter and Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin from his elected position as a county commissioner for his role in the US Capitol attack. The ruling was the result of a lawsuit seeking Griffin's removal, which alleged that he violated a clause in 14th Amendment of the Constitution by participating in an 'insurrection' against the US government. He had been convicted of trespassing earlier this year. The historic ruling represents the first time an elected official has been removed from office for their participation or support of the US Capitol riot. It also marks the first time a judge has formally ruled that the events of January 6, 2021, were an 'insurrection.'... Griffin, one of three commissioners in Otero County, is also barred from holding any state or federal elected position in the future, state Judge Francis Mathew ruled Tuesday."

Zachary Cohen & Jason Morris of CNN: "A Republican county official in Georgia escorted two operatives working with an attorney for ... Donald Trump into the county's election offices on the same day a voting system there was breached, newly obtained video shows. The breach is now under investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and is of interest to the Fulton County District Attorney, who is conducting a wider criminal probe of interference in the 2020 election. The video sheds more light on how an effort spearheaded by lawyers and others around Trump to seek evidence of voter fraud was executed on the ground from Georgia to Michigan to Colorado, often with the assistance of sympathetic local officials. In the surveillance video, which was obtained by CNN, Cathy Latham, a former GOP chairwoman of Coffee County who is under criminal investigation for posing as a fake elector in 2020, escorts a team of pro-Trump operatives to the county's elections office on January 7, 2021, the same day a voting system there is known to have been breached. The two men seen in the video with Latham, Scott Hall and Paul Maggio, have acknowledged that they successfully gained access to a voting machine in Coffee County at the behest of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell."

Annals of "Journalism," Ha Ha. Ha. David Folkenflik of NPR: In November 2020, a Fox "News" "producer warned: Fox cannot let host Jeanine Pirro back on the air. She is pulling conspiracy theories from dark corners of the Web to justify ... Donald Trump's lies that the election had been stolen from him.... Pirro was far from alone in broadcasting such false claims. In the weeks that followed Election Day 2020, other prominent Fox stars, commentators and their guests heavily promoted them. A repeat target was Dominion Voting Systems, the election machine and technology company. Trump and his allies alleged on Fox that Dominion was engaged in a conscious effort to throw the 2020 race to Joe Biden.... The producer's email is among the voluminous correspondence acquired by Dominion's attorneys as part of its discovery of evidence in a $1.6 billion defamation suit it filed against Fox News and its parent company." ~~~

    ~~~ Marie: I'll bet the paralegal who pulled that email from the piles of papers got the rest of the day off.

Anna Merlan of Vice: "On September 1st, Evie Magazine -- which strives to be the conservative answer to Cosmo, and which promotes COVID denialism and vaccine misinformation, soft-focus transphobia, and a weird obsession with organ meats -- announced a new venture: 28, a 'femtech' company offering workouts and nutritional tips based on users' menstrual cycles, and which requires those users to enter information about the first day of their last period. The week prior, TechCrunch announced the new venture's biggest funder: the investment firm Thiel Capital, which led the latest $3.2 million funding round, and whose founder Peter Thiel has a variety of other interests. (Those include, of late, funding the MAGA movement to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.)"

~~~~~~~~~~~

Marie: For three weeks, beginning this week, I have to be away for the good part of the first two work days of every week. So I'll do what I can to keep Reality Chex up-to-date, but there will be some lapses.

Olivia Olander of Politico: "President Joe Biden continued to add texture Monday to a recent string of criticisms against 'MAGA Republicans,' the right-most wing of the party that he's sought to distinguish from the more moderate, 'mainstream' GOP. 'I want to be very clear up front: Not every Republican is a MAGA Republican,' Biden said at a Labor Day event in Wisconsin. 'Not every Republican embraces that extreme ideology. I know because I've been able to work with mainstream Republicans in my whole career.' However, he continued: 'The extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress have chosen to go backwards, full of anger, violence, hate and division. But together we can -- and we must -- choose a different path forward.'... Biden placed Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican running to keep his seat in Wisconsin's midterm elections, squarely in the 'MAGA' camp.... A protester briefly interrupted as Biden spoke.... 'Let him go. Everybody's entitled to being an idiot,' Biden said after security grabbed the protester."

Alan Feuer & Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "A federal judge intervened on Monday in the investigation of ... Donald J. Trump's handling of sensitive government records, ordering the appointment of an independent arbiter to review a trove of materials seized last month from Mr. Trump's private club and residence in Florida. In a 24-page ruling, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, also enjoined the Justice Department from using the seized materials for any 'investigative purpose' connected to its inquiry of Mr. Trump until the work of the arbiter, known as a special master, was completed.... Her order would not, however, affect a separate review of the documents by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence seeking to determine what risk to national security their removal to Mar-a-Lago may have caused.... Judge Cannon's ruling ... permitted whoever is appointed to the job to evaluate the documents not only for those protected by attorney-client privilege, a relatively common measure, but also for those potentially shielded by executive privilege, which typically protects confidential internal executive branch deliberations.... In her order, Judge Cannon evinced concern that Mr. Trump might suffer 'reputational harm.'... She also noted that, because of the search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump faced 'unquantifiable potential harm by way of improper disclosure of sensitive information to the public.'" Politico's report is here. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I'm kinda surprised Cannon didn't order Trump never again to make another public statement inasmuch as he "suffers reputational harm" every time his opens his fat lips & the best words come out. More seriously, Cannon seems confused by the concept of three branches of government, and -- as Akhilleus & I both speculated last week -- is not competent to do the judge thing. Oh, and that one-president-at-a-time "theory"? Faggedaboudit. Moreover, the items she objected to cover matters that the government would never have presented in a case against Trump for the theft of government documents. She claimed that among the items seized were medical records & tax documents; but whether or not Trump lied about his heart rate & taxes is immaterial to the matters of espionage, theft & obstruction.

     ~~~ Update. Toljaso. Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "A federal judg's extraordinary decision on Monday to interject in the criminal investigation into ... Donald J. Trump's hoarding of sensitive government documents at his Florida residence showed unusual solicitude to him, legal specialists said. This was 'an unprecedented intervention by a federal district judge into the middle of an ongoing federal criminal and national security investigation,' said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at University of Texas.... In reaching [her] result, Judge Cannon took several steps that specialists said were vulnerable to being overturned if the government files an appeal, as most agreed was likely.... 'The opinion seems oblivious to the nature of executive privilege,' [Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at N.Y.U.,] said.... 'Even if there is some hypothetical situation in which a former president could shield his or her communications from the current executive branch,' Mr. Shane said, 'they would not be able to do so in the context of a criminal investigation -- and certainly not after the material has been seized pursuant to a lawful search warrant.'"

Adam Satariano of the New York Times: "Meta was fined roughly $400 million for breaking European Union data privacy laws for its treatment of children's data on Instagram, the latest in a series of steps by authorities in Europe and the United States to crack down on what information is collected and shared by companies about young people online. Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it decided on Sept. 2 to impose what would be one of the largest fines to date under the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., the four-year-old European data privacy law that has been criticized for being weakly enforced.... In 2020, Ireland's Data Protection Commission began investigating Instagram for making the accounts of children aged 13 to 17 set to public by default, and for allowing teenagers with business accounts on Instagram, many of them aspiring influencers, to make public their email addresses and phone numbers." A Politico report is here.

Fat Leonard Flees. Rebecca Ratcliffe of the Guardian: "A Malaysian businessman who pleaded guilty in the US navy's worst corruption scandal has escaped house arrest in San Diego after cutting off his monitoring bracelet, federal authorities have said. Leonard Glenn Francis, known as Fat Leonard, who pleaded guilty in 2015 to offering $500,000 in bribes to navy officers, was due to be sentenced in a few weeks. The supervisory deputy, US Marshal Omar Castillo, said Francis fled from his home on Sunday morning, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Officers who arrived at the property found it empty but discovered parts of his broken GPS tracker bracelet." MB: Wonder if Trump will try this.

Way Beyond the Beltway

Ukraine, et al.

The New York Times' live updates of developments Tuesday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here. The Guardian's live updates for Tuesday are here. The Guardian's summary report is here. ~~~

     ~~~ The Washington Post's live briefings for Tuesday are here: "The U.N. nuclear watchdog will detail its findings on the 'safety, security and safeguards' at the Zaporizhzhia plant, controlled by Russian forces in Ukraine. Inspectors have left the site after an IAEA mission that overcame halting negotiations and the risk of artillery fire, with two representatives staying behind to monitor. As well as publishing its report, the IAEA will brief the U.N. Security Council about the facility.... The flow of gas to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline will not resume until Siemens Energy repairs equipment, the deputy CEO of Russian energy giant Gazprom told Reuters on Tuesday. The Kremlin has blamed Western sanctions for the supply halt, while European leaders accuse Russia of using energy as leverage against countries opposing its war. The pipeline shutdown puts Europe at risk of shortages in the winter as the world faces price hikes. Russia is in the process of buying rockets and artillery shells from North Korea, the Associated Press and Reuters reported Tuesday, citing U.S. intelligence."

Pjotr Sauer of the Guardian: "Russia will not resume in full its gas supplies to Europe until the west lifts its sanctions against Moscow, the Kremlin said, as concerns over Russian gas supplies continued to drive up energy prices. Speaking to journalists on Monday, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesperson, blamed sanctions 'introduced against our country by western countries including Germany and the UK' for Russia's failure to deliver gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Afghanistan. Robyn Dixon, et al., of the Washington Post: "A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the consular section of Russia's embassy in Kabul on Monday, killing a top diplomat, a Russian security guard and four Afghans, according to Russian and Afghan officials. Afghan police reported that Taliban guards at the embassy shot dead the attacker, but his device still detonated. The blast happened as the embassy's second secretary exited the building to read out names to a crowd waiting to hear about visas, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported. The attack against one of the few countries that has maintained an embassy under the Taliban is a blow to the image of the group that took over Afghanistan a year ago and maintains it has control over the country." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Israel/Palestine. Hiba Yazbek & Patrick Kingsley of the New York Times: "The Israeli Army on Monday acknowledged for the first time that Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist killed in May in the occupied West Bank, was most likely shot by an Israeli soldier, but it stopped short of definitively accepting responsibility for her death. The army's announcement -- the conclusion of a monthslong internal investigation -- marked a shift from the original Israeli position, which maintained that Ms. Abu Akleh, a veteran broadcaster for Al Jazeera, had probably been killed by Palestinian fire." The AP's report is here.

U.K. She's Going to Scotland to Visit the Queen. The New York Times is live-updating developments in the transfer of power in the U.K. Although Boris Johnson made a final speech as P.M. today, he did not urge his followers to storm the barricades. So an insurrection is unlikely. ~~~

     ~~~ The Guardian's story of Boris's last speech is here. He too is going to Balmoral to visit the Queen. So, you know, the Queen of England probably is having a lousier day than you are.

~~~ Who Is Liz Truss? Who Knows? William Booth, et al., of the Washington Post: "The next prime minister of Britain will be Liz Truss, whose political journey began on the left -- down with the monarchy! she cried -- only to arrive on the right, as a hard-line Brexiteer who has tried to channel the Iron Lady herself, Margaret Thatcher.... It's fair to say Truss is a shapeshifter. She fought for Britain to remain in the European Union before becoming a staunch defender of Brexit.... In Brussels[, S]he's seen as an agitator, an anti-Europe opportunist who could make matters even worse in the rocky relationship between Britain and the 27-nation bloc.... [Truss was chosen in an election] by 172,437 Conservative Party members -- about 0.3 percent of the British population -- who are older, wealthier and 95 percent White and more to the right than Britain as a whole."

News Ledes

New York Times: "Police cruisers and unmarked trucks raced to the James Smith Cree Nation reserve in the western [Canadian] province of Saskatchewan, and residents were once again warned to take shelter. But hours later, the authorities released a discomfiting statement to a province on edge: Myles Sanderson was still at large. Mr. Sanderson, 30, is one of two brothers accused of carrying out the spree of violence that [that left 10 people dead of stabbing wounds. It] began on the reserve in the predawn hours of Sunday. Investigators found the body of [Myles'] brother, Damien, 31, near a house on the reserve the next day, and said they were looking into whether Myles Sanderson had killed him."

ABC News: "A body discovered in Memphis has been identified as abducted school teacher Eliza Fletcher, authorities said Tuesday. Fletcher's remains were found on Sunday afternoon in a South Memphis residential neighborhood several miles from where she was abducted, police said. The grim news came as 38-year-old Cleotha Abston, the suspect in the kidnapping, was set to make his first court appearance. The Memphis Police Department said charges of first-degree murder and first-degree murder in perpetration of kidnapping have been filed against Abston."

Comments

[Forrest Morris]

Judge Cannon says that any future indictment of the fat one" would
result in reputational harm."
If someone has a reputation that's already 100% harmed, how can it
be more harmed? 120%, 150%, ???

[Marie Burns]

The party that suffered "reputational damage" was not Trump; it was the government, and Trump was the primary driver of that reputational damage. It was he, not the government, who publicized the search. Trump then lied about the search in numerous particulars, including making the false claim that the government had "planted" fake evidence, had "stolen" his passports (he only knew the feds had confiscated them when they advised him they were returning the passports they found among classified docs & newspaper clippings) & other personal items, the false claim that there were no classified documents seized because Trump had declassified them all, and so on.

Trump then caused the search warrant to be published, including the names of the rank-and-file agents who signed off on it. (When the government latter published the warrant in response to press lawsuits, it redacted the names of the agents.)

The proof that Trump damaged the feds' reputation is in the pudding: the numerous GOP members of Congress who harshly criticized the FBI & the few who threatened to "defund" it; and in the hundreds of threats by the public to the lives & well-being of agents.

As for Trump himself, his reputation not only cannot be damaged, he relishes the kind of publicity that he gains when he necessitates searches of his home & other intrusive law enforcement actions. He would not have publicized the search, repeatedly talked about it, then fund-raised off it, were that not the case.

[Akhilleus]

Stochastic intellections of a Tuesday morn…

So the newly minted UK PM, Liz Truss is on the way to Balmoral to See The Queen (cue trumpet voluntary)! Goodie. The queen must be thrilled. “Jesus…another one? Can’t these fuckers stay in place long enough for me to walk the dang dogs?” Truss will be Queen Elizabeth’s 17th PM. Five in the last 12 years. Victoria had 10 over her reign. To put it in perspective, had we a monarch who served with 17 PM’s (presidents), that stretch would have started with Coolidge.

And what about that name? Touts in Britain are likely laying odds as to when the first headline of the sort “Government Trussed Up!” will scream off the tabloids. Or how ‘bout “Do You Truss Liz?”

Charlie Savage, in a piece linked above, refers to the legalistical legerdemain performed by that Federalist/Trumpy loose Cannon judge-like person in Florida as “unprecedented” and highly unusual. T’ain’t unusual a’tall, a’tall. She’s a Trumpy judge. She was hustled in with practically no debate as a lame duck pick by the Fat Fascist and she’s doing exactly what she was put there to do. Help Trump. I don’t know what kind of a judicial thinker she was before, or might have been, but now she’ll forever be known as a Trump hack and lapdog. Another person tainted for life by a connection with King Midas in reverse.

Reading Marie’s comment about that Fat Leonard dude who bribed the Navy officers and is now in the wind, “I wonder if Trump will try this”, begat an immediate image of Fatty rolling down the freeway in a golf cart, à la OJ in the Bronco, with cops, the FBI, and the DoJ in hot pursuit, and Sean Hannity in a Fox chopper up above radioing Trump to take the next exit.

There’s a McDonald’s at the off ramp.

[P.D. Pepe]

Weary am I re: this protective covering of Trump––Forest asks the right questions. John Feeley, the former Ambassador to Panama who resigned in protest recalls his first encounter with Trump:

"In the Foreign Service, we don't have the luxury of gnashing our teeth at political outcomes. The hope is that person recognizes how delicate and complex it is to make foreign policy. It's boring and it's slow––but it's how you make good products over time. It was obvious Trump had little knowledge of how this all works."

In describing Trump he said this:
"He's like a velocirantor –-he has to be boss and if you don't show him deference he kills you."

I am sure today Mr. Feeley feels fury at all those stolen top secret papers that this once President purloined because he could and no one stopped him for fear of "being killed?"

[Ken Winkes]

The deference Cannon showed to the former guy in her ruling leaves me hovering between my usual outrage and a calmer (not quite philosophic) I guess we'll see.

While we might wish and believe that the law should treat everyone the same, that there should be equal justice under the law, we know that doesn't happen and ain't gonna, particularly for a former president, no matter how awful a person he might be.

So while I don't know what thoughts or urges were spinning in that Federalist judge's brain and while I'd like to see the Pretender in the slammer posthaste, I'm not as upset by here decision as others are and as perhaps I should be.

I just hope the Master specially appointed is not inclined to find the mythical "executive privilege" the Pretender is hoping for hidden in the watermarks of every page he or she turns over.

Such findings would immediately push my outrage button again.

[Jeanne]

With regard to this latest outrage of Dumpface being coddled by the courts, I am not surprised, but I, like PD, am weary. I am sure this "judge" was under an untold amount of harrassment and influence from those who lionize the least respectable example of former presidency. He's a pig. I guess we should feel sorry for those deluded souls who fantasize about the ascendance of said pig to the highest office in perpetuity. But they are all deluded and dangerous, and the judge percolated enough gobbledygook in the ruling to confuse most people. She isn't a fine example of judgery, in fact, she is now a hack with the best of hackness. As for the pigman, he is apparently the luckiest criminal in history. Coated with Crisco, he wiggles out again.

[Akhilleus]

Ken,

The government can, and probably will, appeal the ruling by this loose Cannon Hack de Trump. The problem is, to whom will they appeal? There are so many Trump/McConnell/Federalist hacks out there now, they (we) might still get screwed. That is, after all, their job: screw whomever might seek to force some confederate ne’er do well to abide by the law and suffer the consequences for refusing. But should they get a real judge who can spot this farce, which is clearly visible through a fog at midnight, with dark glasses on, true justice might still prevail.

Understand, however, that this is just one step in a long process during which Trump and his treasonous horde will obstruct, deflect, lie, and threaten violence at every turn.

[RAS]

Kurt Eichenwald has a few things to say about Judge Cannon's ruling. The consequences of upholding this pathetic ruling would be disasterous for the country, not that GOP cares about the products of their actions.