This morning, CBS News cameras captured on video the sight of former president Trump’s lawyers entering the Department of Justice. Shortly after their two-hour meeting ended, a message appeared on the Trump-affiliated social media site Truth Social, in all caps: “HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S [sic] WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP - THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
the Republican National Committee promptly tweeted footage of House Oversight Committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) suggesting that the “Biden family” has engaged in “a pattern of bribery, where payments would be made through shell accounts and multiple banks,” in a system of “money laundering.”
Politicians can affect millions of of lives, and even lives of generations yet to come. Why is it that they can tell egregious lies with impunity? If we believe in government of the people, by the people, for the people, and we citizens can get in serious trouble in many ways for lying to our own government, how is that that those we hire to manage the government get to lie outrageously to us?
My heart goes out to Ukrainians every day, and Russians who don't want this war too.
Claiming their political opponents are doing the very thing that they themselves are doing is the vein of the extremist (MAGA) Republican playbook the last 8 years or so. So transparent yet so many do not see it, it's all so heartbreaking.
It really does sound like Trump might actually be charged. It truly couldn't happen to a more deserving person.
Thanks so much to the author for these letters. (And congrats on being banned from travel to Russia!)
"Keep his powder dry" and "square the circle". I love it. If I was still working in GOP politics as a career choice, I'd be wanting to work with Sununu. He has a clue. This is not the Presidential election you want to be running in. Trump and his loyals are toxic...predictable...but insane. Pence will never poll above 5%. DeSantis is a train wreck that barely works in FL and has the weight and power of Disney pushing back at him. The Christian right is VERY predictable. They want us all back in the 1950's. I hate to tell them but Black folks, Gay & Trans folks are all out of the bottle...and they are not going back in...not to please a bunch of folks who have a persecution complex and want to run others and save them from sins they are not committing. The very good news is that Trump is damaged goods and he won't go quietly into the night like Nixon did. He's going to yell and scream IN ALL CAPS...because he needs the attention. That's actually the key to his behavior. He needs the attention and has to be the hero or victim in his never ending reality show. Peace to all. Enjoy your summer.
Yay for “electoral irrelevance.” Go Gen Z -- and others in the 90M people eligible to vote who don't. As Simon Rosenberg has laid out, let's Get to 55 (winning 55% of the vote) to crush MAGA by supporting young voter registration (every year, 4M turn old enough to vote -- and are overwhelmingly progressive or at least Dem-leaning), and doing everything possible to GOTV!
As to the Former Guy, this was his lawyers' last chance to avoid an indictment for obstruction and for unlawful possession of national security documents. Prosecutors routinely afford potential criminal defendants an opportunity to argue their case why they should not be prosecuted. Apparently, nothing in the way of exculpatory evidence was offered on behalf of the former president, nor would one expect that there would be some sort of exculpation that the Federal District Court might find meritorious in a way that would negate the mountain of evidence that has been accumulated showing that he acted willfully and knowingly in hiding national security documents (regardless of their administrative classification within the national security system). Former President Trump's sole defense was that other presidents had not been prosecuted the way it looks like he will be, possibly within the coming week when a formal indictment is expected to issue from the federal grand jury now hearing evidence against him.
In the short run, Trump will be using this indictment as a spur to raise money from his mesmerized supporters. In the long run, however, it is all but announced that the Department of Justice has an interlocking series of indictments in the works, whether it is for his obstruction in the national security documents matter; or a future prosecution for his obstruction and participation in the conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election results, which nobody is mentioning at this time. But from the factual standpoint, they are all cross referenced and interrelated. There's also the matter, about which there has been little mention in the press, about two post-election investigations that the Trump Campaign commissioned to determine whether there had been any sort of election manipulation that could have resulted in Trump's electoral defeat. And, in fact, we learned today that there had been two such investigative efforts commissioned by the Trump Campaign, each of which informed the former president that there was no manipulation, and that he lost the election fair and square. Prosecutors will be creating a narrative, based upon the two studies mentioned, to establish that the former president knew to an absolute certainty that there was no electoral fraud. And yet, for the three years since the election, Trump has continued to maintain that his reelection was 'stolen' from him, and that this bogus claim was a principal incentive to his followers to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The facts are not in dispute. What federal prosecutors have been pursuing is evidence relating to Trump's state of mind. To date, there is evidence from a legion of independent third-party sources showing that Trump knew that he lost the election, and rightly so. What comes out in this past week's disclosure about an interview with persons involved in assisting Meadows, Trump's former Chief of Staff, to write a memoir, in which Trump admitted that during the time immediately before he left office, whether in the closing months of 2020, or in January, 2021, that he had gotten into a bitter conflict with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, where it became known that General Milley had vowed to prevent Trump from going to war with Iran (in particular) in order for Trump to preserve his ability to remain in office by creating a manufactured national emergency. The interview was recorded on audio tape, or some sort of digital device, in which Trump was heard rustling papers in his hands, while he was telling his Interlocutors that it was General Milley who is the architect of a plan to attack Iran, but the Trump was not allowed to show his interviewers the actual documents because of their national security provenance. The story that Trump was peddling that General Milley was the source of the plan to attack Iran is untrue; and factually, it is preposterous, given the nature of the operational planning and programming protocols within the Department of Defense, where the general would have nothing to do with developing war plans. What comes across so vividly is that Trump was using national security documents in order to seek revenge on a government official who opposed him. If further evidence bears the story out, it clearly establishes that Trump's oft-repeated statements that he could declassify documents by merely thinking about it are patently false. It also establishes a plausible motive why Trump might want to retain possession of such documents in order to embarrass or damage the reputation of someone in government whom he despises. This revenge motive dovetails neatly with similar types of actions that Trump engaged in over his entire lifetime, but with particular concern for his treatment of former FBI officials who were looking into Trump's connections with Russians looking to sabotage the upcoming American election. Trump's predilection for revenge-seeking is legendary and well-documented. Investigators have already discounted the notion that Trump might seek to monetize top-secret documents in his possession, by selling them, or by using them to influence foreign powers; or that the former president was holding onto these documents because they were souvenirs of his days as president — Trump is not a reader, and he is not one to scheme to use sequestered information for some future purpose that he might not readily anticipate. He is entirely too pedestrian, with lower-class tastes and proclivities. But in taking revenge against the highest ranking military officer we have, that has the ring of truth to it. And that's what this little tattletale story about Iran appears to be all about. It intuitively makes sense that Trump would want to be in a position to mention that he has a document in his possession that puts his opponent in the wrong. The problem was then, and is now, that is a matter of law he is prohibited from using that document for any purpose whatsoever after he leaves the presidency. But it does give us a dumpster dive into the former president's thinking, such as it is.
Trump is a master at low cunning; and he is shown to be a feral force of nature when it comes to coming after rivals for elective office. We will soon see how this all plays out; but the evidence of Trump's state of mind with respect to the top-secret documents that he was hoarding, and the reasons for him doing so, are becoming all too apparent. There is nothing intellectually elevated about any of this information that is just now coming out. Trump's rationale for keeping these documents hidden away, and working assiduously to prevent their discovery, is not an element of the crime for which Trump will be charged, but his rationale is something that people intuitively understand, in all of its spitefulness and hatred.
There is a world of difference among the GOP presidential wannabes. Trump, of course, uniquely has established a track record which runs the gamut from publicly licking Putin's boots at Helsinki to inciting a insurrection on January 6, 2021. And this traitorous thug is GOP's frontrunner for 2025? But nobody matches DeSantis for pure chutzpah. Who else has banned books and attempted to defraud the Walt Disney Company? Donald Trump is not the only Public Enemy Number One running for POTUS in 2024.
The image of three new Trump lawyers entering the Department of Justice to meet with special counsel Jack Smith suggests a logical Trump legal defense, as he is being inundated with criminal and civil ‘harassment’ in diverse states and courts:
TRUMP IS RUNNING OUT OF LAWYERS WHO ARE WILLING TO RISK THEIR REPUTATIONS (AND LAW LICENSES) STRUGGLING TO DEFEND THE INDEFENSIBLE.
Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell top the list of solon schlemiels who have fallen on their own petards working for this False Fact Felon (FFF). Almost daily we hear of lawyers who are abandoning FFF and turning state’s evidence in an effort to squeeze the stench off their double-breasted suits.
I await the day when FFF, encountering ‘the greatest witch hunt of all time,’ will seek to postpone court proceedings because of his inability to recruit defense lawyers.
FFF without a modern-day Roy Cohn is judicially naked, which is an image that makes me shudder.
Well, one thing is for certain, Trump is predictable. It's really laughable. Who writes in all caps? John Irving certainly got away with it in A Prayer for Owen Meany, but the former President, really!@X&* As I begin to work in my community on the 2024 election, I want to be prepared to answer questions about Harris and her work as VP. Come to realize that I do not know much about the role of VP and her performance. Would love any suggestions for reading. I am in the midst of my 20 year son who is in college and his friends who keep dumping on Biden and Harris. I think the mainstream media is shining light on Biden's not insignificant accomplishments, but I want more on Harris. Thank you!
We have a long road ahead of us even if Trump is indicted now and hopefully more. There is a whole ecosystem of the current GOP that would just as easily turn to clown master 2 Ron DeSantis who is worse than Trump. The battle for the soul of America is like the Ukrainians versus the Russians...no end in sight
I think we're going to find that when the indictments drop, we won't experience the joy that we might have imagined. Why? Because the indicted is a pitiful man, in spite of how high he's flown. We were insufficiently wary in 2016 and shortchanged by the electoral college process. Whatever people might have thought about Mrs Clinton, I doubt she would have run so fast and loose over the constitution and the law. When the DOJ, Georgia and New York are done with tfg, we'll feel some grim satisfaction that the law has prevailed, but it'll be a Pyrrhic victory, one we want to file away and forget because under all the details there is just this deep and pervasive sadness about the pain we've endured, the fraction of our populace that has been duped by the swindler extraordinaire and the probability that we have not learned how to prevent it from happening again down the line. The hounds of hell have been unleashed and it will take heroic efforts to send them back where they came from. Indictments won't assuage the pain and suffering we feel for ourselves and the part we all played in this awful drama that persists and spreads across the country.
“THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!” Everything is BIG with tfg. His lies about his own crimes and his “what abouts.” HIllary? He must be in a time warp. Everyday he is closer to being unhinged. And irrelevant in his party and with voters. Coincidentally, while the stolen documents are still in the news, the pool at Mar-a-Lago flooded and possibly destroyed evidence. How inconvenient.
Republicans have been trying to “square the circle” for half of my long life, with the help of the Goebbels of our time, Murdoch. And he has done a masterful propaganda job, even enticing our MSM to follow the money they saw him rake in from “news entertainment/reality show bull Schitt.” Has the treason network (or clones) modified their methods? Just more careful about how they demonize the innocent. Politicians are still fair game, it seems. Still, I will join the indictment party and rejoice as chump circles the drain. But the scum he leaves behind must be scrubbed away…
the Republican National Committee promptly tweeted footage of House Oversight Committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) suggesting that the “Biden family” has engaged in “a pattern of bribery, where payments would be made through shell accounts and multiple banks,” in a system of “money laundering.”
Politicians can affect millions of of lives, and even lives of generations yet to come. Why is it that they can tell egregious lies with impunity? If we believe in government of the people, by the people, for the people, and we citizens can get in serious trouble in many ways for lying to our own government, how is that that those we hire to manage the government get to lie outrageously to us?
Dump is shaking in his boots. Good. Thank you, Heather, for clarifying this ongoing, history-making news. I am definitely on indictment watch....
I wish the American Bar Association would put some presure on the payoffs received by members of Scotus.
My heart goes out to Ukrainians every day, and Russians who don't want this war too.
Claiming their political opponents are doing the very thing that they themselves are doing is the vein of the extremist (MAGA) Republican playbook the last 8 years or so. So transparent yet so many do not see it, it's all so heartbreaking.
It really does sound like Trump might actually be charged. It truly couldn't happen to a more deserving person.
Thanks so much to the author for these letters. (And congrats on being banned from travel to Russia!)
"Keep his powder dry" and "square the circle". I love it. If I was still working in GOP politics as a career choice, I'd be wanting to work with Sununu. He has a clue. This is not the Presidential election you want to be running in. Trump and his loyals are toxic...predictable...but insane. Pence will never poll above 5%. DeSantis is a train wreck that barely works in FL and has the weight and power of Disney pushing back at him. The Christian right is VERY predictable. They want us all back in the 1950's. I hate to tell them but Black folks, Gay & Trans folks are all out of the bottle...and they are not going back in...not to please a bunch of folks who have a persecution complex and want to run others and save them from sins they are not committing. The very good news is that Trump is damaged goods and he won't go quietly into the night like Nixon did. He's going to yell and scream IN ALL CAPS...because he needs the attention. That's actually the key to his behavior. He needs the attention and has to be the hero or victim in his never ending reality show. Peace to all. Enjoy your summer.
Yay for “electoral irrelevance.” Go Gen Z -- and others in the 90M people eligible to vote who don't. As Simon Rosenberg has laid out, let's Get to 55 (winning 55% of the vote) to crush MAGA by supporting young voter registration (every year, 4M turn old enough to vote -- and are overwhelmingly progressive or at least Dem-leaning), and doing everything possible to GOTV!
Trump tries one of his old hits. “BUT HER EMAILS!!!”
As to the Former Guy, this was his lawyers' last chance to avoid an indictment for obstruction and for unlawful possession of national security documents. Prosecutors routinely afford potential criminal defendants an opportunity to argue their case why they should not be prosecuted. Apparently, nothing in the way of exculpatory evidence was offered on behalf of the former president, nor would one expect that there would be some sort of exculpation that the Federal District Court might find meritorious in a way that would negate the mountain of evidence that has been accumulated showing that he acted willfully and knowingly in hiding national security documents (regardless of their administrative classification within the national security system). Former President Trump's sole defense was that other presidents had not been prosecuted the way it looks like he will be, possibly within the coming week when a formal indictment is expected to issue from the federal grand jury now hearing evidence against him.
In the short run, Trump will be using this indictment as a spur to raise money from his mesmerized supporters. In the long run, however, it is all but announced that the Department of Justice has an interlocking series of indictments in the works, whether it is for his obstruction in the national security documents matter; or a future prosecution for his obstruction and participation in the conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election results, which nobody is mentioning at this time. But from the factual standpoint, they are all cross referenced and interrelated. There's also the matter, about which there has been little mention in the press, about two post-election investigations that the Trump Campaign commissioned to determine whether there had been any sort of election manipulation that could have resulted in Trump's electoral defeat. And, in fact, we learned today that there had been two such investigative efforts commissioned by the Trump Campaign, each of which informed the former president that there was no manipulation, and that he lost the election fair and square. Prosecutors will be creating a narrative, based upon the two studies mentioned, to establish that the former president knew to an absolute certainty that there was no electoral fraud. And yet, for the three years since the election, Trump has continued to maintain that his reelection was 'stolen' from him, and that this bogus claim was a principal incentive to his followers to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The facts are not in dispute. What federal prosecutors have been pursuing is evidence relating to Trump's state of mind. To date, there is evidence from a legion of independent third-party sources showing that Trump knew that he lost the election, and rightly so. What comes out in this past week's disclosure about an interview with persons involved in assisting Meadows, Trump's former Chief of Staff, to write a memoir, in which Trump admitted that during the time immediately before he left office, whether in the closing months of 2020, or in January, 2021, that he had gotten into a bitter conflict with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, where it became known that General Milley had vowed to prevent Trump from going to war with Iran (in particular) in order for Trump to preserve his ability to remain in office by creating a manufactured national emergency. The interview was recorded on audio tape, or some sort of digital device, in which Trump was heard rustling papers in his hands, while he was telling his Interlocutors that it was General Milley who is the architect of a plan to attack Iran, but the Trump was not allowed to show his interviewers the actual documents because of their national security provenance. The story that Trump was peddling that General Milley was the source of the plan to attack Iran is untrue; and factually, it is preposterous, given the nature of the operational planning and programming protocols within the Department of Defense, where the general would have nothing to do with developing war plans. What comes across so vividly is that Trump was using national security documents in order to seek revenge on a government official who opposed him. If further evidence bears the story out, it clearly establishes that Trump's oft-repeated statements that he could declassify documents by merely thinking about it are patently false. It also establishes a plausible motive why Trump might want to retain possession of such documents in order to embarrass or damage the reputation of someone in government whom he despises. This revenge motive dovetails neatly with similar types of actions that Trump engaged in over his entire lifetime, but with particular concern for his treatment of former FBI officials who were looking into Trump's connections with Russians looking to sabotage the upcoming American election. Trump's predilection for revenge-seeking is legendary and well-documented. Investigators have already discounted the notion that Trump might seek to monetize top-secret documents in his possession, by selling them, or by using them to influence foreign powers; or that the former president was holding onto these documents because they were souvenirs of his days as president — Trump is not a reader, and he is not one to scheme to use sequestered information for some future purpose that he might not readily anticipate. He is entirely too pedestrian, with lower-class tastes and proclivities. But in taking revenge against the highest ranking military officer we have, that has the ring of truth to it. And that's what this little tattletale story about Iran appears to be all about. It intuitively makes sense that Trump would want to be in a position to mention that he has a document in his possession that puts his opponent in the wrong. The problem was then, and is now, that is a matter of law he is prohibited from using that document for any purpose whatsoever after he leaves the presidency. But it does give us a dumpster dive into the former president's thinking, such as it is.
Trump is a master at low cunning; and he is shown to be a feral force of nature when it comes to coming after rivals for elective office. We will soon see how this all plays out; but the evidence of Trump's state of mind with respect to the top-secret documents that he was hoarding, and the reasons for him doing so, are becoming all too apparent. There is nothing intellectually elevated about any of this information that is just now coming out. Trump's rationale for keeping these documents hidden away, and working assiduously to prevent their discovery, is not an element of the crime for which Trump will be charged, but his rationale is something that people intuitively understand, in all of its spitefulness and hatred.
There is a world of difference among the GOP presidential wannabes. Trump, of course, uniquely has established a track record which runs the gamut from publicly licking Putin's boots at Helsinki to inciting a insurrection on January 6, 2021. And this traitorous thug is GOP's frontrunner for 2025? But nobody matches DeSantis for pure chutzpah. Who else has banned books and attempted to defraud the Walt Disney Company? Donald Trump is not the only Public Enemy Number One running for POTUS in 2024.
The image of three new Trump lawyers entering the Department of Justice to meet with special counsel Jack Smith suggests a logical Trump legal defense, as he is being inundated with criminal and civil ‘harassment’ in diverse states and courts:
TRUMP IS RUNNING OUT OF LAWYERS WHO ARE WILLING TO RISK THEIR REPUTATIONS (AND LAW LICENSES) STRUGGLING TO DEFEND THE INDEFENSIBLE.
Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell top the list of solon schlemiels who have fallen on their own petards working for this False Fact Felon (FFF). Almost daily we hear of lawyers who are abandoning FFF and turning state’s evidence in an effort to squeeze the stench off their double-breasted suits.
I await the day when FFF, encountering ‘the greatest witch hunt of all time,’ will seek to postpone court proceedings because of his inability to recruit defense lawyers.
FFF without a modern-day Roy Cohn is judicially naked, which is an image that makes me shudder.
Well, one thing is for certain, Trump is predictable. It's really laughable. Who writes in all caps? John Irving certainly got away with it in A Prayer for Owen Meany, but the former President, really!@X&* As I begin to work in my community on the 2024 election, I want to be prepared to answer questions about Harris and her work as VP. Come to realize that I do not know much about the role of VP and her performance. Would love any suggestions for reading. I am in the midst of my 20 year son who is in college and his friends who keep dumping on Biden and Harris. I think the mainstream media is shining light on Biden's not insignificant accomplishments, but I want more on Harris. Thank you!
We have a long road ahead of us even if Trump is indicted now and hopefully more. There is a whole ecosystem of the current GOP that would just as easily turn to clown master 2 Ron DeSantis who is worse than Trump. The battle for the soul of America is like the Ukrainians versus the Russians...no end in sight
He gonna get caught, just you wait and see.
"Why is everybody always pickin' on me?"
I think we're going to find that when the indictments drop, we won't experience the joy that we might have imagined. Why? Because the indicted is a pitiful man, in spite of how high he's flown. We were insufficiently wary in 2016 and shortchanged by the electoral college process. Whatever people might have thought about Mrs Clinton, I doubt she would have run so fast and loose over the constitution and the law. When the DOJ, Georgia and New York are done with tfg, we'll feel some grim satisfaction that the law has prevailed, but it'll be a Pyrrhic victory, one we want to file away and forget because under all the details there is just this deep and pervasive sadness about the pain we've endured, the fraction of our populace that has been duped by the swindler extraordinaire and the probability that we have not learned how to prevent it from happening again down the line. The hounds of hell have been unleashed and it will take heroic efforts to send them back where they came from. Indictments won't assuage the pain and suffering we feel for ourselves and the part we all played in this awful drama that persists and spreads across the country.
“THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!” Everything is BIG with tfg. His lies about his own crimes and his “what abouts.” HIllary? He must be in a time warp. Everyday he is closer to being unhinged. And irrelevant in his party and with voters. Coincidentally, while the stolen documents are still in the news, the pool at Mar-a-Lago flooded and possibly destroyed evidence. How inconvenient.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/05/politics/mar-a-lago-pool-flood-suspicions-prosecutors-trump-investigation-classified-documents/index.html
Republicans have been trying to “square the circle” for half of my long life, with the help of the Goebbels of our time, Murdoch. And he has done a masterful propaganda job, even enticing our MSM to follow the money they saw him rake in from “news entertainment/reality show bull Schitt.” Has the treason network (or clones) modified their methods? Just more careful about how they demonize the innocent. Politicians are still fair game, it seems. Still, I will join the indictment party and rejoice as chump circles the drain. But the scum he leaves behind must be scrubbed away…