I can’t even look at election news any more. It’s all doom and gloom. The fact that the Republican party can talk openly about cutting Social Security and Medicare without fear of punishment at the polls is astonishing. That a Nazi like Doug Mastriano is in Pennsylvania spouting blatant anti-Semitism as the Republican nominee for governor is astonishing. That the rummage pile of damage that is “Herschel Walker” might possibly defeat the Rev. Raphael Warnock is astonishing. I’m not sure there’s any coming back from this. We don’t have a country any more. What used to be the United States just a big dysfunctional socio-cultural-political garbage heap.
Yesterday the Fifth Circuit, “America’s Trumpiest Court,” declared that the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional. The court’s reasoning is already being called “novel.” It used to be that courts were there to save us from the idiocy of politicians. Now there’s no one to save us from the idiocy of courts.
On that cheerful note … it’s looking more and more likely that Trump is going to face criminal charges for something, eventually. You probably heard about this yesterday —
Former President Donald J. Trump signed a document swearing under oath that information in a Georgia lawsuit he filed challenging the results of the 2020 election was true even though his own lawyers had told him it was false, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday.
The accusation came in a ruling by the judge, David O. Carter, ordering John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who strategized with the former president about overturning the election, to hand over 33 more emails to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Judge Carter, who serves with the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, determined that the emails contained possible evidence of criminal behavior.
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Judge Carter wrote. He added in a footnote that the suit contained language saying Mr. Trump was relying on information provided to him by others.
I understand these emails will be made public eventually. And then this week Trump was deposed in the E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit. What he said in the deposition has not been made public. But it’s interesting to note that Trump’s original defense was that whatever defaming thing he said about Ms. Carroll was said while he was President and acting in the capacity of POTUS. Even if judges agree with that, which is questionable, the moron repeated the same statements that inspired the lawsuit on his social media platform. And he wasn’t acting as POTUS then.
After Judge Kaplan denied Mr. Trump’s request to delay, Mr. Trump blasted Ms. Carroll in a lengthy social media post, repeating the kind of statements that had prompted her to sue in the first place.
“This ‘Ms. Bergdorf Goodman’ case is a complete con job,” Mr. Trump said in his statement. He said that Ms. Carroll was not telling the truth, that he did not know her — and that she was not his type: “While I am not supposed to say it, I will.”
That was before he was deposed. After he was deposed he “shared videos on Truth Social calling E Jean Carroll ‘crazy’ and mocking her rape claims against him just hours after he was deposed in her defamation case against him.” So if she didn’t have a strong enough case against him before, she’s got a stronger one now.
Also, Trump’s fundraising isn’t going so well. Bloomberg reports that he’s spent 91 cents to raise each dollar. Of course, that there are still people willing to donate to Trump is kind of astonishing.
In other court news, today Lindsey Graham lost another appeal to block the subpoena from the Fulton County Grand Jury.
This just in — the SCOTUS rejected a request to block implementation of the Biden administration’s student debt relief program.
I believe this is the most recent development in the Mar-a-Lago documents case —
An excerpt from a new audiobook revealed that President Donald J. Trump shared classified letters from Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, with the journalist Bob Woodward and seemed to acknowledge that they were sensitive material that he should not be sharing.
“Don’t say I gave them to you,” Mr. Trump said in December 2019, according to a copy of Mr. Woodward’s audiobook obtained by CNN, adding that “nobody else” had the letters and imploring the journalist to “treat them with respect.”
The Washington Post reported that a month later, in January 2020, Mr. Woodward also asked to see letters that Mr. Trump had written to the North Korean leader. Mr. Trump replied, “Oh, those are so top secret.”
The original letters between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump were among the voluminous number of presidential records that the National Archives tried to recover from Mr. Trump after he left office. Mr. Trump resisted returning the boxes of documents he had taken to his Florida estate, describing them to several advisers as “mine.”
I’m sure there’s something I’m forgetting. Too much going on.
