The Washington Post is reporting that Russian men are being grabbed off the street and enlisted into the military.

Police and military officers swooped down on a Moscow business center this past week unannounced. They were looking for men to fight in Ukraine — and they seized nearly every one they saw. Some musicians, rehearsing. A courier there to deliver a parcel. A man from a Moscow service agency, very drunk, in his mid-50s, with a walking disability.

“I have no idea why they took him,” said Alexei, who, like dozens of others in the office complex, was rounded up and taken to the nearest military enlistment office, part of a harsh new phase in the Russian drive.

In cities and towns across Russia, men of fighting age are going into hiding to avoid the officials who are seizing them and sending them to fight in Ukraine.

What is probably the series finale of the J6 Hearings ended with a bang, with the committee members voting to subpoena Trump. He’ll probably wriggle out of it somehow, but it still was clever plot twist.

While the hearings were going on, the Supreme Court dropped an unsigned, one-sentence order that it would not reinstate Judge Loose Cannon’s order that the special master review the classified documents.

In other news, we learned that Trump formed a new company in Delaware, called Trump Organization II. Now New York AG Letitia James is asking a judge to restrict Trump’s business activities while her office sues him for allegedly committing decades worth of fraud. As I understand it, she believes Trump planned to move all his assets to the new company to put them out of her reach.

In more other news, a federal judge has denied a request by former president Donald Trump to pause proceedings in a defamation case against him brought by former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. Trump had won a temporary pause from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which sent the case to the appeals court in D.C. to determine whether Trump was a federal employee as defined by the law when he publicly rebutted Carroll’s story that he had raped her years ago. Trump is scheduled to be deposed in a few days, and it looks like he can’t get out of that.

All this stuff has happened within the past 24 hours. Headline at Alternet: ‘Furious’ Donald Trump ‘raging the last few days’ as legal woes pile up.

Donald Trump is “furious” and has been “raging the last few days” over three of the numerous legal cases he is facing.

According to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, the former president’s rage is over the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s classified documents case, the defamation case against him by journalist E. Jean Carroll who alleges he raped her, and a so-called “pyramid scheme” which he and some of his family members were involved in. He is being sued for fraud in that case, and was forced to give a deposition in it last week.

Here’s a link to a story about the pyramid scheme.

On Wednesday a federal judge said Trump should not be allowed to delay the E. Jean Carroll defamation case and ordered him to give a deposition next week, refusing his request for a delay.

“Trump put out a statement yesterday excoriating E. Jean Carroll, who is suing him for defamation after she accused him of rape decades earlier.” … In his rant Wednesday night some legal experts say he established further evidence for Carroll’s defamation case. He had argued his comments were protected because he made them while being president. While that argument is in question, he now is no longer president.

Way to go, champ.

J6 Hearing today! I’m planning to spend the afternoon watching the teevee. Please do add any comments about the hearings to this post.

While Alex Jones was setting new standards for being an asshole, a Connecticut jury awarded some Sandy Hook parents nearly a billion dollars. And that’s just compensatory damages; I understand there may be more punitive damages. Jones’s previous penalty was from a court in Texas. Texas tort laws have been written to protect defendants and make it hard for the damaged plaintiff to get relief. This includes very strict limits on awarded damages, so whatever Jones was penalized in Texas will be whittled down considerably. But that’s Texas. Connecticut is different. The bobbleheads on MSNBC last night doubted an appeals court would lower the penalty, especially given Jones’s behavior through the trials. Jones might possibly get some accommodation in bankruptcy court someday, it says here, but we’ll see. It’s likely Jones will spend the rest of his sorry-ass life getting money wrung out of him by those Connecticut plaintiffs.

And yesterday we learned the feds have hard evidence — surveillance videos and witness testimony — that Trump had a lot of the stolen government documents he was hoarding moved after he’d been subpoenaed. This is obstruction on its face. See Aaron Blake, Trump’s fast-growing obstruction of justice problem, and Quinta Jurecic at Lawfare, Trump’s Obstruction of Justice, From Mueller to Now.

I’m saying John Fetterman can do the job in the Senate. I never met the man, but he was on television a bit last night and was holding his own. His one lingering problem, which he is very open about, is that his brain has trouble processing what people tell him. So he uses a close-caption machine that captions other peoples’ speech, and he reads what they’re saying to him, and responds.

That may sound a bit weird, but after having had a TIA (transient ischemic attack) last spring I can kind of appreciate what Fetterman is going through. We both had blood clots in our brains. Mine broke up after about 40 minutes, give or take, and then I was okay. But during those 40 minutes my brain was not processing sensory input the way it usually did. Things didn’t look right. It wasn’t that my vision was blurry. I could see things, but they didn’t look familiar. At one point I was trying to find my phone so I could call 911, and I knew exactly where the phone was because it was being charged. I had it plugged into the same power strip my laptop was plugged into. But when I tried to find it I couldn’t recognize it. I was lucky I could find a land line phone and could dial 911.

Modern neuroscientists explain that the thing around us we call “reality” is really a kind of collaboration between external stimuli and our nervous systems. Stimuli enter through our eyes and ears, but it’s our brains that create the experience of sight and sound. This is how our brains evolved to navigate the world. Our brains are creating colors and depth perception and the way things sound. So if some neurons somewhere start misfiring, the brain can’t replicate reality the way it did before. This is basically how psychedelic drugs work also.

In Fetterman’s case, his auditory processing problem doesn’t mean he can’t think and reason as he did before. It’s interesting to me that he can understand what he reads even if he can’t understand the same thing spoken to him. But he has a work-around for this, and the problem may correct itself eventually.

Do read The Vulnerability of John Fetterman by Rebecca Traister at New York Magazine. She has been covering his campaign and has seen big improvements in his functionality.

As summer turned to fall, Fetterman returned to the trail in person, powering through his convalescence at rallies and via television and newspaper interviews, his physical condition visibly improving. “Standing up in front of 3,000 people and having to talk without a teleprompter or anything? That is the most pure example of transparency there is,” he told me. …

… Tucker Carlson said that Fetterman is “brain damaged” and “can barely speak,” and has joked about his “stupid little fake tattoos,” comparing him to a “barista in Brooklyn dressing like a lumberjack.”

Do you want to talk brain damaged? Herschel Walker almost certainly has some degree of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Nearly all men who have played professional football do, it says here. I’ve seen no discussion of that anywhere, in spite of the obvious fact that Walker is dumb as a sock. Yet yesterday Charlie Cooke wrote at National Review that “Like it or not, voters are going to discuss Fetterman’s condition, and trying to browbeat them into silence won’t work.” I am not seeing anybody being browbeaten into silence about John Fetterman’s condition. What the bleep are these people going on about?

Recovering from a stroke takes some time, and Fetterman has had to do it while running for Senate. How many people could stand up to that?

See also Senators Who Have Had Strokes Say John Fetterman Can Do The Job.

John Fetterman’s gradual recovery from a stroke has become a Republican attack point in the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race, but two senators who recently suffered strokes said Fetterman’s health shouldn’t be an issue.

Like Fetterman, Sens. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) had strokes this year, but both returned to work and have been doing their jobs. They said Fetterman would be able to do the job, too.

“We’re walking around, we’re having conversations, we’re talking to people, we’re engaged,” Lujan told HuffPost on Wednesday. “Cognitive ability is strong. And so I’m confident of the work that John Fetterman will do when he’s elected U.S. senator.”

Strokes are caused by a lot of different things, and I am not a physician. Fetterman’s doctors have said they believe he will make a full recovery, and I see no reason to doubt that.

Yesterday I linked to a column by Aaron Blake, Trump’s nonsensical riff on past presidents and classified documents at the Washington Post. But what I was too slow to put together is that the nonsensical riff amounted to a confession that he took the government documents and kept them on purpose.

Seth Meyers picked up on it, too.

See also:

On Monday’s edition of CNN’s “The Situation Room,” legal analyst Elliot Williams broke down the controversial argument Trump made at his Mesa, Arizona rally in defense of hoarding classified documents at his Florida country club — an argument his legal team has so far declined to make when under oath in court.

“I had a small number of boxes in storage at Mar-a-Lago guarded by Secret Service and my people and everybody,” said Trump in the clip played on CNN. “I mean, it’s safe. There is no crime, there is no crime. It’s not a crime. And they should give me immediately back everything that they’ve taken from me because it’s mine, it’s mine.”

“So when you listen to that, does it make the attempt to blame that government agency look even more absurd?” asked anchor Wolf Blitzer.

“It does,” said Williams. “That is what prosecutors would call a confession for a crime, and the mere fact that you think it’s not a crime doesn’t change that fact. Look, Wolf, I can burn your house down and if I burn your house down and say, you know what, I didn’t commit arson, I was just playing with fire at Wolf’s house, it’s still an act of arson. Whatever, we don’t even need to explain that point.”

Andrew Weissman called Trump’s words at the rallies a “summation exhibit.”

This is what we call a summation exhibit.
Proof from the defendant’s own mouth. And on video. https://t.co/896a89GJdj

— Andrew Weissmann ? (@AWeissmann_) October 10, 2022

Aaron Blake explained the “socks decision” Trump keeps talking about, which was about some recordings of President Clinton’s.

The recordings weren’t kept in Clinton’s sock but rather in his sock drawer (as Trump later correctly said)

More important: Clinton didn’t leave the White House with the recordings; they were stored in a sock drawer in the White House during Clinton’s tenure.

And they weren’t classified; they were tapes of conversations Clinton had with an author who was working on the president’s oral history.

A court decided that Clinton could keep the recordings, but of course the facts of this case in no way resemble what Trump did.

And Aaron Blake explained the bowling alley/Chinese restaurant that received papers of G.H.W. Bush.

So on Friday Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb told the Justice Department that the reason she certified back in June that she knew for a fact all the sensitive government documents at Mar-a-Lago had been returned, when they hadn’t … is that another lawyer told her to do it.

The other lawyer was Evan Corcoran, Bobb says. It was Corcoran who drafted the certification, she says. And she was not bright enough to insist that if he thought the certification was accurate, why didn’t he sign the bleeping thing? Live and learn.

Rolling Stone:

The news that Bobb is dishing to the feds, reported initially by NBC News, comes just over two months after the FBI searched Trump’s Palm Beach estate, where they found scores of sensitive, classified documents. This means Bobb’s statement was false, of course. She claims it’s not her fault, though, reportedly telling investigators that one of Trump’s other lawyers, Evan Corcoran, told her to sign it.

NBC News adds that Bobb insisted a disclaimer be added to the letter that it was based on “information that has been provided to me.” The person who provided said information, she told investigators, was Corcoran. “She had to insist on that disclaimer twice before she signed it,” a source told the outlet. “She is not criminally liable. She is not going to be charged. She is not pointing fingers. She is simply a witness for the truth.”

How noble. Just for fun, let’s look at what Marcy Wheeler wrote back on September 4:

There’s something weird about the argument that Trump’s lawyers — each time with the participation of Evan Corcoran — are making about the search of Mar-a-Lago. What they claim they’re up to is all over the map, and has evolved (for example, their first filing focused on Executive Privilege, but in last week’s hearing, Judge Aileen Cannon had to remind Trump lawyer Jim Trusty that’s what he was supposed to be arguing).

But their true goal, it seems, is to learn enough about what was taken so they can attempt to claw back certain materials that would incriminate Trump for reasons other than the sheafs of highly classified information that were stored in an insecure storage closet. It’s a two step process: Learn what was taken, so they can then argue that its seizure was a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment under what’s called a Rule 41(g) motion.

And to that end, the first filing argued that they need a more detailed inventory, describing what was seized and from where, so Donald Trump can make a Rule 41 motion claiming it was improperly seized.

They’re all kind of making it up as they go along, I suspect.

In related news — Yesterday Trump had a rally in which he claimed that all the other presidents took classified documents, too, except they didn’t. See Aaron Blake, Trump’s nonsensical riff on past presidents and classified documents at the Washington Post.

I was only sort of following the Herschel Walker meltdown this week. I’ve also started to read the Maggie Haberman book on Trump, Confidence Man. All I can say about it right now is that it’s very long and describes Trump’s entire life, starting when he was a bratty toddler. (I should say “when he was a child”; he’s still a bratty toddler, of course.) Right now I’m still in the 1980s.

But one thing I did not realize until I stumbled across it last night was that Trump knew Herschel Walker in the 1980s. Walker played for the New Jersey Generals U.S. Football League team when Trump owned it, ca. 1983. Some of you may have remembered that, but I am very sure I paid no attention whatsoever to Donald Trump and the U.S. Football League back then. According to Trump’s own account of several years ago, Walker used to call Trump if he didn’t think the coaches were playing him enough, and so Trump would override his coaches.

When Walker decided to run for the Senate seat in Georgia he’d been living in Texas for a decade. Did he call Trump and ask him for help in getting a Senate nomination in Georgia? Did Trump ask him to run? It just seems so random that Walker would suddenly decide to run for the U.S. Senate at this point in his life.

See also GOP crisis in Herschel Walker race was nearly two years in the making in the Washington Post. The GOP could have stopped him from being the nominee if it had tried. Much of his history of domestic abuse was in the public record, not to mention the fact that he hadn’t actually lived in Georgia for a very long time. But they gave him a pass.

Sorry I’ve been busy. Here are some stories you might not have heard about elsewhere. I plan on writing something tomorrow.

Republicans really do have higher covid death rates than Democrats.

New York AG Letitia James smacks down Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

See how much territory Ukraine has taken back from Russia.

Lindsey Graham said the Capitol insurrectionists should have been shot in the head. Seriously.

Regarding Trump’s appeal to Clarence Thomas to get the 11th Circuit out of his documents case — this can go either way, IMO. In a sane world Trump’s request wouldn’t have a chance, so we may see how corrupted Clarence Thomas truly is.

First, this is what Trump wrote on his social media platform yesterday:

“NARA lost a whole hard drive full of HIGHLY SENSITIVE information from the Clinton White House — more than 100,000 Social Security numbers and addresses, Secret Service and White House operating procedures (EXTREMELY SENSITIVE!), political records, and who knows what else. They left the hard drive in an unsecured location, and didn’t realize it was gone for months — some say the data could have filled millions of books, and NARA admitted the material was ‘personally identifiable,’ impacting thousands of White House staffers, visitors, and even one of Al Gore’s daughters. NARA actually had to offer a large ($50,000!) reward to try and get the information back. What else have they ‘lost’? How can Americans trust a system like this? There is no security at NARA. I want my documents back!”

In other words, he’s saying that because NARA lost an external hard drive with personal information (but not national security secrets) on it thirteen years ago, Trump can demand to get “his” documents back. Government documents are still not “his” documents.

Here’s some information on Trump’s arguments to Clarence Thomas at SCOTUSblog:

Trump contended that the court of appeals lacked the power to put Cannon’s order on hold because the Biden administration had not specifically appealed that order and because, in any event, it was not the kind of order that can be immediately appealed.

Even if the court of appeals did have the power to review Cannon’s order, Trump added, it should have allowed her ruling to stand. Alleging that Trump “had sole discretion to classify” documents generated during his presidency, he argued that Cannon properly referred the issue to a special master “to determine whether documents bearing classification markings are in fact classified.”

As I recall, Judge Dearie determined that unless anyone could prove otherwise, all documents marked classified are in fact classified. Trump’s recollections of what he might have done, or wish he had done, do not count.

See also Marcy Wheeler’s interpretation. I’m going to quote a big chunk of it.

At first, Trump argues that Cannon has not ordered DOJ to share classified records with anyone but Dearie. That’s false: She ordered DOJ to share classified records with Trump’s lawyers.

In fact, in the very next paragraph, Trump admits that Cannon’s order is worse to that in Al Odah a DC Circuit case decided per curiam by a panel including Merrick Garland. Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah was a plaintiff in a habeas petition — as an enemy combatant he hadn’t and never was charged with a crime — but he was challenging indefinite detention with inadequate due process. By comparison, Trump has not been charged and if and when he is charged, his lawyers will get to see the classified evidence against him. For now, he’s just a plaintiff and the record is uncontested that the warrant executed on his beach resort involved no gross abuse of his rights.

Without acknowledging that the claim Cannon only ordered DOJ to share with Dearie is false, Trump makes the argument that DOJ should have to share with Trump’s designees under the Presidential Records Act. As DOJ has already noted, of course, that’s only true of the records are where they are supposed to be: In the possession of the Archives. They’re not, and that’s part of the problem.

Another part of the problem is that, elsewhere in this appeal, Trump unquestioningly invokes EO 13526, which governed classified information for the entirety of his term and still does. As I’ve noted, that explicitly says even former Presidents must get waivers of Need to Know requirements to access classified information. Trump never changed that order before he became a former President.

In the next paragraph, Trump then complains that DOJ might complain about sharing all of this information with Dearie (and Trump’s lawyers) but might decide to share some of the information with witnesses. Again, elsewhere in this appeal, Trump unquestioningly invokes Navy v. Egan, which is the Supreme Court precedent that says the President — not the former President — gets to decide who needs access to classified information or not.

And nowhere in this argument do Trump’s lawyers admit something that DOJ laid out explicitly before the 11th Circuit: At least one of them, Evan Corcoran, is a witness or possibly even a co-conspirator (DOJ referred to his lawyers, plural, as potential witnesses, suggesting Lindsey Halligan (who was at Mar-a-Lago during the search) or Jim Trusty has had a role in the obstruction process as well. Of course, Trump also neglects to mention the obstruction part of the investigation, which makes all documents with classification marks proof that Trump defied a subpoena.

In other words, Trump is even more poorly situated than Al Odah, who at least had lawyers uninvolved in his potential security concerns. The only one of Trump’s lawyers who’s definitely not a witness, Kise, is also the one who recently was a registered agent of Venezuela.

As I keep saying in this matter, no one really knows how any of this will turn out. Trump’s argument that Ginni Thomas’ favorite President is no Gitmo detainee surely will work with Clarence, who will decide whether to take this appeal (or ask the entire court to weigh in). But along the way, Trump has compared himself unfavorably — legally, at least — with a former Gitmo detainee.

Update: This tweet thread from Steve Vladeck notes that Trump never describes what irreparable harm he faces if Dearie can’t review the classified records now.

Update: One more thing Trump doesn’t tell SCOTUS: That Judge Cannon has altered her own order, taking the classified documents out of it altogether, which makes Vladeck’s point about emergency relief even more hysterical.

Update: Justice Thomas has given the government a week to respond, which suggests even he doesn’t see this as the emergency it would have to be for SCOTUS to get involved.

On one hand, Trump’s case is weak. On the other hand, Clarence Thomas and the Federalist Society majority at SCOTUS..

On one hand, surely all of the justices have read the hand-wringing over Aileen Cannon’s judicial incompetence by the nation’s legal scholars. They must realize that if they side with Trump they will lose even more of their extremely flimsy legitimacy.

On the other hand, Clarence Thomas and the Federalist Society majority at SCOTUS. I am making no predictions.

Worth watching. The Russian “military” may be about to implode.

Also, this is what retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster said on Face the Nation on Sunday.

LT. GENERAL H.R. MCMASTER: Hey, good morning, Margaret. It’s great to be with you. Well, this is a tremendous victory for – for the Ukrainians. And it’s a victory that I think that they could turn into a cascading series of defeats of Russian forces. This is the – the encirclement of Lyman and the- and the Russian forces pulling back, but also, in the last two days, the Ukrainians also simultaneously defeated a Russian- a Russian counterattack and also made progress further in the south near the strategically important city of Kherson. And I think, Margaret, what we might be at here is really at the precipice of- of really the collapse of the Russian army in Ukraine, a moral collapse. And- and I think they must really be at a breaking point. If you look at just the numbers of casualties, the vast area that they’re trying to defend, and now, of course, Russia is trying to mobilize conscripts and send them to- to the front untrained. And I think it’s very important to- to also understand that these forces that are in full retreat now out of Lyman were really the first round of mobilization. Remember when Putin was trying to recruit more and more people with paying about three-times the- the average wages to get so-called volunteers to go forward. Those forces were hastily trained, thrown into that front, and these are the forces that are collapsing just right right now.

Today’s big headline at the Washington Post is Ukraine hammers Russian forces into retreat on east and south fronts. Ukrainian troops are pushing further into the areas Russia allegedly “annexed.”

Meanwhile, Tucker “Axis Sally” Carlson is a big hit on Russian television for blaming  everything on Joe Biden, saying that if there is nuclear war it will be entirely Biden’s fault.  At least CPAC recognized it had gone too far —

CPAC deleted it, but Twitter remembers.https://t.co/JM1Aa6Qg1f pic.twitter.com/NGpPhZvW5N

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) October 1, 2022

I haven’t seen any recent polling on U.S. public opinion on the Ukraine War, but I have a real hard time believing that anyone not plugged into Fox News half the time has much sympathy for Russia in this, or blames President Biden.

This is going to drag on for a while, but in the long run I don’t see any way this is going to end that doesn’t involve some variation of bye bye, Vlad.