Blue Country Gazette: August 2022

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

After the latest DOJ filing, it's hard to believe Donald Trump hasn't already been indicted

Image from DOJ response showing classified documents on the floor of Trump's office in Mar-a-Lago — **Image from DOJ response showing highly classified documents scattered across the floor of Trump's office at Mar-a-Lago**

On Tuesday evening, the Department of Justice responded to the order from a Donald Trump-appointed judge who said she was inclined to grant Donald Trump’s request for a “special master” to review documents removed during the Aug. 8 FBI search at Mar-a-Lago.

In that response to Judge Aileen Cannon, the department not only explained the timeline of events with more clarity than has been revealed before, but delivered a shocking view of how classified information had been treated by Trump, including directly stating that highly classified documents were “likely concealed and removed” for the purposes of obstruction. The DOJ response even included an image showing how FBI agents found clearly marked, highly classified documents of the most sensitive kind: sitting in plain sight, spread across the floor. Other documents were recovered from the drawers of Trump’s desk.

Included in the filing is information that resets the narrative on several events that took place at Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s attorneys insisted that all the records taken from the White House were held in that now infamous “storage room.” However, the DOJ reports that “the former President’s counsel explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes” in that room. Trump’s attorneys even signed a statement, saying that their own “diligent search” found no other classified materials.

That statement is what’s known, in legal terms, as an outright lie; it’s also unquestionable obstruction and concealment of classified materials. And that’s just the start.

As many have pointed out, the arrangement of documents on the floor likely represents them being pulled from the box on the right by the FBI for the purposes of taking a documentation photo, not their being tossed out by Trump.

On quick review, the DOJ filing breaks down into these areas:

First, there is the summary of the government’s argument opposing the appointment of a special master. In this summary, the DOJ argues that Trump lacks standing to make this request; that the Presidential Records Act establishes clear rules for the ownership and treatment of these documents; and simply, that the documents do not belong to Trump. Additionally, the government insists that there’s no point in giving Trump his special master, because the FBI filter team has already completed its review of the documents.

And the DOJ doesn’t hesitate to push back at Judge Cannon for her unprecedented intervention in the case.

Furthermore, this Court lacks jurisdiction to adjudicate Plaintiff’s Fourth Amendment challenges to the validity of the search warrant and his arguments for returning or suppressing the materials seized.

Next comes the factual background of the case. That’s where most of the new information—and big, sharp nails in Trump’s legal coffin—are waiting.

From the moment Trump reluctantly left the White House in January 2021, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has worked to retrieve materials that had been improperly taken to Mar-a-Lago. When they finally recovered 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago in January 2022, they discovered a variety of clearly-labeled classified information scattered within the boxes, including 25 documents labeled “Top Secret.”

The nature of the documents recovered at that point, and the way in which they had been casually stored among old magazines, newspaper clippings, and other unrelated material, made NARA want to go straight to the FBI. However, they decided to work with Trump through the process of the Presidential Records Act. At every step, Trump and his attorneys were slow to respond, failed to respond, or gave responses that didn’t answer questions sent, ultimately stretching out the process for months.

Finally, the fed-up NARA team told Trump’s attorneys that they were going to proceed with referral to the FBI. Trump tried to assert privilege, which NARA rejected. Once the FBI reviewed the records, a criminal inquiry was swiftly opened. In May, a grand jury subpoena was submitted to Trump, demanding the return of all classified documents. Again, Trump’s team slowed the process, applying for an extension that gave them until June 7 to comply.

On June 3, FBI agents and DOJ attorney visited Mar-a-Lago and were given a single “Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape,” containing what were supposed to be the last classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Trump attorney (and OAN host) Christina Bobb then signed a document stating that “a diligent search was conducted“ and no more classified material remained.

When it comes to the infamous storage room, the visiting agents were told that the remainder of Trump’s White House materials were stored there.

Critically, however, the former President’s counsel explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained.

The Redweld envelope turned out to contain 38 classified documents, including 17 marked “Top Secret.” However, the FBI soon “uncovered multiple sources of evidence” that more classified documents were still at Mar-a-Lago, and not just in the storage room. How this information came to them is not made clear in the filing, but this seems to very likely be the result of a whistleblower.

And it wasn’t just that Trump was still holding onto classified information after handing over a signed statement that there were no more documents. It’s that there was an active effort underway to hide that information from the government.

The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.

When the FBI finally conducted its search, it found numerous documents outside the storage room, including three classified documents inside Trump’s own desk.

The image above attached to the filing—which shows top secret documents scattered uncovered across a carpeted floor—is purposely of too low a resolution to read details. However, it is possible to make out that some of these documents are marked “HCS,” meaning that they represent human intelligence, generally related to United States undercover assets overseas. Other document are marked “TK,” meaning “talent keyhole.” These are documents related to “space assets,” generally satellite imagery or associated analysis. Neither type of document seems like something Trump could even potentially argue was open to claims of privilege or connected to any legitimate activity.

The Aug. 8 FBI search netted over 100 new classified documents in two hours—after Trump’s attorney swore that there were no more to be found.

With each new filing, the case against Trump becomes more damning. Even following the FBI search, most pundits were ready to write this off as a dispute between Trump and NARA, one that was likely to be ended once all the documents were filed back into their proper places.

But at this point, it’s not just a matter of Trump holding documents he shouldn’t have taken.

These were classified documents of the highest possible level, including human intelligence and space-based intelligence that could not even vaguely be construed as connected to something Trump would need “for his memoirs.”
They were extremely clearly marked, shredding any claim that they were taken accidentally.
Trump took every effort to drag his feet in holding onto these documents, including having his attorney sign off on a patently false claim that there were no more classified documents to be found.
Far from being stored in any secure location, documents were found scattered across Mar-a-Lago, including in Trump’s desk.

it’s hard to see how the case for outright obstruction, lying to the FBI, hiding classified materials, and interfering with an investigation could be any clearer.

If the appearance of the documents in the DOJ filing represents how they were found, just the image alone raises additional concerns. Why were these document spread out across the floor? They give every appearance of documents that were were either being searched for specific contents, or even photographed.

Every filing so far has made the case against Trump even more obvious, to the point that it’s simply overwhelming.
However you look at it - climate change or the scene of the stolen top secret documents crime - Mar-a-Lago is increasingly under water.

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Male Politicians Don't Seem to Have Noticed How Angry Women Voters Are

"Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.” Matt Gaetz. (photo: Jemal Countess/Redux)

Dahlia Lithwick / Slate

30 August 22

readersupportednews.org

There is something happening with angry women voting on abortion.

Long after the time had passed for male GOP officials to stop, to just stop, pretending they know or understand anything about female anatomy, reproductive organs, medical emergencies and basic preventative health care, they have continued to talk. They have continued to talk and talk and talk even when the massive blowback after the Dobbs decision proved it was an error; Kansas proved it was an error; and after the surprise election of Pat Ryan in a New York special election proved it was an error. Every time a Republican man opens his mouth to talk about women’s bodies, ten new female voters get their wings. Yet somehow, they cannot seem to stop themselves!

It is surely the very textbook definition of “privilege” to find yourself unbothered by protests, polling numbers, and voter registration data. Justice Samuel Alito actually laughed in the face of outraged females who called out the bad history, bad economics, and bad medicine in his leaked draft opinion—their complaints were numerous and well-founded, yet he didn’t change a thing. Instead, he smugly told women that if they didn’t like the outcome in Dobbs, they could just “seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office” and that “women are not without electoral or political power.” The court’s newest approval ratings suggest the same, though I don’t think Justice Alito likes that kind of political power very much at all.

Because, Happy Women’s Equality Day, women are taking him up on the offer. One analysis of the Kansas’ voter registration list showed that in the week after Dobbs, more than 70 percent of newly registered voters in that state were women. Those numbers, according to an Upshot analysis of 10 states with available voter registration data, show consistently higher registration for women after the Dobbs leak in May. As Jennifer Rubin recently noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that, “62 percent of women registering since Dobbs registered as Democrats, 15 percent as Republicans and that 54 percent were younger than 25.” And a Pew Research Center poll indicates that “a majority of registered voters (56 percent) say the issue of abortion will be very important in their midterm vote, up from 43 percent in March.” Tom Bonier, CEO Of TargetSmart recently posted on Twitter: “We are seeing early signs of what could lead to a huge increase in women voting in November. …This surge is young and female.” Both Mitch McConnell and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel are panicking about the GOP’s odds in Congress, directly connected to fundraising around abortion.

I have a lot of theories about why nobody should be surprised that women are friggin’ furious right now, which include, as Mark Joseph Stern has been arguing all summer, the increasingly horrifying tales of women, disproportionately on teenagers and victims of violence, left to suffer from sepsis, refused prescriptions and denied treatment for ectopic pregnancies, and ever more horrors. And yet, the forced birth Republicans continue to insist that none of this is happening, or that journalists and physicians are making it all up.

If you’ve ever suffered a miscarriage, sought emergency contraception, needed cancer drugs that were available to you in May and unavailable today, or lost a much-wanted pregnancy and then had to litigate the repercussions with hospital attorneys and wild-eyed state prosecutors, you are afraid and anxious right now. That is happening. There are a lot of us. And as President Biden warned this week, Democrats losing Congress will mean that abortion is in peril everywhere.

Yet the men, they just keep on talking. Some examples:

· In June Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio told CNN’s Pamela Brown, in response to a question about his state law that contains no rape exceptions: “You don’t know you were raped for two months? … It’s hard to conceive of somebody who doesn’t know they were raped for two months.”

· In July Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., asked a gathering of like-minded misogynists “Have you watched these pro-abortion, pro-murder rallies?… The people are just disgusting. But why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.”

· Last month during debate over a near-total abortion ban in West Virginia, Republican Del. Chris Pritt said on the floor of the legislature that that child support requirements bad because if a man gets a woman pregnant, he would force her to have an abortion to avoid paying child support. And abortion is bad.

· When Indiana lawmakers approved a near-total ban on abortion earlier this month, Rep. John Jacob (R) announced that he voted in support because “the body inside of the mom’s body is not her body. Let me repeat that: The body inside of the mom’s body is not her body. Not her body, not her choice.”

It actually never ends. And the harder these guys try to seem sensitive and caring, the worse it goes for them.

Case in point: Viral video last week showed South Carolina state Rep. Neal Collins (R) describing the excruciating hurdles faced by a 19-year-old thanks to anti-abortion legislation he himself had supported. But Collins, fighting back tears while telling that story, didn’t actually change his vote: He just abstained, while his colleagues advanced one of the most restrictive bans in the nation. (His statement also bizarrely focused on his own sleepless suffering rather than that of the victim). These guys sure do like to keep on talking.

I don’t understand what some of these legislators are thinking. Do they forget that women have the vote? (Happy Women’s Equality Day.) Do they think women don’t have ears? Or cannot read words? Or that women are just kidding when they take to the streets, register to vote, and flip elections?

Even the politicians who are changing their tune are doing so in a matter that is frankly confusing: Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters quietly scrubbed his website’s abortion policy restrictions this week, rewriting or erasing five of his six previous hardline positions, including earlier support for a “a federal personhood law.” He then released a gaslight-hued new ad posted to Twitter recasting his abortion views as “commonsense.” And then there are those who have simply stopped talking altogether. Pennsylvania’s Gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, for example, has gone from a position in which he had championed a six-week ban, opposed exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother, and favored criminal penalties for doctors and nurses who perform abortions to essentially being a mime. OK, this one I actually do get: It’s cowardice, but at least it’s strategic.

The notion that your words have no impact, change nothing, and reveal no truth has been so baked into public political life these past years that it’s no wonder a good many elected officials seem to really believe it. But it a non-trivial number of voters do listen carefully to their elected officials and candidates for high office when they speak. They do absorb the gist of the sentiments offered and the cruelty that underlies it. And they also vote. It says so much about where we are just now that this simple connection must be explained as if it were string theory.

It’s not mere coincidence that new polling shows that “threats to democracy” is suddenly ranked as the number one issue for registered voters. It rolled in at 21 percent, this week, overtaking the economy, crime, and abortion. When you are repeatedly being told by those in power that your preferences don’t matter and when those in power believe that saying the quiet parts out loud is electorally costless, they aren’t just saying that women don’t matter. They’re saying democracy doesn’t matter either. But it turns out they don’t get to decide that. You do.

In fact, Republicans don't even count reproductive rights as "health care." Will they make contraceptive illegal next?

Monday, August 29, 2022

Amy Coney Barrett's "faith community" is a misogynistic cult.

“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” ― Robert A. Heinlein

Cult: “a religious group often living together, whose beliefs are considered extreme or strange by many people.” (Cambridge Dictionary)

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the Supreme Court’s anti-choice ‘Gang of Five,’ has made no secret of her profound Catholic faith. But she has been less forthcoming about her association with a cult. More than just a religious fundamentalist, she is a member of the secretive group ‘People of Praise’. And once served them as a ‘Laypastoral Women’s Leader’. A position the group called ‘Handmaiden’ until 2017. (It’s no coincidence that the series “The Handmaid’s Tale” premiered in April 2017)

Now a leaked video of a recent private People of Praise event reveals the subservience the organization demands from its female members. In the video, marking the cult's 50th anniversary, Dorothy Ranaghan — wife of one of the sect’s co-founders, Kevin Ragnahan — explains how some female followers wept uncontrollably in reaction to the group’s early teachings on “headship” and the “roles of men and women”. The organization’s dogma claims that God divinely ordained men as the “head” of the family and gave them dominance over women.

According to Dorothy Ranaghan,

“Some of the women – who are still in my women’s group, as a matter of fact – were wearing sunglasses all the time, because they were always crying and would have to hold on to their chairs every time somebody started teaching, because ‘What are we going to hear this time?”

She added as the audience and her interviewer laughed: “But it all worked out just fine in the end.”

In short, the brainwashing worked. And the newly initiated cultists accepted their changed reality. Notably, her final sentence is reminiscent of the last lines in Orwell’s ‘1984’ as Winston Smith acknowledges his complete subjugation to his oppressors:

“O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.

He loved Big Brother.”

Bearing this in mind, consider that Barrett lived in the Ranaghan household while she attended law school at Notre Dame. However, she is intelligent enough to know how her association with the Christian charismatic sect would look. Barrett has never publicly disclosed or discussed her membership in the cult. And she denies that their antediluvian ideas on gender roles influence her judicial thinking.

On the contrary, she has said she is a “faithful Catholic” whose religious beliefs would not “bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge." But then she ruled to overturn Roe, an act that only springs from religious beliefs — which have no place in a country established as officially non-religious.

The problem with religious fundamentalists is that while they can say their religious beliefs will not prejudice their thinking, they are either lying to us — or to themselves. It is the same psychology as a cop denying that racism played a part when they shot an unarmed Black man. Would the cell phone have looked like a gun if a white guy had been carrying it?

Barrett’s association with People of Praise is not a happenstance. Her father was a member of the cult’s all-male senior management when she was a girl in Louisiana, and her mother was a handmaiden. They steeped her from birth in the bitter acid of misogyny and talk of a woman existing only to produce children.

In a tract from the early days of the organization, Ranaghan explains this,

“The child in the womb expands the mother's body, changing its dimensions. As her body yields, so do the borders of privacy and selfishness. Her very existence gives to another. If we look around us at the women who we most admire, we will often see that they give and give and give of themselves, that they seem to have boundless time, energy, and service to give.

They are not private persons but are surrendered and available to care for others. Pregnancy teaches a woman that others have a claim on her very person for the service of life.”

The lesson is clear - and Barret has learned it well. Women do not own their bodies. And now this fanatic has burdened women with her personal beliefs. She presents constitutional arguments for her right-stripping decision. But the Constitution in the hands of a zealot is like the Bible to a Christian fundamentalist. They can twist it to support whatever flavor of bigotry they are serving.

And Barrett is likely just getting warmed up. In an internal magazine, the cult outlined its thinking on marriage,

“Governments do have good reason to support and encourage this kind of [heterosexual] marriage because they have a vested interest in producing future generations of well-informed citizens. Supporting traditional marriage is a time-honored way for societies to ensure that children are well cared for.”

Is gay marriage next on the chopping block? And as Barrett is a fundamentalist Catholic, you have to think that contraception will also have a date with the executioner.

After that, who knows? School prayer? Mandatory creationism class? An American 'Index Librorum Prohibitorum'. Criminalizing fornication and adultery? (Just kidding on the last one. Too many evangelicals would be going to jail.)

"Yikes!!! They're on to me. I thought I could just bullshit my way through my confirmation and then spend the rest of my life on the court returning America to those days of yore when women were in abject servitude to men."

Sunday, August 28, 2022

Gov. DeSantis says quiet thing about abortion out loud and then runs away from reporters

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to be the next president of the United States. He has successfully replicated Donald Trump’s general obdurate dunderhead mannerisms—the ones so applauded by the MAGA base. He has also been able to hoodwink popular online libertarians into believing that his ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ approach to COVID-19 policy was successful, even though all evidence shows it was not.

In recent weeks, DeSantis has started to strike hard with national GOP talking points in order to both up his profile and prime the pump for the inevitable announcement that he’s going to run for president in 2024. One of the third-rail issues for Republicans that is difficult to play both sides of, especially in states that honestly can swing either way (like Florida), is abortion. Reproductive rights have been revoked for millions of Americans after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and while many conservatives are uneasy about abortion and women, specifically, having rights, they don’t actually believe the government should control everyone’s bodies.

Early in July, DeSantis and his fellow Florida Republicans cheered their victory at being able to thwart reproductive rights by reinstating the 15-week abortion ban law they hastily pushed through. However, this was the comprise version of what the GOP really wants, which is an all-out ban on reproductive rights for pregnant individuals.

On Tuesday, the ever-cowardly DeSantis answered a single “policy” question from reporters, and we all got to see why Gov. DeSantis spends most of his press appearances not taking serious questions. Asked about the 15-week abortion law, DeSantis started out with the general talking point: “15 was very difficult to be able to achieve. We were happy we were able to achieve it. Ahhhhummm,” and it is at this point that DeSantis says the quiet part out loud: “And so we look forward and we welcome future endeavors. Ahh, but we ah, we realize there’s still going to be fights on the legal end on that.”

**Dunderhead realization in four panels**

The obvious follow-up question, which DeSantis just realized he had opened himself up to, was, “What would you like to see as an ultimate end to abortion?” At which point DeSantis ran away.

They are coming for control over your bodies. This is Conservative Christian Theocracy for white folks.

When will Republicans learn to read?

Saturday, August 27, 2022

All You Need to Know About the Motives and Motivations of the Trumps in a Single Photo

Don Jr. posted this photo of Daddy with the message: Redact this! You are a class act, Don Jr. - a chip off the old block. It's his gluttonous gut that needs to be redacted.

All you need to read from the memo Barr claimed cleared Trump on obstruction is a single footnote

US President Donald Trump (L) and US Attorney General William Barr arrive to deliver remarks on citizenship and the census in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC, on July 11, 2019. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s been more than three years since former Attorney General William Barr issued his infamous “summary” of the report created by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Barr’s four-page document was a highly slanted and heavily spun version of the actual report, downplaying the very serious nature of the evidence found against Donald Trump and members of his campaign connecting them to perjury, campaign finance violations, bank fraud, acting as undeclared agents of foreign governments, and obstruction—at a minimum.

The issue of obstruction applied specifically to Trump, who took actions that deliberately prevented Department of Justice investigators from obtaining accurate and complete information. However, the conclusion of Barr’s summary was a claim that he and other attorneys at the Justice Department, “after careful analysis,” could not find sufficient evidence to indict Trump for a crime. That conclusion was supposedly supported by a Justice Department memo on March 24, 2019, specifically on the matter of whether Trump obstructed justice.

In recent months, Barr has gotten something of a whitewash for his walking away before the bitter end after the 2020 election, and for providing testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, but this came after escapades in which Barr tried to encourage foreign intelligence services to perjure themselves in support of Trump’s conspiracy theories and launched John Durham as a special counsel on an endless effort to undercut the justice system.

Now, the most egregious part of Barr’s conclusion is in the news again, as the release of new documents shows that the “careful analysis” was just another lie.

Barr’s summary and the memo that supported it are both facing new scrutiny following the release of a key memo on a Freedom of Information Request initiated by CREW.

As Talking Points Memo reports, this is a “compromised and disturbing document” that shows the Justice Department under Barr writing a memo that was created not as genuine analysis of the issue, but explicitly to act as exculpatory evidence for Trump. This isn’t a document shaped by the concerns of a prosecutor, or even a neutral judge. This is a document created by the defense team, which was then referenced by Barr as a means of giving Trump an out.

But there’s more to it than that. The contents of the memo, the contents of the Mueller report, and the summary provided by Barr are in strict contrast with Barr’s own explanation of what would have constituted an indictable crime.

As Marcy Wheeler writes at emptywheel, the clear evidence shows that Barr, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and everyone else involved simply skipped over the part where they read the report prepared by Mueller’s team and got straight to work on debunking it. The memo, written just seven hours after the report landed on Barr’s desk, was drafted in such haste that it doesn’t even bother to cite the instances of obstruction that it is purporting to evaluate. Instead, it dismisses them all in a single footnote:

Given the length and detail of the Special Counsel’s Report, we do not recount the relevant facts here. Our discussion and analysis assumes familiarity with the Report as well as much of the background surrounding the Special Counsel’s investigation.

That’s the legalese equivalent of TL;DR. Except that they followed up “didn’t read” with “and that’s why there was no crime.” This is a memo that might as well have been written before the report was produced, for all the attention that it gives the evidence.

Or, as Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC, there was no careful analysis: Barr just “made that up.” That’s the same conclusion reached by the D.C. Court of Appeals, which issued the order mandating the release of the memo:

“The [Justice] Department’s submissions, the court explained, indicated that the memorandum conveyed advice about whether to charge the President with a crime. But the court’s in camera review of the memorandum revealed that the [Justice] Department in fact never considered bringing a charge.”

Barr asserted more than once that if Trump testified falsely, or coached other people to do so, or tried to prevent people from testifying, or offered someone a pardon in return for false testimony, any of the above would be a crime. Mueller’s findings provided evidence that Trump and other members of his staff had engaged in multiple instances of exactly these actions.

For that matter, so did Bill Barr. Because the release of the memo clearly shows that indicting Trump was never on the table. The “careful analysis” memo was made without any reference to the actual crimes, and was instead nothing more than a prop for Barr, who used it repeatedly to lie to the public and to Congress.

As Daily Kos wrote at the time of Barr’s initial announcement:

Donald Trump got a pass. He will walk away from this not just free from consequence, but emboldened by the idea that he really is above and beyond any rules.

The Mueller investigation lasted just over a year and-a-half. It resulted in the indictment of 37 individuals. Five members of Trump’s campaign team pleaded guilty to charges that included illegal lobbying for a foreign government and conspiracy against the United States.

Under Barr, the Justice Department dismissed the results of this report in a matter of hours, without reading it and without citing the evidence it contained.

John Durham’s “investigation” is now approaching the end of its third year. It long ago passed the length of the Muller investigation, and come January will be twice as long as that investigation. Over that time, two people have been indicted on charges of perjury. One of those two was acquitted at trial. The second goes to trial in October. There is no sign that Durham intends to end his investigation any time soon.

Bill Barr has been getting credit for opting out of Jan. 6. The truth is, he was one of its primary causes.

Bill Barr slinking in the shadows: he's still guilty as hell of aiding and abetting Trump.

Friday, August 26, 2022

The Horror of People Willing to Die for Donald Trump

Roads in Clinton County, Ohio, are seen closed during on Aug. 11 after an armed man tried to breach the FBI's Cincinnati office and fled. (photo: Nick Graham/AP)

Alyssa Rosenberg / The Washington Post

readersupportednews.org

26 August 22

On Thursday afternoon, a man whom authorities have identified as Ricky Shiffer was shot and killed in a stand-off with police officers after he allegedly tried to break into a FBI office in Cincinnati. Reports suggest that he may have been motivated by a strong devotion to former president Donald Trump and by anger at the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

On Thursday evening, The Post reported that according to sources, the search at Mar-a-Lago was aimed in part at recovering “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons.” Trump’s response? A post on Truth Social, the platform he founded, declaring, “Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax,” and a false suggestion that “Barack Hussein Obama” had done something similar.

But whatever we may learn about Shiffer’s motivations and the results of the FBI search, one thing is clear: The number of people who have died seemingly in service of an idol as unworthy as Donald Trump is tragic.

It’s one thing for Trump to relieve his followers of their money for dubious causes. (The former president has raked in millions of dollars ostensibly dedicated to political work, when in reality what money has been spent has gone to Trump’s personal expenses, according to Post sources.)

And goodness knows, Trump isn’t the only person whose acolytes behave wretchedly. Die-hard Johnny Depp fans and the stans who enlisted in rapper Kanye West’s online war against actor Pete Davidson are proof that nasty crusades of all types will never lack for recruits.

But it’s different when people start dying.

Four of Trump’s supporters died at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol: Ashli Babbit, who was shot while trying to climb through a broken window; Kevin Greeson, who suffered a fatal heart attack; Benjamin Philips, who succumbed to a stroke; and Rosanne Boyland, whose official cause of death was “acute amphetamine intoxication,” but who was caught up in a crush of bodies on the Capitol grounds. Christopher Stanton Georgia died by suicide later that month after he was arrested on unlawful entry charges stemming from Jan. 6; he pleaded not guilty before his death.

Now comes the death of Shiffer, who was also apparently at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Some might be tempted to create distance from these tragedies through mockery, or by treating Trump’s devotees as oddities.

That impulse — to disparage or dismiss the weird and extreme — seems to undergird a 2020 New York Times profile of a widowed farmer in India who adopted Trump as a personal deity, then collapsed and died after taking to his room and refusing to eat when Trump tested positive for covid-19. It’s also the sentiment behind so much snide social-media chatter. For instance: “some dude woke up today and decided to commit suicide by cop bc the former host of celebrity apprentice wasnt allowed to keep the top secret documents he stole from the white house.”

It's easy to scoff. But this sort of commentary ignores the sadness running through so many of these stories.

Ashli Babbitt was looking for meaning because her military career had stalled out, and her pool company was failing. The QAnon conspiracy theory — which presents Trump as a bulwark against a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles — gave Rosanne Boyland purpose and a framework for understanding the world as she struggled with addiction.

The absurdity and maliciousness of the cause for which these people have died only compounds the horror of their deaths. How is it that no one, no institution, could offer something more substantive than the manifest hollowness of Trump and Trumpism?

An essential part of Trump’s malign magic is its impermeability. Suggest that his followers deserve better — whether that is an actual infrastructure package or a leader who appeals to their best qualities rather than their basest — and you’re accused of exhibiting the very contempt that made Trump attractive in the first place. Suggest Trump is scamming his followers, and you’re a tool of the deep state. According to Trump and his many enablers, there is no evidence that isn’t planted or manufactured, no moral act that is disqualifying, no act for which Trump himself can be held responsible.

Even the people who seek to martyr themselves in Trump’s defense can be redefined and reinterpreted through this corrupt logic: On social media, Trump fans aren’t celebrating Shiffer as a Trumpist patriot. They’re dismissing him as a false flag planted to paint the FBI in a flattering light.

Those of us who live outside the boundaries of this mad realm may be tempted to count ourselves lucky. Still, we should be concerned for the residents of Trumpland for their own safety. And if that’s not enough, we should care because the people who die for Donald Trump may someday take others with them.

If he can pull this one off, it will be his biggest murder ever - "people tell me it's a perfect murder."

Thursday, August 25, 2022

Another GOP Lie Disproven: Actually, Canceling Student Debt Will Cut Inflation, Boost Economy

Biden’s targeted loan forgiveness will help, not harm, the economy. (photo: Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos)

25 August 22

Biden’s targeted loan forgiveness will help, not harm, the economy.

We want to fight inflation and we want to keep the labor market strong. One of the most important ways to achieve both goals is to forgive a portion of student-loan debt. And yesterday, President Joe Biden announced that he was doing just that—canceling up to $10,000 in student debt for those making less than $125,000 and designating an additional $10,000 in loan forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients. Yet critics are attacking the measure, even at its modest level and with its targeted exclusions and benefits, as inflationary and unfair.

Whatever your view of student-debt cancellation, the inflation argument is a red herring and should not influence policy. Taking that logic to the extreme, canceling food stamps would do far more to reduce inflation—but that would be cruel and inhumane, and fortunately, no one has suggested doing so. A closer look at the student-debt-cancellation program suggests that the new student-loan policy may even reduce inflation; at most, its inflationary impact will be minuscule, and the long-term benefits to the economy are likely to be significant.

The contention that debt cancellation will be inflationary contains a series of flaws. To start with, the value of the reduced debt repayments is so small that the cancellation’s impact will be negligible.

Although the broad estimates of the total amount of canceled debt can be big—some reach hundreds of billions of dollars—these figures derive only from budgeting practices for how credit programs like student loans are recorded. The government and budget analysts calculate a number that is known as “the present discounted value of foregone payments.” This corresponds to a current estimated value not of the lost payments this year, but of those in all future years. In other words, this calculation treats all of the losses from debt cancellation as though they occurred right now in a single year (adjusted for inflation)—a far cry from the reality. Such an accounting procedure can be an appropriate practice for thinking about the government’s long-run balance sheet, but it is a very poor guide for understanding what actually happens to people’s spending.

The inflation hawks compound this error by assuming that the indebted students will take their forgiven debt and go on a spending spree, a splurge of such magnitude that they would have to somehow find someone in the private sector willing to lend them the same amount at low interest rates to finance their extravagance. Economic theory says that these individuals will, at most, consider this an increase in their net wealth—I say “at most” because in many cases, these loans would never have been repaid at all. And economic theory also says that an increase in wealth is spent gradually over the course of a person’s life, not all in one year.

The actual amount of annual debt payments that would be reduced now, during this present inflationary episode, will probably run to tens of billions of dollars, not hundreds of billions. The lower number is likely because, again, many of those whose debt is being forgiven would not be making the payments anyway; many people with these debts simply don’t have the economic means to repay them.

The costs of cancellation are also far less than the value to be realized when student-debt payments resume after having been halted during the pandemic. Right now, because of the forbearance put into place in 2020, no payments are being made on government-owned student loans. This policy was essential to stabilize the economy during the pandemic. As part of a larger program of cancellation, the Biden administration would end forbearance; the resumption of payments in January is estimated to be worth more than $30 billion annually.

These numbers are modest relative to the size of our economy. Still, their net effect will be to reduce inflation.

Some of the critics demand that payments should simply resume without any cancellation. That would plunge a large number of student debtors back into immediate financial distress and further loan delinquency. According to analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, just before the pandemic, 11 percent of student debt was either in default or more than 90 days in arrears. Because of pandemic forbearance and other emergency measures, that default rate went to zero for most student debt—though researchers found that student loans excluded from forbearance continued to default, not surprisingly, at a high rate. According to the New York Fed’s survey, once payments resume, we will quickly return to that world: A large segment of people will be unable to service their payments and, in the Fed’s words, “lower-income, less educated, non-white, female and middle-aged borrowers will struggle more in making minimum payments and in remaining current.”

This level of distress is bad for the economy, both in the short run, as we strive for a robust recovery, and in the long run. Having little or no access to credit means that starting a family or a small business, moving, or otherwise building up lives is much harder for so many young people. A growing body of evidence backs up the common-sense conclusion that student-loan debt is linked to people delaying significant life events such as getting married and having children.

This has society-wide consequences. People’s well-being is obviously affected, and so is the economy. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that student debt is associated with weak new-business formation, in particular of new businesses with one to four employees. Given that the rapid increase in the number of small businesses—especially ones founded by Black and brown entrepreneurs—that we saw in 2021 may already be slowing down, we should be looking for ways to support that growth, not undercut it.

Studies of those student debtors who have had the good fortune to get their debt canceled by courts have found that the freedom from loan payments allows people to borrow anew and move around the country to take better jobs. Because continuing to build up our labor force and help people find jobs better matched to their skills is so important, a comprehensive student-loan debt-cancellation program will have a valuable economic upside.

Until recently, the U.S. led the world with high-quality and widely accessible college education. American prosperity and freedom have been tied to innovations such as the land-grant university, the GI Bill, and our world-class public universities. But because that education now comes at an ever-increasing price accompanied by an ever-increasing student debt for so many, our students fall behind before they even start their first jobs. The entire system of supporting and financing higher education needs an overhaul, but in the interim, we need to understand and address the immediate problem—and the Biden administration yesterday took a crucial first step by reducing the debt burden on many struggling American families.

Joltin' Joe is piling up the positives.