And yet another lawyer, this one an expert on traffic citation law, is getting a plea deal for couping in Georgia. Only the best people!
Open Thread
Another lawyer getting another plea dealPost + Comments (88)
by David Anderson| 88 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Crime Syndicate, Trump Crime Cartel
And yet another lawyer, this one an expert on traffic citation law, is getting a plea deal for couping in Georgia. Only the best people!
Open Thread
Another lawyer getting another plea dealPost + Comments (88)
by David Anderson| 227 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate, Trump Crime Cartel
MSNBC reports that Ken Chesebro has also pleaded guilty to couping in Georgia.
Kenneth Chesebro on Friday pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case, the day after Sidney Powell did the same.
The lawyers charged in the sprawling racketeering case were set to be the first to face trial. Now, three of Donald Trump’s 18 co-defendants have pleaded guilty, following Scott Hall‘s plea last month.
Much like Powell, the plea deal requires full testimony but no jail time.
And another lawyer pleads guilty for coupingPost + Comments (227)
This post is in: GOP Death Cult, Open Threads, Proud To Be A Democrat!, Republican Crime Syndicate, Republicans in Disarray!, Schadenfreude
Mitch McConnell looks like a medieval artist's depiction of the Black Death. Here's why that's a problem for Joe Biden.
— Not up for trouble, please stop asking (@agraybee) September 7, 2023
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he has no plans to retire early and has reminded his colleagues of his unparalleled fundraising prowess amid recent questions about his freeze-ups. https://t.co/dTaac0nlfj
— Axios (@axios) September 7, 2023
… Between the lines: McConnell claimed that he’s had no freeze-up incidents beyond the two documented on camera.
= Now that he’s back in D.C., he’ll repeatedly be on camera during long work days.
President Biden and McConnell were born in the same year
Biden is clearly still fit mentally and physically
McConnell is not
Age is a red herring and was always just a cudgel to go after POTUS
Republicans and many in the media are sad their go to criticism is in tatters https://t.co/omlEw8ktZT
— Qondi (@QondiNtini) September 7, 2023
No they don't, most elected Republicans(especially those in the senate) have rallied behind McConnell in the last few weeks defending his health.
But it's nice to make shit up I guess, right?
— Hewie (@dahughjestanus) September 7, 2023
McConnell tries to downplay questions about his health pic.twitter.com/JQCiwRuLr9
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 6, 2023
NEW: During a closed door lunch, McConnell went over his health history & said he was given a “clean bill of health” by doctors, per Sen. Kennedy. And McConnell told GOP members he has only experienced freezing episodes twice — and they just happened to be in front of cameras.
— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) September 6, 2023
In his first press conference since freezing for the second time, McConnell says that Biden "has been too slow" in giving more aide to Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/J53oyAMrpl
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 6, 2023
Response from ‘Ex-Newsmax & Ex-OANN WH Correspondent. Named Top 10 Twitter Influencer’ with 625,000 followers:
When discussing buzzards in the GOP, Little Prince Rand will not be out-media’d:
Sen. Rand Paul does not buy the "dehydration" explanation for Mitch McConnell's "freezing" event.
“I think it’s an inadequate explanation to say this is dehydration… Well, I practiced medicine 25 years and it doesn’t look like dehydration to me, it looks like a focal… pic.twitter.com/dNp65GeHbs
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) September 6, 2023
Knife in back. Twist to come. https://t.co/PBx03JbSXf
— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) September 5, 2023
2/ Piece is also good reminder that Rand Paul is unquestionably the biggest raging cock in American politics, almost regardless of where you stand in politics. He and his dad both OG white supremacists but at least the dad had a congenial personality.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 6, 2023
But Josh ‘Hawlin’ Arse‘ Hawley is a real contendah!
Hawley: I did not vote for Mitch McConnell for leader. He is not my choice for leader. I think we need a change. pic.twitter.com/Y2dWbYTPox
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 7, 2023
Excellent annotations from Jim Newell, at Slate:
… Some context is useful here. When Florida Sen. Rick Scott challenged McConnell for the leadership position late last year, Hawley was in Scott’s corner. And he reiterated that a number of times to reporters on Tuesday. When I asked Hawley whether it was time for McConnell to step aside as leader given his health issues, he said, “You’ll have to ask somebody who voted for him.”
In a shocking correlation, it’s the Senate Republicans who’ve had antagonistic or frosty relationships with McConnell in recent years who seem most concerned about his recent health issues hampering his ability to stay on as leader. But that’s always been a small bloc. McConnell fended off Scott’s leadership challenge last year by a 37-to-10 vote. And those 37 senators, along with several of the 10, are still in lockstep behind McConnell’s leadership.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney won the planned response of the day.
“We might lose from Mitch McConnell 20 seconds a day,” he told reporters, “but the other 86,380 seconds are pretty darn good.”…
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s had a long up-and-down but more frequently down relationship with McConnell, offered a Cruzian master class in prepared ambiguity.
“The health scares he’s had were frightening,” Cruz said when I asked how concerned he was about McConnell’s leadership ability. “But age comes for us all, and Mitch is stubborn as a mule, and he’s tough. And so he’s been in my prayers in recent weeks.” (Stubborn as a mule: It works as both a compliment and a dig.)…
There had been some chatter last week from Senate Republicans about calling for a “special meeting” to discuss McConnell’s health. Since Senate Republicans already have three meetings a week in a format known as “lunch,” calling for a “special meeting” would’ve served little other purpose than to embarrass the man.
No such special meeting materialized. McConnell did, however, use the first 10 or so minutes of Wednesday’s lunch to give a personal status update. For someone so thoroughly disgusted at ever having to talk about his health, this mustn’t have been easy for him. But it appeared to have done the trick…
The most interesting part of Republicans’ lunch, though, may not have been what McConnell said or reiterated. It was the sequencing of lunch speakers. (If you’ve followed McConnell’s meticulous planning over the years, this seemed far from a coincidence.) As soon as McConnell finished speaking, Steven Law—a former McConnell aide and the chief of the “McConnell-aligned” super PAC the Senate Leadership Fund—“made a presentation about McConnell fundraising,” per Punchbowl News.
In other words: There was a reminder that McConnell controls the money…
The Pitchbot finds it unnecessary to gloss further:
‘The Devil They Know’: McConnell’s Health Issues Worry Democrats – The New York Times https://t.co/soyD5qISHY
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) September 7, 2023
And before y’all start getting bright ideas…
I keep seeing this idea. This is not legal.
Kentucky law mandates that if McConnell retires, Beshear picks someone from a list of 3, selected by the Republicans. And he is required to do this within 21 days. He does not have the ability to appoint a RINO, a Dem, or nobody. https://t.co/taK11km77t pic.twitter.com/jQbgzlXKM5
— Lakshya Jain (@lxeagle17) September 5, 2023
by TaMara| 200 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate, Trump Crime Cartel, Lock Him Up...Lock Them All Up
Fani Willis will be speaking soon. I’ll try to find a live feed.
Meanwhile;
READ the 98-page indictment: https://t.co/Wkk0PGM5qx
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 15, 2023
Mark Freakin’ Meadows…but no Lindsay
Live feed:
If that one gets annoying, USAToday seems to have just the press conference feed set up here.
Indictment #4: Rico! Meadows! and More!Post + Comments (200)
by TaMara| 73 Comments
This post is in: Asshole, Media, Our Failed Political Establishment, Politics, Republican Crime Syndicate
In case you missed it, this is chilling:
Eric Meyer, publisher of the Marion County Record, answers questions in his newspaper office Friday after police seized computers, servers, cellphones and other items. He says he doesn’t know how they will get the newspaper out on Tuesday, but, “We will publish something.” (Sam Bailey/Kansas Reflector)
Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”
The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
Meyer said he had never heard of police raiding a newspaper office during his 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal or 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.
“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid. Read more here
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It is not hyperbole to say that this attack on the people’s right to know appears to have killed the Marion County Record’s Joan Meyer. From Melinda Henneberger: https://t.co/EqU8bElgLo
— The Kansas City Star (@KCStar) August 13, 2023
Here’s a paywall-free version of my column about the police raid on the Marion County Record newspaper. #ksleg https://t.co/gIBGF1ezTs
— Joel Mathis (@joelmmathis) August 12, 2023
Back in the 1990s, on my very first day at my very first newspaper job, my boss — a sometimes-crusty, often-jolly Battle of the Bulge veteran by the name of Bill Meyer — told me to call up a local businessman who was, rumor had it, about to open a new branch of a popular chain restaurant in our small central Kansas town.
“Ask him when it’s going to open,” Bill told me. “And ask him if he’s going to serve beer.”
It wasn’t an idle question. The businessman owned another restaurant from the same franchise the next town over, in a small Mennonite community, and certainly no beer was served there.
So I did what I was told. I called the businessman. I asked him about his new restaurant. And, finally — not thinking much of it — asked him the final question: Would the new establishment serve beer?
There was a long silence on the phone.
“What kind of reporter are you anyway?” he sputtered. “What do you think you’re doing asking questions like that?” If memory serves, he then hung up on me. It was an unexpectedly fractious start to my journalism career.
The paper where I had just started? The Marion County Record.
You’ve probably heard of the newspaper by now. It was raided Friday by the Marion police, many of its computers and all the other stuff its staff uses to, well, put out the newspaper, were hauled away with no guarantee of their quick or safe return.
“We’re going to have to reinvent the wheel to put out this week’s paper,” Eric Meyer, Bill’s son, told me on Friday after news of the raid became public and very quickly went viral nationally.
We’re not entirely sure of the reasons behind the raid. Marion’s police chief wasn’t taking questions, at least initially. But the apparent cause — unsurprisingly to me, given my own first-day memories of the paper — had something to do with the paper’s unpublished investigation of a liquor license for a catering business.
The mixture of alcohol, business and journalism in Marion has always been touchy, apparently.
Since we don’t know the full details behind the raid, though, I’m not going to get into all the nitty-gritty. Bill, who died in 2006, wouldn’t want me to write without having a firm command of all the facts.
But it’s scary when police raid a newspaper. It looks and smells like a threat to the First Amendment. Investigators had better have a damned good — even extraordinary — justification for the search warrant. God help them otherwise.
I do want you to know about the Marion County Record, though.
It’s one of those small town newspapers that serves as both the backbone of its community, and of the journalism profession at large. I wasn’t the only young reporter to get my start there: Bill — a member of the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame and a KU alum who had the Jayhawk fight song played at his funeral — regularly hosted summer interns from the university, sending them back out into the world after a few months of doing everything: Taking pictures, writing features, covering city council meetings, you name it. It was an immersive education.
Sometimes, the paper threw elbows. Bill once told me about coming into work to find a bullet hole in his office window.
Small town journalism is a delicate balance, though. Everybody knows everybody. You can’t hide from the people you write about. When the paper ran a rather prominent correction about an error I’d made, I was razzed on the streets of Marion for a solid week.
A few years before he passed, Bill called me to talk about maybe coming back to town. It’s a nice community, he told me, a place where you can serve that community and make a comfortable living.
He loved the town. And he loved the newspaper. Rural Kansas and community journalism both face brisk headwinds these days. The two situations are probably related. Whatever the outcome of this ugly mess, Marion and its newspaper will still need each other to survive.
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I think the best thing we can do to help this small paper get through this is to subscribe (here).
Personally, I think Police Chief Gideon Cody, Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, and drunk driver Kari Newell are about to go through some things.
(note: the dying bird is randomly NOT supplying the full tweet, so you may have to click through to see images. Apologies).
Let’s Talk About The Marion County RecordPost + Comments (73)
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Crime Syndicate, Republican Venality, Trump Indictments
More in sorrow than anger…
Bill Barr on CBS: "You have to remember — a conspiracy crime is completed at the time it's agreed to and the first steps are taken. That's when the crime is complete." pic.twitter.com/IVQ5T3x2Yh
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 6, 2023
And galavanted around the globe with his supposedly independent special counsel, finding nothing, and stomping all over his dick meeting with criminals and spies who’d, in prior years, taken runs at corrupting the Trump campaign and Trump allies. https://t.co/KBL7fNTo3g
— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) August 6, 2023
Former Attorney General Bill Barr said he is willing to testify against former President Trump at his Jan. 6 trial. https://t.co/jQmFbzHORr
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 6, 2023
Look at that stern expression! You know it’s over when the GOP’s lifetime consigliere switches from ‘Perhaps some unfortunate assumptions may have been made’ to ‘Throw that miscreant under the jail… ‘
… Barr, who was appointed by Trump, responded “of course” when asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if he would be willing to appear as a witness in Trump’s trial over federal charges related to alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He declined to answer whether he was interviewed by the special counsel in connection to the federal investigation.
Barr has been a staunch critic of the former president since he resigned from his post shortly after the 2020 election. He noted that the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith was a “challenging” one, but that he does not think it “runs afoul of the First Amendment.”
When asked about his interactions with Trump and how he told the former president there was no evidence of election fraud, Barr said that his investigations into the fraud “satisfied” the conclusions…
First rule of GOP Legal Fight Club: When your client is obviously sunk, cut your own losses:
Bill Barr: 'Would not come out very well' for Trump on the stand https://t.co/eO1tpD6aLE
— POLITICO (@politico) August 3, 2023
Once Trump lost power Bill Barr saw the light. I’m glad he has. But recall that Judge Walton (rightly) concluded that Barr put forward such “misleading” and “distorted” accounts of the Mueller report that it called into question his credibility. That matters, too. @AWeissmann_ https://t.co/TDql7vnNj0
— Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) August 5, 2023
Speaking of miscreants, Kaitlan Collins is making a strong bid to replace Maggie Haberman in this new ‘Downfall’ era of TFG’s career…
Bill Barr on CNN: “As the indictment says, they’re not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants. He can even lie. He can tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better. But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy.” pic.twitter.com/YqK1g4alaK
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 3, 2023
Collins: You think jack Smith has more?
Barr: Oh, yes. I would believe he has a lot more, pic.twitter.com/zyDoPNgICG
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 3, 2023
Bill Barr makes interesting point on CNN: if Trump wants to argue he was simply following the advice of counsel, he would have to take the stand. (Which he almost certainly would not do.)
— Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) August 3, 2023
This is my favorite clip in a long time. pic.twitter.com/FQVA76cHbW
— Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) August 3, 2023
Barr killed 1980s Iran-Contra investigation. Bush was Vice President under Reagan. Bush may/may not be in on Iran-Contra. Barr was Bush’s AG. He advised Bush to pardon all White House suspects with ability to disclose Bush’s role in Iran-Contra. All pardoned, leaving Bush clear.
— Dan Cofran 🇺🇸 🏴 (@dancofran) August 6, 2023
GOP Venalilty Open Thread: Bill ‘Ever Lower’ Barr Is No InnocentPost + Comments (134)
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Republican Crime Syndicate, Trump Crime Cartel, Trumpery
So this has happened:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump faced new charges Thursday in a case accusing him of illegally possessing classified documents, with prosecutors alleging that he asked a staffer to delete camera footage at his Florida estate in an effort to obstruct a federal investigation into the records.
The indictment includes new counts of obstruction and willful retention of national defense information, adding fresh detail to an indictment issued last month against Trump and a close aide. The additional charges came as a surprise at a time of escalating anticipation of a possible additional indictment in Washington over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
I continue to regret my failure to purchase popcorn futures at the appropriate time.
Over to the jackaltariat! (Open, if schadenfreude doused thread.)
Image: Dirk Hals, Merry Party in a a TavernMerry Party in a a Tavern, 1628