Lawyers spitting venom at each other
Department of Justice lawyers apparently finally ran out of patience with the sandbagging and lying that Trump’s sleazebag lawyers and propagandists routinely engage in. The DiJ has asked the judge to hold Trump’s sleazebag attorneys in contempt of court. That prompted this poison dart from one of the sleazebags:
The request came after months of mounting frustration from the Justice Department with Trump’s team — frustration that spiked in June after the former president’s lawyers provided assurances that a diligent search had been conducted for classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Club and residence. But the FBI amassed evidence suggesting — and later confirmed through a court-authorized search — that many more remained.
Trump is under investigation for three potential crimes: mishandling classified documents, obstruction and destruction of government records.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the former president’s lawyers “continue to be cooperative and transparent.” He added: “This is a political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen.”
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
Sleazebag Cheung should be jailed for (i) lying about being cooperative and transparent, and (ii) referring to a legitimate investigation as a political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen. Unfortunately, given how sleazy the courts allow people to be, one can be pretty sure sleazer Cheung won't face any punishment for his current blast of lies. After all, he spewed that venom outside of court, and there's far more leeway for sleazery outside court than inside. Well, at least that's how is supposed to be.
Whack the whistleblower
It was a big deal that Reality Winner’s probation officer let her travel from Texas to her sister’s house in North Carolina over Thanksgiving. She is, after all, a traitor, in the eyes of the law.
Ms. Winner was arrested in 2017 for leaking to journalists a classified intelligence report on Russian hacks into U.S. election infrastructure and has been confined ever since — in a Georgia county jail, a federal prison, a halfway house and, most recently, in a probation so strict that she often feels strangled.
Still, Ms. Winner viewed the trip with the wariness of an underdog conditioned to expect any small kindnesses to turn against her.
“It wasn’t my idea,” she said flatly by phone. “I preferred not to go.”
Oh, and another thing, she said pointedly: She went during Thanksgiving but for her niece’s birthday.
“I hate Thanksgiving,” she said. “I hate the food. I hate the vibe.”
This side of Ms. Winner becomes familiar after a while: the cranky prison yard impulse to let everyone know just how much she doesn’t care and can’t be hurt. It poorly camouflages the battered idealist who, despite disillusionment and harsh punishment, appears bent on finding some way to make herself useful on a grand scale. She never had much money, education or connections, but in her own way, she has repeatedly tried to save the country — first as a military linguist guiding foreign drone attacks and later by warning the public that Donald Trump was lying about Russia.
She still isn’t allowed to talk about her military service or the contents of her leak, leaving me to puzzle over why a young woman who still guards the secrets of the terrorism wars would risk everything to expose a five-page National Security Agency file on efforts to hack voter registration systems.
Ms. Winner mailed the report anonymously to The Intercept, where a reporter took the ill-advised step of giving a copy to the N.S.A. for verification. The authorities almost immediately zeroed in on her. She was charged under the Espionage Act, the same laws used to prosecute the Rosenbergs, Aldrich Ames and pretty much any other 20th-century spy you can name. The act has long been criticized for lumping together leaks motivated by public interest and, say, peddling nuclear secrets to a foreign government. Ms. Winner is considered a prime example of its downside.
She pleaded guilty and was given 63 months in prison, the longest federal sentence ever for the unauthorized release of materials to the media. (The former C.I.A. director David Petraeus got off with probation and a fine for sharing eight notebooks full of highly classified information with his biographer, who was also his mistress.)
There is just so much wrong with this. If Winner got 63 months in the slammer, why didn't Petraeus get 63 years? She was a low level person working to inform the American people of grievous lies by Trump, while Petraeus was a military general and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency working to make money for himself. She was selfless and altruistic, while he was selfish and sleazebag. Petraeus betrayed us, Winner did not. Again, these observations by Brooke Harrington about rich and powerful people rings absolutely true:
“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”
The whacked whistleblower
Electoral reform looks set to die in the Senate
Fizzling voting rights push angers Black lawmakersThe move by House Democratic leaders to fast-track a defense policy bill without tackling voting rights has ruffled some members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who saw the must-pass Pentagon package as their last best chance to address election protections for several years to come.
The critics are grumbling that party leaders simply haven’t been aggressive enough in efforts to force the Senate to adopt the various voting rights bills passed by the House this Congress. Some are also suggesting that leadership has taken their support for granted.
“It seems like the Black caucus has always supported leadership in what it’s tried to do, but leadership of this caucus hasn’t returned the favor, always,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), a member of both the Black caucus and the liberal “squad.” He added, “And so now we’re in a precarious position where voting rights will continue to be under attack — state to state — will continue to be gutted.”
At issue was the fate of legislation — named after the civil rights icon and late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) — to restore those parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act nullified by the Supreme Court in 2013. House Democrats had passed the bill this Congress, but it was blocked in the Senate, where GOP support is needed to overcome the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold.
In time, the Democrat’s failure to protect voting rights could easily turn out to be catastrophic. Maybe so catastrophic that America turns into a some form of a kleptocratic, White Christian theocratic dictatorship with permanent Republican Party rule. The Republican Party undeniably intends to neuter elections and non-Republican voters as much as they possibly can. Evidence of that intent includes (1) all the laws state Republican legislatures have passed since the 2020 elections, and (2) the fact that the radical right Republican Supreme Court significantly nullified election protections in 2013.
But who knows, maybe somehow the Senate will snatch this from the jaws of massive defeat and turn it into a win. But if that is going to happen, Schumer better get it done real soon. Time is almost out. Given vehement radical right Republican Party opposition to protecting elections and voter’s rights, things don’t look good for Team Democracy. Team Kleptocracy-Theocracy-Tyranny has got to be feeling pretty good about its prospects right now.
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