The Mahablog

Politics. Society. Group Therapy.

The Mahablog

Trump’s Appeal Bond and Other News Bits

I’ve been looking for any information on the appeal bond posted by Trump yesterday. And we don’t know much.This is from Alternet

The ex-president’s bond was guaranteed by the Federal Insurance Company — a New York-based subsidiary of the company Chubb Group LLC, which is headquartered in Switzerland. In 2018, Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg served on a trade advisory committee in the Trump White House. The Washington Post reported that “it was not clear from court records what collateral Trump presented to obtain the bond from Chubb.”

We don’t know what was put up for collateral, we don’t know if it was co-signed, we don’t know what fee Trump is being required to pay. Seems a tad hinky. Some commenters are breathlessly noting that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was at Mar-a-Lago yesterday and wondering if Orbán was involved in securing the loan. That’s pure speculation, note. Orbán came to the U.S. to meet with Trump but is not meeting with President Biden, which is definately hinky.

Trump has now officially taken over the RNC, so watch the RNC budget get drained on behalf of Trump. You down-ballot candidates are on your own.

In other Mar-a-Lago news, this is from Joyce Vance yesterday

In the Mar-a-Lago case, two additional prosecutors filed their notices of appearance, the formal way a lawyer advises a judge they will be participating in a case. One of those lawyers handled Trump’s appeal on presidential immunity to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, leading to widespread speculation Jack Smith is gearing up to appeal Judge Aileen Cannon to the Eleventh Circuit.

Cannon will have to issue an appealable order before that can happen. But that moment may well come when she rules on pending classified discovery issues or Trump’s request to make the names of witnesses public.

We can hope.

The fallout from Thursday night continues, including the trashing of Sen. Katie Britt. I get the impression that Republicans are projecting all their frustrations at having been owned at the SOTU onto her. She may or may not have a career after this. But here’s a fun read about her — Is Katie Britt for Real?

State of the Union: Joe Did the Job

(Before getting to the SOTU — Trump just posted the $91 million appeal bond in the E. Jean Carroll case. Now let’s see him come up with the bigger one.)

I have to say I’m feeling a LOT better about the November election after last night. There will be many bumps ahead, of course. But even as I keyboard a lot of Republicans probably are wondering if they overdid the “Joe is old and senile” claim a tad.

Best headline so far: GOP Stunned To Discover It’s Not Running Against A Cadaver In 2024

Republicans who have turned Joseph R. Biden into a caricature of falling-down dementia and drooling incontinence have set the bar so low that anything above a flatline EKG from the president knocks them back on their heels.

They were left spluttering that Biden’s State of the Union was too loud and too campaign-y. They couldn’t maintain a basic level of decorum in the chamber, giving Biden the chance to knock them around with ad libs and direct call outs, directly facing the GOP side of the chamber. He turned the call and response of the Black church into whack-a-MTG.

Brian Tyler Cohen at MSNBC wrote,

Unfortunately for Donald Trump and his campaign, Biden didn’t sound like a man in the throes of cognitive decline. The GOP may have gaslighted itself into selling one version of Joe Biden to its loyal sycophants — but that version exists only in their fever dreams. And the president proved as much tonight.

It says something about the Republian mood, I think, that the GOP response from Alabama Senator Katie Britt got the harshest blowbacks from other Republicans. I didn’t watch it, but I take it that after President Biden’s near-virtuoso performance, her response was just weird. A number of commenters predicted it will be replicated on SNL tomorrow night. See ‘What the Hell Am I Watching’: Republicans Torch Their Own SOTU Rebuttal at Rolling Stone. And this is from Daily Beast, Official GOP Response to SOTU Has Republicans ‘Losing It’

The freshman senator is considered a rising star in the party. But her speech’s intense tone—with an over-the-top dramatic cadence that was delivered in a kitchen—left political operatives and observers struggling to make sense of it.

The performance was so bad that some Republicans watched the high-profile speech with a grimace.

A GOP strategist told The Daily Beast that Britt’s delivery quickly became a gossip item Thursday night among operatives connected to Donald Trump—something that could have potential implications for her consideration as a vice presidential pick on the 2024 ticket.

“Everyone’s fucking losing it,” this Republican said, requesting anonymity to discuss private conversations. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”

It may be they weren’t reacting to Britt as much as to the realization they’d just been owned by Joe Biden, and Britt’s speech didn’t help. And to add insult to injury, Trump’s toy social media platform went down during the speech, leaving his fans unable to enjoy Trump’s witty retorts (/sarcasm). I understand a handful of House Republicans actually left the room during the speech. Whether that was in protest or because the whole event was too painful for them, I cannot say.

If you didn’t watch the speech, you’ll want to watch it. It wsn’t just the words, but the energy in the room (or lack of it on the GOP side), that made it an event. This is not to say there weren’t spots that could have been better, but on the whole it made a lot of Democrats very happy.

The State of the Union

If you’re watching and want to comment, feel free.

Meanwhile, this happened today.

A federal judge on Thursday denied Donald Trump’s last-minute plea for extra time to front a massive sum of money to appeal his rape defamation trial, forcing the tycoon to suddenly come up with $91 million.

On Thursday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan told the former president that he was in a mess of his own making—after losing a trial that found him directly responsible for lying about sexually abusing the journalist E. Jean Carroll, ordered to pay an $83 million verdict, and waiting until the very last second to come up with a backup plan. …

… The judge then noted that Trump had essentially run out the clock all on his own, burning through nearly all of the 30 days he had until the $83 million judgment came due—and not even lining up the higher sum he’d need to pay to appeal the judgment. Instead, Trump defense lawyer Alina Habba waited until last weekend to propose an unorthodox alternative: a lowball offer to front a quarter of the money  instead.

Just today he had another judgment that went against him.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been ordered to pay a six-figure legal bill to a company founded by a former British spy that he unsuccessfully sued for making what his lawyer called “shocking and scandalous” false claims that harmed his reputation.

A London judge, who threw out the case against Orbis Business Intelligence last month saying it was “bound to fail,” ordered Trump to pay legal fees of 300,000 pounds ($382,000), according to court documents released Thursday.

Orbis was founded by Christopher Steele, who once ran the Russia desk for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.

Also, too: Trump to Seize Control of GOP Machine After Clinching Nomination

Update: This is an energized speech. Ukraine and Putin right out of the box.

Oh, he’s being feisty. The January 6 insurrectionists were not patriots! They failed! Eat it, Republicans.

Speaker Johnson looks constipated.

Kate Cox who had to leave Texas to have an abortion is there.Directly addressing the justices about Roe v. Wade. Sam Alito isn’t there.

He’s taunting the Republicans.

Jobs! Labor! Unions built the middle class! This is a classic Democratic speech.

Speaker Johnson looks like he wants to be somewhere else.

This is like a Dem Party pep rally.

Speaker Johnson looks like he’s waiting to get root canal.

The Republicans are looking down at their shoes.

He’s yanking their chains over the border bill they tanked. They don’t like it.

MTG is having a tantrum.

“We can fight about the border, or we can fix it. I’m ready to fix it.”

Speaker Johnson stood for John Lewis of blessed memory. I bet MTG didn’t.

Overall a good speech.

The New Political Landscape and Wednesday’s News Bits

So Nikki Haley suspended her campaign in spite of winning Vermont. She might have felt it best to suspend the campaign with at least a few electors in her pocket. She’s still in a position to claim the nomination in case Trump implodes. Although of course who knows what the RNC might do if Trump implodes.

Dean Phillips — remember him?– finally took the hint and is dropping out also. I understand Marianne Williamson is still running. No one cares.

The nominees for president in 2024 are now pretty much set in stone, as if they weren’t already. I personally think a long general election campaign helps Biden. Trump needs to be more visible. He needs to be in all the television news every bleeping day. Let everyone see him screaming his word salad speeches about retribution and people who don’t speak languages. He’ll gut his own general election chances the same way he screwed himself in the second E. Jean Carroll trial by being a flaming asshole in the courtroom.

And I understand from exit polling a substantial portion of Haley voters say they weren’t voting for Haley as much as they were voting against Trump. The question is, will these voters be inclined to hold their noses and vote for Trump in November, anyway? Or will they be alarmed enough by his erratic speech and behavior to maybe just not vote, if they can’t bring themselves to vote for Biden? And I still think that a substantial part of the electorate hasn’t been focusing on Trump or Biden or the news in general. Things will change when/if they ever do. Current polling means very little.

I understand that MAGAs tended to win out over moderates in down-ballot Republican races yesterday. These tend to be the same sort of people who mostly lost in 2020 and 2022, so let’s hope that trend continues.

Adam Schiff will almost certainly be elected to Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat. I’m okay with this, but it’s sad that Katie Porter and Barbara Lee won’t be in Congress next term. Maybe they can come back in 2026.

Regarding the meeting between Trump and Elon Musk — the New York Post is reporting that Musk declared he won’t be contributing to any presidential campaigns. Fine, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he won’t help Trump out with his appeal bonds. There’s also some nonsense going on with Musk and Tesla and OpenAI that I haven’t been following closely, but apparently it makes Musk look bad.

Appeal Bond Watch: There’s been no apparent movement from Trump on paying the appeal bond in the E. Jean Carroll judgment, which now totals over $91 million and is due on Saturday.

Soon we won’t have Kysten Sinema around to make fun of any more. But here’s a nice retrospective of her political demise — Kyrsten Sinema Drove Herself Out Of Politics by Kate Riga at TPM.

Does Trump Have the Money, or Not?

Trump’s deadline to put up the E. Jean Carroll judgment is this Saturday, March 9, and he’s still trying to get out of it. This just happened today:

 Former President Donald Trump is seeking a new trial in the defamation case brought by former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, arguing that the judge in the case improperly restricted his testimony.

Trump in January was ordered to pay $83.3 million in damages to Carroll for defaming her in 2019 when he denied her allegation that he sexually abused her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.

Trump spent less than five minutes on the witness stand, during which he testified that “I just wanted to defend myself, my family and frankly the presidency.”

Judge Lewis Kaplan instructed the jury to disregard the remark because it fell outside the bounds of what Trump was allowed to say.

In a court filing Tuesday, defense attorneys argued “the Court’s restrictions on President Trump’s testimony were erroneous and prejudicial” because Trump was not allowed to explain “his own mental state” when he made the defamatory statements about Carroll.

“This Court’s erroneous decision to dramatically limit the scope of President Trump’s testimony almost certainly influenced the jury’s verdict, and thus a new trial is warranted,” defense attorneys Alina Habba and John Sauer said.

The defense also asked Judge Kaplan to reduce the $83.3 million damage award, arguing it “surpasses the permissible bounds for such damages and exceeds comparable awards” in the Southern District of New York.

I can’t imagine how “his own mental state” would be a legal excuse to say any of the things he said. Also, in the second trial that ended in January, the judge had already found Trump guilty of defaming Carroll, and the only thing the trial was about was how much damages Trump would have to pay. Trump doesn’t seem to grasp that.  It’s also likely Kaplan was doing Trump a favor by limiting his speech in court, considering how badly Trump’s own behavior hurt him in that case.

I am going to be absolutely furious if some other judge somewhere lets Trump  slide on this.

Earlier today Carroll’s lawyers had hit back at Trump for his “promise” to be good for the penalty without putting up a bond. This is from Law & Crime:

In response to Donald Trump‘s continued promises to a judge in New York that he will pay the $83.3 million he owes to writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her — without posting security — Carroll’s lawyer has offered a taut reply: Once again, Trump offers nothing to credit him but his “unsubstantiated say so.”

The message came in a one-page letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan after the former president — already beset on all sides by indictments and legal dramas in Florida, Georgia, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere in New York City — asked for a third time to stay the execution of the defamation award to the veteran writer.

Trump’s attorneys Alina Habba and John Sauer have proposed that the court should give the defendant an unsecured 30-day delay to pay until all of his post-trial motions are resolved, or to allow him to post a reduced bond that would come in at little over $24.4 million.

Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan wrote in the Monday letter to the judge that Trump’s latest filings are riddled with incorrect claims that it is she who “mischaracterized” existing Second Circuit case law on the enforcement of judgment without the posting of bond or another condition.

Not only has Trump once again offered “no alternative means other than his own unsubstantiated say so that he will have the $83.3 million available when Carroll prevails on appeal,” Kaplan wrote, but when his lawyers pointed to a 2015 strip search case in Long Island to support their argument, they misinterpreted it.

There’s more. But, yes, everybody knows what a hole Trump is in and that he has a history of lying about money.  No one with any sense would trust him. His promioses to pay for anything mean nothing.

At The New Republic, Greg Sargent has a bad news is kind of good news post

Some new polling from a top Democratic pollster finds mixed news for Team Biden on this front: Large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be “dictator for one day” to his vague threat to enact “termination” of provisions in the Constitution.

That’s maddening for obvious reasons. But it also presents the Biden campaign with an opportunity. If voters are unaware of all these statements, there’s plenty of time to make voters aware of them—and the polling also finds that these statements, when aired to respondents, shift them against Trump.

The survey—which was conducted by veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin for the group Save My Country and shared with The New Republic—did something novel. It polled 400 voters in each of three swing states—Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and weighted them in proportion with each state’s Electoral College votes. It omitted respondents who voted for Trump in 2020 and also said Biden didn’t legitimately win.

In short, the poll was designed to survey voters who are genuinely gettable for Biden. The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above, Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol, his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause, his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin” opposition, and a few more.

Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump,” the memo accompanying the poll concluded.

The good news for Biden is that when respondents were presented with these quotes, it prompted a rise in Trump’s negatives. For instance, after hearing them, the percentage who see him as “out for revenge” jumped by five points, the percentage who see him as “dangerous” rose by nine points, and the percentage who see him as a “dictator” climbed by seven points.

This is why I’m not having a meltdown over the presidential polls. All is not lost. I heard recently that most voters don’t blame Trump for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. How many times did Trump brag — on video — that he was the one who overturned Roe?

For that matter, probably most voters haven’t listened to Trump speak at any length about anything since he left office. He’s getting worse. He barely knows what planet he’s on sometimes. There is plenty of opportunity for Democrats here.

In other news: Kyrsten Sinema announced she’s not seeking re-election. She may finally have gotten the memo that nobody likes her.

Today is Super Tuesday, of course. If anything interesting happens I may comment more later. Or not.

Update: TPM: Feds Slap 12 New Counts On Bob ‘Gold Bars’ Menendez

 

SCOTUS Puts Trump Back on Ballots

As expected, the Supreme Court is keeping Trump on the Colorado ballot. It was a unanimous decision [maybe not; see below] that I have just given a quick skim. The gist of it seems to be that only the U.S. Congress can determine if a presidential candidate is disqualified under the 14th Amendment insurrection clause. States may disqualify candidates for state offices any way they like, but not a national office.

NBC News

The court said the Colorado Supreme Court had wrongly assumed that states can determine whether a presidential candidate or other candidate for federal office is ineligible.

The ruling makes it clear that Congress, not states, has to set rules on how the 14th Amendment provision can be enforced against federal office-seekers. As such the decision applies to all states, not just Colorado. States retain the power to bar people running for state office from appearing on the ballot under section 3.

“Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the states, responsible for enforcing section 3 against all federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse,” the ruling said.

By deciding the case on that legal question, the court avoided any analysis or determination of whether Trump’s actions constituted an insurrection.

I’m sure there will be all kinds of learned legal analyses of this decision as the day goes on. I’ll keep an eye out for anything interesting.

Update: Here’s something interesting. At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern writes The Supreme Court’s “Unanimous” Trump Ballot Ruling Is Actually a 5–4 Disaster.

Five justices—Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—went further: They declared that only Congress may enforce the insurrection clause against federal candidates. How, exactly? The majority says that Congress must “prescribe” specific procedures to “ascertain” when an individual is disqualified under the 14th Amendment. Such procedures, of course, do not exist today. And without them, the majority insists—in just a few paragraphs of sparse reasoning—the insurrection clause cannot be enforced against office seekers. It derives this conclusion from two primary sources: “Griffin’s Case,” an 1869 opinion written by Chief Justice Salmon Chase, acting as a circuit judge, and Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, which says, “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The three liberal justices wrote a separate opinion, authored jointly, to explain why this reasoning fails. First, Griffin’s Case was, until Monday, widely discredited as the political handiwork of a chief justice plotting to run for the presidency as a great conciliator between North and South. It is “a nonprecedential, lower court opinion by a single Justice in his capacity as a circuit judge,” as the liberal justices wrote. Moreover, Sen. Lyman Trumbull, an author of the 14th Amendment, resisted the logic of Griffin’s Case, declaring that while congressional legislation might provide a “more efficient and speedy remedy” for disqualifying a candidate, it is the 14th Amendment itself that “prevents a person from holding office.”

Second, it is bizarre to claim that the insurrection clause requires enabling legislation by Congress when the remainder of the 14th Amendment—indeed, all three amendments ratified after the Civil War—is “self-executing” (meaning it does not require congressional action for enforcement). Everyone agrees that Congress need not pass a law to ensure that all persons have due process, equal protection, and freedom from enslavement. Why, the liberals wondered, did the majority create “a special rule” for the insurrection clause alone? They added that the clause does mention congressional action, but only to say that Congress may lift a disqualification by two-thirds vote: “It is hard to understand why the Constitution would require a congressional supermajority to remove a disqualification if a simple majority could nullify Section 3’s operation by repealing or declining to pass implementing legislation.”

These disagreements matter a great deal. As the liberals point out, the majority’s sweeping Congress-only approach “forecloses judicial enforcement” of the insurrection clause—in, for instance, the context of a criminal trial involving an insurrectionist. It also bars future enforcement on the basis of “general federal statutes” that compel “the government to comply with the law,” since the majority says any congressional enforcement must be “tailored” to the insurrection clause. And it even empowers the Supreme Court to prevent Congress from disqualifying an insurrectionist in the future, because the court can claim that any enabling legislation did not adhere to the made-up rules in Monday’s opinion. By blocking off these pathways, the liberals wrote, the majority “foreclose future efforts to disqualify a presidential candidate under that provision. In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course.” They continued:

Section 3 serves an important, though rarely needed, role in our democracy. The American people have the power to vote for and elect candidates for national office, and that is a great and glorious thing. The men who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, however, had witnessed an “insurrection [and] rebellion” to defend slavery. They wanted to ensure that those who had participated in that insurrection, and in possible future insurrections, could not return to prominent roles. Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President.

Notably, the liberals actually had Justice Amy Coney Barrett on their side too. She authored a separate opinion expressing her disapproval of the majority’s overreach but declining to say more because “the court should turn the national temperature down, not up.” So, in effect, Anderson is a 5–4 decision, with a bare majority effectively repealing the insurrection clause for federal officeholders. The liberals’ disapproving citations to Bush v. Gore and Dobbs give a sense of how disastrously they believe the majority went astray.

In related news, Allen H. Weisselberg is expected to plead guilty to felony perjury today.

Recommended read by Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer: Mitch McConnell is the arsonist who set America on fire and ran away.

At Rolling Stone, Trump’s White House Was ‘Awash in Speed’ — and Xanax.

In January, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions. 

The report didn’t say why so many of those pills had been given out. But for many who served in the Trump White House, the investigation highlighted an open secret. According to interviews with four former senior administration officials and others with knowledge of the matter, the stimulant was routinely given to staffers who needed an energy boost after a late night, or just a pick-me-up to handle another day at a uniquely stressful job. As one of the former officials tells Rolling Stone, the White House at that time was “awash in speed.”

Here’s what the Mayo Clinic says about modafinil. I’ve long suspected Trump was taking some kind of stimulant, and this could be it. It can cause mental confusion.

Saturday News Bits

The U.S. airdropped thousands of meals into Gaza earlier today and plans to airdrop a lot more. I hope this helps. There are also reports that Israel has agreed to the framework of a six-week cease-fire.

Stuff to Read: At Axios, see “Department of Life”: Trump allies plot abortion crackdown for second term. The Heritage Foundations is calling for the Department of Health and Human Services to be the Department of Life. And the first act of the DoL would be “explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans ‘from conception to natural death.'”

See also Lulu Garcia-Navarro at the New York Times, Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for ‘Institutionalizing Trumpism.’ No paywall.

Also at the New York Times, see As Trump’s Criminal Trial Approaches, He May Be His Own Worst Enemy by, um, a bunch of people. It basically documents that Trump has been ordering his lawyers what to do in court because Trump thinks he knows better than anyone. And this is likely to trip him in the upcoming hush money case, which will be heard by Justice Juan M. Merchan. Justice Merchan was born in Bogotá, and we’ll see how much time expires before Trump posts some anti-Latino slur about him on his toy social media site.

Lawyers who have represented Mr. Trump view the prospect of him testifying before Justice Merchan as potentially disastrous. The judge is a no-nonsense jurist who presided over the conviction of Mr. Trump’s family business in a tax fraud trial.

If Mr. Trump insists, he could pose a make-or-break challenge for Mr. Blanche and Ms. Necheles.

They recently appeared before Justice Merchan at a pretrial hearing with their client mostly silent beside them, and seemed to test the tightrope he will walk during the trial. Mr. Trump wanted to delay it, but the judge promptly set a March date.

Mr. Blanche lodged objections, none of which swayed Justice Merchan, who quickly bridled. “Tell me something you haven’t already said today,” the judge said.

Shortly thereafter, Justice Merchan asked Mr. Blanche if he was done talking. He was not, but the judge cut him off, instructing Mr. Blanche to “please have a seat.”

“Yes, your honor,” Mr. Blanche replied, sitting down with Mr. Trump.

Update: Here’s another one, by Chauncy DeVega at Salon: “Better than Jesus”: How far will the cult of Trump go?

Today’s Investigation Fun House News

At least the Joe Biden impeachment clown show in the House seems to be well and truly dead, for the moment, anyway. As in, like, they may start to say, “what impeachment?” At WaPo, Dana Milbank asks, How do you say ‘impeachment is dead’ in Russian?

Clearly, they will take dirt from any source, no matter how dubious. Even then, they have produced nothing that shows Joe Biden was involved in any way in the businesses of his son. Of course, Republicans don’t actually need any evidence to impeach the president, if they have the votes. But even the impeachment ringleader, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (Ky.), has tiptoed away from this goal. He told a group of us staking out the Hunter Biden deposition on Wednesday that “the purpose of this investigation [is] to create legislation” — legislation to stop “the Bidens from continuing to enrich themselves.”

Wagging two index fingers, Comer admonished: “The American people do not want families to peddle access to the tune of $200,000.” Asked whether his legislation would also target the Trump family, which peddled access to the tune of about $2 billion, Comer ignored the question as he walked away.

See also Republicans Are Basically Admitting the Hunter Biden Deposition Was a Bust at Rolling Stone.  And Philip Bump writes, Hunter Biden gives House Republicans the rebuttal they didn’t want.

At one point, a questioner pressed Biden to admit that there was a suspicious pattern in his father having met people with whom Hunter Biden or his partners ended up doing business. Biden rejected that framing.

“The pattern I see is that you literally have no evidence whatsoever of any corruption on the part of my father,” he said. “And therefore what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make every single thing in business that I was ever involved in somehow corrupt.”

Of course they are. But I until they find some new tidbit to investigate they may have to stop for a while. I wonder, though, if Hunter will be the new Hillary Clinton, who endured about three decades of investigating, by my count.

Final arguments in the Fani Willis hearings are this afternoon. Maybe we can be done with this sideshow soon and get back to prosecuting people for racketeering.

There’s a hearing today on when the Mar a Lago documents case can begin. Jack Smith is asking for July 8. Recently there were news stories that said Trump wanted to move the Mar a Lago case up to this summer, presumably to interfere with Jack Smith’s J6 case, but now they’re back to arguing that it would be unfair to hold the trial in an election year. I assume Loose Cannon will side with Trump, but we’ll see.

Trump has only one week left to pay the E. Jean Carroll judgment. This is from Forbes:

CRUCIAL QUOTE

Trump’s filing asking to pause the monetary judgment “simply asks the Court to ‘trust me’ and offers, in a case with an $83.3 million judgment against him, the court filing equivalent of a paper napkin; signed by the least trustworthy of borrowers,” Carroll’s attorneys wrote.

CHIEF CRITIC

Trump’s attorneys argued “there is no cognizable risk” of Trump not paying the judgment against him, noting Carroll has previously “concede[d] that President Trump’s resources suffice to satisfy the judgment.” “Having argued to the jury that President Trump has great financial resources, Plaintiff is in no position to contradict herself now and contend that she requires the protection of a bond during the brief period while post-trial motions are pending,” Trump’s lawyers claimed.

FORBES VALUATION

Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $2.6 billion as of September. That includes just over $400 million in cash and liquid assets—enough to cover Carroll’s judgment alone, but not his total legal fines when combined with his judgment in the fraud case.

Trump has a long history of being sued for nonpayment and getting away with forcing the plaintiffs to accept pennies on the dollar. He may think he can get away with that in this case. I’m hoping he can’t.

The latest news from Gaza is particularly alarming. This would be the time for the Biden Administration to publicly break with Netanyahu’s government over it’s handling of Gaza. Getting aid to the people in Gaza has to be the priority now.

Trump Admits He Doesn’t Have the Cash!

Bad news and good news. I just heard the bad news, which is that the Supreme Court has decided to hear the Trump immunity claim, which is going to delay the J6 trial, possibly fatally. I’m just hearing this, as I said.

The justices set argument for the week of April 22 to consider a unanimous ruling from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that rejected Trump’s sweeping assertion of immunity from prosecution.

I haven’t digested the details yet. Now for the good news:

The New York Times reports that Trump admits he doesn’t have the cash to post the civil fraud case penalty.

Donald J. Trump offered a New York appeals court on Wednesday a bond of only $100 million to pause the more than $450 million judgment he faces in his civil fraud case, saying that he might need to sell some of his properties unless he gets relief.

An appellate court judge promptly denied Mr. Trump’s emergency request to halt the financial judgment, but the former president is not out of options. Mr. Trump can try again with a panel of five appellate court judges, which will entertain his request next month.

However that panel rules, the request represented a stunning acknowledgment that the former president, who is racing the clock to secure a bond from a company for the full amount if he does not produce the money himself, lacks the resources to do so. …

… In seeking relief, Mr. Trump’s lawyers disclosed that he would be unable to secure a bond for the full $454 million, raising the prospect that he might soon default on the judgment if the full appeals court denies his request.

He’s trying to get a court to delay the judgment that he can’t do business with a financial institution registered in New York, which is pretty much all of them outside of Russia. He also wants more time to get the money together.

The link should get you past the paywall. This was my last gift article for the month for the New York Times, so take advantage. Anyway, the 30-day clock started ticking on February 23, so he’s going to have a hard time selling and closing on properties in time.

Mr. Trump might eventually be able to secure a bigger bond. His stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, his social media company, could be worth up to $4 billion after a long-delayed merger is made final this year.

No way is that crap Truth Social worth anything. But let’s go on … NY Attorney General  Letitia James has already asked the court to deny the request. And if Trump admits he can’t come up with the money, she can start foreclosing before the 30 days are up, the news story says.

In its own filing, Ms. James’s office asked the appeals court to deny Mr. Trump’s request.

“There is no merit to defendants’ contention that a full bond or deposit is unnecessary because they are willing to post a partial undertaking of less than a quarter of the judgment amount,” the attorney general’s office wrote. “Defendants all but concede that Mr. Trump has insufficient liquid assets to satisfy the judgment.”

I want New York to seize the Westchester golf club and turn it into a public park. It looks like it has a really nice swimming pool.

The Daily Beast says AG James accused Trump of sneaking assets into Florida.

Donald Trump is already trying to dodge the colossal $464 million bank fraud judgment, with the former president attempting on Wednesday to appeal the decision without forking over the cash required to challenge the ruling. 

But as Trump’s lawyers claim he doesn’t have the money to appeal without selling a building, the New York Attorney General claimed Trump is quietly moving his assets to Florida. …

… But when the AG raised objections in court documents to the proposal to put up a reduced amount of collateral, Letitia James drew attention to another matter entirely: Trump appears to be trying to move assets out of her reach.

Dennis Fan, a senior assistant solicitor general at the AG’s office, alerted appellate judges at the state’s First Judicial Department that Trump has sneakily relocated business entities from New York to Florida.

“There is substantial risk that defendants will attempt to evade enforcement of the judgment (or make enforcement more difficult) following appeal,” Fan wrote, noting that “after the court issued its February 16 order, defendants announced for the first time that various Trump Organization entities operating in New York are allegedly now located in Florida.”

“As the court recognized earlier in this case, there is unfortunately a distinct need to ‘ensure that defendants do not dissipate their assets or transfer them out of this jurisdiction,’” he continued.

This is just exhausting.

Michigan Primary: Did It Mean Anything?

The Michigan primary showed Nikki Haley losing whatever steam she had. I’ve been thinking she would stay in at least until after Super Tuesday, which is next week, but we’ll see.

On the Dem side, with 95 percent of votes counted, President Biden has 81.1 percent of the vote; uncommitted 13.3 percent; Marianne Williamson 3.0 percent, and Dean Phillips 2.7 percent. Yes, once again we see Dean “no steam” Phillips having a worse night than New Age Snake Oil Saleswoman Marianne Williamson, even after Williamson had suspended her campaign. Unfortunatelly Williamson was so encouraged by her distant third finish she unsuspended her campaign. I’m not sure what she thinks she’s going to accomplish. There will be no Dem primary television debates, which I assume helped her sell a lot of books in 2000.

Josh Marshall has an interesting observation about “uncommitted.”

There’s a significant difference between the breakdown of the primary day and the early/mail vote. The gist is that the primary day vote is significantly better for “uncommitted” and the early/mail vote better for Biden. The net effect of this is that Biden seems to be adding to his margins now since the primary day vote was in most cases getting counted first. So for instance, Dearborn (which is the heart of the state’s Arab-American community) had been like 75% for uncommitted. But now it’s at roughly 55% to 41% as the early votes get counted.

Dearborn is in Wayne County, which currently has 17 percent for uncommitted.

I have a few theories. But they’re just that.

My read of the overall contest is that there was a lot of coverage of an anti-Biden protest vote. That spurred what amounts to a normie-Dem driven counter-protest. That’s what gets you such an overall high turnout. The normies I would guess are more consistent voting Democrats who tend to be higher educated and more affluent. Those folks do a lot of voting by mail and early voting in all elections. The uncommitted meanwhile seems heavily centered in the college towns and perhaps in less consistently voting immigrant communities. It seems plausible that those were more primary day voting groups. Again, this last point is informed speculation.

That’s probably as good an explanation as any, until a better one comes along. I suspect President Biden will need those uncommitted votes to win Michigan in November, so I hope he takes the message they’re sending very seriously. U.S. foreign policy should have gotten tougher on Bibi Netanyahu a long time ago. On many occasions Biden has said with some pride that he has worked with every Israeli Prime Minister since Golda Meir. Some of the young folks who voted “uncommitted” yesterday possibly never heard of Golda Meir and don’t remember when she was a much-loved figure in the U.S. But her days have long passed, and it’s time the U.S. faced that.

In other news: A “star witness” for the Trump lawyers’ side of the contest to disqualify Fani Willis failed to deliver anything approximating “testimony” at a hearing yesterday. How long is this nonsense going to drag on?

Also, too: Mitch McConnell is going to step down from his Senate leadership position in November.