Happy First Day of Jury Selection/Tax Day. The two things I’m going to watch for today is (1) will Judge Merchan address Trump’s continued violations of the gag order? And (2) will Trump try to behave himself? So far already the Judge has denied another  Trump request that he recuse himself.

I want to address what happened in Israel over the weekend. The Wall Street Journal is reporting Israel’s defense depended a lot on the U.S. and Arab partners. This is behind a paywall, but the Jerusalem Post reports Saudi Arabia acknowledges helping defend Israel against Iran. And Jordan also has been public in its participation in Israel’s defense. Basically, Jordan and the Saudis are saying this was more about their own self-defense than it was about helping Israel. And now President Biden is publicly telling Netanyahu to not retaliate.

(Update: Shortly after I published this Iran launched an airstrike into Israel, and Israel vows to retaliate, which is what nobody but right-wing warmongers wanted.)

I’m not sure why I haven’t seen more reporting on this, but I stumbled into a mention buried deep in this column that there will be a hearing on the $175 million appeal bond issued by Knight Specialty Insurance. This hearing has been set for April 22, which is one week from this Monday, when jury selection begins regarding the criminal charges brought by the Manhattan D.A. Good times. It is possible that if the bond is rejected, Letitia James can start seizing Trump’s assets immediately. That’s assuming some judge doesn’t decide to cut Trump another break, of course.

Going back to this article — For all his bombast, Trump is plummeting – financially, legally and politically, by Lloyd Green — bascially, it says little has gone well for Trump these past few days. And see also Jonathan Martin, Trump the Front-runner? Not so fast. The general election polls are still alarming, with Trump slightly ahead in most of them, but the gap is closing, at least.

Something else I learned today, from Paul Farhi in The Atlantic: Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble.

As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.

According to the author, the main cause if this implosion was a change in Facebook algorithms.

Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites.

Changes in Google algorithms also reduced digital news consumption, but not as much.

These changes impacted all digital news sites, but for some reason it slammed right-wing sites more. This suggests a lot more of their traffic was driven by social media links and not by regular returning readers. And while readership of the big-mainstrem-media sites and liberal sites has somewhat recovered or at least has stabilized, with few exceptions right-wing sites are still struggling to adapt. The bad news seems to be that while viewership of the Gateway Pundit is down 62 percent (yay), right-wing podcasters like Steve Bannon are doing fine. And I assume right-wing talk radio is still out there, somewhere.

And I have no idea if Mahablog readership has changed. I used to be able to see how many people viewed the site every day, but that feature disappeared some time ago and I haven’t figured out how to get it back.

But be of good cheer, because the Senate Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed Leonard Leo. About time. Well, in fact, they subpoenaed him a few months ago, but I’m just now hearing about it. Of course, Leo assumes himself to be above accountability to any mere Congress.

The big-money rightwing donor Leonard Leo said he would not comply with a subpoena issued by the US Senate judiciary committee, as it investigates undisclosed gifts to conservative supreme court justices that have stoked an ethics crisis at a court already held in historically low public esteem.

Referring to Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the committee, Leo said: “I am not capitulating to his lawless support of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse [a Democrat from Rhode Island] and the left’s dark money effort to silence and cancel political opposition.”

The “dark-money effort” was especially rich, coming from Leo. And Leo might want to check with Peter Navarro about how his four-month prison sentence, for ignoring a congressional subpoena, is going.

Finally, here’s an odd story — House Republicans fume over “messaging” votes by Andrew Solender at Axios.

The House Rules Committee’s schedule for next week consists entirely of a half dozen bills to prohibit the Energy Department from setting energy use standards for home appliances.

The Liberty in Laundry Act, the Refrigerator Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards, or SUDS, Act are among the bills.

There is no sign, however, of legislation to provide military aid to Ukraine, Israel or Taiwan, which some lawmakers have said they expect to come up for a vote next week.

I like the Refrigerator Freedom Act. The refrigerator in my apartment at random intervals toots out a noise that sounds somewhere between a tired bugle call and a foghorn. Maybe it wants to be set free.

The appliance bills have no chance in the Senate, and everybody knows that. They are pure “messaging,” to let the American people know what the Republican Party stands for, which apparently is major appliance personhood. But at least a handful of House Republicans are tired of “messaging” and want to, you know, do real things. Exactly what, I’m not sure. I doubt the House will get any more productive this year.

Something I wrote back in 2006:

In the long term, even if Roe v. Wade were overturned and a whole mess of states criminalized abortion the next day, the overwhelming force of public opinion would eventually set things right again to make abortion legal. That is, unless the United States isn’t converted into a fundie theocracy, in which case all bets are off. And in that case abortion law will be the least of our problems.

Well, here we are. This week’s Arizona Supreme Court decision is still causing tremors. Republicans in Arizona are holding a master class in How to Look Stupid. On Tuesday they were denouncing the decision and trying to run away from the 1864 law. But then Republicans in the Arizona legislature blocked at attempt by Democrats to overturn the law. Which makes one question if they mean what they say. (/snark)

Meanwhile, Trump is still turning his unnaturally bronzed face toward cameras and promsing that just returning the issue to the states has already settled everything, and the states will sort it out (and don’t ask me about abortion again). But red states are descending into chaos over abortion (see: Arizona). It’s kind of been all over the news. Michael Tomasky writes at The New Republic that Trump has taken the dumbest possible position he could have taken.

The embrace of a 15- or 16-week ban would have left plenty of space between Trump and his party’s anti-abortion extremists. It would have enabled him to say, when some deep-red state passed some draconian ban, “No, I don’t agree with that at all; here’s my position, 15 weeks.”

But now? I remember thinking Monday morning that hypothetically, his new “states’ rights” position meant that any extremist position adopted by any state could now be hung around his neck.

The gods sure have a sense of drama because barely 24 hours passed before we went from hypothetical to all too real, when the Arizona state Supreme Court turned the clock back to General Sherman’s march to Atlanta. 

See also The problem with Donald Trump ‘leaving abortion to the states’? The states. And of course this chaos was entirely predictable. The Dobbs decision had sent the issue back to the states, and a number of state legislatures have since shown us all how bonkers they are. And the backlash against the Right over abortion was entirely predictable also; at least, I’ve been predicting it for some time. I wrote in 2005:

GOP dominance in the Midwest and South, especially in rural areas, came at a cost. Urban and suburban moderates and independents are getting squeamish about voting Republican. And if Roe v. Wade goes down, expect a stamped to the Left.

One sometimes hears that there was little abortion controversy before Roe, which is a flat-out lie. I well remember the Missouri state legislature did little else but argue about abortion, and I believe that was fairly standard. When Roe was decided, the relief in state capitals was palpable. If Roe is reversed, several states will outlaw abortion immediately, and most of the remainder will be embroiled in abortion wars as the Fetus People demand satisfaction. And Republicans won’t be able to hide any more. Most of ’em will have to find a way to placate the Fetus People while not scaring away everyone else.

Ain’t enough nuance on the planet to pull that one off.

Plus, “let the states decide” was the old, pre-Dobbs, talking point for the forced birth crowd. No one who has paid attention to this issue over the years believed they meant that, because there was no way they were going to stand aside and tolerate any states deciding to keep abortion legal. All too predictably, since Dobbs they’ve moved on to calling for some kind of national ban.

I don’t know if Ross Douthat fully appreciates what a tool he is here:

The captivity of the pro-life movement to the character of Donald Trump is a crucial aspect of contemporary abortion politics. But maybe not quite in the way suggested by Trump’s decision this week to publicly distance himself from his pro-life supporters by refusing to endorse national restrictions on late-term abortions.

Here Douthat has cheerfully forgotten that the old goal was letting the states decide. Now he’s embraced a new fiction that the abortion criminalizers only want to ban “late term” abortions. “Late term” here is Fetus People Speak for “whatever we say it means.” In medical science, a “late term’ pregnancy is one that has apparently gone on longer than normal, past the 40 week mark that is considered “full term.” In the context of Douthat’s column he seems to think that 15 weeks — less than the halfway point in the pregnancy — is “late term.” If a 15-week ban goes into effect, the Fetus People will gradually redifine “late term” to “ten seconds after fertilization.” You can count on that.

It’s clear where the Right is going on abortion, except to the Right. Even if they know deep down, they can’t sayit out loud.

See also Lawrence O’Donnell on Trump’s face paint.

The  $175 million bond Trump posted a few days ago in the civil fraud case is still being scrutinized. Newsweek has been reporting that the bond will be rejected, but this is only Newsweek, and I’m not seeing the bigger guns of news reporting touch this yet. Newsweek may well be jumping the gun. Newsweek’s source is a former federal prosecutor.

Still, Rachel Maddow began her show last night with one of her signature nerdy dives into the company that gave Trump the bond, Knight Specialty Insurance. This company does indeed seem very skeezy. What’s in this video is only part of it.

See also Timothy Noah, Trump Has Hocked Himself to the Repo Man and Ben Metzner, The Shady Company Backing Trump’s Bond Somehow Just Got Even Shadier, both at The New Republic.

Speaking of shady, I did catch a few minutes of Trump’s abortion announcement last night. He looked like this.

I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I was fixated on his face, or more accurately, whatever cheap greasepaint he puts on his face without bothering to cover his ears and temples. I swear in this video he’s an inch away from being in blackface. He must be putting that mess on himself and never figured out the blending thing. Or else whoever is applying his makup really, really hates him.

In the now-stalled J6 case, yesterday Jack Smith filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to reject Trump’s claim of absolute immunity. See Philip Bump, The special counsel’s most essential argument against Trump’s immunity claim, in WaPo for details. See also ‘Profoundly ahistorical’: 4-star generals side with Jack Smith, tell Supreme Court Trump’s immunity claims are ‘assault’ on democracy at Law & Crime.

In other news, the Arizona Supreme Court today ruled that a 160-year-old abortion ban (from before statehood!) is still on the books and can be enforced. This law effectively bans all abortions in Arizona. One complication here is that Arizona currently has a Democratic governor and attorney general, and they are saying they aren’t going to enforce this law. Expect lawsuits.

Trump whiffed on abortion. His “big plan” designed to “make both sides happy” and put the issue to rest is … wait for it… let the states decide. It’s a states’ rights issue, he says.

This, of course, was the old consensus on the Right, which ended as soon as the Dobbs decision did exactly that … let the states decide. Then the forced birth people marched on to their new goal, a national ban. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America has already issued a statement expressing disappointment. Trump had been expected to endorse a federal 15-week ban, which the Fetus People would have loved until the next day, when they would have begun pushing for a 6-week ban. Etc.

Trump released his plan by video, which I refuse to watch, so I’ll have to quote people with stronger stomachs. Josh Marshall:

If you haven’t seen it yet, Donald Trump put out a video this morning in which he says a lot of gobbledegook, takes credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, and then says the abortion bans should be left up to individual states. We can draw the obvious intent: Republicans are terrified about the politics of abortion rights. He wants to take credit for overturning Roe and then say, essentially, my role is done now so leave me out of it. We will now see a lot of press tut-tutting toward anyone who points out the obvious point that Trump didn’t discuss the kind of blue-state abortion ban he has privately said he’ll support and sign if he’s reelected President. He avoids discussing plans to ban abortion drugs, which are now the primary way women get abortions in the country, or prevent them from being mailed to women in states with abortion bans.

Not exactly a profile in courage. David Kurtz:

But let’s not leave the misimpression that Trump spoke in coherent sentences or a logical structure. He threw out a few conceptual frameworks, like “life” and “babies” and “winning.” But he stopped short of endorsing a nationwide ban. To try to make up for it, he smeared Democrats with the false claim that they favor executing babies after birth. He literally said that.

Not that I was expecting anything significant. Issues that are more complicated than putting on his socks are out of Trump’s cognitive league. But this is lame even by Trump standards.

Update: Everybody hates Trump’s “plan.” And I haven’t even heard from Democrats. Mike Pence doesn’t like it. Miz Lindsey Graham doesn’t like it. And as I already said, the Fetus People don’t like it. The only ones who seem to like it are House Republicans, who may nope that making abortion a state issue (again) takes the heat off them in the November elections.

Also, too,  here’s a new ad from the Biden campaign.

In other news, Jose Pagliery at Daily Beast tells us Trump’s $175 Million Bond Is Even Shadier Than It Looks.

The little-known insurance company that rescued Donald Trump by providing a last-minute $175 million bank fraud bond isn’t just unlicensed in New York; it hasn’t even been vetted by a voluntary state entity that would verify it meets minimum “eligibility standards” to prove financial stability.

Perhaps even more troubling, the legal document from Knight Specialty Insurance Company doesn’t actually promise it will pay the money if the former president loses his $464 million bank fraud case on appeal. Instead, it says Trump will pay, negating the whole point of an insurance company guarantee, according to three legal and bond experts who reviewed the contract for The Daily Beast.

In brief, it isn’t clear whether Knight has the capital to make good on the bond, which may be why it’s fudging on whether it will pay the money if Trump loses the appeal.

In subsequent court filings, the AG’s office immediately questioned whether Knight Specialty was even good for the money. The law enforcement agency said it “takes exception to the sufficiency of the surety,” noting that Knight Specialty is trying to operate “without a certificate of qualification.”

Later in the article:

Buried in the typical legalese of the contract is the phrase: “Knight Specialty Insurance Company… does hereby… undertake that if the judgment… is dismissed… Donald J. Trump… shall pay… the sum directed.”

In other words: If Trump loses the case, Trump will pay. But that’s no different than Trump’s obligation before the bond was issued.

“Getting into the weeds, the company undertakes that Trump will pay,” said one bond industry source who declined to be publicly identified for this story.

NY Attorney General James isn’t stupid. We may not have heard the end of this.

From the WTF? Department. Trump’s RNC Chair Includes Ukraine in List of US Adversaries

In How Gaza Protesters Are Challenging Democratic Leaders, the New York Times reports that “From President Biden to the mayors of small cities, Democrats have been trailed by demonstrators who are complicating the party’s ability to campaign in an election year.” But they are not protesting Republicans.

Some of this is ridiculous:

Some of the most contentious clashes have taken place on deeply Democratic terrain. A recent City Council meeting in Berkeley, Calif., turned ugly, with protesters interrupting a Holocaust survivor at a meeting where members discussed a bill marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Representative Shri Thanedar, a Democrat from Michigan, said he had been shocked when more than two dozen attendees at his holiday party at a crowded restaurant in Detroit removed their jackets to reveal pro-Palestinian shirts. As they began chanting through a bullhorn, physical altercations broke out. One older woman was sent to a hospital with a broken nose.

“To see the deaths happening in Gaza is heartbreaking,” said Mr. Thanedar, who supports a “negotiated cease-fire” that would release Israeli hostages and end the military campaign. “But if they’re trying to draw attention to that, hurting elderly people isn’t necessarily going to help them get the support that they need.”

And in Danbury, Conn., the president of the City Council described being surprised by demonstrators demanding a cease-fire call from the city of roughly 90,000 people.

“In my mind, where are you addressing that concern?” said Peter Buzaid, the council president. “You would go to the senator’s office. You could go to the congressman’s office, you’d protest outside the White House. Right? You might go to the U.N. It’s not something that I thought would happen at our local council chambers.”

I certainly appreciate the importance of letting President Biden know that his Israel policies are really, really unpopular. But this is sounding more like narcissistic people getting high on their own self-righteousness. Or perhaps some of this is being organized by individuals who don’t exactly have the best interests of the Democratic Party at heart.

And Republicans are being let off the hook? A lot of them are openly opposed to any humanitarian aid for Gaza. See The Vicious Things Republicans Have Said About Palestinians Since October 7 at The Intercept. It begins,

MICHIGAN REPUBLICAN REP. Tim Walberg recently declared at a town hall that the U.S. “shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid,” in Gaza. Instead, he posed, “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”

And also,

On October 11, Ohio Rep. Max Miller lambasted Tlaib for planting a Palestinian flag outside her congressional office. He refused to recognize Palestine as a state, calling it “a territory that’s about to probably get eviscerated and go away here shortly, as we’re going to turn that into a parking lot.”

A few days later, Miller’s colleague Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., took the unusual step of donning the military garb of a foreign country in the halls of the Congress — wearing an Israel Defense Forces uniform he earned while volunteering for the country’s military in 2015. Shortly thereafter, he introduced an amendment that would slow down humanitarian aid to Gaza. “Any assistance should be slowed down — any assistance,” Mast said in a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the bill. 

But for some reason the protesters are giving Republicans a pass and instead are protesting Democrats, including at state and municipal level? On what planet does this make sense? And let us not forget —

But, according to the Gaza protesters, this is all fine. It’s only Democrats who are bad. My comment to the Times:

I do wish Democrats in general had gotten tougher with Netanyahu a long time ago. But if Biden loses to Trump because of the Gaza protesters, Trump will give Netanyahu a green light to do whatever he wants in Gaza. No more food drops or piers or using leverage to allow humanitarian aid. And as the remaining Palestinians are being bulldozed into mass graves, I will find those Gaza protesters and ask, “Happy now?”

Another commenter — and I’m sorry I can’t find the comment now — compared the current Gaza protesters to anti-Vietnam protesters in 1968 who, angry with LBJ, turned their righteous anger on Hubert Humphrey (who was actually against the war, but didn’t say so loudly enough for some) and helped Richard Nixon become POTUS. I’m sure most of us remember how that turned out.

In other news: Some time this week Trump has promised to release his “deal” on abortion policy that is going to make everybody happy.

The presumptive Republican nominee, who has pledged to make a statement on abortion this week, has said for months that if elected he would “come together with all groups” and “negotiate something” that would “make both sides happy,” suggesting that “15 weeks seems to be a number that people are agreeing at.”

“We’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years,” he said.

You probably heard we had an earthquake in these here parts yesterday. It made an impressively loud roar, but it didn’t do any damage I’m aware of.

But here’s the fun part. I’m reading the epicenter was near Tewksbury, New Jersey. Guess what else is near Tewksbury, New Jersey?

Yep, the dadblamed epicenter was maybe within or very near Trump’s New Jersey golf course. COINCIDENCE???????!!! Of course, one could argue it was a very Trumpian earthquake — lots of noise, but not so much quake.

Speaking of the Bedminster golf course — Trump appears to be refusing to release anything substantive about the state of his health, including his cognitive fitness. The last thing he made public was a three paragraph statement with no details from a New Jersey osteopath named Dr. Bruce A. Aronwald. Aronwald, 64, is a member of the Bedminster golf club. Raw Story:

A November letter about Trump’s health, written by Aronwald and released by the former president’s campaign, stood in stark contrast to a White House report on Biden’s health, with the Post reporting it lacked “specifics like blood pressure and medications, the letter had just three paragraphswithout specific numbers proclaiming that Trump was in ‘excellent health’ and had ‘exceptional’ cognitive ability. It did not disclose Trump’s weight.”

An attempt by the Post to ask for more specifics was rebuffed after a visit to the doctor’s office, with the doctor explaining, “There is no need for President Trump to release another medical report in addition to the one he recently made public. The President is strong physically and sharp cognitively, and he’s in excellent health overall.”

In other words, Trump’s blood pressure and cholesterol are off the charts and his brains are held together with duct tape.

But now for something really disgusting — see what Mike Huckabee is pitching these days. IMO this is the best argument I’ve seen yet for outlawing home schooling.

Regarding Monday’s solar eclipse, this page let’s you plug in your zip code to see how much of an eclipse you’ll get. See also Greg Sargent at New Republic, Trump Is Accidentally Exposing Aileen Cannon’s Shady Pro-MAGA Game.

[Update: I’m just hearing that No Labels has abandoned its plan to run a presidential ticket in 2024. After Joe Lieberman died last week I suspected the plan would be called off.]

Some of the talking heads on MSNBC last night warned us that Judge Cannon appears to be preparing to accept some or all of Trump’s argument that he was entitled to keep whatever documents he wanted under the Presidential Records Act. He was not, and the PRA says no such thing, but neither Trump nor Cannon seem to be big on the reading comprenehsion thing. And if Cannon waits until jury selection has begun and then dismsses the case, double jeopardy is attached and Trump cannot be tried again in the documents case. Liz Dye at Above the Law writes,

The prosecution demands speedy resolution of the matter to provide it “the opportunity to consider appellate review well before jeopardy attaches.”

Indeed this has been the nightmare scenario put forth by former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner on (my show) Law and Chaos and by Lawfare’s Roger Parloff: Judge Cannon will do something outrageous to throw the case, but she’ll do it after jeopardy has attached, when it’s too late for the government to do anything about it.

Jack Smith, no fool, sees this coming. Here is the conclusion from his Tuesday filing, page 23:

For the reasons set forth above and in the Government’s opposition to Trump’s motion to dismiss based upon the PRA, the Court should reject the legal premise that the PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has any bearing on the element of unauthorized possession under Section 793(e). As such, it should deny Trump’s pending motion to dismiss and adopt preliminary jury instructions as proposed by the Government above. If, however, the Court does not reject that erroneous legal premise, it should make that decision clear now, long before jeopardy attaches, to allow the Government the opportunity to seek appellate review.

Or, “You ain’t gettin’ away with this, lady. Don’t even try.” See also:

And see also Matt Naham at Law & Crime.

Smith’s filing doesn’t threaten to have Cannon removed from the case, but in two places it drops big hints that he’s ready to file a writ of mandamus with the appeals court that would force her to correct her errors before moving on to trial.

I also want to say that the photos of Jack Smith always remind me of a quote about Ulysses Grant: “He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.”

Update: Cannon dismissed Trump’s motion to dismiss the case, but she did so leaving open the possibility of dismissing it later. after double jeopardy is attached.  MSNBC:

In a court filing ahead of Cannon’s ruling, Smith said that he wanted her to clarify her position on the instructions, so that he could appeal her before trial if she adhered to that fringe view, which he noted rested on a flawed legal premise.

But in her Thursday order, Cannon cast Smith’s request as outlandish, deeming it “unprecedented and unjust.” That might be a fair characterization had he made it out of thin air. But he made it in response to her strange previous order, in which she requested proposed jury instructions rooted in what one might call an “unprecedented and unjust” legal view. So without that context for how we arrived at this point, the judge’s characterization is misleading.

Cannon ended her order by stating, “As always, any party remains free to avail itself of whatever appellate options it sees fit to invoke, as permitted by law.”

Jack Smith has to take further action before the trial begins. Stay tuned.

In other news: A couple of days ago Trump coughed up a $175M appeal bond in the New York fraud case. What you may not have heard is that the bond was bounced back to Trump for correction. Law & Crime reports:

A review of the New York County Supreme Court docket on Wednesday shows that paperwork for former President Donald Trump‘s newly-secured bond of $175 million was temporarily rejected and “returned for correction.”

The cause for the rejection, according to the New York County Supreme Court website, is because the requisite paperwork lacked a current financial statement. …

… It is also missing the name of his attorney-in-fact. Trump will have a chance to resubmit his request….

… As Law&Crime previously reported, Trump secured a bond of $175 million thanks to Knight Insurance Company of California. Owner Don Hankey was effusive in his praise of Trump after the bond secured, calling himself a “supporter.” But Hankey was less clear about whether Trump used bonds as collateral for the final amount.

Well, okay. I wasn’t sure how big a deal any of that was. But now CBS News is reporting that the bond may not be valid.

When former President Donald Trump posted a $175 million bond in New York on Monday, it appeared that he had evaded a financial crisis. He had paused enforcement of the more than $460 million judgment against him following a civil fraud trial, while his appeal is pending. 

But the surety bond was missing vital information typically included in those filings, experts say. These standard elements include documents related to power of attorney for the bond provider, Knight Specialty Insurance Company, a financial statement from the company and a certificate of solvency from the Department of Financial Services.  

“There seem to be serious issues,” said Bruce H. Lederman, an attorney who has filed many bonds in New York, including for a real estate developer challenging a judgment. Lederman said he was struck by “glaring errors” in the bond.

“In all the years I’ve been doing this, you always have to have a certificate from the Department of Financial Services saying that you’re licensed to issue a surety bond,” he said, referring to the missing certificate of solvency under Section 1111 of New York Insurance Law. …

…Adam Pollock, a former assistant attorney general in New York, said, “This bond is deficient for a number of reasons.” 

“Including that the company doesn’t appear to be licensed in New York and doesn’t appear to have enough capital to make this undertaking,” Pollock said.”

You can read the whole thing for all the pros and cons. But it does seem that there’s a chance the bond could be rejected.  On March 25 the appeals court gave Trump ten days to come up with the smaller bond, so if this bond is rejected he’ll either have to be given another extension, or he’s out of luck.

pic.twitter.com/mUXtqVD9XY

— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) April 3, 2024

Chef Jose Andres told Reuters today that his World Central Kitchen workers were targeted by Israel and killed, systematically, car by car.

“This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place,” Andres said.
“This was over a 1.5, 1.8 kilometers, with a very defined humanitarian convoy that had signs in the top, in the roof, a very colorful logo that we are obviously very proud of,” he said. It’s “very clear who we are and what we do.”

I believe him. From everything I’ve read the destuction of that food convoy had to be deliberate. See also José Andrés: Let People Eat at the New York Times (no paywall).

I’m reading that while President Biden is very angry, there are no immediate plans to change policy. A shame; this incident would have been the time to make a change.

I wrote a couple of days ago that Israel’s ultra-orthodox faction would be drafted into the military for the first time. Today Fred Kaplan in Slate expands on this a bit.

Netanyahu’s coalition, which put him back in power early last year, consists entirely of factions to the right of his own quite right-wing Likud party. If Netanyahu lets this draft exemption expire, he will alienate the ultra-Orthodox factions that support him; if he extends it, he will alienate the secular Jews that support him. Either way, he could be in trouble. His coalition’s majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, is narrow. If just five of his partners were to resign, as some are threatening to do over the exemption issue, he would lose his majority. New elections, which otherwise aren’t scheduled to take place until 2026, would be held. Polls indicate that he would lose.

It’s not clear to me whether this draftng has begun. There were reports that some Haredi have received draft notices, but other reports say the military is still preparing to send draft notices and that there are some number of days to work out a compromise. But the end of the Haredi draft exemption has been called “an earthquake” in Israel.

It’s obvious Netanyahu would prefer Trump to win the election, with the assumption that Trump will give him everything he wants without having to apologize for killing civilians.

In other news:

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo wants you to know that Special Counsel Jack Smith Is Done With Judge Aileen Cannon And Lets It Show.

Jack Smith takes a new tone of incredulousness and disdain for her mishandling of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

The issue at hand is her failure to have yet ruled on Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss based on his inane, unprecedented, and counterfactual reading of the Presidential Records Act. Instead of rejecting the argument out of hand, Cannon not only is entertaining it but ordered the two sides to propose jury instructions based on two different deeply flawed interpretations of the PRA.

That set up an nearly impossible challenge for Smith: How do you draft jury instructions that are so wrong on the law without looking like an idiot, undermining your own case, and pissing of the judge?

The answer: You can’t.

So Smith went all in, no longer trying to placate, educate, or hand-hold Cannon.

Smith ripped her interpretations of the PRA: “both of the Court’s scenarios are fundamentally flawed and any jury instructions that reflect those scenarios would be error.” He said her “legal premise is wrong” and her requested jury instructions “would distort the trial.”

Smith all but threatened to take Cannon up on appeal, urging her to rule promptly and not wait until a jury has been seated and thereby deprive the government of the opportunity to appeal. At this point, Smith would prefer an adverse ruling to no ruling at all: “Whatever the Court decides, it must resolve these crucial threshold legal questions promptly. The failure to do so would improperly jeopardize the Government’s right to a fair trial.”

Just read the whole thing.

Before going into the outrages du jour, I want to point to a couple of recommended articles. First is Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane by Maureen Tkacik at The American Prospect, and the other is The Boeing Nosedive: A once-venerable company turned its soul over to shareholders and courted disaster by Jeff Wise at New York magazine. Truly a disaster fable for the days of late-stage capitalism. What’s worse, I doubt the captains of industry who run everything will learn a thing from this. And the Ayn Rand libertarians still believe that government regulation is the root of all evil, I’m sure. More inspections/regulations might have saved Boeing’s ass, not to mention some lives.

The Florida Supreme Court made some moves yesterday that may or may not impact the November election. They upheld a 15-week abortion ban and cleared the way for a six-week abortion ban to go into effect on May 1. But the Court also allowed an abortion rights initiative to go on the November ballot, along with a legalizing marijuana initiative. Democrats are hopeful this gives them a shot a winning some elections in Florida, particularly the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Rick Scott. Scott won by a whisker in 2018. The Dem primary is in August, so we don’t know who will be running against him yet. Trump won Florida by 1.2% in 2016 and 3.4% in 2020, which is not too intimidating.  I hope some of you Floridians will comment on this.

I understand that in Florida a referendum needs 60 percent of the vote to pass, which may be too heavy a lift. But we’ll see.

House Republicans are pushing to rename Washington D.C.’s Dulles International Airport after Trump. Give me strength. I dimly remember there was an effort to rename it after Reagan some years ago, and we dodged that bullet. Not that I’m a big fan of John Foster Dulles. But anything but Trump.

Yesterday Judge Juan Merchan expanded the gag order he had placed on Trump to include the families of the judge and prosecutor. Judge Merchan said,

[T]his pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose. It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are “fair game” for Defendant’s vitriol.

Further,

The average observer, must now, after hearing Defendant’s recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well. Such concerns will undoubtedly interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitutes a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself.

Trump was put on notice that that “he will forfeit any statutory right he may have to access iuror names if he engages in any conduct that threatens the safety and integnty of the jury ot the jury selection process.”

The judges don’t want to put Trump in jail right now, even thoughhe belongs there. I understand that. But Rolling Stone is reporting that Trump isn’t taking these gag orders seriously.

According to two people who have recently spoken to Trump about the upcoming criminal trial, one of the reasons the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee has been convinced he can get away with attacking Merchan’s daughter without punishment is because, as he’s privately boasted, he has tested judges and prosecutors on gag orders before — without any serious repercussions. 

This included a time late last year when Judge Arthur Engoron threatened Trump with a possible night in jail for his behavior during his New York civil fraud trial. Every time, Trump has gotten away with it. So far, judges have not moved to rein in or punish Trump the way they would with virtually any other U.S. citizen, had they behaved in the same manner that the ex-president has.

So now, the former — and perhaps future — president seems emboldened to bring that aggressive, taunting approach to his history-making criminal trial.

“A criminal trial is different than a civil one, so this could turn out differently,” one of the sources tells Rolling Stone. “But from talking to [Trump] about this … you can tell he thinks these guys have tried to be tough guys, tried to rattle him, and then, it was all talk. He’s said this time it’s the same: He has to show he’s not afraid of these people, simple as that.”

I haven’t heard that he’s badmouthed anybody covered by the gag order today. But I’m not watching that closely.