The Alaska and Wyoming primaries are today, and all the preview comments are about Sarah Palin, Lisa Murkowski, and Liz Cheney. The Alaska election is especially complicated, because Alaska recently switched to rank choice voting. I get a sense no one is terribly clear how that’s going to impact the races. See Nathaniel Rakich at FiveThirtyEight for commentary.

Yesterday we learned that Trump’s clown car team of lawyers had their fingers in a lot of sensitive election data they shouldn’t have been given access to. No real surprise. Lots of people need to face some criminal penalties, though.

And Lindsey Graham and Rudy Giuliani are perhaps even now struggling to be reconciled with facing the Fulton County Georgia grand jury regarding election interference. Will either of them fall on their swords for Trump? Will Rudy be indicted?

Note: I have grandchildren visiting, so posting will be light this week unless something really significant happens.

Yesterday the New York Times reported that one of Trump’s lawyers — it didn’t say which one — last June signed off on a declaration that all classified materials in Trump’s possession had been returned to the government. Somebody’s in trouble.

Here’s a sentence that’s so New York Timesy: “The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material.” Ya think?

A long article at WaPo, Trump’s secrets: How a records dispute led the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago, is worth reading. It fills in some more details. The National Archives started to nag Trump about missing documents in the spring of 2021, it says. 

People familiar with those initial conversations said Trump was hesitant to return the documents, dragging his feet for months as officials grew peeved and eventually threatened to alert Congress or the Justice Department to his reticence.

This is from the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Trump’s lawyers and representatives have said that they were in negotiations with the government when the FBI showed up and that they have complied with Justice Department requests.

One, it’s been dragging on for well over a year. Two, these were not “negotiations.” This was the government saying “You have things in your possession that should not be in your possession, and you must hand them over now.” No compliance, no negotiation.

WSJ describes Trump’s final days in the White House as chaotic, especially since Trump didn’t begin to prepare to leave until the last minute. So things were thrown in boxes haphazardly. However, much of the classified material was of a nature that it should’t have just been lying around, even in the White House, where Trump could have just thrown in it a box.

Back to the Washington Post:

[Update: the House just passed the Inflation Reduction Act. Now it just needs President Biden’s signature.]

I take it the warrant and receipt are out, and — whoa — the warrant mentions the espionage act.

A document attached to the search warrant said the agents were searching for “All physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime and other items illegally possessed in violation of” three laws, including a part of the Espionage Act that the Justice Department describes on its website as a “key national defense and national security” provision. The section cited in the search warrant “applies to activities such as gathering, transmitting to an unauthorized person, or losing, information pertaining to the national defense, and to conspiracies to commit such offenses.”

That sounds pretty serious. You can find the actual search warrant here.

I’m hearing on MSNBC there were four boxes of materials that had been given the highest top secret designation, “TS/SCI.” (Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information) I’m reading that SCI stuff must absolutely never be removed from a “sensitive compartmented information facility.”

Whether any of this touches on nuclear weapons information, we do not yet know.

So Trump had boxes of this stuff in the basement. For a time the basement wasn’t even locked. Then he put a padlock on the door and figured that was fine.

It appears that someone alerted the Department of Justice that Trump had TS/SCI documents that he was still hanging on to, even after being served with a subpoena to turn over documents in June. It appears that the search warrant was more than justified.

Trump issued this statement today:

“Number one, it was all declassified,” Trump said. “Number two, they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request.”

So, one, none of this had been declassified per normal protocols. His waving his tiny hands over the boxes and chanting “be thou declassified” doesn’t cut it. He can order that documents be declassified, but then the original classifying agency has to complete the process, it says here.

Two, obviously, the government HAD been asking for all documents he shouldn’t have kept, for some time, and obviously Trump was still sitting on them.

Trump has also been claiming that President Obama removed “33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” and took them to Chicago. But the National Archives (NARA) shot that down. All of the documents of the Obama Administration are properly stored in NARA facilities, they said. Some of those facilities are in Chicago, but a NARA facility is not the Obamas’s basement. “As required by the [Presidential Records Act], former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration,” NARA said.

This is an interesting bit, reported by Josh Marshall today:

This morning the House Freedom Caucus, ground zero of Trumpism and coup plotting, canceled the press conference they had planned to bewail the FBI search of the ex-President’s home.

Somebody must have tipped them off what was coming.

I’m not hearing from any big-name Republicans yet. Even Josh Hawley, who has been tweeting that Merrick Garland must be impeached, has gone silent today.

More to come, I’m sure.

I’m just now learning that Merrick Garland issued a statement saying that, one, he personally approved the decision to seek a warrant on Mar-a-Lago, and two, the Justice Department filed a motion requesting the Trump warrant and property receipt be unsealed.

I understand the DoJ will also talk to Trump’s lawyers asking if they have any objections to making the warrant and receipt, or the list of what was removed, public. What do you bet the lawyers are going to object? They have been free to make these things public all along, and I notice they didn’t.

Yep, it says here (scroll down) the lawyers are considering filing a motion to challenge the release of the warrant and receipt. They have until 3 pm EST tomorrow to do this.

They don’t want it released, I bet. They just have to come up with some kind of excuse for why releasing it would be unfair to Trump.

And this popped up this afternoon in an article by Maggie Haberman, Ben Protess and Glenn Thrush in the New York Times:

Mr. Trump’s team has declined to disclose the contents of the search warrant. A number of organizations, including The New York Times, are seeking in federal court to have it unsealed.

Some senior Republicans have been warned by allies of Mr. Trump not to continue to be aggressive in criticizing the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the matter because it is possible that more damaging information related to the search will become public.

Pass the popcorn.

Update:

FBI looked for documents related to nuclear weapons at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

If Trump had secret documents related to nuclear weapons, ours or anybody else’s, he’s toast.

Trump’s very bad week continues. Today he was deposed by lawyers from New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office. He took the Fifth.

Today, Trump’s lawyers are claiming that the FBI found nothing incriminating at Mar-a-Lago but also that they planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago.

At WaPo, Philip Bump reviews what we know, and don’t know, about Monday’s FBI search of Mar-a-Lago (no paywall). This is worth reading, as it includes a lot of details about what was going on at Mar-a-Lago during the search. In brief: A pack of agents arrived at 9 am. The Secret Service was not told in advance they were coming. There were no guests staying there, and Trump was in New York/New Jersey, so the place was pretty empty.

The lawyers started arriving about 10 am. The lawyers who have seen the warrant verified that the agents were looking for documents, including classified documents, that belong to the government and shouldn’t have been removed from the White House.

The search concluded about 6:30 pm. The agents removed about 12 boxes of materials, most of which had been stored in a basement.

Another good source of information is this timeline by Zach Montague at the New York Times (no paywall). This goes back to the day before Trump vacated the White House. It appears the Justice Department initiated an investigation into Trump’s document violations in April.

Some time last spring, some federal agents, including one involved in counterintelligence, met with Trump and some of his lawyers at Mar-a-Lago. Philip Bump’s article said that at this meeting it was learned a lot of documents were stored in a basement with no security whatsoever. After that meeting, Trump put a padlock on the door, which was broken on Monday. So the searchers knew the documents were there.

A comment I heard repeated on MSNBC last night was that possibly the DoJ obtained a search warrant instead of a subpoena because of national security concerns.

Why would Trump want to hoard secret government documents in his basement? One, incrimination; two, leverage; three, maybe he could sell them for a lot of money.

Another comment I heard on the teevee is that there could be a connection between the seizure of Rep. Scott Perry’s phone yesterday and the Mar-a-Lago documents. Preliminary examination of the documents might have prompted the seizure of the phone. This is speculation, obviously.

So that’s as much as we know right now, I believe.

Update: This morning there were rumors in rightieworld that there must have been an informant. Now Newsweek is reporting there was an informant, according to unnamed government officials.  But I don’t see why an informant was necessary, since the feds already knew Trump was keeping a bunch of White House documents in the basement. The only way this would be significant would be if the informant described some especially sensitive document.

There are primaries in four states today — Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Here is Steve Benen’s preview.

This happened today: Trump tax returns must be given to Congress, federal appeals court says in new ruling. The tax returns and related entities must be turned over to the House Ways and Means Committee, the court said.

There is all kinds of speculation sluicing around regarding yesterday’s FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, including an opinion that the search was really about January 6. I would rather not speculate but wait until we get some solid information.

On the other hand, between the FBI search and the tax return decision, I’m speculating whether Trump will suddenly think up some excuse to be in some other country for a while. If I were him, I’d have lawyers looking up places with nice weather and amenities and no extradition agreements with the U.S.

Paul Waldman:

In his recent speeches, Donald Trump has taken to saying that he is “the most persecuted person in the history of our country.” The millions who lived and died in slavery? Native Americans who endured the Trail of Tears? Sure, they suffered. But did they get kicked off Twitter?

Now that the FBI has executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the former president can indulge what has become his most important impulse, his driving motivation, his very reason for being: to whine and complain.

Heh.

I’m just hearing this. Details to come.

Update: So far, there is little in the way of official information coming from the Justice Department. There is widespread consensus that the search is mostly likely about documents, possibly including classified documents, illegally removed and taken to Mar-a-Lago. Here is the New York Times coverage, outside the paywall.

There is also widespread consensus that this is a big bleeping deal.

Bess Levin writes at Vanity Fair,

As reporter and historian Garrett Graff opined shortly after the news broke: “This is one of the most significant, sensitive, and politically explosive actions the US Justice Department and FBI has ever taken—one of a tiny handful of times it’s ever investigated a president. Bottom line: The FBI & DOJ must’ve known they had the goods.” In other words, there’s a fuck-ton of ketchup dripping down the walls tonight, and this seems 100% plausible:

Donald Trump is going to run for president on an explicit pledge to imprison Biden, his son, Garland, and anyone else he feels like, and the entire Republican Party is going to get on board with that.

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) August 9, 2022

Bring it on, I say.

Updates:

Trump supporters are calling for Civil War. Yeah, that’ll be over as soon as the meatballs face a line of tanks.

Aaron Blake has a good roundup of the knee-jerk reactions from the Right. Linked without the paywall.

There’s a whole lot of celebrating going on about the Senate’s passing the Inflation Reduction Act bill. It still has to survive the House. I’m hoping the troublemaking “moderates” get the message that this is not the time for grandstanding. Just pass the damn thing without changes, please. Then everybody can go home for August recess, right?

And it’s a bit nauseating to see Joe Manchin being lauded as some kind of hero, when his primary contribution was to extort benefits for his fossil fuel donors in exchange for his support for the bill.

In other news …

This one is complicated. You’ll remember that Michigan was one of the “contested” states in the 2020 election, and Trump supporters in Michigan went on a rampage looking for “evidence” that the votes had been tampered with. As I understand it, some of these supporters persuaded county clerks into giving them access to the voting machines, which was a felony. Investigation into this breach has turned up the name of Kalamazoo lawyer Matthew DePerno, who won the primary to be the Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general.

Politico reports,

DePerno led a November 2020 lawsuit against the state’s Antrim County over an election night tabulation error that was quickly fixed but which Trump and his allies seized on to claim the entire presidential election was fraudulent. Among the evidence that Nessel’s office said it uncovered were digital ID’s matching the seized voting machines which DePerno had used as evidence in that ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit.

Yeah, it looks bad. DePerno is running against the incumbent attorney general, Democrat Dana Nessel. Nessel has recused herself and requested that a special prosecutor be named to continue the investigation, since she and DePerno are political opponents.

The big headlines today tell us that while he was president, Trump wanted Nazi generals.

“Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Mr. Trump told John Kelly, his chief of staff, preceding the question with an obscenity, according to an excerpt from “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, published online by The New Yorker on Monday morning. (Mr. Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Ms. Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker.)

The excerpt depicts Mr. Trump as deeply frustrated by his top military officials, whom he saw as insufficiently loyal or obedient to him. In the conversation with Mr. Kelly, which took place years before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the authors write, the chief of staff told Mr. Trump that Germany’s generals had “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”

Mr. Trump was dismissive, according to the excerpt, apparently unaware of the World War II history that Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star general, knew all too well.

The Inflation Reduction Act bill, a.k.a. the Reader’s Digest Condensed BBB bill, passed in the Senate, people. Fifty Dems voted yes, fifty Republicans voted no, and Kamala Harris broke the tie. Woo HOO!

Now it goes to the House, which had better not screw it up.

The next question is, what is still in this bill? One provision that got chopped at the last minute was a $35 price cap on insulin. The cap will still apply to Medicare, but that’s all. As I understand it, the Senate parliamentarian had flagged some parts of the cap as being in non-compliance with reconciliation, and the Republicans used that to take it out..

And that sounds like an issue that could be used against all Republican senators running for re-election.

As described in the last post, the bill isn’t all we could have hoped for regarding prescription drugs.

The prescription drug pricing reforms aim to help cut costs for seniors enrolled in Medicare. It caps their out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 annually, while allowing the U.S. government to negotiate the price of a small set of medicines beginning in 2026. The landmark proposal is expected to save elderly Americans money and achieve billions in savings for Washington over the next decade. Pharmaceutical giants, which forcefully opposed the bill, also would be required to pay “rebates” to the federal government if they raise Medicare drug prices beyond the rate of inflation.

We still would get $369 billion for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and investing in renewable energy sources. It renews current subsidies in the Affordable Care Act, which were about to expire. It also dedicates some money for staffing up the IRS, a provision that really has Republican panties in a twist.

To get Joe Manchin’s support,

Democrats agreed to mandate new oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, while party leaders committed to pursue a separate bill in the coming months that makes it easier for developers to override some environmental objections. That proposal could greatly benefit a long-stalled pipeline in Manchin’s home state, a trade-off that some Democrats described as an uncomfortable necessity.

And to mollify Kyrsten Sinema, they had to dial back proposed tax increases on wealthy investors. Sinema is up for re-election in 2024; I trust we can get rid of her then. We’re stuck with Manchin until 2026.

The Big News last night was that Kyrsten Sinema agreed to the Schumer-Manchin reconciliation bill, with some changes.

To win Ms. Sinema’s support, Democratic leaders agreed to drop a $14 billion tax increase on some wealthy hedge fund managers and private equity executives that she had opposed, change the structure of a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations, and include drought money to benefit Arizona.

This is what Ed Kilgore predicted a few days ago. “While Sinema may not want to personally kill this heaven-sent deal herself, it would be surprising if she doesn’t take at least a pound of flesh in concessions to show her corporate friends she is still a major player,” Ed Kilgore writes. Looks like he was spot on.

Today he writes,

Sinema (and, for that matter, Schumer) seems to have calculated that liberal revulsion over the price she demanded for her support would be more than offset by joy that she didn’t kill the whole thing. So Senate Democrats went along with her demand (they also added some additional drought money, while offsetting the cost of concessions to Sinema via an excise tax on stock buybacks). That means on paper, at least, the Inflation Reduction Act has the 50 votes it will need (along with Kamala Harris’s tie-breaker) to finally emerge from the upper chamber.

There are still some hurdles. The parliamentarian has to sign off on the bill before it can be voted on as a budget reconciliation bill, without having to deal with the filibuster/cloture rule. Then it has to be subjected to the “vote a rama” process in which many senators will offer amendments. And then it has to pass the House, where the usual assholes, a.k.a. “moderate” Democrats, will probably try to bleep it up by adding other things that will require it to go back to the Senate.

But if it does pass, it would be a great thing both for the nation and for the Democrats’ chances in the midterms. The bill contains $369 billion to combat climate change, and a lot of that investment will go to creating “green energy” manufacturing jobs. Greg Sargent writes,

At its core, the bill constitutes industrial policy that would invest in the creation of clean-energy manufacturing jobs, including in former coal communities. As I’ve argued, this would allow Democrats to shift the debate: Rebuilding jobs in the industrial and Appalachian heartlands requires accepting realities of global warming and technological change — and harnessing them to our advantage — rather than remaining mired in backward-looking nostalgic fantasies.

In other words, when Republicans oppose the bill, Dems can honestly say they’re trying to stifle job creation.

The bill also extends the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies through 2025. Otherwise they would have expired right before the midterms, I understand.

It also includes some provision for Medicare to negotiate drug prices, but only some drugs, and it doesn’t kick into effect until 2026.

Still, this is a big deal, and it could be voted on very soon. Fingers crossed.