On Wednesday, June 12, the House GOP voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to turn over the audio recording of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. Hur, you’ll recall, was the right-wing toadie tasked with investigating Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents from his time as Vice President.

Hur declined to recommend charging the President with a crime, citing insufficient evidence. Hur also threw a bunch of gratuitous shade about the President’s aging brain. Hur then got hauled in front of Congress by irate Republicans who were angry Hur didn’t recommend charges. They also wanted to hear more of Hur’s opinions of Biden’s mental acuity. That hearing pretty much went nowhere. Then Gym Jordan and James Comer sent a subpoena to the Justice Department for the audio recording of Hur’s interview. Justice sent them a transcript of the interview but not the audio. President Biden had invoked executive privilege and said the audio will not be released. Justice’s hands were tied. That brings us to Wednesday and the contempt of Congress vote.

Yesterday a Justice Department official responded to the House Republicans, explaining that it was Justice’s “longstanding position and uniform practice” to not prosecute officials who don’t comply with subpoenas because of a president’s claim of executive privilege. This seems straightforward enough that even Gym Jordan ought to be able to understand it, but perhaps I’m overestimating Gym Jordan.

Here’s the latest:

 Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that the House will go to court to enforce the subpoena against Attorney General Merrick Garland for access to President Joe Biden’s special counsel audio interview, hours after the Justice Department refused to prosecute Republicans’ contempt of Congress charge.

“It is sadly predictable that the Biden Administration’s Justice Department will not prosecute Garland for defying congressional subpoenas even though the department aggressively prosecuted Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for the same thing,” Johnson said in a statement. “This is yet another example of the two-tiered system of justice brought to us by the Biden Administration.”

Johnson is, of course, leaving out the executive privilege thing. Joe Biden is the sitting president. He can do that. Neither Bannon nor Navarro had valid excuses for not complying with a subpoena. Johnson should have heard of executive privilege, considering that his God-Emperor Trump made some attempts to use executive privilege after he left office, which is not how it works. And Gym Jordan famously blew off a subpoena from the January 6 committee; he had no excuses either.

This is all just political theater, of course. The only reason Republicans want the audio is so they can creatively edit out some clips and use them in campaign ads. And they will continue to complain that “Joe Biden’s Justice Department” is corrupt and doesn’t play by the rules, even though it clearly does.

Also last week, Politico reported that Trump called Mike Johnson at some point and demanded the House overturn the 34 convictions against him. Trump is too addled to understand that the U.S. House has no authority over what goes on in a city court. Johnson surely knows better, but is said to have promised to do something anyway.

I am so tired of these people.

In other news:  Some top CEOs met with Trump last week.

Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting, multiple attendees told CNBC.

“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one CEO who was in the room, according to a person who heard the executive speaking. The CEO also said Trump did not explain how he planned to accomplish any of his policy proposals, that person said.

Several CEOs “said that [Trump] was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Today the Supreme Court decided that a ban on bump stocks is unconstitutional.

In a 6-3 ruling on ideological lines with the court’s conservatives in the majority, the court held that an almost 100-year-old law aimed at banning machine guns cannot legitimately be interpreted to include bump stocks.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a firearm equipped with the accessory does not meet the definition of “machinegun” under federal law.

Here is the ruling; Thomas’s opinion begins on page 5. As you know, “bump stocks” are an accessory used with semiautomatic weapons. They work with the firearm’s recoil to make the weapon fire repeatedly without the shooter pulling the trigger again and again. At least, that’s what I read in news articles; I’ve never fired one.

The question that Thomas addressed was whether a such a modified weapon could be classified as “machine gun.” Thomas writes that “Under the National Firearms Act of 1934, a ‘machinegun’ is “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’” Any full-auto weapon, in other words. Ownership of machine guns and anything used to convert semiautomatic weapons into machine guns is tightly restricted by that same act. Thomas then gives us several pages of verbiage that argues a bump stock doesn’t really convert a semiautomatic weapon into a fully automatic one, so a bump stock is not covered by the NFA of 1934. You can read it all yourself if you care what it says.

Note that a bump stock was used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 60 people, and also in the Buffalo mass shooting in 2022. And probably some others I’m not remembering. In 2017 after the Las Vegas shooting a poll found that 82 percent of Americans wanted bump stocks banned. But we must only pass laws approved by the Imperial Court, will of the people be damned.

The National Firearm Act of 1934, which has been amended a couple of times, is not a total ban on automatic weapons. It does, however, put so many restrictions on acquiring one that it’s just about impossible for civilians to do so legally. Or even illegally; I understand they are very scarce in the U.S. This act was challenged in court, and in United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), the Court said, among other things, that the Second Amendment protects only the ownership of military-type weapons appropriate for use by a “well-regulated militia.” (There’s a long article here about the Miller decision that looks like an interesting read, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.) And the NFA remains the law of the land.

I don’t believe Miller has been overturned. The issue, of course, is that the old “well-regulated militia” enshrined in the Constitution, in the Second Amendment and in Article I, Section 8, paragraphs 15 and 16, carried muzzle-loading muskets that the men were required to obtain themselves. Hence, a right to own firearms had to be protected for the sake of the militia. But the state militia system — which, truth be told, was never all that effective at defense — was reorganized as the National Guard in 1903. Guardsmen don’t supply their own weapons, I don’t believe, so the purpose of protecting firearm ownership for the sake of the militia is kind of outmoded. The 2008 Heller decision then expanded the right to carry arms beyond just militia service, but didn’t eliminate the connection to the long-ago self-armed militia entirely.

But it seems to me that firearm technology has changed so drastically that any opinion about what is or is not a “military-type weapon” protected by the Second Amendment can get pretty arbitrary, especially since it was decided a long time ago that full-auto weapons are not protected. And I strongly suspect that if we could wake up and reconstitute the authors of the Second Amendment and show them what people are shooting now, they’d be shocked and horrified and want to repeal the amendment themselves.

Speaking of Clarence Thomas — see Harlan Crow Provided Clarence Thomas at Least 3 Previously Undisclosed Private Jet Trips, Senate Probe Finds at ProPublica.

Update: More analysis by Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority carved a huge loophole into the federal prohibition against machine guns on Friday, striking down a bump stock ban first enacted in 2018 by the Trump administration. Its 6–3 decision allows civilians to convert AR-15–style rifles into automatic weapons that can fire at a rate of 400–800 rounds per minute. One might hope a ruling that stands to inflict so much carnage would, at least, be indisputably compelled by law. It is not. Far from it: To reach this result, Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion for the court tortures statutory text beyond all recognition, defying Congress’ clear and (until now) well-established commands. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in dissent, the supermajority flouts the “ordinary meaning” of the law, adopting an “artificially narrow” interpretation that will have “deadly consequences.” This Supreme Court will be squarely at fault for the next mass shooting enabled by a legal bump stock. …

… For years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had been monitoring these devices; the agency found some unlawful, depending on their precise mechanisms, but did not take a formal position overall. The Las Vegas shooting prompted ATF to conclude that bump stocks transform semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, rendering them illegal under a long-standing federal statute. That’s because this law bans “any part designed and intended solely and exclusively” for “converting a weapon into a machinegun.” And a “machinegun” is defined as any firearm that fires “automatically” by “a single function of the trigger.” After extensive deliberation, ATF found that bump stock–equipped rifles do exactly that.

Yesterday the Southern Baptist convention voted to oppose in-vitro fertilization. They didn’t call for a ban — yet — nor did they forbid Southern Baptists from using IVF. Instead, they passed a resolution that calls on Southern Baptists “to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation, especially in the number of embryos generated in the I.V.F. process.”

I interpret that to mean that it’s okay to use IVF to achieve pregnancy as long as no surplus fertilized zygotes are created as a result. Which means the odds of success will be very low.  (And for the record, the SBC narrowly failed to pass a ban on women pastors. This tells me they recognize a public relations disaster when they see one. But just before this vote the SBC voted to expel the First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Virginia, because the church allows women to serve even in senior pastoral roles. This suggests some ambivalence about women pastors.)

IVF was an issue in the Senate yesterday. Chuck Schumer and the other Democrats have been challenging their Republican colleagues to go on the record on women’s health-related issues, such as protecting a right to birth control. This week Chuck and the gang proposed a bill to protect access to IVF. So then this happened:

In response, Republicans have clung to two legislative gambits of their own that they say are just as good. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) offered a simple resolution demonstrating the Senate’s “support for Americans who are starting and growing families through in vitro fertilization.” Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Katie Britt (R-AL) put forward a bill that would make states ineligible to receive Medicaid funding if they ban IVF.  …

… Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) blocked the Republican bill, calling it a “PR tool.”

“[This is] just another way for Republicans to pretend they are not the extremists that they keep proving they are,” Murray said on the Senate floor as she objected to unanimous consent. 

“The bill allows for states to push for regulations that could severely reduce the standard of care for IVF treatment, such as restrictions on how many embryos are created and what individuals can do with these embryos — decisions that should only be made between patients and their doctors, based on science and clinical guidelines,” she added of the Cruz-Britt bill.

Limiting the number of fertilized eggs produced in IVF and limiting what can be done with those eggs seems to be where the Right is coming down on IVF. Medical experts say limiting the number of fertilized eggs produced will make it much more difficult to achieve a successful pregnancy with IVF.

Yet there’s more. The Christian right is coming for divorce next writes Anna North at Vox.

Typically, the only way to do it was to convince a judge that your spouse had committed some form of wrongdoing, like adultery, abandonment, or “cruelty” (that is, abuse). This could be difficult: “Even if you could prove you had been hit, that didn’t necessarily mean it rose to the level of cruelty that justified a divorce,” said Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina.

Then came a revolution: In 1969, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California (who was himself divorced) signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, allowing people to end their marriages without proving they’d been wronged. The move was a recognition that “people were going to get out of marriages,” Zug said, and gave them a way to do that without resorting to subterfuge. Similar laws soon swept the country, and rates of domestic violence and spousal murder began to drop as people — especially women — gained more freedom to leave dangerous situations. 

Well, forget that. Republican lawmakers in several states are working to abolish no-fault divorce and go back to the bad old days.  “Conservative commentators and lawmakers are calling for an end to no-fault divorce, arguing that it has harmed men and even destroyed the fabric of society,” Anna North writes.

Michelle Boorstein and Hannah Knowles write at WaPo about what the Christian right wants from a second Trump term.

Should Trump reclaim the presidency in November, they say, it would represent a historic opportunity to put their interpretation of Christianity at the center of government policy. …

… Among the proposals being pushed by the Christian right’svariousgroups and leaders:

• Removing the words “gender” and “abortion” from federal program documents, as well as the related funding.
• Imposing new restrictions on abortion pills, perhaps through the authority of the Food and Drug Administration.
• Carving out greaterexemptions to anti-discrimination laws intended toprotect LGBTQ people.
• Establishing a more visible role for Christianity in public schools, including more prayer led by both teachers and students.

There was some good news on the theocracy front today. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the bid to restrict distribution of mifepristone, the main abortion pill. And it was unanimous. The court found that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue, because they couldn’t prove they had been personally harmed. Okay. But Justice Kavanaugh dropped big hints that maybe someone else could sue.

In other news: Trump wants to eliminate most federal income tax by just adding tarrifs to all imports. Basically, he wants to go back to the antebellum economy.

Trump is getting called out for his stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Apparently he was so inchoherent at a closed-door meeting with House Republicans it was “like talking to your drunk uncle.” See also Eugene Robinson, Is Donald Trump okay? and Tom Nichols, Let’s talk about Trump’s gibberish.

Hunter Biden was found guilty of three federal gun crimes. President Biden says he will respect the verdict. One might think the Right would be holding a victory dance now, but they’re strangely subdued. At least, reaction on the rightie websites is fairly subdued. They don’t seem to know if they’re supposed to celebrate or just continue to be angry about something. Well, moving on …

There’s a lot of contradictory reporting, but something seems to be happening with the cease-fire proposal President Biden announed a few days ago. Yesterday the United Nations Security Coundil approved this plan.. The Associated Press:

The U.S.-sponsored resolution welcomes a cease-fire proposal announced by President Joe Biden that the United States says Israel has accepted. It calls on the militant Palestinian group Hamas to accept the three-phase plan.

The resolution — which was approved with 14 of the 15 Security Council members voting in favor and Russia abstaining — calls on Israel and Hamas “to fully implement its terms without delay and without condition.”

Israel has not accepted this plan, though. Here’s Al Jazeera:

The resolution welcomes a three-phase ceasefire proposal announced by US President Joe Biden last month, which calls for an initial six-week ceasefire and the exchange of some Israeli captives held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

The second phase would include a permanent ceasefire and the release of the remaining captives. The third phase would involve a reconstruction effort for the devastated Gaza Strip.

The US says Israel has accepted the proposal, although some Israeli officials have since promised to continue the war until the elimination of Hamas, the Palestinian group that governs Gaza.

The resolution calls on Hamas, which initially said it viewed the proposal “positively”, to accept the three-phase plan.

It urges Israel and Hamas “to fully implement its terms without delay and without condition”.

Hamas was quick to welcome the resolution on Monday. In a statement after the vote, Hamas said it was ready to cooperate with mediators and enter indirect negotiations over the implementation of the principles of the agreement.

It seems the official position of the United States that Israel has accepted this plan, even though I’m not seeing such a commitment from Netanyahu. The BBC reported earlier today:

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “reaffirmed his commitment” to a Gaza ceasefire plan, and that if it does not progress Hamas will be to blame.

Mr Blinken reiterated his call for Hamas to accept the plan as outlined by President Biden 11 days ago. He was speaking a day after holding talks with Mr Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

He said the onus was on “one guy” hiding “ten storeys underground in Gaza” to make the casting vote, referring to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

Mr Netanyahu has not publicly endorsed what Mr Biden outlined nor said whether it matches an Israeli ceasefire proposal on which Mr Biden’s statement was based.

Reuters, but so far no one else, is reporting that Hamas has accepted the ceasefire plan.

Hamas accepts a U.N. resolution backing a plan to end the war with Israel in Gaza and is ready to negotiate details, a senior official of the Palestinian militant group said on Tuesday in what the U.S. Secretary of State called a hopeful sign.
Qatari and Egyptian mediators said they had received a formal reply from Hamas to the U.N.-backed truce proposal, and Hamas and its ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad expressed “readiness to positively” reach a deal to end the war in Gaza in a joint statement on Tuesday.

Rolling Stone is reporting that Sam Alito has said the quiet part out loud.

Justice Samuel Alito spoke candidly about the ideological battle between the left and the right — discussing the difficulty of living “peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamental” differences that “can’t be compromised.” He endorsed what his interlocutor described as a necessary fight to “return our country to a place of godliness.” And Alito offered a blunt assessment of how America’s polarization will ultimately be resolved: “One side or the other is going to win.”

Alito made these remarks in conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3, a function that is known to right-wing activists as an opportunity to buttonhole Supreme Court justices. His comments were recorded by Lauren Windsor, a liberal documentary filmmaker. Windsor attended the dinner as a dues-paying member of the society under her real name, along with a colleague. She asked questions of the justice as though she were a religious conservative. 

It should be noted that Lauren Windsor did ask some leading questions, but Alito didn’t hesitate to take the bait. What’s sad is that the “Christians” who want Christianity nationalized (I don’t think Jesus would approve) imagine they are under threat from liberals. But speaking as a liberal I am happy to let them be as rightie-religious as they wannabe. I have absolutely no desire to interfere with their religious beliefs and practices in any way. They just can’t force their beliefs and practices on anyone else. In insisting they and they alone can set policy for the U.S., they have made themselves a threat to the freedom of everyone else. If they want a war they’re going to get one, but they started it. And it’s entirely unnecessary. And anyone who thinks like Alito absolutely should not be on the Supreme Court.

In other news: Trump is scheduled to have his probation interview today, and apparently he’s going through with it. He’s not in New York City, though. He’s being interviewed remotely from Mar-a-Lago. This means he gets to skip the blood test part, I take it. Otherwise I don’t care. I’m fine with him being someplace other than New York. Sorry about that, Florida.

I have some charts for you today. Let’s start with this one I snagged from Newsweek  —

Sorry the print is so small. But if you can read it, the column on the left lists Supreme Court justices going back twenty years. Some of them are retired and/or deceased. I understand this chart gives the number of gifts received by each justice and whether they were disclosed or undisclosed. That long bar at the top belongs to Clarence Thomas.

This chart shows us the value of those gifts.

The long bar at the bottom is Clarence Thomas, showing a total value of gifts received to be over $4 million. Of the current justices the second-place winner is Sam Alito, whose gifts totalled just over $170,000.

Newsweek says “The data was compiled using official disclosure reports as well as reporting from a number of media outlets which identified gifts received by justices between January 2004 and December 2023.” So that’s probably not all of it, just what could be teased out of available information.

This was compiled by a group called Fix the Court, and you can get more details from them about what they figured into this data. A lot of the gifts were things like plaques, medals, and “gift baskets” (fruit and cheese?) that aren’t necessarily a big deal. There are also advance and royalty payments for books written by justices, which doesn’t bother me either as long as they are disclosed. Seems to me profits from books aren’t gifts but income. But Thomas, obviously, is in a class by himself.

As soon as Democrats have a majority in the House and Senate …  It still takes a two-thirds vote in the Senate to remove a judge from office, but we can dream.

In other news. This is what happened when the Federalist published a hit piece on Dolly Parton because she doesn’t hate gay people.

Elon Musk has threatened to leave Tesla if his $56 billion pay package is not approved. Considering that Tesla sales have been lagging way behind other EVs, I’m not sure what value Musk has been adding to the company that’s worth $56 billion. Seems to me Tesla would be better off breaking from him. But this will be up to the shakeholders, who will vote on June 15. If it were up to me I’d cut him down to $56 with a promise of some gift baskets if sales pick up.

ProPublica revisits the biggest political crime in American history, even though nobody is exactly sure what it is.

Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. There are some good history articles online, such as On D-Day, the U.S. Conquered the British Empire by Michel Paradis at The Atlantic and ‘Almost terrifying to contemplate’: Why D-Day nearly didn’t happen by Garrett M. Graff at WaPo.  And we should be grateful President Biden is representing the U.S. at the commemoration today and not that other guy.

“In their generation, in their hour of trial, the Allied forces of D-Day did their duty,” Biden said, standing before dozens of World War II veterans at the Normandy American Cemetery. “Now the question for us is, in our hour of trial, will we do ours?”

Yesterday’s Senate vote on the right to contraception amounted to an IQ test for Republicans. They flunked.

Republicans argued the bill was unnecessary, because they don’t oppose contraception and there are no efforts to ban it.  

“Senate Democrats are using their power in the majority to push an alarmist and false narrative that there was a problem accessing contraception,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said on the Senate floor. “This is not an issue unless their candidate for president is running behind in the polls.” 

If they don’t oppose access to contraception, then why block the bill? They must have known the point of the bill was to get them all on the record of being for or against a right to contraception. And, in fact, there are several attempts by Republicans in the states to put limits on access to contraception. See also:

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a story allegedly sourced from several people, Democrats and Republicans, that allegedly documented deep concern about President Biden’s mental decline. Yeah, they’ve gone back to that. Josh Marshall read it for all of us and reports that the “several people” are Mike Johnson and Kevin McCarthy.

I read the piece and I noticed right away, but had to go back and make sure I was understanding the circumlocutions, that this purported deep dive on Biden’s slipping leads off with the accounts of two people: Speaker Mike Johnson and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. There are some efforts to fuzz that up with Johnson since you have to piece together the meaning of the sourcing. (It’s based on the accounts of “six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened” during a one-on-one meeting between Biden and Johnson. ¯\_(?)_/¯ ) About ten paragraphs in it notes in passing that of the more than 45 people the reporters spoke to for the piece over several months “most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans.”

I do wish I could ask Mike Johnson when the Commandment about not bearing false witness (number eight or nine, depending on the source) was suspended. But just notice that that Murdoch Media is resurrecting the “Joe is brain dead” talking point now.

Update: Charles Pierce:  “I find it more than a little convenient that, after a solid month of stories about how El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago was dozing off at the defense table during his own criminal trial, we have ‘some’ who ‘wonder’ about Biden.”

What we’re up against: Pennsylvania Republicans jeer, leave statehouse floor in protest of officers who defended Capitol on Jan. 6.

Finally we get to our not-favorite judge Aileen “Loose” Cannon. Loose continues to find creative ways to waste time and push the trial date further into the future. Yesterday she re-shuffled the dates of hearings on various issues and added a new one, a hearing on whether Jack Smith’s appointment of special counsel is unconstitutional. And she took the bizarre step of inviting third party “friends of the court” with no direct involvement in the case to offer testimony at this hearing. Next I expect Trump’s lawyers to file a brief claiming the court has no jurisdiction because Trump is actually the Dauphin of France. Loose would probably schedule a hearing on that. See also Judge Aileen Cannon Will Entertain Any Excuse to Delay Trump’s Trial at The New Repuplic.

Update: Judge orders Steve Bannon to report to prison on July 1 for contempt of Congress sentence

In all the hoopla over the thirty-four counts some other news got buried. On Friday  President Biden proposed a permanent cease-fire plan between Israel and Hamas (more here on the plan from Al-Jazeera). Very, very simply, the plan includes three phases that would begin with releasing hostages and prisoners on both sides plus allowing hundreds of food trucks into Gaza. Next would be negotiation toward a permanent end to hostilities, and last is the rebuilding of what was destroyed. I assume that somewhere in there some provision would be made for how Gaza will be governed.

President Biden initially framed the proposal as an Israeli proposal that he hoped Hamas would accept. Many have pointed out that he waited to announce the proposal until after Shabbat had started in Israel, so that Netanyahu couldn’t respond right away. By now it’s clear Netanyahu wasn’t behind the proposal and probably won’t agree to it. Juan Cole explains that if Netanyahu did accept a peace plan his hard-right coalition would collapse, costing him his position as Prime Minister. See also Fred Kaplan at Slate.

Complicating all this is that on Saturday Netanyahu was invited to address Congress. Speaker Mike Johnson has been pushing hard for this, and I take it Chuck Schumer finally caved. It’s not clear to me if Netanyahu will be speaking remotely or will show up in person. I don’t think he could set foot in the U.S. without being slammed by protests. A large part of the Democrats of both houses are already saying they will not attend.

In another surprise move, President Biden announced he is putting tighter restrictions on the number of migrants allowed to cross the border and apply for asylum. Progressives in Congress are not happy. I suspect Biden has his eye on the election with this one. There’s not much he can do about the border until he gets a Congress that will work with him.

Speaking of Congress — I couldn’t bear to watch any of the news stories about the House committees grilling Dr. Anthony Fauci and Attorney General Merrick Garland. House Republicans are just baboons throwing feces as far as I’m concerned. Some might consider that comparison an insult to baboons.

In other news — see 3 Organizers Of Trump Fake Elex Plot—Including Chesebro—Charged In Wisconsin.

Also, too — The Epoch Times is a horrible, hard-right propaganda rag. And now it may go out of business.

D’oh! Why didn’t we think of this?

Take a propagandistic news outlet and pump it full of cash from overseas criminal scams that you laundered yourself and bingo you have a supposedly growing media property. Allegedly.

The one glitch, as Epoch Times CFO Bill Guan found out, is that the law may eventually catch up to you.

Guan was indicted in the Southern District of New York on one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and two counts of bank fraud for allegedly laundering $67 million in illicit criminal proceeds for the benefit of the Falun Gong-affiliated Epoch Times.

Among the sources of the so-called “revenue” laundered into Epoch Times were fraudulently procured unemployment insurance benefits obtained using stolen identities that were then loaded onto prepaid debit cards and sold at 70-80 cents on the dollar, according to the indictment.

Falun Gong is a Chinese religious movement that also produces those Shen Yun music and dance extravaganzas you must have seen advertised on the TV. Falun Gong was horribly persecuted in China and now has its headquarters in New York state somewhere, I understand. I used to be sympathetic to them until I found out the organization is behind right-wing extremist politicians here and in Europe. So they came West for freedom and are working to destroy freedom. I appreciate why they would be anti-Communist, but neo-facsism isn’t an improvement.

Let’s just hope Epoch Times shuts down.

In the days before The Verdict a number of poll analysts had pointed out that much of Trump’s “lead” in the polls was coming from people who didn’t vote in 2020. If you looked at polling results of people who did vote in 2020 — people who are likely to vote, in other words — Biden looks a bit better. See The Shaky Foundation of Trump’s Lead: Disengaged Voters.

The disengaged voters are also low-information voters. Some of them may have been barely aware that Trump was on trial for something. But I think the news about the conviction was big enough they might have heard it by now. And it may take some time to process. There are all kinds of opinion columns out there about What This Will Mean for the Election. I don’t think we know yet. A lot will depend on what the two parties do with the conviction, and what comes out in news and social media about the conviction and eventually settles into “conventional wisdom.”

Also, a lot is going to depend on Trump in the next few days.

Juliette Kayyem at The Atlantic provides some interesting observations —

The first post-trial press conference of the once and potentially future president, and now convicted felon, was bizarre, even by his standards. The word unhinged tends to be overused in this context, but Donald Trump lacked focus as he spoke after the conclusion of his trial in a New York state court on 34 felony counts relating to his payoff of the porn star Stormy Daniels. The presumptive Republican nominee ranted about this and that, including off-topic riffs on “Little League games” being canceled, “propane stoves,” the rainy weather, and immigrants living in “luxury hotels.” It wasn’t really a press conference—he took no questions—but nor was it what some feared it would be: a call to action.

Here’s an unfiltered video of the press conference. I could only watch about a third of it. Trump did sound old and tired at the beginning but pulled himself together a bit, even as what he said was a stream of lies. About the only thing he got factually correct in the part I watched is that some guy really did attack another guy with a machete in a Times Square McDonald’s on May 30. The rest of it is nonsense, and I believe you all are well informed enough to recognize that if you watch it. For the record, there are fact checks here and here.

Kayyem then notes that Trump didn’t call for violence in his speech, and as far as I can tell he hasn’t yet since the conviction. His culties are calling for burning down the nation, but so far I haven’t heard they’ve done anything about it.

Trump could already have started using his sentencing date, July 11, as a cause for his supporters and the GOP elites to rally around, much as he did with January 6, 2021. Then, the last time he lost big, he was still president and had all of the tools of the presidency to try to stop his loss from taking effect and prevent the transfer of power. But he doesn’t have that this time. He is not in office; this is not 2021. He may yet attempt to orchestrate disruption, protest, even violence, but unless he is elected again, he cannot promise his supporters that they will be pardoned. And he could actually face jail time. The calculations are different.

That last part about facing jail time is critical. Trump may dimly understand that his behavior between now and the sentencing could make a difference in the sentencing. And having a violent mob outside during his sentencing hearing might not be the smartest move, assuming he could conjure one.

That said, Reuters just reported this —

 Donald Trump said he would accept home confinement or jail time after his historic conviction by a New York jury last week but that it would be tough for the public to accept.

“I’m not sure the public would stand for it,” the Republican presidential candidate told Fox News in an interview that aired on Sunday. “I think it’d be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”

I suspect most of the public would take it pretty well. And as I understand it, even if Trump were sentenced to jail he could seek to have the sentence stayed pending appeal, which of course could take a while. I don’t expect him to be locked up anytime soon.

Back to Juliette Kayyem:

Second, a great deal has happened since January 6, 2021, and Trump should rightly be worried that he cannot deliver the crowds. The MAGA movement is furious but not organized. “Mass mobilizations are hard and require work,” The Atlantic’s Ali Breland wrote on Friday, including “boring little logistical things.” No such effort on Trump’s behalf seems under way. And, as I’ve written previously, Trump’s people may be angry, but they are also dispersed and in disarray, and many are in jail because of the post–January 6 prosecutions. Several leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, groups that took such a planning role before the Capitol riot, have been found guilty and are serving time for seditious conspiracy. Today, Trump’s rallies are small, though he continues to lie about the numbers.

Kayyem points to the pathetically sparse show of support outside the Manhattan courthouse, even as Trump kept lying that “they” were keeping the protesters away.  The notables of the Republian Party showed up to kiss Trump’s ass, of course. (Someday some of those same people will swear up and down they didn’t really mean it; they never really liked Trump, really. They were just there to unify the party, or something.) Even though New York City is mostly solid blue, there are still a few million Trump voters within easy public transportation distance of the courthouse. More could have been there if they had wanted to be there.

As the summer goes on we may see a reprise of the “Trump trains” of 2020 or the even better Trump boat parades that were a source of much amusement four years ago. Or, we may not. That will be something to watch for. There’s a headline at The Guardian declaring the Right is mobilizing, but it didn’t give any examples of actual mobility among Trump supporters other than bloviating on the Internet. What we are more likely to see are the GOP bozos in Congress (example) attempting to “investigate” Judge Merchan (and his daughter) and Alvin Bragg. That could get ugly.

There’s also the fact that Trump has an election to win. Unleashing a violent mob, even if he could do it, may not do much to win over independents and old school suburban, college educated Republicans. Kayyem writes,

Trump lost the election in 2020. He lost in court last week. He’s on a longtime losing streak, and he knows that the only way to turn that around is to win the presidency. The likelihood that Trump can’t help himself is always high, and he could easily beckon violence on his social-media platform and get a response from the die-hard fringe. But Trump may be calculating that a spectacle of unruly masses on July 11—assuming he could get them—would not be such a great look for a presidential candidate when the whole world is watching. 

And so, according to Reuters,

Asked what Trump supporters should do if he were jailed, Republic National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump told CNN: “Well, they’re gonna do what they’ve done from the beginning, which is remain calm and protest at the ballot box on November 5th. There’s nothing to do other than make your voices heard loud and clear and speak out against this.”

That may be the official Trump campaign position on protesting. If there are any violent protests, Trump will probably want to be able to demonstrate he didn’t call for it.

In related news: There’s a thing called a “pre-sentence interview” Trump is supposed to submit to, in person, before the sentencing hearing. This is a New York state thing, I take it. According to Business Insider, after the verdict Trump actually was handed a form telling him to immediately report to a probabtion department upstairs somewhere to begin some kind of processing, but he didn’t do that. He’s supposed to schedule an in-person interview with the probabtion department, but he is expected to blow it off. There are no specific penalties attached to blowing off the interview, but it won’t help him at sentencing.

Trump is now claiming he never called for Hillary Clinton to be locked up back in 2016. So what percentage of Americans are stupid enough to believe that?
Something else to read: “Swept Up!” The Russian Payments That Led to Trump’s Felony Conviction at Emptywheel.

MAGA as a social-psychological phenomenon has always been about alienation. All kinds of smart observers of mass movements have said that people who are alienated from their communities and cultures are vulnerable to being sucked into authoritarian mass movements. Through such a movement people find connection, identity, and a feeling of power. They even find a sense of purpose, even if their only purpose is owning the libs.

This article in Scientific American was written shortly after Trump won the 2016 election, so it’s a tad dated, but it says a lot of useful things about Trump supporters. For example,

In simple terms, a Trump rally was a dramatic enactment of a specific vision of America. It enacted how Trump and his followers would like America to be. In a phrase, it was an identity festival that embodied a politics of hope.

And

When we put it all together, these figures tell us something important about leadership in general and about the 2016 leadership contest. They underline the point that leadership is never about the character of individuals as individuals. This is the “old psychology of leadership” that our own theoretical and empirical analysis has called into question. Instead leadership is about individuals as group members—whose success hinges on their capacity to create, represent, advance and embed a shared sense of “us.”

Another feature of Trumpism is the way he used his rallies to reinforce the sense that his alienated audience was under threat. The larger culture wasn’t just strange and uninviting to them; it was actually out to get them. There was safety only in banding together with like-minded folk and not asking questions.

That’s why it hardly matters to the true believers that Trump didn’t accomplish a single damn thing he promised to do when he was running in 2016. What matters is how he makes them feel about themselves. And a threat to Trump is felt as a threat to his culties. Their identities are fused with his.

Reuters reports that Trump followers are calling for violence because of the verdict.

Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.

After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.

And so on. We’ve yet to see if this will go beyond talk, of course. Trump’s powers to call up riotous mobs haven’t worked all that well recently.

It’s a damn shame the Manhattan trial wasn’t televised. Watching Trump sit, obediently and often asleep, in the courtroom day after day might have put a big dent in his image. But the true believers probably heard little about the tamed and subdued Trump sitting in the court. I doubt that the trial that was reported, if it was reported, on right-wing media bore much resemblance to the trial that I was following in the New York Times and MSNBC. And for that reason I don’t know how much Quinta Jurecic’s observations in The Atlantic hold true:

Trump’s political appeal has always been tied to perceptions of his invincibility. He was a force of nature, the godlike manifestation of the people’s will unbound by law. Now, though, the Trump balloon has been punctured. The Übermensch is not so über. When Trump stepped out of the courtroom after the verdict to deliver remarks to the press, he walked with hunched shoulders, declaring his innocence in a flat, exhausted tone, as if he was struggling to summon his typical reserves of fury. He had a new look about him, unseen even after the 2020 election, when he lost but claimed victory; he looked defeated.

Trump will appeal, but that’s going to take time. In the meantime there will be a sentencing, and the title “convicted felon” will stick to Trump like dog poo on his shoes. The conviction may not have punctured his follower’s image of him, yet, but over the next few weeks it could start to sink in.

It’s also the case that while the true believers may rally around Trump, the conviction could have a different effect on more traditional conservative voters — such as the people still voting for Nikki Haley in primaries — and right-leaning independents. These are people who may share some hard-right opinions but whose personal identities aren’t centered on Trump.

Seriously, though, the only way to break the fever of Trumpism is for Trump to be revealed without doubt as vulnerable and fallable and a loser. If that ever happened, his “base” is likely to crumble.

Speaking of the appeal, Reuters reports that the appeal will center on Stormy Daniels’ testimony. That seems a weird choice. I wonder if that is Trump’s idea.