CNN is reporting that Jack Smith has offered limited immunity to two Trump fake electors. Also,

Prosecutors have played hardball with some of the witnesses in recent weeks, refusing to grant extensions to grand jury subpoenas for testimony and demanding they comply before the end of this month, sources said. In the situations where prosecutors have given witnesses immunity, the special counsel’s office arrived at the courthouse in Washington ready to compel their testimony after the witnesses indicated they would decline to answer questions under the Fifth Amendment, the sources added.

Sounds like things are getting serious on that front.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett has some disclosure issues. A professor who had just taken a leadership role at the Religious Liberty Initiative (RLI) at Notre Dame Law School purchased Barrett’s private home months after she was sworn in in October 2020. This is the same group that hosted Justice Sam Alito at a conference in Rome last year, The one where he joked about the Dobbs decision. Ironically, Alito’s speech at the conference was about defending religious liberty. Anyway, according to several news stories the RLI has had several briefs before the court. In a little bit of googling I couldn’t find any positions they’ve taken that seemed terribly egregious. But it says something that Alito is the one they hosted at their big conference.

Do see Dahlia Lithwick, Justice Alito IS the Salmon.

The problem with continuing to frame the Harlan Crow/Barre Seid/Paul Singer stories as “ethics” issues is that we tend to think of “ethics” scandals in league with failures to use the correct shrimp fork. This is kind of what happened when we framed the great pay-to-play Supreme Court Historical Society caper that permitted one couple, the Wrights, to purchase access to the Alitos and the Scalias for the price of $125,000, as a “leak” story. We keep centering the justices and their “ethics” misfires at the expense of the real grifting here: Billionaires being assigned, like something out of the Big Brothers program, to individual justices for the purposes of lavish gift giving and influence.

Look again at ProPublica’s photos of Paul Singer, Antonin Scalia, Leonard Leo, and Samuel Alito and the Big Shiny Fishes they netted. If you think the fish is the trophy in this picture, you’re making a galactic-category error. The trophy is the justice. The vital question here is not why did Justice Alito agree to take the trip, because the trip sounds quite awesome. The question is why did Leo pick him to go, empty seat on the private jet notwithstanding, and why was building a friendship with someone who was in the literal business of reshaping the court to favor his own business so urgently necessary? …

… Nobody in this world enjoys hearing that they are the salmon. But that is why we don’t allow the salmon be the sole arbiter of whether they are the salmon. Let’s please stop framing this issue in terms of “ethics” and “friendships” and “honor.” It is a big-game safari for access to powerful people, and this game has been played since power was first invented. Naming this as an influence scheme clarifies the rules and it clarifies the stakes, and most of all, it clarifies the stench.

Do read the whole thing. Use a “private” window if you hit the paywall.

So the newest Supreme Court scandal involves Sam Alito. This is from ProPublica (by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski):

In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.

Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.

In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.

Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.

Here’s where it gets hinky. ProPublica sent questions to Justice Alito to get his side of the story. ProPublica asked him to respond by Tuesday at noon. Alito did not respond. Instead, he published a hissy fit screen in the Wall Street Journal, headlined ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.

However, Alito’s little fit was published five hours before the ProPublica article was made public. Alito couldn’t have know what the article said, even though he cited it as if he had read it.

Paul Farhi and Robert Barnes write for WaPo,

Alito’s Journal column, bluntly headlined “ProPublica Misleads Its Readers,” was an unusual public venture by a Supreme Court justice into the highly opinionated realm of a newspaper editorial page. And it drew criticism late Tuesday for effectively leaking elements of ProPublica’s still-in-progress journalism — with the assistance of the Journal’s editorial page editors.

An editor’s note at the top of Alito’s column said ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan had sent questions to Alito last week and asked for a response by Tuesday at noon. The editor’s note doesn’t mention that ProPublica hadn’t yet published its story — nor does it mention that Alito did not provide his answers directly to ProPublica.

The WaPo writers continue,

Alito, who wrote the landmark Dobbs decision that struck down federal abortion rights last year, didn’t list the trip on his financial disclosure forms, an omission that some ethics experts say could violate federal law.

The article noted the role of conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo in organizing the Alaska trip, including recruiting Singer to fly Alito to the lodge. The longtime head of the Federalist Society, Leo helped Alito win confirmation to the Supreme Court. Singer and the lodge’s owner were major donors to the Federalist Society.

All very neat and tidy, isn’t it?

The facts not in question are that in 2008 Alito flew to Alaska for a fishing trip in a private jet belonging to billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican donor Paul Singer, buthe  didn’t report the flight as a gift. He then failed to recuse himself—and ruled in Singer’s favor—in a 2014 Supreme Court case called Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital. The case involve one of Singer’s hedge funds. Alito claims that he didn’t make the connection between the hedge fund and Singer, and anyway there was no appearance of impropriety, for reasons.

And he wasn’t required to recuse or disclose and the lodge was “rustic” and not at all luxurious. Even though a room there cost $1,000 a night, Chris Hayes just said on MSNBC. And I liked this part:

As for the flight, Mr. Singer and others had already made arrangements to fly to Alaska when I was invited shortly before the event, and I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant. It was my understanding that this would not impose any extra cost on Mr. Singer. Had I taken commercial flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons to assist me.

In other words, he was doing us all a favor by taking that seat on that private plane for the nice fishing holiday. We should thank him.

Above the Law: Sam Alito Laments It’s Getting So You Can’t Take All-Expense Paid Luxury Vacations Funded By Billionaires Anymore

David Kurtz, TPM, Sam Alito Is A Peevish, Self-Absorbed Piece Of Work

For what it’s worth, I read the ProPublica piece less as an indictment of Alito for failure to report or of the lax ethics rules binding Supreme Court justices and more as a window into the corrupt project to swing the court towards the right:

Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the conservative Federalist Society, attended and helped organize the Alaska fishing vacation. Leo invited Singer to join, according to a person familiar with the trip, and asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet. Leo had recently played an important role in the justice’s confirmation to the court. Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo’s political groups.

What it reads to me as: Leonard Leo was trotting out his newly confirmed show pony Samuel Alito in front of the megadonors who fund the conservative legal movement. No amount of ethics rules and regs will crack the foundational corruption of that effort.

This just plain stinks.

CNBC is reporting that Judge Canon has set the documents trial for August 14. Yes, of this year. “In the order Tuesday, Judge Aileen Cannon told Department of Justice prosecutors and lawyers for Trump to file all pretrial motions by July 24. Cannon also ordered that all hearings in the case, including the trial, will be held in U.S. District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida..”

Other people quoted in the article are doubtful it will really begin that soon, as there are a lot of legal kinks to work out and expectations that motions will be filed..  But I’m hoping that this indicates Canon was chastised enough the last time she was involved in Trump’s documents that she’s not going to pull any tricks on his behalf this time. We’ll see.

Trump’s newest excuse for why he didn’t return the documents was that the boxes contained a lot of other stuff, like his clothes. This is from an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News last night.

“Why not just hand them over then?” he asked.

Trump responded: “I wanted to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out of them. I don’t want to hand that over to [the National Archives and Records Administration] yet. And I was very busy, as you’ve sort of seen.”

The former president said there were “many things” beyond classified documents including “golf shorts, clothing, pants, shoes.” When Baier asked if the boxes contained defense documents, Trump said, “Not that I know of.”

Oh, yeah, the government absolutely will give you unlimited amounts of time to sort through your stuff and to find the national security documents they’ve been after you about for more than a year and a half. Not a problem.

Rolling Stone reported it this way:

“Like every other president I take things out,” Trump said. “In my case, I took it out pretty much in a hurry. People packed it up and left. I had clothing in there, I had all sorts of personal items in there. Much, much stuff.” After a brief digression to call his former attorney general Bill Barr a “coward,” Trump reiterated, “I have got a lot of things in there. I will go through those boxes. I have to go through those boxes. I take out personal things.” Finally, he clarified what those items were: “These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things: golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes, there were many things,” he said. 

He knows the word “interspersed.” I’m surprised. See also Matt Naham at Law & Crime, ‘I don’t want to hand that over to NARA yet’: Trump went on Fox News and essentially confessed to violating the Espionage Act.

He also denied that the secret government document about Iran he was caught talking about on tape was actually a document. Or secret.

According to the transcript, Mr. Trump describes the document, which he claims shows General Milley’s desire to attack Iran, as “secret” and “like, highly confidential.” He also declares that “as president, I could have declassified it,” adding, “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

But in the interview on Monday, with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Mr. Trump denied that he had been referring to an actual document and claimed to have simply been referring to news clippings and magazine pieces.

“There was no document,” Mr. Trump insisted. “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”

He actually was waving around a pair of his old golf shoes when he was caught on tape. There are lots of things in those boxes. And as they say, were you lying then, or are you lying now? Or both?

If this guy isn’t convicted, the U.S. should just admit it’s a failed state.

Today the Washington Post is reporting that the Justice Department really did delay looking into Trump’s involvement in January 6. (No paywall.)

A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.

A USA Today poll shows that support for legal abortion has gone up since the Dobbs decision. This is not surprising. The disturbing stories of what nonsense women have had to endure to get medical care have probably surprised a lot of people. The hard-core forced birth crowd is very certain there is never any medically justifiable reason to terminate a pregnancy, of course. But there are a lot of people out there who probably never gave it much thought before.

One of the things I’ve been working on this weekend is a post about the Temperance movement. There’s very little living memory of it left, of course. If we think of it at all, we think of shrewish old ladies breaking up saloons with axes. But for more than a century, from the 1820s to the 1930s, the Temperance movement was a big deal, and it had a big impact on U.S. politics. And, boy howdy, did it succeed! They set out to abolish liquor, and they got a Constitutional amendment passed that did exactly that.

The more I looked up stuff about the Temperance movement, the more parallels I found with abortion criminalization. There was no scientific polling in those days, unfortunately. But particularly from about the 1890s on, a lot of politicians were afraid to speak out in favor of saloons and legal drinking. It’s a bit like where Democrats were for a long time on abortion; it was considered suicidal to come out and say you wanted to keep abortion legal. It was more politically expedient to be “dry” than “wet.” All deference was given to the “anti” side, because their voters were more likely to be single-issue and driven to the point of fanaticism.

And what killed the Temperance movement, of course, was Prohibition. They got what they wanted, and people realized they didn’t like it. It wasn’t just that people missed being able to enjoy a drink now and then. The organized crime wave that came after was pretty nasty. And state tax revenues dropped like a rock. There was not much of an upside, in fact. Maybe people drank a lot less, but the unintended consequences weren’t worth it.

I thought this was interesting: Prohibition began in 1920. In their 1928 party platforms, both the Democrats and the Republicans pledged to support and enforce the Eighteenth Amendment but did not elaborate. Bur in 1932, the Republicans committed considerable verbiage to Prohibition in the platform. In all this verbiage they didn’t clearly come out and say that maybe it was a bad idea and should be repealed, but they did, very gingerly, suggest that maybe the states could be given more say on the matter of liquor sales.

But the Democrats in 1932 just plainly said “We advocate the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.” They hadn’t had the nerve to say that in 1928. Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide election very effectively killed Prohibition.

As with banning liquor, the Dobbs decision is showing people why criminalizing abortion is a really bad idea with a lot of harmful, unintended consequences. And, once again, the Republicans are on the wrong side of public opinion and history and don’t know what to do about it. You can find all kinds of advice on the Right, such as this article in the Federalist that calls for “positive pro-life messaging.” Yeah, they just need better messaging. That’s the ticket. All this horror about women nearly bleeding to death because their doctors don’t want to go to jail just needs to be framed in a better light, right?

What we’re going through now is nasty, but maybe it will kill the forced birth movement once and for all. Let’s hope.

Also, too: Remember when the Taliban dynamited those ancient standing Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan? Now the Taliban is selling ticket to the rubble. They need the money.

Andrew Weissman made an interesting point on MSNBC last night, that Trump keeps saying things that amount to admissions of guilt. Philip Bump writes,

As he was rolling along in the comments he offered outside his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday evening, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann (and veteran of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe) noticed something.

“Whatever documents the president decides to take with him, he has the right to do so,” Trump said in his speech. “It’s an absolute right. This is the law. And that is something that people have now seen.”

In an interview on MSNBC, Weissmann (who can be trusted to have a firmer grasp on the legal issues at play) pointed out that this undermines his case rather than proving it.

“When you are charged with the illegal retention, the illegal possession of the documents,” Weissmann said, “it is not a good idea to say, ‘Hey, you want to know why I took these? Because I could.’ That is not a defense to that charge. That is an admission to the charge.”

This, of course, is why lawyers tell their clients to keep their mouths shut. But Philip Bump makes the point that Trump’s only defense against the criminal charges is becoming POTUS again. Somehow, dimly, he may know he can’t win in court. He’s swinging for the fences. Bump continues,

This is why he may think it makes sense to frame his arraignment in the context of his campaign, to fundraise off it and to turn the attention it generates into political attention. This is why he might not care too much that the Andrew Weissmanns of the world are able to pick out incriminating details — they’re only incriminating for a competition on which Trump isn’t focusing.

I’m not even going to address why what Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden did with government records is no where in the same ball park as what Trump did. And I trust y’all know that as well as I do. Now he’s got his defenders repeating “Presidential Records Act” over and over, in the belief that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to keep whatever records he wanted. This, of course, is the exact opposite of what the Presidential Records Act actually says.

A separate defense of Mr. Trump’s actions has been offered up by the former president’s lawyers for months, and lately it has been appearing with more frequency in right-wing media: He is not guilty, the argument goes, because of a law called the Presidential Records Act. Congress passed this law in 1978, after the Watergate scandal, specifically to prevent presidents from taking papers that don’t belong to them when they leave the White House. (An earlier law stopped Richard Nixon from destroying his own papers, including the Watergate tapes, after his resignation in 1974. Mr. Nixon challenged the law but lost in the Supreme Court.)

The act says explicitly that the federal government “shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession and control of presidential records.”

And this is how the Trump team interprets the records act: “The president can take whatever he wants when he leaves office,” said Kash Patel, a lawyer who served as a high-ranking national security adviser in the Trump administration. When the president takes a document, he went on, “it transitions from being U.S. government property to the personal, private property of the past president.” This is about as wrong as it is possible to be; it is literally the opposite of what the law says, especially when you are talking about the sort of highly sensitive documents — nuclear secrets, military strategies and so forth — that Mr. Trump is charged with illegally keeping in his possession. I would call it gaslighting, except it’s not creative enough.

“There’s no ambiguity in the law,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and former director of the Nixon Presidential Library. “The 31 documents that are listed — there’s no way you could apply the P.R.A. and determine they were personal records. Under the P.R.A., they belong to the American people. Trump stole American property.”

When dealing with Trump, of course, it’s entirely possible he believes the Presidential Records Act allowed him to take the documents. Trump’s concept of “factual” is a tad wobbly. Between his numerous personality and psychological pathologies and his profound stupidity, it’s hard to know if he knows he’s lying. What Kash Patel’s issues are, however, I do not know.

Right now we may well be in a race to see if Trump can be convicted of something before the 2024 general election. It’s also possible that Trump’s legal problems will erode his election chances. We’ll see.

I’m watching the teevee to see if anything significant happens. It appears there’s not a huge crowd at the Miami courthouse, and they’re milling around waving flags. Trump is in the courthouse getting processed. I take it there are no cameras allowed inside and that reporters in the building are now allowed “devices,” so they can’t communicate.

So what’s going to happen tomorrow? Trump is supposed to report to the federal courthouse in Miami for a 3 pm EST hearing. I am hearing on MSNBC that Judge Aileen M. Cannon will not oversee the hearing. Normally a criminal defendant would be fingerprinted, handcuffed, and photographed before such a hearing, but Trump may get a waiver on that. It’s not clear if Trump will be allowed to speak or asked to enter a plea. After the hearing Trump is expected to fly to New Jersey and delivery remarks from his golf club in Bedminster at 8:15.

Trump faces a lawyer shortage, especially lawyers admitted to the Florida bar and admitted to practice in the Southern District of Florida, There are reports some criminal defense attorneys contacted by Trump’s team have turned the job down already. One suspects they aren’t going to get the crème de la crème of available attorneys.

Trump supporters on social media and elsewhere are vowing war.

Escalating violent rhetoric in online forums, coupled with defiant statements from the former president and his political allies, have put law enforcement officials on alert for potential disruptions ahead of Trump’s court appearance. He is facing a 37-count federal indictment, 31 of which allege he willfully kept classified documents in his possession after leaving the White House. …

… Trump, during a radio interview with longtime adviser Roger Stone on Sunday afternoon, repeated his call for protests. For his part, Stone — who helped mobilize the protest movement that drew thousands to the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, 2021 — encouraged demonstrators to remain peaceful, civil and legal.

But Trump’s supporters have at times alluded to potential violence — including Kari Lake, a Republican from Arizona, who has planned a rally in support of Trump at a hotel in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday night. During a conference of Georgia Republicans on Saturday, Lake suggested Trump’s prosecution could be met with violence, noting that she and other supporters are members of the National Rifle Association.

“The entire Trump phenomenon was, from the very beginning, about conservative fear of losing America.” — Zack Beauchamp, Vox

Now that we’ve had a few hours to digest the documents case indictments — wow, this was worse than I imagined. He had boxes containing highly classified documents stuffed all over Mar-a-Lago, including in publicly accessible bathrooms and ballrooms and whatnot. And Jack Smith has testimony that on some occasions Trump showed this stuff to random people. And he knew good and well he wasn’t supposed to have those documents, or else why go to such lengths to hide them from the National Archives and FBI?

I see that people still on Twitter are linking to a 2022 interview of Kid Rock by Tucker Carlson, in which Kid Rock seems to be saying Trump showed him a classified map of North Korea. Let that sink in.

Trump is a grotesquely warped person. We knew that all along. I’m not terribly surprised any more at anything he does. I believe I’ve said before that he makes more sense if you imagine him to be a spoiled pre-adolescent boy. But what’s frustrating is the rest of the Republican Party and its institutional support structure.

A lot of us are old enough to remember the televised Watergate and Nixon impeachment hearings, in which Republicans for the most part treated the hearings seriously, asked intelligent questions, and made intelligent comments. I don’t remember anyone gaslighting the proceedings to turn it into a clown show to protect Nixon. And we’ve all heard the story about how bleeping Barry Goldwater and other senators told Nixon he’d better just resign. In those days, Republicans knew when it was time to cut somebody loose. Not now. Even now nearly all of the Republican/right wing establishment is pushing the claim that President Biden ordered the indictments to knock Trump out of the 2024 presidential race.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote today, “Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.” Seriously? WSJ continues,

Thirty-one of the counts are for violating the ancient and seldom-enforced Espionage Act for the “willful retention of national defense information.”

But it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.

Did they bleeping even read the indictments? At what point was Trump in any way engaging in “good faith negotiations” with the National Archives? And the thing continues with the usual whataboutism. Joe Biden had classified documents in his garage! Hillary Clinton’s emails!

The editors of the National Review, who were the original Never Trumpers as I recall, at least admit that Trump deserves to be prosecuted. But to get to that part you have to wade through verbiage about how those nefarious lefties have been twisting the law to get to Trump.

Trump fans online are calling for civil war and mass murder. We’ll see if they get off their sofas to actually do anything, though.

What’s the difference between 1974 Republicans and 2023 Republicans? It’s not as if the Republican Party hasn’t gone off the rails before. They famously were the party of Joe McCarthy some years earlier. But even then, when McCarthy was exposed for what he was in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings and Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now program, McCarthy was cut loose. In 1954 he was censured by the Senate in a bipartisan vote. And fortunately for America he didn’t live long enough after that to make a comeback.

At this point, one would have to be genuinely demented to not see that Trump is utterly unfit to be President. But we have a lot of genuinely demented people in this country.

Philip Bump had an interesting comment today —

Last week, CNN reported on the existence of a recording, taped at Donald Trump’s golf club in New Jersey, in which the former president is heard talking to writers working on a book being written by Trump’s last chief of staff. In the recording, Trump made note of a document in his possession that was classified, a significant admission, given the indictment handed up against him this week.

Hours after news of the indictment broke Thursday, CNN published excerpts of the conversation.

Trump never understood the role of the POTUS. He had no interest in the United States and its people, except as things to exploit to glorify and enrich himself. His efforts to hang on to the position after he lost the election have done serious harm to our political institutions. This is obvious. Even the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal ought to be able to understand that. Yet they won’t. Everywhere, the Republican Party and the institutional infrastructure supporting it and their warped version of “conservatism” works to normalize and protect Trump. In a sane world they’d be cutting him loose. In a sane world they would have cut him loose a long time ago.

Awhile back I wrote a post titled The GOP: A Cornered and Wounded Animal. They’re cornered and wounded because they are on the losing end of too many causes. I wrote: “Unfortunately, they’re not going to stop acting like wounded and cornered animals in the near future. They have staked Trump, abortion, and guns as the hills they’re going to die on, and they may very well do that. So to speak.” But lately I’ve seen a lot of callouts to “paranoid style,” which recalls Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” I read it again and noticed this, after a review of Famous Paranoid Episodes of American History (emphasis added):

The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Hofstadter wrote this in bleeping 1964. Just short of 60 years ago. And the right wing has only gotten worse. It’s turned itself into a paranoia machine. Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media infrastructure, along with social media, are perpetually feeding the paranoia so much more effectively than in 1964 or 1974.

But this is truly at the heart of Trumpism and why those who support him can’t see him for what he is. He’s a moron, but he has a grifter’s instinct for giving the people what they want, what he can sell. And he has packaged himself as the last hope of the paranoids; the one who might finally slay the evil Left. It’s going to take more than some chiding words from a Joseph Welch equivalent to bring people to their senses.

Update: A couple of observations. One, from what I can see Trump supporters are either ignoring the indictments or assuming it’s all fake news. Not too surprising.

Two, I’m wondering if Trusty and Rowley, the two lawyers who resigned this morning, decided to resign when they received the text of the subpoena.

Update: Text of indicment here.

Update: The indictments are unsealed. (No paywall.) I don’t think the indictment itself is online yet, but I’ll post a link as soon as it is. I’m hearing the bobbleheads on MSNBC say that it says he did show classified documents to random people. Also,

Update: CNBC is reporting that two Trump lawyers, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, resigned from the documents case today. They aren’t saying why, except that now is a “logical time,” whatever that means. Trusty and Rowley were two of the three attorneys who met with Jack Smith earlier this week. Their joint statement:

“This morning we tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, and we will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the January 6 investigation,” according to the joint statement from Jim Trusty and John Rowley.

Something happened. I’m guessing Trump threw a screaming fit at them, and they decided they didn’t have to take it any more.

^^^

Although the indictments are still sealed, Trump’s attorneys have blabbed a bit. According to Trump Attorney Jim Trusty, these charges are included:

An espionage act violation (18-USC-793) — Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.

Also 18-USC-1519 — Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy.

Also 18-USC-1512 — Witness tampering / obstruction of an official proceeding.

Trusty also said there are “several obstruction-based-type charges and then false statement charges.”

There is speculation there could be additional indictments regarding the documents coming out of the Washington, D.C. grand jury. There could be two separate sets of charges and two separate trials, in other words. I’ll add to this post if I hear anything else.

Update: This is from CNN: Exclusive: Donald Trump admits on tape he didn’t declassify ‘secret information’. We already knew about this particular document, but there’s a new detail.

Former President Donald Trump acknowledged on tape in a 2021 meeting that he had retained “secret” military information that he had not declassified, according to a transcript of the audio recording obtained by CNN.

“As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t,” Trump says, according to the transcript.

CNN obtained the transcript of a portion of the meeting where Trump is discussing a classified Pentagon document about attacking Iran. In the audio recording, which CNN previously reported was obtained by prosecutors, Trump says that he did not declassify the document he’s referencing, according to the transcript.

Update: WTF? ABC is reporting that bleeping Judge Aileen Cannon will oversee the case initially.