Trump has announced he has been indicted in the documents case.

Several Trump advisers confirmed the charges. Trump said he has been summoned to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m. A seven-count indictment has been filed in federal court naming the former president as a criminal defendant, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a case that has yet to be unsealed.

MSNBC has a chryon saying “NBC news confirms Trump Indicment.”

Okay … I know you want it …

We know very little else because the indictment is still sealed.

And Pat Robertson died. A twofer.

So what’s with the merger of the PGA and the LIV? Not that I pay any attention to golf, but I thought they were bitter enemies. I bet golf fans are not going to be happy.

There’s a lot of speculation that Jack Smith will bring indictments this week on the documents case. One complication is that he’s had a Florida grand jury looking at the  case as well, it was revealed in the past several hours. I understand some of Trump’s Secret Service detail have testified.

Trump’s lawyers met with Jack Smith yesterday. I wonder how that went?

So that’s how well Trump’s lawyers’ meeting with the DOJ this morning went pic.twitter.com/02IUuzgWX5

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) June 5, 2023

And then there’s the one about how water from the Mar-a-Lago swimming pool was accidentally drained into the room where the surveillance videos were stored. Sure.

Mark Meadows testified to one of Jack Smith’s grand juries, the New York Times is reporting, but which grand jury and when isn’t clear.

Ron DeSantis’s Florida is still flying migrants to blue states, most recently to California.At least two chartered jets carrying migrants from Florida landed in Sacramento recently. And Gavin Newsom isn’t having it. Newsom is threatening to bring kidnapping charges against DeSantis. From the Los Angeles Times:

Documents carried by the migrants appear to show that the weekend flight was arranged through the Florida Division of Emergency Management and that it was part of the state’s program to relocate migrants, mostly from Texas, to other states, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said.

He doesn’t have enough migrants in Florida so he’s still borrowing them from Texas?

Sixteen migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were transported from Texas to New Mexico and flown on a chartered jet to Sacramento, where they were dropped off Friday at a church, Newsom said.

On Monday, a plane carrying 20 migrants arrived in Sacramento. Both groups were flown by the same contractor and were carrying documents indicating that their transportation involved the state of Florida, according to officials with the California Department of Justice.

Florida’s anti-migrant efforts have had several unintended consequences. Recently Florida passed a law intended to make it harder for undocumented people to remain in Florida without getting caught. Then some Republicans realized that might be a bad idea. 

“This bill is 100 percent supposed to scare you,” said Roth. “I’m a farmer, and the farmers are mad as hell. We are losing employees. They’re already starting to move to Georgia and other states. It’s urgent that you talk to all your people and convince them that you have resources, state representatives, and other people that can explain the bill to you,” he added, essentially begging Florida’s labor force to not leave the state that cares little for them.

Yeah, who’s going to pick the oranges? Whose going to clean all those luxury resort beachfront hotel rooms? The article goes on to say that Farmer Roth is a big-time Trump supporter who also loves Ron DeSantis. But this new bill intended to drive undocumented migrants out of Florida is just to scare people, Roth says. Nobody means it.

The pleading by Republicans who are reaping what they sowed comes after Latin American truck drivers began rallying behind calls to strike and not enter Florida, while thousands of workers and families have marched across the state protesting the bill and threatening to leave the state.

Oh, and remember the flight that was arranged by Florida that took migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vinyard? A Texas sheriff wants to file criminal charges about that.

I agree with Charles Pierce that these little stunts cry out for federal intervention. We really shouldn’t have the governor of one state filing charges against the governor of another state.

I’m in the new place, and I think it will be fine, although right now it’s all boxes and chaos. But now I have wifi! I’m in business!

The most intriguing thing in the news today is that Jack Smith’s documents case grand jury is expected to meet this week after a hiatus. Are they getting close to deciding indictments?

Chuck Todd is leaving Meet the Press. Best comment so far:

I’d ask a follow up question about why Chuck Todd is leaving Meet the Press, but in his honor, I won’t. #ChuckTodd https://t.co/HlmcVnLjEH pic.twitter.com/ErWT1rheuO

— Damon ?????? (@DamonMast) June 4, 2023

He’ll be replaced by Kristen Welker. I don’t recall watching her enough to know if she’ll be an improvement or just another squish.

Speaking of lame journalism, do see the article by Tim Alberta at The Atlantic, Inside the Meltdown at CNN. There’s a paywall, but they let you read a freebie every so often. Then read Nicholas Carlson at Yahoo News, ‘It’s like watching a snuff film’: Media elites shocked by The Atlantic’s surgical dismantling of CNN boss Chris Licht. The Atlantic’s portrayal of Licht was brutal, and it’s being speculated he’ll be replaced soon. From the Yahoo article, my favorite quote it this:

“Let’s get real. The problem isn’t Licht, it’s his paymasters. The American billionaire class has convinced themselves that the way to save journalism is to make it as bland and as both-sidesy as possible. They chose Licht as their latest champion of harmless vanilla inoffensiveness. The problem is, no one wants vanilla. Not even a tasting spoon of it.”

Bland, both-sidesy, harmless vanilla inoffensiveness, thy name also is Chuck Todd. And see also Could Jeff Zucker Fix CNN? He Seems to Think So. (no paywall) at the New York Times. Zucker’s approach wasn’t exactly what journalism needs either, of course.

In other news: There’s also a paywall at The Telegraph that’s keeping me from reading Anglo-Saxons aren’t real, Cambridge tells students in effort to fight ‘nationalism’. And I really wish I could read it, because it has mightily pissed off the crew at Breitbart. They are “erasing the English”! Breitbart says. But I covered all this a couple of years ago in The Truth About Anglo-Saxons. There really were no Anglo-Saxons, exactly. The term “Anglo-Saxon” didn’t become common until long after the Angles and Saxons, who were two separate tribes, had been displaced by the Normans in 1066. And most of the cultural and political attributes we think of as “English” come from the Normans, not the Angles or Saxons.

The Breitbart article only mentions the Normans once:

It comes amid a wider movement in academia to link the historical group of Germanic Angles, Jutes, and Saxon peoples who arrived after the end of Roman controlled Britain and the conquest of the Normans with alleged racism, which many claim has been fostered in America.

I read that about six times. Is it saying that the Germanic Angles and Saxons arrived after the “conquest” of the Normans, who in fact conquered the Angles and Saxons? It may just be sloppy writing, or it may mean that the writer honestly didn’t know the Anglo-Saxons got their asses whupped and lost control of their territory on the island of Britain almost a thousand years ago. They were shupped by Norman invaders from France. And the “Anglo-Saxons” didn’t become romanticized as the epitome of civilized white people until the 1700s, when British imperialists were trying to normalize the colonization of many brown people by their own white selves. And of course the construction “Anglo-Saxon” came to be adopted here across the pond as a synonym for the higher grade of white people who are not Irish, Italian or Polish. This also is a construction that a Swedish friend of mind finds weird; I had to explain it to him.

So now white racists in England are thumping their chests and saying “We English exist”! Yes, and thank the Normans for that. But to the nutjob who complained that denigrating the Anglo-Saxons is like “saying the same thing about, say, Aboriginal Australians, Maoris or Native Americans” — um, the Celts would like a word.

The Big Move is almost upon me. I’ll be taking up residence in my new place on June 1.

I understand the House is going to vote on the debt ceiling deal today. It’s expected to pass, but we’ll see.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report for the New York Times that Jack Smith has subpoenaed some Trump White House aides in regard to the firing of Christopher Krebs (no paywall). You might remember that Krebs was the administration’s cybersecurity expert who judged the 2020 election to have been “the most secure in American history,” which pissed off Trump.

The team led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has been asking witnesses about the events surrounding the firing of Christopher Krebs, who was the Trump administration’s top cybersecurity official during the 2020 election. Mr. Krebs’s assessment that the election was secure was at odds with Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions that it was a “fraud on the American public.”

Mr. Smith’s team is also seeking information about how White House officials, including in the Presidential Personnel Office, approached the Justice Department, which Mr. Trump turned to after his election loss as a way to try to stay in power, people familiar with the questions said.

The investigators appear focused on Mr. Trump’s state of mind around the firing of Mr. Krebs, as well as on establishing a timeline of events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. The latest subpoenas, issued roughly two weeks ago, went to officials in the personnel office, according to the two people familiar with the matter. …

…“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” the statement from Mr. Krebs’s agency read.

Five days later, Mr. Trump tweeted that Mr. Krebs was “terminated” after releasing a “highly inaccurate” statement about the 2020 election.

It gets better.

Within the Presidential Personnel Office, a small group of Trump loyalists, led by Mr. Trump’s former personal aide, John McEntee, were on a mission to find and fire people perceived as disloyal to Mr. Trump within the federal bureaucracy. And they had fingered the outspoken Mr. Krebs, who had been appointed by Mr. Trump himself, as among the ranks of the disloyal.

Staff members within the personnel office had drafted a document about Mr. Krebs that outlined reasons to distrust him. The memo, first reported by Jonathan Karl of ABC News, detailed a litany of Mr. Krebs’s alleged sins against Mr. Trump, including: “Wife posted a family photo on Facebook with the ‘Biden Harris’ logo watermarked at the bottom.”

Jack Smith is also looking into personnel interactions between the White House and the Justice Department during the time Trump was grasping at anything to overturn the election result.

There’s a deal. It’s not great. It could be worse. Here are the major provisions. At least it gives us a two-year reprieve from going through this again. And the House Knucklehead Caucus hates it. That’s some comfort.

The Texas House has impeached Texas AG Ken Paxton. You’ll remember Paxton for his lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election, his tireless efforts to keep Texas women barefoot and pregnant, and his many creative excuses for why firearm regulations “don’t work.” So it’s astonishing to me that the Republican Texas House is turning on him. The Texas Tribune explains,

Paxton had faced few political consequences for years for his many public scandals. Allegations against him included taking bribes from a real estate investor, trying to protect that same investor from legal action, abusing the powers of the office and firing staff members who reported his misconduct.

But after Paxton’s office asked lawmakers to use taxpayer dollars to pay a $3.3 million settlement to the whistleblowing staffers, the scandals proved too much for the Donald Trump-backed attorney general to shake off.

“No one person should be above the law — least not the top law enforcement officer of the state of Texas,” state Rep. David Spiller, R-Jacksboro, a member of the House Committee on General Investigating, told his House colleagues on Saturday.

“We should not ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen,” he said. “Texas is better than that.”

The impeachment charges centered on Paxton’s entanglement with Nate Paul, an Austin real estate investor whose relationship with Paxton as a friend and political donor had caused several of his staff members to report him to federal authorities and prompted an FBI investigation — which Paxton allegedly refused to help law enforcement with. Paul was fined more than $180,000 and ordered to serve jail time by a state judge after he was found in contempt of court earlier this year.

“All roads lead to Nate Paul,” state Rep. Ann Johnson, a Houston Democrat and vice chair of the investigating committee, told the chamber before outlining Paxton’s yearslong relationship with his friend.

Members of the House committee that investigated Paxton said they believed he broke the law by using the agency to serve the interests of Paul, from whom he allegedly took bribes — including when the real estate developer was sued for fraud.

Now the Texas Republicans are bringing up earlier bribery incidents that had escaped their notice, in spite of their being public knowledge. For example,

And then there was the divinely-inspired donation at a local Dairy Queen.

While Paxton was serving in the Texas Legislature as a state representative a decade ago, he became affiliated with the CEO of Servergy, a McKinney-based software company that courted him as a partner. William Mapp, the firm’s founder and former CEO, had donated to Paxton’s campaign and the two decided to go into business together.

At a Dairy Queen, the CEO reportedly said that “God had directed him” to give Paxton 100,000 shares of company stock, which Paxton argued shows the stock was a gift.

“However, documents … indicate that the stock was, again, for services,” the House Committee’s report said.

The Servergy relationship became the subject of a felony securities fraud indictment in 2015 that accused Paxton of recruiting investors without disclosing his own investment in the company or attempting to confirm the company’s claims about its technology.

According to the SEC, he persuaded five people to invest $840,000 into the company. The case is still ongoing.

So asking for tax dollars to clean up one of his messes was the bridge too far. Another interesting complication is that Paxton’s wife serves in the Texas Senate and hasn’t said whether she will recuse herself. Note that one of the charges against Nate Paul is that he allegedly gave a job to a woman with whom Paxton was having an affair.

Pass the popcorn.

Update: See How Ken Paxton Went From Teflon Ken To Being Impeached By His Own Party at TPM.

There’s an excellent must-read piece by Philip Bump at WaPo that summarizes everything we know so far about Trump’s hoarding of government documents. No paywall. Here is just a bit.

On Thursday, The Washington Post teased out another aspect of this complicated situation. According to people familiar with the investigation, the government has evidence that Trump’s team practiced moving documents he took from the White House — the implication being that they rehearsed hiding them. Then, shortly before inviting the Justice Department to come pick up a cache of documents, the Trump employees apparently put that practice to use.

This has been the subtext to the investigation from the outset: Trump had things he wanted to keep despite not being authorized to do so. The timeline of events, delineated below, reinforces that idea.

I’m frantically boxing stuff up and preparing to move it to New York. But I had to say something about the Elon Musk-Ron DeSantis disaster yesterday. How big a mess is Twitter now if even The Boss can’t count on a glitch-free event? And I’m hearing the audience wasn’t exceptionally large. This made Ron look bad, but IMO it’s worse for Elon.

Today the Supreme Court put limits on the EPA’s power to regulate wetlands. SCOTUS really isn’t so much a court any more. It’s more like a House of Lords that makes sure the wealthy and monied get the last word.

There is all kinds of reporting that Jack Smith is wrapping up the Mar a Lago documents investigation and will be bringing indictments soon. This is why Trump’s “lawyers” tried to get a meeting with Merrick Garland, which they won’t get.

Texas AG Ken Paxton is in a lot of trouble.

It looks like the debt ceiling impass will go down to the wire. Will Biden invoke the 14th Amendment? One day he says he won’t, the next day he says he’s thinking about it.

Matt Egan at CNN reports that the Wall Street people aren’t worried about default.

Debt ceiling-inspired selloffs have been almost nonexistent. The Nasdaq is still up by a staggering 22% on the year. And CNN’s Fear and Greed Index of market sentiment is nearing “extreme greed” mode.

Perhaps this indifference is because investors have seen this drama before. They know how it ends: with politicians waiting until the last minute before giving in and finally raising the debt ceiling before disaster strikes.

Maybe it’s going to take a stock market plunge to get the tycoons up in arms about it, Egan speculates. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

To complicate matters, Trump has been urging House Republicans to not give an inch. Obviously he wants to destroy the economy so that he can blame Joe Biden and be POTUS again. Any Republican who allows the debt ceiling to rise is going to get slimed by the MAGAs. Although given the results of recent elections, that might not be a bad thing for a candidate.

Ezra Klein, whose opinion I respect, says the 14th Amendment plan won’t work. But Robert Reich, writing in The Guardian, says just go for it already. He recalls that in 1985 Congress agreed to raise the debt ceiling only after the Reagan Administration had started to raid the Social Security fund to pay debts. (I did not know this.) And then Reich points out that the crazies running the House aren’t bending at all.

Which is why it’s critical for Biden to continue paying the government’s bills and for the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, to continue using every bookkeeping scheme imaginable to find the means to pay those bills.

They must never declare an “X-date”, and never default.

If Kevin McCarthy and his band of radicals don’t like this, let them take the Biden administration to court.

Let House Republicans argue in the courts that the 1917 act establishing the debt ceiling has precedence over section 4 of the 14th amendment, which requires that the “the validity of the public debt …. shall not be questioned.”

I’m with Reich on this one. But if the 14th is invoked Janet Yellen had better be prepared to borrow money asap before Clarence Thomas and the boys of SCOTUS try to stop her.

Republicans walked out of debt ceiling talks this morning, saying the White House isn’t being “reasonable.” I am hoping the White House is seriously considering some 14th Amendment option to just ignore Congress and give Treasury a go-ahead to borrow money as needed to pay debts. Don’t wait for a court ruling; just do it.

Do watch this segment from The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell from last night. He goes on a bit long at the beginning, so if you want to skip the first four or five minutes that’s okay. Just be sure to watch it to the end.

Gym Jordan is running his “protect Donald Trump from facing the law” committee like the petty, pissant tyrant that he is, ignoring House rules and making up his own rules as he goes along. He is trying to freeze Democrats on his committee out of participating in it, obviously. See also Steve Benen, Jim Jordan is inadvertently discrediting his own case against the FBI and Jim Jordan Freaks Out When Dem Confronts Him With House Rules by Justin Baragona at Daily Beast.

Part of Jordan’s problem is that his “whistleblowers” don’t meet the legal definition of whistleblower. He seems to think he can just designate somebody as a “whisleblower” as needed. His FBI “whistleblowers” are ex-employees who were terminated for various misconducts. Nikki Ramirez writes in Rolling Stone,

REP. JIM JORDAN (R-Ohio) claims he has testimony from “dozens” of whistleblowers who’ve provided him with proof that the FBI is unfairly persecuting conservatives. This doesn’t actually seem to be the case.

The first three of these witnesses whose testimony Jordan received were not really “whistleblowers,” but disaffected former FBI employees receiving financial backing from former President Trump’s ally and advisor Kash Patel. None of them have been given whistleblower protection status by the Department of Justice. 

Jordan held a hearing of the Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday that featured two of these witnesses. During the hearing, Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.) confronted suspended FBI agent Garret O’Boyle and former agent Steve Friend as to whether they had received payments from Patel. Both admitted they had. …

… Friend was suspended by the FBI after refusing to participate in cases related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He was also one of three agents who had their security clearances revoked by the FBI, in his case for having “espoused an alternative narrative about the events at the U.S. Capitol” and downloading documents to “an unauthorized removable flash drive.” 

During questioning, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D- Va.) displayed tweets from the witnesses espousing conspiracy theories about the Capitol riot, including that undercover federal agents had been responsible for the attack. 

So yeah, it’s a mess.

This afternoon Bob Iger of Disney announced the company is scrapping a plan to build a $1 billion office complex in Orlando, “costing the state more than 2,000 six-figure jobs,” it says here. One suspects Florida needs Disney more than Disney needs Florida.

More information has come out on Diane Feinstein’s recent medical issues. It wasn’t just shingles. I realize she’s being kept in her position for procedural reasons, but this points to just one more way Senate rules need to be changed. Keeping her in the Senate is bordering on grotesque.

Speaking of grotesque, Josh Hawley’s “manhood” book is out, and the reviews are brutal. I especially like Lloyd Green at The Guardian, Robin Abcarian at the Los Angeles Times, and Rebecca Onion at Slate.