The Washington Post is reporting that the Mar-a-Lago classified documents held secrets about Iran and China.

I can’t even look at election news any more. It’s all doom and gloom. The fact that the Republican party can talk openly about cutting Social Security and Medicare without fear of punishment at the polls is astonishing. That a Nazi like Doug Mastriano is in Pennsylvania spouting blatant anti-Semitism as the Republican nominee for governor is astonishing. That the rummage pile of damage that is “Herschel Walker” might possibly defeat the Rev. Raphael Warnock is astonishing. I’m not sure there’s any coming back from this. We don’t have a country any more. What used to be the United States just a big dysfunctional socio-cultural-political garbage heap.

Yesterday the Fifth Circuit, “America’s Trumpiest Court,” declared that the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional. The court’s reasoning is already being called “novel.” It used to be that courts were there to save us from the idiocy of politicians. Now there’s no one to save us from the idiocy of courts.

On that cheerful note … it’s looking more and more likely that Trump is going to face criminal charges for something, eventually. You probably heard about this yesterday —

Former President Donald J. Trump signed a document swearing under oath that information in a Georgia lawsuit he filed challenging the results of the 2020 election was true even though his own lawyers had told him it was false, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday.

The accusation came in a ruling by the judge, David O. Carter, ordering John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who strategized with the former president about overturning the election, to hand over 33 more emails to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Judge Carter, who serves with the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, determined that the emails contained possible evidence of criminal behavior.

“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Judge Carter wrote. He added in a footnote that the suit contained language saying Mr. Trump was relying on information provided to him by others.

I understand these emails will be made public eventually.  And then this week Trump was deposed in the E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit. What he said in the deposition has not been made public. But it’s interesting to note that Trump’s original defense was that whatever defaming thing he said about Ms. Carroll was said while he was President and acting in the capacity of POTUS. Even if judges agree with that, which is questionable, the moron repeated the same statements that inspired the lawsuit on his social media platform. And he wasn’t acting as POTUS then.

After Judge Kaplan denied Mr. Trump’s request to delay, Mr. Trump blasted Ms. Carroll in a lengthy social media post, repeating the kind of statements that had prompted her to sue in the first place.

“This ‘Ms. Bergdorf Goodman’ case is a complete con job,” Mr. Trump said in his statement. He said that Ms. Carroll was not telling the truth, that he did not know her — and that she was not his type: “While I am not supposed to say it, I will.”

That was before he was deposed. After he was deposed he “shared videos on Truth Social calling E Jean Carroll ‘crazy’ and mocking her rape claims against him just hours after he was deposed in her defamation case against him.” So if she didn’t have a strong enough case against him before, she’s got a stronger one now.

Also, Trump’s fundraising isn’t going so well. Bloomberg reports that he’s spent 91 cents to raise each dollar.  Of course, that there are still people willing to donate to Trump is kind of astonishing.

In other court news, today Lindsey Graham lost another appeal to block the subpoena from the Fulton County Grand Jury.

This just in — the SCOTUS rejected a request to block implementation of the Biden administration’s student debt relief program.

I believe this is the most recent development in the Mar-a-Lago documents case —

 An excerpt from a new audiobook revealed that President Donald J. Trump shared classified letters from Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, with the journalist Bob Woodward and seemed to acknowledge that they were sensitive material that he should not be sharing.

“Don’t say I gave them to you,” Mr. Trump said in December 2019, according to a copy of Mr. Woodward’s audiobook obtained by CNN, adding that “nobody else” had the letters and imploring the journalist to “treat them with respect.”

The Washington Post reported that a month later, in January 2020, Mr. Woodward also asked to see letters that Mr. Trump had written to the North Korean leader. Mr. Trump replied, “Oh, those are so top secret.”

The original letters between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump were among the voluminous number of presidential records that the National Archives tried to recover from Mr. Trump after he left office. Mr. Trump resisted returning the boxes of documents he had taken to his Florida estate, describing them to several advisers as “mine.”

I’m sure there’s something I’m forgetting. Too much going on.

That faint whimper you may hear is the end of the much overhyped Durham Investigation that was supposed to reveal how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the Deep State and the Democrats all colluded to pick on poor Donald Trump and level false charges against him about his collusion with Russia.

A little over a month ago we learned that Durham’s grand jury’s time was up, and he wasn’t calling another one.

As of November 2021 Durham had issued single-count indictments against two Americans for making a false statement, and a five-count false statement indictment against a Russian national. One of the Americans was acquitted at trial; the other, an FBI lawyer, entered into a plea agreement with no jail time for doctoring an email used in preparation for a wiretap renewal application.

The Russian national, Igor Danchenko, goes on trial next month. The Right is feverishly looking forward to the Danchenko testimony that will discredit the evil Steele Dossier. The problem, of course, is that (one) the Steele Dossier has already been pretty much discredited; (two) the Steele Dossier wasn’t nearly as big a part of the evidence against Trump that the Right claims it to be. In fact, when the FBI began its investigation it didn’t yet know the dossier existed.

Well, folks, today Igor Danchenko was acquitted of all charges. And that’s the end of the Durham investigation.

Durham tried to prove that Danchenko had lied about the dossier, and those lies led to an FBI wiretap of a Trump adviser. But the jury decided otherwise.

Mr. Trump and his supporters have falsely sought to conflate the dossier with the official investigation into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia, but the F.B.I. did not open the inquiry based on the dossier and the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, did not cite anything in it as evidence. …

,,, Mr. Steele hired Mr. Danchenko to canvass contacts in Russia and Europe about Mr. Trump’s business dealings in Russia.

Mr. Danchenko conveyed rumors that Mr. Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia, and that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes in a hotel room in Moscow. But during an interview with the F.B.I., Mr. Danchenko said that he had first seen the dossier when BuzzFeed published it and that Mr. Steele had exaggerated his statements, portraying uncorroborated gossip as fact.

So that’s that.

The Washington Post is reporting that Russian men are being grabbed off the street and enlisted into the military.

Police and military officers swooped down on a Moscow business center this past week unannounced. They were looking for men to fight in Ukraine — and they seized nearly every one they saw. Some musicians, rehearsing. A courier there to deliver a parcel. A man from a Moscow service agency, very drunk, in his mid-50s, with a walking disability.

“I have no idea why they took him,” said Alexei, who, like dozens of others in the office complex, was rounded up and taken to the nearest military enlistment office, part of a harsh new phase in the Russian drive.

In cities and towns across Russia, men of fighting age are going into hiding to avoid the officials who are seizing them and sending them to fight in Ukraine.

What is probably the series finale of the J6 Hearings ended with a bang, with the committee members voting to subpoena Trump. He’ll probably wriggle out of it somehow, but it still was clever plot twist.

While the hearings were going on, the Supreme Court dropped an unsigned, one-sentence order that it would not reinstate Judge Loose Cannon’s order that the special master review the classified documents.

In other news, we learned that Trump formed a new company in Delaware, called Trump Organization II. Now New York AG Letitia James is asking a judge to restrict Trump’s business activities while her office sues him for allegedly committing decades worth of fraud. As I understand it, she believes Trump planned to move all his assets to the new company to put them out of her reach.

In more other news, a federal judge has denied a request by former president Donald Trump to pause proceedings in a defamation case against him brought by former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. Trump had won a temporary pause from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which sent the case to the appeals court in D.C. to determine whether Trump was a federal employee as defined by the law when he publicly rebutted Carroll’s story that he had raped her years ago. Trump is scheduled to be deposed in a few days, and it looks like he can’t get out of that.

All this stuff has happened within the past 24 hours. Headline at Alternet: ‘Furious’ Donald Trump ‘raging the last few days’ as legal woes pile up.

Donald Trump is “furious” and has been “raging the last few days” over three of the numerous legal cases he is facing.

According to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, the former president’s rage is over the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s classified documents case, the defamation case against him by journalist E. Jean Carroll who alleges he raped her, and a so-called “pyramid scheme” which he and some of his family members were involved in. He is being sued for fraud in that case, and was forced to give a deposition in it last week.

Here’s a link to a story about the pyramid scheme.

On Wednesday a federal judge said Trump should not be allowed to delay the E. Jean Carroll defamation case and ordered him to give a deposition next week, refusing his request for a delay.

“Trump put out a statement yesterday excoriating E. Jean Carroll, who is suing him for defamation after she accused him of rape decades earlier.” … In his rant Wednesday night some legal experts say he established further evidence for Carroll’s defamation case. He had argued his comments were protected because he made them while being president. While that argument is in question, he now is no longer president.

Way to go, champ.

J6 Hearing today! I’m planning to spend the afternoon watching the teevee. Please do add any comments about the hearings to this post.

While Alex Jones was setting new standards for being an asshole, a Connecticut jury awarded some Sandy Hook parents nearly a billion dollars. And that’s just compensatory damages; I understand there may be more punitive damages. Jones’s previous penalty was from a court in Texas. Texas tort laws have been written to protect defendants and make it hard for the damaged plaintiff to get relief. This includes very strict limits on awarded damages, so whatever Jones was penalized in Texas will be whittled down considerably. But that’s Texas. Connecticut is different. The bobbleheads on MSNBC last night doubted an appeals court would lower the penalty, especially given Jones’s behavior through the trials. Jones might possibly get some accommodation in bankruptcy court someday, it says here, but we’ll see. It’s likely Jones will spend the rest of his sorry-ass life getting money wrung out of him by those Connecticut plaintiffs.

And yesterday we learned the feds have hard evidence — surveillance videos and witness testimony — that Trump had a lot of the stolen government documents he was hoarding moved after he’d been subpoenaed. This is obstruction on its face. See Aaron Blake, Trump’s fast-growing obstruction of justice problem, and Quinta Jurecic at Lawfare, Trump’s Obstruction of Justice, From Mueller to Now.

I’m saying John Fetterman can do the job in the Senate. I never met the man, but he was on television a bit last night and was holding his own. His one lingering problem, which he is very open about, is that his brain has trouble processing what people tell him. So he uses a close-caption machine that captions other peoples’ speech, and he reads what they’re saying to him, and responds.

That may sound a bit weird, but after having had a TIA (transient ischemic attack) last spring I can kind of appreciate what Fetterman is going through. We both had blood clots in our brains. Mine broke up after about 40 minutes, give or take, and then I was okay. But during those 40 minutes my brain was not processing sensory input the way it usually did. Things didn’t look right. It wasn’t that my vision was blurry. I could see things, but they didn’t look familiar. At one point I was trying to find my phone so I could call 911, and I knew exactly where the phone was because it was being charged. I had it plugged into the same power strip my laptop was plugged into. But when I tried to find it I couldn’t recognize it. I was lucky I could find a land line phone and could dial 911.

Modern neuroscientists explain that the thing around us we call “reality” is really a kind of collaboration between external stimuli and our nervous systems. Stimuli enter through our eyes and ears, but it’s our brains that create the experience of sight and sound. This is how our brains evolved to navigate the world. Our brains are creating colors and depth perception and the way things sound. So if some neurons somewhere start misfiring, the brain can’t replicate reality the way it did before. This is basically how psychedelic drugs work also.

In Fetterman’s case, his auditory processing problem doesn’t mean he can’t think and reason as he did before. It’s interesting to me that he can understand what he reads even if he can’t understand the same thing spoken to him. But he has a work-around for this, and the problem may correct itself eventually.

Do read The Vulnerability of John Fetterman by Rebecca Traister at New York Magazine. She has been covering his campaign and has seen big improvements in his functionality.

As summer turned to fall, Fetterman returned to the trail in person, powering through his convalescence at rallies and via television and newspaper interviews, his physical condition visibly improving. “Standing up in front of 3,000 people and having to talk without a teleprompter or anything? That is the most pure example of transparency there is,” he told me. …

… Tucker Carlson said that Fetterman is “brain damaged” and “can barely speak,” and has joked about his “stupid little fake tattoos,” comparing him to a “barista in Brooklyn dressing like a lumberjack.”

Do you want to talk brain damaged? Herschel Walker almost certainly has some degree of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Nearly all men who have played professional football do, it says here. I’ve seen no discussion of that anywhere, in spite of the obvious fact that Walker is dumb as a sock. Yet yesterday Charlie Cooke wrote at National Review that “Like it or not, voters are going to discuss Fetterman’s condition, and trying to browbeat them into silence won’t work.” I am not seeing anybody being browbeaten into silence about John Fetterman’s condition. What the bleep are these people going on about?

Recovering from a stroke takes some time, and Fetterman has had to do it while running for Senate. How many people could stand up to that?

See also Senators Who Have Had Strokes Say John Fetterman Can Do The Job.

John Fetterman’s gradual recovery from a stroke has become a Republican attack point in the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race, but two senators who recently suffered strokes said Fetterman’s health shouldn’t be an issue.

Like Fetterman, Sens. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) had strokes this year, but both returned to work and have been doing their jobs. They said Fetterman would be able to do the job, too.

“We’re walking around, we’re having conversations, we’re talking to people, we’re engaged,” Lujan told HuffPost on Wednesday. “Cognitive ability is strong. And so I’m confident of the work that John Fetterman will do when he’s elected U.S. senator.”

Strokes are caused by a lot of different things, and I am not a physician. Fetterman’s doctors have said they believe he will make a full recovery, and I see no reason to doubt that.

Yesterday I linked to a column by Aaron Blake, Trump’s nonsensical riff on past presidents and classified documents at the Washington Post. But what I was too slow to put together is that the nonsensical riff amounted to a confession that he took the government documents and kept them on purpose.

Seth Meyers picked up on it, too.

See also:

On Monday’s edition of CNN’s “The Situation Room,” legal analyst Elliot Williams broke down the controversial argument Trump made at his Mesa, Arizona rally in defense of hoarding classified documents at his Florida country club — an argument his legal team has so far declined to make when under oath in court.

“I had a small number of boxes in storage at Mar-a-Lago guarded by Secret Service and my people and everybody,” said Trump in the clip played on CNN. “I mean, it’s safe. There is no crime, there is no crime. It’s not a crime. And they should give me immediately back everything that they’ve taken from me because it’s mine, it’s mine.”

“So when you listen to that, does it make the attempt to blame that government agency look even more absurd?” asked anchor Wolf Blitzer.

“It does,” said Williams. “That is what prosecutors would call a confession for a crime, and the mere fact that you think it’s not a crime doesn’t change that fact. Look, Wolf, I can burn your house down and if I burn your house down and say, you know what, I didn’t commit arson, I was just playing with fire at Wolf’s house, it’s still an act of arson. Whatever, we don’t even need to explain that point.”

Andrew Weissman called Trump’s words at the rallies a “summation exhibit.”

This is what we call a summation exhibit.
Proof from the defendant’s own mouth. And on video. https://t.co/896a89GJdj

— Andrew Weissmann ? (@AWeissmann_) October 10, 2022

Aaron Blake explained the “socks decision” Trump keeps talking about, which was about some recordings of President Clinton’s.

The recordings weren’t kept in Clinton’s sock but rather in his sock drawer (as Trump later correctly said)

More important: Clinton didn’t leave the White House with the recordings; they were stored in a sock drawer in the White House during Clinton’s tenure.

And they weren’t classified; they were tapes of conversations Clinton had with an author who was working on the president’s oral history.

A court decided that Clinton could keep the recordings, but of course the facts of this case in no way resemble what Trump did.

And Aaron Blake explained the bowling alley/Chinese restaurant that received papers of G.H.W. Bush.

So on Friday Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb told the Justice Department that the reason she certified back in June that she knew for a fact all the sensitive government documents at Mar-a-Lago had been returned, when they hadn’t … is that another lawyer told her to do it.

The other lawyer was Evan Corcoran, Bobb says. It was Corcoran who drafted the certification, she says. And she was not bright enough to insist that if he thought the certification was accurate, why didn’t he sign the bleeping thing? Live and learn.

Rolling Stone:

The news that Bobb is dishing to the feds, reported initially by NBC News, comes just over two months after the FBI searched Trump’s Palm Beach estate, where they found scores of sensitive, classified documents. This means Bobb’s statement was false, of course. She claims it’s not her fault, though, reportedly telling investigators that one of Trump’s other lawyers, Evan Corcoran, told her to sign it.

NBC News adds that Bobb insisted a disclaimer be added to the letter that it was based on “information that has been provided to me.” The person who provided said information, she told investigators, was Corcoran. “She had to insist on that disclaimer twice before she signed it,” a source told the outlet. “She is not criminally liable. She is not going to be charged. She is not pointing fingers. She is simply a witness for the truth.”

How noble. Just for fun, let’s look at what Marcy Wheeler wrote back on September 4:

There’s something weird about the argument that Trump’s lawyers — each time with the participation of Evan Corcoran — are making about the search of Mar-a-Lago. What they claim they’re up to is all over the map, and has evolved (for example, their first filing focused on Executive Privilege, but in last week’s hearing, Judge Aileen Cannon had to remind Trump lawyer Jim Trusty that’s what he was supposed to be arguing).

But their true goal, it seems, is to learn enough about what was taken so they can attempt to claw back certain materials that would incriminate Trump for reasons other than the sheafs of highly classified information that were stored in an insecure storage closet. It’s a two step process: Learn what was taken, so they can then argue that its seizure was a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment under what’s called a Rule 41(g) motion.

And to that end, the first filing argued that they need a more detailed inventory, describing what was seized and from where, so Donald Trump can make a Rule 41 motion claiming it was improperly seized.

They’re all kind of making it up as they go along, I suspect.

In related news — Yesterday Trump had a rally in which he claimed that all the other presidents took classified documents, too, except they didn’t. See Aaron Blake, Trump’s nonsensical riff on past presidents and classified documents at the Washington Post.

I was only sort of following the Herschel Walker meltdown this week. I’ve also started to read the Maggie Haberman book on Trump, Confidence Man. All I can say about it right now is that it’s very long and describes Trump’s entire life, starting when he was a bratty toddler. (I should say “when he was a child”; he’s still a bratty toddler, of course.) Right now I’m still in the 1980s.

But one thing I did not realize until I stumbled across it last night was that Trump knew Herschel Walker in the 1980s. Walker played for the New Jersey Generals U.S. Football League team when Trump owned it, ca. 1983. Some of you may have remembered that, but I am very sure I paid no attention whatsoever to Donald Trump and the U.S. Football League back then. According to Trump’s own account of several years ago, Walker used to call Trump if he didn’t think the coaches were playing him enough, and so Trump would override his coaches.

When Walker decided to run for the Senate seat in Georgia he’d been living in Texas for a decade. Did he call Trump and ask him for help in getting a Senate nomination in Georgia? Did Trump ask him to run? It just seems so random that Walker would suddenly decide to run for the U.S. Senate at this point in his life.

See also GOP crisis in Herschel Walker race was nearly two years in the making in the Washington Post. The GOP could have stopped him from being the nominee if it had tried. Much of his history of domestic abuse was in the public record, not to mention the fact that he hadn’t actually lived in Georgia for a very long time. But they gave him a pass.