From Politico:

It would have been easy to write Nebraska off as a fluke, after Democrats ran better than expected in a House race there last month. But then came Minnesota, where Democrats again beat expectations. And then, in New York on Tuesday, the dam broke.

“Well, shit,” one Republican strategist texted late Tuesday, as results from a Hudson Valley special election filtered in.

It would have been a victory for Democrats if they’d even kept it close. Instead, Democrat Pat Ryan beat Republican Marc Molinaro in a district that Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020, but that would have appeared to favor Republicans in a normal midterm climate.

This race was considered a bellweather. Ryan’s television ads promoted his support for abortion rights, while Molinaro ran on inflation and crime (for the record, he’s against them). Abortion rights won.

And, may I add, any day that both Carl Paladino and Laura Loomer lose elections is a pretty good day.

“It can be tempting to read too much into special elections,” the Politico piece continues. And the Hudson Valley is not the Midwest. But since the end of Roe, “it’s been nothing but one sign after another that Democrats — while still widely expected to lose the House in November — might not be in for the all-out drubbing once predicted.”

Nathaniel Rakich at FiveThirtyEight writes that Yes, Special Elections Really Are Signaling A Better-Than-Expected Midterm For Democrats. There’s still time for that to change before the November midterms, of course, but there’s no question that the political landscape has shifted in Dems’ favor since Sam Alito’s Dobbs decision was handed down.

If something happens to cause gas and food prices to go up again, things could change. But it’s also the case that Trumpworld may be at the beginning of a meltdown.

Immediately after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, the MAGA faithful and their Republican fellow travelers rallied to Trump’s cause of perpetual outrage and bottomless grievance. But Trump and his immediate circle appear to be having a hard time keeping it together. How could any of them thought that releasing the National Archives letter was a good idea, for example? And the so-called lawyers working for him now can’t manage to fill out basic legal paperwork correctly.

Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer write for the New York Times,

The National Archive letter debacle appears to be an example of Trump seeking a public relations victory while making a huge legal misstep. He, or somebody, was so eager to prove that President Biden was behind the FBI raid (and the National Archive letter didn’t say he was) that he failed to notice the letter made Trump’s hoarding of classified documents look much more serious. This was a boneheaded move, made by a guy who is no longer sitting in the Oval Office where he was surrounded by at least some smart advisers.

And at this point Trump isn’t about to get any smarter. He may yet avoid criminal indictments, but if he does it won’t be because he’s so good at 12-dimensional chess.

Update: We’re getting some clues of one possible reason Trump was hanging on to classified documents. He thought they were cool stuff he wanted to put in his presidential library. From the Wall Street Journal:

The former president asserted early on, in a monthslong back-and-forth with National Archives officials seeking to recover the material, that it was his property and destined for his presidential library, said a person familiar with the matter.

“He has said, ‘People put this stuff in their library. How can they put it in their library if it has to go back to the Archives? I don’t understand why I can’t have these things,’ ” the person recalled. Mr. Trump has said he declassified all the material.

Over the last several hours we’ve seen more evidence that Trumpers and “normies” do not live in the same reality.

The weirdest thing is that Trump, or someone working for Trump, released a letter from the National Archives to Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran, dated May 10, 2022, regarding the ongoing issue of Trump’s hanging on to classified documents. The letter was published on a right-wing site. Trumpers seem to think this letter is good for Trump’s side of the argument.

It is not.

For example, the righties are claiming the letter “proves” the White House facilitated the DOJ proble into the missing documents and quashed Trump’s rightful executive privilege. In fact, what the letter says is that White House counsel was informed of what was going on, but that the White House deferred to the judgment of the National Archive person who wrote the letter, Debra Steidel Wall, and is staying out of it. And then Wall clearly explains why Trump cannot legally claim executive privilege to keep the files. He just can’t. Wall wrote,

It is not necessary that I decide whether there might be any circumstances in which a former President could successfully assert a claim of executive privilege to prevent an Executive Branch agency from having access to Presidential records for the performance of valid executive functions. The question in this case is not a close one. The Executive Branch here is seeking access to records belonging to, and in the custody of, the Federal Government itself, not only in order to investigate whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner but also, as the National Security Division explained, to “conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported and take any necessary remedial steps.” These reviews will be conducted by current government personnel who, like the archival officials in Nixon v. GSA, are “sensitive to executive concerns.” Id. at 451. And on the other side of the balance, there is no reason to believe such reviews could “adversely affect the ability of future Presidents to obtain the candid advice necessary for effective decisionmaking.” Id. at 450. To the contrary: Ensuring that classified information is appropriately protected, and taking any necessary remedial action if it was not, are steps essential to preserving the ability of future Presidents to “receive the full and frank submissions of facts and opinions upon which effective discharge of [their] duties depends.” Id. at 449.

Because an assertion of executive privilege against the incumbent President under these circumstances would not be viable, it follows that there is no basis for the former President to make a “protective assertion of executive privilege,” which the Assistant Attorney General informs me has never been made outside the context of a congressional demand for information from the Executive Branch. Even assuming for the sake of argument that a former President may under some circumstances make such a “protective assertion of executive privilege” to preclude the Archivist from complying with a disclosure otherwise prescribed by 44 U.S.C. § 2205(2), there is no predicate for such a “protective” assertion here, where there is no realistic basis that the requested delay would result in a viable assertion of executive privilege against the incumbent President that would prevent disclosure of records for the purposes of the reviews described above. Accordingly, the only end that would be served by upholding the “protective” assertion here would be to delay those very important reviews.

Among other considerations, even if these documents safely remained in Trump’s basement and no foreign agent or drunk wedding guest or disgruntled employee or Kash Patel got past the padlock to take some of them, if they’re in Trump’s basement they are not available to current government officials who might need to know what’s in them. Duh.

Seriously, there is no valid argument that Trump had any right to hang on to the documents. And the feds aren’t sure they have them all even now.

Yesterday Trump filed a lawsuit asking that the Department of Justice cease reviewing the documents and instead appoint a special master to decide if they fall within the scope of the FBI’s search warrant. And any documents that don’t should be returned to Trump.

From Salon:

The lawsuit argues that the raid was politically motivated, claiming that Trump is the “clear frontrunner” in the 2024 election “should he decide to run.” The lawsuit accuses the feds of violating Trump’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure and asks that the court block “further review of seized material” until they are reviewed by a special master. …

… Weissmann, the former federal prosecutor, said Trump’s filing has a “fatal flaw” because it doesn’t reckon with the fact that the documents legally belong to the National Archives, not the president.

“Nothing needs to be sifted because none of the documents are actually the former president’s. These all belong, whether classified or not classified, to the national archives,” he told MSNBC. He went on to describe the court filing as a “press release masquerading (tenuously) as a legal brief.”

Orin Kerr, a conservative law professor at UC Berkeley, noted that “lawyers are giggling at Trump’s motion, and how poorly it was done.”

“Reading Trump legal filings you imagine a lawyer who doesn’t quite know what he’s doing and then Trump taking a Sharpie to the draft and insisting on passages that read like tweets,” he tweeted.

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe described the filing as “very strange,” questioning why it took Trump two weeks to call for the intervention.

“It’s sort of too late to ask for some new special master,” he told MSNBC.

Tribe argued that any other citizen who took classified documents home “would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.”

“So he is sort of asking Merrick Garland to prosecute him,” Tribe said. “If he’s being treated not as president but as a citizen, he’s got to be indicted,” he added. “Otherwise, the rule of law just doesn’t mean anything.”

Another amusing document was posted by Trump on Truth Social. The concluding paragraph is a hoot:

This Mar-a-Lago Break-In, Search, and Seizure was illegal and unconstitutional, and we are taking all actions necessary to get the documents back, which we would have given them without the necessity of the despicable raid of my home, so that I can give them to the National Archives until they are required for the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.

Yeah, I was gonna give everything back to the National Archives but the FBI raid got in the way. Yeah, I was gonna do my homework as soon as I’m done playing Minecraft. You don’t have to me so mean to me. It’s not my fault it’s past my bedtime.

Greg Sargent:

This seems to have been the week that the Republican Party realized its midterm Senate candidates are a pack of bozos. Mehmet Oz? Herschel Walker? Seriously? (In a sane world Eric Schmitt of Missouri would be on that list too, except he’ll probably win.) FiveThirtyEight has Democrats slightly favored to keep the Senate.

Mitch McConnell nearly admitted that Republicans are unlikely to take back the Senate. And “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”

At National Review, Jim Geraghty asks, Are Republicans Blowing Their Chances of Winning Control of the Senate? The very conservative Geraghty tries for several paragraphs to put the best possible GOP spin on current polling data.

But overall . . . yeah, the narrative that Republicans are blowing their chances in what should be winnable races because they nominate deeply flawed, relatively unknown, far-too-Trumpy or extreme candidates has a lot of evidence to support those contentions. Blake Masters has yet to look all that strong against incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly in Arizona’s Senate race, which was expected to be one of the most competitive races of the cycle. The hopes that Joe O’Dea would give incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet a serious run for his money in Colorado have yet to bear fruit. In a year like this, you would think a North Carolina Senate race would be a relatively easy win for Republicans, but that doesn’t appear to be the case yet, and it’s a similar story in Nevada, where incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto is hanging in there against GOP nominee Adam Laxalt.

Winning Ohio was supposed to be a snooze for J.D. Vance, but this week a PAC associated with Mitch McConnell announced it was making a $28 million ad buy in Ohio on Vance’s behalf. Vance, a newbie to politics, turned out to be inept at the campaigning thing. Nate Silver still considers Tim Ryan to be a long shot, however.

Speaking of ad buys, do see ‘It’s a rip-off’: GOP spending under fire as Senate hopefuls seek rescue by Isaac Arnsdorf at the Washington Post.

In a highly unusual move, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week canceled bookings worth about $10 million, including in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. A spokesman said the NRSC is not abandoning those races but prioritizing ad spots that are shared with campaigns and benefit from discounted rates. Still, the cancellations forfeit cheaper prices that came from booking early, and better budgeting could have covered both.

Here’s where it gets weird:

The NRSC’s retreat came after months of touting record fundraising, topping $173 million so far this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures. But the committee has burned through nearly all of it, with the NRSC’s cash on hand dwindling to $28.4 million by the end of June.

As of that month, the committee disclosed spending just $23 million on ads, with more than $21 million going into text messages and more than $12 million to American Express credit cardpayments, whose ultimate purpose isn’t clear from the filings. The committee also spent at least $13 million on consultants, $9 million on debt payments and more than $7.9 million renting mailing lists, campaign finance data show.

How do you spend $21 million on bleeping text messages? Never mind. Obviously money is disappearing somehow. As far as I know the RNC is still covering Trump’s legal fees, and they were nuts to agree to that. But that’s separate from the NRSC, or it’s supposed to be.

Part of the problem, the article says, is that the NRSC put a lot of money into digital fundraising and building up a database of small-dollar donors. But this has not gotten the results they had hoped for. It’s not known whether the small-dollar donors are feeling penny-pinched or whether they are sending their small dollars to Trump, who fundraises incessantly.

Bess Levin at Vanity Fair has a handy-dandy guide to all the legal trouble lined up against Trump. (Vanity Fair gives you one free article, and when that’s used up try an incognito window or another browser and you can usually get to read another one.) Here is the list.

*The Classified Document/Mar-a-Lago investigation

*The Justice Department investigation into January 6/plot to overturn the election

*Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s criminal investigation into election interference

*The Manhattan District Attorney’s Criminal Case Against the Trump Organization, Etc.

*The New York Attorney General’s Civil Investigation Into the Trump Organization

*The Westchester County district attorney’s Criminal Investigation of the Trump Organization

*The DC Attorney General’s Criminal Investigation of January 6

*The E. Jean Carroll Defamation Suit

*Mary Trump’s lawsuit for defrauding her out of millions of dollars

*The House of Representatives’ January 6 Lawsuit

*The Eric Swalwell Suit over the attempt to stop the Electoral College certification

*The Capitol Police January 6 lawsuits

*The Metropolitan Police January 6 lawsuit

*The Michael Cohen lawsuit

*The Class Action Lawsuit Against the Trump Biz and the Trumps

*The NAACP Legal Defense Fund Voting Rights Lawsuit

*The Trump Tower Assault Lawsuit filed by five people who said Trump’s security assalted them while they were protesting in 2015

I’d forgotten about some of those. All are still pending.

Rolling Stone reports that the FBI is questioning Trump’s National Security Staff about his top secret document alibi.

Two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone that the FBI has begun asking former Trump administration officials whether they’ve heard of the so-called “standing order” Trump claims to have given. In recent days, the sources say, the feds have sent interview requests to the ex-officials, including former National Security Council personnel. The FBI has asked some of them to visit local FBI field offices to answer follow-up questions concerning the ex-president, classified and highly sensitive documents, and the alleged “order.” That order, Trump’s office insisted last week, dictated that any “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken into the residence were deemed to be declassified.”

CNN reports,

18 former top Trump administration officials tell CNN they never heard any such order issued during their time working for Trump, and that they believe the claim to be patently false.

Several officials laughed at the notion. One senior administration official called it “bullsh*t.” Two of Trump’s former chiefs of staff went on the record to knock down the claim.

“Nothing approaching an order that foolish was ever given,” said John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff for 17 months from 2017 to 2019. “And I can’t imagine anyone that worked at the White House after me that would have simply shrugged their shoulders and allowed that order to go forward without dying in the ditch trying to stop it.”

Of course, we don’t know that anyone working for Trump really would have died in a ditch trying to stop Trump from taking secret documents to his residence — I am hugely skeptical, actually — but that’s the story they’re going with now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is from the Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

Back to the Washington Post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump issued this statement today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody must have tipped them off what was coming.

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

More to come, I’m sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pass the popcorn.

Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Waldman:

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

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

Heh.