Rachel Maddow makes a good point here, why would the Republicans invite Jack Smith to testify publicly when all he would say is what he said?
Trump was the chief propagator of the big lie (stolen 2020 election), the fake electors, the coercion of state officials, the frivolous, evidence-free, court challenges, the plot to have Mike Pence announce Trump had won the election, the Green Bay Sweep, and the bloody riot at the Capitol with the gallows outside to hang Mike Pence. There was only one leader, one beneficiary, of this desperate many armed criminals octopus, Donald Trump.
In fairness to our demented president, the Federalist Society Six on the Supreme Court declared him the victor in 2004’s Trump v. United States. They ruled that he couldn’t be prosecuted for anything he could argue was part of his official job. So we have to forgive him for taking it so literally, he was never a man to see nuance, even before his steep cognitive decline. If he could, theoretically, order Seal Team Six to murder his political opponents, if done in consultation with his cabinet (official core duty) — and pardon the hit men with no restrictions — then why should he not believe he can fire all Inspectors General without cause, purge the civil service without cause, rescind Congressional budget allocations he hated, shake down right wing law firms, TV networks, universities, weaponize the DOJ for retribution against his enemies, and so on? Many of those acts are not even arguably criminal, at best they are violations of civil law, or norms, or whatever.
The New York Times published an exhaustive, if politely phrased, catalogue of Trump’s mafia don presidency. Check it out.
The link to the article again — the details are many, and impressive in their thoroughness. Dictator on day one or bust, courtesy of the tireless work of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, The Antonin Scalia Law School, The Council for National Policy, The Institute for Humane Studies and so on. It is worth bearing in mind, in the face of this onslaught of Nazi contempt for law and democracy, that many of their policies, political theories and practical plans are as ridiculous and legally untenable as the asinine theories of now disbarred far-right wing constitutional crackpot John Eastman and longtime Trump buddy (predictably abandoned by his old friend once things went south for him) Rudy“Trial by Combat” Giuliani.
If you want motive for the cold-blooded killing of a woman with a breezy attitude by an ICE agent with a violent attitude, listen to the last couple of seconds of this video. You can hear Jonathan Ross, or one of his fellow ICE agents, say “fucking bitch” after the third shot to her face, as the dead woman’s car lurches forward 100 ft to crash, kind of says it all.
VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left, who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe, against our law enforcement officers.
VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job. The idea that Tim Walz and a bunch of radicals in Minneapolis are going to go after and make this guy’s life miserable because he was doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous.source
From the White House podium Thursday, Vice President JD Vance characterized the victim of the shooting — a 37-year-old mother of three identified as Renee Nicole Good — as a member of “a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”
“This is classic terrorism,” Vance said. “We’re not going to give into terrorism on this.”
Wednesday afternoon, Trump went on the attack.
“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Trump said it was “hard to believe” the ICE officer was alive — despite video showing he remained on his feet throughout the incident and was filmed walking around after the shooting.
“The gaslighting is off the charts and I’m having none of it. This guy was doing his job. She tried to stop him from doing his job. When he approached her car, she tried to hit him.
A tragedy? Absolutely. But a tragedy that falls on this woman and all of the radicals who teach people that immigration is the one type of law that rioters are allowed to interfere with.”
Today, in a press conference on the shooting, Vice President J.D. Vance made even more extreme statements, claiming—all evidence to the contrary—that the woman shot in Minneapolis was part of a “left wing network” and that “nobody debates” that she “aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator.” In fact, among those who “debate” Vance’s version of events are the journalists at the New York Times, who today published a slow-motion analysis that demonstrated conclusively that the vehicle was turning away from the officer when he opened fire.source
I salute the Grey Lady for posting this video report of the shooting
Or as Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post spun the shooting of Renee Good, when enraged ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot her three times in the face, as … you be the judge.
After a member of unelected Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller’s deportation goon squads shot a peaceful woman, Renee Good, in the face, three times, at close range, just before Trump myrmidon Kashyap Pramod Patel shut local authorities out of the investigation of the cold-blooded murder [1], Kristi Noem, proud killer of puppies, issued this lying statement, on social media, of course.
“ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries. This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”
Drug prices, as we all can plainly see, as we were promised, have also dropped between 1,300% and 8,000% since the Glorious One took office again (I myself got a check for almost $48,000 from a pharmaceutical giant, or so I’m told), so we have no reason to doubt anything in ICE Barbie’s account. To call her a piece of shit is an insult to excrement. Speaking of stinking, greasy, fly-encrusted turds:
Trump jumped in with his own fact-free post lying that the shooter had been run over: “I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot at her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe that he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
Heather continues:
That both DHS and Trump posted false accounts of the shooting even as there are four videos circulating that reveal those accounts to be lies shows they no longer are making any attempt to justify their actions. Instead, they are demanding Americans abandon reality in favor of whatever the administration says. If this works, it would be a demonstration of totalitarian power, the ability to control how people think. Accepting that lie is a loyalty test.
The agent who killed Good was identified by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He is an Iraq War veteran who has been with ICE since at least 2016. The agent was previously injured in a traffic incident while seizing an undocumented man who was later convicted of dragging the agent with his car. This doesn’t justify what happened. At all.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration guru, who is not a lawyer, maintains ICE agents are untouchable. “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop or obstruct you is committing a felony,” he said on Fox. This is patently false in America — always has been and always should be.
Though Minneapolis’s mayor and Minnesota’s governor vowed to seek justice for Good, Trump & Co. made sure they were unable to. The FBI announced on Thursday morning that it would be handling the investigation alone, boxing out the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Historically, the agencies work together.
The BCA said in a statement that the U.S. attorney’s office “had reversed course: the investigation would now be led solely by the FBI, and the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.”
“[Trump], in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.”
If this testimony had been aired live, two days before the law required all of the Epstein files be made public, imagine the shit show, even on Bari Weiss’s CBS. That’s why it happened behind closed doors, why Trump’s puppets waited until New Year’s Eve to release it. Jim Jordan, a belligerent cretin whose claim to fame is that as a college wrestler he was impossible to pin (like when he was assistant coach watching college wrestlers being sexually abused by his boss, and since) was completely overmatched by Jack Smith. Smith made the clear case against Trump for conspiring to overthrow election results after losing the election in 2020. There is no doubt that the events were set in motion for the benefit of one man, Donald, and the amoral billionaires who are his chief benefactors/beneficiaries. To wit:
Meritocracy
Here are the two slam dunk federal cases against Trump, in a nutshell. He violated the Espionage Act by illegally taking classified documents with him when he left the White House. He “negotiated” with the Department of Justice and the National Archives for a year about retaining the documents, lied about having classified documents, claimed he could declassify them with his mind, had his lawyer lie in a false affidavit that he’d already returned them all. There was probable cause for a judge to issue a search warrant. The FBI found file boxes full of illegally retained government documents, including classified ones. There is not anything alleged about any of this. His obstruction of justice, his lies, his lawyers’ lies, his illegal retention of the documents, all matters of public record. Only Clarence Thomas, in a note to Venezuelan-American judge, lame duck Trump lifetime appointee Aileen Cannon, got Trump off the hook for this one, by declaring Jack Smith illegally appointed (spoiler alert, he wasn’t, he was only appointed too late to do his job).
The Washington D.C. case is equally straightforward. Trump knew he’d lost the election, he was told several times by his closest advisors, as they later testified under oath. He continued to lie about iihht (and $50,000,000 was dumped into an ad campaign to promote this lie). He worked with fake electors from several states in a scheme to throw the election to the GOP majority (by state) House. He called election officials to twist arms in states he lost. He had operatives accessing voting systems, bringing frivolous lawsuits, spreading knowingly false information. He called for a crowd to assemble in Washington D.C. for the morning of the certification of Biden’s win. He whipped up the crowd for an hour and urged them to parade (without a permit, which would have mobilized DC police to supervise it) to the Capitol to “peacefully” fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore. As the riot unfolded, and before his allies fled for their lives, e called his allies in Congress urging them to execute the plan to illegally keep him in office. He watched the riot live on TV for hours. It was with great reluctance that he finally made a video telling the rioters to go home (none were arrested), that he loved them, that America would never forget this day of love.
Just to prove his great fuck you to democracy had been perfectly righteous, on his first day back in the Oval Office he pardoned all of the rioters who were found guilty of violent assaults on January 6th. A Day of Love. 2020 was a stolen election, ask any current GOP member, they all wriggle away from answering that Biden won. “Well, Biden was the president…” they will say. Yep, he was.
Meantime, a robust 1% of the Epstein files have been made public (with massive redactions) by the most transparent administration in US history under (and in defiant contempt of) the Epstein Files Transparency Act Trump himself signed into law. Do not compare the murderous, compulsively lying Mr. Trump to Mr. Hitler! How dare you?!! By all means, dude, illegally invade a South American country and render the leader and his wife to … CECOT? What could go wrong?
“Anti-woke” influencer Bari Weiss was chosen to run CBS news by billionaire Trump donors/CBS buyers Ellison, father and son, because they like the cut of her jib. She can look woke cucks in the face and own them. The Ellisons paid her $150,000,000 for her blog when they hired her as Editor-in-Chief of CBS. Here’s an email Weiss wrote to CBS news staff after killing the story of hundreds of humans rendered, without any legal process at all, to an El Salvadorian torture prison for indefinite detention and abuse.
Our mission? Media monopoly, owned by oligarchs, promoting curated “news” supportive of the regime’s policy goals to implement permanent one party, totalitarian rule? Hmmm, I guess that tracks. It may indeed seem radical, on a slow news week when nothing of great national consequence is happening, to kill a carefully vetted story damaging to the fulfillment of their mission.
Slow news week. The DOJ violating a law the president signed, withholding 99% of files in a brazen, lawless attempt to protect an actual cabal of powerful, untouchable pedophiles, likely also including their boss, an adjudicated rapist — slow news. The chaotic serial dumps of thousands of compromising documents relating to notorious pedophile, teenaged girl trafficker and blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein, including numerous mentions of his fellow “playboy” the president, and the sudden “discovery” of a million new files … a very, very slow news week, you dig.
At least Rupert “Fair and Balanced” Murdoch’s FOX news can straighten this CBS kerfuffle out. CBS may have indeed have had a reasonable, even if dubious, or possibly spurious, rationale for killing the story:
Psychopaths will be psychopaths
Yawn, very slow news week. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate.
60 Minutes, the famous hour-long weekly CBS news digest, was set to air a piece about the brutal conditions in El Salvador’s infamous torture prison, CECOT. This is the prison Kilmar Abrego Garcia and about two hundred other men were illegally rendered to, under the direction of Trump’s repugnant henchmen, Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller and puppy killer Kristi Noem (she, in defiance of a federal court order).
Under our law a person must have a chance to defend himself against illegal detention (this right is called habeas corpus) before he can be sent to prison, particularly in another country, particularly one known for torturing its prisoners. 60 Minutes did a fairly harrowing piece on the prison, including several interviews with people sent to CECOT by Trump.
These men, all non-criminals, were illegally imprisoned, for a sadistic indefinite sentence and brutalized on video in the El Salvadoran dictators, notorious torture complex. The piece on CECOT passed all legal vetting and editorial standards meetings at CBS. It was scheduled to air last night. Bari Weiss killed the story. Robert Reich covers the horror of it beautifully here. This is the letter the segment’s producer wrote to her news team:
News Team,
Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.
I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.
Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.
We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.
If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient.
If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.
These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.
CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.
We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.
I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.
Sharyn
No good dictator will tolerate truthful reporting on their abuses — like the hundreds illegally rendered to CECOT torture prison in El Salvador last Spring. Here’s the story Bari Weiss killed, on behalf of the guy with the “alcoholic’s personality” (and the 1% on whose behalf he acts), the increasingly demented Orange Polyp, on behalf of billionaire Trump donors/media monopoly entrepreneurs Larry Ellison the elder and Ellison the younger.Ellison the younger is the basic Jared Kushner, though with less access to the president, so far.
The piece was actually on YouTube for a little over an hour today, before the billionaire son of a billionaire, Ellison the younger, made sure his legal team was striking this video (shot off a screen, aired in Canada, if I recall) for copyright violation.
This was put up earlier today by Senator Cory Booker. I saw it at 2 pm, I was about number 200,000. Early the next morning 1,100,000 people had seen it. Give it a like!
“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Wow. Check out what the NY Times published on the eve of the deadline for the DOJ [partially, conditionally, grudgingly] complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, unanimously passed by Congress (but for one diehard MAGA representative) and signed into law, thirty days ago, by Trump himself:
The article (which Trump surely regards as a treasonous, false, witch hunt hit job) begins:
Jeffrey Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” He and Donald J. Trump also had “no formal relationship.” They went to a lot of the same parties. But they “did not socialize together.” They were never really friends, just business acquaintances. Or “there was no relationship” at all. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”
For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Trump and his representatives have offered shifting, often contradictory accounts of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, one sporadically captured by society photographers and in news clips before they fell out sometime in the mid-2000s. Closely scrutinized since Mr. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell during Mr. Trump’s first term, their friendship — and questions about what the president knew of Mr. Epstein’s abuses — now threatens to consume his second one.
The controversy has shaken Mr. Trump’s iron hold on his base like no other. Loyal supporters have demanded to know why the administration has not moved more quickly to unearth the convicted sex offender’s remaining secrets. In November, after resisting months of pressure to release more Epstein-related documents held by the federal government — and facing an almost unheard-of revolt among Republican lawmakers — Mr. Trump reversed himself, signing legislation that requires their release beginning this week.
Mr. Epstein had a talent for acquiring powerful friends, some of whom have become ensnared in the continuing scrutiny of his crimes. For months, Mr. Trump has labored furiously to shift himself out of the frame, dismissing questions about his relationship with Mr. Epstein as a “Democrat hoax” and imploring his supporters to ignore the matter entirely. An examination of their history by The New York Times has found no evidence implicating Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of minors.
But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.
In response to a detailed list of questions from The Times, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement: “This fake news story, which is not worth the paper it’s printed on, is just another stale regurgitation of decades-old false allegations against President Trump. The truth will remain the same no matter how many times The New York Times tries to change it. President Trump did nothing wrong, and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a creep.”
And one last bite (from the article), with the classic Trump assessment of a guy he now claims to have hardly known:
In the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein — now extraordinarily wealthy and well connected — seemed to grow less content with the anonymity he had carefully drawn around his life and business. In 2002, practically inviting public scrutiny, he arranged to fly with former President Bill Clinton and a celebrity entourage on a humanitarian trip to Africa. Details of the trip were soon shared with The New York Post’s Page Six. Not long after, New York magazine published the first major profile of Mr. Epstein. Mr. Trump provided the headline quote: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Trump, after shaking down ABC for $16,000,000 with a frivolous lawsuit over an on-air comment that Trump had been found civilly liable for rape (the judge in that case said as much, it is only an idiosyncrasy of New York State law, he explained, that differentiates “sexual assault” — no penis in vagina proved — and “rape”) and CBS for the same amount for doing what every TV station does — editing an interview, has also sued the NY Times and, the other day, the BBC.
The faltering, insanely litigious president ridiculously claimed, through his army of low rent Roy Cohns, that the BBC unfairly and viciously edited segments of his infamous January 6th speech to a crowd that stormed the Capitol moments later to make it falsely look like he had urged them to storm the Capitol.
Here are the highlights of his long harangue to the rioters on January 6th. You be the judge if there is a way to edit this incendiary speech where he is not telling the crowd he’s riled up for over an hour, with detailed lies about a “stolen election” he knew he had lost, to hit the Capitol, he promised he was going down there with them, “and we fight like hell or we won’t have a country anymore.”
You have to love the generally spineless NY Times’ last line in its report on this Hitlerian move on the part of Putin’s pliable puppet, Donald J. Trump, now suing the British Broadcasting Corporation, an outfit almost as despicable in his squinty eyes as our own Public Broadcasting Service. Here’s the Times, at its best:
The president also has a defamation lawsuit pending against The New York Times, which accuses the news organization of trying to undercut his 2024 candidacy and disparage his reputation. The Times says the lawsuit has no merit.
gratuitousblahg 