<....“There are questions as to whether Leo-affiliated nonprofits have diverted substantial portions of their income and assets, directly or indirectly, to the personal benefit of Leonard Leo,” read the Campaign for Accountability’s complaint.

“Such payments were generally listed as made in exchange for alleged consulting, research, public relations, or similar services. However CFA has reasonable questions about whether those alleged services were actually rendered at all or, if services were rendered, whether the payments made were substantially in excess of fair market value,” said the complaint, which covers the period between 2016 and 2020.

POLITICO reported that a total of $43 million flowed to Leo’s company over two years and that the bulk of it came from The 85 Fund, a nonprofit run by his allies which has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past decade to promote Trump’s Supreme Court picks, file briefs before the court and, more recently, used an alias to push for voting restrictions and accuse Democrats of cheating in the 2020 election.

It is now run by Carrie Severino, an attorney and former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas listed as director in the group’s most recent IRS paperwork and is collecting massive amounts of anonymous funds: $117 million in 2021.

In discontinuing the group in the state of Virginia, the new address Severino listed is a virtual office suite in Fort Worth, Texas, shared by a “Two Men and a Truck” franchise. The office building advertises virtual and coworking spaces.

Further complicating the picture: in Texas, a new registration for “The 85 Fund” was filed on June 27 under yet a different address in a different city than the one listed on the Virginia paperwork. It is also registered in Texas as a for-profit entity.

This location is a UPS store in a strip mall next door to a restaurant called the “Snooty Pig Cafe.” As POLITICO previously reported, The 85 Fund had been using a UPS drop box in DC’s Georgetown neighborhood as its principal office address.

Beginning in 2016, Leo formed or helped reorganize two for-profit businesses — CRC Advisors and BH Group — to perform millions of dollars in services for his aligned nonprofits.

In those five years, BH Group brought in $15 million from the nonprofits. Yet unlike CRC, BH Group doesn’t appear to have advertised itself as a consulting or public relations firm, or even have had a website. During some of that time, Leo was employed full-time as a vice president at the nonprofit Federalist Society, raising questions about how he could have reasonably generated millions of dollars in consulting fees at the same time, the complaint says....>

<.....The 85 Fund’s switch to the Fort Worth office building came days after POLITICO inquired, on June 30, about certain Leo allies who may have personally benefited from millions in anonymous donations that moved through the 85 Fund over the past decade.

A number of the groups that receive contributions from Leo’s “dark money” network, in turn, hold sizable contracts with his firm, CRC Advisors. This includes the Federalist Society, the nation’s preeminent conservative debating society where Leo was executive vice president and still serves as co-chairman. Among payments the complaint flagged to the IRS and DC attorney general is $3.1 million which the Federalist Society paid to CRC between 2020 and 2021 for “media training.”

On July 7, a Leo spokesperson offered an initial response to inquiries POLITICO had made about The 85 Fund, previously known as the Judicial Education Project. That was the day paperwork with Severino’s signature was filed “surrendering” The 85 Fund’s charter in Virginia.

In the paperwork, Severino stated the plan to move to Texas was adopted by a majority of the board of directors on Dec. 8, 2022. It has three board members. In addition to Severino, they include treasurer Gary Marx and chair Todd Graves, according to the latest IRS paperwork available.

It’s not the only major conservative nonprofit to have moved to Texas in recent years. The National Rifle Association, contesting multiple lawsuits from attorneys general in New York state and Washington, D.C., alleging violations of nonprofit law, announced in early 2021 that it would relocate to Texas.

Yael Fuchs, who was a senior lawyer on the New York case against the NRA, said Texas has limited regulation over charities, making it a more attractive legal environment for nonprofits.

“This gambit isn’t going to deprive the regulator [DC] of jurisdiction over past wrongdoing but it could create some hurdles,” she said. They include complications in gaining injunctive relief or obtaining evidence, “but there are ways of getting over those,” said Fuchs, former head of charities enforcement in the New York attorney general’s office.

It’s also not the first time a Leo-aligned group has shifted operations after media scrutiny.

A separate Leo-aligned group that appears to have been involved in the 2017 sale of GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway’s company was dissolved last fall, three days after POLITICO inquired about whether it helped to facilitate the multi-million-dollar deal while she was advising Trump on judicial candidates.

In his statement, Rivkin, the lawyer for the groups targeted in the CFA complaint, said CFA was connected to Arabella Advisors, a firm that was founded by former Bill Clinton appointee Eric Kessler. Leo has long compared his business practices to those of Arabella.

Both Michelle Kuppersmith, CFA executive director, and Steve Sampson, Arabella spokesperson, said their groups have no financial relationship. However, CFA was originally part of the Hopewell Fund, a nonprofit for which Arabella provides administrative support. CFA spun off from Hopewell in 2017, both groups confirmed.

Arabella is a for-profit company that provides administrative, HR and accounting services to largely philanthropic nonprofits which are largely independently run.>

<Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis denied a request from former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to delay his arrest, in a terse but polite letter to Meadows attorney John Moran.

Meadows is a key witness in several of the cases against Trump, and a co-defendant in the new indictment of Trump on 13 counts related to election crimes. DA Willis gave Trump and the 18 co-defendants named in the indictment until August 25 to surrender for arrest and arraignment.

While a parade of those defendants have begun showing up to surrender for arrest, Meadows and his attorney asked for more time — a request that Willis politely but firmly denied in a brief letter via email:

Good Morning Mr. Moran:

I am not granting any extensions. I gave 2 weeks for people to surrender themselves to the court. Your client is no different than any other criminal defendant in this jurisdiction. The two weeks was a tremendous courtesy. At 12:30 pm on Friday I shall file warrants in the system. My team has availability to meet to discuss reasonable consent bonds Wednesday and Thursday.

Yours in Service,

Fani T. Willis

District Attomey

Atlanta Judicial Circuit

Trump himself is expected to surrender Thursday in what many see as an attempt at counterprogramming the first Republican primary debate on Fox News.

Asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt if Trump’s decision to surrender was a deliberate attempt to draw the spotlight away from the debate, Fox News anchor Bret Baier — who is co-moderator of the event — said ” I think there has to be some planning. You I mean, I think it is about sucking the oxygen out of the room for anybody. You had a big night on Wednesday making the rounds on Thursday. I do think that there as, they’re calculated like that. It’s not a great counter-programming thing, but I do think it is calculated.”>

<There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!” I heard the comparison made at least a half-dozen times this weekend on various political shows.

(For the record, Hillary did nothing whatsoever even remotely close to Trump’s theft of classified materials. Among the 50,000+ personal emails on her server, Republicans found three that had markings indicating they were at one time classified, none had to do with espionage or compromised national security in any way, and all three were clearly there because she had replied to somebody using the wrong account in error. But we can expect this to be the distraction line coming from Trump and the GOP all this week.)

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2020, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

While, at this moment, most of the evidence is circumstantial, collectively it paints a damning picture for which it’s hard to find any other possible explanation.

This article’s opening sentence describes the worst-case scenario that the media seems to be going out of its way not to even get close to mentioning. Again, this is, at this moment, still speculation, in large part because the alleged conspirators have been so successful at destroying much of the evidence that might have implicated (or cleared) them.

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense, then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.

They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops hadpreviously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media.

Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:

・Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.

・Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.

・Not to employ any riot control agents.

・Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.

・Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.

・Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.

・Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.

・Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units....>

<.....If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again asking for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has been reported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widely reported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, "absolute and unmitigated liars" for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

Most recently — just in the past few weeks — we discover that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel and Ryan McCarthy, were all wiped of all conversations they had on January 6th.

ICE, whose plainclothes agents were sent by Trump to Portland to beat up and kidnap protesters off the street and used, essentially, as his private militia was also instructed by the Trump Administration to wipe all their phones after January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

Similarly, if Trump was planning to install himself in power in a way that echoed and aligned him with Putin, he’d need the active help and support of his palace guard, the Secret Service.

Here, again, we discover that the evidence is not only missing but that Trump appointees — still in government — knew about it for over a year and concealed that information from the January 6th Committee, Congress, and the media.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning.

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

And lest you think that even Trump wouldn’t be so audacious as to solicit help from a foreign government to hold power, please remember that he was impeached for exactly that: his attempted extortion of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to smear Joe Biden.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.

First, throughout 2020 and in January of 2021, Trump removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of Top Secret (and above) documents that, according to multiple news reports, contained information that could reveal the identities and locations of America’s spies and agents....>

<.....Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi government.

As The Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.

The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

The Washington Post noted that:

Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

*… \[National Security Advisor\] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls\.*

Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Funddocuments more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recently admitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.

The Washington Post, just yesterday, reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could damage our national security, intentionally leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations:

Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.

The Mueller Report identifies ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who would could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.....>

<....For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific obstruction of justice crimes:

These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.

There are, after all, credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted when the story leaked two years later:

The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, we pulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is alsofluent in English and German) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large room in which they met.

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

・On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White House told Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

・The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

・Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban a bounty to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop, a possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.

As The New York Times noted at the time:

Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.

Instead of stopping Putin, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen), crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from the country in an orderly fashion.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a visit to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump made “promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies....>

<.....As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress":

*Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint \[against Trump\] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees\.*

Along his journey toward converting America into a full-blown oligarchy (as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class), Trump has picked up quite a few democracy-skeptical allies.

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Perhaps he had ambitious plans for a role in the Trump administration after the planned end of American democracy?

With that backstory, consider more contemporary events to see if they fit together.

In January of last year Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sources assert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities.

Three months later, in March of 2021, Jared Kushner filed papers showing that his brand new investment company — against the advice of the Saudi government but at MBS’s order — had received over $2 billion from the Kingdom.

It’s still unknown if or how much money the Kingdom gave to Trump himself, presumably through the dark offshore accounts common among billionaires like Trump.

This was not the first time Kushner had apparently altered US foreign policy or shared valuable US secrets with Middle East players in exchange for large quantities of cash that flowed directly to him or other members of the Trump family.

As investigative reporter Vicky Ward notes in the most recent post on Vicky Ward Investigates on Substack:

Kushner was struggling with the ticking time bomb of a $1.8 billion mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue that would come due in February of 2019—a debt no domestic buyer was interested in. Not even the Chinese or Qataris wanted it. … Kushner desperately needed a bail-out for his troubled building…and the clock was ticking.

Then, in the spring of 2018, two things happened within weeks. First, the U.S. withdrew their support of the blockade of Qatar, leading the Saudis and Emiratis to lift it.

Then, Brookfield, a Canadian real estate investment trust whose largest outside shareholder is the Qatari government, bailed out the Kushners in a deal that has real estate moguls rolling their eyes to this day: A 99-year lease paid upfront on a building that was bleeding money.

Which brings us back, again, to last year, just after Trump’s failed January 6th attempt to overthrow the US government....>

<.....About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. As The Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:

Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

Is it possible that all these different data points are part of one whole?

・That Trump had a plan, worked out with Putin, MBS, a few dozen high administration officials, and a large handful of Republicans in the House and Senate, to overthrow our government and establish an oligarchic system like what is currently in place in Russia and that Fox “News” showcased in Hungary?

・That once that overthrow was completed under the gimmick of six Republican-controlled states “discovering voter fraud” and changing their Electoral College votes, the plan was that Trump and his GOP allies (including the 11 Republican senators who, this May, voted against aid to Ukraine) would quickly move to re-align America away from NATO/EU and toward Russia/Saudi Arabia?

・That, as soon as he was sworn in for a second term, he’d invoke his October 21, 2020 Executive Order 13957 that would instantly fire 50,000 senior Civil Service employees encompassing the management of every federal agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees?

・That as soon as that transformation of America and our alliances was complete, Trump would use a national state of emergency to suppress dissent and seize control of voting systems across the nation to insure he and the Republicans loyal to him would continue in power for the long run?

・And that the deaths of our spies, the Saudi-driven explosion in oil prices when Biden came into office, Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine, and even Xi’s cranking up his aggression against Taiwan were all just the echoes of Trump’s failed plan?

After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a coup attempt before in this country: wealthy industrialists tried to kidnap or kill President Franklin Roosevelt 91 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.” Not a single one of those conspirators were ever arrested or tried; why not try again?

While, as noted, some of this is just speculation right now, every day we get more information that seems to validate it. After all, if you’re going to try to overthrow your nation’s government and anoint yourself dictator for life, wouldn’t you want to do everything possible to guarantee your success? Why just do half-measures?

The only “innocent” explanation I can come up with for Trump stealing spy-level documents and squirreling them away in Florida is what I noted in my Saturday Report last weekend:

Trump is simply mentally ill with a condition common among billionaires: hoarding syndrome. If he hadn’t been born rich, he’d be living in an apartment filled with newspapers and old tin cans from floor to ceiling; instead, he hoards money and anything else he thinks has value that gets close enough to grab.

This is ‘normal’ among kleptocrats like Idi Amin or Baby Doc Duvalier: they think that they are the state, so everything the state owns is their property. Supporting this premise are over 3,000 former contractors and employees (including attorneys) who’ve sued Trump because he’s refused to pay them over the years.

Even if that’s the extent of it — which I believe is extremely unlikely — we appear to have dodged a huge bullet here.

Was there a high-level conspiracy in the Trump administration, done in concert with one or more foreign countries, to end democracy in America?

Did they intend to seize control of our government on January 6 and never let go?

Was their next plan to realign us with autocratic nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary?

Given how effectively it appears much of the evidence including emails, phone calls, and text messages (that could exonerate as well as convict) has been destroyed, much of that destruction apparently done by Trump himself while in office (toilets, papers being burned, etc.) and, more recently, by Trump appointees still in our government, we may never know.

But even the possibility — that the question can be credibly raised given the evidence laid out here (which only scratches the surface) — should give every American pause.

<Jeff Clark begged the federal court to give him more time to surrender to Fulton County because he didn't want to be "rushed." Legal analysts didn't think that it would fly, but it was still up in the air whether Meadows "delay for a day" request would be more persuasive.

Both failed, with a U.S. district court judge telling both men they had to submit to arrest by the deadline set by the district attorney last week.

Strategist and legal analyst Aaron Parnas said simply, "thoughts and prayers."

Civil rights lawyer Andrew Laufer cracked up, and New York lawyer Joshua Stein replied, summing up the decision with a cartoon photo of Batman slapping Robin across the face.

New Mexico commercial and water litigator Owen Barcala called it "a rare bench slap by understatement."

Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega predicted that the Meadows motion would fail, in large part because she said that his lawyers misquoted one of the laws that he used as justification. The law Meadows tried to use claimed that he could skip arrest but the law was only for cases that were "decided on their merits," she explained. Not trials where there is a score of evidence to consider.

After the decision was posted, she explained, "Note that the focus of Judge Jones' denial of Meadows' motions for emergency relief is the need for an evidentiary hearing before any relief could be granted. Meadows's (sic) brazen attempt to skirt this obvious prerequisite was never going to succeed."

Georgia lawyer Anthony Michael Kreis said that the decision was something even a third-year legal student could have identified as a "dead-end stunt." He went on to call it an example of "legal clownery." He noted that Monday's hearing on the removal to federal court will be another matter.

As national security expert Marcy Wheeler pointed out, Judge Jones' decision shows how "ridiculous it is to assert federal jurisdiction over GA case before reviewing evidence."

"Another one bites the dust!" mocked former impeachment lawyer Norm Eisen. "Now Meadows loses HIS emergency motion to avoid turning himself in (as I predicted on @CNN ). He didn’t have enough for the extraordinary relief he sought."

Donald Trump reposted information about his "rally" at the jail on Thursday. Many of those same legal analysts expressed their concern that it would likely turn the courthouse into chaos.

"This isn't going to be a good scene," said lawyer Joshua Schiffer.>

<Major Wall Street firms that decided to expand their asset management operations into China are struggling to capitalize on the market, according to The Wall Street Journal.

BlackRock, a top U.S. investment company, is one of many American firms that are struggling to compete in the Chinese market, ranking only 145th out of almost 200 Chinese mutual funds, with other firms like Fidelity International and Neuberger Berman ranking even lower, according to the WSJ. Factors contributing to the firm’s woes are a lack of willingness from local companies to utilize American investment banks, a struggling Chinese economy and restrictions from both the U.S. and China.

In 2020, China removed certain barriers for firms, including restrictions on U.S. asset managers selling mutual funds to individual Chinese investors and limits on foreign ownership in securities firms in China, according to the WSJ.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase all reported revenue drops in their Chinese investment banking operations last year, according to the WSJ. BlackRock initially raised $917 million for its fund in 2021, with the fund ultimately shrinking by 47% as of June 30.

The Biden administration earlier in August banned investments in some Chinese companies for American private investment companies operating in the semiconductor, quantum computing and artificial intelligence sectors.

The Chinese real estate market is in crisis as top developers grapple with massive debts, with Evergrande Groupe going to U.S. bankruptcy court last Friday in order to restructure its $340 billion in debt so as not to default on foreign bondholders.

Securities regulators in China announced Friday that they would take measures to bolster its declining stock market by cutting trading costs, supporting share buybacks and encouraging long-term investment. The move was an attempt to boost investor confidence as the wider economy struggles.

BlackRock, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.>

<Special counsel Jack Smith's team in a Tuesday court filing laid out a defense lawyer's potential conflicts of interest in response to Judge Aileen Cannon's inquiry in the Florida case against former President Donald Trump and two codefendants over his retention of national security documents and alleged efforts to prevent their retrieval.

Cannon earlier this month questioned Smith's use of a grand jury in Washington D.C. after prosecutors already charged Trump and his co-defendants in the Southern District of Florida.

The special counsel's team requested a hearing on whether defense attorney Stanley Woodward's slate of clientele in the case posed a conflict of interest. Prosecutors said in the Tuesday filing that Woodward is representing codefendant Walt Nauta, a personal aide of the former president, in the case and has previously represented Yuscil Taveras, who was listed as "Trump Employee 4" in the indictment and is now a government witness, we well as two other potential witnesses.

Though the government attempted to provide a sealed filing with the motion to outline the potential conflicts, Cannon — acting on her own — struck it down and demanded a reason for why the grand jury in Washington, D.C. was still sitting in the case, noted Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff.

Woodward then accused the special counsel of attempting to "diminish the Court's authority over the proceedings" and "undermine attorney-client" relationships without any basis by using the D.C. grand jury to compile evidence for a case that has already received an indictment. The lawyer also asked to strike his former client Taveras' proposed incriminating testimony against his current client, Nauta, in order to maintain the proceedings' integrity and Nauta's right to choose his counsel.

Given no other choice but to detail Woodward's conflicts on the record because of Cannon's inquiry, the government provided the specifics in its Tuesday response, Parloff explained, calling the filing "devastating."

In March 2023, according to the filing, the special counsel called Taveras, whom Woodward represented at the time, to appear before the D.C. grand jury. Prior to that, the government had alerted Woodward to a potential conflict but the lawyer said he didn't know of any. Then, during the testimony, Taveras perjured himself, denying that he discussed destroying video surveillance footage with Carlos De Oliveira. The government also noted that a lawyer for Trump had referred Taveras to Woodward and that his fees were then being paid by Trump's Save America PAC.

On June 20, the government advised Taveras, through Woodward, that he was the target of a perjury investigation in D.C., the venue of the alleged incident. A Florida grand jury had handed down the first Trump indictment regarding his retention of classified documents earlier that month, and it did not name Taveras or De Oliveira.

"The target letter to Trump Employee 4 crystallized a conflict of interest arising from Mr. Woodward's concurrent representation of Trump Employee 4 and Nauta," the special counsel wrote in the filing, explaining that having Taveras correct his testimony to avoid prosecution would then incriminate Woodward's other client, Nauta.

Woodward, however, still declined to recognize any conflict in the case, insisting instead that Taveras could choose to go to trial and fight his charges, noting that he'd also told Taveras he could cooperate with the government, according to the filing.

On June 27, special counsel Jack Smith requested a conflicts hearing before Chief Judge James Boasberg in D.C., who supervises the D.C. grand jury. Smith had also advised Cannon of the requested proceedings in sealed filings that same day. Woodward did not object either.

Judge Boasberg asked an independent counsel, D.C. Federal Public Defender attorney Shelli Peterson, to advise Taveras on the potential conflicts. The Trump employee then asked Peterson to represent him in the case and retracted his false testimony, resulting in the implication of Nauta, De Oliveira and Trump, prosecutors said.>

<David Shafer, a former chairman of Georgia's Republican Party and one of the 19 people charged in the Georgia 2020 election interference case, claimed in a Monday court filing that he and the other Republican electors who attempted to falsely certify a victory for Donald Trump were acting at the direction of the former president.

As defendants in the far-reaching indictment begin to surrender to authorities ahead of the Friday deadline, "Shafer's position signals that some may be poised to turn on the former president," Axios reports.

"Mr. Shafer and the other Republican Electors in the 2020 election acted at the direction of the incumbent President and other federal officials," lawyers for the former GOP chairman wrote in the filing.

"Attorneys for the President and Mr. Shafer specifically instructed Mr. Shafer, verbally and in writing, that the Republican electors' meeting and casting their ballots on December 14, 2020 was consistent with counsels' advice and was necessary to preserve the presidential election contest," they added.

Shafer and 15 other Republican electors met at Georgia's capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, and signed a document falsely declaring that Trump had won the state. Shafer had portrayed himself as the "chairperson" of Georgia's Electoral College and filed a fake slate of 16 pro-Trump electors in December 2020, according to The New York Times.

Shafer is facing eight charges in the Georgia indictment, including false statements and writings, forgery in the first degree and impersonating a public officer. In addition to some of the electors and a slew of other alleged conspirators, Trump and several of his former attorneys have also been charged in relation to their alleged roles in attempting to subvert the election results.

The former Republican party chair — like co-defendants Jeffrey Clark and Mark Meadows — is trying to have his state-level case transferred to federal court, which would place the case under the authority of a federal judge and potentially pull a more sympathetic jury pool.

Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, told CNN that the filing "could be devastating for the former president."

"Shafer explicitly places explicitly places the entire responsibility for the fake electoral scheme squarely on Donald Trump," Cunningham explained. "He says, 'I was acting at his personal direction.' He does that because he's trying to get into federal court under a law that says even if you're not an officer of the United States, if you are acting under the officer's direction, you can get to federal court. He is making that statement to get to federal court, but at the same time implicating Trump directly in the fake elector scheme."

Shafer also gained widespread attention on social media early Wednesday morning when he posted his own mugshot to X and made it his profile picture after surrendering to Fulton County authorities overnight.

He was one of two defendants to turn themselves in early Wednesday. Former Coffee County GOP Chair Cathy Latham, who is alleged to have partaken in an effort to copy sensitive election software in January 2021 and was also one of the 16 fake electors, is the other.

According to 11Alive, as of 11 a.m. ET on Aug. 23, six total defendants have surrendered to authorities in Fulton County with Ray Smith, a Georgia attorney charged for his alleged role in gathering witnesses to provide testimony before state legislative subcommittee hearings held in December 2020, and Trump-aligned lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, one of the alleged "architects" of the plot, most recently joining the count later Wednesday morning.>

<Indulge me, dear readers.

You might consider the scene I am about to describe as implausible, even fantastic. I share a healthy dose of your scepticism since its central character – Donald Trump – is, as we know, incapable of stillness, let alone introspection.

Still, I think it is possible that when his familiar gallery of sycophants, enablers and lawyers has left for the day and he is alone in the quiet of night, the profundity of the legal peril Trump confronts has to register if only for an instant or two.

Sitting in a gilded room at Mar-a-Lago, his painted-on, orange-hued tan washed away, his trademark crisp blue suit, white shirt and long, red tie abandoned, and holding a cell phone for lonely company, the troubling truths that Trump keeps hard at bay are bound to intrude into his reality-defying cocoon.

In those rare moments, an unsettling measure of doubt which may occasionally tip into fear must grip Trump as the cascading list of criminal charges grows with each indictment. I suspect that after a little while, this simmering anxiety dissolves as quickly as it appears.

Then Trump returns to the comfort of his signature state of denial, reassuring himself that he will, as always, escape the comeuppance served to others beneath him who served him – loyally. They are expendable. Unlike Mr President.

Trump’s abiding sense of invincibility is a by-product of his defining authoritarian nature and preening, gangster-saturated hubris. But history confirms that, one after another, once cocksure thugs – in and out of high office – who remained confident that they were absolutely and permanently beyond reach are belatedly and reluctantly obliged to face the harsh, discordant music.

We have already had the pleasure of watching as Trump’s pedestrian crew of co-conspirators – who tried to engineer a slate of fake electors in Georgia after the 2020 presidential election – begin to be booked and have their mug shots taken for embarrassing posterity. More are scheduled to follow.

On Thursday afternoon, it will be Trump’s turn to endure that indignity. What a delightful spectacle that is likely to be, coming only hours after Trump’s agreeable tête-à-tête with a former Fox News faux journalist, Tucker Carlson, who has grovelled his way back into a sexual predator’s embrace.

Carlson’s pre-recorded burnishing of his indicted guest’s seething megalomania and platforming of the predictable litany of discredited accusations and mad conspiracy theories will, of course, satisfy Trump’s junkie-like need for validation and attention. Yet, just as with all fleeting highs, it will pass, replaced again by the blunt lows of exposure, vulnerability and humiliation.

Trump’s fourth appearance before a judge in the past four months is further evidence that the bluster and bravado that have resonated with his deplorable followers and silenced most of his servile Republican opponents, will not intimidate, nor dissuade prosecutors from doing their duty to hold Trump to serious account in Manhattan, Washington, DC, and Atlanta courtrooms....>

<.....With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party’s surrender to every diseased, autocratic aspect of Trumpism was on dutiful display during the two-hour “debate” among the grasping roster of also-rans on Wednesday evening. Their faint prospects of becoming the nominee rest – whether they are prepared to admit it or not – with the sometimes-sudden vagaries of time and nature and, ironically, the success of prosecutors whose dogged work they have almost universally and hysterically decried as an affront to fairness and a retributive assault on the Republican Party.

Perhaps like you, my impatience with prosecutors had me questioning whether Trump would ever face the reckoning he has earned for disgracing the Constitution he swore to protect and defend in 2016 while placing a hand on his childhood bible, as well as the bible Abraham Lincoln used at his inauguration in 1861.

I was convinced that precedent and the persistent tenets of US exceptionalism which made the presidency sacrosanct shielded Trump from prosecution. Happily, I was wrong – partly.

While I counted the chances that Trump would ultimately sit in the dock as slim, I sensed that enlightened Americans were stirring in powerful rebuttal to the cresting wave of ignorance, hate and evangelical lunacy washing over them.

Slowly, the wheel began to turn. Belief began to emerge from resignation. Courage began to trump cowardice. Action began to replace inaction. Resistance, began, inch by inch, to move from rhetoric to reality.

These days, I believe the inconceivable is conceivable: Trump, I am more than hopeful, will be jailed. Look at the number and breadth of the charges set out with surgical precision in persuasive indictment after persuasive indictment. Taken together, they catalogue a crime spree that constitutes a “criminal enterprise” of breathtaking scope, with the intent to silence his accusers, hoard a cache of sensitive documents, incite an insurrection to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president, and subvert the democratic will of millions of voters in Georgia and beyond.

The 91 stiff, uncompromising charges are immune to Trump’s screeching outbursts and tired shenanigans meant to dilute and distract from the inevitable consequences of the barrage of felonies that he will, in due and steady course, be compelled to answer for.

Fox News cannot save him. His loud, obnoxious family and surrogates cannot save him. Neither will the imprisoned fanatics now holed up in jail for having stormed the Capitol at their patron saint’s sinister, self-serving urging.

Trump’s only imaginable salvation is to prevail next November and trigger an extraordinary crisis pitting a future convicted felon against the Constitution. Trump would welcome and revel in destroying the frayed remnants of a republic to save himself.

He will fail. As they did in 2020, enlightened Americans will see to that in 2024.>

<Donald Trump played himself and made the wrong move - which led him straight into Jack Smith's hands by announcing his candidacy for President early. By doing so, Trump failed to "game the system." But, Smith is not falling for it and is putting his foot down.

Special Counsel Jack Smith is firmly opposing the efforts of the legal team representing former president Donald Trump to postpone the trial dates for his cases until 2026, which would conveniently fall after the upcoming presidential elections.

In response to the scheduling request from the Trump legal team, Smith wrote to the court, highlighting that the defendant's pursuit of a trial date in 2026, which would undermine the public's right to a prompt trial, is based on irrelevant statistics and cases. Additionally, Smith pointed out that the defendant exaggerated the extent of new and unique discovery materials while overstating the challenges associated with their review.

Smith also addressed the defense's claims of conflicts, asserting that these conflicts are easily manageable and don't warrant a significant delay in setting trial dates. Responding to the defense's argument about the sheer volume of documents involved – reportedly "approximately three million pages" of discovery material – Smith clarified that evaluating the burden of reviewing such documents requires more than just a page count assessment. He emphasized that in cases like this, the complexity of the material plays a crucial role.

Federal prosecutors also clarified that the case does not involve classified information and that classified material is not anticipated to be introduced in the government's primary case.

Former Attorney General Barr expressed his belief that urgently resolving Trump's cases before the election is crucial because the American public deserves to be informed about potential wrongdoing. Barr labeled the second indictment as straightforward and indicated that with a competent judge, the case could conclude with a verdict before the following summer.

Barr also commented on the possibility of the court accommodating scheduling requests, suggesting that any accommodations would likely only span a few days and not extend as far into the future as the Trump legal team proposes. Barr dismissed the notion that winning the Republican primary would significantly alter the scheduling of indictment trials, emphasizing that candidacy does not grant immunity from legal proceedings. Barr affirmed: "You don’t get immunity for two years in a run-up to an election just by saying, ‘Hey, I’m a candidate.’"

Regarding Trump's indictments, Barr criticized two specific ones – the New York case involving payments to an adult actress, which he saw as a politically motivated attack, and the more recent Georgia case, which he deemed overly extensive. However, Barr regarded the federal cases under Smith's jurisdiction as "legitimate.">

<Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis proposed an Oct. 23 trial start date in the Georgia 2020 election interference case involving former President Donald Trump and his allies after lawyers for one of the co-defendants filed a motion demanding a speedy trial.

The aggressive filing from Kenneth Chesebro, the mastermind behind the plan to send fake electors to Congress from states Trump had lost, surprised legal experts. "He is making a risky gamble," New York University Law Prof. Ryan Goodman wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

When defendants make such requests at the district attorney's office, "that's a declaration of war," Chris Timmons, a former Georgia prosecutor, told Salon.

"Basically, what you're saying is I'm ready to go to trial and I want it tomorrow if I can get it," Timmons said.

A speedy trial request is typically filed in situations where a client, who is innocent, is in custody and can't get a bond, he added.

"I suppose this makes sense if you're Chesebro," Georgia State University Law Prof. Anthony Michael Kreis wrote on X. "He has fewer fingerprints on things in Georgia specifically than the others— his charges are all conspiracy-based. But the removal question complicates: isn't clear that the removal of one defendant doesn't mean the removal of all."

Chesebro is charged with racketeering and other offenses, including conspiring to commit impersonating a public officer, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiring to commit false statements and writings.

Willis responded to Chesebro's speedy trial demand on Thursday calling for the trial for all 19 Fulton defendants to begin in October, according to a court filing — five months earlier than the March 4, 2024, start date she initially proposed last week.

MSNBC legal analyst Katie Phang called the response "Willis calling Kenneth Chesebro's bluff."

"While most defendants seek to delay the day of reckoning for various reasons, on occasion, they seek to enforce their right to a speedy trial," former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade told Salon. "Some want to clear their name and move on. Others hope to catch the prosecution flatfooted and unprepared for trial."

McQuade pointed to the example of former Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who invoked his right to a speedy trial. The case fell apart when it was revealed that the government had violated rules related to sharing evidence during the legal process. This may have happened as a result of the government's rushed efforts to prepare.

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance wrote that Chesebro "thought he was calling Willis' bluff on her readiness to go to trial."

"He was not. Willis is not here to play," she added.

Ultimately, the final decision on timing lies in the hands of Fulton Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who was assigned to the case randomly just last week.

However, "this is a very powerful move," on Chesebro's part, Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, told Salon.

"His demand now forces the trial in this case to take place before the end of this calendar year – for all defendants, unless one or more other defendants can succeed in a 'motion to sever.'"

Former President Donald Trump's attorney immediately moved to sever his case after Willis' filing on Thursday.

There could be a strategic advantage for other defendants Timmons pointed out. Chesebro could be tried on his own or with a couple of other defendants, and everyone else is "severed out."

For Chesebro, this suggests that he's ready to go to trial and "has nothing to hide," Timmons said.

"The other thing is you may not be tried with other defendants," he said. "So, if you're concerned that you're in a trial with Donald Trump and that the case against him is going to be so massive that you just sort of get swept up in it, and the jury comes back [finding everyone] guilty on everything, you might have a better chance if you're on your own. Then the jury has to consider you as an individual."

However, filing the speedy trial request on Chesebro's part is still a big deal, "it's punching somebody in the mouth," he said. "It is a game changer that shifts the entire timetable and everything else in this case.">

<Some of the defendants in the expansive Georgia election interference case may be desperate to cut a deal if others charged alongside Donald Trump start getting convicted, according to a legal expert.

The former president and 18 other people, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Trump's ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows, have been arrested as part of Fulton County DA Fani Willis' investigation into alleged criminal attempts to overturn the 2020 election, with each defendant charged with violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

Willis previously indicated that she intends to bring all 19 defendants to trial at the same time, potentially resulting in mammoth proceedings lasting several months.

However, Georgia judge Scott McAfee has accepted a request from Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who is accused of seven felony counts in Willis' investigation, for a "speedy trial." He set an October 23 date for Chesebro's case to begin.

Speaking to MSNBC's The Last Word, former deputy assistant attorney general Harry Litman suggested that some defendants may want to cooperate with Willis' investigation if Chesebro ends up being found guilty in his trial, or even preemptively flip before Chesebro's case begins.

"It scares them to their soul," Litman replied when asked about whether the other defendants in Trump's case are thinking about co-operating.

"Remember, all 19 here are charged with the vast RICO enterprise. So that might be one thing in Chesebro's head, you can't isolate it just to me, you're going to have to put on much of your case," Litman said.

"But of course, if things come back, they've seen the sort of shock and awe, they'll be looking—it may be too late by then—but they'll be looking very, very much to cut a deal," he added.

Willis' office essentially agreed for Chesebro's trial to begin in two months' time. Judge McAfee has not named any other trial date for the other 18 defendants in the case, including Trump.

Even if Chesebro is put on trial separately, Litman said that the case against him will still be a "pretty big, sprawling proceeding."

Melissa Redmon, a law professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, told Reuters that prosecutors will want to try as many of the 19 defendants in the election interference case together as possible, since the "whole point of RICO is to be able to tell the full story of what everyone did and how their actions were interrelated."

The talk about the defendants in the election interference case comes as former Georgia GOP Finance Chairman Shawn Still, who was charged in connection with being part of the so-called fake elector plot in the state, said that the scheme to falsely declare Trump had beaten President Joe Biden was organized at the behest of the former president.

"Mr. Still, as a presidential elector, was also acting at the direction of the incumbent president of the United States," Still's attorney Thomas Bever wrote in court filings while trying to move the case to federal court. "The president's attorneys instructed Mr. Still and the other contingent electors that they had to meet and cast their ballots on Dec. 14, 2020."

Following Chesebro's speedy trial request, Willis suggested all 19 defendants in her RICO case could be put on trial on October 23, a motion which was rejected by Trump's legal team.

"President Trump also alerts the Court that he will be filing a timely motion to sever his case from that of co-defendant Chesebro, who has filed a demand for speedy trial, or any other co-defendant who files such a demand," Trump's attorney Steven Sadow wrote in response to Willis.

Willis' office has been contacted for comment via email.>

<According to an analysis of a new Politico Magazine/Ipsos poll, "dubious" claims that every Donald Trump indictment results in a boost in his re-election prospects are not borne out by the numbers -- and, in fact, support for the embattled ex-president is in a slow-motion free fall.

Writing for Politico, former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori stated Trump's key defense against his four indictments is falling flat on its face with voters who aren't part of his rabid MAGA base.

As Khardori explained, any chance the former president has of returning to the Oval Office would require him to appeal to independents and undecideds and a growing number instead believe he belongs in jail.

"The survey results suggest Americans are taking the cases seriously — particularly the Justice Department’s 2020 election case — and that most people are skeptical of Trump’s claim to be the victim of a legally baseless witch hunt or an elaborate, multi-jurisdictional effort to 'weaponize' law enforcement authorities against him," he wrote.

To make his point, he noted, "Fifty-nine percent of respondents — including nearly two-thirds of independents — said that the Justice Department’s decision to indict Trump in the 2020 election case was based on a fair evaluation of the evidence and the law. At the same time, however, 44 percent of respondents — including 20 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of independents — said that the decision was based on trying to gain a political advantage for Biden.

Khardori added that there is plenty of room for Trump's support to collapse because a substantial number of voters don't fully understand the charges against him.

"Somewhere between roughly one-quarter and one-third of respondents said that they do not understand the charges in the cases well," he explained, before adding, "That could change as the cases proceed through litigation — and, in particular, if one or more cases goes to trial before next November."

He then predicted, "It is reasonable to assume that the media coverage and the facts revealed at any trials would, on balance, be unhelpful to Trump as a political matter, even if he manages to avoid convictions. Criminal defendants generally do not come out looking better at the end of highly publicized trials, even if they get off at the end of the day.">

<Let’s start with the obvious: It’s perfectly normal for men in the back half of their 70s and beyond to die. The current life expectancy for men in America is 76 (and plummeting by the day). Former President Donald Trump will be 78 next November. President Joe Biden will be 81.

Both men also appear visibly unhealthy. Biden frequently falls. It's easy to forget that each tumble Biden takes on the steps of Air Force One is a potentially life-threatening event. In fact, 32,000 elderly Americans die per year due to injuries related to falls. The fall Biden took on his bike in Delaware last summer was particularly disturbing because his reflexes didn't seem to activate as he collapsed sideways to the pavement.

Biden also frequently wanders despite being closely handled by his staff and the first lady. Wandering is common among people who develop Alzheimer’s disease, which is the fifth leading cause of death in Americans above the age of 65. Reports of his increasingly frequent and severe temper tantrums are also consistent with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, as are his frequent mental lapses in public.

Trump isn’t faring much better. While he’s maintained his mental acuity, he is visibly heavier than ever. The last physical results from his term as president revealed that his body mass index was 30.4, which is considered obese. His waistline seems to have ballooned significantly since then, a fact he recently admitted. Obesity is particularly deadly for men at Trump’s age. The higher someone’s BMI, the shorter their lifespan. The life expectancy of an individual with a BMI over 30 is 77.7 years, which will be Trump’s age by Super Tuesday. Doubtless, Trump’s poor diet and admitted lack of exercise are leading contributors to his obesity. His son, Donald Trump Jr., recently remarked that no one alive has eaten more McDonald’s per capita than his father.

Trump is also a relentlessly negative person, which tends to exacerbate poor health, particularly in the elderly. People who regularly engage in negative emotions are more likely to develop dementia than those who don’t, and people who are frequently hostile have a higher risk of developing heart disease. It stands to reason that Trump’s tendency toward negative emotion will become more pronounced in the coming months as he attempts to fend off multiple federal indictments that carry the potential of a life sentence while running for president.

Of the two possibilities, a premature Trump death is the more harrowing. Forty percent of the country would immediately pour into the streets for a victory parade that would make Pride month look like supper with Great-Aunt Doris. Another 40% would scour the internet for the real story — after the Russiagate hoax and the Hunter Biden laptop cover-up, who could blame them? Others would greet revelers in the streets with AR-15s slung over their shoulders. Who knows what might happen next?

A premature Biden death would be less immediately intense but no less calamitous. It would elevate Vice President Kamala Harris, a politician of such little stature that she was slated to finish sixth in the presidential primary of her home state in 2020 before dropping out. Her presence atop the Democratic ticket would further debase our national politics. A general election matchup between Harris and Trump would almost certainly be the pettiest, dumbest, and most combustible in American history. The sheer idiocy that would reverberate out from such a clash could finally undo the social fabric for good.

The Trump era has seen the nation undergo one monumental stress test after another. That our democracy still stands is a testament to the genius of the framers. But the sudden death of either Biden or Trump would stretch our internal tension to its limits.

The odds of a major political death are untenably high as we enter presidential election season. There is still a chance that one or both of the parties will come to their senses and deny their respective nominations to these old and unhealthy men. But I’m not holding my breath.>

<I want to talk about symbols, images, and fascism.

Here is Trump’s mug shot from his arraignment yesterday in Georgia. It’s a look of defiance — which I’m sure he practiced repeatedly beforehand — intended to make his supporters and his Republican base feel defiant, too.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is Trump’s thousand-word response to Wednesday night’s Republican debate, which he declined to attend.

He timed his arraignment in Georgia for yesterday so that it — and this photo — would dominate Thursday’s and Friday’s news, rather than anything or anyone emerging from the debate.

But a defiant photograph isn’t “news.” It’s a symbol, an image. Which is exactly what Donald Trump is. He has no political platform, no specific policy agenda, no new ideas, and no plan for what he’ll do if he gets a second term.

He exists as a symbol for the anger, discontent, bigotry, and vindictiveness he has unleashed in America.

He is as close as America has come to a fascist leader, who doesn’t want his followers to think or analyze. He wants them only to feel.

Trump’s lackeys fell in line, expressing the defiance Trump projected in his mug shot.

Fox’s Laura Ingraham told viewers that Trump’s arrest was proof that government officials are trying to “take them out.”

Fox’s Sean Hannity said the Department of Justice will target Republicans “until there’s nothing left of the party.”

All brainless bile.

Last Thursday, Trump complained that Fox News “purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they’re not. Just like 2016 all over again … And then they want me to debate!”

Of course he’s angry. For the man who’s all symbol and image and without substance, a photo like the following conveys a brainless buffoon. It must drive him crazy.

But Trump is not a brainless buffoon. He’s a cunning marketer, a diabolic manipulator of the public, a sly producer of his own daily reality show. His lead in the GOP’s presidential sweepstakes has grown. He will almost certainly be the Republican candidate for president next year — even if he’s in jail.

How to debate a symbol? How to take on an image? How should Biden and the Democrats, and everyone who cares deeply about this country, respond to a demagogue who obsesses over what he projects rather than what he stands for? How to deal with a fascist who doesn’t want followers to think but only to feel rage?

Expose him for who he is.>

<Attorney John Eastman, an architect of Donald Trump’s last-ditch bid to subvert the 2020 election, may not postpone his ongoing disbarment hearings just because he’s been indicted in Georgia, a California judge ruled Friday.

Yvette Roland, a judge on the California State Bar Court, said Eastman had effectively waived any rights against self-incrimination by taking the stand in his disbarment proceedings in June — even though he knew he could be indicted in either Washington, D.C., or Georgia.

Eastman testified then for more than eight hours on a wide range of subjects related to his efforts to keep Trump in power, without invoking his Fifth Amendment rights.

“[Eastman] was completely aware that he had potential criminal exposure for his actions surrounding the 2020 election, which is also the subject of the [state bar charges],” Roland wrote in a 10-page ruling. “Yet, Respondent gave considerable testimony without ever invoking the Fifth Amendment and did not seek abatement until six days into trial.”

It’s the latest setback for Eastman as he fights to preserve his law license while facing felony charges in Georgia for his role in an alleged racketeering conspiracy with Trump and 17 other codefendants.

Eastman was a central figure in Trump’s final push to subvert the 2020 election. He helped press state legislatures to consider appointing alternate slates of electors that were later used to stoke a controversy on Jan. 6, 2021. When no state legislatures agreed, Eastman instead pointed to the existence of uncertified slates of pro-Trump activists who claimed to be electors. Eastman directly pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to recognize those false elector slates to stoke a controversy on Jan. 6, 2021.

Though Eastman’s disbarment proceedings began in June, they were postponed to late August amid scheduled conflicts. In the interim, special counsel Jack Smith issued a four-count indictment against Trump alleging multiple conspiracies to subvert the 2020 election. In the indictment, Eastman was described, though not named, as an alleged co-conspirator in the effort, suggesting charges against him could be forthcoming.

Even before Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged Eastman in Georgia, the attorney moved to postpone the remainder of his bar proceedings, saying his criminal exposure had become greater in light of Smith’s case. Willis’ charges only added to his urgency to have the disbarment proceedings delayed.

But state bar authorities rejected his push, saying Eastman knew seven months ago — when the bar charges against him were filed — that he could be facing criminal charges. The issue was discussed in pretrial proceedings, and Eastman opted to press ahead with the state bar proceedings anyway. He took the stand on several different days in June but his testimony had not yet been completed when the proceedings were paused until this week.

It’s unclear if Eastman will seek an appeal of Roland’s ruling or whether he’ll take the stand and attempt to assert his Fifth Amendment rights in response to additional questioning. He’s been present in the courtroom as his proceedings resumed this week with testimony from witnesses called by state bar investigators.>

'(D)id not seek abatement.'

Curious, is it not how judges who actually follow the rules slap the likes of Eastman, Sidney Powell et al down time and again.

In other words: face the music, <boy>! Y'all hear that giant sucking sound as your vaunted bankroll thins by the hour? Won't be long and yer gonna dish out a powerful lot of cash yaself.

<Appearing on MSNBC's "The Katie Phang Show" early Saturday morning, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner claimed Donald Trump's lawyers can expect their proposal to delay their client's trial into 2026 to be burned to the ground by U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Tanya Chutkan on Monday.

Speaking with the host, he agreed with her assertion and that of co-panelist Hugo Lowell of the Guardian, that the motion from the former president's lawyers was blatantly "ludicrous."

"Glenn, you and I have tried cases in federal court, asking for a trial date as far out as April 2026 is not only laughable, but ludicrous. What do you expect to see on Monday with Judge Chutkan?" host Phang prompted.

"Katie, it was not a reasonable ask, and frankly I think that that will make Judge Chutkan's decision it little bit easier," Kirschner replied. "This is not a legitimate lawyering that's going on by Donald Trump's criminal defense attorneys. It feels more like they're acting as assistant campaign chairmen to Donald Trump."

"So listen, if the most reasonable voice in the room is [special counsel] Jack Smith and his team of federal prosecutors, and I believe that those are the reasonable voices, then Judge Chutkan is likely going to go with their recommendation."

"I suspect you are going to see Tanya Chutkan to set a trial date for sometime in early 2024 so that this case can be resolved well in advance of the November 2024 presidential election," he predicted.>

<Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) could face new corruption charges as prosecutors meet with lawyers to weigh a decision, reported the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

According to the report, prosecutors are looking into whether he or his wife Nadine Arslanian sold political favors in exchange for gifts. They are also investigating how a New Jersey businessman became the sole certifier of Halal meat exported from the United States to Egypt one month after a meeting with Menendez.

A report earlier this summer found that another person caught up in the probe, real estate magnate Fred Daibes, has ties to the mob. Other strange transactions have been reported around the case, including that Menendez's wife sold $400,000 in gold bars shortly before his office was facing a federal corruption probe.

"The senator remains confident this matter will be successfully resolved," said a spokeswoman for Menendez, and the senator has categorically denied any wrongdoing, saying of the halal contract allegations in an interview on CNN, "If anyone looks at my history on Egypt, they would know that by both denying aid to Egypt, denying arms sales to Egypt, criticizing its human-rights record, I am not in a position to be helpful to anyone as it relates to Egypt."

Menendez, who has served in the Senate since 2006 and chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, has a history of corruption and gifts-for-services allegations against him.

In 2015, he was indicted on federal charges of conspiracy, bribery, and honest services fraud. Prosecutors asserted that Menendez took $1 million in gifts and campaign contributions from Salomon Melgen, an ophthalmologist from Florida, in exchange for resolving a Medicare billing dispute at Melgen's practice and fast-tracking visa applications for several of his girlfriends. However, the jury deadlocked in that case, causing a mistrial. The Justice Department chose to drop the charges in that case shortly after that.>

<In moderation, religious and spiritual practices can be great for a person's life and mental well-being. But religious fundamentalism—which refers to the belief in the absolute authority of a religious text or leaders—is almost never good for an individual. This is primarily because fundamentalism discourages any logical reasoning or scientific evidence that challenges its scripture, making it inherently maladaptive.

It is not accurate to call religious fundamentalism a disease, because that term refers to a pathology that physically attacks the biology of a system. But fundamentalist ideologies can be thought of as mental parasites. A parasite does not usually kill the host it inhabits, as it is critically dependent on it for survival. Instead, it feeds off it and changes its behavior in ways that benefit its own existence. By understanding how fundamentalist ideologies function and are represented in the brain using this analogy, we can begin to understand how to inoculate against them, and potentially, how to rehabilitate someone who has undergone ideological brainwashing—in other words, a reduction in one's ability to think critically or independently.

How Religious Ideologies Spread

Similar to how organisms and their genes compete for survival in the environment and gene pool, ideas compete for survival inside brains, and in the pool of ideas that inhabit them. The famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has used this insightful analogy to explain how ideas spread and evolve over time. In his influential 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he refers to ideas as "memes" (the mental analog of a gene), which he has defined as self-replicating units that spread throughout culture. We are all familiar with many types of memes, including the various customs, myths, and trends that have become part of human society.

As Dawkins explains, ideas spread through the behavior that they produce in their hosts, which is what enables them to be transmitted from one brain to another. For example, an ideology—such as a religion—that causes its inhabitants to practice its rituals and communicate its beliefs will be transmitted to others. Successful ideas are those that are best able to spread themselves, while those that fail to self-replicate go extinct. In this way, some religious ideologies persist while others fade into oblivion.

It is easy to see why religion quickly spread through culture once it emerged. When humans gained the cognitive capacity to reason and plan for the future, they became aware of their own mortality. The realization that oneself and all one's loved ones will someday die is naturally terrifying, and this existential fear perfectly set the stage for anxiety-reducing ideas, like ones that offer a never-ending afterlife. But religions are complex ideas, and the psychological effects they have on minds go beyond just relieving anxiety.

Essentially, the brain is a biological computer, and an ideology is a set of coded instructions, or "cultural software," that is running on the brain's hardware. Esteemed philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett insightfully described how ideas can control minds when he said, "The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes." In this regard, it is often not the brain that controls the mind, but the memes that compose the mind that control the brain. This is especially the case when the meme is a religion.

Religions Mutate

Like genes and gene complexes, when an ideology is replicated—or passed from one person or group to another—it undergoes mutations. As a consequence, different versions of that belief system are produced, which generate different types of behavior. As such, there are often good and bad variants of any given religion. For instance, there are moderate versions of Christianity and Islam, that promote qualities like a sense of community and a moral code that fosters ethical behavior. These ideas can be beneficial to the host organism, i.e., the religious-practicing individual. At the same time, there are harmful variants of Islam and Christianity—specifically the rigid fundamentalist versions— that cause the host mind to process information in a biased way, think irrationally, and become delusional.....>