<.....Ideological Viruses and Mental Parasites

There are various types of viruses and parasites, and viruses are themselves parasites. While biological viruses are infectious agents that self-replicate inside living cells, computer viruses are destructive pieces of code that insert themselves into existing programs and change the actions of those programs. One particularly nasty type of computer virus that relies on humans for replication, known as a "Trojan horse," disguises itself as something useful or interesting in order to persuade individuals to download and spread it. Similarly, a harmful ideology disguises itself as something beneficial in order to insert itself into the brain of an individual, so that it can instruct them to behave in ways that transmit the mental virus to others. The ability for parasites to modify the behavior of hosts in ways that increase their own "fitness" (i.e., their ability to survive and reproduce) while hurting the fitness of the host, is known as "parasitic manipulation."

One particularly intriguing example of parasitic manipulation occurs when a hairworm infects a grasshopper and seizes its brain in order to survive and self-replicate. This parasite influences its behavior by inserting specific proteins into its brain. Essentially, infected grasshoppers become slaves for parasitic, self-copying machinery.

In much the same way, Christian fundamentalism is a parasitic ideology that inserts itself into brains, commanding individuals to act and think in a certain way—a rigid way that is intolerant to competing ideas. We know that religious fundamentalism is strongly correlated with what psychologists and neuroscientists call "magical thinking," which refers to making connections between actions and events when no such connections exist in reality. Without magical thinking, the religion can't survive, nor can it replicate itself. Another cognitive impairment we see in those with extreme religious views is a greater reliance on intuitive rather than reflective or analytic thought, which frequently leads to incorrect assumptions since intuition is often deceiving or overly simplistic.

We also know that in the United States, Christian fundamentalism is linked to science denial. Since science is nothing more than a method of determining truth using empirical measurement and hypothesis testing, denial of science equates to the denial of objective truth and tangible evidence. In other words, the denial of reality. Not only does fundamentalism promote delusional thinking, it also discourages followers from exposing themselves to any different ideas, which acts to protect the delusions that are essential to the ideology.

If we want to inoculate society against the harms of fundamentalist ideologies, we must start thinking differently about how they function in the brain. An ideology with a tendency to harm its host in an effort to self-replicate gives it all the properties of a parasitic virus, and defending against such a belief system requires understanding it as one. When a fundamentalist ideology inhabits a host brain, the organism's mind is no longer fully in control. The ideology is controlling its behavior and reasoning processes to propagate itself and sustain its survival. This analogy should inform how we approach efforts that attempt to reverse brainwashing and restore cognitive function in areas like analytic reasoning and problem-solving.>

<A flurry of former President Donald Trump's co-defendants in the Georgia election racketeering case are filing motions to request "speedy trials," a move that could separate the case from that of Trump himself. But these filings are not what they appear to be, warned former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman on MSNBC. Indeed, it could be an effort to take advantage of a highly technical loophole in Georgia law that could force prosecutors to throw their cases out.

"I think the most important thing right now is making sure that these cases get to trial immediately, both in Georgia and in the District of Columbia," Akerman told anchor Ari Melber. "We've got a hearing set up for Monday before Judge Chutkan. She's going to set a trial date. I'm hoping that it's going to be January/February. We also have an issue with the trial date in Georgia. We have Mr. Chesebro asking for a speedy trial. Normally with a multi-defendant case like that, that gets tagged to everybody. The judge at this point has said that at this time, it only relates to Mr. Chesebro. So the question is whether the D.A. is going to move to have the entire case put on in October or, in some way, this is going to be put over beyond even despite the invocation of the Speedy Trial Act. But under Georgia law, it's pretty strict that if they don't go at a certain time after he puts in his notice of speedy trial, it's an automatic acquittal. And the problem here is that the D.A. cannot be forced to try this case twice."

"Just briefly, you're explaining the strategy by some defendants is not necessarily that they really want the fastest trial possible," said Melber.

"No, of course not," agreed Akerman.

"But they know there's a sanction there that would be normally what we could call a loophole," said Melber. "They're afforded that under the law, so it's not a bad loophole in the eyes of the way the Georgia law is written."

"It's a loophole in the sense that they're trying to make it look like Mr. Chesebro wants his speedy trial rights when, in fact, I'm sure he's been put up to it by the other defendants," said Akerman. "They all talk. They all have — I'm sure they have a joint defense agreement. And this is not something that was dreamed out of thin air.">

<It’s déjà vu all over again. When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg earlier this year charged Donald Trump with falsifying New York business records to hide damaging information from voters in the 2016 presidential election, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Trump's congressional ally, ran interference, attempting to investigate and intimidate prosecutors. Now that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has charged the former president with 2020 presidential election interference, she faces similar harassment from Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. As before, Jordan’s move is an abuse of power.

As we explained the last time Jordan attempted to intrude, Congress can't use its investigative power to engage in law enforcement. Yet once again that is precisely what Jordan is attempting to do by seeking to second-guess and superintend a pending case by a local prosecutor.

The Constitution gives no express power to our national legislature to engage in investigations. But it has been understood since the very first Congress that the legislative body has such implied powers within Article I. The limits of those powers have been emphasized ever since — including by Trump himself.

During his presidency, Trump and his allies, including Jordan, loudly insisted on those limitations. For example, when Congress tried to obtain Trump’s tax and financial records, Jordan proclaimed it “an unprecedented abuse of the committee’s subpoena authority.”

An emboldened Trump fought a legal battle all the way to the Supreme Court in Trump v. Mazars USA — only for the court to rule against him in a 7-2 decision. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that the “congressional power to obtain information is ‘broad’ and ‘indispensable.’” But in an important qualification directly applicable to Jordan’s demand to Willis, the court’s majority noted that a congressional information request (in that case a subpoena) is valid only if it is “related to, and in furtherance of, a legitimate task of the Congress.” Interfering with a state prosecution is not such a task.

The court also noted that such requests — when they intrude on an area of unique constitutional significance — must meet three other standards: They must not be overly broad, unsubstantiated by evidence or unduly burdensome on the recipient to comply with.

How do Jordan’s specific demands to Willis stack up under the Mazars ruling? He asks for a broad array of confidential or internal documents and communications that would not normally see the light of day, including information that could reveal strategy, witness information, internal deliberations and contacts with special counsel Jack Smith, other prosecutors and government officials. As if that weren't enough, Jordan also wants information about the office’s federal funding streams, much of which is likely completely unrelated to the Trump investigation. And given congressional Republicans’ handling of other sensitive documents, Willis has every reason to believe any of these sensitive matters could be leaked to Trump or the public.

If the House asked a federal prosecutor to provide detailed internal information about an open investigation or prosecution, the Justice Department would not comply, citing constitutional separation of powers. There are innumerable examples of such hard nos, most recently the refusal to provide information about the ongoing Hunter Biden investigation. It should not be any different for a local district attorney under principles of constitutional federalism — due regard for the states as co-equal sovereigns. The Supreme Court has repeatedly backed that up by declaring the “fundamental policy against federal interference with state criminal prosecutions.”

Jordan’s Georgia fishing expedition runs afoul of each of the four specific requirements set out by the court in Mazars. First, there is no legitimate congressional purpose here; as the timing makes clear, this letter is an effort by Jordan to support his favored presidential candidate by disrupting a good-faith prosecution on a legitimate legal basis. Although the defense is entitled to extensive discovery —as it should be — neither the defense, Congress, nor the public is entitled to information that might reveal the detailed thoughts and impressions of the lawyers investigating and prosecuting a case.

Second, the request is far broader than necessary for any legitimate legislative purpose. It requests a breathtaking swath of documents containing confidential and sensitive information that has little to do with the business of Congress — and everything to do with providing political cover for Trump, starting with counter programming his arrest....>

<.....Third, rather than being supported by “detailed and substantial” evidence, it relies primarily on unsubstantiated conclusions from dubious sources. For example, Jordan draws a nefarious inference from the fact that “the Fulton County Superior Court’s Clerk publicly released a list of criminal charges against President Trump reportedly hours before the vote of the grand jury.” But as one of us immediately recognized and wrote that day, and as the clerk has since confirmed, this was an innocent mistake. It came as a result of testing the electronic filing system to make sure it could withstand the onslaught that lay ahead in connection with this large case. These kinds of mistakes happen all the time. It just so happens that this one occurred in an exceptionally high-profile matter.

Fourth, it is entirely unclear what legislative action Congress could take in relation to the evidence Jordan seeks, other than to impede the Georgia prosecution. That would, among other things, run afoul of the 10th Amendment, which reserves such powers to the states. The Fulton County and Georgia legislative bodies have oversight over Willis, not Congress.

Jordan’s demands right now exist only in a letter and not yet in a subpoena. But given these infirmities, Willis may legitimately hold firm and force the House to subpoena and sue to enforce it, just as Bragg did in New York. Courts will not enforce such subpoenas if they would interfere with a state-level criminal prosecution, as is the situation here. (Although a federal district judge initially ruled against Bragg in blocking a subpoena of a former special assistant district attorney, the 2nd Circuit stayed that decision pending appeal. The case was resolved when the parties came to an agreement.)

If the Fani Willis request was the first of Jordan’s misfires, he might be entitled to more benefit of the doubt. But his shenanigans here come on top of a litany of previous dubious deeds and misuse of his office over the years that call into question his fitness for the office he holds.

Perhaps most notably, Jordan himself refused to cooperate with the Jan. 6 House Select Committee’s investigations despite having critically important information, including his contacts with Trump about the events of that terrible day. Ironically, Jordan suggested that the request to question him was “far outside the bounds of any legitimate inquiry, violates core constitutional principles and would serve to further erode legislative norms.”

Willis should call Jordan’s bluff and remind him of those words here— and that as the Supreme Court has put it, “the National Government, anxious though it may be to vindicate and protect federal rights and federal interests, always endeavors to do so in ways that will not unduly interfere with the legitimate activities of the States.”

If it comes to litigation, the courts will see through Jordan’s efforts for the distracting and partisan political theatrics they are. The careful balance of power between the states and the federal government — although long debated ever since our nation’s founding and in the decades following — is now well-defined in all but the most extreme circumstances. This is not one.>

<With Donald Trump facing felony charges over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the former president is flooding the airwaves and his social media platform with distortions, misinformation and unfounded conspiracy theories about his defeat.

It's part of a multiyear effort to undermine public confidence in the American electoral process as he seeks to chart a return to the White House in 2024. There is evidence that his lies are resonating: New polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that 57% of Republicans believe Democrat Joe Biden was not legitimately elected as president.

Here are the facts about Trump's loss in the last presidential election:

REVIEWS AND RECOUNTS CONFIRM BIDEN’S VICTORY

Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 was not particularly close. He won the Electoral College with 306 votes to Trump's 232, and the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots.

Because the Electoral College ultimately determines the presidency, the race was decided by a few battleground states. Many of those states conducted recounts or thorough reviews of the results, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory.

In Arizona, a six-month review of ballots in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, that was commissioned by Republican state legislators not only affirmed Biden’s victory but determined that he should have won by 306 more votes than the officially certified statewide margin of 10,457.

In Georgia, where Trump was recently indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 result there, state officials led by both a Republican governor and secretary of state recertified Biden’s win after conducting three statewide counts. The final official recount narrowed Biden’s victory in the state from just shy of 13,000 votes to just shy of 12,000 votes.

In Michigan, a committee led by Republican state senators concluded there was no widespread or systematic fraud in the state in 2020 after conducting a monthslong investigation. Michigan, where Biden defeated Trump by almost 155,000 votes, or 2.8 percentage points, was less competitive compared with other battleground states, although the result in Wayne County, home of Detroit, was targeted by Trump and his supporters with unfounded voter fraud claims, as were key urban jurisdictions across the country.

In Nevada, the then-secretary of state, Republican Barbara Cegavske, and her office reviewed tens of thousands of allegations of possible voter fraud identified by the Nevada Republican Party but found that almost all were based on incomplete information and a lack of understanding of the state’s voting and registration procedures. For example, Cegavske’s investigation found that of 1,506 alleged instances of ballots being cast in the name of deceased individuals, only 10 warranted further investigation by law enforcement. Similarly, 10 out of 1,778 allegations of double-voting called for further investigation. Biden won Nevada by 33,596 votes, or 2.4 percentage points.

In Pennsylvania, the final certified results had Biden with an 80,555-vote margin over Trump, or 1.2 percentage points. Efforts to overturn Pennsylvania’s election failed in state and federal courts, while no prosecutor, judge or election official in Pennsylvania has raised a concern about widespread fraud. State Republicans continue to attempt their own review of the 2020 results, but that effort has been tied up in the courts and Democrats have called it a “partisan fishing expedition.”

In Wisconsin, a recount slightly improved Biden’s victory over Trump by 87 votes, increasing Biden's statewide lead to 20,682, or 0.6 percentage points. A nonpartisan audit that concluded a year after the election made recommendations on how to improve future elections in Wisconsin but did not uncover evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state, leading the Republican co-chair of the audit committee to declare that “the election was largely safe and secure.” The state’s Assembly speaker, a Republican, ordered a separate review, which a state judge said found “absolutely no evidence of election fraud."...>

<..... AP INVESTIGATION FINDS MINIMAL VOTER FRAUD IN SWING STATES

An exhaustive AP investigation in 2021 found fewer than 475 instances of confirmed voter fraud across six battleground states — nowhere near the magnitude required to sway the outcome of the presidential election.

The review of ballots and records from more than 300 local elections offices found that almost every instance of voter fraud was committed by individuals acting alone and not the result of a massive, coordinated conspiracy to rig the election. The cases involved both registered Democrats and Republicans, and the culprits were almost always caught before the fraudulent ballot was counted.

Some of the cases appeared to be intentional attempts to commit fraud, while others seemed to involve either administrative error or voter confusion, including the case of one Wisconsin man who cast a ballot for Trump but said he was unaware that he was ineligible to vote because he was on parole for a felony conviction.

The AP review also produced no evidence to support Trump’s claims that states tabulated more votes than there are registered voters.

Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.

TRUMP'S OWN ADMINISTRATION FOUND NO WIDESPREAD FRAUD Trump was repeatedly advised by members of his own administration that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

Nine days after the 2020 election, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a statement saying, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history." The statement was co-written by the groups representing the top elections officials in every state.

Less than three weeks later, then-Attorney General William Barr declared that a Justice Department investigation had not uncovered evidence of the widespread voter fraud that Trump had claimed was at the center of a massive conspiracy to steal the election. Barr, who had directed U.S. attorneys and FBI agents across the country to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities, said, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

The Jan. 6 House committee report details additional instances where administration officials and White House staff refuted Trump’s various allegations of voter fraud.

COURTS HEARD TRUMP'S LEGAL CHALLENGES AND REJECTED THEM

The Trump campaign and its backers pursued numerous legal challenges to the election in court and alleged a variety of voter fraud and misconduct. The cases were heard and roundly rejected by dozens of courts at both state and federal levels, including by judges whom Trump appointed.

One of them, U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, was on a federal panel that declined a request to stop Pennsylvania from certifying its results, saying, “Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections.”

The U.S. Supreme Court also rejected several efforts in the weeks after Election Day to overturn the election results in various battleground states that Biden won.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT VOTING MACHINES WERE UNFOUNDED

Many of the claims Trump and his team advanced about a stolen election dealt with the equipment voters used to cast their ballots.

At various times, Trump and his legal team falsely alleged that voting machines were built in Venezuela at the direction of President Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013; that machines were designed to delete or flip votes cast for Trump; and that the U.S. Army had seized a computer server in Germany that held secrets to U.S. voting irregularities.

None of those claims was ever substantiated or corroborated. CISA's joint statement released after the election said, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”

Nonetheless, many of these and other unfounded claims were repeated on Fox News, both by members of the Trump team as well as by some of the network’s on-air personalities. Dominion Voting Systems sued the network for $1.6 billion, claiming the outlet’s airing of these allegations amounted to defamation.

Records of internal communications at Fox News unearthed in the case showed that the network aired the claims even though its biggest stars, including Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, as well as the company's chairman, Rupert Murdoch, did not believe they were true.

Dominion and Fox News settled out of court for $787.5 million....>

<.....CLAIMS INVOLVING SUITCASES AND BALLOT MULES ARE DEBUNKED

Trump and his supporters also have claimed that a number of other factors contributed to a broader effort to steal the presidential election.

One theory advanced by both Trump and one of his lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, is that “suitcases” full of fraudulent ballots in Georgia cost Trump the election there.

Then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen told the Jan. 6 House committee that he personally reviewed the video purported to show the fraud allegation in question. He recounted telling Trump: “It wasn’t a suitcase. It was a bin. That’s what they use when they’re counting ballots. It’s benign.”

State and county officials also had confirmed the containers were regular ballot containers on wheels, which are used in normal ballot processing.

But a week later, Trump publicly repeated the suitcase theory, saying, “There is even security camera footage from Georgia that shows officials telling poll watchers to leave the room before pulling suitcases of ballots out from under the tables and continuing to count for hours.”

Richard Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general, told the Jan. 6 committee that, days later, he told Trump that “these allegations about ballots being smuggled in in a suitcase and run through the machine several times, it was not true. … We looked at the video, we interviewed the witnesses.” But Trump continued to repeat the false claim.

Another debunked claim spinning a tale of 2,000 so-called ballot mules was featured in a film that ran in hundreds of theaters last spring. The film alleges that Democrat-aligned individuals were paid to illegally collect and drop ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But the AP determined that the allegations were based on flawed analysis of cellphone location data and drop box surveillance footage.>

<During an appearance on MSNBC, former Watergate attorney Jill Wine-Banks warned Donald Trump he could end up in pre-trial detention if he doesn't tone down his rhetoric about his criminal indictments.

In a segment with host Ayman Mohyeldin on the former president's attacks on prosecutors, including Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special counsel Jack Smith, Wine-Banks suggested sanctioning Trump financially would be ineffective since he would just pay the fines with his supporter's donations.

As the expert explained, Trump is putting the judges in a tough spot if they decide to jail the former president, but that he may leave them no choice.

According to Wine-Banks, Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump's Washington D.C. federal trial, is "up to the task" of handling the former president's attacks.

"I think that she can handle it, but she is in a very difficult position because putting him in custody has to be a last resort," she explained. "He may push her to that, but he will see it as a political advantage, and so she has to be careful not to give him that advantage. But there is a limit to what she can do to enforce his compliance with what her reasonable requirements for his release are."

"She can penalize him with a monetary fine but his supporters are paying his legal bills already so it doesn't hurt him and he doesn't care about them and their money," she added. "And so I don't know how much benefit in terms of his compliance it would be to fine him if he doesn't obey the fine. She said she would move to trial date up but she can only move it up so far without denying him due process and the adequate time to prepare, and he knows that and she knows that."

"So there's a very limited amount of things that she can do other than incarceration, and I think that that may have to be if he -- you know [political consultant] Stuart Stevens is right: he can't control himself," she elaborated. "And so if he goes way beyond the bounds and is clear in his threats and provoking his supporters to create violence in response to these threats, I think that he will have to be shut up by being incarcerated, and we have an example of Eugene Debs who ran for president from jail and so it is possible that he can continue his campaign from jail.">

<Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the University of California Berkeley’s Rubric for Assessing Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging – but it makes for salutary reading. It demands that a low score be given to any applicant who “states the intention of ignoring the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treating everyone the same’”.

Such a diktat is the tip of a “woke” iceberg poised to sink Western liberalism, argues John Gray. “The university campus,” he writes in The New Leviathans, “is the model for an inquisitorial reign that has extended its reach throughout society.” Just as well, no doubt, that this former Oxford don got out of academia a few years ago, before the inquisitors moved in.

Gray doesn’t cite, say, virtue-­signalling personal pronouns that must sign off every corporate email, nor does he name-check former philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, driven out of her university post for arguing that biological sex is not a social construct. But such examples are implicit in his denunciation of what he calls “woke religion”.

That seeming oxymoron is typical of Gray’s elegy for western liberalism. In his 2007 book Black Mass, he argued that the secular ideologies that have shaped our history since the Enlightenment, ones ostensibly based on rejecting traditional faiths in favour of cool reason, were actually expressions of repressed religion. To such ersatz faiths as Bolshevism, free-market fanaticism, transhumanism and militant atheism, Gray now adds woke religion.

What irks him most is that the supposedly liberal world is being refashioned according to American norms. It’s US cultural imperialism, akin to the global success of Friends or McDonalds, but more sinister. Bestsellers such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, as Gray puts it, “provincialise a universal evil”. He contends instead that “a critique of racism cannot be based on 21st-century American theories of ‘whiteness’”. Racism is not just an African-American experience.

Woke, for Gray, is not just a cult, but a career path by which useless graduates can reclaim lost status. The problem is that too many of us have graduated in the humanities, and are likely to join what he calls “a lumpen intelligentsia that is economically superfluous”. That is a kind way of putting it: the late anthropologist David Graeber reckoned that one of the problems with Western society today is so many of us are working at what he called “bulls--t jobs”.

Gray draws instead on historian Peter Turchin’s recent account of surplus intellectuals, an expanding underclass without power or purpose. As capitalism concentrates power and wealth in fewer hands, large swathes of elites such as professors, journalists, lawyers charity workers, community activists find redemption from symbolic castration and dwindling status in becoming grand inquisitors of the wokerati. “Woke movements are the revolt of the professional bourgeoisie.” Gray knows what he’s on about: he was a Guardian columnist for many years.

All of this would have been surprising to the man who inspired this book, Thomas Hobbes. In his 1651 book Leviathan, the philosopher imagined how humankind might escape the state of nature, that war of all-against-all in which each of us faces continual danger and fear of violent death. His Leviathan was a state whose powers were unchecked, but whose goals were strictly limited to safeguarding its subjects from tyranny and lawlessness...>

<.....Gray argues that the “New Leviathans” that give his book its title are, paradoxically, forcing liberty on us, namely by telling us what they think we need if we want to be truly free. Stalin and Mao, in this sense, prefigured Stonewall and other foes of free speech: instead of providing safeguard against tyranny, their unchecked power was about engineering human souls. Stalin and Mao’s dictatorial successors, Putin and Xi, follow the same playbook. “Russia,” Gray writes, “has projected famine and poverty across the world, [and] China has established a surveillance regime which through exports of technology threatens freedom in the West.”

This analysis seems uncontroversial. Where Gray’s idea applies to the self-loathing West is in what he describes as its collapse into a Hobbesian state of nature in which “dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased.” Our own dissidents aren’t crushed with ice-picks or polonium, but by social media and human-resources inquisitors, while libraries, galleries and museums exclude viewpoints that are condemned as reactionary. The West’s new leviathan is just as ruthless as Russia or China’s: “Woke hyperliberalism is Puritan moral frenzy unrestrained by divine mercy or forgiveness of sin. There is no tolerance for those who refuse to be saved.”

This wasn’t in the script. In 1992, when Francis Fukuyama celebrated Western victory in the Cold War with his The End of History and the Last Man, he suggested that the triumph of Western liberalism over Soviet totalitarianism was the decisive victory for freedom. Gray’s 1998 book False Dawn rubbished Fukuyama’s hubris, but perhaps even he didn’t foresee the capture of liberalism, three decades on, by forces effectively bent on destroying it.

Gray is always a bracing thinker. He rounds on climate ideologues for not realising the truth that “renewable energy is a fossil-fuel derivative”: all those electric batteries require lithium, nickel and cobalt, which need to be mined using gas and oil. He skewers, too, the current generation of liberals who never tire of denouncing the West for its racism, sexism and imperialism. “These same liberals,” he points out, “insist that Western values – human rights, personal autonomy and the like – must be projected to the last corners of the Earth.”

And when Gray imagines the future, it is in colourful terms. After Putin’s dream of a Great Rus founders in the wasteland to which he is reducing Ukraine, what will the world look like? Russia will become “a steampunk Byzantium with nukes”. China? “A high-tech Panopticon.” The EU? An “avatar of the Holy Roman Empire, a faded kaleidoscope of shifting principalities and powers.” And America? “A florid hybrid of fundamentalist sects, woke cults and techno-futurist oligarchs.” These new leviathans, Gray predicts, will be surrounded by ungoverned zones, some of which will never emerge from anarchy. In this context, what’s happening in Niger and the Central African Republic, with the Wagner group helping to strangle infant democracies, is just a foretaste.

What is clear to Gray is that instead of the triumph of western liberalism, purportedly the most successful export product in history, we are witnessing precisely what Hobbes sought to banish for good: the war of all-against-all. Human lives are likely to become nasty, brutish and short – precisely what the writer of Leviathan sought to prevent. All-conquering, history-ending Western liberalism? A fairy tale told by an idiot, past its sell-by date, signifying nothing.>

<Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows will be handed a legal loss by Judge Steve C. Jones on Monday after the "fatal" concession his legal team made amid attempts to move his case to federal court, legal analysts predicted on Sunday.

Meadows was indicted on felony charges alongside former President Donald Trump and 17 others in Georgia by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis earlier this month. Trump's former chief of staff is facing charges of violating the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) laws and solicitation of violation of oath by public officer in relation to his alleged role in a plot to illegally overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Days after his indictment, Meadows' attorneys filed a request to remove the case from Fulton County to a federal court, arguing that he was performing his official duties at the time of his alleged crimes.

"Mr. Meadows has the right to remove this matter," the filing states. "The conduct giving rise to the charges in the indictment all occurred during his tenure and as part of his service as Chief of Staff. Nothing Mr. Meadows is alleged in the indictment to have done is criminal per se. Mr. Meadows intends to file a motion to dismiss the indictment...as soon as is feasible."

Meanwhile, Meadows filed a motion to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on Tuesday, asking the federal court to help him avoid arrest after Willis rejected his proposed deadline extension and threatened to arrest him if he failed to agree to the bond terms and voluntarily surrender. Jones ruled against Meadows on Wednesday.

In an article written in Just Security on Sunday, legal analysts Walter Shaub, Normal L. Eisen, and Joshua Kolb said on Meadow's attempt to remove his case, "Even though the legal hurdle is low and the law is favorable to federal officers, Meadows faces a seemingly insurmountable barrier."

The barrier being that Meadow's lawyers have "remarkably conceded that 'all the substantive allegations in the Indictment concern unquestionably political activity.' In the context of these charges, that should be fatal to Meadows' claim for removal," the article states.

Shaub, Eisen and Kolb wrote that the Hatch Act, which prohibits executive branch employees from interfering in elections, shows that Meadows "will not be able to meet his burden of showing the alleged conduct was connected to his official duties."

The legal analysts added that the former chief of staff will have to show that his conduct was for or relating to any act under the "color of his office" in order to move his case to a federal court and that he has a "colorable federal defense" to the charges.

"The first prong of the removal test is generally considered to have a low threshold in the Eleventh Circuit, 'requir[ing] only a causal 'connection' or 'association' between the act in question and the federal office," Shaub, Eisen and Kolb wrote.

Jonathan Turley, legal analyst and law professor at George Washington University, told Newsweek on Sunday, "The Hatch Act is a legitimate objection to raise to the removal motion. It is certainly true that Meadows concedes in his brief that "all the substantive allegations in the Indictment concern unquestionably political activity."

He continued: "However, the decision of Willis to include over 160 different acts, tweets, and statements in the indictment could come back to haunt the prosecution. Some of the acts do seem to fall into Meadows' role as chief of staff. There are good arguments on both sides. However, it could require an appellate process to fully sort out. It will require not only an interpretation of the scope and applicability of the Hatch Act as well as the scope of the duties of the Chief of Staff. Chiefs of Staff tend to be jacks of all trades. They deal with a range of legislative and political matters facing a president. To the extent that this matter is appealed, it is not clear if the court will enjoin further proceedings pending a final decision."

Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg also told Newsweek on Sunday, "I agree that the Hatch Act specifically barred Meadows' conduct and should prove fatal for his attempt to remove the case to federal court. His removal request made a crucial concession that all of the 'substantive allegations in the Indictment concern unquestionably political activity.' That should be enough under the Hatch Act for Judge Jones to reject Meadows' Motion."

Meanwhile, former Department of Defense (DOD) official Ryan Goodman took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to comment about the article, praising the legal scholars' analysis.

<America is rapidly bifurcating — becoming two nations — and one of the main drivers of the process is a federal system that encourages Red states to mooch off Blue states, using essentially stolen tax money to reinvent the old Confederacy, “own the libs,” and wage “war on woke.”

Most Red states have become oligarchic white supremacist medieval-like fiefdoms with obscene levels of often multigenerational wealth at the top, extreme poverty at the bottom, and working people, women, and minorities kept in subordinate roles through explicit government and corporate policy.

In this, these Red states are following the once-classic European and later Southern US tradition of a patriarchal, hierarchical society run by male kings, nobles, plantation masters, and wealthy churchmen, with all the work done by serfs, slaves, women, or impoverished wage-slaves.

Frederick Douglass, who was born into Southern slavery, described the South as “a little nation by itself, having its own language, its own rules, regulations, and customs.”

Fewer than 2000 families — six-tenths of one percent of the Southern population — owned more than 50 enslaved people and ruled the oligarchy that we call the Confederacy with an iron fist. The 75 percent of white people in the South during that era who did not own any enslaved persons generally lived in deep poverty.

Women had no rights, queer people were routinely tortured and murdered, education for both enslaved Africans and poor whites was generally outlawed, religious attendance was often mandated, and hunger and disease stalked all but those in the families of the two thousand morbidly rich planter dynasties.

Modern-day Red states are doing their best to recreate that old Confederacy, right down to state Senator Kathy Chism’s new effort to return the Confederate battle flag to Mississippi's state flag. Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence have both emphasized their presidential pledges to restore the names of murderous Civil War traitors to American military bases, celebrating their armed defense of the “values” of the Old South.

Today’s version of yesteryear’s plantation owners are called CEOs, hedge and vulture fund managers, and the morbidly rich.

They use the power of political bribery given them by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — with Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking Citizens United vote on behalf of his sugar daddy Harlan Crow — to lord over their Red states, regardless of the will of those states’ citizens.

Working people in Red states are kept in poverty by “Right to Work for Less” laws based on the GOP’s 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (passed over Harry Truman’s veto), deprived of healthcare by their governors’ refusal to expand Medicaid to cover all low-wage working people, and draconian cuts along with byzantine bureaucratic obstacles to getting state aid ranging from housing support to food stamps to subsidized daycare to unemployment insurance.

Women are returning to chattel status in Red states, the property of their fathers or husbands, their bondage enforced by bounty systems and the threat of imprisonment should they try to assert agency over their own bodies.

Multiple Red states have outlawed teaching the actual history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the ongoing violence and persecution suffered by racial, gender, and religious minorities. Many are using government tax revenues to subsidize typically-all-white “Christian” religious schools, a trend spreading across Republican-controlled states like an out-of-control fungus.

Almost a dozen GOP-controlled states have passed laws criminalizing protests against Republican policies, and, writes The Atlantic quoting the International Center for Non-for-Profit Law, “several of those states have simultaneously provided civil or criminal protection for drivers who hit [and kill] protesters…”

Others have banned books and fired teachers who dare discuss diversity or basic sex education. Many, as I wrote here yesterday, are withholding state funds from banking and investment institutions that consider the environment, social justice, or governance on behalf of the working class and the poor (ESG) when making business decisions.

Climate change, they’ll tell you as they take campaign funds from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it’s created, is a hoax perpetrated by liberal scientists who are somehow “getting rich” by warning the world of its consequences.

Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis no longer rule the South on behalf of the notorious “2000 families” but their spiritual heirs, today’s Red state governors, would make them proud with their restrictions on voting, encouragement of armed white supremacist vigilantism, and state tax subsidies for American oligarch billionaires and their corporate empires....>

<....Georgia Governor Brian Kemp — whose family, investigative reporter Greg Palast discovered, was the first to bring enslaved Africans to Georgia — famously signed a law codifying 10-hour voting lines in Black neighborhoods and giving his state the power to throw people off voting rolls without justification in a closed-door ceremony before a painting of one of the 2000 families’ Georgia slave plantations.

It’s said that Red states are trying to take us back to the 1950s. In fact, most are shooting for the 1870s, when women were the property of their husbands, poor children worked 12-hour days for pennies, queer people were invisible, and Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic people could be murdered with impunity.

On the other hand, Blue states have embraced 21st-century values of inclusiveness, tolerance, education, healthcare, a clean environment, worker’s rights, higher minimum wages and unionization, gun safety, paid sick leave, and are working to override the electoral college to bring democracy to the race for president.

Most have enacted gun control laws that often include assault weapon bans, outlawed forced “captive audience” union-busting meetings, expanded drug treatment programs, decriminalized marijuana, strengthened abortion rights protections, raised their minimum wages, and are moving quickly to green their economies to mitigate climate change.

They’re offering protections to asylum seekers, women seeking medical care, and transgender individuals fleeing overt persecution in Red states. They celebrate gay marriage and honor the holidays of religious minorities. Women and racial minorities make up large parts of their legislative bodies and occupy many of their governor’s offices.

In this, Blue states are following the vision and values laid out by several of America’s Founders who helped create the first nation in world history espousing the idea that nobody should have to live in poverty and an important role of government was to prevent people from falling through the cracks.

Thomas Paine, for example, laid out a proposal for what we today call Social Security in his pamphlet Agrarian Justice, and Thomas Jefferson created the nation’s first totally free university (the University of Virginia). Half the delegates to the Constitutional Convention spoke against slavery as a curse against our nation’s ideals, although it took a bloody war to end that “peculiar institution” held so tightly in the grip of the 2000 families.

Even in the first years of our republic, the founding generation understood that caring for the public good was an essential function of government, as referenced in the preamble to the Constitution. President George Washington signed the first legislation providing federal funds for poorhouses that including food, clothing, shelter, and medical care along with job training.

Three decades later, when the legislation was up for renewal, President James Madison (the “Father of the Constitution”) vetoed a provision proposed by Southern states that would have cycled those revenues through local churches, writing in his veto message that federal funding of churches — even for charitable antipoverty purposes the government supported — “would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

So, how did we get here and what can we do about it?

Ironically, it turns out that Red states are able to carry out their campaign of reviving the old Confederacy and its values of patriarchy, hierarchy, and wage slavery in large part because Blue states are subsidizing them.

While Donald Trump carried 2,497 counties in the 2020 election compared to Joe Biden’s 477 counties, the Blue counties Biden carried generated a total of 71 percent of the nation’s economic activity.

The fiscal health of Blue states and counties — along with widespread Red state poverty exacerbated by Red State tax breaks for the morbidly rich — accounts for the bizarre reality that Blue states are subsidizing the brutal and retrograde policies of Red states.

A March 2023 report from the Rockefeller Institute lays out how glaring this appropriation of Blue state revenue is by the Red states. In just New York, for example, they write that over a five-year period:

“New York taxpayers have given $142.6 billion more to the federal government than New York residents have received back in federal spending.”....>

<.....As the Associated Press summarized in an article titled AP FACT CHECK: Blue high-tax states fund red low-tax states:

“Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.

“Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for tax every dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.

“California fared a bit better than other blue states. It received 96 cents for every dollar the state sent to Washington.”

When the Biden administration tried to just slightly slow down the Red state gravy train, specifying in the American Rescue Plan that the subsidies to the states for helping people who lost their jobs due to Covid could not be misappropriated and redirected to tax cuts for local billionaires, their politicians — dancing to the tune of their in-state oligarchs — went ballistic. As Forbes documented:

“So far, a total of 18 red states are plaintiffs in five separate lawsuits challenging a provision in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Biden signed into law last month which says that state governments cannot use any of the $350 billion in federal pandemic relief funds coming their way to ‘either directly or indirectly offset a reduction’ in their net tax revenue resulting from state tax cuts.

“In a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, 21 Republican state attorneys general described it as ‘the greatest attempted invasion of state sovereignty by Congress in the history of our Republic.’”

Federal policy fails to equalize revenue flowing to Red states against the tax money they send Washington DC. This loophole in US tax law is driving this bizarre process where citizens in Blue states are forced by law to pay for all-white “Christian” academies, enforcement of abortion restrictions, persecution of asylum seekers and immigrants, and political attacks on queer people.

Red state “welfare queen” governors and legislatures are going to happily continue this grift as long as we let them get away with it. Congress should pass legislation mandating that Red state revenues to DC must at least match 90 percent of the money they get back; 100 percent would be better, and help hugely with our nation’s budget deficit.

It’s time to end Red state welfare!>

<citizens! know your mass shooter — use this handy guide:

<Questions related to bias, objectivity, and accuracy in news hang over every media outlet, journalist, and news consumer. While nothing new to the news industry, understanding which news sources are reliable and in which direction they lean has become an increasingly daunting task given the mass proliferation of new outlets and the rise of infotainment.

Furthermore, in a time of bad actors, misinformation, and a political class blurring the lines between statesmen and media figures – members of Congress hosting cable news shows for example – the question of who to trust has never been more important for the health of our democracy.

A Colorado startup called Ad Fontes (meaning ‘to the sources’ in Latin), which recently raised $4.2 million in a first round of financing, believes it can help answer that question with its Media Bias Chart, which released a major data update earlier in the month.

The chart rates publications on two separate criteria, reliability and bias. On one axis, reliability is charted from 0 to 64 with anything over 40 coming in as very reliable. Publications that land somewhere between 40 and 30 are still quite reliable but include much more analysis or opinion. Anything below 24 is characterized as “Selective or Incomplete Story/Unfair Persuasion/Propaganda.”

The other axis plots how far away from zero publications veer, with zero being purely balanced coverage and -42 being “most extreme left” and 42 being “most extreme right.”

Cable News Networks

When looking at the five top cable news networks, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, Newsmax, and NewsNation, CNN and NewsNation lead the pack in reliability with a 39.3 and 39.2 rating, respectively. MSNBC comes in third with a 31.5 reliability rating, while Fox has a 26 rating, and NewsMax is in “propaganda” territory with a 18.7 rating.

In terms of bias, NewsNation lands in the middle with a 2, skewing it ever-so-slightly right. CNN is next with a -10, putting it in “skews left” territory, while MSNBC has “strong left” rating of -16.8. Fox charts at “strong right” with a 17.83, while NewsMax is in “hyper-partisan right” territory with a 21.33.

Notably, Fox News and MSNBC have a wide range of reliability on the chart, while CNN’s programming remains between the 35 to 45 area.

Ad Fontes founder Vanessa Otero explained her methodology in a recent op-ed, writing, “all our articles and episodes have been rated by three-person (left-right-center) panels of Ad Fontes-trained analysts. We currently have over 60 analysts on staff who have collectively manually rated over 60,000 pieces of news and informational content.” Otero acknowledged that both she and her analysts have an inherent bias and that they actively work to “mitigate” those by “using repeatable standards and metrics and allowing accountability by having others observe” their process....>

<.....Looking at different hours of cable news television shows the disparities within cable news networks when it comes to reliability. The morning shows, for example, chart as more reliable than the networks as a whole, while prime time comes in as less so.

Fox’s Fox & Friends chart at 30.7 for reliability, higher than Fox’s overall 26. Fox & Friends rates in “hyper-partisan right” territory for bias, however, with a 21 — further right than the network overall. MSNBC’s Morning Joe is the most reliable of the top 3 cable news morning shows with a rating of 37.8. CNN This Morning is close behind with a 36.8 reliability rating, both land in “strong left” territory in terms of bias.

At 9 p.m., Fox’s Hannity scored a reliability rating of only 19.8 – putting it in “propaganda” territory. Rachel Maddow, who only hosts on Mondays, scored a reliability rating of 36.7 while Alex Wagner, who hosts the rest of the week, charted a 31.25. Maddow landed as more partisan than Wagner with a -17.7 and -15-75, respectively. Hannity was further from the center with a 24.6 rating. CNN’s 9 p.m. programming, which only recently got a permanent host in Kaitlin Collins, was not charted.

At 5 p.m., cable news’s top-rated show, The Five, charted at a 25.24 for reliability and a “strong right” 18 for bias. MSNBC’s Deadline: White House was more skewed with a -19, but more reliable at 33.3. CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper was the hour’s most reliable show with 36.9 rating and charted at -15.2 for bias.

Overall, of the top three cable news networks, Bret Baier’s Special Report landed as the most reliable program with a 44.33 rating and charted as “skews right” with a 9. CBS Nightly News with Norah O’Donnell, NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, and ABC World News Tonight with David Muir all rated just above Baier, in that order, as the most reliable news broadcasts in the U.S.

CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer wasn’t far behind Baier with a reliable rating of 42.04 and a -11.6 “skews left” bias. Anderson Cooper landed with a 38.10 reliability rating and -13 for bias. Maddow was MSNBC’s most reliable show, while Chris Haye’s All In scored a “propaganda” level 21.7 – Joy Reid fared a bit better with a 23.7 reliability rating. Reid charted a -20.7 for bias, while Hayes was at -18.4.

Chris Cuomo, the former CNN host who now helms the 8 p.m. hour of NewsNation, landed at -5.39 for bias, with a 30.88 reliability ratings.

Mediaite founder and NewsNation’s 9 p.m. host Dan Abrams lands smack dab in the middle on bias, achieving a 0.25, with a 35.89 reliability number.

Fox’s Jesse Watters Prime Time charted at a low 16.91 for reliability, below even NewsMax’s Greg Kelly who scored a 19.7. Laura Ingraham charted a 25.71 for reliability, but was more rightward than Watters scoring a 25.7 to his 23.3 for bias.>

<A Florida prosecutor who was one of two fired by Gov. Ron DeSantis as part of his war on "wokeness" is questioning the timing of her dismissal while revealing that she was poised to bring charges against a bevy of crooked cops.

In an interview with the Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery, Orlando-based State Attorney Monique Worrell suggested that DeSantis -- who is running a faltering campaign to be the 2024 Republican Party's presidential nominee -- may have been giving a local sheriff an assist by removing her from her post.

Worrell notes she was looking into a cover-up conspiracy among law officers who were faking documents to disguise accusations of abusive behavior.

Speaking with the Beast, she explained, "They thought that I was overly critical of law enforcement and didn't do anything against ‘real criminals.' Apparently there’s a difference between citizens who commit crimes and cops who commit crimes.”

Worrell reportedly noted that there are approximately 20 law enforcement agencies that were balking at her investigation and DeSantis rode to their rescue.

"And they were all working against me, because I was prosecuting their cops, the ones who used to do things and get away with them,” she accused.

Pagliery wrote, "of all his stunning power grabs, perhaps the most shocking was the vengeful way DeSantis removed two progressive prosecutors in Central Florida. In August of last year, he fired Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, citing the prosecutor’s stated refusal to jail women for having an abortion that violated Florida’s increasingly stringent and conservative laws."

According to Worrell, it appears DeSantis has been targeting her for months.

"Worrell said she’s less than two weeks away from making the final decision of whether or not to sue the state over the way it handled her ousting. But she’s already developing a plan to run for re-election next year—potentially facing her replacement as an incumbent," Pagliery wrote.>

<Posting to his Truth Social account on Monday in a typo-ridden, all-caps manifesto, former President Donald Trump rewrote history to claim that he had never been subject to an impeachment inquiry, implying that members of Congress simply voted on his impeachment without considering any evidence.

"I NEVER HAD AN IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY, I HAD AN IMPEACHMENT, WHICH I WON! IT WAS STARTED IMMEDIATELY, NO MEETINGS, NO STUDY, NO DELAYS," Trump wrote. "THE LUNATIC FASCHISTS [sic] & MARXISTS PLAY THE GAME DIFFERENTLY."

"THEY ARE OUT TO DESTROY AMERICA. MAGA!" he concluded.

Contrary to Trump's assertion, there was an impeachment inquiry and fact-finding stage both times he was impeached. Trump refused to testify in his defense in the second impeachment for inciting the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, proclaiming the proceedings were rigged from the start.

Trump's outburst followed another post earlier in the morning, during which he accused President Joe Biden of orchestrating the criminal charges against him.

"The division, anger, and hatred that Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President in the history of the United States, has caused by Indicting his Political Opponent, who is leading him in the polls, all for the sake of Election Interference, and getting even for the very fertile investigations of him by the Republican Congress," wrote Trump. "It will only get worse because these deranged lunatics know no bounds. Someday, however, Sanity will again prevail. MAGA!">

<Trump attorney Alina Habba claimed that the former president will not need any preparation ahead of his numerous overlapping trials because he is "incredibly intelligent" unlike the "average person." Habba told Fox News host Shannon Bream that "if this was a normal person... I could understand the concern" but Trump is "incredibly intelligent and he knows the ropes." She questioned, "What is he going to have to be prepped for? The truth? You don't have to prep much when you've done nothing wrong."

Some legal experts cautioned that Habba undercut Trump's argument that he needed extensive time to prepare for his trials. "Trump's lawyer tells FOX her client 'knows all the facts' and doesn't need time to prep for the coup trial — while his other lawyer says he needs till April 2026 because it's so complex," noted longtime Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe. "Wow," marveled attorney George Conway, writing that Habba "really did" destroy Trump's lawyers' argument. "Not a great statement to make just prior to DC Judge anticipated ruling tomorrow on DC trial date," warned former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. "The more his lawyers speak for political purposes, the more they harm/impact the legal case," tweeted national security attorney Mark Zaid.>

Habba is not too swift in the head.

<Former President Donald Trump criticized special counsel Jack Smith's office after a report that a member of his team had a pre-indictment meeting at the White House earlier this year — but a source told NBC News the meeting was with a career White House staffer and not, as he claims, a sitdown to get Biden administration approval for criminal charges.

“It has just been reported that aides to TRUMP prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, met with high officials at the White House just prior to these political SleazeBags Indicating me OVER NOTHING," Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social Monday.

"If this is so, which it is, that means that Biden and his Fascist Thugs knew and APPROVED of this Country dividing Form of Election Interference, despite their insisting that they 'knew nothing,'" Trump added.

Trump was referencing a New York Post report from Saturday that Jay Bratt, the Justice Department's top counterintelligence official, had a meeting at the White House on March 31 with Caroline Saba, who was then deputy chief of staff for the White House Counsel's office. They were also joined by an FBI field agent, the report said.

The Post connected the meeting to Trump's subsequent indictment on charges that he mishandled a trove of national secrets he took with him from the White House, writing, "Nine weeks later, Trump was indicted by Smith’s office."

A source directly familiar with the meeting told NBC News that Saba had facilitated a meeting between Bratt — a key investigator in the documents case — and a career White House official who was in their position during the Trump administration as well.

White House visitor logs recorded the meeting on March 31, 2023, but it is shown just as a meeting between Saba and Bratt.

According to the source, the White House Counsel’s office would attend such a meeting because the counsel represents the institution of the White House and the employees under that umbrella, not just the president.

Bratt was one of the original investigators in the documents case and remained involved after Smith was named special counsel in November. Trump was indicted in the case in June on 37 federal felony counts, including willful retention of national defense information, making false statements and representations, and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

He was hit with additional charges including trying to tamper with evidence in a superseding indictment last month. He's pleaded not guilty and maintains the case is politically motivated.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel's office, told the Post that Bratt was at the White House for a “case-related interview” but declined further comment.

Saba no longer works at the White House.

A spokesperson for Trump's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In his post, Trump said the meeting shows the Biden administration's claims they haven't been involved with the Smith probes is a "big lie." "Dismiss case!" he wrote in all capital letters.

The documents case is scheduled to go to trial in May of next year.

In a separate investigation being led by Smith's office, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan on Monday set a March 4, 2024 trial date in the election interference case.>

<The conservative chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday told the new liberal majority in a scathing email that they had staged a “coup” and conducted an “illegal experiment” when they voted to weaken her powers and fire the director of state courts.

Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, in two emails obtained by The Associated Press, said that firing and hiring a new state court director was illegal and ordered interim state court director Audrey Skwierawski to stop signing orders without her knowledge or approval.

“You are making a mess of the judiciary, the court and the institution for years to come,” Ziegler wrote to her fellow justices and Skwierawski. “This must stop. ... I have no confidence in the recent hostile takeover and the chaotic effect it has had on the court, staff, and the overall stable functioning of the courts."

Liberals gained a 4-3 majority on Aug. 1 when Justice Janet Protasiewicz began her 10-year term after winning election in April. Conservatives had held the majority for 15 years prior to that. The emails are the latest sign of broiling tensions on the court since liberals took control.

In their first week in power, the liberal justices voted to fire the state court director, hire Skwierawski and create a committee to do much of the work that the chief justice had done, a move that significantly weakened Ziegler. She was elected by the conservative majority to a second two-year term as chief justice in May.

On Monday, Ziegler sent Skwierawski an email telling her to stop signing orders under her name.

“It has come to my attention that you have been signing my reserve judge orders without my knowledge or approval,” Ziegler wrote in the email. “You never asked me for permission. You do not have my permission. Stop. These orders are in my name. You have no lawful authority to sign them. If you have signed anything else under my name, please advise immediately.”

Skwierawski responded to Ziegler, in another email obtained by AP, saying she “vehemently” disagreed that her appointment was illegal. She also defended her action signing orders assigning reserve judges, saying state law clearly gives her that authority.

“I had the legal authority and responsibility as well as the moral obligation to sign the orders for reserve judges,” she told Ziegler.

Ziegler said in response to questions from AP that “in order to not create problems at the circuit court" she was reissuing the orders under her name. Ziegler said she was also sending a cover letter that she said Skwierawski would not allow staff to send.

Ziegler also sent a scathing email to all of the justices once again accusing liberals of acting illegally, causing harm to the court's internal operations and public perception. Ziegler refused to schedule weekly meetings with what she called the “invented committee” created by the liberal justices.

“I am not willing to violate my oath or the constitution,” she wrote. “You know that this invented ‘committee’ is in violation of your oath, the constitution and longstanding court practice. It is illegitimate and unenforceable.”

A request for comment from the four-justice liberal majority, left with Supreme Court spokesperson Tom Sheehan, was not returned.

Ziegler also repeated her claim, made when Skwierawski was hired, that the meeting to fire her predecessor was illegal and that she cannot hold the position because she is an elected Milwaukee County circuit judge. Skwierawski is on a leave of absence to take the court director job.

“Judge Skwieraski has not stopped being a circuit court judge and there is absolutely no provision that allows her to take a leave (not resign) and be paid more money for a different position,” Ziegler wrote. “She cannot serve two positions at once. Her purported appointment as interim director of state courts raises serious concerns about this being a public trust violation.”

Ziegler said she would advertise nationally for a new director of state courts.

She also said the committee created by the liberal justices is unconstitutional.

“Again, I will not condone such lawless destruction of the constitution, the judiciary, or the court,” Ziegler wrote. “For 40 years, the role of the Chief Justice has been understood and respected. Your short term goals will cause long term, irreparable damage to the judiciary. What a historical disgrace.”>

<Former President Donald Trump's attorneys have signaled that they will defend him by claiming that he could not have been trying to defraud the United States in the wake of the 2020 election because he sincerely believed he won.

However, a Supreme Court opinion authored in 2011 by conservative Justice Samuel Alito could knock this defense flat on its face.

In a legal analysis published by The New York Times on Monday, New York University Law School professor Burt Neuborne walks through how the 2011 opinion affirmed that proving willful blindness to the falsity of one's words and actions is legally equivalent to proving someone's consciousness of guilt.

In one particular relevant passage in the ruling, Alito argued that "many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the circumstances."

As for how this would apply to Trump, Neuborne argued that testimony from multiple former Trump administration officials and campaign officials provides a track record to show that Trump had been told again and again that he had legitimately lost the 2020 election.

Neuborne concludes that "while this argument is not a slam dunk, there’s an excellent chance that 12 jurors will find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Trump hid from the truth by adopting willful blindness.">

<Furious Georgia Republicans are plotting to invoke a new state law to remove the Fulton County prosecutor gunning for Donald Trump's head, Radaronline.com has learned.

The raging senators plan to christen the law on District Attorney Fani Willis for spearheading the massive investigation that indicted the former president and 18 co-defendants on charges of racketeering and election fraud.

Trump has encouraged his die-hard followers to deploy the new law to impeach Willis.

The law —called Senate Bill 92 — gives the Georgia Senate the power to establish an oversight committee that can remove or discipline “rogue or incompetent,” prosecutors for bad decisions or for soft-on-crime policies.

Georgia Senator Clint Dixon who represents two counties northeast of Atlanta used his Facebook account to lead the clarion call to sack Willis and free-up Trump to battle three other criminal indictments looming over his coiffed hairdo.

“I’m frustrated by the Fulton County indictments handed down last week. This is clearly all about Fani Willis and her unabashed goal to become some sort of leftist celebrity,” Dixon stated in an August 21 post. "This reality is one of the reasons we passed a law this year to hold rogue District Attorneys accountable.”

“Once the Prosecutorial Oversight Committee is appointed in October, we can call on them to investigate and take action against Fani Willis and her efforts that weaponize the justice system against political opponents,” he added. “This is our best measure, and I will be ready to call for that investigation.

Another senator, Colton Moore penned a letter to Gov. Brian P. Kemp demanding a special session “for all purposes, to include, without limitation, the review and response to the actions of Fani Willis.”

“America is under attack. I’m not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors politically TARGET political opponents,” Colton posted on his X account on August 17.

Now some church leaders are calling on Gov. Kemp, who signed the bill into law in May, to speak up and defend Willis who is the first black woman to serve as Fulton County DA.

"We strongly call upon you to make it publicly known that you do not support the calls of those who seek an investigation of (Willis)," Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church stated in a letter to the governor, according to USA Today.

Georgia Legislative Black Caucus and the NAACP held a rally in downtown Atlanta to show their support for Willis.>