<About a decade ago in some distant part of the country, there was a small town that was home to a small diner.

The diner was unremarkable, as far as diners go, with its worn linoleum countertops and omnipresent coffee stains. The menu was lengthy, and it and the place mats were adorned with small advertisements for local businesses and events, in the familiar style. The diner wasn’t the only restaurant in town, but it was popular, and everyone from the mayor to teens skipping school would show up regularly. It was convivial; conversations would often seep out from one table to the room as a whole.

But then the richest guy in town got mad about it.

See, every so often, someone would cause a problem, picking fights or shouting over everyone else. At other times, people would start false rumors. The owners of the restaurant would ask them to be quiet or to leave; on rare occasions, patrons would be banned from the restaurant entirely.

A group of those who had been banned or asked to leave came to the conclusion that the reason they suffered this fate was that their views were too honest, too dangerous to the powers that be. It wasn’t their actions; it was that their existence threatened a status quo that the restaurant was desperate to defend. They argued that the diner was infringing on their right to free speech.

The richest guy in town was sympathetic to this idea. He also had been frustrated at the diner. In the business world, he was an autocrat. But at the diner he often struggled to be heard. He decided that the outcasts were right: The issue was that the diner was impinging on free speech. So he bought the diner.

Immediately, most of those who had been banned were welcomed back. Flush with this new empowerment, they brought in friends and would sit at tables in the corner, shouting insults at those nearby. They would walk around, jumping into other people’s conversations to make rude jokes. And the rich guy would often amplify them, shouting over the din to make sure the restaurant heard. At times he would simply pass the jokes off as his own.

It was a cacophony. Business slowed. But the rich guy insisted that this “free speech” was essential (though he was also quick to acquiesce to push out customers to whom his business partners objected).

One table became the place where some of the angriest, most hateful people in town regularly sat. A photo of some of them making rude gestures while holding a menu circulated. A local clothing store, whose ad was seen in the photo, told the rich guy that it wanted to pull its advertisement.

He went ballistic. What about free speech? he fumed, as though the clothing store’s decision were somehow muffling the diner’s clientele. He began tacitly (and at times explicitly) endorsing the views of his most hateful customers. Other advertisers, spooked, announced that they wanted to pull their ads, too. The rich guy got only madder.

On Wednesday, Elon Musk appeared at the New York Times’s DealBook Summit, where he was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin (whom Musk at one point called “Jonathan”). Sorkin asked Musk about companies pulling their ads from X (formerly Twitter) in the wake of a report showing ads sitting next to pro-Nazi content and after Musk’s endorsement of antisemitic rhetoric and long-debunked conspiracy theories.

Musk was indignant. He claimed that he wanted those companies to stop advertising.

“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money?” he said. “Go f--- yourself.”

It’s a bizarre argument but a revealing one.

Musk has framed his social media company as a battleground in the war over honesty and truth, insisting that any criticism of the company or his decisions is rooted in a fear of an unfiltered reality. But those advertisers aren’t leaving because they are terrified of forbidden truths and desperate to get Musk to silence those they fear. They’re leaving because they don’t want their brands associated with Nazis. They’re probably also leaving in part because Twitter’s audience is shrinking, whatever bespoke metrics the company invents to give a different impression. If you’re Coca-Cola, the cost-benefit analysis here isn’t that complicated.

An advertiser boycott was “going to kill the company,” Musk insisted to Sorkin. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”

Wouldn’t advertisers simply point out, Sorkin asked, that Musk was the one who killed the company by embracing rhetoric they wanted to stay away from?

“Tell it to Earth,” Musk said....>

<....Elon Musk targets advertisers who boycott X with expletive-filled rant

For a long time, Musk — and many others on the right — have labored under the misapprehension that the right to free speech also means facing no repercussions for what you say. This was the core of the backlash against pre-Musk Twitter’s efforts to police abuse and misinformation: that they had a right to say those things and Twitter had no right to keep them from doing so. But, of course, Twitter had every right to decide who said what on its platform and did so.

There is unquestionably an element of this tension that is rooted in status anxiety. White Republicans in particular often view themselves as embattled in a country that looks different (often literally) from the one in which they grew up. They see a challenge to their power and primacy from an emerging younger generation with different values and different expectations about behavior.

This personal threat or discomfort is then often framed as a threat to the nation and national values — things like free speech. We must make America great again. We must ensure that social media is a place where you cannot be held to account simply for promoting ivermectin. There’s great power to be wrung from telling people that their fears about their eroding status are warranted.

Advertisers aren’t “blackmailing” Musk to get him to make X less toxic or to encourage him not to post endorsements of hateful rhetoric. They’re just leaving because Twitter has changed. If anyone is trying to extort anyone, it’s Musk and X chief executive Linda Yaccarino.

Yaccarino responded to Musk’s exhortation for former advertisers to go away with one of her typical attaboys for her boss.

“X is enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people,” she wrote on the site. “We’re a platform that allows people to make their own decisions. And here’s my perspective when it comes to advertising: X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street — and the X community is powerful and is here to welcome you.”

“Information independence” is a terrific phrase, in the same way that “alternative facts” is. It’s a cloak of seriousness that nonsense can wear around the public square. The next time my kids get in trouble for lying at school, I’ll simply remind the principal that they were exercising “information independence.”

You see what she’s trying to do, though — position criticism as being about Twitter’s ostensible philosophy rather than its actual output. This stuff about the “amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street” might work in a slide deck somewhere, but it’s not going to sway the cost-benefit assessments of Coca-Cola’s numerous bean-counters.

Musk wanted the spotlight and got it. Now he’s pretending that being in the spotlight means no one in the audience is allowed to boo.

You may be wondering what happened to the diner. Well, over time, it became a place that you went to only if you really needed something to eat or if you were sympathetic to the rancor that greeted you when you opened the door. The menus and place mats ended up being covered with ads for gold bars, right-wing educational institutions and survival kits.

The rich guy, meanwhile, took a bath on his purchase of the place, going deep into debt. His damaged public reputation, meanwhile, trickled outward; the businesses that made him rich were viewed with new skepticism as well. His purchase of the diner proved to be a folly of enormous scale.

Not that this has any real-world corollary, of course.>

<A screaming match erupted in Donald Trump’s $250 million civil fraud trial Friday when a New York state attorney ran out of patience with the former president’s legal team, according to a new report.

"The court has found that Mr. Trump committed fraud," shouted Kevin Wallace, according to ABC News. "To get into the private wealth group, he committed fraud."

Wallace lost his temper with Trump attorney Chris Kise over a lengthy objection made during the cross-examination of an expert defense witness about Trump's relationship with Deutsche Bank, according to the report.

Kise, drawing on testimony from witness Robert Unell, argued Trump’s favorable loan terms were part and parcel of his rank as a private wealth management client, or a wealthy whale the bank had successfully harpooned, according to the report. Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Unell out of the courtroom so the two testy lawyers could battle it out, according to the report.

"Once you are in the private bank, you are in this sort of rarified [sic] air,” Kise reportedly argued. “It is a flawed premise to say you have to compare it to the outside air.”

Wallace snapped back that Trump gained access to that “rarified air” by committing fraud, as Engoron ruled in a summary judgement before the trial began, according to ABC News.

"He lied to the private wealth group to get these loans,” Wallace said. “Therefore, we are looking at what the interest rate would have been had he not had access to the group he lied to."

Engoron, according to the report, overruled Kise’s objection and agreed.

"I think,” Engoron said, “his explanation is correct.”>

<U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' billionaire friend is only pretending to cooperate with a Senate ethics investigation, a former chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee told Newsweek.

Attorney Alex Aronson, who was instrumental in investigating Thomas' connections to wealthy Republican donors, was reacting to Thursday's announcement by the Senate Judiciary Committee that it has issued subpoenas to Leonard Leo, a conservative activist, and the billionaire Harlan Crow, compelling them to appear before the committee.

The subpoenas were the latest steps in the committee's inquiry into the Supreme Court justices. The committee's Republican minority, which supports Thomas, walked out of Thursday's committee hearing in protest.

Thomas is facing an investigation for allegedly accepting lavish vacations from Crow—including a $500,000 trip to Indonesia in 2019—getting money from another donor to buy a recreational vehicle and other ethics violations.

Aronson said Crow and Leo "are at the center of a decades-long secret influence scheme to line the pockets of their ultra-conservative allies on the Supreme Court."

Crow's spokesman said in a statement to Newsweek that Crow had done all he could to cooperate with the committee, despite concerns about his constitutional rights. The statement also said that issuing Crow a subpoena was a headline-grabbing exercise, a claim Aronson strongly rejects. The statement was a reissue of one Crow's spokesman released in October when the committee was debating the issuing of subpoenas.

"Crow's proffer to the committee of minimal evidence is nothing but a smokescreen to hide these years of corrupt billionaire influence, which have corresponded with a wave of party-line Supreme Court rulings handing huge political wins to corporations and the wealthiest few," Aronson said.

"Mr. Crow's supposed 'constitutional' concerns have been widely rejected by legal scholars and are incompatible with history and tradition. The Supreme Court recently made clear that 'the power of the Congress to conduct investigations is inherent in the legislative process.'"

The statement by Crow's spokesman said, "it's disappointing that one party on the Committee would choose to pursue an unnecessary, partisan, and politically motivated subpoena instead of simply reciprocating Mr. Crow's good faith efforts at a reasonable compromise that respects both sides."

"We offered extensive information responsive to the Committee's requests despite the serious constitutional and privacy concerns presented to the Committee, which were ignored and remain unaddressed."

Newsweek reached out to Thomas and Leo by email on Friday for comment.

In April, the ProPublica investigative website released a report that found Thomas and his wife had taken undisclosed trips, and received other benefits, paid for by Crow.

Thomas' trips reportedly took place over 20 years and were not disclosed among the financial gifts that he received....>

<....One 2019 trip, which involved flying to Indonesia on Crow's private jet and touring the islands on Crow's 162-foot yacht, would have cost Thomas $500,000 had he paid for it, ProPublica claimed. The yacht trip included a private chef and a retinue of staff.

In response, Thomas released a statement, describing Crow and his wife as "among our dearest friends." Thomas added that he was "advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable."

On July 9, the New York Times reported that Thomas had received a range of gifts from wealthy friends through the prestigious Horatio Alger Association.

A Senate Finance Committee report found that Thomas failed to repay a significant portion of a $267,230 loan from 1999 by health care businessman Anthony Welters. The justice used this money to buy a luxury RV. Welters told the Times: "I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family."

"The loan was never forgiven," Elliot Berke, Thomas' attorney, told Reuters at the time. "Any suggestion to the contrary is false. The Thomases made all payments to Mr. Welters on a regular basis until the terms of the agreement were satisfied in full."

In September, Thomas said that he took three trips last year aboard Crow's private plane. He did not acknowledge any earlier travel at Crow's expense, including the 2019 trip to Indonesia.

On October 30, the committee revealed that it is trying to subpoena Thomas' Republican donors. It said that some justices have been "joining billionaires with business before the Court on their private planes and yachts or receiving gifts such as private school tuition for a family member."

Chairman Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said the committee would vote on issuing subpoenas after the "intransigence" the donors have shown in refusing to come before the committee to explain their relationship with Thomas, the longest-serving member of the court.

Update, 12/01/23, 6:05 p.m ET: This article was updated to reflect that Alex Aronson is a former chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee rather than the former chief counsel of the Committee.>

<Donald Trump does not have immunity from criminal charges for actions he took as president, a U.S. judge ruled on Friday, rejecting his bid to toss out the case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith accusing him of unlawfully trying to overturn his 2020 election loss.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan found no legal basis for concluding that presidents cannot face criminal charges once they are no longer in office. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2024 U.S. election, served from 2017 to 2021.

"Whatever immunities a sitting president may enjoy, the United States has only one chief executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong 'get-out-of-jail-free' pass," Chutkan wrote in her ruling.

Because Trump is the first current or former U.S. president to face criminal charges, Chutkan's ruling is the first by a U.S. court affirming that presidents can be charged with crimes like any other citizen.

Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Trump, declined to comment on the ruling.

Chutkan's ruling brings Trump a step closer to facing a jury on charges that he plotted to interfere in the counting of electoral votes and obstruct congressional certification of Biden's victory. Trump has pleaded not guilty and accused prosecutors of attempting to damage his campaign.

The trial is scheduled to begin in March. Trump can immediately appeal the ruling, which potentially could delay the trial while an appeals court and potentially the Supreme Court weigh the issue.

Trump has other pending legal motions to dismiss the case based on claims that it violates his free speech rights and is legally flawed. In addition to the case being pursued by Smith, Trump also faces state criminal charges in Georgia related to his actions seeking to undo his 2020 defeat and two other indictments. He has pleaded not guilty in those cases as well.

The U.S. Justice Department long has had an internal policy not to indict a sitting president, but prosecutors said no such restrictions exist once a president leaves the White House.

Trump's lawyers had made a sweeping claim that he is "absolutely immune" from charges arising from official actions he took as president, arguing that political opponents could use the threat of criminal prosecution to interfere with a president's responsibilities.

His defense team argued that the immunity U.S. presidents have from civil lawsuits should extend to criminal charges.

Prosecutors contended that Trump's argument would essentially put the U.S. president above the law, violating foundational principles of the U.S. Constitution.>

<When Republicans won a small majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, critics predicted that they would waste federal taxpayer dollars with pointless investigations of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. And sure enough, Biden family-related probes have been a priority for House Republicans —including House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky).

Veteran journalist Mark Hosenball, in an article published by The New Republic on December 1, poses a question: Why aren't Democrats in the U.S. Senate — where they have a small majority under Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) — investigating the Trump family the way House Republicans have been investigating the Bidens?

A Democratic source, interviewed on condition of anonymity, offered some reasons.

The source told The New Republic, "One, Democrats simply have other priorities, including a robust policy agenda that they want to focus on. And two, there's no evidence to suggest that additional investigations of Trump would damage or influence his political prospects. In fact, the opposite is likely true. He is already under indictment in three separate places — what other evidence could senators help to uncover that he is manifestly unfit for office?"

One of the things Senate Democrats could investigate, according to Hosenball, is former White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner's Saudi connections.

But the Democratic source told The New Republic, "Partisan attacks from Congress would likely only cause his base to further rally around him. And for what it's worth, there's no evidence that the House Republican partisan stunts attacking the president's family are actually doing anything other than showing what a devoted family man our current president is — a stark contrast from his thrice-married predecessor.">

<Former President Donald Trump criticized Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and MSNBC, accusing the network of conducting a 24-hour hit job on him and the Republican Party.

Trump’s social media post erroneously claimed that MSNBC uses “FREE government approved airwaves,” and he called for government action against the network.

“MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves, and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” Trump said.

“Brian Roberts, its Chairman and CEO, is a slimeball who has been able to get away with these constant attacks for years. It is the world’s biggest political contribution to the Radical Left Democrats who, by the way, are destroying our Country.”

Trump has also hinted at plans for revenge and prosecution if he returns to the White House, creating worry for many.

“Our so-called ‘government’ should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity. Much more to come, watch!” he said.

“The good news is that the ratings of CNN and MSDNC, which is just a terrible group of people, that whole NBC group and Comcast group, these are terrible people, terrible human beings … they’re just disgusting,” Trump said separately.

“If you look at CNN and MSNDC, their numbers are down the tubes, and that’s a good thing.”

“But these are bad people over at Comcast,” he added.>

Whaddaya think, <fredfradiavolo>? This a vendetta, same as the one you supposedly face here?

<Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft Corporation co-founder Bill Gates and “kings” could potentially pay $1 billion for Mar-a-Lago, according to a witness in an ongoing fraud trial involving former President Donald Trump.

Lawrence Moens, a Palm Beach real-estate broker, is set to testify next week in a New York civil fraud trial involving Trump. Moens was named by Trump as an expert defense witness, Business Insider reported.

“It’s like a fantasy list,” Moens said.

“I could dream up anyone from Elon Musk to Bill Gates and everyone in between,” he added in a pre-trial deposition, referring to ultra-billionaires who might be interested in buying the property. “Kings, emperors, heads of state.”

“If they want the best house in the country, that would be one of the top two or three that would be available if they were for sale.”

“I wish he’d let me sell it, but it’s not for sale,” he added.

“And that Mar-a-Lago should be valued at $1 billion because Elon Musk might want to go to Palm Beach,” he added.

The Attorney General’s office asserts that Trump overstated the value of Mar-a-Lago as part of a scheme to secure better interest rates from banks. The property, they claim, was valued at $739 million in 2018, while they believe it was only worth $25 million.

Moens counters that such high-profile individuals are potentially interested in the property, which if true, could support Trump’s high valuation.

The state alleges that over a decade, Trump amassed over $250 million in interest savings and property sales proceeds by misrepresenting his assets’ real value.

Moens is scheduled to testify on Tuesday, and his statements will be critical in this high-stakes trial.>

<stone free or die once admitted <Obviously I'm involved in several on-going "controversies" here on <CG>, so take my advice with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it's still good advice I think!>

The Chessgames double standard against whistle blowers is so unfair. Notice that ALL FTB posts above have been deleted, while the outlandish member attacks by sfod remain in multiple forums. All sorts of evidence has been presented about the troll and editor pal cyberbully. Next to nothing is done to silence them or stop their non-stop harassment of others. No member should be mistreated by deliberate sfod distortions. The fact is that sfod is a weak debater (opinions instead of facts) and The Integrity embarrasses the troll on Rogoff. Recent posts are nothing more than the same old ploy to get rid of political opponents through a dirty public smear campaign by the troll.

Let's go Chessgames -- clean these forums up properly -- take out that trash!! Make sfod blow the whistle or get banned!! sfod has no business hunting other members day after day.>

But it is no problem for <you> to stalk others....

<In October, following an embarrassing 22-day stalemate, House Republicans finally found a guy they can all tolerate as Speaker: Mike Johnson. If you’d never heard of the Louisiana representative, you’re not alone. Multiple Senate Republicans said they had no idea who he was: John Cornyn described him as “pretty anonymous,” and Susan Collins admitted she needed to Google him. Hours before his election on October 25, learning more about Johnson required some serious digging. At the time, Googling “Mike Johnson” brought up hits for a Bachelorette contestant, a retired NHL star, and the owner of a North Carolina Toyota dealership before the congressman appeared in the search, as the Washington Post reported.

Since then, journalists have been scrambling to learn more about who Speaker Johnson is and where he stands on key issues. The conclusion: Despite his Ned Flanders persona, he’s a pretty troubling dude! Unless, of course, you think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, would love to see abortion outlawed nationwide, and don’t think same-sex marriage should be legal.

Here are some not very fun facts we’ve learned about the guy Republicans barely know, but decided to make leader of the House and second in line to the presidency.

He masterminded Trump’s election coup.

If you’ve learned one unsavory fact about Johnson in recent days, it’s probably that he was a key architect of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. As New York’s Jonathan Chait explained, Johnson’s work on this front is actually the “primary source of his leadership claim and the central reason he has managed to unify the party.” After publicly flirting with Trump’s voting-machine conspiracy theories, Johnson honed in on the idea that the widespread use of mail ballots during the pandemic gave the House GOP an opportunity to make Trump president. Chait wrote:

Leaning on his background as a constitutional lawyer, he crafted an argument that several states had improperly changed their voting rules in response to the pandemic, thus nullifying their results and allowing the Republican House to select the winner.

His case, stringing together a series of implausible legal claims, brought together many Republicans who were queasy at Trump’s wild lies with Trump’s strongest supporters. Johnson circulated his case to the party and reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. As the New York Times explained in a deeply reported story last year, Johnson’s arguments had a singular influence. About three-quarters of Republicans supporting Trump’s election challenge, the Times noted, “relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”

But all this went down three years ago, so apparently we’re not allowed to talk about it anymore.

He’s the least-experienced House Speaker in 140 years.

After a short stint in the Louisiana state legislature, Johnson was elected to the U.S. House in 2016. He is in only his fourth term and has never served in a senior leadership position or even as a full committee chair prior to his election as Speaker, according to Politico. That makes him the least-experienced person elected to the top position since John G. Carlisle in 1883.

He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade.

Before entering elected office, Johnson spent eight years working as a senior attorney and national spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group described by the New York Times as the “largest legal force of the religious right.” It is dedicated to outlawing abortion and curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, among other causes. The ADF was behind the case that led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and has scored many other victories for the religious right in recent years, as The New Yorker reported:

In the past dozen years, its lawyers had won fourteen Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding....>

<....While working with the ADF, Johnson fought to shut down abortion clinics and defended Louisiana laws restricting abortion.

He wants to ban abortion nationwide.

Johnson has an A+ rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. He has voted for a federal abortion ban and pushed legislation that would outlaw abortion nationwide. The New Republic reports:

Johnson has also co-sponsored at least three bills hoping to ban abortion at a nationwide level, including the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children From Late-Term Abortions Act, and the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2021, all of which carry criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for physicians who perform abortions.

“It is truly an American holocaust,” Johnson told on local DC radio station in May 2022. “The reality is that Planned Parenthood and all these big abortion (providers), they set up their clinics in inner cities. They regard these people as easy prey. I mean, it’s true.”

He celebrated sentencing abortion providers to hard labor.

The day after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, Johnson excitedly posted that Louisiana’s trigger law banning abortion at all stages of pregnancy had gone into effect, highlighting that abortion providers could be sentenced to hard labor.

He blamed abortion for school shootings.

Johnson made this bizarre argument during an interview with New York’s Irin Carmon in 2015 when he was still working for the ADF.

“Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are,” he said. “When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”

He also blamed abortion for Social Security and Medicare cuts.

While serving as chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2021, Johnson proposed trillions of dollars in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He said these cuts wouldn’t be necessary if forced birth were the law of the land.

“Roe v. Wade gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America,” Johnson said. “You think about the implications of that on the economy; we’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this.”

He blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution.

Of course, abortion doesn’t cause mass shootings alone; the process of evolution is also a culprit. In a sermon he delivered at Christian Center of Shreveport in 2016, Johnson claimed the United States was founded as a Christian nation but had gotten off track in recent years with the introduction of things like “no-fault divorce laws,” “legalized abortion,” and the teaching of evolution, per the MeidasTouch Network.

Johnson then explained why he thinks this led to mass shootings:

“And people say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple generations now of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”

He fought to make taxpayers fund a Noah’s Ark theme park.

Johnson has close ties to the Evangelical “young-Earth creationist” movement, which holds that Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that early humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

In 2015, Johnson represented the Ark Encounter creationist theme park, which features dinosaurs riding on a life-size Noah’s Ark, in its successful legal battle to secure $18 million in tax subsidies from the state of Kentucky. According to HuffPost, Johnson has described himself as a “dear friend” of Ken Ham, founder of the group Answers in Genesis, which is behind both the Noah’s Ark theme park and the Creation Museum.

“The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” Johnson said in a 2021 interview with Ham.

Johnson has yet to be questioned about his personal views regarding the origins of human life and the age of the planet....>

<....He fought to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana.

While serving as senior counsel for the ADF, Johnson went before the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2004 and 2014 to defend a statewide ban on gay marriage. ABC News reports that around the same time, Johnson also “filed suit against a New Orleans law that provided benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.” A state appellate court upheld the benefits.

While advocating against the New Orleans law, Johnson argued that the path from supporting gay rights to allowing pedophilia is a slippery slope.

“When you tear down the taboos, the doors open up for everything. That’s the danger,” Johnson said. “We are not trying to tie homosexuality to pedophilia, but when you tear down one barrier, others fall … Let’s stop here and draw the line here because then it leads to sexual anarchy.”

He led an anti-gay campus movement.

In the early aughts, far-right Christian groups responded to nationwide Day of Silence protests, in which students on college campuses remained silent all day to highlight anti-gay discrimination, by organizing “Day of Truth” counterprotests. This effort, which involved conservatives handing out pamphlets on the evils of homosexuality, was spearheaded by Johnson and the ADF.

“If the other side is going to advance their point of view,” Johnson told the Harvard Crimson in 2005, “it’s only fair for the Christian perspective to present their view, too.”

He wrote a lot of homophobic op-eds.

Throughout his time working with the ADF, Johnson wrote multiple editorials that have been unearthed by CNN. In these op-eds, he argued for the criminalization of gay sex and said legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to America’s doom.

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated laws against sodomy, Johnson wrote an editorial in his local Shreveport, Louisiana, paper arguing that “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse.” He also said constitutional bans on discrimination don’t apply to gay people as “all are capable of changing their abnormal lifestyles.”

In other pieces that ran in the same Louisiana paper, Johnson called homosexuality an “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle.” He also wrote, “Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices.”

He introduced a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Americans’ attitudes toward gay marriage have evolved rapidly in the past few decades, and plenty of politicians have made remarks about homosexuality that they now regret. But Johnson didn’t leave his anti-gay stances in the early aughts.

Late last year, Johnson voted against a bill codifying same-sex and interracial marriages (he was joined by all but 39 Republicans).

Around the same time, Johnson introduced a bill that critics described as a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which never got a floor vote. The Stop the Sexualization of Children Act would have blocked the use of federal money to “develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually oriented program, event, or literature” for kids under 10. Sexually oriented was loosely defined: As NPR noted, “The language in the proposed legislation lumps together topics of sexual orientation and gender identity, with sexual content such as pornography and stripping.”

He was an advocate for “covenant marriage,” which makes it harder to divorce.

Johnson got his first media exposure in the late ’90s as the face of Louisiana’s marriage-covenant law. While a law student, Johnson helped draft the 1997 Family Research Council–backed law creating an option for couples to sign a “covenant” that requires counseling and several years of separation prior to a divorce. Johnson and his wife, Kelly, opted for a covenant marriage when they wed in 1999.

“My wife and I both come from traditional Christian households,” he told ABC News in 2005. “My own parents are divorced. As anyone who goes through that knows, that was a traumatic thing for our whole family. I’m a big proponent of marriage and fidelity and all the things that go with it, and I’ve seen firsthand the devastation [divorce] can cause.”

The Johnsons are still together and host a podcast called Truth Be Told, in which they “present thoughtful analysis of hot topics and current events from a Christian perspective.”....>

<....He blamed post-Katrina looting on America turning away from God.

After Hurricane Katrina, Johnson took a break from railing against the evils of homosexuality in his local paper and wrote an op-ed blaming the looting that happened after Hurricane Katrina on atheists, legalized gambling, and then–Lousiana [sic] governor Kathleen Blanco’s being “a nurturer rather than a firm, decisive leader.”

“The Bible teaches that man has an inherently sinful nature, capable of all kinds of evil,” Johnson wrote. “What we are seeing is the natural by-product of a culture that increasingly denies God’s existence, makes excuses for immorality, and fosters a sense of entitlement and victim mentality amongst the poor.”

He supported displaying the Ten Commandments in public buildings.

While working for the Alliance Defending Freedom in 2003, Johnson wrote an editorial for a Shreveport, Louisiana paper that said a recent Gallup poll “found that 77 percent of Americans strongly disapproved of the federal court’s removal of Justice Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama judicial building. We will highlight these statistics in the brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that I and other attorneys are writing in support of Justice Moore’s appeal.”

Roy Moore was eventually removed from his position as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama for refusing a federal court’s order to remove a marble Ten Commandments monument that he’d installed in the Alabama Judicial Building.

He doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state.

This shouldn’t come as a shock considering everything we’ve just learned. ABC News reports that during a podcast recorded in September 2022, Johnson referred to the “so-called separation of church and state” and said, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”

“If anybody tries to convince you that your biblical beliefs or your religious viewpoint needs to be separated from public affairs, you should politely remind them to review their history and you should not back down,” he added.

He once partnered with a conversion-therapy organization.

Before entering politics, Johnson provided legal advice to a group called Exodus International, which held counseling sessions designed to help young people “convert” from gay to straight. According to CNN, Johnson advised the group between 2005 and 2010 and promoted its anti-gay stances in interviews. “I mean, our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and we cannot change,” he told a radio host in 2008. “Homosexual behavior is something you do; it’s not something that you are.”

In 2013, Exodus International closed and its founder apologized for the “pain and hurt” caused by the group.

He suggested that Rome fell partly because it was too gay.

CNN reports that during his time advising Exodus International, Johnson offered an unorthodox theory for Rome’s collapse. “Some credit to the fall of Rome to not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society,” he told a radio host in 2008.

His wife is an anti-gay therapist whose work was inspired by the ancient Greeks.

Before Kelly Johnson took down her website last week, she billed herself as a therapist with a specialty in temperament counseling. Her firm, Onward Christian Counseling Services, states that homosexuality is equivalent to bestiality and incest. As Insider explains, the company takes a very old-school view of psychology:

The temperament-based approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic. Richard and Phyllis Arno, who established a test to identify people’s temperament, founded the National Christian Counselors Association in the early 1980s. They and their advocates prefer the term temperament over personalities as the term personality is characterized as a “mask” while temperaments are “inborn” and thus inherent to each individual regardless of outside influences such as parenting. Their work is largely based on Hippocrates’ view that there were four temperaments....>

<.....He was dean of a college that failed to launch.

In 2010, Johnson was hired to be the first dean of the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law at Louisiana Christian University. “From a pure feasibility standpoint,” Johnson said, according to comments uncovered by the Associated Press. “I’m not sure how this can fail.”

It failed. The law school did not bring in enough money to get off the ground and the funding that it did pull in was allegedly misappropriated by the Louisiana Christian University president. In hindsight, all this may have been a blessing: In 2018, six men accused Paul Pressler, the school’s namesake, of sexual misconduct while several of the accusers were underage.

It’s not clear whether he has a bank account.

Look, the 51-year-old Speaker of the House probably has a bank account. But he’s not telling us about it. As the Daily Beast reports, Johnson’s financial disclosure forms dating back to 2017 state that he does not have a savings or a checking account in his name, despite his $200,000 salary. Nor, according to the forms, does he have any investments or assets. Perhaps he’s just living as Jesus intended — though probably not, given the leeway he wants to give wealthy tax cheats.

He uses anti-porn monitoring software.

During a conversation on the “War on Technology” at Benton, Louisiana’s Cypress Baptist Church last year, Johnson advocated for the use of Covenant Eyes, a popular brand of “accountability software” marketed to parents and religious organizations to police online activities deemed inappropriate.

“It scans all the activity on your phone, or your devices, your laptop, what have you; we do all of it,” Johnson said, per Rolling Stone.

“It sends a report to your accountability partner. My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He’s 17. So he and I get a report about all the things that are on our phones, all of our devices, once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate.”

Regardless of your opinion on how closely teens’ online activities should be monitored, this raises some obvious security concerns. When Wired tested Covenant Eyes and a similar service, Accountable2You, it found that in addition to scanning for pornography, the services take advantage of accessibility permissions to “either capture screenshots of everything actively being viewed on the device or detect the name of apps as they’re being used and record every website visited in the device’s browser.” So if he’s still using the service, the new Speaker is letting a third party tech company see and possibly record everything he’s doing on his devices....>

<.....He said America is “depraved and dark,” citing queer youth and lack of churchgoing.

Most examples of Johnson’s homophobic statements are pretty old, so maybe he’s changed his tune? Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In a prayer call with Christian-nationalist MAGA pastor Jim Garlow this fall, Johnson described America as almost irredeemably “depraved.” Why? Because more kids are openly queer and Americans aren’t attending church as much. Per Rolling Stone:

The segment was filmed Oct. 3, just weeks before Johnson’s unexpected rise to become speaker of the House. Garlow pressed the clean-cut Louisiana congressman to say “more about this ‘time of judgment’ for America.” Johnson replied: “The culture is so dark and depraved that it almost seems irredeemable.” He cited, as supposed evidence, the decline of national church attendance and the rise of LGBTQ youth — the fact, Johnson lamented, that “one-in-four high school students identifies as something other than straight.”

Johnson went on to invoke Sodom, the city destroyed by God for its wickedness in the Bible. Then he tearfully prayed “that You not give us the judgment that we clearly deserve.”

He wrote the foreword to a book full of homophobic insults

CNN reports that, in 2022, Johnson did a favor for a Louisiana politics blogger named Scott McKay, writing the foreward to his book called The Revivalist Manifesto. In it, he wrote that the book managed “to articulate well what millions of conscientious, freedom-loving Americans are sensing.”

If Johnson is right, they’re sensing a lot. The book suggests that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was part of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking ring; that poor Americans are “unsophisticated and susceptible to government dependency”; and that the totally bogus Pizzagate and Seth Rich conspiracies are at least somewhat true. Like the new Speaker’s many op-eds, the book is also prolifically homophobic, disparaging gay people — and especially Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. He is described as “openly, and obnoxiously, gay” and “Gay Mayor Pete Buttigieg.”

“I obviously believe in the product, or I wouldn’t have written the foreword,” he said in a podcast last year. “So I endorse the work.”>

<According to legal scholar Benjamin Edwards, a recent lawsuit filed by America First Legal, headed by former Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, is cause for the courts to come down hard and sanction the right-wing advocacy group for bringing frivolous lawsuits that he called fraudulent.

Noting that Miller's group has filed a security fraud lawsuit against Target, Edwards wrote for the Daily Beast that the lawsuit has no chance of succeeding and is a waste of the court's time — and that sanctions against America First Legal are called for.

Edwards, the current Chair of the Securities Regulation Section for the Association of American Law Schools, wrote that not only should judges issue sanctions, but that the appropriate state bars should investigate the group.

Noting that the Target lawsuit is based on a Miller grievance that the retail chain "sold LGBTQ merchandise and ran a Pride campaign" and thereby defrauded investors, the legal expert labeled the lawsuit fraudulent in its assertions.

"Functionally, the litigation boils down to griping about how America First Legal fundamentally disagrees with Target’s operational decisions, including the 2023 Pride campaign. But this value judgment does not establish anything approaching securities fraud," he wrote before adding, "To be clear, the lawsuit against Target lacks any plausible basis."

He then explained, "The lawsuit itself resembles a fraud. America First Legal touts its expertise and claims to be waging sophisticated legal fights to advance conservative causes. Yet, the Target litigation reveals an entirely frivolous filing, wasting Target’s money on legal fees and the court’s time to review it."

According to the attorney, the lawsuit has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with press releases by America First Legal designed to raise money from gullible conservatives.

Based upon that, he wrote, "The lawyers involved, who clearly do not understand securities law, presumably thought they could file a claim with losing the case as the downside risk. But securities litigation carries higher stakes. If the court does its job and follows the law, this should result in sanctions and judicial findings that America First Legal, and its co-counsel Jonathan Berry of Boyden Gray, filed frivolous litigation.">

Pity the laws Britain uses are not in effect here, which would force the losing party to pay all court costs.

<Donald Trump's questionable usage of his presidential pardon power before he left office is paying dividends for his 2024 presidential campaign as grateful recipients are showering his campaign with cash and, in some cases, using the media platforms to boost his chances of returning to the Oval Office.

According to a deep dive from the Washington Post, the former president and his campaign have taken in nearly $1.8 million from appreciative recipients and their families with more expected to come.

The report notes, Donald Trump's ability to grant clemency was mostly focused on those accused of white-collar crime than any other offenses, with the Post adding that "tax scofflaws, health-care fraudsters, corrupt politicians and Ponzi schemers all benefited."

Those people, the report notes, are well positioned to lavish money on his latest campaign.

"The Post found 26 clemency recipients or their immediate family members have contributed to a Trump campaign account or a pro-Trump political committee. That means more than 1 out of 10 of the people who received pardons and commutations gave money either before they received clemency, afterward or in both periods, for a total of nearly $1.8 million," the report states with Charles Kushner, father of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner leading the way.

The elder Kushner, who received his pardon in 2020 has contributed $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC in 2023.

The report adds, "New York-based real estate investor Alex Adjmi had served time in the late 1990s for a money-laundering conviction. He rarely donated to federal campaigns, records show, but in 2020 he made three payments, including one contribution to the Republican National Committee and another to a joint account with the Trump campaign totaling $37,600. Adjmi was among the 144 people who received clemency on Trump’s last day in office. This year, he donated $100,000 to a pro-Trump political committee."

In an interview, Adjmi claimed, "It had nothing to do with my pardon.”>

Nice little windfall.

<Representative Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, seemingly wants Representative Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat, expelled from the House after George Santos was ousted from Congress on Friday.

With Santos, a New York Republican, facing a 23-count federal indictment and following the release of a scathing House Ethics Committee report, the legislative chamber voted 311 to 114 to expel the freshman representative. Nearly all Democrats and 105 Republicans backed the successful effort, making Santos only the sixth in United States history to be expelled from the House. Meanwhile, Bowman, who has represented New York's 16th District since 2021, pled guilty in October to a misdemeanor for falsely activating a fire alarm at the Cannon building in Washington, D.C., as lawmakers were working to vote on a government funding bill to avert a partial shutdown in September.

A spokesperson for Bowman's office said that the congressman reached an agreement with prosecutors to pay a $1,000 fine and write a formal apology letter to U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger in exchange for the dropping of all charges.

While speaking with the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) in an article published on Saturday, Boebert affirmed her belief that Bowman should be expelled by noting that while Bowman was convicted of a crime, Santos has not been.

"He's been convicted of a crime. George Santos wasn't. He's pled guilty to a crime. George Santos has not been convicted of anything. This is a terrible precedent, a shameful precedent was just set," the congresswoman said.

Newsweek has reached out to Boebert and Bowman via email for comment.

Santos has been accused of fabricating many of the details of his life, in addition to defrauding campaign donors and misusing campaign funds. The now-former congressman has lied about his work history, what schools he attended, his ancestry and the details about how his mother died. Although Santos has said he "exaggerated" some of his backstory, he maintains his innocence. He also has doubled down on many of his fabrications, suggesting that his statements have been misrepresented in the media.

In addition, Boebert took to X, formerly Twitter, on Friday to share her disapproval of Santos' removal from the House, "In America, the presumption of innocence ensures that any citizen accused of any crime is considered innocent until proven guilty. George Santos has not been convicted of any crime. Until today's vote, only five members of the House of Representatives had ever been expelled. Three were expelled for supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War and the two others were expelled after criminal convictions."

She continued: "Expelling an elected official without due process is an extreme measure and sets a dangerous precedent that I could not support. George Santos was elected by New York's Third Congressional District voters and until the day he is actually convicted of a crime, it should have been up to those voters whether or not he remained in Congress."

Meanwhile, Bowman has faced criticism and calls for removal from the House from several Republicans.

"It's not just pulling any fire alarm. It's pulling a fire alarm in the middle of a proceeding," GOP Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York said in an interview with Politico in October. "He was a high school principal. If anyone knows the old trick of pulling a fire alarm, it's a high school principal. [Bowman was the principal of a middle school]."

However, appearing on Fox News in October, legal analyst Jonathan Turley discussed comments from Malliotakis, who claimed to have 12 co-sponsors for a bill to expel Bowman, saying at the time that the congressman's actions were likely not grounds for such an action and warned that going through with it could be a slippery slope.

"It most certainly can be charged as a misdemeanor, a criminal misdemeanor," Turley said. "Now, does that mean that it's grounds for expulsion? I don't think so. If you start to do this, you're going to find a lot of folks are pushing for the expulsion of others. The fact that over hundreds of years, we've only expelled five members should tell you something. They always had that power, but I think both sides recognize that down this road lies madness. If we start to expel members, it's going to become an insatiable appetite.">

Till this flap, I had the misguided view that Nicole Moronicity actually had her wits about her.

<<perf: Glad you did not edit the typos/misspellings of <dice>. Made for a droll read. Maybe he'll get it right when released from his self-imposed incarciration, don't you know.>

Incarceration.

<Firebrand Rep. Matt Gaetz predicted that the expulsion of lying Long Island Rep. George Santos could imperil Republicans’ majority in the House of Representatives.

Gaetz (R-Fla.), who led the mutiny against former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in October, warned that other Republicans could be on their way out of the lower chamber.

“Our willingness to self mutilate on these things really impairs our ability to get the job done,” Gaetz lamented on the “The Charlie Kirk Show.”

Truth-challenged Santos (R-NY) became the sixth member ever expelled from the House on Friday when 105 Republicans backed the effort to oust him.

With Santos out, Republicans’ majority in the lower chamber has winnowed down by one.

Gaetz called Santos’ ouster “tactically stupid” and fretted that other House Republicans could soon leave.

“Congressman Bill Johnson of Ohio has taken a college university presidency that can knock us down to two. And I don’t really think Kevin McCarthy is sticking around long,” he said.

“We got a bunch of these octogenarians in our conference. If God forbid, any of them were to cross the Rainbow Bridge, we would be in a situation where we could literally lose the majority because we were so eager to throw George Santos out before even being convicted.”

Gaetz railed against efforts to push out the scandal-plagued rep, demanding more due process and arguing that the scandal engulfing New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, who was indicted on bribery charges in September, was more concerning.

The vote to oust Santos came in the wake of a damning report from the House Committee on Ethics alleging that he “blatantly stole” campaign funds.

Notably, Gaetz is under investigation from the House Committee on Ethics believed to center on accusations of him using illegal drugs and engaging in sexual misconduct.

Gaetz says GOP could lose the House majority in next few months because Santos was expelled, Bill Johnson & McCarthy are leaving any day, which would put them at a 1 seat majority, and they have a bunch of members who are old and could die any day.

Gaetz has denied the allegations against him. McCarthy has publicly alleged that Gaetz crusaded to depose him because he refused to interfere in that probe.

The Florida congressman fiercely rejected that claim from McCarthy.

Earlier this year, federal prosecutors officially decided not to pursue charges against Gaetz following a similar investigation.

Republicans’ grip on the House of Representatives has dropped to four seats. AP Santos is also facing a 23 count indictment for alleged embezzlement, defrauding donors, and more.

Since his ejection, Santos has begun an apparent revenge tour against members of Congress, announcing plans to furnish several ethics complaints against lawmakers.>

<<perfidious: There appears to be a bug in the censor feature; I just tried to post and was cautioned not to use the word 'a*****e', which was neither entered by me, nor appeared anywhere in the intended content.>

The censor engine talked about you.>

<Former White House press secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki fired back at Donald Trump on Sunday, mocking his "crazy, unhinged," threat to go after her network in a Truth Social post.

On November 28, the former president raged, "MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves, and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Brian Roberts, its Chairman and CEO, is a slimeball who has been able to get away with these constant attacks for years. It is the world’s biggest political contribution to the Radical Left Democrats who, by the way, are destroying our Country. Our so-called 'government' should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity. Much more to come, watch!"

After noting it "sounded just like another one of those crazy, unhinged rants" that Americans have become accustomed to from the four-time indicted, twice impeached former president, she first joked, "He also talked about himself in the third person, always a red flag in my book, and he included his middle initial in that too."

Then she took him to school on how freedom of the press works in the United States.

"Trump is promising to resort to an authoritarian tactic should he become president again," she explained. "Does the federal government have any role in the oversight of a cable news network? No they actually don't. But that's not the point here. What's important is that he's threatening to use the power of the government against media he believes is being critical of him."

"Believe me, I know from experience from many days and hours at the briefing room, that the relationship between the U.S. government and the free press can be tense at times," she explained. "And even both of the presidents I worked for, they had their own moments of unleashing their media critiques when they didn't like a story. and when I think about the role of the free press and how essential it is for our democracy. I also think about my time as a spokesperson for the State Department."

After recalling her experiences with one critic of the administration's policies, she added, "It's actually a threat to the free press. A threat to democracy. And that threat comes at a time when a record total of 533 journalists are currently detained worldwide ; that's according to Reporters Without Borders. A large number of them are being held by the sorts of authoritarian regimes that Trump envisions creating here at home.">

<Kenneth Chesebro, a co-defendant of former President Trump in the Georgia election interference case, has announced plans to meet with investigators in Nevada and Arizona who are conducting separate investigations into efforts to secure Trump’s reelection after his loss in the 2020 election, according to The Washington Post.

Chesebro, a Trump lawyer involved in the creation of an alternate elector scheme that aimed to certify Trump-supporting “fake” electors in battleground states, has recently pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to file false documents. Following his guilty plea, Chesebro’s legal counsel has requested permission from the court to travel to Nevada, Arizona, and Washington, D.C. for ongoing investigations related to election fraud cases. The Nevada attorney general’s office is currently investigating six activists who falsely claimed to be the state’s true electors, while Arizona authorities are also conducting a probe into the fake electors in their state.

Nevada has offered Chesebro a “proffer” agreement, protecting him from charges in exchange for truthful testimony, but no such agreement exists in Arizona.

The Arizona investigation primarily focuses on Trump-supporting electors and the efforts of Trump’s allies to pressure state and local officials to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 election.

As evidence continues to emerge in these investigations and the Georgia case moves forward, it is expected that they will become increasingly contentious for Trump and his allies.

Aside from Nevada and Arizona, ongoing investigations into alternate elector plots are also taking place in Michigan and New Mexico. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office has not provided any comment on whether it is looking into the state’s fake electors scheme.>