<.....While the Ukraine episode has absorbed most of the attention surrounding Musk’s new media power, it is just part of a far broader, lower-profile bid to reengineer the entire grid of digital communications in his own image. As countries around the world struggle to establish digital sovereignty in the face of US-based behemoths like Meta and Alphabet, they have been boxed into the Musk-branded connectivity racket. Even before they gained access to the monopoly platforms that can severely limit their own ability to participate in public discourse, many countries had come to rely on Musk’s Starlink empire to support high-speed Internet in newly connected and low-population-density regions.

Starlink’s stranglehold on the global Internet gives Musk a market desperate for what he offers—much more so than with any of his other ventures. Much of the world lacks the underground fiber or cables that carry high-speed Internet to American cities. In the vast areas of the world that are sparsely inhabited, Starlink’s low-orbit satellites offer very good Internet service for an accessible price, by US standards. So for anyone who lives between the two coasts of Australia or Canada (or in remote stretches of the United States, for that matter), or is struggling to run a business or a military unit in a war zone, Starlink seems essential.

Starlink had the first-mover advantage, flooding the skies with small, relatively inexpensive satellites that connect with battery-powered mobile receivers on the ground (or on a ship, a plane, or a drone) as early as 2019. Since then, it has launched more than 5,000 satellites that serve more than 60 countries; Musk plans to have a total of 42,000 in orbit.

Since additional space satellite lines can’t be summoned out of nowhere, Musk has profitably exploited the classic “tragedy of the commons”: He’s enclosed a shared social good and forced everyone who relies on it into a position of permanent market subservience.

Musk’s actions have made it clear why this unprecedented accumulation of power is so dangerous. Because he controls global connectivity from a position of zero public accountability, his “mogul’s whim” is the sole basis on which this essential service is distributed in emerging tech markets. Over and over, Musk has deployed this power clumsily, incoherently, and dangerously.

Of course, Musk didn’t become the Lex Luthor of the high-speed digital age simply by virtue of his own grit and determination: The role was massaged into being by early negotiations over the reach and architecture of the World Wide Web. Back in the 1990s, the United States used trade-negotiation pressure and persuasion to ensure that private operators built most of the world’s digital infrastructure. This meant that US-based companies like Cisco, Qualcomm, Microsoft, and Google would end up dominating all the layers of the global communications ecosystem.

This has been a colossal mistake. By acting swiftly to enable the mogul class to control the pipelines and practices of global digital communications, the United States rendered important public policy concerns such as privacy, security, and diversity of viewpoint as afterthoughts, trailing the mad rush for innovation and expansion. This left countries struggling to retrofit the public interest into a system already rigged against it. Meanwhile, illiberal regimes such as Russia and China rapidly adapted the mogul-driven model of Net connectivity to the dictates of state suppression.

Much like Donald Trump, Musk craves attention and revels in controversy. He’s a pugilist and a bully who has no convictions other than that of his own moral rectitude. But unlike Trump, Musk possesses a storehouse of wealth that’s real and spectacular. With the exception of his four years as president, Trump had never run anything that mattered much in the world. He rarely had the ability to affect others’ lives—except for his unfortunate business partners and former allies, whom he regularly stiffed and betrayed.

Musk currently controls six companies. Some, like the civic infrastructure firm the Boring Company, do little more than sell vaporware. Others, like Neuralink and xAI, are moonshot vanity projects, unlikely to achieve market viability in the near term—if ever.....>

<....Twitter, or X, was a publicly traded company until Musk took it private, drawing on the largesse of morally compromised investors such as the Saudi royal family. The only good thing about Musk’s ransacking of Twitter and other properties is that he has largely managed to make his investments, debts, and decisions a subject of comedy rather than a relevant factor in the world; after his first year as owner, Twitter has shed 16 percent of its user base and seen app downloads decline by 38 percent, while ad revenue has cratered. Still, there are baleful—and rapidly multiplying—liabilities from Musk’s reign when it comes to the site’s utility as an aggregator of breaking news, as the response to Hamas’s attack on Israel made clear: In no time, Musk’s all-but-unmoderated platform was overrun with disinformation, fake reports, old videos, and vituperative speech from all sides.

Tesla is Musk’s lucky break and the source of most of his wealth—though here, too, he didn’t so much disrupt the electric-vehicle market with radical innovation as buy his way into it. In 2004, he acquired the largest stake in Tesla from the company’s engineer-founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. As the largest shareholder, Musk took over the company board. Later, he installed himself as CEO, lending his face and voice to the mission of promoting a new kind of car company that would liberate individual transportation from its dependence on petroleum and organized labor.

Tesla is the only publicly traded company in Musk’s portfolio, and the one operating under the most complex lattices of regulatory influence around the world. As a result, it’s been the subject of many of his messy face-offs with regulators and plaintiffs’ attorneys. The disclosure and transparency requirements that come with the ownership of a publicly traded company have sparked some of Musk’s trademark fits of rage. His public statements and tweets seeking more executive impunity have repeatedly landed him in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Indeed, he nearly lost his leadership role at Tesla after he tweeted a phony threat to take the company private in order to loose it from the surly bonds of regulatory oversight.

Which means that SpaceX is the only true Musk-generated success story. It may also well be his only consistently profitable company. Most of its revenue comes from public contracts with various national governments. SpaceX builds and launches rockets and satellites, but it has a track record of launch failures and other operational embarrassments that have sparked widespread criticism and calls for robust regulatory scrutiny of its actions.

Much as the failed search engine Yahoo bumbled its way into its role as the Web’s premier news site in the early aughts, SpaceX appears to have backed into its own role as the owner of a consumer utility. As it has scaled up into a global Internet service provider, Starlink has demonstrated an ability to reliably fulfill a widespread demand at a reasonable price point. But if it continues to be one of the only viable products on Musk’s rapidly overpopulating island of misfit tech toys, he probably won’t resist the temptation to break it in new and unexpected ways, as the geofence episode in Ukraine made all too clear.

Again, the key mismatch here is the consignment of a critical social good—affordable Internet access—to the hands of a privately held company. Too often, the critics of privately controlled media resources skate over the distinction between public and private ownership, and thus misunderstand the incentives bred by the latter form of corporate control. To cite one decisive political illustration of these differences, it was a hallmark of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent term in office that nearly all of his marquee funders and advisers came from the world of private capital. Much of Trump’s lead economic and trade initiatives followed the path laid by such dubious sources.

The same real-world consequences can be traced in the contrast between Musk and the tech titans presiding over publicly held corporations. Figures like Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg exert massive influence over what Americans see, read, and believe. But because the companies they run are publicly traded, they must answer to the disciplinary force of shareholders as well as the mandates of regulators.....>

<.....Of course, shareholders aren’t a monolithic force for the good—far from it, in a corporate managerial regime driven by the mandate to maximize stock returns above all else. However, certain blocs of shareholders, such as pension funds and university endowments, can exert pressure on company managers to evince concern about issues like workplace diversity, environmental damage, and harms to democracy. If CEOs face enough of this sort of pressure, they may feel obliged to deliver reforms to address any corporate behavior that could damage the reputation of the company and thus its bottom line. In addition to these big players in securities markets, short sellers and activist investors also help discipline firms and markets, often forcing corporate boards to address issues they’d otherwise ignore, such as insupportable growth projections or shady accounting practices.

Activist investors and short sellers have already aired important criticisms of how Tesla is run and demanded that the company be held accountable for its many legal and fiscal failures—investor Jim Chanos cautions that Tesla is “ridiculously overvalued,” with a market capitalization 75 times higher than its revenue. As a result, it’s safe to say that Musk hates short sellers more than anyone else on his rapidly expanding enemies’ list. (Earlier this year, Musk settled a defamation suit brought by a Tesla short seller.) That antipathy is likely one reason why Musk immediately took Twitter private after he acquired the company, and has harbored the same plans for Tesla.

Musk’s remarkable ability to avoid accountability through private ownership has distinguished him from almost every other major media mogul and corporate titan on the scene today. Even former Fox News CEO and chairman Rupert Murdoch, for all his excesses, egomania, and bald power plays, ruled over publicly traded companies. When he faced friction, fines from regulators, or losses from litigation, Murdoch just took the write-offs and forged ahead, knowing that his public holdings were a ready source of capital and credit access.

Musk’s outsize role as a private-capital communications baron also presents a shift in how we approach the problem of media consolidation. Traditional critics of trends in media ownership typically focused on the “networks”—the original Big Three television broadcasters and their allied print, radio, and book-publishing fiefdoms, all ruled by a shareholding oligarchy. Detractors of the former media order properly called out these conglomerates for the inordinate power they wielded over editorial decision-making and the disbursal of information along the traditional grids of profit-making and (not incidentally) advertiser appeasement. Tracking the 20th-century journalistic failures of CBS, ABC, and NBC alongside the market interests of their owners—General Electric, Disney, and Gulf and Western—the traditional critique of media consolidation focused on the means of information production and distribution. Expanding on the speculations of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, critics reasoned that if the medium was not entirely the message, at least the medium and message were inextricably bound together via the forces of vertical integration.

We still have such leviathans, as the success of Disney (which, in addition to ABC, now controls ESPN, Marvel Studios, and many other sources of content) and Murdoch’s News Corporation show us. In other words, media concentration remains a genuine problem—but it’s now a different problem. The nature of the corporation matters more than ever, and so does the sanity and stability of its owner and CEO.

In sorting out this new media landscape, it’s helpful to think of our media systems as being aligned along three layers, in three dimensions.

The base layer is the infrastructure: all that metal and fiberglass, all those satellites and routers. Today, a small handful of cable and telecommunications companies, such as Comcast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, control most of our information grid.

The second layer is what we might call the “application” component of the mass assimilation of information. Here, Google and Facebook—or rather, Alphabet and Meta—form a duopoly that manages what we consider important, interesting, and “relevant.” (And thanks to the algorithmic symbiosis that these gateway platforms have formed with their users, they harvest data that predetermines access and consumer choices on those users’ behalf.) We might be approaching an inflection point at which a new international player, such as the Chinese company Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, could shake up this duopoly—but we’re not there yet....>

<.....The final layer is the one media consumers know best: the content. It’s the focus of the hypothetical ideal reader (or scroller or viewer or listener), who represents the aspirational quest for reliable information to fuel public deliberation in a democracy. It’s also, of course, the delivery point of the sprawling digital attention economy. Therefore, every major player at this level of media activity must pay heed to the algorithmic power possessed by the monopoly platforms arrayed across the second layer: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. These platforms guide readers and viewers toward one piece of content over another—which means, in turn, that each producer of content must pander to the algorithms, at the potential cost of their market existence.

This final layer is also the only one that continues to foster some degree of actual competition among market players. At the same time, it’s also the principal focus of regulatory scrutiny, as demonstrated most recently by the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust suit against Google and its recent rejection of the proposed merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. That regulatory mismatch is a legacy of the old model of media concentration. Public concern over the concentrated power of Google and Facebook is only about a decade old, which means that efforts to limit the power of those companies remain largely theoretical.

Meanwhile, the expansive and unprecedented reach of privately held communications companies means that control over the infrastructure level is the most consequential issue in the realigned digital media landscape: According to a recent McKinsey study, private equity controlled $675 billion of the global tech market in 2022—up from $100 billion in 2012. It is also, as we have seen, why Elon Musk is a problem. Surveillance of users, strategic targeting of companies and states, and throttling of content can happen above the infrastructure layer, to be sure, but these sinister forces are far more powerful and effective when instituted there. People can usually choose the applications they use and the content conveyed through them. But when it comes to the underlying data grid, they are rarely able to make a meaningful choice beyond the market leader, because of either network economies of scale or simple market inertia.

As a dominant player in the infrastructure domain, Musk has adapted well to these conditions. Far from an apostle of competitive capitalism, he’s steeped in the same monopoly vision advanced by his former Paypal colleague Peter Thiel. And like that early Facebook investor, Musk recoils at the thought that market pressures, labor, investors, or the public interest might play some legitimate role in determining the best way to run his businesses....>

<.....This affinity speaks to another critical element of Musk’s corporate biography. More than serving as an ideological vessel of his upbringing in apartheid South Africa, or hewing to his later tutelage in the rarefied precincts of the Ivy League, Musk truly came of age during Silicon Valley’s belle epoque of venture capital. Because venture capital investors seek to create new markets and business models largely out of thin air, they often make decisions based on their market crushes and storied gut instincts. Their job is to push piles of money into the laps of unproven entrepreneurs, without the usual benefits of testing their hypotheses against data or track records to arrive at reasoned decisions.

If the classical models of market capitalism can be said to contain any traditional virtues, they are principally those of Greek tragedy: the slow-rolling punishment of hubris, imperial ambition, and vanity. Companies that simply amass VC backing on glorified elevator pitches while blowing past any market warnings about their overriding folly usually meet a bigger market nemesis in the end, by misdirecting capital that could otherwise be used productively to satisfy real needs. For two lurid recent illustrations of this principle, see the collapse of Elizabeth Holmes’s scam blood-testing company, Theranos, and Samuel Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire, FTX, and their eventual reckonings with the federal justice system.

Elon Musk is the poster CEO for the combined fecklessness of venture capital investing and private capital ownership. He’s melded the hubris-rewarding ethos of the VC world with a cult following seemingly designed to feed his titanic ego and his desire to make himself the wealthiest human ever. And he did all this without ever employing that many people, without selling many products on the open market, and without even turning a profit very often.

Musk’s success in defying so many traditional laws of market gravity means, among other things, that we have missed the moment to create Internet service as a public utility. Now we have to begin reckoning with the legacy of that failure as it wreaks havoc across the globe. One place to start would be a serious effort to work through the costs and benefits of nationalizing satellite Internet delivery systems like Starlink. It’s true that a slapdash or jingoistic model for such an endeavor runs the risk of extending the same sort of American market hegemony that created Musk’s rise to the summit of the global communications order in the first place. But it’s equally true that the specter of having Elon Musk as the de facto arbiter of global struggles over national sovereignty and information access means that we no longer have a choice.>

<The two top officials heading up Donald Trump's third campaign for the presidency are being placed in the unenviable position of having to issue statements clarifying his planned policies because he can't stop talking about being a "dictator," according to a columnist Monday.

What started as comments by some of the ex-president's former aides about plans to use the power of the presidency to go after his perceived enemies in Congress and in the press has taken on a life of its own, wrote Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton.

That, in turn, became a full-fledged firestorm after Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Trump for assurances he wouldn't abuse power or seek retribution once he was back in the Oval Office, to which Trump replied, "Except for day one. I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

Parton wrote that the Trump campaign is growing increasingly nervous that his dictator talk is sticking — particularly because he keeps riffing on it in speeches, including in New York City on Saturday night.

She noted that senior Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita were forced to issue a statement proclaiming, "Any personnel lists, policy agendas, or government plans published anywhere are merely suggestions," after the dictator talk started getting traction in the press.

According to Parton, "You might have thought that Trump would press pause on all the dictator talk considering that his campaign is obviously getting very nervous about it. But no. He appeared before the New York Young Republicans over the weekend and repeated his 'dictator on day one' line, making even less sense than before."

According to the columnist, that kind of talk can cripple the Trump campaign before it even gets through the primaries and Wiles and LaCivita know it.

"The few professionals in the Trump campaign understand that it's lethal for Trump's chances in the general election if the public is actually informed of what he plans to do," Parton wrote before adding, "Now that the press is no longer under the illusion that ignoring what he says is the best way to cover him, those pros are starting to realize that they can't control Trump or the people around him.

"They aren't the first to have that rude awakening. It would be a big relief if they were the last.">

<Special counsel Jack Smith's team has asked the Supreme Court to step in and decide the issue of presidential immunity regarding former President Donald Trump's federal election interference charges.

Smith is asking the court to immediately resolve the issue, to prevent any delay of the March 4 trial date.

"Respondent’s appeal of the ruling rejecting his immunity and related claims, however, suspends the trial of the charges against him, scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024," the special counsel wrote in a filing Monday. "It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected.

In October, Trump's legal team filed its first motion to dismiss the case, citing what Trump's lawyers claim is his "absolute immunity" from prosecution for actions taken while serving in the nation's highest office.

The judge overseeing the case, D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, rejected the motion.

Trump has appealed to the circuit court and asked for all proceedings to be stayed in the matter, pending appeal. Over the weekend, Smith's team said the district court should deny the request to halt the proceedings.

The case Smith cites in asking the Supreme Court to step in by using "certiorari before judgment" -- essentially a line-skip before an appeals court has a chance to weigh in -- is the United States v. Nixon, when President Richard Nixon refused to hand over secret White House tape recordings to a special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal.

Historically, the rare procedure is only granted in cases that are of "imperative" importance to the public, as Smith himself acknowledges.

"The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request," Smith's filing says. "This is an extraordinary case."

The move could represent an enormous risk for Smith, whose entire case against Trump could hinge on a landmark decision from the Supreme Court that could -- for the first time in American history -- determine whether a former U.S. president can be prosecuted for actions taken while in office.

"It requires no extended discussion to confirm that this case -- involving charges that respondent sought to thwart the peaceful transfer of power through violations of federal criminal law -- is at the apex of public importance," Smith writes.

"The charges implicate a central tenet of our democracy," Smith says in the filing. "And the charges allege that respondent conspired to transgress the law in manifold ways: by intentionally using fraudulent means to obstruct the presidential electoral process; by obstructing constitutionally prescribed processes in Congress for counting electoral votes; and by seeking to deprive millions of voters of their electoral choice for President."

Trump in August pleaded not guilty to charges of undertaking a "criminal scheme" to overturn the results of the 2020 election by enlisting a slate of so-called "fake electors," using the Justice Department to conduct "sham election crime investigations," trying to enlist the vice president to "alter the election results," and promoting false claims of a stolen election as the Jan. 6 riot raged -- all in an effort to subvert democracy and remain in power.

The former president has denied all wrongdoing.>

<The question of Donald Trump’s criminal jeopardy could be headed to the Supreme Court sooner rather than later. That’s after special counsel Jack Smith on Monday requested that the court conduct an expedited review of Trump’s claims to “absolute” immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct in office. The court quickly signaled it will consider the petition and asked Trump’s team to respond by next week.

One way to read that request is that Smith felt this issue would ultimately wind up at the Supreme Court anyway, and he’d rather get it out of the way early in hopes of keeping the trial on track for next year. (Trump’s claim threatens to delay the election subversion trial, which is scheduled for March 4. The district judge ruled against him, but an appeals court would normally consider the case next.) Another reading is that Smith is confident of the outcome and is seeking to call Trump’s bluff — in the process, potentially dealing him a significant early setback in his criminal cases courtesy of the nation’s highest court, which is stocked with Trump-appointed justices.

If it’s the latter case, Smith might have reason to be optimistic.

After all, the Supreme Court has ruled against Trump on multiple occasions and has even rejected a Trump claim to absolute immunity — unanimously.

The case arose late in Trump’s presidency. It dealt with a subpoena from the Manhattan district attorney for records from Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA. Trump claimed he had absolute immunity from the subpoena as a sitting president.

The episode is perhaps most notable for a remarkable courtroom scene. In it, an appeals-court judge brought up Trump’s 2016 claim about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. The judge asked if Trump’s absolute immunity argument meant that a President Trump could do that and not even face an investigation while still in office.

“Nothing could be done?” Judge Denny Chin asked. “That’s your position?”

Trump attorney William Consovoy responded: “That is correct. That is correct.”

That’s not the view the Supreme Court took. In fact, it was unanimous that a sitting president didn’t have absolute immunity from a state subpoena. In the opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted that, when the case was brought to the nation’s highest court, Trump’s own solicitor general declined to endorse the full extent of Trump’s argument. (The solicitor general instead merely argued that there should be a “heightened standard of need” for evidence from a sitting president.)

The Supreme Court in the current case would be tasked with deciding a separate question — not whether a sitting president is immune from state subpoenas, but whether a former president is immune from criminal prosecution for acts while in office.

The question at issue takes things to another level. The subpoena case dealt with a matter in which Trump was plainly wrapped up in a criminal investigation. Now the question is whether such an investigation can result in charges and a conviction.

The 2020 case demonstrates how tough an argument it could be for Trump’s lawyers to make at the Supreme Court. Indeed, while arguing for absolute immunity from a state subpoena, his attorney actually indicated it was quite clear that Trump could be prosecuted after leaving office. He suggested it was something of a fallback, showing that a president wasn’t above the law.

“Of course, Congress retains the impeachment power,” Consovoy said. “And on the other side of impeachment, as the text of the Constitution makes clear, the president like all other citizens is subject to the laws and jurisdiction of states and the federal government alike.”

To emphasize: “As the text of the Constitution makes clear.”

At another point, Consovoy said, “This is not a permanent immunity.”

Trump’s lawyers are now in effect arguing that it is a permanent immunity. That puts them in the position of arguing to a Supreme Court that has rejected a Trump claim of absolute immunity that a president can do literally whatever he wants in office and never face criminal consequences.

In effect, Smith is asking a conservative-leaning Supreme Court — one third of which consists of Trump-nominated justices — to decide that crucial threshold question early and to decide against Trump.

If the court expedites the case and rules in Trump’s favor, a conviction was never going to stick anyway and we’ll have surely entered a new era of presidential power.

If it rules against Trump — again — what many legal experts regard as an attempted delay tactic might no longer look like such a smart gambit.>

Choke on it!!!

<Your cyberbully editor remains wildly off-the-charts. This isn't an informational debate, not even close. It's just contrived insults of Alan's feeble imagination. perfidious needs, deserves a long vacation.

What would happen if FTB spoke to people this way post after post after post, as a matter of routine??? I write one reasonable sentence without naming names and my post gets deleted and suspended.

<spread your hatred, lies and conspiracy theories> describes Alan Shaw to a "t". That's the daily routine of that cyberbully.

<Three months after the FBI seized classified records from Mar-a-Lago last August, a longtime employee of Donald Trump’s private club quit his job.

Within days, the former president did something he rarely did – Trump called the former employee on his cell phone to ask why he was leaving after two decades of working at the resort, according to two sources and material seen by CNN.

The employee told the former president he had another business opportunity he wanted to pursue. The message later got back to the former employee that Trump thought he was a “good man.”

But he wasn’t just any staffer at the club – the former employee was a witness to several episodes special counsel Jack Smith included in his federal criminal indictment charging the former president with mishandling classified documents. He had moved several boxes for Trump and was also privy to conversations referenced in the indictment between Trump and his two co-defendants, Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira, and Trump’s body man Walt Nauta – putting the former employee in a unique group of Mar-a-Lago staffers who could be in a position to provide valuable information to investigators.

The phone call from Trump, described to CNN by multiple people familiar with it, was part of a pattern of outreach to the former employee, who would become a key witness in the months after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and before Trump’s June indictment. Interactions included offers of legal representation by attorneys paid for by Trump and complimentary tickets to a golf tournament, as well as repeated reminders he could come back to work for Trump.

Taken together, the incidents may have been harmless, even gracious exchanges between friends or business contacts. But the special counsel’s office investigating Trump showed interest in them. In interviews with investigators before Trump’s indictment, the former employee shared details of how associates of the former president kept in touch after he had stopped working at Mar-a-Lago, the sources told CNN.

Most of the interactions have not been previously reported and none were referenced in the criminal indictments.

Yet they highlight an under-the-radar approach long used by Trump’s business and political world to keep tabs on allies and former associates, something prosecutors and defense attorneys are still watching for as Trump’s trials approach.

A series of interactions

The former employee was particularly close to De Oliveira, and many of the interactions were with his long-time friend, who has remained loyal to Trump. The former president is paying for De Oliveira’s lawyer, according to public records.

De Oliveira had been the one who passed the former employee’s phone number to Trump upon his departure, one of the sources said.

Not long after he left his job, De Oliveira told the former Mar-a-Lago employee he was sure Trump would like to see him at an upcoming Trump-hosted golf tournament and asked if the former employee wanted complimentary tickets....>

<.....On another occasion, De Oliveira communicated to the former employee that his job was still available if he wanted to return to working at Mar-a-Lago. Nauta also told him he could come back to work at Mar-a-Lago, going so far as to show up at the former employee’s gym in person with De Oliveira, which was unusual, according to one of the sources.

A lawyer for De Oliveira didn’t respond to requests for comment, and a lawyer for Nauta declined to comment on the interactions. Attorneys for the former employee and Trump also declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the special counsel’s office.

By early 2023, the former employee found his own attorney, suspecting correctly that he might get subpoenaed by federal investigators looking into the classified documents case, the sources said. Around that time, he was still in frequent contact with De Oliveira, who brought up that the former employee wasn’t using a Trump-provided lawyer, pointing out how expensive a lawyer outside the Trump fold could be.

In another instance, John Rowley, who at the time was a top lawyer on Trump’s defense team, left a voice mail for the former employee saying he knew he had received a grand jury subpoena to testify in the documents case. Rowley asked the employee to call him, but the employee never called back. The New York Times previously made public the existence of this voicemail.

Rowley told the newspaper in an interview in September he was trying to help witnesses if they needed lawyers, and not attempting to influence testimony. Generally, corporations can find and pay for lawyers when lower-level employees are swept up as witnesses in an investigation, and it doesn’t necessarily mean ethics are being compromised.

Whether Trump employees would use defense lawyers provided by the ex-president has loomed over the case. For instance, one Trump employee who cut a deal with prosecutors provided details that led to the indictment of De Oliveira only after switching from a Trump-provided lawyer to a federal public defender.

Since that episode, prosecutors in the case have taken pains to make sure Nauta, De Oliveira and other witnesses are aware of the possible conflicts of interest that could arise by having a small collection of Trump-funded attorneys represent multiple people in the case.

De Oliveira’s use of a Trump-provided lawyer was so notable to investigators they included it in their indictment, after describing his alleged part in the obstruction conspiracy with Trump and Nauta. De Oliveira took on a lawyer paid for by Trump, after Nauta and others discussed his loyalty and whether he was “good,” the indictment said.

And as De Oliveira celebrated a birthday with the former employee at a South Florida casino in August 2022, Trump called De Oliveira directly to tell him he would provide him an attorney.>

<<fredthejackal> receives disrespect because he hands it out like candy at Easter.

You play good little acolyte, he will fawn over you for all to see. Do not, on any account, call him out; same as his hero, POTUS 45, he becomes the very picture of outrage.

His game is classic projection and confession rolled into one, and those who shed light on this fact become enemies for life. His mission is to repeatedly lie, exaggerate and propagate half-truths, because that is his raison d'etre. Once one is an enemy, no calumny will be spared that unfortunate soul.

He claims Christian values, yet is mercilessly at war with others.

< Progressive advocacy groups in Arkansas on Monday asked a full federal appeals court to reconsider a three-judge panel's ruling that private groups can't sue under a key section of the federal Voting Rights Act.

The Arkansas Public Policy Panel and the Arkansas State Conference NAACP asked for the case to go before the full 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after a panel ruled 2-1 last month that only the U.S. attorney general can enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The groups, which are challenging Arkansas' new state House districts under the law, told reporters in a conference call that the ruling reverses decades of precedent and would remove a key tool for voters to stand up for their rights if it's not reversed. It also would put future challenges at the whims of partisan politics, since the president nominates the attorney general.

“By jeopardizing private parties’ ability to enforce the act, the panel decision threatens to make the promise of the Voting Rights Act hollow and should not be allowed to stand," said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the groups in the case.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act requires political maps to include districts where minority populations’ preferred candidates can win elections. Lawsuits have long been brought under the section to try to ensure that Black voters have adequate political representation in places with a long history of racism, including many Southern states.

Earlier this year, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Alabama's congressional map redrawn to boost representation for Black voters in a case brought by private individuals and groups.

“I just want to make sure that we are able to speak up, speak out and give those people voices that they need on what’s going on in our community," Barry Jefferson, president of the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP, said. "Their votes are their voice.”

The groups said in their request Monday that last month's ruling conflicts with all three other appeals courts that have ruled on the issue. It noted that Congress has repeatedly reauthorized the Voting Rights Act without questioning the privately enforced cases.

“If the panel decision is left undisturbed, this vitally important statute will mean different things in different parts of the country,” the filing said.

In a statement Monday, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, called the appeals panel's decision “well-reasoned” and said it correctly explained why only the federal government could bring lawsuits under Section 2.

“I will continue to vigorously defend the Arkansas Board of Apportionment in this case,” Griffin said, referring to the three-member panel that draws the state's legislative districts. The board includes the governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

The 8th Circuit ruling applies only to federal courts covered by the district, which includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

The groups' request comes as Louisiana is asking the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a different conclusion from one of its three-judge panels, which rejected the argument that there is no private right to sue under the Voting Rights Act. Ruling in a Louisiana congressional redistricting case, the 5th Circuit panel said the U.S. Supreme Court so far has upheld the right of private litigants to bring lawsuits alleging violations of Section 2, as have other circuit appellate courts.

Citing the Arkansas case, Alabama and 12 other Republican states last week asked the full 5th Circuit court to reconsider the panel decision.

“Section 2 contains no express private right of action,” the filing said. “And the VRA’s structure confirms that the provision creates no implied private right of action either.”

All but one of the 8th Circuit's active appeals judges were appointed by Republican presidents, but advocates said they remain hopeful that the court would reverse the panel's decision in the Arkansas case.

“At the end of the day, this is a decision of two judges out of a circuit with 11 active judges, and eight judges have yet to have their say,” Lakin said.

The groups are challenging Arkansas' state House redistricting plan, which was approved in 2021 by the all-Republican state Board of Apportionment.

The redistricting plan created 11 majority-Black districts, which the groups challenging the map argued was too few. They argued the state could have drawn 16 majority-Black districts to more closely mirror the state’s Black population. Republicans hold a majority in both chambers of the Legislature.

<[Event "New England Open"] [Site "Fitchburg Mass"]
[Date "1985.09.01"]
[EventDate "1985"]
[Round "4"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Shaw, Alan"]
[Black "Chase, Christopher"]
[ECO "A67"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 e6 4.Nc3 exd5 5.cxd5 d6 6.e4 g6 7.f4 Bg7 8.Bb5+ Nfd7 9.Bd3 Qh4+ 10.g3 Qe7 11.Nf3 0-0 12.0-0 Nb6 13.Kg2 Bg4 14.h3 Bxf3+ 15.Qxf3 c4 16.Bc2 N8d7 17.Bd2 Nc5 18.Rae1 Nbd7 19.Qe2 Rfe8 20.Qxc4 Nb6 21.Qe2 Bxc3 22.Bxc3 Nxd5 23.Bd4 Rac8 24.Bxc5 Rxc5 25.Ba4 b5 26.Bxb5 Rec8 27.Rf2 Nb4 28.a3 Nc2 29.Rd1 Rxb5 30.Qxb5 Ne3+ 31.Kf3 Nxd1 32.Rd2 Nxb2 33.Qxb2 Qe6 34.g4 Qc4 35.Re2 Qd3+ 36.Re3 Qf1+ 37. Kg3 Qg1+ 38.Kf3 Rc1 39.Re2 Rb1 40.Qc2 Rf1+ 41.Rf2 Rc1 42.Qb2 Qh1+ 43.Kg3 Qe1 44.Qb8+ Kg7 45.Qb2+ Kg8 46.Qb8+ Kg7 47.Qb2+ Rc3+ 48.Kh2 Qe3 49.Rc2 Qg3+ 50.Kh1 Qxh3+ 51.Kg1 Qxg4+ 52.Kh2 Qxf4+ 53.Kg1 Qg5+ 54.Kh1 Qh5+ 55.Kg2 Qf3+ 56.Kh2 Qf4+ 57.Kg1 Qe3+ 1/2-1/2>

<[Event "New England Open"] [Site "Fitchburg Mass"]
[Date "1985.09.02"]
[EventDate "1985"]
[Round "5"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Kochman, David"]
[Black "Shaw, Alan"]
[ECO "C00"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "84th US Open"]
[Site "Pasadena CA"]
[Date "1983.08.??"]
[EventDate "1983"]
[Round "6"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Watson, John L"]
[Black "Glueck, David"]
[ECO "E62"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "84th US Open"]
[Site "Pasadena CA"]
[Date "1983.08.??"]
[EventDate "1983"]
[Round "11"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Glueck, David"]
[Black "Haessler, Carl"]
[ECO "B10"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "15th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1987.??.??"]
[EventDate "?"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Gruenfeld, Yehuda"]
[Black "Glueck, David"]
[ECO "C04"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "15th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1987.??.??"]
[EventDate "1987"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Glueck, David"]
[Black "Seirawan, Yasser"]
[ECO "B40"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "15th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1987.??.??"]
[EventDate "1987"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Glueck, David"]
[Black "Damljanovic, Branko"]
[ECO "B40"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "15th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1987.??.??"]
[EventDate "1987"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Frias Pablaza, Victor"]
[Black "Glueck, David"]
[ECO "D63"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]
[Source "365chess"]

<[Event "15th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1987.??.??"]
[EventDate "1987"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Djuric, Stefan"]
[Black "Glueck, David"]
[ECO "D60"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "15th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia, PA"]
[Date "1987.??.??"]
[EventDate "1987"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Browne, Walter Shawn"]
[Black "Glueck, David"]
[ECO "D61"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

< Scat dat!

Lies, lies, and more fantastic lies from the fake crybaby of completely backward statements. Z free legend 0000000010 is a dishonest hissy troll full of pigshit -- YOU, stone free or die. You damn well know that you are perfidious' lapdog and the two of you have harassed FTB for parts of three decades!!!

If you don't want to hear from FTB, then leave FTB alone, TROLL. No, sfod won't do that, because sfod CRAVES negative attention! This forum is still more proof (does any regular still need proof?) that stone free or die intends to harass FTB every day for life.

<It's become a holiday tradition, especially in the red states. Every year, in response to overtly Christian displays put up in government buildings, the Satanic Temple petitions to set up a display honoring Lucifer in state capitols. They usually succeed. See, the Supreme Court long ago created a loophole in the First Amendment to allow religious displays, by arguing that as long as every group gets to have one, it doesn't violate the "no establishment of religion" clause. By putting up altars to Satan next to the annual nativity scenes, the Satanic Temple makes their point about the silliness of this loophole.

More important, however, is the trolling part. Every year, Christian conservatives discover the Satanic display and have a loud, public temper tantrum about it. In this, Satanists prove their point: Conservatives claim to respect religious plurality, but it's a lie. The overt religious iconography on government property was always about promoting the Christian nationalist view that theirs is the only "real" American religion.

It's hardened into a ritual because both sides get something out of it. The fundamentalists get a chance to freak out and use this as evidence for their lurid conspiracy theories claiming demonic forces are out to get them. The Satanists and their fans get a chance to remind everyone that Republicans are hypocrites who never really believed all that "free speech" talk. This year, the annual rite is playing out in Iowa, where the Satanists have antagonized the Christians with a goat's head wreath in the Des Moines capitol building.

The story has more national resonance than usual, however. It's happening in the shadow cast by a much darker, more dangerous bad faith debate over free speech: The fight over alleged anti-semitism on campus.

In their twin quest to divide-and-conquer the left and deflect from Donald Trump's responsibility for unleashing a torrent of bigotry across the U.S., House Republicans decided to host one of their many disingenuous spectacles disguised as "hearings" last week. Three presidents of elite universities — Harvard, M.I.T, and the University of Pennsylvania — were summoned to discuss anti-semitism on campus in the wake of Israel's war on Gaza. In a clip that went viral, these three were unable to state plainly under questioning from Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., that students would be expelled if they called for genocide of Jews.

The trick worked as intended, causing the anti-MAGA coalition to tear at each other with arguments over whether these presidents were in the right on free speech grounds, whether the threat of anti-semitism from campus is overblown, and why the voices of teenaged college students are treated as emblematic of the entire left. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote, "you can see the trap Stefanik laid."....>