<....On Wednesday, the House select committee formed when Republicans took power in 2023 held a hearing. Its mandate is ostensibly to unearth examples of the government and federal law enforcement engaging in biased, partisan activity — it is called the committee on “weaponization of the federal government” — but its focus has generally been to air grievances that bubbled up in right-wing media and conversation.

The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), excoriated the committee’s efforts in her opening remarks.

“We’re here because a former president is on trial in New York,” she said. “That’s why we’re here.”

She played a clip from Fox host Maria Bartiromo challenging a Republican member of the committee.

“President Trump is in a trial all day long, every day in New York City. Where is this committee of weaponization and what are you doing about it?” Bartiromo asked. She claimed that “we’re losing the country” and then continued her criticism. “With all due respect, I’m not blaming you specifically, but it’s not enough to set up a committee that’s called the weaponization of federal government. That’s not doing it for anybody. We want to hear more from you. We want to hear action. We want to know what the heck is going on in this New York trial where nobody can seem to come up with a crime.”

Why, she was asking, wasn’t this committee formed specifically to push back on the purported Deep State doing more in Trump’s defense? Why aren’t you helping him?

The short answer, of course, is that the Manhattan trial is untethered to any federal efforts. But Bartiromo — perhaps the most eager consumer of pro-Trump rhetoric to appear on cable television — simply wants the committee to engage in “action” that comes to Trump’s defense.

“Trump is charged in these cases because there is sufficient evidence to reasonably believe that he committed almost 100 serious crimes in this country,” Plaskett said at the hearing, in response to Bartiromo. She accused the committee’s Republican majority of “using its platform to bully American people into believing falsehoods, falsehoods which serve little purpose other than to scare everyday Americans, spread confusion, and attempt to reelect Donald Trump.”

This is, in fact, the “action” that it and its Republican members are often undertaking.

Trump’s political rhetoric has been thematically consistent from the outside: him against the world, us against them. But his positioning of himself has varied. In 2016, he was the outside challenger. In 2020, he was the powerful incumbent. Now he’s the victim, the guy who they’re trying to attack relentlessly.

Gagged by the judge in New York and forced to endure cold temperatures in the courtroom, he needs your help. A recurring monthly contribution, preferably.>

<A group of MAGA loyalists and wannabe heavy-hitter lawmakers played hooky from the Capitol on Thursday and made their way up to Manhattan to support Donald Trump in court.

While the merry band of court jesters, headlined by Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL), may have been there to demonstrate their personal devotion to the former president and publicly attack the judge on his behalf, sources close to Trump sure don’t seem impressed.

In fact, three well-placed Trumpworld sources who spoke with The Daily Beast all suggested this latest court-crashing contingency did more to embarrass themselves than anything.

"Morons. All of them. Selfish morons,” one senior GOP aide told The Daily Beast, referring to Boebert, Gaetz, and their fellow travelers, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Eli Crane (R-AZ), and Bob Good (R-VA).

Not only did this group risk overplaying their hands in Trumpworld through overexposure and gratuitous sycophancy, our sources said, they also opened themselves up to attack by skipping votes on the Hill, effectively leaving the Democrats with a majority for the day.

“You can’t think of a more bozo crew to come through,” said one source close to Trump, requesting anonymity to relay the reaction within the former president’s orbit. “And honestly, if ChatGPT could come up with an F-tier list, that would be it.”

That “F-tier” stands in stark contrast to what this Trumpworld source described as the ex-president’s “first tier” of courthouse guests, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and top vice-presidential contenders such as Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and J.D. Vance (R-OH), who treated the opportunity as an audition of sorts.

Unlike the Thursday cohort of colorful, mostly fringe personalities, the likes of Johnson and Scott traveling up to New York to defend Trump was viewed as a badge of honor within the former president’s circle, these sources all said. Vance used a podium outside the courthouse to rail against “every single person involved in this prosecution,” while Johnson, as the top legislative Republican, decried how Trump was “clearly frustrated” to be “tied up now for the fifth week in this trial that has no merit.”

The Thursday crew didn’t have quite the same gravitas.

Good, in particular, drew the ire of Trumpworld sources for appearing at the Manhattan criminal court. “Some of these people are showing up because they’re disgusted by what’s going on in New York. [But] a lot of them have ulterior motives,” a source close to the Trump family texted The Daily Beast. “Bob Good is a perfect example—he spat in DJT’s face during the primaries and now that he has millions of dollars in negative ads falling on his head in a primary that he’s sure to lose. He’s trying to cozy up to DJT.”

The source continued: “We see you, Bob, and we’re not buying it.”

Good met with Trump prior to the event and talked with him. While he declined to delve into specifics, the House Freedom Caucus chair said it was a “great visit.”

He claimed that despite the optics of being up against a pro-Trump primary challenger—who was also in attendance, riding in Trump’s motorcade to the trial—he wasn’t going for any political reason and just wanted to show his support for the big man.

“This was all about supporting the president,” Good told The Daily Beast. “The Freedom Caucus is the most important relationship for the president in the House, we’re the ones who had his back in his first term, and we’re the ones who will have his back in a second term.”>

<An upside down flag was spotted outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the days leading up to President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, according to photos obtained by The New York Times Thursday. The symbol—meant to evoke an America in distress—was favored at the time by advocates of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Alito, for his part, denied any involvement in the placement of the flag, and instead blamed his wife. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” he told the Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” Experts in judicial ethics, however, decried the use of such blatant political messaging outside the home of a supposedly nonpartisan justice. This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told the newspaper.>

<If your coup does not succeed, try, try again.

Former President Trump and his allies — including the Speaker of the House and members of Congress — are already laying their foundation to claim the 2024 election was stolen. Their claim would be laughable, ignorable even, if Donald Trump had not previously used the same lie to incite a violent attack by an armed mob on the U.S. Capitol only three years ago.

Unfortunately, this history is repeating itself in real time.

We are watching the same cast of characters performing from the same script. In 2020, MAGA extremists made false claims that the election was fraudulent and stolen, a carefully crafted narrative that many of our House Majority colleagues participated in. Speaker Mike Johnson even tried to disenfranchise millions of Americans by leading an amicus brief to overturn the free, fair and secure 2020 election. Now, the former president and his allies in the House are doubling down on their efforts to undermine the sanctity of our elections, with the false claim that millions of noncitizens are voting in our federal elections.

Last week, Speaker Johnson stood shoulder-to-shoulder with discredited election deniers on the steps of the Capitol — the very steps that a violent pro-Trump mob overran on Jan. 6, 2021 — and announced the introduction of an unequivocally xenophobic bill that would discourage and even bar eligible American voters from registering to vote.

Is there any evidence of this massive conspiracy? No. Not even according to Speaker Johnson, who was forced to admit the claim of mass noncitizen voting in federal elections is not “provable.”

Indeed, independent sources have repeatedly debunked this myth, verifying that noncitizens voting in federal elections is extraordinarily rare and has never been shown to impact the outcome of any election. It is already a federal crime for a noncitizen to vote in federal elections. States have several existing systems in place to deter noncitizen voting and individuals who violate the law face prison time and deportation.

But former President Trump, Speaker Johnson and their extremist allies in the Republican Conference clearly have contempt for the intelligence of American voters — they think we do not know any better, that we cannot see through this flailing attempt to cling to power by peddling scare tactics and lies.

Here’s the part they’re not saying out loud: Speaker Johnson and House Republicans are not actually concerned about noncitizens voting in federal elections. They admit they have no evidence to back up their claims. Their real ambition is to lay the groundwork for blame and obfuscation to do violence to the Constitution and deny the people their say in the outcome of this election.

We have been here before. We cannot ignore the potential for another January 6.

As the January 6 Select Committee report found, Donald Trump started laying the foundation for his “big lie” months before Election Day, claiming mail-in voting would produce a “rigged” election. He did this in interviews, tweets and even presidential debates.

Six months out from the 2024 presidential election, we are seeing a hauntingly similar narrative being crafted around alleged noncitizens voting in federal elections, despite Republicans’ knowledge that it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and that federal and state law enforcement are adept at enforcing this law.

We are at a critical moment in our nation’s history and the experiment of American democracy. We must work together as a nation to combat the disinformation and fraud campaign the Republican Party has begun to write about the 2024 election.

In 2020, many did not foresee the scale and scope of the former president’s desperate and corrupt attempts to stay in power. We now have the advantage of hindsight.

When tomorrow’s historians write about Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2024 election — and they surely will — they will eviscerate the Speaker’s insidious bill and they will condemn the pitiful actions of House Republican apologists. The record will be clear, and the verdict of history will be harsh. And Americans will remember that congressional Democrats took a stand for truth and democracy.>

<If it weren’t for mercy, an 18-year-old from Brooklyn popped on drug charges back in the ’90s may not have the extraordinary life he lives in Washington today, a life that’s becoming a headache for the residents of the nation’s capital.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), one of three children raised by a single mom in Crown Heights, was arrested for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute when he was 18 and had just moved to Florida for college.

“My pastor always says that everybody in life is 15 seconds away from stupid,” he told Amy Bennett Williams, a reporter at the Fort Myers News Press. “But when you’re desperate, you’re three seconds away. And I was desperate.”

Though sentencing guidelines in Florida called for up to 15 years in prison for the charge, Donalds — called a “Rising Star” by President Donald Trump in 2020 — caught a break. Twice.

After getting a second chance on the drug charge thanks to a pretrial diversion program, he caught a bribery charge three years later. He got both records expunged and proved flexible sentencing can open doors to young people who make mistakes.

Now, as a vocal conservative in the GOP, he’s leading the charge in cracking down on young offenders in D.C. — and making a historic challenge to the District’s home rule — even though he’s not an elected leader representing the people here.

“This bill requires that we treat adult criminals as adults, like the rest of the country does,” said Donalds, who was legally an adult when his judges went soft on him.

But it’s about more than that.

“This bill would be the biggest rollback of D.C. self-government in a generation,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) said in a speech on the House floor after Donalds’s bill, The D.C. Crimes Act, or the D.C. Criminal Reforms to Immediately Make Everyone Safer Act, passed 225-181 in the House this week.

Here we go again.

It’s another case of hypocrisy by meddling from House Republicans desperate for election-year fearmongering storylines and terrified of the prospect that D.C. residents will ever get the vote in Congress that we are owed as Americans.

Donalds got some juice when he made noise with the tea party in Florida. So you’d think he would be down with our cheeky license plates in D.C. that say: “Taxation Without Representation.”

Instead, he’s going all King George on us.

His bill would permanently prohibit the elected D.C. Council from creating any kind of legislation on sentencing, even if the members want to make punishments tougher.

It also proposes restricting the leniency that judges have to grant at their discretion during sentencing. Like the kind that saved Donalds from prison.

He could be presenting himself as a role model for change when he’s legislating, not only when he’s campaigning. Or he could focus his deep concern about youth crime into the headlines about teen homicide in his home district, Florida’s 19th....>

<....Because D.C. has had enough of politicians coming from that slice of the electoral map. Anyone remember Rep. Trey Radel (R-Fla.), who was caught playing around in D.C. snow not long after he got here in 2013?

And not the kind that melts.

Radel was busted after buying $250 worth of cocaine from an undercover federal agent. Court records showed that he got his nose candy at that particular Dupont Circle marketplace frequently.

He left office after the judge went pretty easy on him with just a year of probation. Huh. That lenient sentencing thing again.

Sometimes, those House members get a little crazy when they win an election and get to the big time in D.C., quickly looking to make a name for themselves.

Donalds made national news last year when he was rumored to be one of the contenders to take over the House speaker job from Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

That didn’t work out, so maybe he’s taking from McCarthy’s playbook by trying to run things in D.C.

Last year, McCarthy used a carjacking close to Capitol Hill as his platform to launch a sweeping rebuke of American democracy, leading other members of Congress on voting to overturn local crime legislation that the D.C. Council enacted.

This happened while his central California hometown of Bakersfield — the city I chose to honor for being the birthplace of the band Korn — was named the car theft capital of America by insurance adjusters.

Yet he was all about legislation nearly 2,700 miles away in D.C.

This is not what y’all came to the District for, honorable members.

Your forebears will tell you this.

“The District has been starving to death politically for 70 years,” Sen. Matthew Neely (D-W.Va.) said back in 1951, when he argued to get out of local politics and grant home rule to D.C.

Before D.C. finally got independence in 1973 under President Richard M. Nixon, the city was governed by folks stuck with one of the most loathed committee assignments in Congress: the District Committee.

Those members grumbled.

They didn’t make it all the way to Washington only to be back in local politics and working on teacher salaries and student bus fares for constituents they’d never meet.

Stay in your lane, honorable members from all over.

Crime in the District has been steadily declining this year. We’ve got this.

All you can give us is the vote we deserve.>

<Two leading Democratic senators are pressing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to reveal whether he repaid a wealthy friend any of the principal for a $267,230 loan he used to buy a luxury motorhome.

The letter to Thomas' lawyer, dated Tuesday, raises questions about potential tax violations by the conservative justice, who is the longest-serving member of the Supreme Court.

Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., in their letter, assert that Thomas never repaid a significant portion of the principal loaned to him by his friend Anthony Welters, nor has Thomas said whether the loan was forgiven.

"That such income from the forgiven debt was not reported on any of Justice Thomas's financial disclosure reports raises the possibility that Justice Thomas also did not report such forgiveness as income for tax purposes, as federal law requires," the senators wrote in the letter.

The New York Times first reported in August that Thomas in 1999 paid for his Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon — a luxury RV — with a loan from Welters, a close friend of his.

The Senate Finance Committee, which Wyden chairs, found in October that Welters "ceased collecting principal or interest on" the loan in late 2008, the new letter noted.

"It appears that no principal was ever repaid on the loan before all payments ceased," the letter said.

Thomas' lawyer, Elliot Berke, told the senators in January that the justice had made payments to Welters "until the terms of the agreement were satisfied in full."

Wyden and Whitehouse called Berke's response a "non-answer" in their Tuesday letter.

"'Satisfied' could have any number of meanings in the context of repayment, forgiveness, or discharge of debt," the senators said in their letter.

"There should be a simple answer as to whether Justice Thomas had hundreds of thousands in debt forgiven so that he could retain possession of a luxury motor coach that doubles as a second home," the senators wrote.

If Thomas' debt to Welters was canceled, forgiven or discharged for less than the amount he owed, Thomas would have had to report the amount as income on his tax returns, the letter noted.

"At the moment, Justice Thomas has done absolutely nothing to address the perception that he may have failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in forgiven debt on his federal income tax returns and pay the income taxes owed," the letter said.

"The possibility of a serious tax violation of this kind by a member of the Supreme Court warrants investigation," wrote Wyden and Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on federal courts.

The senators asked Berke to respond with clarification on the terms and repayment of the loan by June 3.

Berke did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

The inquiry is just one part of a larger ethics controversy surrounding Thomas.

ProPublica reported in April 2023 that the conservative justice for decades accepted luxury vacations from Republican billionaire Harlan Crow — an apparent violation of a financial disclosure law.

Later reports also found that Harlan paid the school tuition of Thomas' great-nephew.

Democrats have also called on Thomas to recuse himself from considering an appeal by former President Donald Trump arguing that he is immune from prosecution in his election interference federal criminal case. Democrats point to reports that his wife, Ginni Thomas, took part in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in Trump's immunity appeal on April 25, with Thomas on the bench.>

<As the war in Gaza reaches new levels of catastrophe—fighting has resumed in the north and escalated in the south, thousands of children are orphaned, and alarming rates of hunger have become famine—in America, pro-Palestinian and pro-peace activists are still imploring legislators and the White House to call for a cease-fire and end, stem, or condition U.S. military aid to Israel. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are rising. College student protesters have also built encampments and gone on hunger strikes to pressure their respective university leaders and trustees to divest from any businesses associated with the Israeli military apparatus.

Meanwhile, advocacy is also evolving on social media. A curious new trend you might be noticing in your feeds is the Blockout 2024 movement: a call for the public to signal their disapproval of celebrities who are “silent” on Palestinian rights by blocking them and boycotting their work. The logic of the movement, such as it is, is that users will deal a blow to the stars’ ad revenue and royalties, and thereby pressure them to change their minds and actions.

It’s difficult to discern the monetary or political impacts of the trend on the struggle for human rights in Israel-Palestine, let alone the staying power of this particular action among pro-Palestinian activists. Some are divided on its efficacy and whether the energy around celebrity activism (or lack thereof) distracts from on-the-ground protests, fundraising, and lobbying about Gaza.

Still, these concerns haven’t stopped the movement from growing. One prominent TikTok page dedicated to the cause, @blockout2024, has more than 180,000 followers. The creator of the account has posted videos with millions of views called “Celeb block of the day” featuring popular stars to “divest” from as well as encouraging people to make videos with their own personal block lists.

That personalization of each list, however, has resulted in pretty disparate standards for boycotting. The block lists—which users are calling a digital guillotine or “digitine”—encompass stars who have been outwardly pro-Israel, such as Jerry Seinfeld and Amy Schumer. But the “digitine” tends to be even more focused on stars who, while not publicly supporting Israel or the Israeli military campaign, have not adopted what users deem a firm-enough pro-Palestinian stance; many of the targeted stars have said nothing at all about the conflict. Take, for example, calls from other users to block Kim Kardashian, who recently replied, “Free Everybody,” after a protester chanted “Free Palestine” during her talk at a business festival in Germany. Beyoncé, too, has been targeted for blocking, for not yet publicly speaking about Israel or Palestine. (She also received backlash last year after her film Renaissance was screened in Israel.) Some of the blocked stars have even supported cease-fire and Palestinian rights. Billie Eilish, for example, has been mentioned, even though she wore an Artists4Ceasefire pin at the Oscars and has publicly urged for fundraising to support struggling Gazans. One creator justified Eilish’s inclusion on her block list by saying her activism hasn’t been enough....>

<....Other celebrities named for blocking include Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, Taylor Swift, Kylie Jenner, and Harry Styles.

In an Instagram video with 834,000 views, a singer named Anees called it a way for activists to take power back.

“We the consumers of content are the ones who drive revenue and profit from ad consumption on social media,” Anees said. “If it’s an artist, don’t listen to their music. If it’s an actor, don’t watch their movies. And if it’s a content creator, refuse to consume their content by blocking them.”

While this might seem pretty far removed from the war and those with power to control it, activists seem to be merely trying to reach those who seem to have more prominence and money, and perhaps therefore more power and influence, than themselves. This might help explain why many antiwar activists bristled at the Met Gala last week. In response to clips circulating from the opulent fundraiser, some users said it was like “watching from District 12,” comparing holding the event during wartime to elites’ hoarding of resources in the The Hunger Games. Protesters disrupted the gala and were arrested. Another block list is circulating with stars’ names who attended the gala.

What remains to be seen is whether any of these rejections will stick. Fan and online reaction to artists’ political stances have affected celebrities before, after all. Think of someone like Debra Messing, Kid Rock, or Clint Eastwood. Their politically active lives have defined who they are to the public, and have shaped their audiences.

Macklemore was once a villain to many left-leaning fans for what they deemed cultural appropriation and unwarranted success in hip-hop, but he’s gained new admiration among many similar observers for his song “Hind’s Hall,” a pro-Palestinian anthem. (However, the song didn’t stop him from getting added to at least one user’s block list.)

In November, after Noah Schnapp, one of the stars of Stranger Things, posted pro-Israel content, some fans of the series announced a boycott of the upcoming season.

Even Malala Yousafzai, the renowned human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has faced backlash by the movement’s supporters, following her co-producing collaboration with Hillary Clinton on the women’s suffrage–centered musical Suffs. Clinton argued in an op-ed against a full cease-fire, so Yousafzai’s association with her drew criticisms of hypocrisy (Yousafzai later affirmed her support for cease-fire and condemned Israeli leadership).>

<Foxtrot employees arrived at work on April 23 to find out they’d be laid off en masse. They were ordered to lock up the stores and kick customers out. At many of the delivery app–turned—grocery store chain’s 33 locations, they left behind shelves and freezer cases full of food. And in at least one location, they didn’t even clear out the milk and meat from the fridge.

Less than a month later on May 10, the rotting food along with most of whatever else was left of Foxtrot was auctioned off at a foreclosure sale held by JPMorgan over Microsoft Teams. Many of the call’s roughly 150 attendees, on the surface, seemed qualified to bid if the price was right. As I scrolled through the attendee list, I saw a woman who identified herself as the general counsel of a Chicago-based restaurant chain, management from two different Texas-based grocers, and staff of multiple private venture funds.

But these would-be bidders barely stood a chance before things got … weird. Eric Goldberg, attorney for DLA Piper, representing JPMorgan, explained that a company called Further Point Enterprises submitted a $2.2 million bid for Foxtrot’s assets in advance. Five different people in the chat asked for a list of the items within each lot. Goldberg then asked if there was a bid for $2.3 million. When nobody responded, he declared the sale of Foxtrot final, and opened the bidding for Dom’s, a specialty grocer in Chicago that Foxtrot merged with in November, at $200,000. Someone unmuted to say, “People are asking for the links to the lots”; Goldberg didn’t acknowledge this and concluded the call without any bids on Dom’s.

Further Point Enterprises, a private holding company reported by the Real Deal to be working with Mike LaVitola, one of Foxtrot’s co-founders, successfully acquired “substantially all of the assets” of Foxtrot—including the inventory in the stores, the intellectual property, the furniture, and more—for a tiny fraction of the $180 million investors gave Foxtrot over the past decade.

What happens next?

That’s the question on Lindsey Ridley’s mind. She was a shift manager at the Wicker Park location in Chicago, putting her years of work experience at companies like Starbucks and Walgreens to good use.

“Nobody should have to experience this void of unknowns,” she said. When is she getting another job? Now that she’s behind on rent, when is her landlord going to serve her with a five-day notice to evict? Where will she and her daughter go? Ridley set up a GoFundMe but has only raised $180. She said she’s been getting some interviews, but nothing has panned out. When managers realize she used to work at Foxtrot, the interviews “divert from what my qualifications are, and how hard I’ve worked, to ‘What happened?’ and ‘Wow, did you see it coming?’ ”....>

<....Foxtrot’s origin story began on a ski trip when Mike LaVitola and Brian Jaffee decided it was too hard to get beer, wine, or ice cream delivered to their apartments. It was 2012, about a year after the initial launch of Postmates and the same year Instacart and Drizly launched. The two University of Chicago B-school students looped in a software developer to help, and the trio convinced their friends and family to give them $50,000, launching Foxtrot first as a delivery app in Chicago in 2013.

Things got off to a good start. Foxtrot opened up its first location, and then another, and then two more. LaVitola started to raise money from outside his social circle to grow the company—$1 million in 2015, $6 million in 2018, $17 million in 2020, $42 million in 2021, and in 2022, a whopping $100 million. That money transformed Foxtrot from a local chain of corner stores to a VC-backed upstart where the young and affluent could buy Jeni’s ice cream, craft beer, and high-protein pumpkin-seed ramen, or have a barista whip them up a coffee date smoothie. Foxtrot moved to a 25,000 square feet headquarters that one former employee described to me as “the world’s stupidest office,” befitting Facebook or Google, not a few dozen corner stores that hadn’t turned a profit.

Foxtrot’s sudden collapse means they owe a bunch of people a bunch of money. A number of vendors have come forward to the press saying they have unpaid invoices. Many, like Carolyn’s Krisps, Onigiri Kororin, and Oak Cliff Coffee, are small businesses. Two vendors, both produce companies, have sued. Landlords have sued. And workers are suing—under the WARN Act, companies with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days’ notice of layoffs, or compensate workers for two months’ worth of wages and benefits.

But although all these groups—the workers, the landlords, and the suppliers—have debts that are (likely) legitimate, most of those folks will never see a penny.

On Wednesday, Foxtrot’s parent company, Outfox Hospitality, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but it’s not clear what’s left to divvy up. After all, JPMorgan has ostensibly already sold what they asserted was “substantially” everything to Further Point. We’re now left with two different companies: old Foxtrot, which still owes all the former employees and vendors money (and has entered bankruptcy), and new Foxtrot, which owns all of old Foxtrot’s assets and is reportedly talking to old Foxtrot’s former landlords in an attempt to reopen stores....>

<....Along with Foxtrot’s assets, Further Point Enterprises acquired the right to relaunch Foxtrot without cleaning up the company’s metaphorical, and in some cases literal, messes. As Melissa Jacoby, professor of law at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explained to me, although there can be exceptions, buyers in these types of sales don’t inherit any of the debts or obligations of the original company. It looks like this is a fresh start for the company’s founder.

One auction attendee told Retail Dive that the process was “completely ramrodded.” What’s grim, however, is that secured creditors like JPMorgan are usually free to ramrod as they please. If JPMorgan sold Foxtrot for less than the fair market value, JPMorgan would likely lose its right to sue Foxtrot to recover any additional money. But, generally speaking, secured creditors like JPMorgan don’t have any obligations to all the unsecured creditors who are behind them in line—in this case, the many men and women who were stocking Foxtrot’s shelves, or the small businesses that have been hosed.

Eric Goldberg, Further Point Enterprises, Mike LaVitola, and Greenberg Traurig, the firm representing Outfox Hospitality in its bankruptcy, did not return Slate’s requests for comment.

The laws that put secured creditors like JPMorgan at the front of the line are important. A company could owe you money because it failed to pay out required severance, because it’s polluting your drinking water, because it sold you a defective product, or simply because your grandma bought you a gift card you haven’t redeemed yet. And an increasing number of people are independent contractors—Uber drivers, freelance journalists, and more—putting them in roughly the same legal category (suppliers) as the seltzer and ice cream companies that sold goods to Foxtrot.

But across the board, our legal system—the Uniform Commercial Code, which governed Foxtrot’s foreclosure, the bankruptcy, and what comes next—doesn’t look kindly on the claims of the little guy.

As her store was closing, Ridley asked her boss if she could take home some food, at least the perishable stuff, and her boss told her no—that food belonged to the bank now. Which was true. But also—disgusting.

<The first jarring line offered by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) during his conversation with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business on Thursday morning was his declaration that he believed that the impeachment inquiry he’s helping to lead into President Biden was “hopefully in the final stages.”

That inquiry, initiated in September, has been reportedly in its final stages since January. Or, rather, since December. Or, really, since November. It has been in its final stages for longer than it was ever not in its final stages for the simple reason that Comer and his colleagues keep pushing things out in hopes that they can wrap things up with some credible point of success. But credible successes have eluded them. The probe, instead, has only offered a surfeit of oversteps and embarrassments.

In one sense, it was bold of Comer to join Bartiromo on Thursday. She has been in the habit recently of challenging her guests — not for their habit of not delivering on promises but because they aren’t doing enough. She keeps getting mad because she wants Republicans to do … something that embarrasses or hobbles Biden, whatever that might be. Maybe Comer gets a pass because he refuses to learn that his efforts to embarrass Biden have so spectacularly failed.

The segment began with Bartiromo reading from a list of questions Comer’s House Oversight Committee sent to the president in March.

“The committee has accounted for over $24 million that has flowed from foreign sources to you, your family and their business associates,” she read. “The committee has identified no legitimate services to merit such lucrative payments.” Later, she added another section: “The committee has identified and successfully traced money from foreign transactions, including from China, straight to your bank accounts.”

All of this is nonsense or exaggeration. The millions of dollars mentioned were, for the most part, uncovered well before the impeachment inquiry began; most of the money, as The Washington Post’s Fact Checker explained in August, went to people other than members of Biden’s family. Multiple witnesses explained what services were provided for that money, including investments in real estate or consulting on corporate governance. There was no money from China going “straight to [Biden’s] bank accounts,” just a multistep, weeks-long chain of transactions that was in service of repaying money Joe Biden had loaned his brother.

All of this has also been pointed out countless times publicly — including by me when Comer and Bartiromo walked through the same points in December when the probe was in its final stages. Comer (ostensibly a rigorous investigator) and Bartiromo (ostensibly a journalist) should know these points are inaccurate. But neither acknowledged that to the audience. An audience, mind you, that is tuning into Fox Business and being treated to typical Fox News fare.

Comer’s response to all of this was the “final stages” comment and the announcement that he was subpoenaing another bank for records about some other account, as he’s done so often before. Maybe this will be the credible point of success — and maybe this time a wolf really is threatening the sheep.

Then it was more of the same, typical, debunked patter, like that the Bidens had lots of “shell companies” (see the aforementioned Fact Checker piece for an explanation) and that the Bidens couldn’t “answer exactly what the family did to receive this money” (ibid.).

Bartiromo asked how many bank accounts had been associated with the president, and Comer hemmed and hawed. Eventually, he landed back in his safe space of old allegations.

“We found two specific checks that went from the Biden family influence-peddling to Joe Biden personally, one for $200,000, and one for $40,000,” he said. “So we’ve identified a quarter of a million dollars in direct payments that Joe Biden received from his family’s shady influence-peddling schemes.”

In November, back when the probe was in its final stages, I described a similar claim as Comer’s “most dishonest attack yet.” After all, those checks were each repayment of old loans to Biden — a reality manifested in records showing the initial loans and in the fact that both checks, written well before Biden became president, are labeled as “loan repayment” in the memo field. Comer’s argument is, in essence, that if you loan your brother money and he pays you back, you’re morally culpable for how he got the money to do so.....>

<....“You’re talking about dozens of accounts, dozens of LLCs and no answer yet as to what they did to receive this money,” Comer repeated, raising this old point for the third time in the interview. “It’s, I think, Maria, the biggest public corruption scandal in our lifetimes and the fact—”

Bartiromo interjected: “Wow!”

Comer concluded by complaining that the media didn’t want to write about it. Which isn’t true! It’s just that writing “actually” gets a bit repetitive, especially when the thing that isn’t true was robustly debunked more than nine months ago.

Then Bartiromo turned her attention to Oversight’s effort to “investigat[e] the White House’s so-called push to boost voter registration.”

“One of the things we’re doing,” Comer said, “is we’re trying to follow the money, much like we’ve done in the Biden family investigation. We’re trying to identify bank accounts that we can subpoena to see who’s paying for many of these campus protests, voter registration drives, things to influence the election.” He also mentioned the effort to crack down on noncitizen voting, which has been a hot topic on the right since House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) visited Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Noncitizen voting is already illegal and occurs at nonsignificant rates, but the boundaries of reality have not constrained Comer previously. Going to see who’s paying for the campus protests, eh? Yeah, I get that this is good Fox News fodder, but “putting up a cheap tent” is not a particularly expensive endeavor that defies explanation.

Then the interview culminated in truly spectacular fashion.

“We reported this week on a flier that was being handed out, according to another congressman,” Bartiromo said to Comer, “basically telling illegals who are coming across the border, don’t forget to vote for Joe Biden. It’s illegal to vote if you’re not an American citizen in a presidential election.”

“Are you saying that the administration and the Democrats are trying to do just that?” she asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, somebody’s paying for that,” Comer replied. “Somebody’s doing it. And we’re going to try to find out who it is and do what we can to hold them accountable.”

When this story first emerged last month, it was quickly pointed out that the fliers appeared to be fake, misinformation centered on elevating the prospect of noncitizens voting. Last week, NPR dug into the story further, demonstrating that the purported originator of the fliers denied creating them, pointing out various holes in the story and noting that it originated with right-wing activists.

But here was Bartiromo raising the issue to Comer, each of them treating this noncredible allegation as credible and damaging. Just as the two had done so often in 2023 with the debunked claim that Biden had taken a bribe. And just as they continue to do with the impeachment investigation.

Comer assured Bartiromo that his approach to voter-registration questions would be “like [what] we’ve done in the Biden family investigation.”

That is very much the problem.>

Well has Comer learnt the art of accusation without proof from the J Edgar Hoover school: keep matters general, then when pressed, even by that most blatant of shills Maria Bartiromo, bob and weave one's way to the next round of unsubstantiated dross.

<The United States Congress took six months to approve a supplemental spending bill that includes aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The drama, legislative maneuvering, and threats to remove a second speaker of the House of Representatives have left reasonable people asking what, exactly, is going on with Republican legislators: Have they recognized the perilous state of the world and the importance of U.S. leadership? Or was the difficulty in securing the aid the real signal worth paying attention to—making Republican support for the assistance just a last gasp of a conservative internationalism that is no longer a going concern?

In the breach between these two narratives lies the future of the Republican Party—whether it has become wholly beholden to the America First proclivities of Donald Trump or can be wrenched back to the reliably internationalist foreign policy of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

Former President Trump has long questioned the value to the U.S. of international alliances, trade, and treaties, and involvement in global institutions. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, who propounds the Trumpian view, recently said of the fight over the supplemental spending bill: “Notwithstanding some lingering Cold Warriors, we’re winning the debate because reality is on our side.” And Vance may be right about who’s winning: 22 of the 49 Republicans in the Senate voted for the supplemental when it was presented in February, at a time when Trump was agitating against it; Speaker of the House Mike Johnson persuaded Trump to stay on the sidelines for the April vote, and five more Republican senators opposed the legislation anyway. That suggests a rising, not ebbing, tide.

If Vance is correct, this could be the last aid package for Ukraine—meaning that Ukraine will ultimately lose its war with Russia. Republicans will have the U.S. pull away from alliance commitments in Asia and Europe and withdraw from participating in trade agreements and international institutions.

But Republican lawmakers and voters are far from united around this worldview. Despite the onslaught against internationalism, Republican voter support for NATO has decreased only marginally, from 44 percent in 2015 to 43 percent currently. And despite some radical party members’ fulminating that Republicans who’d voted for the supplemental would be hounded by voters, no backlash actually took place.

Some Republican legislators who supported the supplemental spoke of it in terms redolent of the internationalist Republican tradition. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, said: “This House just showed tyrants and despots who wish harm upon us and our allies that we will not waver as the beacon of leadership and liberty.” Johnson, who’d formerly voted against aid to Ukraine, put his job on the line to get the bill passed, in the name of doing what he said was “the right thing.” Representative Mike McCaul of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, described the speaker’s reversal as “transformational … he’s realizing that the world depends on this.” And if that is indeed where Johnson stands, he does so in the company of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has indicated that he will commit his final two years in the Senate to restoring Republican internationalism.

Ultimately, the Republican Party’s direction will become clear based on the policies it chooses to oppose or support. The supplemental was one test; some of the others are less high-profile but at least as consequential, if not more so, because they concern the very building blocks of a conservative international order. Given that the leader of the Republican Party does not favor these ideas, creating policies to advance them will be difficult. But difficult is not impossible, as the success of the supplemental shows.

For example: Will Republicans fight to increase defense spending? The past four presidential administrations have failed to spend even what was needed to carry out their own national-security strategies—and this at a time when the world has been growing more dangerous, as U.S. adversaries have coalesced into an axis of authoritarian powers. Defense spending is popular with the public: In a Reagan Institute poll, 77 percent of Americans said that they favored bumping it up. But doing so will require a reordering of priorities, whether through reforming entitlements, raising taxes, shifting money from domestic to defense budgets, adopting policies that speed economic growth, or allowing deficits to continue to balloon. Republican willingness to make these hard choices in order to spend more on defense—particularly on ship building and munitions stocks—will be a leading indicator as to whether the internationalists among them are gaining ground....>

<....So, too, will the Republican stance toward the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which establishes rules for navigation and boundaries for the exploitation of maritime resources. The convention commits countries to recognizing that territorial waters become international 12 nautical miles from shorelines, and it delineates countries’ exclusive national zones for mining and fishing. In 1994, the United States signed the convention, which has also been signed by 168 other nations and the European Union. But the U.S. Senate has so far refused to ratify it. Conservatives are concerned that the convention impinges on U.S. sovereignty; even the urging of former President George W. Bush, when he was in office, failed to convince them otherwise.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea sets terms that the United States already abides by and enforces on other countries. Without it, America may be forced to comply with the rules its adversaries—chiefly Russia and China—prefer to establish, or else to spend time and money protecting itself and its allies against those countries’ maritime activities. Every living chief of naval operations advocates the convention’s passage. And countries contending with Chinese claims in the South China Sea view U.S. ratification as an indicator of American commitment to the rules-based order on which they rely. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and Democrats Mazie Hirono and Tim Kaine have introduced a resolution to ratify the convention. Republicans will have to decide whether they will provide the votes to pass it or make hostility to treaties a hallmark of their party.

Similarly, the GOP will need to decide exactly what its posture will be on international free trade. Efforts to integrate China into the global economic order on equal terms failed; as a result, both American parties lost their appetite for international trade agreements and turned instead to imposing punitive tariffs on China and restricting its market access. This approach has not been successful either. In fact, the bipartisan retreat from global trade agreements as a lever of international power comes at a time when more Americans—eight in 10—view international trade as beneficial to consumers such as themselves than at any other time in the past 50 years. My American Enterprise Institute colleagues Dan Blumenthal and Derek Scissors have argued for updating trade agreements in the Western Hemisphere—as the Trump administration did with the North American Free Trade Agreement—while prioritizing new agreements with Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. A truly internationalist Republican Party will pursue such a policy, which would strengthen the trade links among Western nations.

In recent years, the United States has withdrawn from dominant roles in numerous international institutions. Neither the Trump administration nor the Biden administration bothered to nominate judges for the World Trade Organization, greatly weakening that body. Meanwhile, China secured leadership roles in Interpol and in the UN agencies that regulate international telecommunications, air routes, and agricultural and industrial assistance. China nearly assumed leadership of the UN’s international maritime organization, which would have allowed it to rewrite the rules for freedom of navigation. Perhaps Republicans can be persuaded that ceding such positions to China is damaging. Much as with the Convention on the Law of the Sea, Washington and its allies can either lead the institutions that set and enforce rules or work to shield their interests from the reach of them. Setting the rules is more cost-effective.

How the Republican Party addresses these nuts-and-bolts national-security policies will reveal its true direction—whether it will continue to lurch toward Senator Vance’s America First policies or return to the values it came to embody after World War II. Even if Donald Trump—the avatar and motive force behind America First—returns to the presidency, Speaker Johnson’s adroit management of the supplemental bill shows that Congress is not powerless. By reasserting its constitutional prerogatives, the legislature can constrain the executive. But for that to happen on national security, Republicans have to believe that American security and prosperity require active engagement in the world.>

<Investors cheered this week’s consumer price index print, which pointed to lower inflation and higher chances for a Federal Reserve rate cut in September. Overlooked in all the excitement, however, is the fact that the U.S. consumer is getting a little green around gills.

The same day as CPI, April retail sales came in worse than economists were expecting, flat from March but down if you strip out cars, gas, and building materials. The New York Fed’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, released Tuesday, shows debt levels and delinquency rates continuing to rise as more people miss payments on credit cards and auto loans. On May 10, the University of Michigan reported a sharp and surprising 13% drop in consumer sentiment in its preliminary May reading after little change the prior three months.

“We’re definitely starting to see additional pockets of stress as the savings cushion people built up during the pandemic is depleted,” says Shannon Saccocia, chief investment officer at NB Private Wealth, the wealth management arm of Neuberger Berman.

All of which could spell trouble for the many diversified bond funds that own securitized debt backed by payments owed on consumer debt, such as credit cards, auto loans, student loans, and home mortgages.

These so-called asset-backed securities are often investment grade, usually floating rate, and have been terrific performers while the Fed has been raising interest rates and the economy has remained surprisingly resilient.

Income funds have added asset-backeds for their high yields and diversification benefits, says Michael Sheldon, chief investment officer at RDM Financial Group. They performed better than traditional bonds, which fall in price when rates rise, allowing investors to “take advantage of the most aggressive Fed rate-hiking cycle in several decades.”

A new crop of pure-play securitized income funds launched in the past year and have been performing nicely, despite growing worries about consumer credit. The Janus Henderson Securitized Income exchange-traded fund made its debut six months ago and boasts a current yield of 6.71%, with a veteran fund manager in John Kerschner. But even he admits to worries about consumer credit. “What concerns us isn’t the overall level of delinquency, which we are obviously keeping a very close eye on, but that spreads have come in so much,” he says. Spreads are the industry term for the yield an income security earns over a risk-free Treasury.

At the end of 2022, a subprime auto loan rated double-B would yield about eight percentage points more than a comparable Treasury, or around 12%, says Kerschner. Now that spread has dropped to around three points, or around an 8% yield. “That still looks pretty good to most investors,” he notes, “but you have to think about where the risk is going and take into consideration what you are being compensated for that risk and is it enough. Now we’re on the borderline of that.”

JSI is emphasizing securities tied to home mortgages and business loans, rather than consumer loans, but he concedes it’s virtually impossible for an investor to tell what’s what from the list of holdings. He suggests avoiding funds that use a lot of leverage, are too small, or that aren’t offered by an established firm. And of course, beware of too high a yield. “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is,” he says.

No, consumer spending isn’t about to fall off a cliff. But investors should weigh the risk/reward of investing in lower-quality consumer credit at this point. As Saccocia asks, “Is it worth it when we’re still getting attractive yields in higher-quality fixed income?”>

<[Event "Framingham CC Championship"] [Site "Framingham Mass"]
[Date "1988.04.26"]
[EventDate "1988"]
[Round "2"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Eldridge, Larry"]
[Black "Shaw, Alan"]
[ECO "B08"]
[WhiteElo "1852"]
[BlackElo 2267"]
[Source "Framingham CC Bulletin"]

1.e4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 3.Nc3 d6 4.Bc4 Nf6 5.Qe2 Nc6 6.Nf3 Bg4 7.Be3 e5 8.d5 Nd4 9.Bxd4 exd4 10.Bb5+ Nd7 11.Nd1 0-0 12.Bxd7 Bxd7 13.c3 dxc3 14.Nxc3 Re8 15.0-0 f5 16.Nd2 b5 17.Nxb5 Qb8 18.a4 a6 19.Na3 Qxb2 20.Nac4 Qxa1 21.Rxa1 Bxa1 22.Qd1 Bg7 23.exf5 Bxf5 24.g4 Bd7 25.Ne3 Rab8 26.Qc2 Rec8 27.Qe4 Bf6 28.Nf3 a5 29.Qf4 Rf8 30.Qc4 Bd8 31.Nd4 Bh4 32.Qxc7 Bxf2+ 33.Kg2 Bxe3 34.Qxd7 Bxd4 0-1>

Puff! puff! puff! (that legacy)

Don't like it, twin axes of evil? Choke on it!