What a buffoon.

All he had to do was return the docs when he was initially asked to return them.

Now they have obstruction on Numbnuts to boot.

But, given his lifelong habit of getting over, still believes he is in the driving seat.

<Mort, real name Oleg, Brexit and Trump election veteran troll, killed on toilet cause his garden shed collapsed, awarded highest russian honour, a slice-of-bread medal, RIP

Gazafan, white race activist (a role formerly known as KKK member), fervent critique of white race being discriminated in a subjective field of sport, a recent victim of white genocide which is well bigger than holocaust, RIP

Joshka, a true and real and not rino fighter against election results, calling for civil war whilst wearing beer helmet and army garments, victim of rushing upstairs to get his automatic rifle, thus getting heart attack due to obesity, RIP

Kayser Sauze, a fervent advocate of global superiority of brasilian healthcare and infrastructure system, knifed in a favella for his old huawei phone, his last words being "no there are no potholes in this road im dieing on, its just the illuminations of streetlights that are soon to be here" RIP

Diceman, a victim of Chicago shooting-by, last seen spraying "back of the bus" on the wall, post mortem experts still arguing at what point of his life his cognitive capabilities were diminished, some claiming he might have been born without

Devere, a punisher of Big Pharma, an expert on alternative medicine, preparing various elixirs, mainly hashcakes and joints, in his mum basement whilst getting any moment now a final proof of covid being a hoax, died as a result of drinking bleach, RIP

Ohiochess fun, missing in a maga rally action, last seen wearing maga cap and looking for UFO Elvis and Election Fraud; he left behind his 3 either nices or children, depending on how you look at the fact that Ohio is married to his front teeth-and straight-sight-free cousin Jessica, RIP

George Wallace, self proclaimed winner of every dispute on any given subject, a beta tragically raped to death by alpha Steve, his last words being "homo alert" and "libs crickets", and "its not a rape according to Graham hierarchy", RIP

Have to say that was a pretty inspired send-up.

<On CNN Thursday, legal expert Norm Eisen laid out how former President Donald Trump is weakening his legal position with his constant public attacks on the Justice Department and FBI on his Truth Social website.

Specifically, Eisen said, one of Trump's most recent "truths" on the site that complained about the infamous photo of classified document folders released by the DOJ is a major confession that hands more evidence to federal investigators.

"Donald Trump himself posted on Truth Social, his social media outlet, and he was talking again about the photo that was released and the appendix of the DOJ filing," said anchor John Berman. "He writes 'There seems to be confusion as to the 'picture' where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when they broke into my home. Wrong! They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big 'find' for them. They dropped them, not me — Very deceiving … And remember, we could have NO representative, including lawyers, present during the Raid. They were told to wait outside.'"

"'They took them out of cartons,' he says, which is very different than what he had been saying, which is they planted it," added Berman.

"John, the — one of the key issues in this case, we have some evidence on this, it is really the last key issue that will determine whether or not Donald Trump is charged, is his personal knowledge that these classified documents were where they were, and there is also very disturbing allegations and the government's filing yesterday about the way the documents were moved after they were requested by the government," said Eisen. "You've got to prove Donald Trump's intent. Well, guess what, he just provided — by admitting that he knew they were in the cartons, he just provided the government with more proof that, yes, he was involved in this."

"So it is a mosaic," added Eisen. "You put together all the evidence. That's another piece of evidence, incompetence.">

<President Joe Biden sought to drive a wedge between MAGA Republicans and "mainstream" Republicans in a speech at Philadelphia's Independence Hall on Thursday — and some GOP lawmakers did not take kindly to his prime-time address.

"Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic," Biden said.

"Now I want to be very clear, very clear upfront, not every Republican — not even a majority of Republicans are MAGA Republicans," he said. "Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know, because I've been able to work with these mainstream Republicans."

"But there's no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans and that is a threat to this country," Biden said. "Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country."

The difference between MAGA Republicans and the rest of the country was the major theme of Biden's speech.

"MAGA Republicans don’t understand what every truly patriotic American knows. You can’t love your country only when you win," Biden said. "The MAGA Republicans look at America and see carnage and darkness and despair."

Although Biden clearly said his criticism was aimed only at MAGA Republicans, which he described as a minority of the GOP, some Republican lawmakers tried to paint it as an attack on half of America.

"Biden promised to unite the nation. Instead, he’s isolated and vilified conservative Americans," Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) tweeted.

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) argued, "The 'Unity President' views his political opponents as domestic terrorists."

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) argued, "It's audacious for a president who calls his political opponents 'semi-fascist' to be lecturing America about decency."

Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) used Biden's speech voice her dislike of name-calling while complaining about Marxists.

"After promising to 'heal the soul of the nation,' Joe Biden has resorted to name-calling because the incompetent Marxists running his White House created an inflation crisis, an energy crisis, a border crisis, and a recession," Miller publicly posted.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) tweeted, "Divider-in-Chief!"

"Joe Biden ran on unity and togetherness. Tonight’s divisive and tone deaf speech is a culmination of his team’s work and rhetoric," Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) argued. "This Administration has villainized any American that does not agree with their radical far-left agenda."

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) seemed to take the criticism personally, using all capital letters to shout, "I'm Ultra MAGA."

"This man wants to divide and attack half of America," Boebert argued. "He’s not a leader, he’s a puppet for the hateful Left.

"Never before has a President shown such hatred for his fellow Americans," the Trump supporter added.>

<Donald Trump wrote what appears to be a panicked post on his Truth Social account Thursday morning, attacking his detractors, pointing to what he claims are the "hoaxes" perpetrated against him, and concluding that the press, he says, "is pushing hard for the Sleaze to do something that should not be done!"

Trump is known for attaching negative nicknames to his opponents but has rarely used the term "the Sleaze" before. When he has it generally has been about Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which does not seem to make much sense in this context.

A plain reading of Trump's remarks (below) would lead some to think he is afraid of being indicted.

While NCRM generally does not publish the former president's remarks in full, we are this time so readers can have as clear an understanding of them, in context, as possible.

"Even though I am as innocent as a person can be, and despite MY campaign being spied on by the Radical Left, the FISA COURT being lied to and defrauded, all of the many Hoaxes and Scams that were illegally placed on me by very sick & demented people, and without even mentioning the many crimes of Joe and Hunter Biden, all revealed in great detail in the Laptop From Hell, it looks more and more like the Fake News Media is pushing hard for the Sleaze to do something that should not be done!"

In other posts Thursday Trump has screamed, "PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT!" and "The Justice Department and FBI are “leaking” at levels never seen before - and I did nothing wrong!!!"

He also appears to be taking the position, one which some experts have argued is wrong, that he is protected by the Presidential Records Act, and has recently suggested that he, as a former president, still has powers afforded to the sitting president.

Calls have grown in recent weeks for Trump to be indicted over reports that he allegedly held 700 pages of documents with classified markings, and refused to return them all to the National Archives, forcing NARA and DOJ at different times to retrieve them, including most recently by the FBI executing a search warrant.

Recent headlines also support a plain reading of Trump's remarks that point to him appearing to be panicking over calls for him to be indicted, and predictions that he will be.

Trump's representative to the National Archives, John Solomon, published a letter written by the Acting National Archivist that was anything but exculpatory for Trump.

It revealed multiple instances of the federal government, mostly DOJ, requesting the return of what we now know were 35 cartons of White House records. Those requests included a trip to Mar-a-Lago by top DOJ officials, which resulted in an in-person meeting with Trump and his attorneys, and four DOJ investigators, "including Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section at the Justice Department," as CNN had reported.

News reports also reveal Trump told multiple aides the White House records, including, presumably, the classified documents, were his property, as The New York Times revealed.

“It’s not theirs; it’s mine,” he said repeatedly.>

<In an extremely unusual move for the Biden Administration, the White House responded to an attack on the President’s student loan forgiveness plan by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene by announcing that the far right wing Georgia GOP Congresswoman had over $180,000 in PPP loans forgiven.

Highlighting the hypocrisy of Greene and other Republicans claiming it’s unfair to have loans forgiven at taxpayer expense, the White House also posted to Twitter that U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), and other Republicans attacking the administration for its student loan forgiveness program, had massive PPP loans forgiven.

“Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven,” the Biden White House tweeted from its official verified Twitter account late Thursday afternoon.

That is correct.

According to ProPublica, Rep. Greene’s family construction business took out a PPP loan on April 10, 2020, for $182,300. In total, including interest, the federal government forgave her and her family’s loan totaling $183,504.

The PPP loans, also known as the Paycheck Protection Program, originated under President Donald Trump and was facilitated via the Small Business Administration. The were $800 billion in PPP loans made, according to NBC News.

Watchdogs estimate billions in fraudulent PPP loans were forgiven.

“For our government just to say, you know, ‘okay, well your debt is completely forgiven.’ Obviously they have an agenda for that they need votes in November,” Greene can be heard saying on Newsmax in the video below. “So the timing is a pure coincidence there as well, but it’s completely unfair and taxpayers all over the country, taxpayers that never took out a student loan, taxpayers that pay their bills and and you know, maybe even never went to college or just hard-working people. They shouldn’t have to pay off the great big student loan debt for some college student that piled up massive debt going to some Ivy League school. That’s not fair.">

<...Odds on BP closing his forum today 1/10>

Far better odds than those of <big catamite> acquiring some humanity about him.

<After the 2020 election, a Georgia poll worker who was falsely accused of voting fraud by former President Donald Trump was pressured and threatened with imprisonment during a meeting arranged with the help of an ally of the Trump campaign, a prosecutor said in a court filing Friday.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating whether Trump and others illegally tried to influence the 2020 election in Georgia. As part of the probe, Willis filed court documents on Friday seeking testimony from Willie Lewis Floyd, a director of Black Voices for Trump, a group aimed at increasing the former president's support among Black voters.

In December 2021, Floyd was asked to arrange a meeting to discuss an “immunity deal” with Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County election worker whom Trump and his allies falsely accused of pulling fraudulent ballots from a suitcase, according to Willis.

Willis said Floyd arranged for Trevian Kutti — whom Willis described as a “purported publicist” based in Chicago — to meet with Freeman. The prosecutor has previously sought Kutti's testimony.

Kutti told Freeman that “an armed squad" of federal officers would approach her and her family within 48 hours and that Kutti had access to “very high-profile people that can make particular things happen in order to defend yourself and your family," according to Willis' court filing.

The district attorney cited video footage as evidence of those statements.

Kutti did not immediately respond to an email message seeking comment Friday. A message to Floyd's Instagram account was also not immediately returned.

Freeman and Kutti met at the Cobb County Police Department, where Kutti told Freeman that “freedom and the freedom of one or more of your family members” would be disrupted if Freeman declined her assistance. Kutti said Freeman was “a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up,” according to Willis.

The meeting was captured in part by a body camera, Willis said.

Kutti also said she wanted to connect Freeman to Floyd, whom she described as a “Black progressive crisis manager, very high level, with authoritative powers to get you protection that you need," Willis said.

During a subsequent phone call with Kutti and Floyd, Freeman was pressured to reveal information under threat of imprisonment, Willis said.

Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, appeared in June before the House Jan. 6 committee and have told lawmakers how the lies about election fraud upended their lives. Moss was also a poll worker in Fulton County.

Willis has sought testimony from numerous witnesses with ties to Trump as part of her investigation, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham. Giuliani, who’s been told he’s a target of the investigation, testified before the special grand jury last month. A federal judge on Thursday ruled that constitutional protections don’t shield Graham from testifying.

Trump has blamed voter fraud for his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden. State officials and federal investigators, including Trump’s own attorney general, have said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 contest.>

So he just confessed to having the docs...

<Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has angrily denied that he ever threatened the Social Security program — even though he has.

Johnson, a devoted Trump ally who is trailing in the polls in the upcoming midterms, last month proposed that funding for Social Security (and Medicare) be decided year by year as part of “discretionary” spending programs. That would subject funding to a potentially fierce partisan political battle annually, jeopardizing a predictable income for some 69 million Americans — most of whom have paid into the program their entire working lives.

Johnson insisted Sunday on “Fox & Friends” that claims he’s out to gut Social Security are a “lie.”

“All the Democrats can do is lie about me,” said the testy senator. “The most outrageous lie they’re telling about me right now is that I want to cut or end Social Security ... what elected official would ever want to cut Social Security? It is absurd on its face. I want to save Social Security.”

Johnson warns in his campaign website that Social Security benefits may have to be “cut” without enough money to support the program. Yet Johnson enthusiastically voted during the Trump administration to slash corporate taxes 40%, sucking an estimated $2.3 trillion out of the American Treasury over 10 years.

Ben Nuckels, a Wisconsin-based Democratic strategist, said Johnson had stepped on the “third rail” of American politics by threatening the stability of Social Security and Medicare funding.

“Ron Johnson never misses an opportunity to stick his foot in his mouth,” Nuckels told The Hill. “Johnson opened up this big new line of attack with his radical, extreme positions on Social Security that voters 55 and over are going to be acutely aware of. When you have 60 to 65% of the electorate above the age of 50, that’s going to be a big problem for him,” he said.

The Social Security issue is not the only one Johnson is now trying to dodge.

He’s also ducking his attempt to deliver a slate of fake electors to former Vice President Mike Pence to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Now he insists he was only involved for “seconds,” and that he really had no idea what was going on.

“I had virtually no involvement,” the senator told a reporter last month. “Literally, my involvement lasted seconds, OK?”

Johnson never had the opportunity to turn over the names of the fake electors because Pence’s chief of staff said they wouldn’t be accepted.

One of the fake electors is on Johnson’s campaign payroll. The Department of Justice is currently investigating fake electors in Wisconsin and six other states and their plot to overthrow the choice of voters, according to Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chair of the House Jan. 6 commission.

Johnson currently appears to be the most vulnerable of Republican senators in the midterm elections. The 11-year Senate veteran is trailing Democratic opponent Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes by a slim margin, according to recent polls, in yet another example that extreme Trump loyalty might not pay off in the general election.>

<Bed, Bath and Beyond has announced it will be closing 150 stores. Most of them are in areas that voted Republican. Bed, Bath and Beyond is now facing bankruptcy. Bed, Bath and Beyond stopped stocking My Pillow products because they didn't like the owner, Mike Lindell's, politics. Because of this there was a backlash against Bed, Bath and Beyond on the part of conservatives. Many conservatives were loyal customers and stopped shopping there.

Go woke, go broke. Businesses should remain politically neutral.>

<Former President Donald Trump was slammed Wednesday after a new report claimed he had super top secret documents describing a foreign country’s nuclear capacities stashed at his Florida resort home.

Former Defense Secretary William Cohen, a lifelong Republican, led a chorus of outrage, calling the new report fresh evidence that Trump poses a “clear and present threat to democracy.”

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti called the mere presence of the document at Trump’s home evidence of a grave crime.

“It is among our nation’s most closely held secrets,” Mariotti said on Twitter. “What possible justification is there for taking and holding this document in a country club?”

FBI seized the nuclear documents along with hundreds of classified documents during the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post reported late Tuesday.

The paper cited unidentified “people familiar with the search.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., dodged questions about the search and whether he wanted to be briefed on the potential national intelligence issues, claiming he had not been in touch with fellow lawmakers during the end-of-summer recess.

“We’re following like all of you are,” McConnell told reporters.

Trump previously denied reports that there were nuclear secrets found at Mar-a-Lago, calling them a “hoax.”

But the ex-president uncharacteristically avoided mentioning the new nuclear report in a rant about the search on his social media platform.

Instead he complained that they took some of his medical and tax records, which the FBI says were mixed in with highly classified information in boxes in a lightly secured storage room.

“They also improperly took my complete and highly confidential medical file and history, with all the bells and whistles (at least they’ll see that I’m very healthy, an absolutely perfect physical specimen!),” Trump wrote.

Trump’s own former attorney general trashed that complaint, noting that the fact Trump kept personal documents alongside highly classified documents is evidence of mishandling.

“If you find very sensitive documents in Trump’s desk along with his passports, that ties Trump to those documents,” Barr said Wednesday on Fox News.

A day earlier, Barr slammed the federal judge who appointed a special master to comb through the documents.

The conservative former Trump loyalist also came close to predicting Trump will face indictment, praising the government for having “very strong evidence.”

Even Fox News morning host Steve Doocy noted that there is no good reason for Trump to have taken the documents, much less defied a subpoena to give them back.

“That doesn’t seem like something you should have in your post-presidential drawer,” Doocy said.

But Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., countered by slamming the Justice Department for possibly leaking the information.

“All this information is coming from one side and one place,” he said. “Who are the sources with knowledge of the investigation? The FBI and Justice Department.”>

<A story in Florida deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting.

It’s about Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, and the arrest of 20 Floridians. The crime they stand accused of committing is a form of election fraud, specifically voting even though past criminal convictions made them ineligible.

“Today’s actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting,” DeSantis said at a news conference in August, touting the arrests as the first big score of an election integrity task force he created to great fanfare last year. “If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

The arrests, the statements and the sentiments behind them are not especially surprising, given that DeSantis has always presented himself as a tough, “law and order” governor. And they are likely to endear him to conservatives who think America is awash in voter fraud, usually committed for the sake of helping Democrats and usually involving voters from minority groups.

Sure enough, most of the 20 arrested Floridians are Black, according to media accounts.

But the rationale for their arrests hasn’t held up well to scrutiny. Over the past few weeks, severallocal and nationalpublications have pieced together the stories of what many of these Floridians actually did and why. It looks less and less like episodes of nefarious election tampering and more and more like instances of honest confusion about what a new voter law says.

It’s the kind of situation that might prompt some introspection and maybe even an apology from some elected officials. But DeSantis hasn’t even acknowledged the arrests might have been a mistake, let alone suggested that any of these Floridians deserve an apology ― which perhaps says a lot about his style of leadership, as well as about the many conservatives who cheer it.

An Effort At Redemption – And The Confusion It’s Created

The backdrop to this drama is Florida’s history of permanently denying voting rights to convicted felons.

For years, advocates sought to end that practice, partly by arguing that people who paid their debt to society deserved a chance to rejoin it and partly by noting the disparate impact of disenfranchisement on Black voters. (Many laws blocking convicted felons from voting trace back to the post-Reconstruction era, when state officials were trying to stop the recently freed slave population from voting.)

The amendment passed overwhelmingly, with nearly two-thirds of Floridians voting for it. But it contained two important exceptions: Those convicted of felony sexual crimes or murder remained unable to vote. The 20 Floridians who were arrested in August for voter fraud had been convicted of these classes of crimes, according to charging documents.

“Clearly those were illegally cast votes,” DeSantis said at a Wednesday news conference where the arrests came up. “I don’t think there’s any question about that.”....>

<....But in stories about some of the arrests by reporters from the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times, Politico and The Washington Post, a clear pattern has emerged. The Floridians say they had no idea their crimes made them ineligible to get back their voting rights. And when they submitted their applications to state agencies, they said, they were granted new voter registration cards.

“We don’t think that people should be prosecuted while the state has a system in which the state itself is unable to verify voting eligibility on the front end,” Neil Volz, deputy director of the Florida Restorative Rights Coalition, told HuffPost.

One likely reason these Floridians got their voting cards is that the state agency in charge of elections has been overwhelmed trying to make the new system work, which, in part, has a lot to do with the way DeSantis and his allies implemented the amendment after voters approved it. Specifically, they introduced a requirement that convicted felons pay off old court fees before getting their voting rights back.

Figuring out who owes what has been a nightmare for agencies, and among the many reasons the amendment’s advocates think arrests like the ones Florida made in August are problematic. “We don’t think that people should be prosecuted while the state has a system in which the state itself is unable to verify voting eligibility on the front end,” Volz said.

Even some Republicans think there’s a problem that needs fixing: “I think it’s really up to law enforcement and state attorneys to exercise a level of grace and mercy where they believe that their intent was not to defraud,” Jeff Brandes, a GOP state senator from St. Petersburg, told the Herald.

DeSantis, by contrast, has made no such concessions. Instead, he has said responsibility for screening applications lies with local authorities, not the state ― a stance the state’s own elections chief contradicted in an email. He has also blamed independent nonprofit organizations that have been helping convicted felons file their applications, saying these groups need to be more vigilant about making the law’s exceptions clear.

When asked in that Wednesday news conference about the arrests, he defended them yet again, saying they sent an important signal: “I think this will help show people and disabuse them of maybe any lack of clarity that they have about what the rules are in Florida,” DeSantis said.

A Familiar Pattern On Voting Rights – And Politics

If the media reports and affidavits are correct and the legal system works like it’s supposed to work, then the lack of clear intent of Florida could ― and probably should ― spare the Florida 20 from more jail time. But that’s no sure thing.

The proof comes from Texas, a state where leaders have the same record of fighting voting rights expansion and where a woman received a five-year prison sentence for voting illegally despite strong evidence she didn’t realize she was breaking the law.

Many advocates for voting rights are furious with DeSantis, and not just because of what the arrests have meant for the lives of these Floridians. They also worry these actions will have a chilling effect on people who really are eligible to get back their voting rights.

“The state is prosecuting people for honest mistakes, creating more fear and intimidation and further undercutting the promise of Amendment 4,” Patrick Berry, counsel in the Brennan Center’s democracy program, told HuffPost in an email.

Some advocates have also been noting that DeSantis didn’t make the same fuss about a handful of voter fraud cases involving residents of The Villages, whose relatively affluent residents tend to vote Republican. (In each of those cases, residents had voted in two different states, with intent unclear.)

“You have a situation that’s been demonstrated time and time again,” Cecile Swoon, president of Florida’s League of Women Voters, told HuffPost. “Certain people have the law enforced against them. Others don’t.”

Whether statements like that have any effect on policy or politics, of course, remains to be seen.

DeSantis is up for reelection in November, and, despite some recent polling showing a relatively tight race, most analysts expect him to defeat Democratic nominee Charlie Crist. And that will position him well to seek the Republican presidential nomination, perhaps as soon as 2024.

A record of arresting people for unintentional voter fraud probably won’t hurt his standing with many conservative voters. It might even help.>

How can they say that when they defend the Orange Gusano?

<The more we learn about former President Donald Trump’s apparent theft of documents from the White House, the worse the story gets.

And not just for the legal jeopardy he has put himself in, but, more importantly, for the national security of the United States.

That is especially the case, in light of the recent revelations from Washington Post reporters Devlin Barrett and Carol Leonnig, that among the documents found in the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago were secrets pertaining to the nuclear program of a foreign nation.

And there were other documents so highly classified that all but a small handful of U.S. government officials were denied the right to see them or even know about their existence.

The story, should it prove to be true, appears to confirm many of the worst fears national security experts have had with regard to the risks associated with Trump’s illegal relocation of the documents to his Florida home/country club.

It makes it absolutely clear that this is not merely a dispute about “document storage”—as Republican defenders of Trump such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio would have you believe.

Rubio, as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, ought to know better than to so willingly transform himself into a political parrot, demonstrating such little regard for the vital interests of the United States.

The documents found at Mar-a-Lago are highly classified because they would cause grave damage to our country—and potentially to individuals working on our behalf—should they fall into the wrong hands.

Storing them in Trump’s desk, or a closet at a country club that is already known to be a favored stop for foreign spies, certainly raises the likelihood that could have happened.

And that is to say nothing of the damage that could result had Trump—or anyone with access to the documents— shared them with the wrong people.>

<Donald Trump and the U.S. Department of Justice on Friday introduced new court filings in the battle over a special master in the courtroom of controversial Judge Aileen Cannon.

Prosecutors recommended retired Judge Barbara Jones and retired appeals court Judge Thomas Griffith while Trump's lawyers suggested former Judge Raymond Dearie and Paul Huck, Jr., who is listed as a former general counsel for Florida's governor.

"The two sides also clashed substantially over the duties of the special master. Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the arbiter should look at all the documents seized in the search and filter out anything potentially subject to attorney-client or executive privilege," The New York Times reported. "By contrast, the government argued that the master should look only at unclassified documents and should not adjudicate whether anything was subject to executive privilege."

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman tweeted, importantly, Trump doesn’t argue that he declassified material."

Litman was not the only legal expert to focus on the importance of the omission.

National security attorney Bradley Moss wrote, "With yet another court filing, it is increasingly clear there is no evidence of Trump's alleged 'standing declassification order,' and no evidence that these particular classified records were ever declassified."

Former Pentagon special counsel Ryan Goodman wrote, "Gosh, I wonder why President Trump's side did not claim he declassified MAL documents, and instead just said this milquetoast line. Easy bet: Because they do not want to be caught in a false statement to a court - subject to sanctions and 18 USC 1001.">

<Brigham Young University has found no evidence that a racial slur was yelled at Duke volleyball player Rachel Richardson, meaning establishment media once again jumped on a racial hoax without waiting for evidence.

BYU interviewed 50 eyewitnesses and reviewed “security and raw footage from all camera angles taken by BYUtv of the match.” The university had put four ushers, a police officer, and a Duke assistant athletic director in the student section after Duke’s coach relayed Richardson’s accusation of a slur being used. Richardson said the slurs were louder in the fourth set of the match, yet none of the people placed in the student section heard them, nor did the students or Duke’s players aside from Richardson.

Of course, Richardson didn’t hear them either — because they were never said. This has become completely clear. The fan Richardson singled out as having used the slurs was shown on video not to have said them, and BYU has now lifted the ban it initially placed on him. Not one person in the sold-out school-record crowd of 5,507 could vouch for Richardson’s claims: not the fans, not security, not her own teammates.

It didn’t matter to establishment media, which treated this as true from the moment the accusation was made. CNN, ESPN, NPR, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all reported the nonexistent slurs as fact without bothering to look into the accusation and find out if it was true. (We used to call that “journalism.”) Jemele Hill, the Atlantic’s go-to race-baiter, predictably pushed the false claim.

USA Today’s Mike Freeman, the less successful version of Hill, went even further. After police determined that no slur was said after reviewing the video, Freeman declared that anyone who doubted Richardson’s claim was a conspiracy theorist. And South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley continued the despicable trend of turning women’s basketball into a progressive political tool, canceling games with BYU over slurs that were never used.

Nothing will be learned from this, just as nothing was learned over Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax or Bubba Wallace’s noose hoax or the Colorado Rockies slur hoax. Establishment media are desperate for anything that perpetuates their narrative of racism running rampant in America, even if that means taking fake stories and presenting them as true, regardless of silly things like “facts” or “evidence.”

None of the journalists or pundits who pushed this hoax should be employed, but they will face no consequences for this. This is what their outlets incentivize them to do. The media demand for racism dwarves the supply, and so these media figures and their outlets will dutifully jump on the next racial hoax with all the enthusiasm they did for this one.>

<After learning Thursday that Queen Elizabeth II was on her deathbed, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, Uju Anya, sent out a contentious tweet: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” The tweet went viral and garnered even more attention — and pushback — after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos quote-tweeted Anya’s comment and said he didn’t believe she was “working to make the world better.”

This kind of back and forth is par for the course on Twitter. But then something a little more unusual — and troubling — happened. Anya’s employer, Carnegie Mellon, issued a statement:

We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account. Free expression is core to the mission of higher education, however, the views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster.

Universities almost never issue statements like this because the very premise of a university is to serve as a bastion of independent thinking and provide a forum for intellectual free-for-alls. A university would never be presumed to endorse any of its scholars' individual beliefs, which is key for academia as a space for provocation to thrive. So in effect, this statement was a condemnation and implicitly a signal to other academics at the university that they should watch their mouth on certain matters. While the motivation behind the unusual statement is unclear, it underscores how vulnerable public intellectuals are to controversy-driven social media pile-ons.

It is vital to embed Anya’s tweet — which was deleted by Twitter because it violates Twitter’s rules against wishing harm on other users — in a broader context. In a follow-up tweet to her ultra-viral one, she wrote, “If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star.”

Anya told NBC News in a subsequent interview that her perception of the British monarchy was heavily shaped by Britain’s role in the suffering of her family during the brutal Nigerian civil war after Nigeria’s decolonization and independence from Britain. She explained that her family had been displaced during the war and that some of her relatives had been killed. "I take deep offense at the notion that the oppressed and survivors of violence have to somehow be deferential or respectful when their oppressors die," Anya said to NBC News.

None of this means one must approve of the sadism in Anya’s first tweet. It’s not something I would tweet, in part because of a personal moral commitment to not take satisfaction in the pain of others, even if the pain is warranted. But what’s undeniable is that it stems from a place of personal hurt and political opposition to the imperial history and legacy of the British monarchy. Even if one found Anya’s statement distasteful, it’s also critical to recognize how distasteful the whitewashing of the British empire has been in the official British narratives celebrating Elizabeth’s life. Beneath the comment about suffering, Anya’s tweet stakes out a position on politics and history, something scholars are expected to do.

Carnegie Mellon felt the need to distance itself from this, and it’s not clear why. Anya’s tweet and some of her responses to the pile-on could be described as rude or mean-spirited, but scholars and thinkers of all kinds are rude or mean-spirited all the time — and often while defending heinous ideas. And yet these exchanges, whether online or in some other form of public correspondence, don’t typically elicit condemnations from the universities that employ them.

It’s possible that the strange condemnation was an attempt to keep a patron happy without directly punishing Anya....>