24.Oct.2026

The Kushner files

As mentioned below, expanded by Steve Schmidt in his The Warning blog: The Kushner files: foreign billions, Russian spies and a betrayed oath. "What would you think if you opened a review of a new television series and read this plot?" he asks at the top. I won't spoil it for you, go read.

"For years, I have asked what Kushner did to obtain the separate $2 billion Saudi investment in his firm after leaving office. In February 2023, I demanded scrutiny by Congress, prosecutors, counterintelligence officials and the press. In September 2024, I explicitly called for coverage “as an espionage story.”

It's been a long time coming. This: "In February 2018, The Washington Post reported Kushner requested more intelligence than any White House employee outside the National Security Council."

In 2018! Schmidt concludes, above an invitation to "tell me what you think in the comments":

The Warning: your turn

An ordinary American suspected of compromising national security would face an investigation. Jared Kushner is still conducting diplomacy on America’s behalf.

Should Kushner be immediately removed from every diplomatic assignment and stripped of access to classified information pending an independent investigation?

Yes, he absolutely should. (As should Witkoff.) Thug and his enablers don't do "independent investigations," though. We need that Blue Wave, people.

Postscript with the top comment after the blog post, from John D.:

"As a New Jerseyan of five decades, I know the Kushner Family is an Organized Crime Family. Actually, it is not just my opinion. There are convictions to prove it."

How's that global instability working out for you?

So, Mr. thug didn't end the war in Ukraine on "day 1" and he started a for-realio new war in the Middle East, goaded by the forever-hawk Bibi Netenyahu, and now the "breaking news" is that Iran in ‘Advanced Stages’ of Planning Attacks Against Americans, Officials Say.

Can we trust them? I have no idea, but plenty of suspicions, given the desperation to turn the Titanic around (as J.D. "JD" Vance so eloquently put it), and somehow stop the Blue Wave that is now 10 days from impact.

Vote like I'm on the ballot, thug says, while his approval hits a new low—"disapprove" by 25 points! and more than two-to-one "independents"—in the latest poll. You know, "driven down by broad disapproval of his handling of the economy, the war in Iran and high gas prices."

Always the price of gas. (Which in my neighborhood has eased off about 10% from recent highs. Is that enough for the short-memory crowd?) Oh, and the price of diesel, which is still north of $6/gallon.

"Regardless of how you might vote, please tell me which party you trust to do a better job" of just about anything is running D+4 (on immigration!) to D+20 (on health care). But voters... we'll have to wait and see (and navigate the violent howling of the losers).

They got a pull-quote from retired nurse Sheila Murdock of Shelley, Idaho (I had to look it up; pop. 5k-ish, home of "Idaho Annual Spud Day"), so there's that.

“People are upset, ‘Oh, Trump put these tariffs on people and now our food costs go up.’ Well, yes, but if you look at the bigger picture and what it eventually does, it makes things better.”

Isn't that sweet and dreamy? She's "already voted absentee for Republicans this year," so solid for the status quo. And the NYT also tells us that Democratic voters are unhappy, too, more unsatisfied with their own party than Republicans are about theirs. (Trust to do a better job about Corruption is D+11, and the Oct. 12-19 polling was done before the latest bombshells—so many bombshells—of Steve Witkoff called Vladimir Putin a "humanitarian," and Jared Kushner's secret negotiations—including more than $700 Million in Transfers. Azerbaijan, Dubai, Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Six years ago. Just imagine what it would be if it were up to date!

That same Saudi Arabia where "the U.S. government has now ordered diplomats and other federal employees to leave." And "rising threats [] go beyond the Middle East, one official said."

Here, eight months into a war first forecast to go "four to five weeks." At levels that people have never seen before. Pete "Mr. T" Hegseth, war criminal, buffed up on March 5:

“Our munitions are full up, and our will is ironclad, which means our timeline is ours and ours alone to control as long as it takes to ensure the United States of America achieves these objectives.”

That was before our "short excursion" got lengthened by Iran started controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Victory! thug declared on March 7. The next day Hegseth said on 60 Minutes “What I want your viewers to understand is this is only just the beginning.”

Yes, indeed. Politifact's tracking on that page was updated through April 20—half a year ago now—when thug assured us he was “under no pressure whatsoever” to make a deal, “although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!”

All things are relative.

21.Oct.2026

Crime me a river

You probably have heard about (and experienced?) the Peter Principle, Laurence J. Peter's notion that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence," which is to say out of their league. There's also the observation that one bad hiring decision leads to reticulating decline of an organization.

Now that we, as a country, have made the worst hiring decision in history, you can see for yourselves. We need a handy descriptor for the combination of the PP and the bad hire infection. Maybe it'll come to me, while I explain what's on my mind just now.

What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a forest falls on a tree do the mushrooms make a sound? And, what is a law if there is no means to enforce it? That's about the Hatch Act, or more formally, the Hatch Act of 1939, An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities. Pretty sure "pernicious" is Stephen Miller's middle name, unless it's Adolf.

"On October 8, 2026, Miller was interviewed by Sean Hannity and was identified as Deputy Chief for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor."

That is, of course, a government position.

"During this interview, Miller said the Democratic Party is “coast to coast” made up of DSA candidates and politicians who won’t condemn them. He spoke specifically of US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. He disparaged political candidates, calling them extremists and cowards.

"Miller concluded his interview by saying that this election “is the clearest choice you will ever have.”

"This is exactly the kind of partisan political activity the Hatch Act is designed to prevent. The law prohibits senior White House staffers from using their official position to interfere in elections. Miller’s partisan comments, delivered in his official capacity, clearly violate the law."

It's not the first time CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) has called Miller out for this. They complained about a similarly despicable (and illegal) performance in late May.

But who's going to prosecute him? The pardon and revenge machine of thug's "Department of Justice"? Not likely. Not yet.

There's a lot riding on this election for the career criminals in the White House.

A mid-week dose of religion (and its discontents)

Taking a break from politics for just a moment, after a friend posted a link to Jim Palmer's Facebook post with "15 things that the misguided religious establishment doesn't want you to know."

It's an interesting list from a former "evangelical megachurch pastor" (as he describes himself), who "wanted to make a difference and help people," but became disillusioned by the religion he was trying to use to do that, and "walked away." With the modifiers "misguided," and "toxic," some of his statements are tautological, but his exposition fills in some of his experience. I was moved to respond point by point.

1. Toxic religion is rooted in fear...

(Maybe not the only form of toxicity, but I would answer that true religion is rooted in love and compassion.)

2. Clergy have no innate authority...

(We, as a congregation, have called ministers to serve us; we grant them conditional authority.)

3. We hold sacred what we are taught to hold sacred...

(Everything is sacred. Peter Mayer rendered that thought into a truly wonderful song, btw.)

4. The stories in our sacred books aren't history...

(Yes, and "our" is doing a lot of work there.)

5. Prayer doesn't work the way you think it does... The underlying theistic premises of prayer are untenable.

(Yes, and he doesn't know what "prayer" is to me, as an atheist, or how I think about it. We know that the placebo effect is real, and I generally try to avoid messing with what's working for someone. Read my blog at your risk.)

6. [Everything] you claim to know about God... is a projection of your psyche.

(I believe in 'God' as a nickname for the ultimate reality of the universe. Not sure that meets his claim.)

7. Nobody is born into the world with a religious belief system imprinted on their soul. People are born human and are slowly conditioned by narratives of culture, race, religion, gender, nationality, which often divide us from one another and masks what makes us one.

(Yes. Narratives of [all that] can also unite us. I'm feeling the thrills of Brian Tate's "We Are One" that I first sang in a chorus of more than a hundred trained voices in Vancouver BC, directed by the composer, at the meeting of the Unitarian Unversalist Musicians Network (now The Association for Unitarian Universalist Music Ministries) two dozen years ago. The text is adapted from Deuteronomy 6: 4-9, fwtw.)

8. Theology isn’t the free search for truth, but rather ... apologetics, [and] all theological reasoning is circular, inevitably “proving” the truth of its own presupposition.

(I believe in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; theology is not my business.)

9. Becoming more religious cannot save us....

(Well. It depends on what "religious" means, of course.)

10. Becoming less religious cannot save us.... [N]either religion nor the lack of religion solely nullifies our human potential to act out of ego, greed, fear, hostility, and hatred.

(Ok. Consider a religion that teaches and encourages us not to act out of ego, greed, fear, hostility, and hatred, though. We need more of that.)

11. Clergy are trained to promote the religion they represent.... [and are] not equipped to address the whole human person.

(Understood, from his religious history, but this is too broad a claim.)

12. A religious leader will claim to have the authoritative interpretation...

(Not my religious leaders.)

13. If your livelihood depends on the success of your church as an organization, clergy will mostly define and reward Christianity as participation in church structures and programs....

(This is about a particular kind of religion. Organizations thrive on participation, and wither from the lack of it. "Not all organizations" are toxic. And participation offers many, varied rewards. I've had a good 40+ year run of participating.)

14. Misguided religion teaches that you lack what you need to effectively manage your life morally and meaningfully....

(By definition of "misguided.")

You have the choice to cultivate a spirituality that doesn’t require you to be inadequate, powerless, weak, and lacking, but one that empowers you toward strength, vitality, wholeness, and the fulfillment of your highest potentialities and possibilities.

(Amen, and hallelujah!)

15. ...Patriarchal religious systems are characterized by misogyny, and rooted in an inadequate and flawed biblical hermeneutic....

(Exactly.)

19.Oct.2026

The unthinkable has arrived (part 2)

HCR's October 18, 2026 Letter from an American leads with the Wall Street Journal's report that Putin has proposed a meeting next month with thug and Xi Jinping, "to decide the fate of Ukraine."

"The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

"A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence."

The prerequisites have been in the news day after day.

"In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect."

The unthinkable has arrived (part 1)

Reading last night's HCR, I thought of Timothy Snyder's lesson, which I see I recited here just 3 days ago. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

It probably doesn't matter how closely you follow everything that's happening, but with "the zone" well and truly "flooded with shit" as Bannon dictated the playbook so memorably that we hardly remember what's-his-name's quip about drowning goverment in the bathtub, there is more than one unthinkable on offer.

Not sure if Marc Elias' Democracy Docket "premium content" will come up for you, but The Constitution Crisis is here, dated yesterday is one alarm channel.

"Donald Trump controls the Department of Justice. It prosecutes his political enemies and looks past the transgressions of his friends. It is staffed with election deniers seeking his favor by undermining free and fair elections....

"For more than a year, states have fended off the Trump administration’s unconstitutional encroachment on their power to set the time, place and manner of federal elections.

"At first, this took the form of demands that states turn over their full, unredacted voter files to the DOJ. Thirty states and the District of Columbia, including California, resisted and were sued. Elias Law Group represented clients in each of those lawsuits.

"The DOJ is 0-26 in the cases decided so far, and my firm is undefeated...."

The attack on California, in particular, escalating in the final weeks before the Nov. 3 election (during that election, underway there, and in other states), and now threatening election officials who do not cooperate with lawless demands is now at the top of the stack.

"Being prepared for what comes next means insisting state election officials follow the law and standing behind those who do. It also requires us to demand that courts act quickly when the DOJ violates the law and Constitution.

"This is Donald Trump’s latest effort to rig the 2026 election. He is betting that it will work. It is up to us to prove him wrong."

He won't stop after the election either. He hasn't stopped from whinging and toady-testing over the 2020 election he lost, six years later. We need an Orbán-level repudiation of this regime from voters to stop the madness.

18.Oct.2026

Betrayal

Not just whatever he did with Jeffrey Epstein, and the high crimes and misdemeanors we all saw the evidence for in 2019 and 2021, but now the utter and abject betrayal of Ukraine, a country that we have occasionally treated as an ally, and a bulwark against Russian aggression.

Thug is in league with Russia. Because the Netanyahu-induced war in Iran screwed up world energy markets, and thug is desperate to have gas and diesel prices down before the election. Even though the clock has pretty well run out on that. (Locally, our 2 weeks of early voting starts tomorrow; absentee ballots have been coming in for weeks.) From Robert Hubbell's newsletter, my emphasis added:

"It is worth pausing for a moment on the depravity of Trump’s request to throttle Ukraine’s access to Starshield. The request was made immediately prior to a massive Russian missile attack on Ukraine. The timing suggests some level of coordination between Trump and Putin regarding the attack on Ukraine—which hit the country’s energy infrastructure and left 600,000 civilians without power."

"In short, Trump has elevated his desire for revenge and retribution above possible death and injury to the Ukrainian people. Trump’s conduct is abhorrent and lies outside the bounds of human decency. Democrats must impeach Trump as the first order of business when they take control of the House in the midterms."

Thom Nichols, for The Atlantic: America Is Now an Ally of Russia; "Donald Trump has abandoned the Western order."

"In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.

"To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public."

We don't actually need David J. Kramer, John Herbst, and William Taylor to tell us that Siding With Putin Is a Huge Mistake, but their direct experience fills in the details.

"President Trump’s inexplicable decision to waive some sanctions on Russia, announced late Friday, essentially gives a pass to the forces of evil in the Kremlin. The move effectively nullifies legislation that was named after the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, passed by huge bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate, and signed by the president. This decision is the latest in a long series that this administration has taken to appease or accommodate the Russians in misguided attempts to get them to negotiate. Russian President Vladimir Putin pockets these naive offerings and still refuses to talk....

"Few wars in recent history have been so black-and-white: Russia is the guilty party that invaded Ukraine for no good reason. Ukraine is, for its part, defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity....

"Putin is a murderous dictator who kills his own citizens as well as those of his neighbors. He treats his troops as cannon fodder."

More than 1.5 million troops killed or wounded so far.

17.Oct.2026

Giant banners of thug's face

Adam Schiff for Senate (in California) email had that subject line, with you-know-who's name spelled out, and more about the Halloween-creepy hangings in the District of Columbia. I am informed that the one on the Deptartment of Health and Human Services is the largest, at eight stories tall. Criminey. The contest for "most ironic" is still open, but hard to outdo the Department of Justice for that. Anyway, what "investigators in [Schiff's] office found is that "The American people paid for every inch of these banners, and we have the receipts." Of course we paid for them.

"Congress long ago outlawed spending taxpayer dollars on propaganda and self-aggrandizement, and an eight-story-high Donald Trump head certainly qualifies.

"I spent years as a federal prosecutor and worked overseas for the Justice Department, and I’ve seen this corrupt movie before. In every country where democracy gave way to one man, the faces went up on the government buildings first.

"They didn’t go up as decoration, or even as vanity, but to teach the people who paid for those buildings a simple lesson: all of this belongs to him now.

"And yet not one of those buildings belongs to Donald Trump.

"They belong to the American people, to the taxpayers who funded them. We were never asked, and we do not have to accept it. Any more than the taxpayer-funded campaign commercials he has been airing."

But, you know, elect a felon, you have to expect criming.

16.Oct.2026

Shorter, approaching the end of days

If I weren't already swimming in more invitations to read things than I can possibly accept, the Substack "notes" feature would be nice. Not sure how they curate the list, but three good selections from blogs I follow. And one wasn't US-political, so that's nice. The author "note" boils it down to teaser length, or provides the synopsis.

Timothy Snyder: A good time to remember lesson 18 of On Tyranny: Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

In the lesser-known realm of the Substack universe, Brian Cronin's Postcards from the Center of the Universe has his first-person account of being in the neighborhood of the magnitude 7.7 earthquake in Panama, and then a debrief of theories of the relatively undisastrous event: Why Did No One Die in the Panama Earthquake? And, if you want to keep going, more about (expat, et al.) life in Panama than I've ever known.

And the shorter of the item from Joyce Vance I blogged yesterday, It’s More Than Just a Little Routine Maintenance.

"Trump is testing the courts. Cutting down trees on a public golf course in DC & pretending it’s routine upkeep. A pretend apology when Trump’s ads ran at taxpayer expense after a Judge ordered him to stop. Here’s the analysis you need to get up to date (there were new judicial orders tonight) & understand what needs to happen next."

14.Oct.2026

Fore!

Let's see if I can avoid bad golf puns while discussing thug's desecration of a public golf course in D.C., with a mind to making it his own. As a monument to himself. Not to read minds or anything, but he can imagine no one else is going to be raising monuments to him when he's gone. So he's, uh, razing this one.

As Joyce Vance points out, It’s More Than Just a Little Routine Maintenance when you cut down more than 400 trees on a golf course. It's like the wrecking ball "upgrades" to the White House (Rose Garden, South Lawn, East Wing), but now more spread out.

I used to work at a (beautiful, wooded) golf course at night. The dead of night, you might say. My "routine maintenance" was moving sprinklers around greens, tee boxes, and fairways. I did not cut anything down in my work.

The thug-degraded Justice Department chose the effective dead of night, after the start of the three-day federal holiday weekend, to turn in an 8-page declaration last Friday night, supposedly covering their asses for sending in "maintenance" bulldozers.

About five pages in, it finally got around to explaining that because the historical design of the course involved fewer trees than it does now, a “tree management and cultural landscape rehabilitation project” that “would implement” 2019 recommendations involving a “tree management plan through selective tree and woody vegetation removal” would take place. This, in the spirit of preserving the “historically open spatial character of the Golf Course.” Only one problem. Judge Reyes had already told them no.

It's not "part of any potential project to redesign or renovate the Golf Course," Kevin Griess, the Superintendent of National Mall and Memorial Parks told the judge. It was "planned tree management and cultural landscape rehabilitation," don't you know.

Tuesday, Judge Reyes entered a TRO that tells the government it “may not fell any further trees” on the golf course. Given the way this White House has trod on court orders, one wonders if they might not just cut the branches off and leave the trunk standing, and then maintain in court, with innocent looks on their faces, that the trees have not been felled.

Read Vance's whole piece. This isn't (just) about stupid games; it's about the ongoing constitutional crisis of thug's administration dancing around accountability from the judiciary.

13.Oct.2026

Bad DOGE

CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) has a hell of an uphill battle. They sued for DOGE (Elon Musk Run Amok) records, and won, and then the Supremes said the district judge (and the appeals court) "ruled too broadly."

Now they're intervening again, agreeing to hear more arguments to help democracy die in darkness. The both sides:

"CREW claims DOGE is a federal agency and therefore is subject to the Freedom of Information Act."

versus

Thug's administration "argues that DOGE is exempt from FOIA's requirements as a presidential advisory body."

A "presidential advisory body" that... (checks notes) "filled influential roles within several federal agencies, where they obtained administrative access to information systems used in procurement and personnel management, terminated certain government contracts, and facilitated mass layoffs and staff reductions."

And assisted with immigration enforcement, and accessed and copied public and classified data from government databases and exfiltrated it to private servers.

Can't wait to hear the SCOTUS "conservatives" pronounce that "Yeah, no, that's all under the unitary executive's prerogative for which there is no constraint of law upon him so nothing to see here just move along or you'll get the electric glove treatment."

8.Oct.2026

A letter from my senator!

Yes, that's a sarcastic exclamation point. There used to be some real excitement in "official" correspondence, but then there used to be some members of congress with a modicum of integrity. Not so much in Idaho.

First things first: we have a better alternative on this year's general election ballot: Todd Achilles, running as an independent. Now back to the daily eye-roll.

The subtext of the subject ("Senator Risch responding to your message") is "we are sending you a boilerplate reply." And not in a hurry, either. The topic was the confirmation of one of thug's shady defense lawyers as Attorney General. That process started in early June. The vote went through on August 7. I'd called both Crapo's and Risch's office that day. Two months later, here's the boilerplate, my emphasis added:

Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding the confirmation of Attorney General Todd Blanche. I appreciate hearing from you.

I have voted for every appointment President Trump made during his first and second terms and I intend to continue that record. The Senate's constitutional role in providing advice and consent to presidential nominations is vital to ensuring a system of checks and balances in government, and I take this role seriously.

He takes it very seriously, by voting for every one, no matter how ridiculous and inappropriate the nomination may be. Got it.

7.Oct.2026

The curse of Bundy again

Ammon Bundy, persona non grata in Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho, tried his luck in Utah and came up short, driving his pickup truck with a 2-years expired registration. And refusing to cooperated with law enforcement, as usual. From St George News:

Bundy said in an interview Wednesday evening that he objects to registration and driver’s-license requirements because he considers travel a “God-given right.”

Also, if he can't drive, he thinks he should be able to walk. Along the interstate highway. Good luck with that, Utah. No, seriously: we all wish you the best of luck in sequestering this invasive weed.

6.Oct.2026

New Smax

There was an ad for it during a baseball game, and I just went slack-jawed and rolled my eyes and zipped on ahead, but then after sleeping on it, the ghost returned. AMERICA IS BACK, I remember. STRONGER THAN EVER. Things are the absolute best they have ever been!

Who knew? George Orwell knew. He wrote a whole book about it. President Pompadour spends his days railing at the "fake news" while pumping up the genuinely fake news. It's gone a bridge too far for some of the old reliable outlets. The Wall Street Journal editorial board went squishy a while ago. Tucker Carlson is saying unfriendly bizarre things. And now that Fox News has somehow been deemed one of the Bigs, it joined the brief boycott of coverage after thug singled out three news networks he particularly didn't like for reporting the enormity of him.

But yeah, I can see millions of my fellow Mericans tuning into a stream of reliably "good" news, given how bad the realer world is going. Like that guy at the next pump over, watching the $$$ display spin and saying "God damn Obama!" (I wasn't there, but heard the anecdote from a friend with no motivation to make it up.)

2.Oct.2026

Actually, the dirt bag is in the Oval Office

Heather Cox Richardson's three days ago-daily does a better job of telling the story than I'm going to, and includes a link to the two page opening statement of Jack Smith, former Special Counsel of the US Department of Justice, before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on Sept. 29.

All of the headline news should have been focused on that statement rather than the unbridled clown-show of Eric Schmitt (R-MO)'s truly lame attempt to catch Smith in a lie that was festering in Schmitt's brain. (Picture the senator stepping on an upturned rake.) The buffoons were not limited to the Senate (where they enjoy legal protection to say any stupid thing they like), but extended to the undead Charlie Kirk Show, "where host Andrew Kolvet cheered Schmitt’s attack on Smith. “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game… in Atlanta,” Kolvet said. “It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”

Ha ha. Not quite. It was not a "great" moment. "This NBA game" had no actual connection to Fulton County (Georgia) D.A. Fani Willis or her colleague Nathan Wade, nor the prosecution of Trump for his felonious attempt to change the result of the 2020 election in Georgia. Not that it matters, but Smith was at a college basketball game in Maryland. What was the subject of the hearing supposed to be?

"The investigation and prosecution of (then former) President Trump for his alleged unlawful retention of classified documents and obstruction of justice, and role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and interfere with the lawful transfer of power,"

first of all. And, with my emphasis added:

"The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power. The evidence showed that President Trump attempted to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force his own Vice President to act in contravention of his oath and to instead advance President Trump’s personal interests; and, on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then exploit the rioters’ violence to further delay it. Over 140 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted that day, a fact we should never forget."

If you have the stomach for it, you can watch the whole bloody 4½ hours of hearing. I did not, but I did note that the fully cuckolded Ted Cruz did some shouting and browbeating and insulting of Jack Smith. And Lindsey Graham's sister, playing lawyer, weakly, and having to cut off Smith's answers before he destroyed her line of argument. Oh, and Adam Schiff had a nice go at discussing all the things that have not outraged his Republican colleagues. (It's a long list.) Schiff did get to mentioning that all of the witnesses for the grand juries were Republicans.

Ok, ok, I did also watch Senators Tillis, Whitehouse (who both may good points), and Josh "first in the air" and later running through the halls Hawley perform his highest insulting dudgeon. His supposed slam dunk winner was that "we've never seen anything like it in this country before," about the prosecution. For crimes we've never seen anything like before, but he didn't get to that part. (With all due respect to Richard Nixon, he didn't come close to thug.) TWICE INDICTED THE (former) PRESIDENT is not the home run Hawley seems to think it is. He didn't really want to ask Smith anything, he just wanted to perform. (At 1.5x speed, it's a hell of a show.) Hawley did make his point that he is a dangerous, unfettered partisan, utterly lacking in integrity. But then, we saw that back in January, 2021 already.

raveling

Tom von Alten