America’s Whimpering Democracy Is Trump’s Past, as Well as Future

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There was a bit of a kerfuffle yesterday in response to an Erik Wemple claim that the media has not shirked media coverage of the risk posed by Trump while focusing non-stop on Biden’s (but not Trump’s) age.

Wemple made a list — and given the prevalence of lefty columnists, not a particularly impressive one, once you look closely.

But it also betrays the degree to which journalists have the same blind spots I have noted in NYT’s series on the subject (which makes up 15 entries in Wemple’s list): they ignore or understate how much of this Trump did in his first term and continues to do it via his right wing allies in Congress.

Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan keep teaming up to write the same story over and over: A second Trump term is going to be bad … really bad.

Just some of these stories, in reverse order from Tuesday’s latest installment, are:

There are several aspects to these stories: a bid to eliminate civil service protections, a personalization of power, and the elevation of people who proved willing to abuse power in his first term: Russel Vought (who helped obstruct the Ukraine investigation), Stephen Miller, and Johnny McEntee (who even before January 6 was making a willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act a litmus test for hiring at DOD), and Jeffrey Clark.

The series, thus far, skirts the language of authoritarianism and fascism.

[snip]

These stories admit that Trump did some of this in his first term. But they describe a process of retribution by the guy who got elected — with abundant assistance from Maggie Haberman — on a platform of “Lock her up!,” who breached the norm of judicial independence 24 days into office when he asked Jim Comey to “let this” Mike Flynn “thing go,” as something that took a while to “ramp up.”

[snip]

[T]hese pieces always vastly understate how much politicization Trump pulled off in his first term, and never describe how that politicization continues at the hands of people like Jim Jordan.

Such reporting will be most salient, I believe, if reports show voters the costs of such abuses of the judicial system have already had and are already having.

Even as the kerfuffle was unrolling, Rosa Brooks published a piece in The Bulwark describing the lessons from a series of five nonpartisan simulations on how American democracy might fare if Trump wins in November.

The simulations showed that the risk Trump poses isn’t necessarily the immediate totalitarianism or civil war liberals sometimes raise, but instead targeted persecution against those who speak up.

The exercises produced some “good news”: None of the simulations devolved into mass violence or civil conflict, and Team Trump found it difficult to fully execute its most ambitious plans. For instance, in one of our exercises, Trump’s efforts to detain millions of undocumented migrants floundered; the money and infrastructure for such a massive operation proved too challenging.

[snip]

High-profile nonprofit groups are undergoing IRS audits, forcing their senior staff to spend most of their time huddled with accountants and lawyers. More university presidents have resigned in the face of investigations, audits, and threats to yank federal funding over curricula and the actions of student protests. Meanwhile, a number of high-profile journalists are the targets of leak investigations. The owners of several major media outlets are under investigation for specious criminal tax code violations, and the FCC is considering revoking the broadcast licenses of a dozen television stations. Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and retired Gen. Mark Milley are under investigation for allegedly mishandling classified materials.

The nation’s streets are largely peaceful. But around the country, numerous civil servants, reporters, teachers, librarians, election officials, and other community leaders are being doxxed and threatened.

You can imagine how this unfolds. Most people will see the writing on the wall: Speak out, and life becomes unpleasant. Your address and children’s names will be posted on social media. You’ll get a nasty letter from the IRS. Perhaps your brother’s undocumented girlfriend will go to work one day and never come home, and you won’t know if she’s been detained or deported. Your pregnant niece might be stopped by police as she drives from Texas to New Mexico, and grilled about whether she’s heading to an abortion clinic. Maybe the FBI and Homeland Security will use undercover agents—or even government surveillance capabilities—to spy on organizations from school boards to church groups, in search of “illegals,” “Christian-hating communists,” the “woke,” and other “vermin.”

The chilling effect on our politics would be intense. Ordinary citizens would self-censor. Many federal, state, and local leaders, rightly worried about the effects on themselves and their families, will quietly step down from their roles.

Definitely read the piece. As you do, though, consider the ways that this, too, is a story of Trump’s past and present, not just his future.

Just yesterday, for example, FBI’s Deputy Direct Paul Abbate said that he “absolutely did not” sign off on the settlement of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s lawsuits and “would never sign off on something like that.”

The allegations in the Privacy Act part of the complaint — the only part included in the settlement — show that before the misconduct allegations against Peter Strzok had been resolved, someone shared his texts with the White House, which in turn got leaked to the press before Sarah Isgur released them en masse, with Rod Rosenstein’s approval.

59. Between late July and December 2017, someone from the Department of Justice alerted the White House to the existence of these texts and, at least, their general content. On information and belief, officials in the White House, in turn, began to contact members of the news media about the texts as a means to try to undermine the Special Counsel’s investigation.

60. No later than December 2, 2017, at least two news organizations printed stories including characterizations of the contents of some of Special Agent Strzok’s texts.

[snip]

62. On December 12, 2017, DOJ willfully and intentionally disclosed to numerous news outlets approximately 375 text messages to, from, and about Special Agent Strzok. In a press release, DOJ called this act a “public release” of the messages.

Years ago, I was told this was a clear violation of the Privacy Act. Having gone through discovery, DOJ appears to agree.

By saying he would never sign a settlement with someone targeted in violation of the law, Abbate was (wittingly or not) stating an unwillingness to make things right after the government violates the rights of a long-valued FBI employee. And Abbate has to know that there are plenty of right wing agents who never got disciplined for sending pro-Trump texts on their phones, including the agents who handled one of the informants targeting the Clinton Foundation.

Republicans threw a similar tizzy fit after DOJ settled Andrew McCabe’s lawsuit for a similar violation of his rights — in that case, of his due process rights. And in McCabe’s case, granting McCabe’s due process would likely have revealed that the allegations he willfully lied about his role in a story that exposed the investigation into the Clinton Foundation were unproven.

The time to stand up to the kind of individualized targeting that Trump has long used is now, was last year, was seven years ago, when the extended campaign to turn Strzok and Page into the face of the Deep State first began.

Waiting to learn the outcome of the election is a cop out.

The time to catalog the damage Trump has already done by the kind of treatment the Bulwark projects in the future is now. All the more so given that its anonymous participants, described to include “former senior officials from President Trump’s first administration, along with former senators and members of Congress,” surely include a number of people who’ve received this treatment. If the way to combat Trump involves solidarity to prevent this isolating doxxing, then such a group is precisely the kind of group that should set an example.

LOLGOP and I are working on a podcast episode that talks about all the people at the FBI that Trump targeted: in addition to Strzok and Page, McCabe and Jim Comey, every person mentioned in the Carter Page IG Report, a number of key witnesses in the Durham investigation, often leveraged to cultivate the testimony Durham needed to sustain his conspiracy theory. That retaliation did real damage to the FBI’s expertise on Russia.

But it has continued even since Trump left office. After first being investigated in the wake of the IG Report, a top Russian analyst, Brian Auten, remains a target because he tracked Russia efforts to influence the 2020 election. Laura Dehmlow — then a unit chief in FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and now the Deputy Director of the National Counterintelligence Center, was bullied because she didn’t come out and say that the FBI had obtained a laptop attributed to Hunter Biden from a computer repairman (which remains inconclusive regarding any Russian influence). Tim Thibault, who in 2016 was one of the people who predicated investigations of the Clinton Foundation, was targeted in part because he made the decision — at the request of FBI agents trying to preserve the integrity of the Hunter Biden investigation — to shut down Peter Schweizer as an informant. Elvis Chan, long one of the most important FBI agents in fighting Russian hacking, was misrepresented as part of the Twitter Files, and ever since, the House GOP has been demanding he sit for a deposition either represented by his personal lawyer or the FBI’s lawyer.

Other members of the “Deep State” that Trump or his flunkies have targeted include:

  • The 51 former spooks who signed a letter stating that the release of the Hunter Biden laptop before the 2020 elections “has the earmarks of a Russian information operation”
  • Witnesses at either of Trump’s impeachments
  • January 6 Committee witnesses and members
  • Capitol Hill Police who testified in January 6 trials
  • Witnesses in the Durham investigation
  • Former Trump officials who’ve spoken out against Trump (again, these likely include some participants in Bulwark’s simulations)
  • Members of the Hunter Biden investigative team, including those who were engaged in the more aggressive targeting of him
  • Every judge, prosecutor, and identified FBI agent who has investigated Trump (note: Aileen Cannon was also targeted)
  • Judges who’ve overseen January 6 trials or those of Trump’s associates
  • Those who didn’t support Jim Jordan as speaker

This has a noticeable effect. Not only does Abbate (along with Chris Wray) cow before Congress rather than explain that Trump’s Administration violated the law, which has repercussions, but it led the FBI to hesitate before going after Trump and his people both before January 6 and during the stolen documents case.

There are those outside of government, too.

A sustained campaign to shut down efforts, both within and outside social media companies, to limit mis- and disinformation has led many programs and experts to quit, largely after sustained doxing and disinformation campaigns.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Trump and his mob have targeted election administrators around the country, both prominent and not. Even if Kamala Harris wins more votes than Trump in November, there are known localities and states where there’s real question whether election denying voting officials will certify the vote. Patrick Byrne has even started issuing death threats against those prosecuting Tina Peters for tampering with election equipment back in 2020.

This is not just about loyalty. This is not just about cowing law enforcement. This is not just retribution — though that serves as cover.

Particularly taking account of the election workers targeted in service of Trump’s Big Lie, this must be understood as systematic: an attack on particular institutions and norms of liberal society: the rule of law, elections, and truth.

We don’t have the luxury of waiting until after November to start defanging the right wing’s stochastic terrorism. That’s true, because they’ll be using it to stoke fear leading up to the election. That’s true because Jim Jordan still has three months wielding a gavel to elicit lynching threats. But it’s also true because the guy managing the FBI is so afraid of Congress that he’s unwilling to say that people selectively targeted for such treatment by Donald Trump are entitled to due process.

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Trump’s Stranglehold on the GOP Is a Vulnerability

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Kamala Harris’ first couple of stump speeches as Presidential candidate included three parts:

  • Set up of prosecutor versus felon contrast (“I know his type”)
  • Tribute to Joe Biden
  • Lay out promise for the future (“Not going back”)

Last night’s speech (at least until CSPAN’s feed crapped out) swapped the second part — the tribute to Biden — and replaced it with an attack on Trump’s role in tanking the border bill.

That swap came after the Vice President’s campaign released this ad, similarly targeting Trump for his role in killing the bill.

To be sure — this is the same approach Biden has taken: imputing from Trump’s deliberate tanking of the border bill opposition to fixing the border. It was undoubtedly one of the reasons Biden spent so much time negotiating the border bill, only to have Congress tank it.

But when Biden used that approach, he explained it. Harris turned it into an attack on Trump’s selfishness.

These ads will not deflate Republican efforts to turn Harris’ role in working with Central America to try to decrease the flow of migrants, which they’ve spun into being the border czar in charge of the entire border, into fear about her approach to the border. But it succinctly flips the script.

It holds Trump accountable for things he made other Republicans do at his behest.

The same is true of the departure of Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, from Heritage Foundation.

Trump’s campaign managers — Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — released a statement crowing after Dans’ departure.

Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.

And Dans booked, then no-showed, an appearance with Kaitlan Collins show.

But ultimately, if you’re making the personnel decisions, as it appears Trump’s campaign did on Dans’ departure, then you own it. It only serves to reaffirm Trump’s role in the project.

And none too soon. Multiple outlets are publishing the forward that JD Vance did for Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, including his adoption of Roberts’ call to “circle the wagons and load the muskets” to take out government.

Vance has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, and in particular to Kevin Roberts, who has been president of the right-wing think tank since 2021 and is the architect of Project 2025. Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism” and has endorsed elements of Project 2025. Vance is also the author of the foreword to Roberts’s upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light, which The New Republic has obtained in full even though the book’s publisher, HarperCollins’s Broadside Books, has apparently tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts.

The subtitle and cover of Roberts’s book were softened as scrutiny of the Trump campaign’s ties to Project 2025 grew. The book was originally announced with the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and featured a match on the center of its cover. The subtitle is now “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match is nowhere to be seen. Promotional language invoking conservatives on the “warpath” to “burn down … institutions” like the FBI, the Department of Justice, and universities has also been removed or toned down, though it is still present in some sales pages.

But the inspiration for that extreme language can be found in Vance’s foreword, which ends with a call for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” and describes Roberts’s ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” (The New Republic downloaded Dawn’s Early Light earlier this month from NetGalley, which provides advance copies of books to reviewers and booksellers. Copies were removed from the platform earlier this month.)

Trump might yet replace Vance — though he has only a few weeks before ballot finalization would make that far more difficult.

But he can’t disown the hundreds of top Trump aides associated with this project.

Because of Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party, Kamala Harris is in a sweet spot: She can claim credit for Joe Biden’s successful policies. But she can also treat Trump as a near-incumbent, holding him accountable for all the things Republicans have been doing to help Trump beat Joe Biden for the last two years.

That may turn out to be a serious vulnerability for Trump going forward.

Update: Roger Sollenberger confirms that LaCivita pushed Dans out.

The Trump campaign forced the architect of the ultraconservative Project 2025 manifesto out of his job on Tuesday as it sought political cover from a controversy dogging Republicans, the Daily Beast can report exclusively.

Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita “put the screws” to mastermind Paul Dans in an effort to force him out and shut down the right-wing shop behind Proejct 2025, a sprawling blueprint that sought to overhaul the federal government and implement an array of far-right policies for a potential second Trump administration, a well-placed source told the Daily Beast.

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DOJ IG Finds Bill Barr’s Personal Intervention in Roger Stone Sentencing “Highly Unusual” But Not Illegal

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DOJ IG has released their long-awaited report on Bill Barr’s intervention in the Roger Stone sentencing.

The takeaway conclusion is that Barr (who refused to cooperate, as did several others) did not intervene in response to Trump’s tweets that day. Based on newly installed Acting US Attorney Tim Shea’s intervention, he had already intervened. DOJ IG concluded that Barr’s intervention was highly unsual, but did not look bad.

We recognize that the Department’s handling of the sentencing in the Stone case was highly unusual, including its filing of a second sentencing memorandum and DOJ leadership’s personal involvement in the preparation of that second memorandum. Moreover, Shea’s and Barr’s participation in the Stone sentencing, given their status as Administration political appointees and Stone’s relationship with the then President, resulted in questions being asked and allegations being made about the Department’s decision making. However, absent a law, rule, regulation, or Department policy that prohibits their participation (none of which exist here), whether the U.S. Attorney and/or the Attorney General should personally participate in such a matter is ultimately left to their discretion and judgment, including their assessment of how such involvement will affect public perceptions of the federal justice system and the Department’s integrity, independence, and objectivity

The report concluded that Aaron Zelinsky did not intentionally lie when he claimed there was a great deal of pressure. His belief that that was the case was good faith.

I’ll have more later.

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Speaker Mike Johnson Demands Better Treatment for Israel’s Prime Minister Than Given the President of the United States

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Ahead of Bibi Netanyahu’s address to Congress, much of the attention has focused on those — starting with Vice President Harris — who will not attend. Speaker Emerita Pelosi is one of a growing number of Democrats who will instead meet with the families of those still held hostage by Hamas.

Right wingers are trying to make a big stink out of Democrats’ decision not to attend an address by a guy accused of war crimes who openly sides with Republicans (I’ve altered this cover slightly).

What has gone unmentioned, however, is that Speaker Mike Johnson sent out a letter ordering members and their guests to maintain decorum.

In the interests of all involved, we will enforce a zero-tolerance policy for disturbances in the building.

All Members should kindly inform their guests that any disruption of the proceedings of the House is a violation of the rules and may subject the offenders to prosecution. If any disturbance does occur, the Sergeant at Arms and Capitol Police will remove the offending visitor(s) from the gallery and subject them to arrest.

As Members, it is incumbent upon us all to likewise model respect and proper decorum as representatives of the American people and our institution, and as ambassadors of the United States on the world stage.

This is, of course, greater reverence than Republicans have offered of late to Democratic Presidents, most recently when Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted President Biden’s State of the Union.

It’s not Israel that has been left behind, Speaker Mike.

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Now that Joe Biden Stepped Down for the Good of the Country, Joe Kahn Must Join Him

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In their latest installment of an editorial making demands of Joe Biden, other Democrats, and voters, but never Donald Trump, the NYT on Monday joined the horde of outlets begging for an open primary.

They were, of course, too slow to keep up with the Old Geezer they’ve spent the last month calling slow, to say nothing of his Vice President who, in just 36-hours, sealed up the nomination and raised $100 million. It was over.

Try to keep up, NYT?

Even with that embarrassment, NYT decided to keep running the endless stream of print, with Ezra Klein whining like he has done and Patrick Healy leading a panel discussion, as well as his own unsubstantiated claims about competition — especially around convention time — helping a candidacy. Bret Stephens had the audacity to claim that by winning the support of democratically elected delegates, Kamala had been coronated.

Try to keep up, NYT.

So back to the editorial NYT posted after it was over, demanding — begging — that it not be over.

Along with its tribute to Biden and a pitch to use this “fresh chance to address voters’ concerns with better policies” (followed by misrepresentations of the current state of both Biden’s immigration and housing policies — try to keep up, NYT!), the editorial nodded to the import of “describ[ing] all the harm Mr. Trump would do to this country.”

Mr. Trump is a felon who flouts the law and the Constitution, an inveterate liar beholden to no higher cause than his self-interest and a reckless policymaker indifferent to the well-being of the American people. His term in office did lasting damage to the people and the project of America and to its reputation around the world. In a second term he would operate with fewer restraints and more willing enablers, and he and his emboldened advisers have made clear they intend to exercise power ruthlessly.

Yet it’s not enough to describe all the harm Mr. Trump would do to this country: The Democratic Party needs to offer the American people a road map to a better future.

This is the second time that this bossy stream of editorials has emphasized the import of describing the danger of Trump: In the first, NYT faulted Biden for failing to “hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies” during the debate.

But this second editorial expands its descriptive scope: Trump’s lies must be debunked and the harm Trump did to this country must be described.

By others. By Democrats.

Yet, even as NYT was obsessing with Biden’s age, it failed in those duties, debunking Trump’s lies and describing the damage he has done.

For example, NYT fell for a PR effort by the Trump campaign to pitch a platform that embraced fetal personhood as a moderation on choice. After spending months leading others on efforts to describe Trump’s amped up authoritarianism in a second term, NYT both-sidesed Trump’s efforts to disavow Project 2025. Even as NYT front-paged Peter Baker’s pursuit of conspiracy theories about the official medical records Biden did release, NYT never described asking for official medical records on Trump’s shooting injury, even while it joined Maria Bartiromo and Benny Johnson to platform Ronny Jackson’s claims instead. NYT finally got around to fact-checking Trump’s RNC speech; they posted it just after midnight overnight, today. CNN, by comparison, had their fact-check up while people were still talking about the speech.

Neither is NYT fulfilling the job of describing the harm Trump would and did do to this country. The other day, NYT let its pharmaceutical reporter falsely claim that Mueller found “no evidence that Mr. Trump or his aides had coordinated with [Russia’s 2016] interference effort,” something that not even the linked story from March 2019 supported, and something that has been further debunked by subsequent reports that Konstantin Kilimnik was a Russian agent and that he passed on the strategy Paul Manafort gave him to other Russian spies (which NYT has reported but presented as limited to polling data) or the footnote unveiled just before the 2020 election that showed the investigation into whether Roger Stone conspired in a hack-and-leak with GRU was ongoing when Mueller finished (something NYT has never reported).

In March, NYT had a good story on Manafort’s reappearance in Trump’s orbit. It did an op-ed on Manafort’s likely role in a second Trump term. While both noted that Trump pardoned Manafort, neither laid out that Amy Berman Jackson judged Manafort to have lied about sharing that campaign strategy with Kilimnik and the deal to carve up Ukraine discussed at the same time. NYT appears to have ignored Manafort’s appearance at the convention.

Nor has NYT shown the least curiosity regarding the role of Donald Trump or his Attorney General in framing his opponent back in 2020. While, in real time, NYT did an exceptionally good story about the Brady side channel Bill Barr set up to ingest dirt Rudy Giuliani had obtained, in part from a known Russian spy, when they attempted to write this after the Alexander Smirnov indictment, NYT covered up Rudy’s central role in related matters. How did the entire Biden – Trump rematch pass without a single story on Trump’s role in framing his opponent?

NYT has covered Trump’s recent coziness with Viktor Orbán, though it was late to the story of Orbán’s post NATO visit and didn’t mention Orbán efforts to end the Ukraine war with Trump. A far better follow-up described that Orbán had relayed Trump’s plans for “a swift push for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.” That was buried, just like NYT’s report on Trump’s growing financial entanglement with the Saudi state, this time on page A8. In NYT’s simpering coverage of Trump’s RNC platform, it mentioned neither the reversals on Ukraine or Taiwan from 2016. And while NYT claims to value descriptions of the damage Trump did to “the project of America and to its reputation around the world,” it recently blamed NATO allies’ concerns about the election exclusively to Biden’s age, rather than the threat that Trump himself poses — and even that was buried in a story buried below other Biden stories.

Joe Kahn’s NYT insists that these topics should be covered.

Yet Joe Kahn’s NYT isn’t doing that job, its day job. It is instead pawning that job off onto Democrats, all the while complaining about the way Democrats are fulfilling the duties of their day job.

And when you raise NYT’s own failures, NYT exhibits the same arrogance, defensiveness, and blindness for which it faulted Joe Biden.

For the good of the country, NYT imperiously demanded, Joe Biden had to step down.

Fine, he did that.

Now either meet the standards your own editorial page lays out or, for the good of the country, find a leader who will.

Update: Pointing to a dumb Nate Cohn report unrelated to NYT’s negligence on Trump coverage (and so not covered here, though I thought about including it), Dan Drezner calls on NYT to get its shit together.

Cohn’s analysis would ordinarily be the kind of piece that I would be defending on social media against those who say, “I cancelled my Times subscription months ago!” But then I got to the last paragraph, which included a particularly jaw-dropping sentence:

In fairness to Ms. Harris, it would be challenging for any Democrat today to advance a clear agenda for the future. Mr. Biden struggled to do so in his re-election campaign. The party has held power for almost 12 of the last 16 years, and it has exhausted much of its agenda; there aren’t many popular, liberal policies left in the cupboard. As long as voters remain dissatisfied with the status quo and the Democratic nominee, a campaign to defend the system might not be the slam dunk Democrats once thought it was (emphasis added).

I am not a Democrat. There are parts of their agenda in their cupboard that I do not want to see implemented. But I have to ask: how in the name of all that is holy did that tendentious sentence get put into Cohn’s piece?! Are you trying to troll the libs?

Just to quickly list what is wrong with this claim:

  1. Controlling the White House is not the same thing as holding unconstrained power. Obama and Biden commanded party majorities in Congress for exactly four of those twelve years. Unsurprisingly, a lot of what they wanted to do did not get through Congress.
  2. Polling shows that Democrats have some agenda items in the cupboard that are pretty popular: expanding access to women’s reproductive health, gun control, bolstering U.S. alliances, reforming the judicial branch, providing a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers; heck, even DEI polls well. In contrast, the Trump-affiliated Project 2025 agenda is ridiculously unpopular.
  3. As Cohn would hopefully acknowledge past Democratic policy initiatives, like the Affordable Care Act, used to be unpopular but have become quite popular over time. When Harris said at her Wisconsin rally that, “we are not going back,” the point is that she can justifiably claim to be defending popular Democratic policies.

My point is that it’s a horrible, unnecessary, inaccurate sentence does not even fit with the rest of Cohn’s essay. So what were you thinking when you dropped it in there? Was it the same person who thought publishing predictable op-eds about the current state of politics from Bill Maher or Aaron f**king Sorkin was a nifty idea?!1

I had a discussion with someone who writes for your paper after Cohn’s piece dropped who mentioned the “same five dinner parties problem” of your editorial staff. You keep talking amongst yourselves so much that the result is an insular conversation in which your perception about what the American people think and want is badly distorted. And then you react to the criticism with vindication — that if you’re getting heat from “both sides” then you must be doing something right.

With Biden’s departure you have an opportunity to do a reset of how you cover and interpret the 2024 election. Please, for the love of God, take it. Get better op-ed submissions. Be better at your jobs!

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Since Leaving Butler, Trump Has Foregone the Best Medical Care and Is Withholding CT Scan Results

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Fresh off his stunt calls for Joe Biden to be drug tested during the debate, Ronny Jackson — the lapsed doctor who turned the White House into a pill mill and covered up Trump’s near-lethal COVID — has made a show of releasing a medical update on Trump’s wound and treatment from the shooting attempt.

This purported medical update is not the first we’ve heard from Jackson about Donald Trump’s ear. Jackson did several media interviews before this, starting with propagandist Maria Bartiromo, a chat which focused far less on a quasi medical description. On July 16, in an interview with far right podcaster Benny, Jackson claimed the bullet didn’t get close enough to Trump’s head to cause any concussive effect. Sometime in the same period, right wing columnist Byron York spoke to Jackson more informally.  Placing himself among that crowd, Jonathan Swan wrote a fawning story from Jackson’s view — confirming that Jackson offered to help Trump “medically or with the press” — mentioning none of the reasons that Jackson’s claims should be approached with skepticism.

So we should assume this “medical report” is about helping Trump with the press as much as it is changing his bandages.

The letter is an excellent test of how well various journalists evaluate credibility of sources — a good proxy for how they treat anonymous sources. You can watch, in real time, whether journalists consider the following before treating a discredited hack like Jackson as a credible source:

  • Is he in a position to know what he claims?
  • Is the report internally consistent
  • Is he otherwise reliable?

For example, according to Jackson’s narrative (and Swan’s report), Jackson was not a witness to the most important detail of the report: what the doctors in Butler, PA determined.

The President was initially treated by the medical staff at Butler Memorial Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania, who did an excellent job of evaluating him and treating his wound. I want to thank them for their outstanding care. They provided a thorough evaluation for additional injuries that included a CT of his head.

Jackson doesn’t know firsthand what their care was like. And Jackson’s reference to possible medical reports, with no substance, should raise questions about why we haven’t heard about the CT results (and why Jackson didn’t mention the CT test when Benny, who remarkably asked a better question than many self-imagined straight journalists, asked him about a concussion).

Crazier still, Jackson sources his knowledge about the bullet trajectory to what was, “reported and witnessed by the entire world, he sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear from a high- powered rifle used by the would be assassin.” Jackson’s description of the wound may well be accurate.

The bullet passed, coming less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear. The bullet track produced a 2 cm wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear. There was initially significant bleeding, followed by marked swelling of the entire upper ear. The swelling has since resolved, and the wound is beginning to granulate and heal properly. Based on the highly vascular nature of the ear, there is still intermittent bleeding requiring a dressing to be in place. Given the broad and blunt nature of the wound itself, no sutures were required.

But even there, Jackson’s description of the amount of bleeding is second hand (and inconsistent with what videos showed). Swan even described that Jackson had fallen behind his spouse, watching in the next room, as he followed Trump’s speech live. He watched the shooting itself on delay.

Mr. Jackson was in his bedroom in Amarillo, Texas, on Saturday night, packing his bag for the Republican convention. He was watching the Trump rally on his iPad, but he had stopped the livestream a couple of times, so he lagged behind Mr. Trump’s remarks by a couple of minutes. His wife, Jane, was watching the rally on a television in the living room, and she was speaking to someone on the phone. She suddenly called out to him.

“She said, ‘The president just got shot,’” Mr. Jackson recalled.

“And I said, ‘What? No.’”

“She goes, ‘Are you behind?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ And so I fast-forwarded it.”

Having gone an entire week exhibiting little curiosity about Trump’s medical condition, many outlets snapped this up as if it was credible.

WaPo’s Maegan Vazquez offers one of the better mainstream treatments of this. She raises Jackson’s partisan bias, describing Jackson as, “a political ally whose actions as a medical provider have come into question over the years,” in the second paragraph and returns to concerns about Jackson in later paragraphs.

He will have further evaluations, including a comprehensive hearing exam, as needed. He will follow up with his primary care physician, as directed by the doctors that initially evaluated him.

Axios’ Emma Loop, by contrast, basically just cut-and-pasted the one substantive paragraph. The only warning about Jackon’s unreliability was a link to a report on Jackson’s alcohol and personnel abuse, labeled as Axios’ “Go Deeper” category.

That made Loop’s report nearly indistinguishable from the one from an intern that Politico tasked with cutting and pasting the release.

WSJ simply stuck a quote from Jackson at the end of a report on Trump’s Grand Rapids rally, perhaps appropriately sandwiched between the ravings from other Trump groupies. It offered no caution about Jackson’s credibility.

NYT hasn’t covered yesterday’s release at all, perhaps figuring that Swan’s earlier fawning coverage was sufficient.

Perhaps the most important problem with Jackson’s report came from former Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr.

As former President, Trump has available to him the best doctors in the world to evaluate a gunshot wound (and any possible damage to his brain).

According to Jackson, Trump hasn’t even consulted his primary care physician yet, nor has he had his hearing tested.

He will have further evaluations, including a comprehensive hearing exam, as needed. He will follow up with his primary care physician, as directed by the doctors that initially evaluated him.

Rather than having his physician care for this wound, then, Trump had his trusty PR flack do so.

But maybe Trump didn’t need a practicing doctor to care for him. Maybe the wound was so minor Trump needs no day-to-day medical care, he needs only a nurse to change his bandaid.

This certainly looked like a medical report. But what it reported is we still don’t know about results on the tests done in Butler, including the CT scan. And rather than conveying that, Trump has chosen to put his Candy Man on the case.

Update: This Alex Wagner interview with Vin Gupta discusses the kinds of concerns that doctors might have going forward.

Update: And here’s Sanjay Gupta with his questions.

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Manufactured Horseshit: Paul Manafort Returns to the Scene of the Crime

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Vaughn Hillyard caught Paul Manafort in a victory lap on the floor of the RNC the other day.

Hillyard: Mr. Manafort, how is it to be back?

Manafort It’s great to be back.

And so it is that eight years after getting advance warning of the DNC release from his long time buddy Roger Stone, almost eight years after Stone emailed Manafort telling him he had a way to win the race, and just short of eight years after Manafort met with Konstantin Kilimnik in a cigar bar and discussed the outlines of a quid pro quo: campaign information for debt relief in exchange for a commitment to carve up Ukraine (Manafort insists he rejected the plan to carve up Ukraine, though the plan nevertheless remained active until at least 2018).

Aside from Hillyard and Robert Costa’s tweets marking Manafort’s arrival, his presence made barely a blip in the news coverage.

Why should it?

Among all the other criminals and insurrectionists, Manafort no longer sticks out.

And with JD Vance’s selection as VP, Manafort’s support for a pro-Russian Ukraine also looks banal, rather than alarming.

But there is likely a backstory few want to pursue.

Back in May, when Paul Manafort’s return was first reported and then denied, 24sight described how (as he had done in 2016), Paulie had been and kept working the back channel.

Manafort has quietly been passing strategic advice back to Trump through co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and longtime Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, the Republican sources said. Manafort has been analyzing polling results and advised on the organization of state Republican parties and selecting delegates to the Republican nominating convention — one of his specialties — according to two Republicans familiar with the dealings.

But LaCivita and other Trump campaign officials vehemently denied Manafort’s involvement.

LaCivita called questions about huddling with Manafort for Trump’s benefit “manufactured horseshit,” in a text message to 24sight News. Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes endorsed LaCivita’s reply, adding some context to the pushback.

“There was clearly a moment of consideration about using Manafort specifically for the convention,” Hughes said Wednesday. “But Manafort very publicly withdrew himself.”

Asked if Manafort had discussions with Fabrizio about helping steer the campaign, Hughes said he was unaware of everything that people talk about outside the campaign.

Three Republicans familiar with the dealings said that LaCivita met with Manafort in suburban Washington last fall. LaCivita denied details of the meeting to 24sight News, but declined to answer additional questions.

LaCivita was denying Manafort’s centrality as vigorously as he is now attempting to deny the (Orbán-aligned) Project 2025, as vigorously as Steve Bannon denied Manafort’s ongoing role in 2016, in spite of receiving plans on how to secure the victory, plans which led Bannon to worry about the appearance of Russian involvement in the victory.

But all these pieces go together.

That is, Trump is running not just as someone who explicitly wants to be a Dictator from Day One, someone who supports all the same policies as a Project that targets divorce and birth control along with the very idea of civil service.

He is running with Russian help on a plan to give Russia what it wants, starting, but not ending, with Ukraine on a silver platter.

Trump, and the guy Trump pardoned for lying about what happened with Russia in 2016, are simply picking up where things left off.

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Will Alex Jones Accuse Donald Trump of Being a Crisis Actor?

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“The gun culture’s winning, and if we beat ’em on that, we can beat ’em on everything,” Alex Jones said about halfway through a rant about the Sandy Hook massacre.

“You know they’re going to exploit this tragedy,” he said, before getting rich off of it.

The rant was played at the Texas trial which led to a billion dollar judgment for the conspiracy theorist’s claims that the act of school shooter Adam Lanza was staged.

Of course, as Jones subsequently conceded, disturbed loner Lanza really did shoot up an elementary school. He really did kill a bunch of children.

In America, one doesn’t need to invent Deep State plots for loners to commit seemingly pointless shootings. Sometimes all it takes is an assault rifle.

And it looks increasingly likely that’s what Thomas Crooks was: someone who wanted to shoot people, not to achieve some political murder or to help Iran avenge Qassem Soleimani’s death, but because that’s how America gives some people’s lives purpose.

According to briefings given to Congress, Crooks seemed to be casing out both Trump and Joe Biden in advance of his attack.

F.B.I. officials told members of Congress on Wednesday that the gunman who tried to kill former President Donald J. Trump used his cellphone and other devices to search for images of Mr. Trump and President Biden, along with an array of public figures.

The 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa., also looked up dates of Mr. Trump’s appearances and the Democratic National Convention, according to people on two conference calls held to answer lawmakers’ questions.

[snip]

F.B.I. officials, speaking on the calls, suggested that his search history indicated he was broadly interested in powerful and famous people, without any obvious ideological or partisan pattern.

Among the other prominent figures the gunman searched for using one of his phones, besides Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, were the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray; Attorney General Merrick B. Garland; and a member of the British royal family, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter publicly.

Mr. Wray, who was also on the calls, went out of his way to caution that the investigation was still in its early stages.

But the absence of “any political or ideological information” at the house Mr. Crooks shared with his mother and father was “notable” because most people who carry out acts of political violence tend to leave a discernible trail of political views, a top bureau official told lawmakers.

[Note: this story also repeats a claim that Crooks forewarned of something on Steam; that appears to be one of numerous instances of people adopting his identity after the fact.]

While accounts vary, some of his schoolmates describe that he was a loner who was bullied.

Speaking to local news outlet KDKA, some young locals who went to school with him described him as a loner, who was frequently bullied and sometimes wore “hunting outfits to school”.

Another former classmate of his, Summer Barkley, cast him differently, telling the BBC that he was “always getting good grades on tests” and was “very passionate about history”.

“Anything on government and history he seemed to know about,” she said. “But it was nothing out of the ordinary… he was always nice.”

She described him as well-liked by his teachers.

Others simply remembered him as quiet.

“He was there but I can’t think of anyone who knew him well,” one former classmate, who asked to remain nameless, told the BBC. “He’s just not a guy I really think about. But he seemed fine.”

None of this makes the shooting less important. None of this excuses the lapses in Trump’s security that allowed it to happen.

Rather, it makes it rather more ordinary — something that Americans have grown all too used to and done far too little to prevent.

Yet, even so, the shooting has still been used to heighten America’s polarization, with partisans on both sides still trying to find party as the cause of this.

It was only a matter of time before a garden variety American school shooter decided to aim at a higher profile target. And yet we’re still not taking from it the message that everyone of these random shootings are a tragedy. Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who heroically shielded his family to protect them, is the victim of this shooting, not Trump. But he’s no more important a victim than the 20 children killed in Sandy Hook. It’s not God that chose this shooting. It is not destiny.

It is, rather, something far darker about America, something that transcends party.

Update: Parkland High father Fred Guttenberg weighs in:

Update: NYT gets to the school shooter analogy too.

Investigators have uncovered what now could be seen as concerning signs: The gunman’s phone showed that he had possibly read news stories about the teenage school shooter who killed four students at Oxford High School in Michigan. Mr. Crooks received multiple packages, including several that were marked “hazardous material,” over the past several months. He looked up “major depressive disorder” on a cellphone later found at his house.

He had also searched a bipartisan roster of political figures, including Mr. Trump, President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, F.B.I. officials told members of Congress. He also looked up both the dates of Mr. Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, Pa., as well as the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

But investigators have not found any evidence that Mr. Crooks had strong political beliefs or an ideological motivation.

Experts who study the histories of gunmen said the emerging picture of Mr. Crooks looked more like a 21st-century school shooter than a John Wilkes Booth.

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In Bid to Withhold Laptop and Hard Drive Forensic Reports, Derek Hines Misstates Hunter Biden’s View on Authenticity of Data on Laptop

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As I noted in this post, I wrote a letter to Judge Maryellen Noreika asking her to release several documents, the more interesting of which are the forensic reports on the laptop attributed to Hunter Biden and the hard drive with John Paul Mac Isaac’s purported copy of the laptop.

Abbe Lowell had no problem with the release of the forensic reports.

Mr. Biden has no objection to the release of either item requested by the journalist—the motion for miscellaneous relief at DE 167 and/or the expert disclosure of Michael Waski at DE 120-2.

Derek Hines did. He said that because he never filed the forensic reports, they are not judicial records before Judge Noreika.

However, his disclosure was never filed with the Court because the defendant agreed that the information derived from his laptop was authentic. Therefore, the expert disclosure was not included as an exhibit for ECF 120 because the certification itself sufficiently supported the motion. Moreover, since there was no dispute about the authenticity of the information derived from the defendant’s laptop, the government did not call Mr. Waski as an expert witness at trial. Accordingly, the expert disclosure is not a judicial record and is not a record before this Court that the Court could unseal.

There are several problems with this response.

First, as I wrote in my letter, nothing in the certification mentioned the laptop or hard drive it certified.

Mr. Waski’s certification, as docketed, does not by itself certify that the laptop was among the devices extracted. While the MIL describes that Mr. Waski’s certification pertains to, “two backup files from laptop and hard drive” (DE 120 at 3), Mr. Waski’s certification itself mentions neither. Instead, it references a “Digital Forensics Report and [an] Extraction Report,” singular. Compare Robert Gearhart’s certification at DE 120-1, which lists the four iCloud backups described in the MIL, “Apple Backup 1, Apple Backup 2, Apple Backup 3, Apple Backup 4,” which in turn match the warrant. (20-mj-165 DE 3 at 2) To confirm that Mr. Waski’s certification pertains to the laptop and hard drive incorporated into the summary and described in the warrant (19-mj-309 DE 3) requires inspecting the Disclosure.

There is no way the public — or Judge Noreika herself — can be certain that the “Digital Forensics Report and Extraction Report,” singular, mentioned in the certification describes the forensics of both (or either!) the laptop and the hard drive. We need to see the description of that report in the Disclosure itself.

The certification relies on the Disclosure to even identify what it is certifying.

More importantly, Hines blatantly misstates Hunter Biden’s view on the authenticity of the data on the laptop. In Abbe Lowell’s response to Hines’ motion to bypass any expert witness, he specifically debunked that claim.

Defense counsel has numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material from Apple Inc. and The Mac Shop, such that the Special Counsel’s claim that the underlying data is “authentic” (id. at 4) and accurately reflects “defendant’s Apple Macbook Pro and [] hard drive” (id. at 2) is mistaken.

Mr. Biden’s counsel told the Special Counsel on May 10, 2024 it agrees not to challenge the authenticity of the electronic data the Special Counsel intends to use with respect to it being what law enforcement received on December 9, 2019 from John Paul Mac Isaac (owner of The Mac Shop), and from Apple on August 29, 2019 and in a follow-up search on July 10, 2020. (Mot. at n.3.) However, Mr. Biden cannot agree this electronic data is “authentic” as to being his data as he used and stored it prior to Mac Issac obtaining it.

He pointedly did not agree that the data derived from the laptop (and hard drive, which I suspect has more irregularities) was “authentic” as to being his own data.

One reason I’m interested in the hard drive is because Hines himself revealed that the “backup” of it is 62% bigger than the laptop of which it purports to be a copy. Understanding why that is so might go a long way to explain anything John Paul Mac Isaac did with Hunter Biden’s data.

As I noted in my letter to Judge Noreika, Congressman Dan Bishop suggested in a deposition on the laptop last year that if the FBI, “has conducted a forensic investigation and has suppressed the results,” people shouldn’t defer to the FBI. This was an opportunity for the FBI to show it’s work.

It — or at least, David Weiss — doesn’t want to.

Update: Corrected misspelling of Hines’ last name. My apologies to him.

Update: Judge Noreika has now docketed my reply. Among other things, I noted that the creation date for the PDF of Waski’s certification post-dates the day when it was sent to Hunter Biden’s team on April 24.

 

The other certification is dated April 23.

Update: Judge Noreika has, unsurprisingly, granted the request to docket the Hallie Biden related filing, but denied the Disclosure on the laptop and hard drive.

ORAL ORDER re: D.I. [247], IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the Sealed Motion (DI [167]) is hereby unsealed. The expert disclosure of Michael Waski is not part of the record of this case or in the Courts possession. IT IS HEREBY FURTHER ORDERED that the Court will not address further informal requests made by letter rather than appropriate motion. Ordered by Judge Maryellen Noreika on 7/18/2024. (as)

 

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