Crooked Media - What A Day: Indict makes right

A happy Trump indictment week to us all.
 

• Yes, disgraced former president Donald Trump has officially made his way from Florida to New York ahead of his arraignment scheduled for tomorrow. Trump reportedly will face charges related to his hush money payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, after a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him on Thursday. Trump is due to surrender on Tuesday, and will likely be fingerprinted before appearing before the judge. He will (naturally) plead not guilty. But if he pleads “not guilty because this is a witch hunt,” then you must take a shot of Fireball. We don’t make the rules.
   

• Trump has wasted no time padding out his (already considerable) legal team, hiring prominent white-collar criminal-lawyer-to-the-stars Todd Blanche, who has urged the judge not to allow videography, photography, and radio coverage of the arraignment. Blanche previously represented Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman and fellow criminal Paul Manafort.
   

• On top of that, federal investigators and the Justice Department have reportedly gained new evidence pointing to obstruction of justice by ole’ Donny boy after he got caught allegedly/definitely stealing classified government documents and hiding them at Mar-a-Lago. Law-enforcement used emails and text messages from a former Trump aide to piece together new details, which highlight the degree to which the investigation under special counsel Jack Smith (will never get over how generic this name is) has begun to centralize the obstruction-of-justice elements at play.

News of Trump’s long-delayed legal accountability have garnered all the expected reactions.
 

• As we’ve seen every time Trump faces real repercussions for his bad deeds, a very loud group spanning the political spectrum has arisen to insist “this will only help him politically.” Most notably, there was this dreadful analysis from New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker who said that the indictment puts Trump “exactly where he loves to be — in the center ring of the circus,” and that the integrity of the case is at stake because Trump is treating it like a spectacle. Baker and others like him have argued (as many did during both impeachment hearings as well as in the aftermath of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago) that this will only embolden Trump and ultimately help him politically. 

• The trouble is: it’s just not a particularly good argument. A new CNN poll finds that 60 percent of Americans approve of the indictment even before it’s been unsealed, but even if that weren’t the case, does it somehow make more sense to continue to let Donald Trump commit crimes ad infinitum with impunity? There are many parallels between Trump and his fellow disgraced former president Richard Nixon, but one of the most overlooked is that the right wing also characterized the Watergate hearings as a partisan witch hunt before public opinion gradually turned against him. 
   

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The Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News is looking increasingly Not Good for the standard bearer of televised disinformation. The Delaware judge overseeing the case ruled on Friday that the case will proceed to a jury trial in mid-April, meaning that the network’s highest-ranking executives and big-name hosts could be compelled to testify about their roles in spreading the Big Lie. Perhaps as significant, Judge Eric Davis also awarded Dominion “summary judgment” on the falseness aspect of the defamation suit, which means jurors at trial will only consider the other element of defamation: malice. Davis ruled that, based on the evidence made public through the proceedings thus far, “none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.” He also said that “pure opinion,” which is protected by the First Amendment, does not apply in this case because the false claims were accusations of criminal activity made by newscasters purporting “to be sources of accurate information.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a bill allowing concealed carry of firearms without a permit into law on Monday. Wow, I’m starting to think this guy is not on the level!

Democrats are targeting 31 GOP-held House districts in the 2024 election cycle, finally going on the offensive!

The Kremlin has begun confiscating passports of Russian officials to stop them from fleeing the country or defecting. Let us know how that goes!!

Germany may block the artificial intelligence application ChatGPT over data security concerns, as Italy recently did. 

Finland’s conservative party leader Petteri Orpo defeated center-left Prime Minister Sanna Marin. The country’s far-right populist party won a record 20.1 percent of the vote. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired yet another member of his cabinet who criticized his planned judicial coup. Dictator alert!!

A Virginia state court judge voided a U.S. marine’s adoption of an Afghan war orphan, more than one year after he took the four-year-old girl away from the Afghan relatives who were raising her. 

The Virginia teacher who was shot by a six-year-old student is suing the school’s administrators for $40 million because they did nothing despite being repeatedly warned that the child had a gun. 

Louisiana State University beat Iowa to win its first basketball championship, men’s or women’s, in the school’s history. Coach Kim Mulkey is now the first women’s coach to win national titles at two different schools. 

Twitter has removed the verification check mark from the New York Times’s account because CEO Elon Musk hates the paper for not covering him adoringly. 

The Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against Norfolk Southern seeking damages and alleging that the train derailment and ensuing environmental disaster in East Palestine, OH, violated the Clean Water Act.

The United States already allocates an eye-popping portion of its annual budget to the military, but now the line between the larger economy and the Pentagon may get even blurrier. In the past year, the Pentagon has begun providing loans, guarantees, and other financial assistance to technology companies it considers crucial to national security, forms of support beyond standard grants and contracts it normally uses. Now, it has taken things a step further. When Silicon Valley Bank failed in March following a bank run, the Defense Department lobbied the government to issue a bailout to insure its investments. But there was no indication that any Pentagon contractors might have been at risk, nor did any of the major defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing have any cash in SVB. So a bank bailout in the name of “national security” would have both baseless and unprecedented. But that hasn’t stopped the proposition from advancing or picking up influential friends like Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA). Relatedly, Warner was notably one of the Democratic senators who voted to repeal key parts of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2018, which is how this mini-crisis arose in the first place.

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NASA named the first woman and first Black astronauts ever assigned to a lunar mission, as part of a four-person team that will fly on the nation’s first crewed voyage to the moon in 50 years. 

Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) signed a bill legalizing medical marijuana into law on Friday. 

Finland will formally join NATO on Tuesday after the Turkish government finally waved through its admission.