Crooked Media - What A Day: Law of the Garland

Disgraced former president Donald Trump had an extremely busy weekend of giving batshit sound bites on television and watching his former administration officials line up to call him a psychopath to various news outlets, leading us to ask one of our favorite questions: Merrick Garland, u up?
 

• A sprawling Washington Post investigation found that federal prosecutors and FBI agents did not look into the White House connections to attempts to steal the 2020 election for over a year. Even when they did finally look into it, the FBI declined to identify Trump as a focus of that investigation. It took Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel for DOJ to question witnesses to Trump’s infamous phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R-GA), seeking to manufacture votes and overturn the election in Georgia. Garland reportedly wanted to depoliticize the Justice Department and restore public faith in it by not investigating Trump (that would appear partisan, after all!) but Republicans came after him anyhow, as if he’d had been persecuting Trump from the get go. 
   

• Before Garland was sworn in, he promised to make legal accountability for those responsible for the January 6 insurrection his highest priority. And as far as actual Capitol rioters are concerned, he did. In the span of just two months, federal agents identified 885 likely suspects and charged 278 rioters. But a few key actors were missing as targets of investigation: namely, Trump and his advisers who, you know, organized and initiated the insurrection in the hope of installing Trump for an unelected second term.
   

• From the outset of his tenure, it’s been apparent that Garland did not want to get mired in the politically-radioactive business of investigating Trump. (Different story for Hunter Biden, it turns out—see below…) Unfortunately for Garland, his “I don’t wanna,” attitude did not make Trump any less deserving of criminal investigations. Look, we’re sympathetic to the guy; we know Merrick Garland wanted to focus on civil rights cases and lower-level forms of political corruption, but no such luck. Unfortunately, the 45th president is an open and unrepentant criminal, who continued to commit crimes aimed at empowering himself and subverting U.S. democracy. Sorry pal!

Now that the DOJ has opened investigations into the former president, Garland may not even have to do that much, because no one works harder to incriminate Trump than Trump himself. 
 

• On Monday, Trump sat down for an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, who shockingly seemed to hold the former president’s feet to the fire (as much as anyone at Fox could) and Trump’s responses reached new heights of incoherence. Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr went on Face the Nation on Sunday and absolutely ripped his old boss a new one, calling him a “defiant nine-year-old,” and saying, “Our country can’t be a therapy session for, you know, a troubled man like this.” Get! His! Ass! Before we give [checks notes] Bill Barr too much credit, he still opposes Trump being prosecuted in New York for his 2016 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels and “questions” whether the former president should be held legally accountable for his connection to January 6 or his efforts to overturn the election. 

• Trump-appointed U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who will oversee Trump’s trial for stealing classified White House documents as he left office has set an initial trial date of August 14. Somehow, Cannon is moving with more deliberate speed than Garland, but we wouldn’t be surprised if her motives are less rooted in the right to a speedy trial than they are in the interest of trying to throw out the case against her pal as soon as possible. 

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How do you solve a problem like Joe Rogan? Well, Spotify isn’t even trying anymore. On Thursday, the most listened-to podcaster in the United States hosted a three-hour interview with anti-vaxxer-and-for-some-fucking-reason-Democratic-presidential-candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedytried to downplay his anti-vaxx crusade at the beginning of his presidential campaign, but given an audience with the conspiracy-minded Rogan, he came roaring back. The two men traded vaccine misinformation, and conspiracy theories about 5G technology and wifi. Now, of course, yada yada yada, freedom of speech and all that. But Spotify paid more than $200 million to host Rogan’s show, which attracts around 11 million listeners per episode, and seems to have utterly abdicated responsibility for his unending flood of medical misinformation. 

Rogan accepted all of Kennedy’s most dangerous, debunked views unquestioningly, including the false claim that vaccines cause autism, which have been repeatedly and conclusively discredited. It goes without saying that Kennedy possesses not even a whisper of medical credentials (he’s an environmental lawyer and loud rich guy by trade) who became a vaccine conspiracy theorist long ago and regularly dabbles in HIV denialism. On Monday, YouTube removed a video of another right-wing crank, Jordan Peterson, interviewing RFK, for violating the company’s long-standing policy against hosting false medical information. YouTube is not some great content-moderation role model (the company just decided it will allow 2020 election denialism back on its platform) but that just underscores how low the bar for corporate responsibility to protect people from medical disinformation has been set, and Spotify still refuses to meet it.

A submarine carrying five people on a tour of the wreckage of the Titanic has gone missing in the Atlantic Ocean, and rescuers are trying to locate it before the oxygen supply runs out. 

Professional online misogynist Andrew Tate was charged with rape, human trafficking, and forming a criminal gang to exploit women in Romania on Tuesday. It’s always the guys you least suspect!

Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to two charges of willfully failing to pay income taxes on Tuesday while also entering into an agreement that may enable him to circumvent conviction on a gun-related charge in Delaware on Tuesday. The prosecutor leading the Biden investigation was a Trump appointee. 

A proposed amendment to the state constitution to restore abortion rights in Missouri will move forward after a judge broke a standoff caused by two Republican officials holding up the process. The measure is expected to appear on the 2024 ballot. 

A federal policy embraced by, of all people, Republican President George W. Bush called Housing First allocates billions of dollars to programs that provide homeless Americans with permanent housing, and has endured for over 20 years. It offers, but does not require homeless residents to accept, access to services like drug rehabilitation or treatment for mental illness. Studied extensively under multiple administrations, research has shown time and again that Housing First “rapidly ends homelessness, is cost-effective, and positively impacts quality of life and community functioning.” These great results have of course not stopped a growing number of Republican lawmakers from demanding that the program be defunded, and baselessly claiming that Housing First has contributed to the growth in homelessness. We gotta admit, that’s a pretty convenient theory if you’re an evil Republican rich guy! As expected, the theory has adherents like Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) and faux populist Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), as well as conservative policy groups like the Texas-based Cicero Institute, all of whom are currently promoting model legislation which would bar Housing First programs from receiving state funds. Super-rich tech guy Joe Lonsdale, who founded the Cicero Institute, called Housing First part of a “Marxist” strategy to blame homelessness on capitalism. Sure, unfettered capitalism caused the commodification and corporate hoarding of housing we see today which led to skyrocketing rents and and homeownership being reserved for a dwindling pool of wealthy Americans all while evictions soar, but hey, Conservatives love any chance to blame “Marxism.” Naturally, their issue with Housing First is that we spend any money on it at all.

We all know media outlets have bias. But sorting through the bias of every story can take a lot of time and effort. So, what’s the solution here?
 

Ground News is a startup on a mission to diversify our media diets so that we can understand where these viewpoints are coming from and how they impact public perception.
 

Their app and website scour the internet to gather related news articles from around the world in one place. Every story is accompanied by a Bias Bar that shows which sources are reporting on the issue and where they fall on the political spectrum using ratings from independent news monitoring organizations.
 

Created by former NASA engineer Harleen Kaur, Ground News is a data-driven tool for curious people. It’s supported by subscribers who are passionate about this issue and believe in a future of positive coexistence, where civil debate is the norm, media is accountable and critical thought is the baseline of our information consumption.
 

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The head of the DOJ antitrust division issued a new directive on Tuesday urging the government to tighten bank-merger guidelines to account for Big Tech’s reach in financial services. 

New housing construction surged by the biggest margin since 2016 in May.