Crooked Media - What A Day: I've McFaddenough

Disgraced former president Donald Trump and his army of aides are (you may want to sit down for this) on the wrong side of the law. 
 

• Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has been aggressively investigatingTrump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including his actions leading up to the January 6 insurrection. Smith’s prosecutors have also sought evidence about ads and email messages related to Trump campaign efforts to raise money off false claims of election fraud, as well as the infamous fake electors scheme. 
   

• But there’s a new twist. The target letter Smith served to Trump insinuated that he could be charged with violating a civil-rights statute that has been on the books since the end of Reconstruction. Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code states that it is a crime for anyone to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person,” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” This statute was put in place after the Civil War as a means to prosecute White people in the South, including Ku Klux Klan members, who used terrorism to prevent formerly-enslaved Black Americans from voting. In modern usage, the law has been employed in cases of voter-fraud conspiracies, which would square with Trump repeatedly espousing false claims of voter fraud.
   

• Federico Klein, a Trump appointee who worked in the State Department, was convicted in Washington on Thursday of assaulting an officer, resisting or impeding officers, obstruction of an official proceeding, civil disorder, and other misdemeanor offenses related to his actions at the Capitol on January 6. The judge presiding over the case? Trevor McFadden, also a Trump appointee! The gang’s all here! Klein was present in a tunnel leading into the Capitol, where prosecutors argued some of the worst violence against police took place. Klein’s attorney argued that what he was doing in the tunnel was in “the eye of the beholder,” which is a truly hilarious attempt at a defense. One man’s bear spray is another’s cologne, as the saying goes.

You’re not gonna believe this, but there’s more where that came from. 
 

• Ever the Trump loyalist, McFadden managed to interrupt Smith’s grand-jury investigation of Trump, despite having no say over it. During the Fernando Klein conviction, McFadden summoned special counsel prosecutor Thomas Windom to his courtroom, for the crime of having made Klein’s lawyer, Stan Woodward, late to the proceedings. Woodward also represents lesser-known Trump aides, two of whom testified before a federal grand jury on Thursday, which apparently left Woodward double booked! Oops! After a brief spat, McFadden allowed the Trump investigation to resume and ruled that Klein could await sentencing from his home, over DOJ’s objections. What a guy.
   

• All of this has House Speaker/spineless miscreant Kevin McCarthy at pains to deny that he struck a deal to hold a symbolic vote to exonerate Trump for the insurrection. “There’s no deal,” he told NBC, despite the fact that Trump’s GOP allies in Congress are rallying around him as he faces multiple criminal indictments. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the number 4 Republican in the House and QAnon shamaness Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced a bill last month to “expunge” both of Trump’s impeachments, a move for which there is no historical precedent (and which flouts the Constitution which enumerates the impeachment power, but not the made up “expungement” power). 

As the legal proceedings against Trump and his allies continue, so too will the debate among less-extremist Republicans about whether remaining loyal to the former president is politically wise.

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2016 was the 25th anniversary of the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and it was also the year HBO released the film Confirmation starring Kerry Washington, a dramatic recounting of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations and her deposition during Thomas’s confirmation hearing. Contemporaneously, a deluge of articles defending Thomas’s character and railing against the film appeared in various media outlets. Websites celebrating Thomas’s career sprung up out of nowhere. A new account called “Justice Thomas Fan Account” appeared on Twitter (hard to think of anything ever that has sounded that fake). The pro-Clarence Thomas media blitz continued for years, and included the creation and promotion of a flattering film about him. According to a Washington Post investigation, the entire apparatus was financed with almost $2 million from conservative nonprofits headed by right-wing “judicial activist” (money-for-judges corruption guy) Leonard Leo. This adds to Leo’s profile as a figure of such outsized influence that he even continues to pull strings behind-the-scenes after he has helped conservative justices secure their lifetime appointments. Man, that Supreme Court code of conduct can’t come fast enough!

The Women’s World Cup in New Zealand heightened security ahead of the Thursday night opening after a gunman killed two people just hours before the country’s first match. 

Democratic presidential candidate, Republican crush of the month, and career anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government 🙄, where he offered an impassioned defense of himself claiming (among other things) “I have never been anti-vax. I have never told the public to avoid vaccination,” otherwise known as perjury.

Police searched a Las Vegas home this week in connection with the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, which is weird, because he’s def still alive. 

Twitter announced in a court filing on Thursday that it plans to subpoena chief Big Tech critic/our mom Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), as it seeks to terminate an FTC consent decree that was put in place to protect users after multiple data breaches. 

Ahead of a protest in Stockholm where a copy of the Koran is slated to be burned, Iraq expelled its Swedish ambassador. Hundreds of protestors stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad and set it ablaze.

Showtime’s Vice documentary series was slated to air an episode called “The Guantanamo Candidate” on May 28 of this year. The episode centered on Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and his time as a JAG lawyer at the infamous Cuban prison complex from March 2006 to January 2007. Reporters for Vice secured on-camera interviews with a former Guantanamo detainee, and a prison guard. Both said they remembered seeing DeSantis at the prison during a hunger strike among detainees. The crew of journalists traveled to Guantanamo Bay seeking to speak to military staff, and made several efforts to ask DeSantis about the allegations directly, but were only able to eventually confront him at a press conference in Israel. The episode had been vetted by the Vice legal team and was returned by Showtime executives without any notes or requests for changes. Despite its completion, the episode never aired.

Now, two people familiar with the incident claim that Showtime, which is owned by Paramount, put the kibosh on the episode due to fears of “political consequences.” One source who had been briefed on the decision to pull the episode claimed that Paramount’s Washington lobbyist DeDe Lea, raised initial objections to the piece, but Showtime has declined to comment. When asked for comment, Vice spokesperson Elise Flick said, “We not only stand behind our rigorous reporting but are proud of the incredible journalism showcased in this story.” The story of the episode’s mysterious shelving has been lost amidst Vice’s bankruptcy and Paramount’s overall mismanagement. What was Paramount afraid of, exactly? A small, very litigious man? Further expenses in a time when it was already trying to cut costs? We have a few guesses. But the completed episode is still floating around somewhere, and Vice is reportedly shopping around its documentary series, looking for a new home.

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A federal judge denied QAnon shaman and January 6 insurrectionist Jacob Chansley’s bid to throw out his conviction. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee is (finally) considering a new ethics code for the Supreme Court because of, you know, all of the corruption. 

Workers for the gay dating app Grindr are petitioning to unionize amid tech layoffs. 

President Biden gave a speech at a shipyard in Philadelphia on Thursday and stressed the need for strong unions across sectors in the future of the United States economy.