Crooked Media - What A Day: Bail to the Chief

- Fox News nightmare Lisa Kennedy Montgomery talking about…a tropical storm

Disgraced former president Donald Trump and four of his co-defendants in the Georgia case came to criminal bond agreements. Now we’re talkin’!
 

• Trump has agreed to pay a $200,000 bond as a condition of his release ahead of his criminal trial in Fulton County, GA, where he and his jabronis are charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election. (He claims he will officially surrender on Thursday.) The bond order was filed in court on Monday afternoon and was subsequently signed by Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee. The order says that Trump “shall perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a co-defendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.” Good luck with that!
   

• John Eastman, one of Trump’s lawyers credited with engineering the fake elector scheme, similarly paid $100,000 in bail in the case. Eastman is also referenced, but not explicitly charged as a co-conspirator, in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal criminal case against Trump. But this deluge of state and federal indictments has done nothing to stop Trump and these same jabronis from continuing to lie about the 2020 election to anyone who will listen. Mike Lindell, fervent Trump surrogate/the MyPillow guy got onstage at a rally in Missouri just two days after the indictment and continued spreading the Big Lie.
   

• In a 37-page document filed on Saturday, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked a federal court to dismiss the state criminal charges against him in the Fulton County case. Meadows claims that his actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election, including participating in Trump’s “perfect” phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, should be immune from state prosecution because they were performed in his capacity as a federal official.

Wednesday’s first GOP primary debate should thus be…interesting! 
 

• Trump confirmed on Sunday that he will not attend the first Republican presidential primary debate, and will skip subsequent ones as well. Sources familiar with the matter say that the former president already taped an interview with Tucker Carlson that is expected to air as counterprogramming of the Fox News-hosted GOP debate. Because Carlson is no longer employed by Fox News, it’s unclear which platform will run the interview. If it’s on Elon Musk’s Twitter Spaces, we can understand why they would want to tape in advance, given Ron DeSantis’s disastrous campaign launch back in May. 
   

• On Wednesday evening, Trump is expected to be at his golf club in Bedminster, NJ, where we’re sure he will be, as always, posting through the pain and definitely not breaking any laws. This will be a sticky week for the Don, as his bond order for the Fulton County case also says that he is not allowed to make “direct or indirect threat[s] of any nature against the community or to any property in the community,” including, but not limited to, “posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media.” The idea that Trump will be able to sit on his hands while his GOP challengers discuss his criminal exposure feels like…a bit of a stretch!

We’ll certainly be watching the GOP debate and Trump’s interview with Tucker before the two programs begin airing on a split-screen for the rest of eternity in hell. 

Big news: Pod Save America is going on tour in the fall! Members of our new subscription community, Friends of the Pod, will have first access to presale tickets and the best seats for these shows. That’s right, the splash zone, baby. The Friends of the Pod subscriber presale starts tomorrow, August 22th through 9 AM local on August 25th, so join at any tier today to get the code. You’ll also get bonus content, access to a great community on Discord and so much more. Go to crooked.com/friends to subscribe and nab those presale tickets!

Twitter and Tesla CEO, right-wing billionaire, and overall enfant terrible Elon Musk is, unfortunately, more than just the world’s richest internet troll. He has also used the credulity of people in high places to position himself as a decision-maker in American public life. After decades of privatization in areas that used to be controlled by the state, Musk has wrapped his tentacles around business opportunities that make him one of the U.S. government’s strangest bedfellows. The Biden administration’s plans to transition the auto industry away from gas and towards electricity hinges on Tesla’s network of charging stations. NASA transports crew members to space solely using Musk’s SpaceX. The war effort in Ukraine is overwhelmingly dependent on SpaceX’s line of mobile internet terminals called Starlink.

According to a new profile in the New Yorker, many government agencies that contracted with Musk’s companies did not foresee the degree to which these deals would be personally vulnerable to the CEO’s whims and temper tantrums. When Starlink communications suddenly stopped working, the Pentagon called Musk to try to work out a deal to get connections up and running again, and Musk responded that he had personally spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin, apparently seeking to personally act as a go-between, which no one asked for, and is (thus) illegal. Musk subsequently denied having said that, but the New Yorker documented that he had told multiple people otherwise, including claiming to one individual to be in regular talks with the Kremlin. So the United States government is not just entangled with but dependent on a racist billionaire with a god complex whose use of ketamine to self-medicate has reportedly become increasingly regular. We can’t imagine how such an arrangement could possibly go south.

Laura Ann Carleton, a store owner in Lake Arrowhead, CA, and mother of nine was fatally shot on Friday after someone took issue with the Pride flag she had hanging outside of her shop. The man who killed her died in an altercation with police shortly thereafter.

As tropical storm Hilary soaked Southern California on Sunday, a moderate 5.1 earthquake struck the same afternoon near Ojai, CA. 

President Biden and the first lady traveled to Maui on Monday to meet with survivors of the devastating wildfires that tore through the island’s western coast. 

The FBI is searching for Chirstopher Worrell, a member of the Proud Boys who was convicted in a bench trial on seven charges related to his actions during the January 6 insurrection. He was scheduled to be sentenced in federal court on Friday but is now missing according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. 

A new Des Moines Register poll shows that Trump still holds a more than 2-to-1 lead over his next-closest GOP challenger in Iowa with five months until Caucus Day.

A U.S. Army Special Operations Command report published on Monday concluded that female soldiers face rampant sexism, harassment, and overt overall hostility to their presence in commando units from their male colleagues. 

The Maryland Department of Health announced a confirmed case of malaria on Friday. The person was briefly hospitalized but is now recovering. The mosquito responsible could not be reached for comment.

On July 2, a Southwest pilot aborted a landing at New Orleans International Airport, because a Delta flight was preparing to take off on the same runway, avoiding a possible collision by seconds. On July 11, An American Airlines flight was accelerating down the runway at over 160 miles per hour when it narrowly missed a Frontier Airlines plane. The same day, an identical close call happened as a German airliner was taking off. Both encounters were so hair-splittingly close that the Federal Aviation Administration described them in internal records as “skin to skin.” Not chill!! An undisclosed FAA report highlighted at least 46 such close calls involving commercial airlines in July alone.

While no major plane crashes have occurred in the United States in more than a decade, these extremely dangerous near-accidents are occurring with much greater frequency than previously realized. The incidents are often the result of human error as the system buckles underneath nationwide staffing shortages for air traffic controllers and other aviation personnel. The close calls have involved all major U.S. airlines and have happened at airports around the country. Annual near-collisions have more than doubled over the past decade. Okay well, you got us! We’re officially scared! Now would be a good time to start a hiring spree and pay air traffic controllers whatever they want.

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American Airlines pilots approved a new contract that includes an immediate 21 percent pay increase, making American the second major U.S. airline to settle with a pilots’ union this year. Let’s hear it for unions, folks!