Crooked Media - The flipping point

Another week of disgraced former president Donald Trump imposing himself on our poor, beleaguered brains.
 

• As Trump’s four criminal cases proceed toward trials, his dozens of allies, aides, and co-defendants have begun to wobble. Lawyers for individuals in that category (both high-level officials and lesser-known associates) are showing signs that some of their clients are starting to flip—if not to cooperate with prosecutors then to defend themselves by blaming everything on Trump. In late August, three GOP activists who were indicted alongside Trump in the Fulton County election interference case stated that their actions were all taken at Trump’s direction. 
   

• Last week, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (another co-defendant in the Georgia case) signaled that his likely defense will be to lay blame at Trump’s feet for driving the effort. Meadows entered a plea of not guilty on Tuesday to charges accusing him of trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia, though he will not appear in court in Atlanta this week as he waived his right to an arraignment.
   

• As the Georgia case proceeds, this strategy of less-involved co-defendants flipping on Trump and blaming him for their actions as the kingpin of the operation could become even more pronounced. Trump and his PAC have covered legal bills for his aides, advisers, and employees during the House January 6 hearings, and have extended the same “generosity” to co-defendants in the federal classified documents case, but the Georgia case seems to be every co-defendant for themselves, which could make getting them to flip easier. At least four of the co-defendants have turned to crowdfunding for their legal fees.

So where does this leave Trump? Well, still very much the frontrunner in the 2024 GOP primary. 
 

• Somehow, Trump’s voodoo-esque hold over GOP voters is still going strong. More than four in 10 potential GOP primary voters say they have “definitely” decided to support Trump, and his lead over his next closest contender, Ron DeSantis, continues to portend nothing short of a blowout. Nearly two-thirds of GOP voters consider Trump one of their top two choices, and 61 percent say they believe he is “extremely likely” or “very likely” to become the party nominee, up almost a full 10 “ percentage points from the beginning of the summer. About one-in-five Republican-aligned voters say they would not support Trump in the primary under any circumstances, and 16 percent say the charges he faces related to January 6 are disqualifying if true, but that likely won’t make much of a difference. 
   

• For his part, Trump is still bulldozing ahead with his campaign, as are former members of his administration. William Chip served as the senior counselor in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security and just launched a nonprofit called Black America for Immigration Reform. Chip is, of course, White, and has a nasty little history of making racist posts on social media. Chip has repeatedly written fearmongering pieces for the right-wing, anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies about the harms caused by immigration to Black Americans. The creation of this “nonprofit” and others like it represent the Republican effort to exploit President Biden’s declining support among nonwhite voters. 

Despite the fact that Donald Trump is a four-times-indicted criminal defendant, there will be no guarantees for Democrats in 2024. They will still have to fight for every single vote even though the other guy might be campaigning from jail, because that’s just the fun little country we live in.

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According to a damning new study released this week by the European Commission (the E.U.’s governing body) Russian propaganda about Ukraine was allowed to disseminate at levels much higher than before the war began thanks to Elon Musk’s “X” (it’s Twitter, goddamnit). Despite various social-media companies making voluntary commitments to take action against Russian disinformation and propaganda, it thrived, possibly in violation of the E.U.’s social media law known as the Digital Services Act. The study reported that “Over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe,” and that reach and influence of such accounts “has grown further in the first half of 2023, driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards.” Yeah, you think???

Twitter has also been accused in a revised civil lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human-rights abuses against users, including disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than the company has for the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada. I wonder why! The lawsuit was brought by Areej al-Sadhan last May against Twitter, predating Musk’s reign of terror. Al-Sadhan is the sister of a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail after Twitter’s California headquarters were infiltrated by three Saudi agents, two of whom were posing as Twitter employees in 2014 and 2015. This led to the exposure and identification of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom, like Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, were later reportedly detained and tortured under the Saudi government’s crackdown on “dissent.” The updated legal filing comes just days after Human Rights Watch reported that a Saudi court sentenced a man to death based solely on his Twitter and YouTube activity. Starting to think that social-media companies are not, in fact, going to “save the world,” as they promised us.

Congress’s attending physician says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does not have “a seizure disorder or…a stroke, TIA or movement disorder such as Parkinson’s disease.” Yep, just a totally healthy elderly man who freezes sometimes and becomes unresponsive! Nothing to see here!

Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Tuesday to delay an upcoming status conference in the criminal case against Rep. George Santos (R-NY) on charges of fraud, money laundering, stealing public funds, and lying to Congress. The new court filing states that prosecutors are discussing “possible paths forward” with Santos’ attorneys. Do we smell a plea deal? 

Top prosecutors in all 50 states are encouraging Congress to study how artificial intelligence can be used to exploit children in the realm of child sexual abuse images and videos. 

Seventy-thousand people are trapped and sheltering-in-place after rains turned the Burning Man festival into a giant mud pit. 

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) voted against sending federal aid to New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy in 2013 when he was a freshman member of Congress. Now that his own state needs the same kind of federal aid in the wake of Hurricane Idalia, he is totally okay with it.

The impeachment trial for Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX) began on Tuesday in the GOP-dominated Texas state Senate. 

After the deficit decreased by the greatest amount ever in 2022, it shot back up in 2023 and is expected to hit about $2 trillion by the end of the fiscal year on September 30. 

Sixty-one people have been indicted on racketeering charges in Georgia for participating in protests against a proposed police and firefighter training facility in Atlanta which critics call “Cop City.” The protesters are being charged under the same RICO law as the 19 defendants currently charged for trying to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election results in the state. The sweeping indictment was brought by Attorney General Chris Carr (R-GA) and details allegations that the defendants are “militant anarchists” who supported a violent movement which prosecutors link to the nationwide 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. The “Stop Cop City” campaign has persisted for more than two years, with activists arguing that the Atlanta-area training center will lead to even greater militarization of the police in the majority-Black city, to say nothing of the environmental damage its construction will cause. Three activists were charged with “felony intimidation” after authorities said they distributed flyers calling a state trooper a “murderer” for his fatal shooting of environmental protester Manuel Paez Teran in the woods back in January. An autopsy in April found that Teran’s body had 57 gunshot wounds. Activists have called the charges “anti-democratic,” and many believe this could set a dangerous precedent for prosecuting even peaceful protestors.

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison for helping to lead the January 6 insurrection, the longest sentence yet for the hundreds of insurrectionists who have been convicted thus far. Love this for us (America). 

For the second time, Alabama’s GOP-drawn congressional map has been thrown out by a federal court because it illegally dilutes Black residents’ voting power in the state. The court has again ordered for the map to be redrawn.