Crooked Media - What A Day: May it Oh Jeez the court

- Fox News Legal analyst Kerri Kupec Urbahn apparently not seeing the irony of making this assertion on Richard Nixon’s birthday

Disgraced former President Donald Trump had (yet another) bad day in court on Tuesday. We love to see it. But was it bad enough???
 

• Trump rolled up to the Washington D.C. courtroom to hear his lawyers argue that presidents enjoy almost complete immunity from criminal prosecution. He went full nonsense to reporters outside, saying: “The president has to have immunity and the other thing is I did nothing wrong!” (Incredible. An iron-clad defense!) Inside, his attorneys did their best to turn his criminal-refrigerator-magnet-poetry into a credible legal argument. But the three judges on the appeals court panel seemed deeply skeptical. After all, Trump has raised various versions of this argument before. Courts typically toss them out, although the process can take a while. 
   

• Unfortunately, that delay is now a serious problem. Even though Trump is very likely to lose (again), the timing could have a big impact on the 2024 election. Trump’s criminal case in Washington D.C. for alleged election subversion will remain on ice until the courts resolve this appeal. And the D.C. case is widely seen as the one most likely to nail Trump before November, since the other three are even more bogged down. A trial date in D.C. had been set for March 4. But as long as this appeal drags on, there’s no saying when the trial will really start.
   

• And a conviction before the election just might matter a lot. Trump’s voters, of course, have shrugged off every batshit thing he’s done in the past. But a lot of folks who say they aren’t bothered by his four indictments also tell pollsters that they would hesitate to vote a convicted felon into the White House. It’s possible that after a conviction, his supporters would move the goal posts for him yet again. On the other hand, if this trial gets delayed too far, we’ll never find out.

How unhinged was Trump’s argument today? His lawyer said the president could literally assassinate a political rival, and get away with it—so long as Congress didn’t get too shirty about it.
 

• The lawyer, D. John Sauer, argued that a president can only be criminally prosecuted for an official act after the Senate convicts him in an impeachment proceeding (something that has never happened in U.S. history). Judge Florence Pan asked: “Could a president order S.E.A.L. Team Six to assassinate a political rival?” The Trump lawyer doubled down on his position. So, y’know, just in case you were thinking maybe a second Trump term might not be so catastrophic…. Keep that one in mind! 
   

• This case is likely to be resolved by the Supreme Court, making it just one more way the high court will impact Trump’s fate and the 2024 election. The Supreme Court will also soon decide whether Trump can be disqualified from state ballots for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Oral arguments for that one are set for February 8.
   

File this under “so crazy it’s worth repeating”: Trump’s attorney literally argued that so long as more than one-third of the Senate backs him up—the threshold to block an impeachment conviction—a future President Trump could have his political opponents gunned down by military commandos and not face criminal consequences. Come on, everybody. This shouldn’t be a tough one.

If you follow Crooked on Instagram or Tiktok, you’ll know that Pod Save The World host Tommy Vietor went down to Iowa last week to check in on voters ahead of the Iowa caucus. To hear more about what he heard on the ground, check out Thursday's special What A Day episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

Popular asthma medication Singulair, also known by its generic name, montelukast, was prescribed to 12 million Americans in 2022, including 1.6 million children. Yet the Food and Drug Administration was slow to alert the public to decades of escalating concerns that the drug could cause aggression, despair and suicidal thoughts, especially in young children, according to a new report in The New York Times. After over twenty years, the FDA finally issued a warning label on the drug in 2020, but the move failed to register with many patients or caregivers. After initially dismissing evidence of adverse effects on the brain during the drug’s approval process  in 1998, the FDA discovered nearly a decade ago that the drug’s manufacturer, Merck, had received thousands of reports of side effects. After a high-profile suicide of a teenage patient in 2007, the FDA still would not force Merck to conduct more rigorous and expensive studies that could have uncovered how common adverse reactions were.

Asthma can be deadly, and the drug is prescribed to children as young as three. Researchers who reviewed side effect reports collected by the World Health Organization in 2015 found outsized rates of anxiety and suicidal behavior among children on montelukast, which researchers deemed “striking” in young children. The year before, Merck unsuccessfully sought approval to sell Singulair over the counter, and FDA records from an oversight meeting that year showed that the company had data on about 46,500 cases of adverse effects. WHO officials only knew about less than one-third of those events. As of 2019, the FDA had documented 82 suicides of people on montelukast, and more than 500 suicide attempts have been linked to the drug through unverified reports to the federal agency. In a 2023 court filing, Merck still denied “a significant link between Singulair and neuropsychiatric events.”

Merck spun the drug off to a company called Organon in 2021, and referred comments from Times reporters to that company. Organon told the paper in a statement that it had communicated appropriate information to patients and health providers about the drug’s risks and benefits. “Nothing is more important to Organon than the safety of our medicines and the people who use them,” the company said. Yes, absolutely. If we’ve learned anything from the past half-century, it’s that major pharmaceutical companies would never lead us astray.

Earth shattered global heat records last year. Now Europe’s top climate agency says that 2023 came dangerously close to the (1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial recorded temperatures) limit that was targeted for the world to stay within at the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. January 2024 is projected to be so warm that for the first time an annual period will exceed the 1.5 degree threshold. 

The United States is currently experiencing the largest surge in Covid-19 since the omicron variant in 2021. 

Disgraced former president Donald Trump said he hopes the U.S. economy crashes in the next twelve months so he can pin it on president Biden. Actively hoping for millions of Americans to suffer profound economic strife for his own political gain: now that’s president material!

Just days before the Iowa Caucuses, Trump’s lead there is only going stronger. 

The presidential campaign of Trump’s former United Nations Secretary Nikki Haley was gaining momentum in recent months but may have officially peaked according to new polls. 

And Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign is in the toilet—he won’t be on the Illinois GOP primary ballot at all! Maybe voters just aren’t connecting with his raging unlikability. 

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was hospitalized after an infection resulted from his December surgery to treat prostate cancer. 

The collision of rising extremism and the advent of artificial intelligence means election disinformation is off-the-charts around the globe. 

French President Emmanuel Macron has named 34-year-old Gabriel Attal as the country’s youngest prime minister in the hopes of fending off the country’s far-right, which is currently leading in polls.

In his fourth visit to the Middle East since the Israel-Hamas war broke out in October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Israel on Tuesday to make “hard choices” in order to normalize relations with its neighbors in the region. The Biden administration is taking pains to clear the path for the creation of a Palestinian state, an outcome many in the right-wing Israeli government—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—explicitly oppose. Blinken also urged Israeli officials to support Palestinian leaders who wish to live peacefully alongside Israelis and stressed that the daily death toll in Gaza is far too high.

Lebanese militant group Hezbollah conducted an airstrike against an Israeli army base in response to recent Israeli bombings in Lebanon. Also on Tuesday, an Israeli attack killed three Hezbollah fighters in south Lebanon, adding to the mounting casualties among its forces. Thousands of civilians have fled both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border as fighting continues to intensify. Hezbollah’s deputy leader Laim Qassem said in a televised speech that the group does not want to expand the war from Lebanon, “but if Israel expands [it], the response is inevitable to the maximum extent required to deter Israel.”

Los Angeles isn’t known for being walkable. But the fantasy Los Angeles of our gay, progressive dreams? That’s a different story. 

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Coal miners in North Dakota uncovered a seven-foot-long mammoth tusk that had been buried for thousands of years. Experts estimated the tusk to be between 10,000 and 100,000 years old.

Democrats in the Maine state legislature overturned a GOP effort to impeach the state’s top election official for her decision to remove disgraced former president Donald Trump from the state ballot over his role in the January 6 insurrection. 

The Department of Labor issued a final rule on Tuesday that will force companies to treat some workers as employees rather than independent contractors or “gig” workers and provide them with the associated benefits.