Crooked Media - What A Day: Okla-stay-at-homa

Between the botched removal of a federal prosecutor and his ill-attended campaign rally, President Trump had a relentlessly embarrassing weekend. 
 

• Late on Friday night, Attorney General Bill Barr attempted to quietly push Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, out of his job. Barr’s Friday night massacre backfired when Berman refused to play along. A few hours after Barr announced that Berman had stepped down and Trump had nominated someone else to fill his post, Berman’s office issued a statement denying that Berman had any intention of resigning. Barr Gets Caught in a Lie, Part One.
   
• On Saturday, the Justice Department released a letter from Barr notifying Berman that Trump had personally fired him. Trump, having finally internalized the idea that he’s not supposed to openly interfere with the Justice Department, told reporters that he was “not involved.” Barr Gets Caught in a Lie, Part Two: 2 Barr, 2 Caught. Still, Berman agreed to step down, having successfully ensured that his own chief deputy Audrey Strauss would take over the office, instead of the administration’s hand-picked interim, until the Senate confirms a permanent replacement. 
   
• The SDNY office has pursued several investigations of Trump’s inner circle, and some potentially damaging inquiries–into Rudy Giuliani and a state-owned Turkish bank—are still ongoing. Barr just (ineptly) fired a prosecutor and tried to install a flunky in his place in order to protect Trump from investigations that might hurt his re-election prospects: An astonishing abuse of power, and a stunt Barr has pulled before. Several Democrats have called for his impeachment, but House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler said on Sunday that while he agrees Barr should be impeached, he thinks it would be “a waste of time at this point.”

In more fun public humiliation, nobody showed up to Donald’s plague party.
 

• Only around 6,200 people attended Trump’s Saturday rally in Tulsa, OK, after his campaign bragged about receiving nearly one-million ticket requests. The campaign abruptly canceled plans for Trump to speak to an outdoor overflow area, because it was basically empty. Trump is reportedly steamed about both the low turnout and the campaign’s disclosure that six of its staffers tested positive for coronavirus hours before the rally. TikTok teens and K-pop fans have claimed credit for inflating crowd size expectations, but the ongoing deadly pandemic and Trump’s eroding popularity are what likely tanked the actual attendance, even in a state Trump won by 36 points. 
   
• Trump’s nearly two-hour speech was a deranged, message-free rant during which he made one stunning admission, while complaining that more testing led to more known COVID-19 cases: “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down.’” Administration officials have since explained that comment as a joke, a reflection of Trump’s frustration, and a “passing observation.” Today Trump dodged a direct question about whether he had ordered a slowdown in testing. We already know that Trump prefers to keep the numbers artificially low, and Senate Democrats now say that the administration has been sitting on nearly $14 billion to expand testing and contact tracing. Anyone see a joke?
   

Amid the farcical weekend that was, the Attorney General removed a prosecutor working on politically sensitive investigations, and the president confessed to actively hobbling the pandemic response. Both our democracy and Americans’ lives depend on all of us ensuring that Trump ends his campaign as dejectedly as he began it. 

It’s not too late join our Adopt A State program. We have one training left, and it's this week! Look how much our organizers have already learned. 

The final training is this Thursday at 5pm PT with Dan Pfeiffer, on finding your leadership style and applying all you’ve learned towards organizing in 2020. If you haven't yet, sign up to adopt a state at votesaveamerica.com/adopt—we'll send you all the details you need.

Kentucky’s primary on Tuesday could be another electoral mess (but maybe not as bad as what you’re seeing on Twitter would suggest). Fewer than 200 polling places will be open, compared to 3,700 sites in a typical year. Jefferson County, the state’s largest with over 600,000 registered voters (and the largest black population in Kentucky), will have just one polling place available. The good news is, Kentucky made absentee voting an option for all voters, and 27 percent of all registered voters had requested early ballots as of last week. Thousands of voters also took advantage of in-person early voting, and Jefferson County’s one polling place for election day is at a giant venue that will have 18 different lines. The bad news is, states haven’t had a great track record of getting absentee ballots to everyone who's requested them in recent primaries, and there’s no way to know what tomorrow’s turnout will look like.

In any event, you’ll want to watch the Democratic Senate primary closely, as Kentuckians choose their candidate to take on Mitch McConnell. Take a minute to get acquainted with underdog progressive candidate Charles Booker → 

• President Trump signed an executive order suspending most temporary-worker visas through the end of 2020, which will impact hundreds of thousands of people.  
   
• The world experienced its largest single-day increase of confirmed coronavirus cases on Sunday, according to the World Health Organization. More than 183,000 new cases were recorded around the world, and the U.S. accounted for 36,617 of them.
   
• Trump’s latest attack on mail-in voting consists of the baseless claim that foreign countries will flood the election with fake ballots. Anyway, here’s an updated list of top Trump officials who have personally voted by mail. 
   
• The FBI has opened an investigation into a noose found in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage stall on Sunday. Wallace is the only black driver in NASCAR’s top circuit, and successfully lobbied the organization to ban Confederate flags at its events. 
   
• A Siberian town in the Arctic Circle recorded a temperature of 38 degrees on Saturday, which doesn't sound too bad until you remember that's in Celsius, which in our dumb system means 100.4 degrees, which...oh no.
   
• Putting a cherry on top of Trump’s humiliating weekend, a federal judge denied the Trump administration’s request to block the release of John Bolton’s book. Someone also leaked a PDF version of the book on Twitter, which we’re not sure if we’re legally allowed to link to, but there’s absolutely nothing we can do to stop you from searching for it. 
   
• Consoling himself with the thought of suing his own family, Trump said his niece is “not allowed” to write her forthcoming book, because it would violate a nondisclosure agreement he claims she signed.
   
• Someone tried to restore an old painting in Spain again. Monkey Christ, meet Cher Virgin Mary. (Virgin Cher-y?) (The painting looks like Cher now.)

President Trump was told in advance in 2016 that WikiLeaks would release materials damaging to the Clinton campaign. The Justice Department has unredacted portions of the Mueller report revealing that in July 2016, Roger Stone told Trump and several campaign advisors that he had spoken with Julian Assange and that WikiLeaks would be publishing those documents shortly. Trump responded, “oh, good, alright.” (The evil version of Bernie Sanders’ “yeah, good, ok.”) Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told investigators that he had overheard the phone call between Stone and Trump. The new revelations are the strongest evidence yet that Trump was aware of outside efforts to hurt the Clinton campaign, that Stone played a direct role in communicating between WikiLeaks and Trump’s advisors, and that Trump lied to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in sworn, written testimony.

New York City has agreed to remove a racist statue of Teddy Roosevelt from outside the Museum of Natural History.

Patagonia will pause its ads on Facebook and Instagram, joining a boycott campaign organized by civil rights groups.

Non-black doctors handed over their Twitter accounts to their black female colleagues for #ShareTheMicNowMed, to amplify their perspectives on the health care system.

NASCAR drivers and other athletes have been speaking out in support of Bubba Wallace.