Crooked Media - What A Day: That's Schoen biz, baby

Over the course of less than three of their 16 allotted hours, lawyers for disgraced former-President Donald Trump did their level best to present exculpatory evidence gin up dishonest talking points and pretexts Republican senators can use to pretend their votes to acquit Trump don’t amount to endorsements of his conduct. 
 

• DISHONEST ARGUMENT ONE: Have you considered that Jimmy Carter also used the word “fight” sometimes?! Trump’s counsel played and replayed video montages of Democrats promising to “fight” or even [clutches pearls] “fight like hell” for things they cared about, whereas Trump often said the words “law and order” a fair amount. Not mentioned: The Democrats were promising to “fight like hell” for things like “passing health-care reform” and not “violently overthrowing the government.” Trump’s lawyers likewise drew a false equivalence between the handful of congressional Democrats over the years who have objected to certifying the results of a presidential election, and Trump’s historic refusal to concede defeat and multifaceted effort to overturn the results. 
   
• DISHONEST ARGUMENT TWO: It’s a free country, bro! Trump was simply exercising his constitutionally protected right to speak freely. Democratic House managers preempted this argument very effectively earlier this week (short version: the first amendment doesn’t mean the president can call for a coup without being impeached). But it did lead to some valuable moments, like when Trump lawyer David Schoen argued that Trump’s incitement wasn’t incitement based on an ecclesiastical reading of a typo. The objective here again isn’t to persuade, but to feed Republican senators a line: I couldn’t vote to convict Trump because my obligation to defend the constitution got in the way.
   
• DISHONEST ARGUMENT THREE: FAKE NEWS! The defense team knocked House managers for relying so heavily on news reports, particularly about Trump’s behavior on January 6. Nobody doubts that Trump was thrilled to see his supporters ransack the Capitol—Senate Republicans know that Trump didn’t do anything to stop the carnage, because some of them called and begged him to intervene and he ignored them! But Trump’s team presents them with a tempting workaround: pretend to believe otherwise.

The good news is Democrats have it in their power to make it hard for Republicans to hide behind these insulting fig leafs by calling witnesses. 
 

• In particular, if Republicans want to cast doubts on media reports about what happened before, during, and after the insurrection, Democrats can subpoena witnesses who can testify under oath that Trump was scrambling to save the Capitol and not, in fact, watching TV and laughing his ass off. There’s even a process in place that would allow House managers to depose GOP senators, like Mike Lee and Tommy Tuberville, who know Trump was calling Republicans trying to further delay certification of the election results, and sicced the mob on Mike Pence even after he knew Pence’s life was in danger.
   
• Likewise, if Republicans intend to acquit Trump no matter what, Democrats can make them do it only after they’ve had to hear from Capitol Police officers who were injured in the attack, or from security officials who can, say, talk about how close the mob came to compromising Mike Pence’s nuclear football, and the launch plans it contains. Something one expert described as “a security breach of almost incomprehensible proportions.”

It’s no mystery why Trump’s lawyers made the weak case they made, the way they made it: They have little else to work with, but they know that many Republican senators have decided to acquit Trump no matter what, and are only in the market for post hoc justifications. Democrats must now decide whether they take those votes in the face of the most damning possible presentation of facts or not.

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Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, was prepared to plead guilty to third-degree murder before then-Attorney General Bill Barr personally blocked the deal. Barr reportedly felt it was too early in the investigation of Floyd’s death, and worried that it would be perceived as too lenient. The plea deal would have averted any potential federal charges, including for any civil-rights offenses, but Chauvin would likely have gone to prison for more than 10 years. Whether Barr truly was worried about public perception or trying to protect Chauvin, it’s probably right that the public would not have reacted to “10 years” with “yep, sounds like justice”—though that decision could look less wise in hindsight, if Chauvin and the three other officers charged in Floyd’s death wind up facing no consequences at all. Judge Peter Cahill’s decision to hold separate trials for Chauvin and the other three men makes the possibility of Chauvin’s acquittal more likely, and Minneapolis is already bracing for more unrest when his trial begins on March 8.

• Come for the longread on Nikki Haley’s attempt to keep walking the pro-Trump/post-Trump tightrope straight into the 2024 presidential primaries, stay for the incredible Ted Cruz anecdote. (It appears he is no more popular in the hairdressing community.)
   
• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton swapped political favors for a donor’s help with a home remodel and a job for a woman with whom Paxton allegedly had an affair, according to the aides Paxton fired last year after they accused him of accepting a bribe. 
   
• Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D-NY) top aide Melissa DeRosa told state lawmakers that the Cuomo administration covered up the number of coronavirus deaths in nursing homes last year to avoid an investigation by the Trump Justice Department. 
   
• Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has joined Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in opposing the inclusion of the $15 minimum wage in Democrats’ coronavirus relief package: “The minimum wage provision is not appropriate for the reconciliation process. It is not a budget item. And it shouldn’t be in there.” One Simple Trick to escape the (real or imagined) limitations of the reconciliation rules: Nuke the filibuster. :)
   
• Deputy White House Press Secretary T.J. Ducklo has been suspended for a week without pay following a report that he threatened to “destroy” a reporter pursuing a story on his relationship with another reporter who covered Biden’s campaign. 
   
• How have Trump supporters reconciled their “blue lives matter” rhetoric with the violent death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick at the hands of insurrectionist rioters, you ask? Horrible conspiracy theories, obviously. 
   
• Justin Timberlake’s p.r. team has seen your Instagram comments, and hopes this is enough?
   
• Happy Valentine’s Day from our human president, first lady, and (non-human, very good) White House dogs. 

NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill has published an op-ed calling on America’s legal institutions to kindly get their shit together. Ifill outlined the many ways lawyers enabled former-President Donald Trump’s most egregious abuses, from the meritless voter fraud lawsuits and false claims from lawyers in Congress that set the stage for the January 6 insurrection, to the central involvement of Justice Department lawyers in Trump’s most harmful policies. Those bad actors have faced very little condemnation from the biggest legal institutions—the American Law Institute invited then-Attorney General Bill Barr to speak shortly after he distorted the findings in the Mueller Report, and made sure he wouldn’t have to answer audience questions. The legal profession needs an urgent institutional reckoning, Ifill argues, and stronger systems to hold lawyers in government accountable for unacceptable conduct.

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Hello, Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo are here with a practical road map on how to turn a red state blue. 

The FDA has given Moderna permission to add 14 vaccine doses to each vial instead of 10, which could boost the country’s vaccine supply by about 20 percent. 

A new UK study found that the arthritis drug tocilizumab can be a lifesaving treatment for people with severe coronavirus cases. 

The Biden administration will begin processing tens of thousands asylum-seekers who were forced to wait in dangerous conditions across the border under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.