@emptywheel

@emptywheel

In a pre-trial filing in the case of Ed Badalian - who is charged with conspiring with Michael Fanone's now admitted assailant, Danny Rodriguez, to obstruct the vote certification - the government identified at least six exhibits pertaining to the events at the Ellipse on January 6 it may introduce at trial.

As noted in this post, I started to write short summaries of where the three main investigations into Trump stand, but they turned into posts.So I'm posting them serially.I wrote about the Georgia investigation here and the stolen documents investigation here.On Thursday, Mike Pence testified to the January 6 grand jury for over five hours.

Joe Tacopina has filed for a mistrial in the E. Jean Carroll suit, accusing Judge Lewis Kaplan of bias.The motion would not go over well with Kaplan on a good day.But among Tacopina's complaints is that Judge Kaplan recognized a literary reference Carroll had made in her book that Tacopina didn't even recognize as a literary reference.

Joe Tacopina has filed for a mistrial in the E. Jean Carroll suit, accusing Judge Lewis Kaplan of bias.The motion would not go over well with Kaplan on a good day.But among Tacopina's complaints is that Judge Kaplan recognized a literary reference Carroll had made in her book that Tacopina didn't even recognize as a literary reference.

As noted in this post, I started to write short summaries of where the three main investigations into Trump stand, but they turned into posts.So I'm posting them serially.In my post on the Georgia investigation, I noted that, as charging decisions have drawn near, Republicans in Georgia have started turning on each other.

For something else entirely, I started writing what I thought was going to be a short summary of where the three major investigations into Trump stand.But those summaries ended up getting long, so I'm going to publish them serially, starting with Fani Willis' Georgia investigation.This post relies on the work of others following the investigation far more closely, especially Lawfare's Anna Bower and GPB's Stephen Fowler.

WASHINGTON On an Air National Guard base in Cape Code, Mass., more than 1,200 military service members and civilians maintain one of the largest support systems for Pentagon drone missions around the world.One of the workers was Airman First Class Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old accused of posting top-secret military reports online.

Today marks the calendar start of celebration season for Mr. EW and I; all our big dates are squished into a short period that, this year, might well culminate in the first of several indictments for the former President.For the US political world, though, today marks crime-fraud exception day, the day that at least one of Trump's attorneys will be obliged to testify about how Trump lied to his lawyers to try to get away with hoarding stolen classified documents.

The WSJ has published an excerpt - the parts relating to January 6 - from the Mike Pence book coming out next week.It includes descriptions of the following conversations with the then-President, at least some of which Pence was the only witness:


     Lunch on November 16, 2020, at which Trump said, "2024 is so far off."

In a motion to keep Jack Teixiera jailed, the government provided more details about what an unstable nut they gave access to the US' most sensitive secrets.While it remains to be seen whether any of Teixeira's leaks got people killed, the government is lucky he didn't go postal before he was caught.

I'm not sure whether it was just chance or whether Ben Smith knew in advance that BuzzFeed would announce the closure of its news division on the same day that he posted an account of publishing the Steele dossier.His account doesn't explain whether the cost of defending against serial Russian lawfare for publishing the dossier made it harder, in the aftermath, to pay journalists' salaries, but it's a question that deserves an answer.

Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss have, as Beryl Howell invited them to do, moved to compel Rudy Giuliani to comply with discovery in their defamation lawsuit.The two 2020 Georgia election workers sued for the damage caused by the lynch mob Rudy summoned by falsely claiming they were attempting to steal votes after he saw a video showing Moss passing her mother a ginger mint.

Back in March, ABC reported that Fani Willis wanted to interview Christina Bobb in the probe of Trump's attempt to overturn Georgia election results.Smart commentators on that investigation, like Lawfare's Anna Bower, suggested that Willis' team likely had discovered, as they worked their way through the January 6 Committee transcripts released after Willis' grand jury had expired, that whereas Bobb has always publicly claimed to have nothing to do with efforts to overturn Georgia's election (she focused on Arizona, Nevada, and, in her J6C interview she belatedly admitted, Michigan), she revealed much later in the interview that she had first met Mark Meadows when she sat in on Trump's call to Brad Raffensperger.

Back in March, ABC reported that Fani Willis wanted to interview Christina Bobb in the probe of Trump's attempt to overturn Georgia election results.Smart commentators on that investigation, like Lawfare's Anna Bower, suggested that Willis' team likely had discovered, as they worked their way through the January 6 Committee transcripts released after Willis' grand jury had expired, that whereas Bobb has always publicly claimed to have nothing to do with efforts to overturn Georgia's election (she focused on Arizona, Nevada, and, in her J6C interview she belatedly admitted, Michigan), she revealed much later in the interview that she had first met Mark Meadows when she sat in on Trump's call to Brad Raffensperger.

Dan Froomkin says reporters should call Jack Teixeira's release of highly classified documents "theft," not a leak, distinguishing "public-spirited" leakers from "self-serving ... thieves."Spencer Ackerman muses that Teixeira, "leaked for that most ineffable thing, something nonmaterial but nevertheless hyper-real in the logic of the poster, and particularly the right-wing-chud poster: clout."

WASHINGTON When Representative Jim Jordan made his appeal to donors at a recent fund-raiser for the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, he pointed to his clash with Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan prosecutor who has criminally charged former President Donald J. Trump, as the kind of pursuit their money was helping support.

April 3, 2023
On March 29, after weeks of delays and uncertainty, Twitter's Developer team announced new pricing tiers for access to the Twitter API that will devastate public interest research.Over the past decade, researchers across the world have relied on Twitter's API to study the impact of social media on democracy, the role of social media in strengthening public health, how social media has been used to amplify marginalized voices, and much more.

As you've no doubt heard, #MattyDickPics Taibbi went on Mehdi Hasan's show yesterday and got called out for his false claims."Well, that, then, is an error."-@mtaibbi, confronted with previously unacknowledged mistakes in his Twitter Files reporting, by @mehdirhasan.Watch the full conversation later tonight: https://t.co/WI2GDlekQP

I'm going to share something I've been laughing to myself about for months, since before I wrote this post on how the financial aspect of Jack Smith's investigation would be a way to break through the otherwise formidable wall of lawyer-witnesses between investigators and Trump's crimes.There's a reason why the fundraising aspect of Trump's Big Lie has been accessible to investigators, even beyond the fact that there's boatloads of financial evidence available with a subpoena.

It's something like 34 paragraphs deep into this WaPo report on how a bunch of documents got shared on a Discord server named "Thug Shaker" before WaPo reveals there was another name for the specific room in which someone who works on a military base shared classified information: bear-vs-pig, an allusion to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The WaPo, with Devlin Barrett as lead byline and Mar-a-Lago Trump-whisperer Josh Dawsey next, has a report describing either new evidence or more evidence of obstruction in the stolen documents case.Some of it, such as that investigators "now suspect that boxes including classified material were moved from Mar-a-Lago storage area after the subpoena was served," is not new - not to investigators and not to the public.