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Jay Shackford

FINALLY, THE TRUMP CASE WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR

But, with 2024 looming, is it already too late?

By Susan B. Glasser/The New Yorker 

July 20, 2023

One word came to mind when I heard the news this week that Donald Trump had received a target letter from the Justice Department special prosecutor Jack Smith, indicating that an indictment is likely of the former President on charges connected with his effort to overturn the 2020 election and remain in power: Finally. This, in the end, is the heart of the matter, a long-delayed reckoning with an offense against the constitutional system so great that it is without historic precedent—no President before Trump ever did such a thing.

Trump received the target letter on Sunday, and revealed it in one of his trademark hysterical social-media posts on Tuesday: “HORRIFYING NEWS!” Over the next couple of days, there were still more legal setbacks. In Florida, a Trump-appointed federal judge overseeing Smith’s other criminal case against the former President—for illegally holding on to top-secret documents—appeared deeply skeptical of Trump’s argument that she should delay a trial indefinitely since he is running for President. In Georgia, the state’s Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s motion to block the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, from prosecuting him for his efforts to pressure officials to overturn his 2020 defeat in the state; criminal charges could result in the coming weeks. In New York, meanwhile, a judge said that Trump could not switch the venue of his Manhattan criminal trial for allegedly paying hush money to silence a former porn star with whom he had an affair. Trump is also facing two more civil lawsuits in New York, both of which could go to trial next year. America’s new political reality, in short, is: Donald Trump, Full-Time Defendant.

And yet Republicans remain in such thrall to their Orange Jesus—the honorific that Party apostate Liz Cheney so memorably quoted one of his acolytes calling him during last summer’s January 6th hearings—that, with each new legal woe, his prospects of winning the 2024 G.O.P. nomination keep going up. Few if any of these cases are likely to be fully resolved before the start of next year’s Republican primaries. Trump’s campaign is now explicitly a race not just to retake the Oval Office but to save himself from criminal conviction. This convergence of campaign and courtroom is, as the former Republican National Committee counsel Benjamin Ginsberg said this week, “a toxic mix unprecedented in the American experiment.” Something’s gotta give.

The apparently impending Smith indictment is not like all the other cases. In theory, it will force the question that has cursed the country since the evening of November 3, 2020, when Trump chose to claim victory in an election he had lost: What to do about a President who will do anything to stay in power, even unleash a violent mob of his supporters on the U.S. Capitol? Isn’t that illegal? How can it not be?

For two and a half years, the failure to answer Trump’s brazen acts with a decisive rebuke has only empowered the former President, enabling him to regain political strength within his party and force its nominal leaders to once again acknowledge his hold over their voters. Consider Mitch McConnell, who is the closest thing the current G.O.P. leadership has to an avowed enemy of the ex-President. Minutes after Trump was acquitted by the Senate in his second impeachment trial, he gave a blistering speech about the ex-President’s culpability in the events of January 6th. McConnell had not voted for conviction but, he insisted, only because of his objection to the process of impeaching a President who was no longer in office. “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell said. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.” The Senate Republican leader all but called for the Justice Department to do what his Senate would not. “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office,” McConnell said. “Didn’t get away with anything. Yet.”

But this week, when liability at last seemed imminent, McConnell said nothing at all. “I’m not going to comment on the various candidates for the Presidency,” he lamely told reporters. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy was even worse. In 2021, he had directly blamed Trump for the attack on the Capitol. “Nobody can defend that, and nobody should defend it,” he said. This week, though, he attacked the Justice Department for indicting Trump in a case that has not been filed yet. It was, he said, an effort to “weaponize government to go after their No. 1 opponent.” According to Politico, the Speaker promised Trump that he would hold a House vote to “expunge” the two House impeachments against him—never mind that no one even knows whether such a thing is constitutionally possible. “I don’t see how he could be found criminally responsible,” McCarthy said. “What criminal activity did he do? He told people to be peaceful.”

Republicans used to revel every four years in their self-proclaimed status as the party of “law and order.” Now they follow Trump into attacks on federal prosecutors, on the Justice Department, on the F.B.I. It’s anyone’s guess how far down this road McCarthy may be willing to go, as the former President combines his legal defense with a political campaign of vengeance, retribution, and personal survival. It was surreal to see pictures of the Speaker as Joe Biden’s guest at the annual White House congressional picnic this week, grinning and chomping on an ice-cream bar, even as he seemed all too willing to light the place on fire if that’s what his restive pro-Trump majority were to demand.

The prospect of Trump returning to the White House is an existential one for American democracy, a political test from which there is no escaping. If this wasn’t clear before, it must be now. A reëlected Trump would be a President subject to no constraints at all—having twice dodged congressional impeachment, and either beaten back the Justice Department and the courts or delayed so long that he could seek to use his regained executive powers to nullify the cases against him. Trump, in his ever-more-apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding his effort to retake the White House, has taken to calling his 2024 race “the final battle.” I have increasingly come to believe that he is correct.

Given the stakes, there’s much to anticipate about what Smith’s latest case against Trump might look like. According to the Times, his target letter indicated that Trump could be prosecuted under three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government, obstruction of an official proceeding, and even a law enacted after the Civil War to give federal agents a means of prosecuting Southern white supremacists, including Ku Klux Klan members who resorted to terrorism to prevent newly freed Blacks from voting.

But knowing what he will be charged with does not mean there is nothing left to learn about this unprecedented plot against America. For that, we must wait for the indictment: Will there be new details showing that it was the President himself who orchestrated the conspiracy to overturn election results in battleground states? New examples of Trump pressuring officials or government agencies? Damning evidence in his own words that he knew he had lost the election and proceeded anyway? Will there be a turncoat—Mark Meadows, perhaps?—to provide revelations from inside Trump’s fevered quest to stay in office after the voters had spoken? I hope and expect so after more than two and a half years of waiting. And yet somehow those questions still seem subordinate to the one that the indictment will not and cannot answer: Did it come too late? ♦︎

Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer, is the co-author of “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.” Her column on life in Washington appears weekly on newyorker.com.

Jack Mallory

Our generation!

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Stephen Hatchett

Our generation!  I just wish I'd  been awake enough at the time to recognize those two men for who they really were.   Maybe that's what it means to be ahead of one's time -- lesser souls like yours truly don't see your value-- yet.  Then-- i did not like Dylan's voice, couldn't really get it enough to agree with what he was saying.  Now, a book of Dylan's poetry is close at hand.

I really did not get why Clay became Ali -- then.   Now-- I just hope I'll have the courage he had if I'm ever challenged to need it.  And not just his  courage, but his values1

Jack Mallory

Ditto, Steve--I should have listened to Mohamed Ali rather than my recruiting sergeant! And Bob D rather than LBJ!
 

Jay Shackford

Trump Political Update

Donald Trump is just a few indictments away from wrapping up the GOP presidential nomination, according to Andy Borowitz in his New Yorker column. 

Jack Mallory

For those of us who like to have the complicated reduced to the reasonably simple, Heather Cox Richardson is a great resource:

“Today a grand jury in Washington, D.C, indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor. 

“The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted and certified by the government; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.” 

“Each of these conspiracies,” the indictment reads, “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.” “This federal government function…is foundational to the United States’ democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.” 

“As Rachel Weiner pointed out in the Washington Post, “conspiracies don’t need to be successful to be criminal, and perpetrators can be held responsible if they join the conspiracy at any stage.”

“The indictment referred to six co-conspirators without identifying them by name, but the details included about them suggest that Co-Conspirator 1 is Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; Co-Conspirator 2 is lawyer John Eastman, who came up with the plan for then–vice president Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role of counting the electoral votes to throw the election to Trump; Co-Conspirator 3 is Trump lawyer Sidney Powell; Co-Conspirator 4 is Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer whom Trump tried to push into the role of attorney general so he could lie that there had been election fraud; Co-Conspirator 5 appears to be Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump attorney behind the idea of the false electors. 

“The identity of Co-Conspirator 6, a political consultant, is unclear.

On The Reid Out tonight, law professor Neal Katyal suggested that the six were not indicted because the Justice Department “doesn’t want the trial of the other six to be bundled up with this and slow this down.” Los Angeles Times senior legal affairs columnist Harry Litman concluded that the absence of Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, from the indictment indicates he’s cooperating with the Department of Justice. Meadows had a ringside seat to the last days of the Trump administration.

“The indictment is what’s known as a “speaking indictment,” one that explains the alleged crimes to the public. It undercuts Trump loyalists’ insistence that the Department of Justice is trying to criminalize Trump’s free speech by laying out that Trump did indeed have a right to challenge the election—which he did, and lost. He also had a first-amendment right to lie about the election.  

“What he did not have was a right to use “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”  

“The indictment begins by settling out that Trump “lost the 2020 presidential election” but that “despite having lost, [Trump] was determined to remain in power.” So he lied that he had actually won. “These claims were false, and [Trump] knew they were false.” More than 15 pages of the 45-page indictment establish that Trump knew the allegations he was making about election fraud were lies. 

“In one memorable December exchange, a senior campaign advisor wrote in an email, “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0–32 on our cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy sh*t beamed down from the mothership.”

“The Trump team used lies about the election to justify organizing fraudulent slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Allegedly with the help of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, they attempted to have the legitimate electors that accurately reflected the voters’ choice of Biden replaced with fraudulent ones that claimed Trump had won in their states, first by convincing state legislators they had the power to make the switch, and then by convincing Vice President Mike Pence he could choose the Trump electors. 

“When Pence would not fraudulently alter the election results, Trump whipped up the crowd he had gathered in Washington, D.C., against Pence and then, according to the indictment, “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” to overturn the election results. “As violence ensued,” the indictment reads, Trump and his co-conspirators “explained the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.” On the evening of January 6, 2021, the indictment alleges, Trump and Co-Conspirator 1 called seven senators and one representative and asked them to delay the certification of Biden’s election. 

“While they were doing so, White House counsel Pat Cipollone called Trump “to ask him to withdraw any objections and allow the certification. The Defendant refused.” Just before midnight, Co-Conspirator 2 emailed Pence’s lawyer, once again begging the vice president to “violate the law and seek further delay of the certification.” 

“While Trump loyalists are trying to spin the indictment as the weaponization of the Department of Justice against Trump, legal analyst George Conway noted on CNN tonight: "All the evidence comes from Republicans. If you go through this indictment and you annotate the paragraphs to figure out who are the witnesses the [special counsel] would use to prove particular points, they're all Republicans. Those are the people who were having the discussions, telling [Trump], 'You lost.'” 

“Trump will be arraigned at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 3. The case of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump has been randomly assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed 95–0 in the Senate. Chutkan has presided over dozens of cases concerning the defendants who participated in the events of January 6, 2021, and has been vocal during sentencing about the stakes of that event. In December 2021 she said: “It has to be made clear that trying to stop the peaceful transition of power, assaulting law enforcement, is going to be met with certain punishment.”

“The attack on our nation’s capital on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” Special Counsel Jack Smith said in his statement about the indictment.

“The men and women of law enforcement who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6 are heroes. They’re patriots, and they are the very best of us. They did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it. They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people. They defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States.”

“The prosecution of former president Trump for trying to destroy those institutions and principles, including our right to consent to the government under which we live—a right the Founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence—should deter others from trying to do the same. Moreover, it will defend the rights of the victims—those who gave their lives as well as all of us whose votes were attacked—by establishing the truth in place of lies. That realistic view should enable us to recommit to the principles on which we want our nation to rest.

“Such a prosecution will reaffirm the institutions of democracy. Donald Trump tried to destroy “the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured…by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.” Such an effort must be addressed, and doing it within the parameters of our legal system should reestablish the very institutions Trump loyalists are trying to undermine.

“As former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said this evening: “Like every criminal defendant, the former President is innocent until proven guilty…. The charges…must play out through the legal process, peacefully and without any outside interference…. As this case proceeds through the courts, justice must be done according to the facts and the law.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-1-2023?utm_medium=email

Jay Shackford

(Editors note: Below is the introduction and the first two pages of the 45-page federal grand jury indictment against Donald J. Trump released yesterday by Special Counsel Jack Smith.  It’s well worth reading the entire 45-page, double-spaced indictment that relies almost entirely on testimony, recordings and documents supplied by Trump-appointed Republican officials of his Administration and people who voted for and wanted Trump to win the election. It’s an historic document — one that should be passed on to future generations. The indictment is widely available on the Internet.) 

Introduction to Indictment of Donald J. Trump

1. The Defendant, Donald J. Trump, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020.  The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election. 
2. Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.  So for more than two months following the election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.  These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.  
3. The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.  He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures.  Indeed, in many cases, the Defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results.  His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts audits or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.  
4. Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.  In so doing, the Defendant perpetrated three criminal conspiracies: 

    a. A conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 371.

    b. A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified (“the certification proceeding”), in violation of 18 U.S.C. 241.

    c. A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 241. 

Each of these conspiracies — which built on the widespread mistrust of the Defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud — targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the the results of the presidential election (“the federal government function”). 

Jay Shackford

The Trump Indictment and the Reckoning Ahead

With the former President still far ahead of the rest of the Republican field, the American electorate is likely headed for a crucial test.

By 

August 1, 2023

By David Remmick/The New Yorker

To read the stark criminal indictment, returned by a federal grand jury on Tuesday, charging Donald Trump with conspiring to steal the 2020 Presidential election is to realize more deeply than before that the country is headed for a great reckoning—in the courts and at the ballot box. It suggests a question that cannot be escaped: Will the American electorate show itself capable of overlooking a conspiracy to undermine democratic rule and return the chief conspirator to power?

The third and latest indictment against Trump sets out four charges and makes the case against him in the plainest terms. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” the introduction to the forty-five-page document reads—and where have you seen a more succinct summary of criminal intent?

Or take the opening lines to Count One, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States: “From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government.”

This indictment is foremost a legal document, not a literary one, but one cannot help thinking that whoever drafted this paragraph and many others like it hoped that its cadences—consonant, rhythmic, startling—would help underline the grave historical stakes. Trump and his co-conspirators retailed “prolific lies” in the cause of denying Joe Biden the Presidency, the indictment insists; they claimed, among other things, that “large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for the Defendant to votes for Biden.” Trump’s co-conspirators are unnamed but are, according to the Washington Post, likely to include the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, the attorney John Eastman, the former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, the former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, and the appellate attorney Kenneth Chesebro.

The indictment is a powerful summation of much that we have learned before, but who, in fact, will read it? What minds will it alter? What difference will it make?

The indictment comes just days after a poll conducted by the Times and Siena College showed that the former President is so far ahead of Ron DeSantis and the rest of the Republican field that it is clear that a large portion of the electorate has decided that multiple criminal indictments current and forthcoming—the 2020 election fraud; the hush-money sex-scandal case, in Manhattan; the election-fraud case, in Georgia; the classified-documents case in Florida—will not dissuade them from voting for Trump. The former President continues to attract millions of supporters who have such antipathy for Biden, for the Democrats, for the “corporate media,” for academia, for all the institutions they see as woke and hostile to their interests, that they interpret Trump’s deviance as defiance, his lies as truthtelling, his fury as their fury. DeSantis has proved a robotic, even pathetic campaigner; his unwillingness to attack Trump with any directness or conviction has not so much impressed right-wing voters as it has further convinced them that he is a humorless pill, a pallid imitation. Trump is their leader and, if need be, in the end, their martyr. As Nate Cohn put it in his analysis of the Times’ poll, “The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.”

Trump’s reaction to the latest indictment closely resembles his reaction to previous indictments and impeachments. It’s a page from “1984.” In a statement on Truth Social, he compared the prosecutors’ case against him to “Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.” Predicting that justice and truth would, in the end, be served, his campaign’s statement went on to say, “The un-American witch hunts will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House so he can save our Country from the abuse, incompetence, and corruption that is running through the veins of our Country at levels never seen before.”

Soon enough, there will be a criminal indictment against Trump from Georgia. Four criminal indictments—each one more serious and more convincing than the last. It is hard to calculate the logistics, the legal fees, the courtroom antics.

And yet it still seems quite possible that Trump will be elected President for a second time. In another story in the Times about its poll, a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Phoenix, a Republican in his early forties named John Wittman, said, “Donald Trump is not a Republican, he’s a criminal.” But Wittman’s sense of discernment is anything but dominant. So far, tens of millions of Americans are willing to overlook not only the multiple criminal indictments of Donald Trump but also his lethal mismanagement of covid-19; his inhumane handling of children at the border; his myriad statements of bigotry and misogyny; his assaults on the free press and the rule of law; his indifference to national security and the climate emergency; his affection for autocrats around the world; his impeachments; his many schemes to enrich his family. According to the Times poll, Biden and Trump are tied in a hypothetical rematch at forty-three per cent. Sooner or later, a great reckoning is coming. ♦

Jack Mallory

Maybe we should have a Favorite Lines from the Indictment theme?

Mine, top of p. 14, “Senior (Trump) Campaign Advisor” commenting on Giuliani's voter fraud allegations: 

“. . . it's all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mother ship.”

**********
 

Seen on or from the water recently:

Loon letting me know I'm a little too close. 
 

Deb spotted this 3-4' long Northern Water Snake catching a little sun at lake's edge. 

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Jay Shackford

“I have a Trump-hating judge, with a Trump-hating wife and family”

By Dead-Center Shacks

It’s time to think about impounding Donald Trump’s airplane, equipping him with an ankle bracelet, confining him to his home in Mar-a-Lago and taking away his passport — all on grounds that the three-time indicted, twice impeached disgraced ex-President is not only a flight risk but continues to act dangerously with total disregard for the rule of law and basic human decency. 

Consider his rants in speeches and on Truth Social over the past week:

   ✴“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

    ✴ Trump has repeatedly described Special Counsel Jack Smith as a “radical left lunatic,” a “deranged psycho” and said he “looks like a crackhead.”

    ✴ Trump has called Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg, who is handling the case against the Trump business organization, “an animal” and a “criminal”…”right out of the old Soviet Union,” slurred the District Attorney in Georgia Fani Willis as “a racist” who “is doing everything in her power to indict me,” and New York’s Attorney General Letitia James as “a racist in reverse.”

    ✴ In his speech last Tuesday in Mar-a-Lago, Trump played the victim card.  “I have a Trump-hating judge, with a Trump-hating wife and family,” Trump said, adding that the judge’s daughter worked for Vice President Kamala Harris and “now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign, and a lot of it.”

   ✴If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump  even raised the specter of a public execution. “They are looking at me through the Espionage Act of 1917, where the penalty is death.” 

Well, after insulting and threatening just about everyone in all these historic cases, it will all come to a head this afternoon at 5 pm EST when the key judge in the Trump saga — U.,S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan — rules on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request for the federal judge to issue a “protective order” in order to protect evidence turned over to Trump’s defense team during the discovery process and to get Trump to refrain from talking with potential witnesses, tampering with jurors or using flame-throwing and threatening remarks aimed at witnesses and others involved in the prosecution of the case.  

If I were Trump, I wouldn’t mess around with Judge Tanya Chutkan.  She’s a tough cookie who doesn’t scare easily.  She has prosecuted dozens of cases in the January 6th insurrection and has a reputation for handing down the toughest sentences.  

“Presidents are not kings, and the plaintiff is not President,” she said recently. 

She was appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed in the Senate by a 95-0 vote (yes, even Lindsey Graham voted for her).  

At a December 2021 sentencing hearing, she looked ahead to the 2024 election, saying “every day we are hearing about reports of anti-democratic factions, people plotting potential violence in 2024.”

“It has to be made clear,” she added, “that trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power and assaulting law enforcement, is going to be met with certain punishment.”

Moreover, it is clear that Trump has already violated a recent warning handed down by New York Judge Manuel Merchan, who is handling he Stormy Daniels hush money case.   During Trump’s arraignment in that case,  Merchan told Trump and his lawyers to “refrain from making comments or engaging in conduct that has the potential to incite violence, create civil unrest or jeopardize the safety or well-being of any individuals.”

Turn on your TVs at 5 pm to see what happens.  

John Smeby

Just finished the summer season playing Senior Softball in The Villages, Florida, my seventeenth YEAR with three seasons of play a year (Winter, Summer and Fall). This was the warmest (HOT!!) summer season so far. Or maybe i am getting older and cannot adapt to the weather during the summer. I am in the back row, the right most player. 

Jack Mallory

Good on ya', John--we can't get out of life alive, but we've gotta live til we die!

Deb missed the shot of me rocketing off the top of that mighty cataract. 

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Clifford Elgin

Jay, thanks for the great information and for keeping us up to date on a lot of the details we don't see in the middle of the country.

Also, I have pictures I'd like to share but they were taken over many years with different cameras so some are on digital and a lot were on film.  I could email them is I had email addresses or, if someone has a suggestion on how to do it, I'll try to send them another way.

Hope all is welll with all of  you,

Kip

Jay Shackford

OPINION

MAUREEN DOWD

Where’s the 

Vicuña Outrage?

Three men walk into a courtroom, as 

August heats up.

Aug. 12, 2023, 7:00 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — For a quiet summer Friday, there was quite a cacophony. Donald Trump crashing around. Clarence Thomas cashing in. Hunter Biden spinning out.

News about these men rocked the capital. Yet there is something inevitable, even ancient, about the chaos enveloping them. Fatal flaws. Mythic obsessions. Greed. Revenge. Daddy issues. Maybe a touch of Cain and Abel.

It’s all there, part of a murky cloud reaching from the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Court House to the Supreme Court to the Justice Department to the White House.

On Thursday, ProPublica dropped a scalding piece about the abominable behavior of Clarence Thomas, following up on its revelations about Harlan Crow paying for Thomas’s luxury trips, his mother’s house in Georgia and private school tuition for his grandnephew. This one is headlined: “The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel.”

In the old days, there was shame attached to selling your office. There was a single word that encapsulated such an outrage: vicuña. President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, accepted a vicuña coat from a Boston textile manufacturer doing business with the federal government. He lost his job and scarred his reputation.

Now Thomas sneers at the law by failing to disclose gifts from billionaires eager to gain influence. (The gifts also benefited his wife, Ginni Thomas, who tried to help Trump overthrow the government.)

ProPublica told the ka-ching: “At least 38 destination vacations … 26 private jet flights … a dozen V.I.P. passes to professional and college sporting events … two stays at luxury resorts … and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.”

Thomas is abiding by the adage that living well is the best revenge. He never got over the humiliation of the Anita Hill hearings, even though his allies smeared Hill as he lied his way to Senate confirmation. (Thanks, Joe Biden!) He came out of it feeling angry and vindictive. He got on the court, muscling past questions about his legal abilities and ethical compass by pushing the story that he was a guy who worked his way up from poverty.

The justice polished that just-folks image over the years by going on R.V. vacations with his wife to escape the “meanness” of Washington. But as The Times reported last weekend, the $267,230 Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon R.V., which Thomas told friends he had scrimped and saved to afford, was actually underwritten by Anthony Welters, a friend who made a bundle in health care.

Thomas is ruining the court’s image and, with the help of other uber-conservatives, he’s undoing our social constructs, causing many Americans to rebel.

At a hearing Friday, the federal judge overseeing the case against Trump for conspiring to purloin Biden’s election victory made a brisk start. “The fact that he is running a political campaign has to yield to the administration of justice,” Judge Tanya Chutkan informed Trump’s lawyers. “And if that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say in a political speech, that is just how it’s going to have to be.”

This will be tough for Trump because, as David Axelrod says, “the sense that he is being tried for political reasons is the essence of his campaign.”

The judge warned Trump’s lawyers, “To the extent your client wants to make statements on the internet, they have to always yield to witness security and witness safety,” adding, “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”

Trump was warped by a father who told him, You’re either a killer or a loser. He couldn’t tolerate losing in 2020 so he concocted a scheme to become a killer — of democracy.

Trump reminds me of fairy-tale figures — like Midas or the ballerina in “The Red Shoes,” a movie drawn from a fairy tale — who crave something so badly, they follow it down a destructive path. Trump refused to let go of the spotlight. He wanted all the attention and now it’s going to crush him.

Like Thomas, Trump is driven by revenge. We shouldn’t hand power to people whose main motive is doing bad stuff to other people.

A few blocks from Judge Chutkan’s courthouse, Merrick Garland emerged Friday with an announcement that surprised the White House — he was elevating the Hunter Biden prosecutor to a special counsel.

This ratchets up the White House family drama. Beau was the ballast for the Bidens. Now he is his father’s hero, which is bound to make the troubled Hunter feel like a zero.

Joe Biden should have reined in Hunter when he began living off his dad’s positions and connections. But the president, who lost two kids and nearly lost this one, is clearly paralyzed when it comes to Hunter.

With Hunter likely going on trial, and the 2024 race underway, it will be harder for the president to argue that Trump is the one with all the legal and ethical albatrosses.

Hunter is staining his father’s campaign, as Thomas is smearing the Roberts court, as Trump is dragging down the G.O.P.

Jay Shackford

Cliff -- Thanks for the kind words.  On the photo issue, just take a picture on your iPhone of the picture you want to circulate, and then post it on the forum. Bests....Jay 

Jay Shackford

Putin and Xi are the Laurel and Hardy of statesmen -- but it's no laughing matter.  By Simon Tisdall/The Guardian

Great summary of what's going on politically with Putin and Xi.  For once, I can send a link rather than copy and paste.  https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/aug/13/putin-and-xi-are-the-laurel-and-hardy-of-statesmen-but-its-no-laughing-matter?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Helen Lambie (Goldstein)

An addendum to Jay's piece about the vicuna coat, which unlike the millions used to bribe Thomas, "...some said was worth $700, Adams said it was manufactured at one of Goldfine’s (the Boston textile manufacturer) mills at a cost of about $69." (LA Times) Sherman Adams was a good friend of my father's (after working on Eisenhower's campaign, he asked my father to join the White House Staff, which he did.) Adams ran the West Wing. If anyone wanted to see Eisenhower you had to get Adams'  approval. This made Nixon furious, and the word among the staff when the vicuna scandal came out, was that it was a set up by Nixon so he could have better access to Ike. Adams was generally liked by staff, Nixon not so much. Of course this all happened when I was 11-12 years old, but it is what I remember hearing at the time and for many years after.

Jack Mallory

Helen and Joanie, re: Thomas--

But on a less sleazy note:

Still life on the Suncook River. 
 

Loon on Willard Pond.

I should have knocked. 

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Helen, thanks for that information!!!! and Jack, your less sleezy notes are wonderful...You could be working for National Geographic but I think you enjoy capturing these photos without work pressure. They are amazing. Love your, caption. You should have knocked. Love, Joanie

Jay Shackford

Super post, Helen. So your dad worked in the West Wing of the White House during Ike’s presidency and for his chief of staff, Sherman Adams.  Even being a life-long Democrat, I’m impressed.  I’m also impressed that you remember the details of Adams’ scandal, which looks like child’s play compared to what’s going on today — i.e., Jared Kushner’s $2 billion deal to manage the the Saudi wealth fund that he wrapped up just hours before landing at Andrew’s Air Base on the afternoon of January 6th when Trump’s storm troopers were rampaging the U.S. Capitol.  We need more colorful and interesting history tidbits like this on the forum.  Everyone has something to share. 

Speaking of famous BCC grads, let me mention a few:

• Deane Beman, a two-time amateur golf champion who later became commissioner of the Professional  Golf Association (PGA) from 1974 to 1994, graduated from BCC in 1956 or 1957.   One of his last accomplishments was setting in motion the building of the stadium PGA Golf Course (Avenal) in Potomac right next to the classic Congressional courses.  Interestingly, Bruce Kessler, who also graduated from BCC in the late1950s and is the older brother of my good friend Jim Kessler (also a 1964 BCC grad), beat Deane in the Washington metro golf championship.   Jim, by the way, is still living in Fairfax County, VA not too far from where I live and he has a second home in Bethany Beach.  He’s the only high school friend I see on a regular basis.  He’s also a very good golfer, but like me, he’s lost a lot of distance on his drives over the years. But he’s still playing tennis, which I gave up years ago.  Impressive!

• Dick Cass, who played with me, Dean Schovounus (sp?), Johnny Adams and a few other BCC grads, on the Sportsmen baseball team when we were in 6th and 7th grades, was President and CEO of the Baltimore Ravens for nearly two decades, 2004 to 2022.   Dick would have graduated from BCC in our ’64 class but he went to Mercerburg Academy (a prep school in Pennsylvania).  His father was an officer in the Coast Guard who was transferred to San Diego — so rather than having Dick move several times during his junior and senior high school years — he sent him to prep school. Not a bad move, with Dick moving on to Princeton and then Yale Law School. At a very early age, you could tell that Dick was really smart as well as being a good athlete. Shortly, after passing his bar, he became an attorney for the NFL in New York and later helped Jerry Jones buy the Dallas Cowboys before being recruited as president for the Baltimore Ravens in 2004.   

• Mike Trainer — who graduated in 1959 and past away in 2015 — was the business manager for welterweight boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard.  If you don’t know anything about pro boxing, you might remember the classic Coke commercials from the late 1970s when Sugar Ray’s six year old son runs into “Mean” Joe Greene of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the runway to Three Rivers Stadium.  Mike set that up.  
• In any event, Mike, who played football and baseball at BCC, got his law degree from the University of Maryland and became an all-purpose attorney with an office in Silver Spring.  While in high school or college, Mike worked one summer at the Bethesda Rec Center in Somerset where Dean, Johnny, Dick and I used to hang out during the day before our Sportsmen games in the evening.   Mike was very competitive — he set up baseball games with other recreational  centers in the area.   
• In any event, Mike became Sugar Ray’s business manager and adviser  after Sugar Ray won his Olympic gold metal in  boxing and turned pro.  By picking Mike, Sugar Ray avoided the mobsters who owned most of the pro boxers at that time and, because of his good management, Sugar Ray was able to hold onto and invest most of his boxing earnings under Mike’s watchful eye.  Consequently, Sugar Ray is a very rich guy. During my younger years when I would visit Las Vegas, I found it very sad seeing Joe Louis work as a “greeter” at Caesars Palace.   
• As a sidebar, I remember running into Dean Schovounus (who later coached the baseball team at Bullis Prep for decades) shagging balls being hit in the outfield during practice with Trainer (we collided) and I dislocated my left shoulder.  It popped back into place right away but Mike had me and Dean walked over to Suburban Hospital more than a mile away.  At Suburban ER, they took an X-ray, put my arm in a sling and sent me on my way with a bill to give to my mother.  No insurance cards back in those days.  They just treated you because you were hurt.  Imagine that!
• One more story on Mike Trainer.  To cover Sugar Ray’s training costs for his first pro fight, Mike raised $25,000 from 24 of his Bethesda friends — including as I recall the late Dr. Butch MacCartee, Ricky Sullivan (BCC’62),  Steve Smith ’63 and the late Mike Windsor (class of ’64).  I had just moved back to Washington and was flat broke.  Otherwise, I would have put some money in the Sugar Ray training pot. After winning the fight, Sugar Ray paid back all the Bethesda boys with 8% interest and ran a full page ad in the Washington Post listing each one by name and thanking them.  First class guys — both Mike and Sugar Ray.  
  •  
• Dr. Butch MacCartee, who also graduated from BCC in 1959 along with Mike Trainer, followed in his father’s footsteps and became orthopedic surgeon after graduating from Duke and Duke Medical School.  Butch played football at Duke as well as BCC.  He was the official doctor of the Washington Bullets (now the Wizards) and the Washington Capitals for years.  I used to see him occasionally at the Caps games when I had access to NAHB’s season tickets.  Butch was a first-rate doctor and a great guy.  He passed away in 2010.  

• Ricky Sullivan (class of 1962) was one of the partners of a major home building company  called  Porten and Sullivan in the 1970s and 1980s.  In 1986, he and his partner sold Porten and Sullivan to a major builder, making millions in the process, signing a no compete contract and staying on for several years running the firm. In 1989, he broke away and started Classic Community Corp, which is a smaller, more flexible building company.  Over his 45 years in the business, Ricky has built more than 7,500 homes and developed and sold 12,000 lots — making him one of the biggest home builders in the area. A graduate of University of Maryland, Ricky got his start in the building business as an accounting executive for U.S. Home, which at the time was the biggest home builder in the country.  Ricky is pretty much retired these days, but he’s still playing the ponies and living at his homes in Potomac and Florida.  

Jack Mallory

Morning!

The wheels of Justice, (or the mill of god, depending on which version you're quoting) grind slowly but exceedingly fine. Attributed all over the place, but at least sometimes true. 
 

The Fulton County grand jury has found that there is probable cause to believe that 19 individuals were involved in 41 criminal counts in 8 ways of obstructing the elections in Georgia. These include lying to the state legislature and state officials, soliciting federal officials, breaching voting machines, creating fake electors, harassing election workers, and engaging in a cover-up. The indictment details 161 separate actions taken to accomplish this conspiracy. (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/08/15/us/trump-indictment-georgia-election?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) 

Fine indeed. May the wheels continue to turn, grinding out a fair trial for the accused and justice for us all.