Peter Thiel Dreams of Empire, Hanna Barakat + AIxDESIGN & Archival Images of AI / via Dave Karpf, Tech Policy Press, January 2025.
I guess everybody's heard about the weird little present eight Republican
senator—Tommy Tuberville (Alabama), Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), Josh Hawley (Missouri) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska)—gave or attempted to give themselves in the continuing resolution that ended the
government shutdown last week, inviting them to sue the government for half a
million dollars apiece for, I guess, insulting them by suggesting their behavior was suspicious, when the FBI seized their
phone records for January 4 to 7 2021, in what was briefly known as the Arctic Frost investigation in 2023.
Or as Josh Hawley said, “Yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone … tapped Lindsey Graham’s phone, tapped Marsha Blackburn’s phone, tapped five other phones of United States senators,” except of course that wasn't true in any way—it was just the metadata for the four days, no wiretaps. And
Biden’s Stasi who claimed to be saving ‘our sacred democracy’ in fact worked overtime to destroy it — all for power. They spied on Catholic churches, prosecuted pro-lifers, deployed the FBI against parents at school board meetings — and tried to tap the phones of their political enemies. Including mine," Hawley wrote on X.
"This is an abuse of power beyond Watergate, beyond J. Edgar Hoover, one that directly strikes at the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment."
Obviously none of that was true either. "Biden's Stasi" is the agency that named special prosecutors to investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings and the classified documents retained in Biden's home from his time as vice president, as also Mike Pence's, though it also did issue a memo, rescinded shortly afterwards, expressing concern about hypertraditionalist Latin Mass enthusiasts, after investigating a
suspect [who] expressed neo-Nazi rhetoric and described himself as a
"Catholic clerical fascist." The FBI said he wrote in a letter to a family member that he
needed to "build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry" in order to "make total war
against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who
control it."
Call me paranoid, but I'm with the FBI on that; I don't get a good feeling off people who call themselves "Catholic clerical fascists" either.
Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, enthroned, with the Hand Sanitizer
of State. Actually, that's an illusion, he was walking into the US
Capitol when this was taken, during Trump's second impeachment in
January 2021. Photo by
Andrew Harnik/AFP
via Getty Images, as seen at CBS News.
Miller, P4 in the Jack Smith cast of witnesses (I'm reading his wonderfully vivid brief on the January 6 case and the theory that the president is immune from prosecution if he stages a coup in the course of performing his official duties), was among those who advised
the president that the 2020 election had not in fact been stolen by Democrats,
that there were not more than 10,000 votes from dead people in Georgia's
returns but more like 12 total, which "could not be outcome-determinative" as
Smith dryly points out, and that the video of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss
during the tabulation of ballots at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta did not
show them pulling ballots from suitcases under the tables and counting them
multiple times or "quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB
ports [presumably containing fraudulent vote counts] as if they are vials of
heroine or cocaine" as Giuliani put it in testimony before the Government
Affairs Committee of the Georgia House of Representatives.
Miller even got a little tetchy about it (p. 25):
(P26 is apparently the Georgia attorney general Christopher Carr, whom Trump
had called on December 8, asking him not to discourage the other state AGs
from joining in the lawsuit pressed by Texas's Ken Paxton against Pennsylvania
and other states including Georgia, to stop them from certifying their
elections.)
Following the reporting on the arguments in the Supreme Court on behalf of
Joseph Fischer, a cop from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, who had already
started driving home from Trump's Stop the Steal rally on 1/6/20 when he heard
on the radio about the crowd gathered around the Capitol and turned his car
around to join the fracas, and made it as far as the East Rotunda where he
turned on his phone's video recorder, yelled "Charge!" and went at a group of
Capitol police who pepper-sprayed him as he slid to his ass on the slippery
floor and into their line, and then hustled him back out of the building.
This behavior, while plainly illegal, did not do a lot of harm: it was already
3:24, well after the congressmembers had fled, and he was only there for about
four minutes. How he became one of the 300-odd January 6 defendants, including
former President Trump, to be charged with a felony count of "obstruction of
an official proceeding" is something else, the insurrectionary violence of his
intentions, as
revealed
in a series of texts and Facebook posts from before and after the riot:
that... shorthand might not be totally apt, if a Monday letter from the judge in the case is any measure. Indeed, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan seems to indicate that what we really have is a third election interference case.
(The paper's headline writers certainly aren't helping, if that's the case.)
My take is that "election interference case" is not a winner, particularly not for this one, The phrase "election interference" doesn't have a happy history in the Trumpery; we've been using it a long time since the discovery that Russian intelligence agencies were interfering in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf, and the only thing we've really gotten out of it, rhetorically, is that Trump now uses it against every damn investigation of his crimes:
The Fani Willis lover, Mr. Nathan Wade Esq. has just resigned in disgrace, as per his and her reading of the judge’s order today. Nathan was the ‘special,’ in more ways than one, prosecutor ‘engaged’ by Fani (pronounced Fauni) Willis, to persecute Trump for Crooked Joe Biden and his Department of Injustice for purposes of election interference and living the life of the rich and famous. This is the equivalent of Deranged Jack Smith getting ‘canned.’ Big stuff, something which should happen in the not too distant future!
And there's a kind of a point there, too; a guilty verdict in any of these criminal cases probably would have an influence on the outcome of the November election, and if the prosecutors believe he's guilty they'd probably be happier if he lost the election too, just as I would. You and I hope to exert an influence on the election too, by voting, and by persuading other people to vote the same way, including by spreading stories about Trump's criminality. Everybody's trying to interfere with the election—that's the point Trump wants to make here, in his post-truth whatabout way, that singling him out as if he were the only election interferer on the block is unfair.
But really, "election interference" isn't a crime in and of itself. If somebody murders his rich uncle for a share of the estate, he doesn't get charged with inheritance interference but with murder; inheritance interference is the motive, not the crime. If a political candidate commits crimes in order to influence the election result, whether it's collaboration or conspiracy with a foreign intelligence agency or the illegal coverup of hush money payments, those are the crimes charged; election interference is the motive. And this seems to be exactly the view taken in New York State: it is a crime only if it's "committed unlawfully".
When Trump's attorney-fixer Michael Cohen arranged for the National Enquirer publisher David Pecker to pay $150,000 kill fee to Playboy model Karen McDougal for her article describing her affair with Trump, that was an unlawful campaign contribution under federal law; it was way over the limit in size, and it was illegal to donate it in secret. When Cohen himself got $130,000 laundered through a shell company to Stephanie Clifford/Stormy Daniels to kill her article on a night with Trump, mushroom imagery and all, that was apparently another unlawful campaign contribution, but when it turned out Trump had ended up reimbursing Cohen for the money with another $130,000 to cover taxes, that made it an unlawful campaign loan, and Trump's own money the illegally unreported contribution, and his attempts to pass it off as legal fees is a case in New York State of falsifying business records in the first degree:
Falsifying business records in the first degree is a felony under New York state law that requires that the "intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof". This is in contrast to falsifying business records in the second degree, which is a misdemeanor that does not have that requirement.[8][92][93] In later filings, Bragg listed three such crimes that that Trump allegedly intended to commit: violation of federal campaign finance limits, violation of state election laws by unlawfully influencing the 2016 election, and violation of state tax laws regarding the reimbursement.
Those three crimes that make the falsification a felony instead of a misdemeanor aren't themselves charged in the Trump indictment, which is a little weird. The first of them, though, is a federal crime, for which Cohen was charged, and convicted in his plea with the Southern District, and he indeed did prison time—Trump himself (Individual-1 in Cohen's case) wasn't charged with it because he was president at the time, I guess, so it's implicit that the crime took place and he was certainly involved in it; we all heard the recording of his call with Cohen in re the Pecker payment.
The second one is the definition of what constitutes "election interference" in New York State (thanks, Just Security!):
N.Y. Elec. Law § 17-152: Conspiracyto promote or prevent election. Under that statute, “Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”
(I'll ignore the tax issue.)
So this is clearly the kind of thing that happened, as summarized at ABC News:
"From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant [Trump] orchestrated a scheme with others [including Cohen, who did prison time for his part, and Pecker, who was given federal immunity in return for his testimony]to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant's electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York," prosecutors said in a statement of facts accompanying the charges.
Which may seem a tiny bit circular—it's unlawful influencing because of the election law violations and the falsification of records, and the falsification of records is a felony rather than a misdemeanor because the influencing is unlawful—but that makes sense to me: it's a real conspiracy, in which the distinct parts aggravate the criminality of the whole.
Anyway, it occurs to me that this is a case where the coverup is not worse than the crime, it is the crime. Or rather I should say the metacoverup is the crime, because if you think about it it's a coverup of a coverup, in which the first-order federal campaign law violation of concealing Donald's nasty sexual behavior (which itself was not a crime but a bad look for the evangelical champion, especially at the moment of the Access Hollywood tape) by paying off the two women is itself concealed by the second-order New York crime of falsifying the records.
So I'd like to propose an improved nomenclature for the criminal cases in which they are clearly differentiated and both the crime involved and its subject matter are referenced:
the Hush-Money Coverup for Bragg's case (I'm not saying it's not an election interference case, but I think the expression tends to make all these cases sound less criminal than they really are, which is why Trump is deploying it so much in his zone-flooding commentary, and it's merely "influence" in any case: I don't think Bragg should put himself in the position of having to argue that knowing about McDougal and Stormy would have made a crucial difference in the election results, not something we can really know);
the Election Racket for Willis's case in Atlanta, in which Trump after the 2020 election is just one (important) member of a criminal gang trying to impose its will in its territory through threats and intimidation, messing with voting machines and tormenting election workers, with more attention to thugs like Giuliani and Meadows; and
the Election Fraud for Smith's Washington case, where Trump is (mysteriously) the only defendant, which overlaps a good deal in content with the Atlanta case but which seems to me to focus less on the activity of making trouble and and unrest (it's remarkable how little attention Smith gives to January 6 itself), and more on Trump's broader personal objective, the "conspiracy to disenfranchise voters" promulgation of the Big Lie, Trump's effort to sustain the idea that he really had won the 2020 election, alongside his knowledge that he was lying; and
the Documents Theft (I've been using this all along) for Jack Smith's Florida case generally known as "Mar-a-Lago", in which the important element isn't that they were in his house (as is also the case for Biden and Pence) but that he deliberately took them from the White House and resisted giving them back in so many ways, with such a variety of lies and subterfuge, and such a total refusal to obey the law.
Narratologically speaking, I think this is a pretty good schema for seeing the four very different proceedings as constituents of a single story, which I hope is a story of Trump's failure. Don't count on that though.
By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America
Happy Easter to all, including crooked
and corrupt prosecutors and judges
that are doing everything possible
to interfere with the presidential
election of 2024, and put me in prison,
including those many people that I completely &
totally despise because they want to destroy
America, a now failing nation, like “deranged”
Jack Smith, who is evil and “sick,”
Mrs. Fani “Fauni” Wade, who said
she hardly knew the “special” prosecutor,
only to find that he spent years “loving” her,
long before the Georgia persecution
of President Trump began (and thereby making
the case against me null, void, and illegal!),
and lazy on violent crime Alvin Bragg who,
with crooked Joe’s DOJ thugs, unfairly working
in the D.A.’s office, illegally indicted me
on a case he never wanted to bring and
virtually all legal scholars say is a case
that should not be brought, is breaking the law in doing so (Pomerantz!), was turned down by all other law enforcement authorities, and is not a crime. Happy Easter everyone!
As is traditional in his annual Easter messages, the former president (who has eloquently said of Easter that it is "just a very special—
time for me. And it really represents family
and get-together and—and something, you know,
if you're a—a Christian"), takes time to reach out to folks he may have neglected for a while over the past year, especially those engaged in what he calls "election interference", by which he means trying to hold him to account for the various crimes he's committed over the past eight-odd years, which might, if he's convicted, make it harder for him to win another term, kind of like the 48 Russian athletes who had Olympic medals taken from them since 2008, just because they used performance-enhancing drugs. It really seems unfair, if you think about it, or even more if you don't think about it.
Time for another victory lap, or two. I told you so, doubters:
Seven counts, and, says The Guardian, and the other papers,
At least some of the counts filed in federal district court in Miami by the office of special counsel Jack Smith include the willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, false statements and concealment under title 18 of the US criminal code, the person said.
"Willful retention of national defense information" is espionage, in the definition provided by the Espionage Act, if you missed that. For what it's worth. I'm afraid it's not espionage in the everyday sense of the word: that's acquiring national defense information with a specific motivation:
with the intent for that information to be used against the United States or for the gain of any foreign nation
which doesn't seem to be alleged here; it's not going to be selling stuff to the Russians or the Chinese or the Saudis. Which is not to say that he necessarily didn't do that but that the special counsel's office doesn't have proof of it. I, as you know, don't think spying in that sense is a significant part of what Trump was doing with the document collection (though I still think Jared Kushner must have been supplying information from the President's Daily Briefing to Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and I know PDBs were included in the stuff squirreled away in Trump's Palm Beach place), so I'm not surprised, but I do hope, narratologically speaking, that they won't make this a bloodless legalist argument about whether the conditions of the statute are met, but rather work to show what Trump and his goons were trying to accomplish by the thefts.
That, as I was just saying a while back, could be part of the prosecutorial point of that Bedminster audio of his interview with Meadows's ghostwriters, that it illustrates him trying to use the stolen documents to implicate his enemies, who included not just those FBI persecutors but also, for instance, General Milley, and Susan Glasser's article showing Milley restraining him from committing war crimes in the final days. CNN has now gotten hold of a transcript:
“Well, with Milley – uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump says, according to the transcript. “They presented me this – this is off the record, but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”
Trump continues: “All sorts of stuff – pages long, look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”
"I just found" this classified report sitting on my desk that happens to prove my point but you're not allowed to look at it. And then the ghostwriters dutifully added the lie to the book:
Meadows’ autobiography includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.”
And Kash Patel continually teased the classified documents that would reveal the plots of which Trump was a victim, throughout 2021 and 2022, without ever showing them, as he told "Clay and Buck":
“And what [Trump] did was on his way out of the White House, he declassified — made available to every American citizen in the world — large volumes of information relating, not just to Russiagate, but to national security matters, to the Ukraine impeachment, to his impeachment one, impeachment two.”
They had to be classified documents to explain why the reporters never got a chance to look!
Speaking of Meadows and, not coincidentally, of stolen classified documents, does anybody remember our discovery last January in the J6 Committee testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson that Meadows was a document thief too, receiving classified materials from the House Intelligence Committee passed to him by Devin Nunes, photocopying them in the White House and taking a bunch of them home, where he intended to get them to fascist journalists John Solomon (now Trump's designated representative along with Patel with the National Archives) and Mollie Hemingway?
I'd pretty much given up hope that anybody professional was ever going to go there, but Hutchinson's testimony has now been discovered by the great Murray Waas, who has posted his findings on Substack, proving, at least, that I wasn't hallucinating this stuff, so I'm giving myself a victory lap on that too.
Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to The Independent and the great Murray Waas:
Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.
A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took “thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.
I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side.
That's now happened. Waas's treatment misses some important details, I think, and I'll be posting something on that at Substack before too long. In the meantime, a happy Indictment Weekend to you all!
Breaking wind ground in Aberdeen. Nobody seems to know how to credit this photo of TFG keeping his ears covered, may have originated here.
While Donald Trump hides in Scotland from the trial for the defamation and battery (under New York's new Adult Survivor Law) of the writer E. Jean Carroll for raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and then lying about it 20 years later—as it winds toward its close (today Lisa Birnbach, the writer friend Carroll called after the rape, and Jessica Leeds, the woman he assaulted in the first-class section of a flying plane, offered their testimony), I thought it might be fun to do a quick survey of where he stands in his legal situation and, given that there are now a few declared Republican presidential candidates, what effect it might have on the race.
I don't see how there's any possibility he wins this first case. The witness testimony is really compelling, Trump's attorney is nasty and disrespectful, both to plaintiff and to judge (evidently following his client's instructions) and looks like a thug, Trump won't be testifying at all, not that it would help him if he did, and since it's a civil trial the jury's doesn't need to be convinced "beyond a reasonable doubt" but only "by a preponderance of the evidence." On the other hand I imagine he files an appeal immediately, or a whole raft of appeals, indefinitely delaying the actual end of the case, and I'm afraid we won't really feel it's over for months or years.
Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks
up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to
The Independent
and the great Murray Waas:
Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of
classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.
A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr
Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took
“thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many
bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in
attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between
his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.
I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side. We've known something about these documents for a long time—Trump started
claiming he had already declassified a stash of documents on the subject as
early as a
Tweet
of October 2020—
“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all
documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American
History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No
redactions!”
—which, like so many Trump statements, was more aspiration than fact; it
wasn't, in fact, until January 19 2021, the day before the Biden inauguration,
that, with some documents in hand, in a "binder" he'd received from the
Justice Department on December 30, he finally issued a
memorandum
to the attorney general, DNI, and DCI directing them to declassify it, with
the redactions demanded by the FBI. I don't think it's been reported whether
they obeyed this order, but it also seems certain that at least one copy of
those materials, probably without redactions and with intact classification
markings, was among the stuff stolen and sent to Trump's Palm Beach club that
day, along with at least one copy of the classified stuff stolen from the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by Chairman Nunes and Chief
of Staff Meadows that the staff had made so many photocopies of
on the same day.
What I'm saying is that Jack Smith seems to have come to the same conclusion
as I did on a motive for at least some of the Mar-a-Lago document
theft—his long quest to avenge himself on the FBI and everyone who exposed his
collusion with Russian intelligence in the 2016 election, and (taking it, as I
always do, just a notch farther than the reported story) that will be the
basis on which Trump is indicted in this case. As, I think, I've been telling
you.
Not only that, but also this week is the
wonderful reporting
in The New York Times by Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner that
shows former attorney general Billy Barr pushing special counsel John Durham
on the same quest to incriminate the FBI and others over the Crossfire
Hurricane and Robert Mueller investigations in the face of the fact that there
was no evidence of any wrongdoing to begin with, and of course practically
none squeezed out after millions of dollars and years of effort (one minor
deception in the filing of the third renewal request on the surveillance order
against Carter Page, discovered not by the special counsel but the FBI
inspector general. Corroborating what I've been telling you since October 2019 at least, including anticipations of this week's stories in
that snipe hunt for evidence in Italy where Barr and Durham came up dry, in
October 2019, and the switch to a criminal investigation, of which I wrote at the time
"It's about Trump, and the idée fixe of Trump's increasing paranoia: that he
must get to his enemies by using their weapons, of saying "bad things" and
getting "dirt". Investigate them all! Lock them up! And its failure so far,
which has been accelerating in recent weeks, as Barr's meta-investigation
falls apart. "
the pressure on inspector general Horowitz to come up with the stuff in April 2020, with a nod to John Solomon's participation in the effort going back to August 2019
"My [i.e., Solomon's] reporting, including interviews with four dozen U.S. officials over the last several months, actually identifies a much larger collection of documents — about a dozen all together — that, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by Democrats"
the use of Russian intelligence disinformation to hint at a bogus case against
Hillary Clinton "to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming
interference by the Russian security service" in
October 2020 (with a guest appearance by the big binder mentioned above, delivered
by DNI John Ratcliffe to Barr's DOJ)
It's always seemed me that this was one big story, starring mad Trump as Captain Ahab after the white whale of the FBI, and all Trump's henchmen from Solomon and Patel back to Bully Barr as the Pequod's doomed crew (Cassie Hutchinson is Ishmael, alone escaped to tell thee?), only it's not a ship but a criminal outfit. And now the news narrative is finally coalescing to my point, under Jack Smith's guidance. I think there could be a lot of indictments, though sadly not of Barr and Durham, who are in some ways the most reprehensible of all (committing some of the exact same crimes of which they falsely allowed Hillary Clinton, together with Comey, McCabe, Mueller, and others, to be accused), and it's looking as if I've had pretty good instincts on this up to now.
It's a little self-indulgent on my part to run this whole idiotic thread, but it's about some misinformation in the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case which seems to be leaving a lot of people really confused.
Includes every scrap of paper the president happens to write a note on. They
can't keep a running catalogue.
Oh, yeah, I wasn't even thinking of the classified ones but of the whole
mess. But who exactly is "they"? NARA wasn't informed of the TS docs, and
was very surprised and disturbed to find them in the first shipment of
boxes. Then they notified DOJ.
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