New comic. Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Jill FrankenStein" went up tonight.
Special Counsel Jack Smith returned the new indictment on Tuesday. The revised charges come only days before the deadline D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan set for both prosecutors and Trump’s defense attorneys to submit reports on how the July Supreme Court decision would impact the case. The next status conference is currently scheduled for Sept. 5.
Earlier this month, Chutkan rejected a motion from Trump’s defense attorneys to fully dismiss the case.
A new grand jury, who had not previously reviewed the evidence against the former president, charged Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights—the exact same charges listed in the original indictment handed down in August 2023.
According to a notice filed by Smith on Tuesday, the new indictment “reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v. United States.”
That July ruling from the nation’s highest court was seen as a death knell for the cases against the former president, the conservative majority having effectively legalized “criminal and treasonous acts,” per liberal dissenter Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The consolation was that special counsel Jack Smith would at least get to air all his evidence in the D.C. court of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama who would get to decide what if any of it could withstand the Supreme Court’s novel new standard.
But Smith, who has charged the former president with conspiring to defraud the United States and obstruct the certification of the 2020 election, himself decided to start over instead. Having seated a new grand jury, on Tuesday Smith returned a fresh 36-page indictment of Trump that maintains the same core charges but with a freshly emphasized framing: these were criminal acts that the former president undertook not in his official capacity but as a private citizen running for public office.
“Even the very first paragraph of the indictment now refers to Donald Trump not as the 45th president of the United States, but as a candidate for president in 2020,” noted Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney who teaches law at the University of Michigan. Appearing on MSNBC, she predicted that Trump’s legal team would certainly maintain anything he did while president was an “official act.”
But McQuade argued that Smith had effectively purged the original 45-page indictment of any conspicuously official conduct, the special counsel now stressing, for example, that Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, was at a privately funded campaign event — and that the ex-president, whose legal team organized a plot to recognize “fake electors” from the likes of Arizona and Pennsylvania, never had an official role in certifying state elections.
“I think this threads the needle,” Ty Cobb, a former White House lawyer under Trump, told CNN, describing the new indictment as a “forceful document” that drives home “the crimes that Donald Trump actually committed.” Smith wisely chose to avoid the moral victory of what legal experts had termed a “mini trial,” publicly fighting over what could survive in the previous indictment, Cobb said. But that also guarantees that there won’t be any sort of trial before voters cast ballots in the presidential election.
Donald Trump's speeches are notorious for their off-the-cuff ramblings, and now some media outlets stand accused of 'sane-washing' his erratic outbursts.
The 78-year-old frequently ditches the teleprompter to embark on wild digressions, including his bizarre reference to the 'late, great Hannibal Lecter'.
Journalist Aaron Rupar has even coined the term 'sane-wash' to describe the efforts by reporters and pundits to decipher the intent behind Trump's disjointed monologues.
Rupar's latest objection was directed at Fox News' coverage of Trump's address to the National Guard Association's conference in Detroit on Monday. Anchor Martha MacCallum suggested that Trump was "hitting three big themes consistently" - crime, the economy, and immigration, reports the Express US.
This interpretation came despite Trump's talk of establishing a 'Space National Guard', his desire to 'fire' those responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawal 'like The Apprentice', and his claim that the US is out of ammunition.
Not only Fox News has been slammed with the accusation, as Kristen Holmes from CNN also faced criticism for 'sane-washing' Trump's words.
Following his campaign rally in Michigan last week, Holmes commented that Trump "was clearly trying to stay on message."
Rupar took to Twitter, stating: "CNN sane-washes an incoherent and unhinged Trump speech for the second straight day."
Please read Marcia's "I'm supporting Kamala -- and noting the non-Blacks on the left who aren't" if you have not already.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for today:
Republican officials, following Trump's cues, have sought to pass restrictive election laws and purge voter rolls, despite experts noting that voter fraud is exceptionally rare.
Officers conducting the raids seized cellphones, computers and documents from people's homes, including the cellphone of Cecilia Castellano, a Democrat running against former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin for a state House seat. Castellano told the Times that the raid on her home last Tuesday was "very frightening" and she did not know why she was targeted. “This is all political,” she said.
Another raid brought officers to the home of Manuel Medina, a consultant for Castellano and the chair of Tejano Democrats, a group that advocates for greater Latino representation in the Democratic Party. “I have been contacted by elderly residents who are confused and frightened, wondering why they have been singled out,” Rosales told the Times. “It’s pure intimidation.”
Proaño said one of those targeted was Lidia Martinez, an 87-year-old who lives in San Antonio. Martinez has been a LULAC member for over 35 years and works to expand voter registration among seniors and veterans in South Texas.
She said that last Tuesday, there was a knock on her door in the morning, and she was greeted by nine officers in tactical gear and firearms who said they were executing a search warrant. Martinez was questioned for over three hours about her voter registration efforts in Texas.
Law enforcement seized Martinez's phone, computer, personal calendar, blank voter registration forms and her certificate to conduct voter registration, according to Martinez.
Lidia Martinez, a volunteer and great-grandmother in her 80s, was woken up in the early morning hours on Tuesday. She said nine law enforcement agents searched her home and questioned her for hours.
"After two hours of questioning, they took me outside in front of all of my neighbors for half an hour while they searched the living room where I had been sitting. They continued to question me, asking about LULAC members," Martinez said. "I said, 'what do you want from me? I am an old lady, all I do is help the seniors."
Martinez said she's been politically engaged since she was a little girl growing up in San Antonio. She never imagined to be trapped in such activity.
“I said I feel like I’m in Russia," Martinez said. “I asked them why they were there and they said because of voter fraud. And I said I’m not guilty of that.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Monday that the state has removed roughly a million people from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of election laws in 2021.
“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting,” he said.
However, election experts point out that both federal and state law already required voter roll maintenance, and the governor’s framing of this routine process as a protection against illegal voting could be used to undermine trust in elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already governs how states should keep their registration rolls accurate and up-to-date, and also includes protections to avoid the inadvertent removal of properly registered voters.
“Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project.
[. . .]
In 2019, Texas officials flagged 95,000 voters whom they identified as “noncitizens” and accused broadly of voter fraud. After review, it turned out that many of the people identified on the rolls were naturalized citizens. The scandal resulted in the secretary of state resigning. The state abandoned the effort after numerous lawsuits, which resulted in the state setting new guidelines for future voter roll clean-ups.
ACLU of Texas attorney Ashley Harris points to the 2019 incident as an example of the state's lack of transparency about how it collects this data.
Signed into law on May 20, 1993, by President Bill Clinton, the National Voter Registration Act opens a new window, also known as the NVRA opens a new window, revolutionized voter registration across the country establishing voter registration requirements and policies to facilitate those requirements. The NVRA required each state to:
It is because of the NVRA that eligible voters can register to vote at their state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) earning the law the nickname “Motor Voter”.
Why is making voter registration more accessible important?
Voter registration is the first barrier to voting. Even with the NVRA and policies like online and automatic voter registrations in some states, approximately 25% of eligible voters remain unregistered to vote, according to 2020 U.S. Census data. The registration gap is greatest among young people, particularly young people of color, young Natives, young people with disabilities and young people from low-income backgrounds. Every year, millions of eligible voters find themselves unable to vote because they miss a registration deadline, do not update their registration, or are unsure how to register.
How did Rock the Vote contribute to the passage of the NVRA?
In the early 1990s, Rock the Vote launched a major national campaign to support the passage of the NVRA. We partnered with the Recording Industry Association of American, MTV, Rolling Stone, major artists and actors of the era, and elected leaders to record and broadcast PSAs, testify at Congressional hearings opens a new window, and conduct public media interviews.
Meta's CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms. Zuckerberg detailed how senior administration officials leaned on the company to censor certain posts about Covid-19, including humor and satire, and “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.
In 2019, before the pandemic began, Facebook announced that they were looking to reduce the influence of anti-vaccination posts on their social media platform.
“We will reduce the ranking of groups and Pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations in News Feed and Search. These groups and Pages will not be included in recommendations or in predictions when you type into Search,” stated Facebook at the time.
“When we find ads that include misinformation about vaccinations, we will reject them. We also removed related targeting options, like ‘vaccine controversies.’ For ad accounts that continue to violate our policies, we may take further action, such as disabling the ad account.”
Facebook already downgrades any posts it doesn’t like the look of regarding the virus, but it’s apparently concerned that some of its users might still interact with the wrong content. It’s not Facebook users’ fault, you see, they’re just hapless plebs with not critical faculties of their own. Thankfully Facebook is on the case.
The social media giant’s VP of Integrity (an Orwellian job title if there ever was one), Guy Rosen, recently provided An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19. “We’re going to start showing messages in News Feed to people who have liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about COVID-19 that we have since removed,” said Rosen.
On the first point, Zuckerberg criticized the Biden administration for its efforts to get Facebook to address coronavirus misinformation — a political win for his Republican critics.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” he wrote. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
The line between what Zuckerberg describes as “pressure” and that the decisions were ultimately Meta’s will be blurred. What’s more, the Supreme Court recently rejected the idea that the administration had crossed an unacceptable line. But this is almost exactly what Republicans wanted him to say.
When rumors first swirled about who would replace President Biden if he stepped down, Black women, who have consistently voted for Democrats, warned leadership within the party to not pass over Kamala Harris. Fast forward to July 21 and Biden immediately followed his announcement that he was dropping out of the race with an endorsement for the vice president. Within 12 hours of that announcement, Win with Black Women (WWBW), an intergenerational network of Black women leaders in the United States, kickstarted a new model for digital organizing for the newly announced Harris campaign. With more than 40,000 attendees present at its weekly meeting, WWBW not only changed the meeting capacity limits of Zoom; it also set off a cascade of fundraising calls across the nation among other affinity groups. To date, other groups that have organized around the campaign include White Women for Harris, White Dudes for Harris, Republicans for Harris, and Latinas for Harris—all groups critical for the Democrats to win up and down the ballot in November. In just one month, the Harris-Walz campaign raised a record-breaking $500 million, demonstrating the level of excitement and joy swirling around the vice president.
The enthusiasm has only become more infectious in the past two weeks. After Harris announced her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, both have continued to build momentum and electrify audiences across the country. Their big test as a joint ticket was the Democratic National Convention—a natural crescendo on their journey to November and another opportunity for Black women to show up and show out for Kamala Harris.