We Now Know Why the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) Refused to Publish the 2024 Autopsy Report

It has finally been published, and the report created by a friend of the DNC Chairman is not just lame and studiously obtuse, it also appears to be AI generated slop.

There never really an autopsy report, just make-work for an incompetent overpaid crony.

The Democratic party has belatedly published a postmortem on its disastrous 2024 election defeat, after an initial decision to withhold the document triggered an angry backlash.

Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), released the report – which fails to mention Gaza or Joe Biden’s age – accompanied by an apology to party members angered by his initial decision to keep the analysis of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump and defeat in both houses of Congress under wraps.

Martin had initially declined to publish the report, authored by a veteran Democratic strategist, Paul Rivera. He cited a need to focus on this year’s midterm elections and avoid re-opening old wounds.

The decision backfired, leading to a crisis of confidence in Martin’s leadership among senior Democrats and accusations that he was keeping the findings secret.

The report focuses on key demographics that Harris lost – including Latinos, men and rural voters in many states – and compares her performance to other Democrats in key state races, such as North Carolina governor Josh Stein.

While I do think that Josh Stein had a good electoral strategy, "Have a Black Nazi who frequents porn forums and self identifies as a perv to run against," is not an easily repeatable campaign. 

Crap

In a feat of corrupt and incompetent judging that is beyond the wildest imaginings of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's spleen, Federal Judge Eileen Cannon has sealed the records of the Donald Trump classified document case forever.

You have to admire one thing about Judge Aileen Cannon down by Florida way. There are sled dogs in the Arctic who don't have this kind of loyalty. From Reuters:

I love Charlie Pierce, but you do not have to admire what she did.

………

You have to go back to the Gilded Age, when the railroads and corporations ran the federal judiciary, to find a federal judge who was as round and complete a hack as Cannon has been in this case. She did everything to stall the proceedings until the unfortunate events of 2024 gave her the opening she needed. That July, she dismissed the documents case on the spurious grounds that Jack Smith's appointment was unconstitutional. An appeals court said that Cannon's handling of the case and her earlier appointment of a special master was "improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction." That is a very polite way of saying, "Get your damn thumb off the scale." By then, the process of burying the report was well underway and, officially, anyway, the last shovel of earth was turned on Monday.

It's time for unofficial solutions. Somebody should leak the daylights of this report. The truth about the Poolshed Papers belongs to all of us.

Please, for the love of God, someone leak this.

Arrogant Morons

Acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency(CISA) Madhu Gottumukkala wanted to look at some extremely sensitive intelligence reports from, "Another Agency." (If I had to guess, it would be the Defense Intelligence Agency).

He could have looked at the pretty fucking secret reports, but he wanted to access the unbelievably fucking super duper secret version of the report, for which the agency required that a polygraph exam for clearance and access.

Mr. Gottumukkala failed the polygraph examination and promptly retaliated against the staff who told him that he had to take the exam or who had administered the exam.

This man should not have access to Colonel Sanders' 11 herbs and spices.*

At least six career staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were suspended with pay this summer after organizing a polygraph test that the agency’s acting director, Madhu Gottumukkala, failed.

The Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation into whether the staff provided “false information” about the need for the test — which was scheduled after Gottumukkala sought access to certain highly sensitive cyber intelligence shared with the agency.

………

The incident this July and the subsequent fallout — which has not been reported before — have angered career staff, alarmed fellow Trump administration appointees and raised questions about Gottumukkala’s leadership of the nearly $3 billion cyber defense agency.

It does not raise questions, it answers them.  He is unsuited to his position. 

………

In an emailed statement, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that Gottumukkala “did not fail a sanctioned polygraph test.”

“An unsanctioned polygraph test was coordinated by staff, misleading incoming CISA leadership,” McLaughlin wrote. “The employees in question were placed on administrative leave, pending conclusion of an investigation. We expect and require the highest standards of performance from our employees and hold them directly accountable to uphold all policies and procedures. Gottumukkala has the complete and full support of the Secretary and is laser focused on returning the agency to its statutory mission.”

The technical term for the above is, "Bullshit."

Anyone who needs access to something that requires a polygraph would have to get it signed off from senior management, i.e.  Madhu Gottumukkala 

………

Compounding that instability, CISA has not had a permanent, Senate-confirmed leader since former Director Jen Easterly stepped down in January at the start of the Trump administration. Gottumukkala, a former senior IT official in South Dakota under Kristi Noem, was appointed by the governor-turned-secretary as deputy director in May. He is currently the most senior official at CISA and also holds the title of acting director.

This guy's qualification is that he's a friend of ICE Barbie?

Chinese spies must be high fiving each each other and doing jello shots right now, because it's like a permanent vacation for them. 

………

Gottumukkala failed the polygraph test in the last week of July, according to five current officials and one former official.

The test was scheduled that month to determine his eligibility to review one of the most sensitive intelligence programs shared with CISA by another spy agency, three current officials and one former official said.

………

Senior staff raised questions about whether Gottumukkala needed to review the intelligence materials on at least two occasions. But he continued to push for the access, even if it meant taking a polygraph, according to four current officials.

In early June, a senior agency official did not approve an initial request signed by mid-level CISA staff to grant Gottumukkala access to the program, on the basis that there was not an urgent need-to-know, according to the third current official. The agency’s previous deputy director, this person noted, had not seen the program.

………

The senior official who denied that read-in request was placed on administrative leave in late June for a reason unrelated to the polygraph, according to three current officials. As a result, that senior official was no longer in their role by the time a second request for a read-in — this time signed by Gottumukkala — was approved in early July, the third current official said.

The phone call is coming from inside the house! 

………

Less highly classified versions of the requested intelligence materials would have been available to Gottumukkala without taking a polygraph, said the third current official.

Still, Gottumukkala persisted.

We are doomed. 

^*2/3 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon thyme, 1/2 teaspoon basil, 1/3 teaspoon oregano, 1 teaspoon celery salt, 1 teaspoon black pepper, 1 teaspoon dried mustard, 4 teaspoons paprika, 2 teaspoons garlic salt, 1 teaspoon ground ginger, and 3 teaspoons white pepper, which is mixed with 2 cups of white flour.

Mixed Emotions

Trump's Brownshirts at the FBI just raided John Bolton's home and office for alleged mishandling of classified documents.

It's clearly an act of [political retribution and wrong, but it is also something bad happening to John Bolton.

It's like watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your brand new car.

You Know, Morons

Source of the headline

It appears that while sharing sensitive dsetails of a stroke on Yemen with his fellow government bureaucrats, Pete Hegseth was also sharing these same details on his personal phone to his wife, brother, and lawyer. 

I did not know that a pathetic drunk could multitask so effectively: 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.

Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

(Emphasis mine)

Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.

Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.

I've got a guess as to why, it's because Secretary Pete is an addicted co-dependent idiot?

Then again, I'm an engineer, not a psychologist, Dammit!*

The previously unreported existence of a second Signal chat in which Mr. Hegseth shared highly sensitive military information is the latest in a series of developments that have put his management and judgment under scrutiny.

Gee, you think?

Their stupidity may yet save the Republic.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal - The Atlantic

If your f%$# up can be best described by a Muppet meme, you have failed completely

So now the good folks at The Atlantic, after having been assured that the discussions on Signal were totally non classified, have released the messages that were inadvertently sent to Jeffrey Goldberg.

Can you say sh%$ show?

Good, I knew you could. (Yeah, I know invoking Mr. Rogers and the Muppets.  PBS is way more powerful than I had previously thought)

So, about that Signal chat.

On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

Well, that's a relief for Mr. Goldberg.  It means that his story did not reveal any secrets, and it also means that further releases will not reveal any secrets.

So Goldberg and his posse are releasing the whole megillah.

Much hilarity ensues:

………

Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security. As a case in point, Goldberg received information on the attacks two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of Houthi positions. If this information—particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face. The Trump administration is arguing that the military information contained in these texts was not classified—as it typically would be—although the president has not explained how he reached this conclusion.

Yesterday, we asked officials across the Trump administration if they objected to us publishing the full texts. In emails to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the White House, we wrote, in part: “In light of statements today from multiple administration officials, including before the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the information in the Signal chain about the Houthi strike is not classified, and that it does not contain ‘war plans,’ The Atlantic is considering publishing the entirety of the Signal chain.”

………

As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the “Houthi PC small group” concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America’s European allies. But on the day of the attack—Saturday, March 15—the discussion veered toward the operational.

At 11:44 a.m. eastern time, Hegseth posted in the chat, in all caps, “TEAM UPDATE:”

The text beneath this began, “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. The Hegseth text continues:

• “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
• “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

Let us pause here for a moment to underscore a point. This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.

Yeah, nothing in the least sensitive here.

You can read the rest. at the link.  It's pretty clear that these folks have no f%$#ing clue.

Some Good News, Though

A federal court has ruled that the abuse of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is unconstitutional.

The court actually ruled in December, but it's only now being made public:

It's official: The FBI's warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In a major December ruling made public this week, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall settled one of the biggest debates about feared government overreach that has prompted calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for more than a decade.

Critics' primary concern was whether the FBI needed a warrant to search and query Americans' communications that are often incidentally, inadvertently, or mistakenly seized during investigations of suspected foreign terrorists.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group that has long said a warrant is needed to conduct such invasive searches, celebrated the ruling as "better late than never." The EFF noted that the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US persons' 702 data in 2021, describing it as a "routine practice" and calling out Section 702 as a "finders keepers" rule that for years has seemingly given feds' unfettered access to many Americans' private and sensitive communication data.

DeArcy Hall agreed with an appeals court that ruled that "the government cannot circumvent application of the warrant requirement simply because queried information is already collected and held by the government," as the US unsuccessfully tried to argue.

I expect this to go all the way to the US Supreme Court, and I have no fucking clue as to how they would rule.

It is clear that the FBI has been abusing the process, which is not a surprise.

It's what cops do.

Pass the Popcorn

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit has ruled that Jack Smith's special prosecutor report can be publicly released, reversing the completely incoherent ruling from Trump's concierge judge Aileen Cannon prohibiting the release of the report.

The injunction stands for another 3 days, which is enough time to appeal to the Supreme Court, but I expect it to come out in a few days:

A federal appeals court on Thursday said that it would not block the Justice Department from releasing a report by the special counsel Jack Smith about the two now-closed investigations he conducted into President-elect Donald J. Trump.

In a brief and unsigned order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, rejected an emergency request from Mr. Trump’s legal team to stop the report from coming out.

………

Both sections of Mr. Smith’s two-volume report remain for the moment under an injunction put in place this week by a lower-court judge in Florida that is temporarily blocking their release.

The Justice Department has already said that it intends to hold off on releasing the volume that concerns the case in Florida in which Mr. Trump was accused of mishandling classified documents after he left office.

They are holding off on that one, which I would argue would be the more interesting report, because there are still court cases against other defendants.

But the department has said that it wants to release the other volume, which details Mr. Smith’s decisions in the case he filed in Washington accusing Mr. Trump of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

In its order on Thursday night, the appeals court left the injunction in place but said that the Justice Department could take further action seeking to appeal it. Still, the injunction, which was issued by Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who oversaw the classified documents case, is scheduled to last only another three days.

Well, I guess historians will find this interesting.

Assange Freed

Short version is that he pled guilty to infections of the Espionage Act, and will be sentenced to time served, and is expected to return to Australia.

It's good that he is out, but it needs to be noted that his plea was basically coerced, and the whole prosecution was basically criminalizing the practice of journalism.

The plea deal Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has reached with prosecutors is bad for American press freedoms. But the outcome also could have been worse.

The deal, which was finalized on Wednesday in a courtroom in a remote U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific, cleared the way for him to walk free after more than five years in British custody, most of which he spent fighting extradition to the United States. In exchange, he pleaded guilty to one charge of violating the Espionage Act.

The result is an ambiguous end to a legal saga that has jeopardized the ability of journalists to report on military, intelligence or diplomatic information that officials deem secret. Enshrined in the First Amendment, the role of a free press in bringing to light information beyond what those in power approve for release is a foundational principle of American self-government.

The agreement means that for the first time in American history, gathering and publishing information the government considers secret has been successfully treated as a crime. This new precedent will send a threatening message to national security journalists, who may be chilled in how aggressively they do their jobs because they will see a greater risk of prosecution.

But its reach is also limited, dodging a bigger threat. Because Mr. Assange agreed to a deal, he will not challenge the legitimacy of applying the Espionage Act to his actions. The outcome, then, averts the risk that the case might lead to a definitive Supreme Court ruling blessing prosecutors’ narrow interpretation of First Amendment press freedoms.

“He’s basically pleading guilty to things that journalists do all the time and need to do,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It will cast a shadow over press freedom — but not the same kind of a shadow that would have been cast by a judicial opinion holding that this activity is criminal and unprotected by the First Amendment.”

In short, he added, the outcome was complicated from the perspective of press freedom and could be seen as neither “all bad or all good.”

………

But for the purposes of press freedom, what matters is not who counts as a journalist, but whether journalistic-style activities — whether performed by a journalist or anyone else — can be treated as crimes. And the charges against Mr. Assange are not about Moscow’s covert efforts to help Donald J. Trump win the 2016 election.

Rather, the charges centered on the earlier publications that vaulted him to global notoriety and made him a hero to the antiwar left: a video of a U.S. helicopter gunning down people in Baghdad, including a Reuters photographer; troves of military incident logs documenting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; a quarter-million diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world; and dossiers about Guantánamo detainees.

The narrow criminal information to which Mr. Assange pleaded guilty centers on one count of conspiring to violate the Espionage Act. The court document says that Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, and Mr. Assange agreed that she would send him national-security files, even though he had no security clearance, and that he would then “communicate them” to others who were also “not entitled to receive them” — that is, publish them.

………

But successfully indicting a nongovernment official for publishing national-security information of public interest that he had obtained while working with a source is different. No one had ever been charged under the Espionage Act for a journalistic act, in part because there had long been a widespread assumption that applying that law to such acts would be unconstitutional.

The charge against Mr. Assange, then, crossed a line. It showed that the 21st-century crackdown on leakers could expand to encompass criminalizing the same sort of actions that brought to light important post-Sept. 11, 2001, abuses like warrantless wiretapping and torture, as well as day-to-day journalism about military, intelligence or diplomatic matters that help people better understand the world.

The charges are literally the performance of journalism.

The facts of whose oxen were gored is irrelevant to the real issue here.

The Fix is In

Federal "Judge" Aileen Cannon has placed an indefinite hold on the Trump classified docukmennts case.

I'm not surprised, she is a MAGAt stooge, but I am disappointed:

Donald Trump’s Florida trial for allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them has been pushed back indefinitely, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon ruled Tuesday, increasing the chance that the former president’s ongoing New York criminal trial may be the only one to happen before the November election.

The judge had originally set the Florida trial date for late May, but that has seemed unlikely for months, with Cannon still needing to make decisions on a number of key legal issues before a jury can hear the case.

At a scheduling hearing in Florida on March 1, Trump’s lawyers pushed to start the classified documents trial after the presidential election, in which he is the presumptive Republican nominee. Prosecutors urged Cannon to pick a date in early July.

………

In her ruling Tuesday, Cannon said there are many complicated legal rules and deadlines surrounding the use of classified evidence in public criminal trials that need to be considered before she picks a new court date.

………

In her order Tuesday, Cannon rescheduled a number of pretrial deadlines that parties will have to meet. The latest deadline is a CIPA-related one and a scheduling conference July 22 — which means the trial cannot happen before then.

………

On individual rulings, Cannon has so far generally sided with the government. She rejected two of Trump’s motions to dismiss the case and ruled for prosecutors on key CIPA-related decisions that could have changed the contours and direction of the legal proceedings.

But when it comes to timing, her decisions have hobbled prosecutors’ efforts to move forward quickly. They want the trial to occur before the election but have not explicitly argued that the November election is an event they are considering.

"Judge" Cannon corrupt as hell, but we knew that when Trump first nominated her.

Lost a True Patriot Today

Danial Ellsberg has died at the age of 92.

He risked life in prison to reveal the lies that the authorities made to promulgate the Vietnam War, and thereafter dedicated his life to whistleblower protections:

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the voluminous, top-secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, a disclosure that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on press freedoms and enraged the Nixon administration — serving as the catalyst for a series of White House-directed burglaries and “dirty tricks” that snowballed into the Watergate scandal — died June 16 at his home in Kensington, Calif. He was 92.

………

Mr. Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated Midwesterner with a PhD in economics, was in some respects an unlikely peace activist. He had served in the Marine Corps after college, wanting to prove his mettle, and emerged as a fervent cold warrior while working as an official at the Defense Department, a military analyst at the Rand Corp. and a consultant for the State Department, which dispatched him to Saigon in 1965 to assess counterinsurgency efforts.

Crisscrossing the Vietnamese countryside, where he joined American and South Vietnamese troops on patrol, he became increasingly disillusioned by the war effort, concluding that there was no chance of success.

He went on to embrace a life of advocacy, which extended from his 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers — a disclosure that led Henry Kissinger, President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser, to privately brand him “the most dangerous man in America” — to decades of work advocating for press freedoms and the anti-nuclear movement.

………

Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in June 1967, the Pentagon Papers comprised 7,000 pages of historical analysis and supporting documents, revealing how the U.S. government had secretly expanded its role in Vietnam across four presidential administrations.

The papers showed that government leaders had concealed doubts about the war’s progress and had misled the public about a troop buildup that eventually took half a million Americans to Vietnam at the peak of U.S. involvement. The conflict cost the lives of more than 58,000 U.S. service members and millions of Vietnamese.

………

Hoping to hasten the end of the war, Mr. Ellsberg contacted several U.S. senators and tried to share the documents through official channels. When he found no takers, he contacted New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, leading to the publication of the first story about the files on June 13, 1971, above the fold on the front page of the Times.

………

When The Post, too, was ordered to stop publishing, it partnered with the Times in court. The newspapers won a landmark decision on June 30, with the Supreme Court ruling 6-3 in favor of allowing publication to continue.

I do not think that the Supreme Court would support the publication today, and today, he would not have gotten bail, and he would have been in solitary confinement for years before the trial even started.

………

Among other revelations, Byrne had learned of a White House-directed burglary of Mr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and had seen evidence of illegal wiretapping against Mr. Ellsberg. The judge also reported that in the midst of the trial, he had been offered a job as FBI director by one of Nixon’s top lieutenants, John D. Ehrlichman.

Oval Office tapes revealed that Nixon and his top aides had coordinated to destroy Mr. Ellsberg’s reputation. “He must be stopped at all costs. We’ve got to get him,” Kissinger said during a meeting with the president, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled on the Pentagon Papers. Nixon agreed. “These fellows have all put themselves above the law,” he said, “and, by God, we’re going to go after them.”

And Kissinger was feted at his 100th birthday.  Lovely.

The president ordered the creation of a special unit, jokingly nicknamed the Plumbers because of its clandestine efforts to find and fix leaks of classified information. The group broke into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, touching off a scandal that culminated with Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

………

Mr. Ellsberg later marveled at what he considered the unintended consequences of the Pentagon Papers. The documents themselves “didn’t shorten the war by a day,” he said, with U.S. bombing in Southeast Asia escalating in the year after their release and American combat troops remaining in Vietnam until 1973.

And yet, he told the New Yorker in 2021, “the criminal actions that the White House took against me … led to this absolutely unforeseeable downfall of a President, which made the war endable.”

“In the end,” he added, “things couldn’t have worked out better.”

It is people like him who make an open and free society possible.

Trump was Arraigned Today

I am not optimistic about this.

Between Republican rat-f%$#ery, and Democratic timidity, I am not ready to celebrate.

Once he is in a non-Photoshop jump suit, I'll drink a toast.

What a Surprise

The federal monitor of the Rikers' Island jail has reported that the man that Eric Adams appointed to head the New York City jail system is covering up wrongdoing.

This is not a surprise.  Eric Adams is arguably the most corrupt mayor of New York City in recent memory.  (Giuliani's corruption was largely post his time as mayor)

Adams has been appointing corrupt and incompetent cronies to positions of power, (at least when he is not appointing his relatives), and this was a foreseeable consequence of his becoming mayor:

A year and a half into Louis A. Molina’s tenure as New York City correction commissioner, the federal monitor overseeing the Rikers Island jail complex on Thursday took direct aim at his leadership, saying that the violence there remained unabated and that officials were hiding information about it.

“The commitment to effective collaboration, as evidenced by the department’s recent performance, has deteriorated,” the monitor, Steve J. Martin, wrote in a report filed in federal district court. “The department’s approach to reform has recently become characterized by inaccuracies and a lack of transparency.”

“These problems have grave consequences for the prospect of reform and eliminating the imminent risk of harm faced by incarcerated individuals and staff,” he added.

………

Thursday’s monitoring report was issued as Mr. Molina was facing intense pressure to turn around one of the worst crises to grip Rikers Island in decades. Appointed by Mayor Eric Adams in January 2022, Mr. Molina inherited chronic absenteeism that had peaked during the coronavirus pandemic and soaring rates of violence and neglect at the jail complex.

More recently, he has had to battle calls for a federal takeover of Rikers Island, avoiding that fate last year in part by promising in federal court to follow a plan to enact reforms.

As scrutiny of his department has intensified, Mr. Molina has taken steps that limit the public release of potentially damaging information, revoking a jails oversight panel’s unrestricted access to video footage from Rikers Island and reversing his predecessor’s policy of notifying the public when deaths occur in custody.

………

The clawing back of information from the public and failure to report deaths and serious injuries have drawn criticism, including from the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, who said in a statement last week that the council was considering “legislative solutions to address this administration’s backtracking on transparency and undermining of oversight.”

In a news conference after touring the Rikers Island facilities on Wednesday, Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, and Brad Lander, the comptroller, said that they would formally call for a federal takeover of the complex.

Thursday’s monitoring report sounded an even more urgent alarm than the one issued in May, concluding that “the current state of affairs in the jails remains alarming, not just for the rampant violence and frequency with which force is used, but also because of regression in the department’s management.”

………

Still, citing the findings of the monitor’s recent reports, advocates for people detained at Rikers Island were renewing their calls for a federal judge to strip Mr. Molina of control over the Correction Department and appoint a receiver to oversee the jails.

They said that Mr. Molina has obstructed the jail’s oversight bodies’ ability to know what’s happening on the inside, inflaming tensions and causing concern that problems were being hidden.

“This administration has not only wrought horrific levels of violence in the jails, but is increasingly authoritarian in seeking to shield its abuses from judicial and public oversight,” Mary Lynne Werlwas, director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, said in a statement on Thursday, adding that reforming the jails should be “placed in the hands of a trustworthy, independent entity that can do what the Department of Correction is unwilling or unable to do.”

"Increasingly authoritarian," is the brand that Eric Adams chose to win election.

This is why we are seeing brutality and coverups both in the NYPD and in the NYC correction system.

Don't Get Your Hopes Up

Thanks, Keith, for the Heads Up

I am referring, of course to allegations that Trump was caught on tape discussing non-imminent US plans to invade Iran.

Apparently, he was having a conversation with some ghost writers, probably for Mark Meadows.

Claiming that he had the document, where then Chairman of the JCS Mark Milly had given him a document of the plans to invade Iran.

Apparently, it was a massive affair involving huge numbers of troops.

It is reported that Trump bragged about how secret the documents were, and he may have waved the papers in front of his face.

Technically, even the existence of such a document is a serious state secret.

In reality, that there is an office in the Pentagon that plans, and routinely updates, plans to invade Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela, and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick is known.

If the description of the tape is real, it does show that Trump knew that he was handling classified documents, which goes to prove intent, but I still don't think that it's enough for the DoJ to invoke the Espionage Act.

Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.

The recording indicates Trump understood he retained classified material after leaving the White House, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation. On the recording, Trump’s comments suggest he would like to share the information but he’s aware of limitations on his ability post-presidency to declassify records, two of the sources said.

CNN has not listened to the recording, but multiple sources described it. One source said the relevant portion on the Iran document is about two minutes long, and another source said the discussion is a small part of a much longer meeting.

………

Prosecutors have asked witnesses about the recording and the document before a federal grand jury. The episode has generated enough interest for investigators to have questioned Gen. Mark Milley, one of the highest-ranking Trump-era national security officials, about the incident.

The July 2021 meeting was held at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with two people working on the autobiography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as aides employed by the former president, including communications specialist Margo Martin. The attendees, sources said, did not have security clearances that would allow them access to classified information. Meadows didn’t attend the meeting, sources said.

If this happened at Bedminster, I would suggest that they pick up the phone and talk to Niitek in Dulles, Virginia.

They have some remarkably advanced ground penetrating radars.  Just the thing to scan Ivana Trump's grave.  (Also, who the f%$# buries their ex wife on a golf course unless the coffin includes incriminating evidence)

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.”

The document Trump references was not produced by Milley, CNN was told.

I get it.  If Trump were just some schmoe, he'd already be sitting in a SuperMax cell awaiting trial.

But we are dealing with a DoJ, and an administration, who are obsessed with a return to normalcy and the, "Norms," so I do not expect to see him in the dock for the foreseeable future.

I would be delighted to be wrong, but I think that the powers that be are too invested in the precedent of Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon to allow this to happen.

Well, Well, Well

It looks like Egypt was making plans to supply rockets to Russia.

It appears taht they were considering selling Sakr 45 rockets, which are compatible with the 122mm BM-21 Grad missile launcher. 

Egypt is denying these reports, and the source of these reports are the leaked files that showed up on Discord a while back, which the US is treating as an actual leak of classified information, so it seems that the credibility seems decent.

The question, of course, is why Egypt would take such a step when it has remained steadfastly neutral.

It's probably not money, an unguided Grad is rumored to cost about $1,000.00 on the open market, so the sale of 40,000 missiles would likely result in sales of only $40 million. (The roughly equivalent unguided M-26 for the MLRS costs about $40,000.00 each)

My guess would be that this was some sort of wheat deal, because the Egyptians are very well aware of the effects of food shortages and price hikes on political stability in the region. (The 2011 Egyptian revolution that turfed out Hosni Mubarak was largely driven by skyrocketing food prices).

President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi of Egypt, one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East and a major recipient of U.S. aid, recently ordered subordinates to produce up to 40,000 rockets to be covertly shipped to Russia, according to a leaked U.S. intelligence document.

A portion of a top secret document, dated Feb. 17, summarizes purported conversations between Sisi and senior Egyptian military officials and also references plans to supply Russia with artillery rounds and gunpowder. In the document, Sisi instructs the officials to keep the production and shipment of the rockets secret “to avoid problems with the West.”

The Washington Post obtained the document from a trove of images of classified files posted in February and March on Discord, a chat app popular with gamers. The document has not been previously reported.

………

In response to questions regarding the document and the veracity of the conversations it describes, Ambassador Ahmed Abu Zeid, spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, said that “Egypt’s position from the beginning is based on noninvolvement in this crisis and committing to maintain equal distance with both sides, while affirming Egypt’s support to the U.N. charter and international law in the U.N. General Assembly resolutions.”

………

A U.S. government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address sensitive information, said: “We are not aware of any execution of that plan,” referring to the rocket export initiative. “We have not seen that happen,” the official added.

Moscow and Cairo have inked several significant deals recently, including an agreement this year for Russia to build a massive railway workshop in Egypt. Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic energy corporation, also began construction last year on Egypt’s first nuclear power plant.

Perhaps most importantly, after the war in Ukraine disrupted access to Ukrainian wheat, Cairo began relying heavily on purchases of Russian grain. The arrangement has helped Egypt avoid wheat shortages that could spark social unrest in a country where poverty is widespread and bread is served with nearly every meal. Egypt is eager to avoid an uprising at home, where an acute economic crisis, including a devalued currency, high inflation and soaring food prices — fueled in part by the war in Ukraine — are stirring up frustrations among civilians.

Assuming that the Discord leaks are real,, this would imply a strategic advantage that Russia has over the west, as hard as it is to believe, the fact that they are an agricultural powerhouse.  (Yes, this is a complete mind-f%$#, but Russia supplies about ¼ of the world's export market for grains.)

It could also be that this is some sort of counter-intelligence operation by the US intended to push Egypt away from Russia, or it could Egyptian disinformation that was fed to western intelligence agencies to mitigate suggested aid cuts to Egypt in response to El-Sisi's abysmal human rights record.

This all is a f%$#ing hall of mirrors, and about the only thing that is certain is that professional liars are involved.

Not This Shit Again!

Now the cable networks are acting like the discovery of classified documents in Biden's old offices is the biggest scandal since Watergate.

Clearly there was some mishandling of documents, but it was 10 documents, not boxes, and once discovered, it was promptly reported, and the documents were promptly turned over to the National Archives.

This does not mean that someone might have mishandled classified documents, and that is potentially a big deal, but the FBI did not have to raid Joe Biden's offices to get the documents back:

After serving as Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years, Joe Biden did what high-profile former politicians so often do: He set up a think tank at a prominent university.

Biden’s was called the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania. But unlike other elected officials and other such institutions, Biden’s engagement with the Penn Biden Center was soon back-burnered. By April 2019, he was a candidate for the presidency.

In November, almost exactly two years after Biden’s election, attorneys for the president were emptying an office at the center when, according to their account, they discovered about 10 documents bearing classification markings. The next day, the documents were turned over to the National Archives. The Justice Department is now reviewing them.

………

At this point, we don’t know much about the Biden documents beyond what his team has made public, which is certainly an important caveat. According to the Biden team’s statement, the documents were found in a locked closet and quickly turned over to the government. What they contain is unclear, as is their current classification level or status. (There are, of course, numerous existing documents that are no longer classified but which may nonetheless still carry classification markings.) One person, tongue presumably in cheek, told CBS News that the documents did not contain nuclear secrets.

We know a bit more about the Trump documents. We know that the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago turned up dozens of documents with classification markings in multiple locations around the facility. We know that one box alone in Trump’s office at the event facility, a room where he regularly entertained guests, held more than a dozen documents.

We also know that the seizure of those documents came only after a lengthy effort to secure documents (both classified and nonclassified) that were produced during his presidency and were therefore government property. The investigation into Trump’s documents was triggered in May 2021 when the National Archives contacted Trump’s team about documents it knew existed but were not in its possession. (The country’s archivist, watching Trump leave the White House the previous January, later mentioned wondering what was in the boxes Trump’s staff was loading into Marine One.) Over the next few months, the Archives and Trump’s team went back and forth on taking possession of the material.

So the information we have at this point is that documents were found that had classification markings, but we do not know whether they were still classified, they kept in a secure location, and when discovered, they were promptly turned over to the National Archives.

At this point, it should be a page 1 below the fold story, but the cable networks leading with this, CNN spent about ¼ of their air time on this from 5 pm to 11 pm, for example, is nuts.

They should be flooding the zone with this with reporters, not mindlessly speculating on air.

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

About those classified documents

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell told Trump's lawyers that they would need to personally certify that they had done due diligence to ensure that Donald Trump had no more classified in his possession.

Well, they did, and they found more classified documents.

No it was not Ivana Trump's grave, it was a self-storage locker:

Lawyers for Donald Trump found at least two items marked classified after an outside team hired by Trump searched a storage unit in West Palm Beach, Fla., used by the former president, according to people familiar with the matter.

Those items were immediately turned over to the FBI, according to those people, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The search was one of at least three searches for classified materials conducted by an outside team at Trump properties in recent weeks, after Trump’s legal team was pressed by a federal judge to attest that it had fully complied with a May grand jury subpoena to turn over all materials bearing classified markings, according to people familiar with the matter.

There has been a lengthy and fierce battle between Trump’s attorneys and the Justice Department in a Washington federal court in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. Much of the legal wrangling remains under seal by a federal judge, but people familiar with the matter say the Justice Department has raised concerns about what prosecutors view as a long-standing failure to fully comply with the May subpoena by Trump’s team.

Emails released by the General Services Administration, which assists former presidents during their transition to private life, show that the government agency helped rent the storage unit at a private facility in West Palm Beach on July 21, 2021. The unit was needed to store items that had been held at an office in Northern Virginia used by Trump staffers in the months just after he left office.

………

The ultimate significance of the classified material in the storage unit is not immediately clear, but its presence there indicates Mar-a-Lago was not the only place where Trump kept classified material. It also provides further evidence that Trump and his team did not fully comply with a May grand jury subpoena that sought all documents marked classified still in possession of the post-presidential office.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that there is no way that Trump will get out of this one.

He will get out of this one, just like he has skated for the past 50 years.

Special Prosecutor Named for Trump

It was inevitable once Trump announced his candidacy for the Presidency again, and Merrick Garland has appointed Jack Smith as Special Prosecutor, which is an interesting choice.

The reason for this being interesting for a number of reasons:

• He is a former head of the DoJ's public integrity section, so he is well suited to the position.
• He was involved in the Brooklyn US Attorney's office investigation of Trump for traud in the 1990s. (There is a typo in the article as to the date)
  
• Most recently, he has been working on war crimes investigations at International Criminal Court in the Hague, and Trump initiated sanctions against some of his co-workers there for doing their jobs in Afghanistan and Israel.
• He has a background in the mishandling of classified information.
  

All in all, I think that this guy will likely be a scrupulous and relentless in his investigation of Trump, but the example of Lucy and the football still applies.

The US attorney general Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to determine whether Donald Trump should face criminal charges stemming from investigations into the former’s president’s alleged mishandling of national security materials and his role in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.

The politically explosive move comes just three days after Trump announced he is running for the White House yet again, despite a disappointing Republican performance in the midterm elections, especially among candidates backed by the ex-president.

………

Garland named Jack Smith, a veteran prosecutor and top former justice department official, to oversee the investigations into Trump as the justice department examines his role in retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence and in the effort to subvert the 2020 election.

………

Trump predictably attacked the move within hours, and complained about an “appalling decision today by the egregiously corrupt Biden administration” at a black-tie event Friday night after earlier telling Fox News’s digital arm: “It is not acceptable. It is so unfair. It is so political.”

I am using Trump's tears to season my soup.

………

But it was to allay those concerns, Garland said at the news conference, that he chose to appoint Smith to run the investigations. “Appointing a special counsel at this time is the right thing to do,” Garland said. “The extraordinary circumstances presented here demand it.”

………

At the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn, Smith helped prosecute a police brutality case that drew national attention and, in the 1970s, [sic, it was actually the 1990s, but fraud investigations of Trump are routing events] investigated Trump over possible fraud charges in a six-month inquiry that ended without charges.

Smith was also briefly involved in the prosecution of a CIA agent for disclosing national defense information and obstructing justice – crimes that echo potential charges against Trump, according to the warrant used by the FBI to search Mar-a-lago.

In a statement released by the justice department, Smith said: “I intend to conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice.

………

The appointment of a special counsel could indicate that the justice department has already accumulated substantial evidence of potential criminality by Trump and his allies, said Barbara McQuade, University of Michigan law school professor and former US attorney.

Your mouth to God's ears.

………

The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Biden had not been given any advance notice of Garland’s announcement. “No, he was not aware, we were not aware,” she said at a delayed press briefing. “The department of justice makes decisions about criminal investigations independently. We are not involved.”

I still don't expect to see Trump in the dock, but I can dream.

Pass the Popcorn

I still don't think that Donald Trump will ever see the inside of a jail cell, or face meaningful sanctions for fraud and tax evasion, but the the January 6 Committee subpoenaing him to testify, the Supreme Court refusing to come to his rescue with regard to his document mishandling at Mar-a-Lago, and the New York State Attorney General seeking an injunction to prevent his shifting assets away from their fraud investigation, it is amusing.

I say this understanding that the well being of the republic, and of our society, is largely orthogonal to my entertainment needs:

The House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, voted Thursday to subpoena testimony and documents from former president Donald Trump, a dramatic culmination of its year-and-a-half-long investigation, and a sign that the committee wants to continue its work beyond this Congress.

“This is a question about accountability to the American people,” Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said ahead of the vote. “He must be accountable.”

The unanimous vote came at the end of a meeting that also revealed new details about warnings from the Secret Service that armed supporters of Trump would go to the Capitol, with one agent describing that morning as the “calm before the storm.”

The question is whether Trump's need to be the center of attention overrides his self-preservation instinct.

The Supreme Court on Thursday refused to reinstate Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s order that a special master review classified documents taken in an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida home and private club.

There were no noted dissents to the court’s unsigned, one-sentence order. It amounted to a quick and sharp rejection of an emergency request by the former president to intervene in the high-profile document review, which is part of an ongoing criminal investigation of the potential mishandling of classified material after Trump left the White House.

The review is being done by special master Raymond J. Dearie, a federal judge in Brooklyn who was recommended for the job by Trump’s legal team. Trump’s lawyers asked for a review of all of the approximately 11,000 documents seized by the FBI to see whether any should be shielded from investigators because of attorney-client or executive privilege.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit put on hold Cannon’s order that 103 of the seized documents that bore classified markings should be part of Dearie’s review. It also reversed Cannon’s finding that the Justice Department could not continue its use of the classified documents in a criminal probe.

Notably, the 11th Circuit's justice is Clarence Thomas's circuit, and even he thought that there was no "there" there.

It's also possible that one of Thomas' clerks told him that if he intervened, then his wife Ginny would be subjected very deep scrutiny if he cut the Trumpster Fire some slack.

Days before the New York attorney general filed a lawsuit accusing Donald J. Trump and his company of fraud and seeking to shut down some of their business in the state, Mr. Trump’s lawyers created a new company in Delaware.

The new company’s name had a familiar ring to it: the Trump Organization, the same name as his old company, now threatened by the lawsuit. And on Sept. 21, the day the suit was filed, the new Delaware company filed paperwork in New York, seeking to be recognized there as the Trump Organization II.

Those maneuvers were detailed for the first time in a court filing on Thursday from the attorney general, Letitia James, who raised the prospect that Mr. Trump was seeking an end run around some of her lawsuit’s harshest potential punishments. By forming the new company, her filing said, the Trump Organization “now appears to be taking steps to restructure its business to avoid existing responsibilities under New York law,” raising concerns that the business might shift assets out of state.

But her filing acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had explicitly said they had not taken any steps to avoid the potential consequences of the lawsuit. Mr. Trump’s lawyers, according to the court filing, also offered to provide “assurances and advance notice” to address Ms. James’s concerns.

………

Ms. James, however, remained concerned about the company’s motives and sought intervention from a judge. Her Thursday filing requested an order from the judge that would prohibit the Trump Organization from transferring its assets without court approval.

“Since we filed this sweeping lawsuit last month, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization have continued those same fraudulent practices and taken measures to evade responsibility,” Ms. James said in a statement. “Today, we are seeking an immediate stop to these actions because Mr. Trump should not get to play by different rules.”

Yeah, Trump is trying to weasel out of his liability.  

This is, after all, a guy who has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy six (and still counting) times.

Pass the Popcorn

In not much more time than it takes to type this sentence, the Court of Appeals for the 11th circuit has ruled that Judge Aileen Cannon was full of crap when she requiring a special master to review document classification.

As I understand it, the special master will continue his work, but only on the documents not flagged as classified, and only to adjudicate whether or not attorney-client privilege is involved, and not for matters of executive privilege, which is a significant reduction of scope, but I need to add the caveat that I am an engineer, not a doctor, dammit!*

An appeals court sided with the Justice Department in a legal fight over classified documents seized in a court-authorized search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, ruling Wednesday that the FBI may use the documents in its ongoing criminal investigation.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the appeals court marks a victory, at least temporarily, for the Justice Department in its legal battle with Trump over access to the evidence in a high-stakes investigation to determine if the former president or his advisers mishandled national security secrets, or hid or destroyed government records.

………

n Wednesday night’s ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta found fault with Trump’s rationale that the classified documents seized on Aug. 8 might be his property, rather than the government’s. The appeals court also disagreed with the rationale used by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon in agreeing to have the classified documents reviewed by a special master to see if they should be shielded from investigators because of executive or attorney-client privilege.

“For our part, we cannot discern why [Trump] would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings,” the court wrote, noting that the stay it issued is temporary and should not be considered a final decision on the merits of the case.

………

The panel found particularly unpersuasive the repeated suggestions by Trump’s legal team that he may have declassified the documents — citing an appearance by Trump’s attorneys on Tuesday before special master Raymond Dearie, who pressed them to say whether the former president had acted to declassify the materials in question.

“Plaintiff suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was President. But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified. And before the special master, Plaintiff resisted providing any evidence that he had declassified any of these documents,” the panel wrote. “In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal.”

Prosecutors have said that two parts of her order — allowing the special master to review the roughly 100 documents that were marked classified and halting the criminal investigation surrounding those documents while the special master conducts a review — jeopardize national security interests.

Theoretically, the Trump lawyers could demand an en banc hearing of the appeals court, or they could appeal to the Supreme Court, but given that the special master, , has already shown that he finds the arguments made by Trump attorneys to be specious, I am not sure that they would gain anything from this but a delay.

Of course, the 11th circuit is covered by Clarence Thomas, and his corruption and hypocrisy is legion, so he might stay the order.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!