Aileen Cannon Tries To Run Out The Clock On Jack Smith’s Report
INSIDE: Rudy G ... Elon Musk ... Mark Z
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
The Saga Of The Jack Smith Report
The legal turmoil over the public release of Volume I of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report continued over the weekend, with U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon again weighing in despite lacking any jurisdiction over the Mar-a-Lago case, because it’s currently on appeal, or the Jan. 6 case in DC, over which she never had jurisdiction.
I’m not going to rehash the confusing series of filings and rulings here, but instead refer you to these good rundowns:
Steve Vladeck: “And just to say the quiet part out loud, the urgency here stems from the unspoken but universally held understanding that, if the January 6 volume hasn’t been publicly released by January 20, it won’t be.”
Joyce Vance: “Delay is ever Trump’s friend in legal proceedings, and the clock is ticking. A delay invoked by Judge Cannon and unchecked by the Eleventh Circuit, or one that happens at the Supreme Court if Trump’s allies appeal there, could, as a practical matter, end the possibility of release of the report.”
Chris Geidner: “The question now is what Garland; the Eleventh Circuit; and, if necessary, the Supreme Court or, if it comes to it, President Biden do about it.
Jack Smith Leaves Justice Department
After the fanfare of his appointment and then leading the two biggest criminal investigations of Donald Trump, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s departure from the Justice Department wasn’t announced but rather tucked into a footnote in a court filing Saturday: “The Special Counsel completed his work and submitted his final confidential report on January 7, 2025, and separated from the Department on January 10.”
Trump Sentenced For His Sole Criminal Conviction
ICYMI: TPM’s Josh Kovensky’s report from inside the courtroom during the sentencing of President-elect Donald Trump in the porn star hush money case.
Rudy G Held In Contempt For Second Time In A Week
CNN: Federal judge slams Rudy Giuliani as ‘outrageous and shameful’ as she holds him in contempt in 2020 election defamation case
Death Toll Rises To 24 In Los Angeles Fires
The toll from last week’s Los Angeles conflagrations rose to 24 as authorities continued to search Pacific Palisades and Altadena for remains. Extreme fire weather was forecast to return to the area this week.
GOP Ghouls Seize On LA Fires To Raise Debt Ceiling
Politico: “A group of House Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump talked about tying wildfire aid to a debt ceiling increase Sunday night, as the fires spreading across huge swaths of Los Angeles are estimated to become one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.”
A Sobering Read
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, the authors of the new book The Origins of Elected Strongmen, writing in Politico:
We’ve studied democratic erosion in countries around the world, and our research has found that the most important bulwark against an elected leader undermining democracy doesn’t come from opposition parties or pro-democracy activists. It comes from the ruling party — and particularly the powerful elites in that party — and their efforts to constrain their own leader.
The danger to democracy is particularly acute in political systems led by parties where leaders wield disproportionate influence relative to the political parties that back them — as is now the case in the Republican Party. Our data on all democratically elected leaders around the globe in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War show that where leaders dominate the parties they lead, the chances of democratic backsliding increase, whether it’s through gradual democratic decay or a rapid collapse
A Profile In Some Courage
One Republican state Supreme Court judge stands up to his partisan North Carolina colleagues.
IMPORTANT
Michael Hirsh: “According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.”
And So It Begins …
AP: “Incoming senior Trump administration officials have begun questioning career civil servants who work on the White House National Security Council about who they voted for in the 2024 election, their political contributions and whether they have made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by President-elect Donald Trump’s team, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.”
Good Read
I fear that, after so many years of Trumpism shaping American politics and culture, a lot of people have become so inundated with Trump’s bizarre stunts, so accustomed to his outrageous rhetoric, that they might be numb to how dangerous this is – and how much this isn’t just “Trump being Trump,” but the face of a radicalizing Right in charge of the Republican Party. There is, unfortunately, no law of nature that says democracy can’t be brought down and wars can’t be started by a bunch of clowns if they have enough support from people, parties, and institutions who enable them. It’s all just a farce – until the goons and buffoons are in power. And that’s where we are.
The Trump II Clown Show
WSJ: In Reversal, Tulsi Gabbard Backs Spying Power in Bid to Win Senate Support
The Schedule: Whose Confirmation Hearings Are On Tap This Week
WSJ: Hegseth Preps for Contentious Confirmation Hearing With Republican Help
Manafort Is Still Manaforting
NYT: “Four years after receiving a pardon from President Donald J. Trump for crimes related to foreign lobbying, Paul Manafort is again seeking business from political interests abroad.”
Elon Musk Watch
NYT: Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs
WaPo: DOGE is dispatching agents across U.S. government
Wired: Elon Musk’s Quest for Domination Has Gone Global
NYT: Elon Musk Hijacks U.K. Politics in Favor of the Far Right
Mark Zuckerberg Is On Quite A Roll
Bloomberg: Zuckerberg Says Most Companies Need More ‘Masculine Energy’
CNBC: Meta announces end of DEI programs
Semafor: Trump, Zuckerberg meet at Mar-a-Lago
404 Media: ‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes
NYT: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era
Satire Is On Life Support
Biden DOJ Tries To Make Small Amends For Tulsa Massacre
WSJ:
In the weeks after the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which white mobs burned the Oklahoma city’s vibrant Black neighborhood to the ground, a federal agent quickly concluded that the attack that left as many as 300 people dead wasn’t motivated by “racial feeling,” and its perpetrators hadn’t broken any laws.
More than a century later, the Justice Department has sought to correct that flawed record, writing in a report made public this week that the rampage wasn’t the result of spontaneous mob violence but rather a coordinated, military-style effort to ruin what was then one of the wealthiest Black communities in the U.S.
You can read the new DOJ report here.
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Joe Biden should simply call *Judge* Cannon's bluff and order his useless AG to make public the reports forthwith, no effing about. Biden has both the authority AND the " immunity" to do as he pleases, so he could do no less by releasing Smith's two volumes, as a last-minute compensation for the dilatory - not to say feckless - actions of Merrick Garland the past four years.
Biden has spent the last year rabbiting on about tRump's "threat to democracy", and here's the former's big opportunity to lay ALL the facts out explaining why and how - these are the facts that were denied presentation to a jury...get on with it, Joe, the clock is ticking, ffs!
Re the Politico thing: the GOP has no incentive to check Trump because they’ve been working towards the state we’re in now for decades. He’s giving them what they want on 5he national level. (Also happening albeit differently on the state level.) Maybe the big tell is that the Roberts court has been going all partisan junta since the Obama administration ie before Trump.
As for the Smith report: Sleepy Joe can use his SCOTUS-granted immunity and order its release, then Cannon can drag someone’s ass into court and explain why she doesn’t need any authority or power to issue a binding order. Bonus: the resulting 11th circuit and SCOTUS decisions would be bangers. Of course, more preferred would be the spirit of Daniel Ellsberg taking control of a DOJ minion to leak the whole smear. OTOH, the problem is that it’s not 1971 and the media would do Trump yet another solid and refuse to make the report available.