New Details Emerge On How Trump Already Weaponized DOJ The First Time
INSIDE: Liz Cheney ... Mark Robinson ... Elon Musk
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
The Best Predictor Of Trump II Is The Abuses Of Trump I
As we prepare for the very real possibility of Trump II and the abuses it would entail – as outlined in public statements by Trump himself, in Project 2025, and the fever dreams of MAGA acolytes – perhaps the best evidence of what we’re in for is what we already endured the first time around.
It remains remarkable that Trump’s abuses of the Justice Department, as serious as they were, wound up overshadowed by the two impeachments, both of which originated from his effort to cling to power, either through corruptly influencing the 2020 election (the First Impeachment) or ignoring the results altogether (the Second Impeachment). Only the Second Impeachment, in the cartoonish-yet-alarming Jeff Clark incident, touched on the myriad ways Trump weaponized the Justice Department and used its powers to target his perceived political enemies.
If you’re having trouble recalling all the ways in which DOJ’s independence, professionalism, and reputation were sullied by Trump’s depredations, the NYT offers a much-needed reminder in a tight, accessible and very on-point package it published over the weekend.
The lead story in the package, authored by reporter Michael S. Schmidt, includes new, never-before-reported details about efforts by the Trump White House Counsel’s Office to steer him away from even worse abuses of the Justice Department and to memorialize those efforts in a self-protective memo, drafts of which they reportedly snuck out of the White House for safekeeping. Your ass-covering memo doesn’t do you much good if it’s hidden away in a White House vault you can no longer access – or is simply destroyed.
A valuable sidebar to the main story is a list of some of the highest profile instances of Trump abusing DOJ to target people he considered threats. It’s a good refresher if time, ambiguity, and the sheer volume of Trump’s transgressions have overwhelmed your memory.
Finally, Schmidt runs through the key findings in a short video:
In Related News …
NYT: Trump’s Talk of Prosecution Rattles Election Officials
The Rules For 2024 Election Are Still Being Written
Georgia: The now-notorious Georgia Election Board issued a new rule requiring election workers to hand count the total number of ballots cast statewide (machines can still tabulate individual ballots at the precinct level). The rule change was opposed by the state attorney general and secretary of state, both Republicans, and is likely to be challenged in court as exceeding the board’s legal powers. The new rule is expected to cause hours of delay in announcing the election results, which is part of a broader GOP scheme to gum up the works in key states in hopes of creating chaos that Donald Trump can exploit if he is trailing in the election.
Nebraska: Donald Trump got personally involved in a renewed push to convince the Nebraska legislature to change the state’s Electoral College allocation to winner-take-all ahead of the November election.
Arizona: The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that 100,000 voters for whom there is no record of having provided proof of citizenship when they registered to vote will nonetheless be sent full ballots for the November election. “We are unwilling on these facts to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests,” the court held.
2024 Ephemera
Liz Cheney suggests that the Republican Party name may not be salvageable and a new conservative party may be needed.
NC-Guv: GOP nominee Mark Robinson is losing campaign staff in droves after last week’s CNN report, though its not clear why all his previous excesses hadn’t been sufficient reason to leave or never sign up in the first place.
Politico: Trump Defender Mike Davis Vows a ‘Reign of Terror’ — Is It All an Act?
Trump Still Slow-Rolling The Jan. 6 Case
After initially blowing their filing deadline and having to ask for permission to file late, Trump lawyers turned a relatively routine discovery-related motion in the Jan. 6 case into an extended re-argument of why U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan should dismiss the entire superseding indictment because of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
UPDATE: Trump Assassination Attempts
In a new court filing, prosecutors alleged that the would-be Trump assassin in the Florida golf course incident acknowledged in a prewritten note that he had planned the attack as an assassination.
Secret Service releases a terse five-page preliminary report about its failures in advance of the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.
GOP Gov’t Shutdown Watch
Congress has reached a deal on a clean CR that would avert a government shutdown by providing funding until Dec. 20, setting up another of those lame duck, holiday season shutdown cliff hangers that have become more the norm lately.
Elon Musk Is Just A Normal Guy Doing Normal Guy Things
What really concerned Musk, however, was that people weren’t retweeting him enough. Teams of engineers were assigned to solve the problem of reduced engagement with Musk’s tweets. Matters came to a head during the 2023 Super Bowl, when he obsessed over the fact that a tweet by Joe Biden received several times as many likes as his own. Nobody dared suggest that the world just found their boss easy to ignore. Engineers were summoned from their Super Bowl parties to headquarters to fix the problem, which they did with a new line of code: “author_is_elon”, a tag that forced everyone to pay even more attention to the richest man in the world.
Climate Watch
The tension between AI and climate goals: With the electricity demands of AI threatening to derail tech companies’ goals for reduced carbon emissions, Constellation Energy has reached a deal to reopen the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant by 2028 and sell all of its energy to Microsoft. “Never before has a U.S. nuclear plant come back into service after being decommissioned, and never before has all of a single commercial nuclear power plant’s output been allocated to a single customer,” WaPo reported.
Fast is not good: A new study of Earth’s climate over the last 485 million years finds that while the planet has been dramatically warmer and cooler than it is at present, its climate has never changed with the speed of the manmade climate change we are now witnessing.
Reuters: “Former President Donald Trump has said he would cancel all unspent funds from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law if he wins the presidential election on Nov. 5. But the vast majority of grants will be spent by the time a new president takes office in January, and targeting what remains would be a massive legal challenge, according to Biden administration officials.
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Great column. I especially appreciate the link to nytimes video.
Thank you again and again.
Finally, a decent NYT article bringing all the receipts in documenting tRump's wholesale abuse of the DOJ prosecuting arm. Since his indictments by SC Jack Smith, the "weaponization" charges by tRump gained him some support, and few gave much attention to how *actual* capture of "law enforcement" played out during tRump's presidency.
Michael Schmidt's work here is a real public service, and directs proper attention toward tRump's constant threats to go ballistic on his "enemies" once back in office. tRump is not joking, he's done it before, and promises to up the ante significantly as soon as he's sworn