Evening Headlines for Wednesday, May 3, 2023
🗽A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson
🗽A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson
WABE: Fulton D.A. talks Trump investigation, with charging decisions expected this summer: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis says she was paying attention last month when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted former President Trump in a case related to hush money payments around the 2016 campaign. “Well, certainly the citizens that elected the D.A. in Fulton have a district attorney that pays attention, so let’s just say I paid attention,” she said in an interview with WABE on Tuesday. Willis plans to announce charging decisions this summer following her investigation into efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election.
New York Times: Trump Will Offer No Defense in Rape Trial, His Lawyer Says: A lawyer defending former President Donald J. Trump against the writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing him of rape said Wednesday that he would present no witnesses. The lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, had earlier told the judge that Mr. Trump would not come to court to testify in the civil case. Mr. Trump, who is again running for president, traveled to Scotland this week to open a new golf course. On Wednesday, speaking out of the jury’s presence, Mr. Tacopina told Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan that an expert witness the defense had hoped to call on Mr. Trump’s behalf was not available. Even without witnesses, Mr. Trump’s lawyers can still use testimony they elicited during cross-examinations of Ms. Carroll and people who testified on her behalf when they make their closing argument to the jury.
Washington Post: CNN and Trump set aside beef for ‘town hall,’ and both draw fire for it: Donald Trump has spent the better part of the past seven years badmouthing CNN, attacking its reporters as “enemies of the people” and calling its reporting “fake news.” He once tried banning one of its journalists from the White House. He routinely mocks its eroding ratings. Yet, on Monday, CNN offered to put Trump on the air live for an hour in prime time — and Trump accepted. Proving that bygones can be bygones, CNN lined up Trump for its first “town hall” telecast of the 2024 presidential campaign. The twice-impeached, once-indicted former president will take questions from Republican and undeclared voters in a CNN-produced event next Wednesday in New Hampshire, the state that will hold the first Republican primary next year.
Vanity Fair: E. Jean Carroll’s Quest for Justice and the Carnage of Donald Trump’s Misogyny: Last week, my friend, 79-year-old writer E. Jean Carroll, began testifying in her civil case against the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. She was able to bring these accusations of rape to court because of a new New York state law, the Adult Survivors Act, which gave Carroll a yearlong window to sue despite her case being out of the statute of limitations. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the law in 2022; it’s hard to imagine that Trump’s political ascension and the #MeToo revelations that followed weren’t in some way responsible for this legal sea change. So perhaps it’s fitting that this same law is now being used to attempt to hold Trump accountable.
Fox News: FLASHBACK: Alvin Bragg invoked race while comparing Trump to Epstein, Weinstein: 'Rich old White man': The Manhattan district attorney who is prosecuting former President Trump for alleged campaign finance violations compared him to sex criminals Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein during his 2021 campaign. In January 2021, as he was campaigning for district attorney, Alvin Bragg argued that "being a rich, old White man has allowed you to evade accountability" in the New York City borough, and that he would make sure to hold Trump "accountable" if elected. "We got two standards of justice," he said during a radio interview on WQHT. "Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein – being a rich, old White man has allowed you to evade accountability in Manhattan. That includes Trump and his children — they were engaged in fraud in a SoHo real estate deal with his children."
Slate: The Supreme Court’s Ethics Issues Are Not All Created Equal: Tuesday morning’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the need to create a binding set of formal ethics rules for the U.S. Supreme Court sounded all sorts of familiar notes. There was some throaty hollering that Sen. Chuck Schumer made the Supreme Court unethical by quoting Justice Brett Kavanaugh at Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and some angry but inscrutable ranting about the liberal media’s complicity in the Dobbs leak. Republicans’ defenses of an Imperial Court that operates on the theory that the justices’ ethics are the justices’ business were either deflections or arguments that justices are essentially infallible gods. The deflections are not worth parsing. The ideology—that the court is the one branch of government so lofty and perfect and sacred that it need not abide by any rules—is very on-brand for the current GOP. So are the lies designed to make the liberal justices look equally complicit in this mess.
The HIll: The longest-serving SCOTUS justices make a compelling case for term limits: Several years ago, a prominent American political figure uttered words to the effect that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue in New York and not have to answer for it. It worked that way for several years, but he was brought short four years later when he had to face the people in a subsequent election. Accountability for public servants was built into our political system, but the safeguards have utterly failed when it comes to our nation’s highest court. Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) can engage in behavior that would have curled the hair of our founding fathers, without having to answer for their misconduct in office.
New York Magazine: All the Texts Fox News Didn’t Want You to Read: In April, just as Dominion Voting Systems’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News was going to trial, Fox settled the case with a $787.5 million payment. Days later, in shocking news that may or may not be directly related to revelations the Dominion lawsuit uncovered, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, its biggest star. Dominion had accused Fox personalities of repeatedly airing debunked election-fraud theories involving Dominion’s voting machine used in the 2020 election. Dominion would have had to prove that Fox News hosts knowingly disseminated falsehoods to their viewers. To that end, the company subpoenaed extensive internal text messages and emails from and between prominent names in the Fox News infrastructure, including Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Rupert Murdoch himself.
Variety: Tucker Carlson’s Racist ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight’ Text Led to Fox News Firing — Report: Tucker Carlson, the recently-axed Fox News host, sent a text to a producer which was the beginning of the end of his relationship with the network, according to a New York Times report. The cruel and racist text was redacted from court filings submitted as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which resulted in the conservative network settling for $787.5 million dollars. The text, which was sent on Jan. 7, 2021, hours after Trump supporters attacked the United States Capitol, described a scene Carlson found distressing, in which he said “Trump guys” beat up an “Antifa kid.” But the part that upset him was that “it was three against one,” and “it’s not how white men fight.”
Financial Times: America’s anything-goes Supreme Court: Here is an example of Washington’s penny-wise pound-foolishness: US federal officials fearful of ethics rules split any outside lunch bill, however small; a US Supreme Court justice, on the other hand, feels free to accept millions of dollars in hospitality and gifts, including a home for his mother, without disclosing it — even though it comes from a donor with a clear agenda. It is almost impossible to remove a lifetime-appointed justice from America’s apex court. Who would dare judge the judges? Nothing better captures the fragility of America’s democracy than the impunity of its Supreme Court. The people may revile their lawmakers, throw proverbial eggs at their president and hold the media in contempt. As long as the law is respected, however, the system will hold. John Roberts, the chief justice, famously said that judges were like umpires. “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them.” No baseball crowd would tolerate a biased umpire.
New York Times: Former F.B.I. Agent Charged in Jan. 6 Riot: Federal prosecutors have charged a former F.B.I. agent illegally entering the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot and said he had called police officers Nazis as he encouraged a mob of Trump loyalists to kill them. The former agent, Jared L. Wise, was arrested on Monday and faces four misdemeanor counts, including disrupting the orderly conduct of government and trespassing, after agents received a tip in January 2022 that he had been inside the Capitol, according to a criminal complaint. Mr. Wise, 50, told the police they were like the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s feared secret police, the complaint said. When violence erupted, he shouted in the direction of rioters attacking the law enforcement officers, “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” Mr. Wise raised his arms in celebration after breaching the Capitol in a face mask, and he escaped through a window, the complaint added.
CNN: Special counsel sat in on Pence’s testimony to federal grand jury: Special counsel Jack Smith sat in on the federal grand jury proceeding while former Vice President Mike Pence testified for more than five hours last week, three sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. Smith and Pence interacted while Pence was at the courthouse, and one source described the interaction as respectful. Smith’s appearance is the first known time the special counsel has attended a grand jury proceeding in the investigation. Smith is leading the criminal probe with a team of prosecutors into the aftermath of the 2020 election and efforts to overturn the results. Pence was poised to recount for the first time under oath his direct conversations with Trump leading up to January 6, 2021. Then-President Donald Trump repeatedly pressured him unsuccessfully to block the 2020 election results, including on the morning of January 6 in a private phone call.
New York Times: Jim Marchant, a Nevada Election Denier, Announces Senate Run: Jim Marchant, a vocal election denier and Trump ally who lost his bid for Nevada’s secretary of state in last year’s midterm elections, declared his candidacy on Tuesday for the Senate in a swing state contest that could decide control of the chamber in 2024. Mr. Marchant, a Republican, is seeking to challenge Senator Jacky Rosen, a moderate Democrat who is in her first term. No other high-profile Republicans have entered the contest so far. During last year’s midterm elections, Mr. Marchant helped organize a national “America First” slate of secretary of state candidates, a group of right-wing election deniers whose campaigns centered on re-litigating baseless voter fraud claims. All but one of the candidates were rejected by voters. The once-obscure election oversight post has taken on heightened significance since the 2020 election. In Mr. Marchant’s race, he did not appear to concede.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Kemp signs ban on donating money to Georgia election offices: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law a ban on donations to county election offices Wednesday, making it a felony for local governments to accept money from nonprofit organizations that gave millions of dollars during the 2020 presidential election. Limiting outside election money became a priority among Republicans in Georgia and across the country after the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which was funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, contributed more than $400 million to election offices nationwide during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. About $45 million of that money was given to local election offices in Georgia. Georgia is the 24th state since the 2020 election to adopt a law to prohibit, limit or regulate private funding to run elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. “Senate Bill 222 builds on previous law to ensure that our election operations are never bought and paid for by partisan or special interests,” said former Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, founder of the voter registration organization Greater Georgia. “This critical measure levels the playing field for election boards across our state and safeguards them from outside influence.”
The Guardian: New video reveals Tucker Carlson’s coarse remark about Dominion lawyer:
Tucker Carlson called a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems a “slimy motherfucker” who “triggered” him in a lengthy deposition last August. The now fired Fox News host made the comments in new on-set footage published on Wednesday by Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog critical of Fox News which has published a string of such videos. Carlson made the comments on set, wearing the same clothes he did on his 26 August 2022 show, the day he was deposed in the Dominion case, Media Matters said. “Holy shit, 10 hours,” Carlson says in the video. “That slimy little motherfucker sitting across from me. The amount, it was so unhealthy … the hate that I felt for that guy.”
New York Times: In Blow to DeSantis, Florida Bills to Limit Press Protections Are Shelved: Legislation that would have sharply curbed press protections in Florida has stalled in the State Legislature and won’t face a vote this year — a rare example of forces on the right thwarting a piece of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s agenda. The bills, introduced in February, proposed sweeping changes to laws that shield media outlets from liability in defamation cases and sought to make it easier for private citizens to file libel suits. Mr. DeSantis has been outspoken in advocating for laws he says would “hold these big media companies accountable.” But Mr. DeSantis, a Republican typically known for having his finger on the pulse of the right, appears to have misjudged the issue. In addition to opposition from news outlets and free-speech groups, the legislation faced a wave of resistance from his allies, including right-wing media outlets, Christian organizations and business groups. They argued that the legislation would harm all news media, including conservative outlets, and lead to an increase in frivolous and costly lawsuits.
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