Trump Watch: The Conservative Condition

The thing about Donald Trump—

One of former President Donald Trump's long-time assistants told federal investigators that Trump repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House that were marked classified, according to sources familiar with her statements.

As described to ABC News, the aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that -- more than once -- she received requests or taskings from Trump that were written on the back of notecards, and she later recognized those notecards as sensitive White House materials -- with visible classification markings -- used to brief Trump while he was still in office about phone calls with foreign leaders or other international-related matters.

(Faulders, Levine, and Mallin↱)​

—is that, while there is clearly a need to actually make a new thread, and eventually threads, for the indictments against him, the evidence against him is so vast that it will require substantial effort to gather it all. The case against him is only exceeded by the absurdity of the circumstance, that we should even be having these kinds of discussions at all. Just look at that lede.

And it actually gets a little bit stranger:

The notecards with classification markings were at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate when FBI agents searched the property on Aug. 8, 2022 -- but the materials were not taken by the FBI, according to sources familiar with what Michael told investigators.

When Michael, who was not present for the search, returned to Mar-a-Lago the next day to clean up her office space, she found the documents underneath a drawer organizer and helped transfer them to the FBI that same day, sources told ABC News.​

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Notes:

Faulders, Katherine, Mike Levine, and Alexander Mallin. "Trump wrote to-do lists for assistant on White House documents marked classified: Sources". ABC News. 18 September 2023. ABCNews.Go.com. 18 September 2023. https://bit.ly/44RV2tL

See Also:

Faulders, Katherine, John Santucci, and Alexander Mallin. "Top Trump campaign aide identified as key individual in classified docs indictment: Sources". ABC News. 28 June 2023. ABCNews.Go.com. 18 September 2023. https://bit.ly/44WDJYf

 

The Shadow Over Americana

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2020 campaign t-shirt, at left, with its apparent Nazi inspiration, right.​

As much as I would like to laugh, as American conservatives show their true selves, the only reason we did Nazi this coming would be if we somehow convinced ourselves it was beyond the pale of possibility.

Republicans have already achieved medical experimentation on children in concentration camps, and give Nazis voice in Congress.

And also remember: This is how badly Republicans want a civil war; they'll go Nazi in order to force other people to stop them, and when they complain of being oppressed, the New York Times will write another sympathetic article.

Insofar as it's not funny, the question is how badly our Republican neighbors really want that bloodshed.

In Missouri, ritual fires have begun, with a Republican gubernatorial candidate promising more book burnings if he is elected; two Republican state senators used actual flamethrowers, last week, for a burning demonstration.

It was all of July when America First, the neo-Nazi movement that Republican members of Congress, such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) and Paul Gosar (AZ-09), support, called for a holy war to eradicate Jews. And now rightist businessman and apartheid son Elon Musk seeks to turn a social media platform against Jews.

And it didn't come from nowhere; this sickness does not arise not ex nihilo. It's been with us for a long, long time. There are reasons why Nazis have always been able to find friends in these United States of America.

 

Fill-In Like a Villain

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​

If you're not watching the House GOP impeachment stunt, well, right.

Still, the part where Rep. Smith (R-MO08) asked, or, as the critic put it↱, rehearsed the wrong question is a useful indicator of how its going.

Smith: We know that over two million dollars of Hunter Biden's tax liabilities were paid off by a big Democrat party donor and Hollywood lawyer who is named Kevin Morris. James Biden, the President's brother, told investigators he did not know how Hunter Biden even knew this individual, but was later asked to thank him for the payment, quote, "on behalf of the family". The Biden family. The family. So, how would such payment, that essentially pushed under the rug the President's son's tax problems, at least for one year, be considered a campaign finance violation on the part of the Biden campaign?

Witness: Thank you for the question. I have no idea. I thought you were going to ask me why would Leslie Wolf say "don't look into that", and I think the answer to that probably is that if it's a campaign contribution, then it implicates Political Person Number One, and that, apparently, is a big barrier that had been created throughout this entire investigation.

And as far as it being a campaign contribution, that two million dollars actually was intended to satisfy the liabilities for two years of Hunter Biden's late-filed and unpaid taxes. Um.​

Note the setup to Smith's actual question; none of it actually supports the question, which is pretty straightforward and technical: How would certain money paid be considered a campaign finance violation? And the answer is "probably" that the money creates an implication that has been lacking in the investigation, "a big barrier" to moving forward. What does that passive language mean, "a big barrier that had been created"? We might wonder who created the barrier and how it works, because it sounds like an inherent barrier of investigation with prosecutorial intention, to connect the alleged impropriety to the alleged suspect. And, to be clear, while Republicans aren't quite sure what kind of hearing↱ they're conducting—a question of rules and procedure that aren't really so hard to answer as the House GOP pretends—we might reasonably expect that by the time we're ready to conduct an impeachment inquiry, yes, this connection between accused wrongdoing and suspect is supposed to be a little more apparent than grasping at uncertainty.

It should be noted that Rep. Smith did follow up by asking the question the witness was expecting:

Smith: Is it unusual for an assistant prosecutor to say don't ... don't look at this individual, this person's off limits?

Witness: As I mentioned in my opening statement, that is how investigations develop ....​

We might remind that Republicans used to be the political party arguing that government doesn't work. This spectacle is yet another exhibit in the catalog; when they said govermnent doesn't work, it wasn't an assessment or projection, but, rather, a threat.

The hardest thing to comprehend is that nobody is actually forcing Republicans to behave this way; it's all their own doing, by their own will.
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Notes:

@Acyn. "This is a great example of how prepared Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are". Twitter. 28 September 2023. Twitter.com. 28 September 2023. https://bit.ly/3LF9w9B

@MuellerSheWrote. "OMG they rehearsed the wrong questions Also, it's not a campaign contribution to Joe Biden to loan Hunter Biden money to pay his tax debts. This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen lol". Twitter. 28 September 2023. Twitter.com. 28 September 2023. https://bit.ly/3PZ1yL6