Trump gave his first interview to Roger Stone for his new radio show DONALD TRUMP (GUEST): I tell you what, they must hate – these Democrats, these crazy lunatic Democrats like deranged Jack Smith. He’s a deranged person, in my opinion. His wife hates me more than he does. You got to see what the wife – the wife hates Trump more than she hates Trump more than any human being who’s ever lived. And it’s a shame. It’s a shame that we can have this because we did a great job with borders, with taxes, with – with everything. I mean, we did a great job with everything that people can hate so much, but I believe they hate our country. ROGER STONE (HOST): Mr. President, many of your supporters intend to go to the Miami courthouse on Tuesday to demonstrate their support for you and to protest what they see as unfair and politically motivated charges. I urge all of your supporters … that if they decide to go, it is essential that they keep it peaceful, civil, and legal. … Do you have a message for those who may be planning to go to just to demonstrate their support for you? TRUMP: I do. We need strength in our country now.
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Tucker Carlson has a very lame new “twitter show”. I think he and his lawyers think they can make the case that because it’s on social media instead of TV he’s not breaking his non-compete clause. He’s just a guy sharing his opinions and talking to his friends, amirite? We’ll see how that goes. Fox is fighting it: Fox News has demanded that Tucker Carlson stop posting videos to Twitter, escalating the dispute between the network and its former star host over how — and if — he can continue to speak publicly now that his prime-time show is off the air. In a letter sent to Mr. Carlson from Fox lawyers, the network accused him of violating the terms of his contract, which runs until early 2025 and limits his ability to appear in media other than Fox. The letter is labeled “not for publication,” in all caps. Since Mr. Carlson was ousted by Fox News, he has begun producing a bare-bones version of his Fox program, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and posting it directly to Twitter.
Axios Republican voters remain overwhelmingly loyal to former President Trump after he was charged with several federal crimes related to his possession of classified documents after his presidency, recent polls show. Why it matters: Despite the charges, Trump is still the favorite for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, according to recent polling. Even some of his fellow candidates have lent support to Trump and questioned the motivation behind the indictment. By the numbers: An ABC News/Ipsos survey published on Sunday found that 80% of polled Republicans said they believe the charges against Trump are politically motivated, while only 9% of GOP voters said they didn’t see politics in the charges. Separately, in a CBS News/YouGov poll published on Sunday, 61% of polled Republican voters said the indictment did not change the way they viewed Trump, while 80% of Republicans said he should still be able to assume office if he’s convicted and wins the 2024 presidential election. The CBS News/YouGov poll also found 76% of Republican voters believe the charges were motivated by politics.
There’s pandering and then there’s pandering The Fuehrer may not be around but how about the Kracken lady, Sidney Powell? I hear she’s at liberty. Or maybe that anti-abortion zealot down in Texas Matthew Kacsmaryk. He’s definitely the Alito and Thomas extremist level. I’m sure DeSantis’ idol Donald Trump put some others on the bench that are even worse if he looks hard enough! This woman seems like an especially good fit: The San Francisco lawyer Harmeet Dhillon is a fixture on Fox News who has garnered support from the likes of Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham; she also helms a non-profit that appears to have directed more than $1m into her law firm, Dhillon Law Group. Dhillon most recently made headlines when she signed on to represent Carlson in a gender discrimination lawsuit he and Fox News face from former producer Abby Grossberg. She also acted as an attorney for Donald Trump and former Project Veritas head James O’Keefe, who in 2021 sued Twitter for banning him.
Four years ago, the Trump administration DOJ prosecuted this fellow and he got 9 years in prison: A former National Security Agency contractor who pleaded guilty to stealing vast troves of classified material over the course of two decades has been sentenced to nine years in prison. Harold Martin III, 54, apologized before U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett handed down the sentence on Friday. “My methods were wrong, illegal and highly questionable,” Martin told the court in Baltimore, according to The Associated Press. Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to “willful retention of national defense information,” a crime that carries a punishment of anywhere from no jail time to a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. His plea agreement called for a sentence of nine years in prison. Martin, who at the time worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, began to accumulate classified documents in his vehicle and at his home in Glen Burnie, Md., in the late 1990s. The Navy veteran held a Top Secret security clearance. He was arrested in August 2016, and the documents were found when the FBI searched his residence.
That’s how I’m describing what will happen at the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. US Courthouse. The MSM headline won’t call them terrorists or mention the guns they will be carrying concealed. And the hostage isn’t Trump, it’s counter protestors, “Antifa”, journalists covering the event and law enforcement. They are focusing on some of same targets as January 6th. The Trump supporters are even busing their supporters in like they did on on January 6th. (It doesn’t look like Charlie Kirk is behind the buses this time, but has anyone talked to Ginni Thomas?) The other hostage is the American public and our sense of feeling safe at protests. When people are armed, deadly violence could happen at any second. It’s not a peaceful protest anymore, it’s a hostage situation. We KNOW that cops prepare for and treat armed people differently, especially those with a history of violence. When the media knows that there will be armed people there, THEY need to talk about this differently. And ask some different questions, like: Will the FBI be arresting people “left of boom” Monday? There should be arrests!
I think we knew that a federal indictment of former president Donald Trump would elicit a collective primal scream from the right wing fever swamp and they have not disappointed. And in true Trump era fashion, the response from most elected Republicans has been a collective whine about “unfairness” and the “weaponization” of the “deep state.” Some have even gone so far as to at least hint around that it’s a nice little country we have here, be a shame if anything happened to it. I would expect nothing less. This is how they roll. There are a few dissenters from that party line. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney put out a statement saying that Trump “brought this on himself” and it’s “consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest” which is true. Former Gov. Chris Christie said “these facts are devastating” which is also true. But these and a handful of others are outliers among GOP elected officials. One very significant former GOP official has come out swinging, however: There are a number of defenses out there.
Like Nazis stumping for him Meanwhile, he is still an ass: On Saturday and Sunday, a group of 15 to 20 protesters donned Nazi symbols and chanted antisemitic slurs along the North Alafaya Trail in Orlando. According to videos that quickly circulated across social media, the protesters gave Nazi salutes, yelled “White power!”, waved an anti-Biden banner and at one point got into a brawl with a driver. The protests have been met with disgust from Democrats and Republicans alike. However, DeSantis did not publicly condemn the marchers until Monday during a press conference, and then largely to deflect blame on to his political opponents. “So what I’m going to say is these people, these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that, we’re not playing their game,” he said.
“plans for high-value-target killings by Prince’s mercenaries” Someone on Twitter in mid-May claimed that Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy had been indicted for arms trafficking in (of all places) Austria. I never saw any other mention of it until this morning. So, for those suffering a little Trump fatigue, apparently “the Elon Musk of the privatization of war” was indicted “with four other individuals in Austria on April 20 for exporting war materials without a license back in 2014 and 2015,” writes Ann Marlowe at The Bulwark: The indictment accuses Prince of using an aircraft-customizing company in which he then held a controlling interest, the Wiener Neustadt-based Airborne Technologies, to retrofit two American cropdusters that were then to be shipped illegally overseas. The charges overlap 2021 United Nations allegations that Prince had in 2019 violated the U.N. arms embargo on Libya in an aborted operation called Project Opus, financed by the United Arab Emirates to the tune of $80 million in support of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, head of one of the two perpetually contesting governments in Libya.
When it comes to campaigning, Democrats are conservatives Self-identified independent voters are not, not really, argues Alex Shephard at The New Republic. They are leaners, 49 percent of Americans per a recent Gallup poll. They lean toward one of the major parties or the other. They just eschew the branding. It’s not a new argument, but it’s fashionable. “By far the dominant U.S. party isn’t Democrats or Republicans,” wrote Mike Allen of Axios. “It’s: ‘I’ll shop around, thank you.’” Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz told TNR, “There’s a reluctance to openly identify oneself as a partisan and to say, come right out and say, ‘I think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat.’” Shephard explains: Self-described independents and leaners do have one thing in common. “Even among people who identify with a political party … the trend is in their disdain for the other party,” said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, or IPPSR, and professor of political science at Michigan State University.