I’m reminded of this interview with Graham after he lost. He’s lying. He just thinks Trump is the best chance for Republican power and he doesn’t care how he does it: Sen. Lindsey Graham told “Axios on HBO” that Donald Trump has a “dark side” but he tries to “harness the magic” because he succeeded where Republican candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney failed. Why it matters: The South Carolina Republican gyrates between support and criticism of the former president, even after Trump harshly criticized McCain — Graham’s longtime friend — and helped spark the Capitol insurrection. “What I’m tryin’ to do is just harness the magic,” Graham told Axios’ Jonathan Swan. “To me, Donald Trump is sort of a cross between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan and P.T. Barnum.” “He could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know can make it. He can make it bigger. He can make it stronger. He can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it,” Graham said.
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His lawyer says he’s not actually going to do that. Here’s a report on his deposition testimony. I don’t think it helped him. He should probably shut his piehole: Before his infamous “grab them by the p—-” remark in the “Access Hollywood” tape, then-candidate Donald Trump told Billy Bush: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” Trump doubled-down on those lines during his deposition on E. Jean Carroll’s rape allegations. “Historically, that’s true, with stars,” Trump testified. “Well what’s what if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true not always but largely true, unfortunately or fortunately.” Originally recorded in October 2022, the video deposition was shown to a jury on Thursday. The jury will only hear Trump on video, as he is not planning to appear in person. In a brief passage, Trump sat expressionless as the “Access Hollywood” tape roles in the corner of the frame, marking the second time the jury saw it played.
Tarrio’s going away along with his cohorts: Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three other members of the far-right extremist group were convicted Thursday of a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol in a desperate bid to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 presidential election. A jury in Washington, D.C., found Tarrio guilty of seditious conspiracy after hearing from dozens of witnesses over more than three months in one of the most serious cases brought in the stunning attack that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, as the world watched on live TV. It’s a significant milestone for the Justice Department, which has now secured seditious conspiracy convictions against the leaders of two major extremist groups prosecutors say were intent on keeping Democratic President Joe Biden out of the White House at all costs. The charge carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Tarrio, behind bars since his March 2022 arrest, didn’t appear to show any emotion as the verdict was read. He hugged one of his lawyers and shook the hand of the other before leaving the courtroom.
This one is a long time right wing operative as well: Federal prosecutors have charged a former F.B.I. agent with 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. ‘ He seems nice. This is an interesting trajectory. I have to wonder how many people like him opted to stay in the FBI. More than we think, I’d guess. From 2004 to 2017, Mr.
Memories… President Donald Trump on Friday extolled the debt ceiling as “a sacred element of our country” that should never be wielded as a bargaining chip in budget talks — despite urging Republican lawmakers to do just that 6½ years ago. “That’s a very, very sacred thing in our country, debt ceiling. We can never play with it. So I would have to assume we’re in great shape,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. The president’s remarks come as White House officials, led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, home in on a two-year budget agreement with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) that would raise the national debt limit. “When I first came into office,” Trump said, “I asked about the debt ceiling. … And I said, I remember to Sen. Schumer and to Nancy Pelosi, ‘Would anybody ever use that to negotiate with?’ They said, ‘Absolutely not.’” The president added: “That’s a sacred element of our country.
He killed that man. This is the sort of rhetoric I see on Next Door frequently. But I haven’t seen anyone suggest that the mentally ill should be ground up as dog food. Yet. It doesn’t sound like the man was threatening anyone. The 24-year-old passenger stepped in after the vagrant, identified by sources as Jordan Neely, 30, began going on an aggressive rant on a northbound F train Monday afternoon, according to police and a witness who took the video. “He starts to make a speech,” freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez said in Spanish during an interview Tuesday, referring to the disturbed man. “He started screaming in an aggressive manner,” Vazquez told The Post. “He said he had no food, he had no drink, that he was tired and doesn’t care if he goes to jail. He started screaming all these things, took off his jacket, a black jacket that he had, and threw it on the ground.” That’s when he said the straphanger came up behind Neely and took him to the ground in a chokehold — keeping him there for some 15 minutes, Vazquez said.
Charlie Sykes had a good column today about the astonishing fact that the GOP front runner is on trail for rape and there is a legion of other women who have credibly accused him of assault: By the latest count, 26 (!) women have accused Trump of sexual assault or misconduct. Here’s the full list. […] Now we hear that Trump plans to skip the Carroll trial, passing up a chance to testify, or to deny the charges under oath. Let’s try to put this into some context: It is hard impossible to imagine that someone with more than two dozen accusations of sexual assault would be able to survive in any other realm of American society: business, entertainment, sports, the military, even politics. We save our lowest standards for the presidency. As we now know, the charges of assault — and rape — are not disqualifying for the GOP; since the release of the Access Hollywood tape, the charges have barely been a factor. Now, they hardly even register. In the right-wing media, the women have been thoroughly memory-holed. Philip Bump notes: Seven times. But, to be fair, it’s not just Fox News.
Just three media groups dominate the national newspaper market – and help shape our political narrative, while the Government has failed to act against 'lawfare', a new report finds
The rise and fall of digital pioneers Ben Smith is making the rounds to promote his new book, “Traffic.” The proprieter of the shuttering BuzzFeed News told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tuesday night he did not aniticpate, in its infancy, what digital media would do to legacy media and politics. The pursuit of clicks contained in the BuzzFeed name came to define the goal of social media. That business model was the digital equivalent of “if it bleeds, it leads.” I recall once sitting in a packed Netroots Nation workshop on writing clickbait headlines to attract eyeballs before clickbait was a word and swiftly became a four-letter one. Smith did not forsee in those days what the lefties’ tech tools that gave rise to Jezebel or Huffington Post would become in the hands of the radical right. I recall, too, that Right Online, the onetime conservative shadow to Netroots, was thought a joke by our younger attendees. Right Online seemed a collection or hopelessly unhip retirees in the digital age trying still learning to turn on a computer and manipulate a cursor. That was then.
In a sea of crazy Like being dipped in living waters. That’s what it’s like anymore to hear an actual expert testify on Capitol Hill instead of partisan shills. Imagine hearings without grandstanding and hectoring from Republicans such as those on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “World’s greatest deliberative body,” indeed. Roll Call: Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee spent a hearing Tuesday making the case for legislation that would put the Supreme Court under an ethics code if the justices didn’t do so themselves, but witnesses were split as to whether Congress has the power to do so. The backers of proposed bills argued that the justices have waited for too long to impose their own ethics code, exemplified by recent reports about undisclosed luxury trips and a real estate transaction Justice Clarence Thomas received from a billionaire GOP donor. Amanda Frost, a University of Virginia Law School professor, testified that the Constitution is silent about the internal workings of the Supreme Court and instead left it to Congress to establish the court’s size, budget and rules like a quorum.