The trend is only continuing, according to Whitehouse. What he finds most troubling is an increase in the number of legal briefs, known as amicus briefs, that are filed without any financial disclosure to convince the justices to rule a certain way.

"The rule of the court purports to say that you can't hide behind a front group. There's almost no other situation in court where somebody is allowed to come in and not identify themselves, and yet there is conspicuous non-enforcement of that rule, and it deprives the public of seeing the coordination among the phony front groups," Whitehouse said, adding that he doesn't "understand why the court doesn't clean that up itself."

In the current term, hundreds of briefs tied to a slew of contentious cases have been filed to the Supreme Court. One highly-watched case, concerning a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, has attracted dozens of briefs that express support for or opposition to the law.

The thread running through Whitehouse’s spoken essays is that the current 6-3 conservative majority on the court is no accident but the product of special interests and dark money—hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending.

Whitehouse chose his title carefully. “It implies that this is not random,” he says. “This is not just, ‘Oh, we’re conservatives, and so we’re going to appoint conservative thinking judges,’ which is the veneer. They would like to maintain this is just conservatives being conservatives.”

He suggests that the model of “agency capture,” when an administrative agency is co-opted to serve the interests of a minor constituency, was applied to the supreme court. “Once you’re over that threshold of indecency, it actually turned out to be a pretty easy target. The other construct to bear in mind is covert operations, because essentially what’s happened is that a bunch of fossil fuel billionaires have run a massive covert operation in and against their own country. And that’s a scheme.”

A few months before the midterms, with pollsters spewing red wave predictions and post-Roe conservatives planning to force raped children to give birth, a bit of political news added to progressives’ gloom. A Chicago billionaire had gifted anti-abortion Supreme Court fixer Leonard Leo the largest known tranche of dark money in U.S. history: $1.6 billion. The sum is staggering; it will finance at least a generation of extreme right-wing political proselytizing. And almost no one—except for the conservative cabal that bagged the whale—had heard of him.

Pete Strzok
@petestrzok
Jun 9 • 5 tweets • 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
As bad as it is, it's quite possible the indictment does not include the most sensitive documents recovered from MAL. 🧵

The indictment charges 31 distinct classified documents (para 77):

21 Top Secret
9 Secret
1 unmarked

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0_2.pdf

1/
Those documents can be further defined by whether they were produced on June 3, 2022, in response to DOJ's subpoena vs seized during the search warrant on August 8, 2022 (see the ending date of offense for each item in para 77):

TS: 10 subpoena, 11 SW
S: 9 SW
Unmarked: 1 SW

2/
Image
Compare this with the total number seized.

Search (indictment para 75):
17 TS*
55 S
31 C

Subpoena (DOJ Aug 30 filing, link):
17 TS
16 S
5 C

Total classified:
34 TS (21 charged)
71 S (9 charged)
36 C (0 charged)

https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/government-response-to-motion-for-special-master-august-30-2022.pdf

* DOJ claimed 18 TS in a 9/26 filing

3/
DOJ recovered 13 TS documents which weren't charged.

Why? For each of the charged documents, DOJ has received authority from the agency owning the information (para 21 lists CIA, DOD, NSA, NGA, NRO, DOE, and State/INR) to use the material in criminal proceedings.

4/
Image
It's possible the remaining 13 were too sensitive: the risk to sources and methods and/or other damage to national security outweighed allowing their use and possible disclosure at trial.

So as you assess how damaging Trump's actions were, keep in mind it's probably worse.

/end

These bills are particularly salient to transgender people, who are twice as likely to serve in the military as cisgender people. According to the 2015 US Transgender Survey, one in five transgender people have reported serving in the military. Issues that target transgender people in the military and transgender veterans are especially harmful due to the large impact they have on the community.

THREAD: 1 of 6. Trump’s comparison of his case with Bill Clinton’s sock drawer is not only incorrect, it is nonsensical. Here’s why.

The Presidential Records Act says presidential records belong to the government, not the individual who served as president. …

2. Presidential records in general are those made by or for the president for use in official business. The statute contains detailed definitions of what is and is not a presidential record. …

3. Bill Clinton’s recordings were from his own interviews, qualifying as diaries, which the Presidential Records Act says are not presidential records. No law precluded Clinton from keeping them. …

4. Trump is charged not with violating the Presidential Records Act, but instead with violating the Espionage Act. The records Trump is alleged to have illegally retained are agency records, such as records of the CIA, NSA, and Department of Defense, not presidential records. …

5. Moreover, these records are covered by the Espionage Act because of their content—information about the national defense, which could be used to the injury of the United States or advantage of a foreign nation—US nuclear program, military capabilities of US & allies, etc. 😱…

6. And Trump is being charged not only because he kept them, but because he obstructed the investigation and lied about what he still retained. This is evidence of consciousness of guilt. If he really believed he could keep them, he would not have needed to lie about it. END.

According to the plaintiffs, President Bill Clinton “enlisted historian Taylor Branch to assist him in creating ‘an oral history of his eight years in office,'” the court decision said. “In 2009, Branch published a book entitled, ‘The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President,’ based upon extensive conversations with President Clinton during his tenure in the White House and the events Branch observed when he was in the President’s office.” [snip]

The judge found, “I am of the opinion that the audio tapes created by Taylor Branch are personal records of President Clinton as defined by the PRA.” [more - worth the long read]

Cannon assumed her position in November 2020 shortly after Trump lost the presidential election. Before her lifetime appointment, she had not served as a judge and had very few opportunities to preside over federal criminal cases because the overwhelming majority of them — 98 percent — resolve with plea deals.

A Times analysis found that only four of the 224 criminal cases assigned to Cannon had gone to trial. The four cases, largely comprised of routine matters including assaulting a prosecutor, amounted to just 14 total days of trial. [snip]

Several lawyers who have appeared before Cannon described her as "generally competent and straightforward" — as well as "someone who does not otherwise have a reputation of being unusually sympathetic to defendants." However, the sources, speaking anonymously to keep from publicly criticizing a judge before whom they may appear again, added that Cannon is "demonstrably inexperienced," particularly when unexpected issues arise or her actions are questioned.

Aileen M. Cannon, the Federal District Court judge assigned to preside over former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, has scant experience running criminal trials, calling into question her readiness to handle what is likely to be an extraordinarily complex and high-profile courtroom clash.

Judge Cannon, 42, has been on the bench since November 2020, when Mr. Trump gave her a lifetime appointment shortly after he lost re-election. She had not previously served as any kind of judge, and because about 98 percent of federal criminal cases are resolved with plea deals, she has had only a limited opportunity to learn how to preside over a trial.[snip]

At the same time, they said, she is demonstrably inexperienced and can bristle when her actions are questioned or unexpected issues arise. The lawyers declined to speak publicly because they did not want to be identified criticizing a judge who has a lifetime appointment and before whom they will likely appear again.

Years before megadonor Harlan Crow was reading ProPublica stories about his close ties with Clarence Thomas, often seen as maybe the most partisan justice on the Supreme Court, he was doling out donations and referring friends to No Labels, the outside group that claims to offer an avowedly nonpartisan approach to politics.

If some might see a contradiction there, it’s one that doesn’t seem to matter to either Crow or No Labels.

Crow’s participation in No Labels fundraisers and work expanding the group’s donor network illustrates how even as the group says it is driven only by bipartisanship, in actuality it is eager to associate with donors who like to hang out with powerful conservatives seemingly OK with skirting federal disclosure laws.

Even more scary, that the Trump Super Pac (Anything else they claim is bullshit) No Labels, will succeed in peeling off enough votes, to get Trump back to the presidency. Now for those that don’t know. No Labels claims it is an organization that supports centrist, bi-partisan policies and politics. It was established in 2010. It is a registered 501c(4) and does not disclose its donors. There is probably a good reason for that.

Because to close observers the supposedly sensible solutions often proposed by No Labels have an uncanny way of benefiting one particular element of our nation: the Hedge fund Billionaires , or more precisely, the finance industry. And when they aren’t looking for tax cuts for the wealthy, some of their brilliant “centrist policies” include things like requiring the unemployed to go the unemployment office to pick up their checks, and cracking down on disability insurance claimants. Nice huh?

In fact, if Rick Wilson and the Lincoln project are to be believed infamous Republican Mega Donor Harlan Crow is one of the biggest givers to this group.

Donations to No Labels are handled by an online fundraising platform called Anedot. According to its website, Anedot typically charges political groups a 4 percent fee plus 30 cents per transaction. Under that formula, when an online contributor sends No Labels $100, Anedot pockets $4.30. That money bolsters Anedot’s mission to raise funds for the right and the GOP. [snip]

But Anedot, according to Dietzel, thrived. In 2020, he told a conservative news site, “Anedot currently serves more than 1,500 Republican candidates and elected officials, and is the only privacy-focused payment processor built and owned by conservatives.” He added, “Anedot has more Republican customers than all other platforms combined—nearly all of whom support [Donald Trump].”

Anedot’s website boasts that it has processed billions of dollars in contributions since it started, and the groups it cites as key clients are conservative and religious organizations: Focus on the Family, the Susan B. Anthony List (a prominent foe of reproductive rights), the Thomas More Society (a conservative Catholic group that supported Trump’s election deniers), the Reformed Theological Seminary (which is “committed to the Bible as God’s inerrant Word”), and the International Alliance for Christian Education.

Ho joined the ACLU as director of its Voting Rights Project in 2013, leading the organization’s work challenging partisan gerrymandering and state laws that would restrict voting.

In 2018, he made his first Supreme Court argument in a successful challenge to the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Ho later argued a second case at the Supreme Court involving the census, Trump v. New York, in which a divided court ruled the challenge was premature.

The first case, Department of Commerce v. New York, was one of four ACLU challenges to Trump-era policies featured in the 2020 documentary “The Fight.” The film followed Ho from practicing for the oral argument in front of a hotel room mirror, to the moment he read the ruling to see how the justices came down.

During an interview in the film, Ho said he’d wanted to find something that would allow him to spend more time with family but abandoned that idea after the 2016 election. “If I’m not going to be a civil rights lawyer right now, in this moment, when?” Ho said.

Yet last’s week’s indictment may have pointed to Trump’s actual Achilles’ heel with his long adulatory base: The document unmasked him to be far more of a buffoon than a warrior.

As Domenech said after the special counsel’s indictment was unsealed, the document “reads … like a Coen Brothers script.” Any Big Lebowski fan immediately picked up on the allusion, which was not to “the Dude,” but to the ironically nicknamed Jeffrey “Big” Lebowski, an apparently rich and powerful millionaire, who lives surrounded by trophies demonstrating his power (including a picture with Nancy Reagan), but is eventually revealed to be a fool.

The Big Lebowski’s failed effort to turn “the Dude” into his dupe ends in failure, with Lebowski whining in frustration on the floor of his empty mansion. Jack Smith’s indictment similarly portrays Trump as a deposed emperor with no clothes.

While some have said that the indictment fails to explain Trump’s motive for his crimes, it’s hardly difficult to discern Trump’s state of mind: In the wake of his failed coup, Trump hoarded, and was determined to retain, tokens of his lost power. The very fact that Trump had no good reason to keep his hands on the trove of documents he stole only makes the episode more pathetic.

Melody 🌻 @fatedfire
Who were the ones that voted present? Why would 5 democrats vote that?
4:29 PM · Jun 14, 2023

ringwiss @ringwiss
·
31m
The five Democrats on the Ethics Committee have agreed to always vote Present on stuff like this, so as to not prejudice any investigation later conducted by the committee.

ringwiss @ringwiss
·
31m
BTW, the five Democrats waited until it was clear that the resolution would be tabled before they voted Present.