We begin with Patrick Marley, Josh Dawsey, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, and Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post and their report of the imminent charges that will be filed against Number 45 for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The proliferation of charges and expected charges marks the most extensive effort yet to hold accountable those who attempted to help Trump remain in office after he lost the election. And because they come as the former president makes vindication a central pillar of his 2024 campaign, experts say they will mark an extraordinary test of the nation’s criminal justice system and political institutions. [...] Smith’s sprawling Jan. 6 investigation has involved dozens of Trump advisers, Republican officials, lawyers and other allies appearing in front of a grand jury that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Washington. The sessions have often served as a way to get Trump’s own people to dispute his claims about the 2020 vote. The grand jury has been presented with unsupported conspiracy theories that were promoted by Trump, as well as reports commissioned by his team that dispute those claims. One person with direct knowledge of the grand jury’s activities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said some of the sessions seem intended to disprove Trump’s election falsehoods once and for all.
The proliferation of charges and expected charges marks the most extensive effort yet to hold accountable those who attempted to help Trump remain in office after he lost the election. And because they come as the former president makes vindication a central pillar of his 2024 campaign, experts say they will mark an extraordinary test of the nation’s criminal justice system and political institutions. [...]
Smith’s sprawling Jan. 6 investigation has involved dozens of Trump advisers, Republican officials, lawyers and other allies appearing in front of a grand jury that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Washington. The sessions have often served as a way to get Trump’s own people to dispute his claims about the 2020 vote.
The grand jury has been presented with unsupported conspiracy theories that were promoted by Trump, as well as reports commissioned by his team that dispute those claims. One person with direct knowledge of the grand jury’s activities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said some of the sessions seem intended to disprove Trump’s election falsehoods once and for all.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says that Jan. 6 indictments and news is the last thing the GOP wanted to hear.
It now appears all but certain that Trump will A) receive the Republican presidential nomination with little real opposition and B) face four separate batches of felony indictments in four separate jurisdictions for crimes ranging from comparatively minor fraud to the greatest crime of all, attempting to overthrow the state and the constitution itself. Those two almost certain probabilities — seemingly facts in utter contradiction — are in fact mutually reinforcing. A normal candidate would be driven from the race. For Trump they become just more evidence of a larger battle that validates his status as not simply the head but the inevitable leader of the Republican Party. His role as victim effectively boxes out any serious challenger for the nomination.[...] One effect of Trump’s probable January 6th indictment is removing a good bit of the centrality and leverage held by Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida. She can effectively slow roll Trump’s case through 2024 in time for Trump to shut down the case and promote her if he is reelected. But with another federal case in DC and two other state cases underway, her moonlighting on Trump’s legal team just matters a lot less. Such as I’ve noted above is Trump’s version of reality. But for all his bravado and “multiple indictments, I’m Loving This!” protestations, the reality is that this amounts to an unmitigated disaster for the GOP.
It now appears all but certain that Trump will A) receive the Republican presidential nomination with little real opposition and B) face four separate batches of felony indictments in four separate jurisdictions for crimes ranging from comparatively minor fraud to the greatest crime of all, attempting to overthrow the state and the constitution itself.
Those two almost certain probabilities — seemingly facts in utter contradiction — are in fact mutually reinforcing. A normal candidate would be driven from the race. For Trump they become just more evidence of a larger battle that validates his status as not simply the head but the inevitable leader of the Republican Party. His role as victim effectively boxes out any serious challenger for the nomination.[...]
One effect of Trump’s probable January 6th indictment is removing a good bit of the centrality and leverage held by Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida. She can effectively slow roll Trump’s case through 2024 in time for Trump to shut down the case and promote her if he is reelected. But with another federal case in DC and two other state cases underway, her moonlighting on Trump’s legal team just matters a lot less.
Such as I’ve noted above is Trump’s version of reality. But for all his bravado and “multiple indictments, I’m Loving This!” protestations, the reality is that this amounts to an unmitigated disaster for the GOP.
Charles Blow of The New York Times sees the impending Trump indictments as “anticlimactic.”
It should feel like the fulfillment of America’s commitment to justice that Trump is finally facing some accountability for his recklessness and ruthlessness, for his disavowal of constitutional concerns and apparent contempt for the law. So why does it feel so anticlimactic? Why does the feeling of foreboding remain? Why is there no sense of finality in the air? It feels that way because there’s no guarantee that we’re reaching the end of Trump’s era of menace. On the contrary, there’s every indication that he has no intention of bending or breaking — that he’d rather destroy our democracy than be accountable to it. America is undergoing an extreme stress test, and no one truly knows how it will emerge.
It should feel like the fulfillment of America’s commitment to justice that Trump is finally facing some accountability for his recklessness and ruthlessness, for his disavowal of constitutional concerns and apparent contempt for the law.
So why does it feel so anticlimactic? Why does the feeling of foreboding remain? Why is there no sense of finality in the air?
It feels that way because there’s no guarantee that we’re reaching the end of Trump’s era of menace. On the contrary, there’s every indication that he has no intention of bending or breaking — that he’d rather destroy our democracy than be accountable to it.
America is undergoing an extreme stress test, and no one truly knows how it will emerge.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker says that there may be more good economic news for the Biden administration.
In the coming months, there may well be more positive news for the White House. A slowdown in housing costs and the price of used cars should get reflected in the official inflation data, including the core Consumer Price Index, or C.P.I., which the Federal Reserve monitors closely because it excludes volatile energy and food prices. “We appreciate that much can go wrong with inflation forecasts, even just a couple months ahead, but you don’t need to make any wild assumptions and cross your fingers in order to generate startlingly low core CPI prints over the summer and into the early fall,” Ian Shepherdson, the chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a client circular last week. In July and August, the core C.P.I. could increase by as little as 0.1 per cent each month, Shepherdson told me, and if this were to happen, he added, the core rate of annual inflation would fall from 4.8 per cent in June to 4.1 per cent in August. With the inflation outlook improving more rapidly than many economists expected, the White House is increasingly sure it can avoid something that all Presidents seeking reëlection fear: an election-year recession. On Monday, the economics team at Goldman Sachs put the probability of a recession in the next twelve months—that is, a broad-based slump in spending, employment, and G.D.P.—at just twenty per cent. “The recent data have reinforced our confidence that bringing inflation down to an acceptable level will not require a recession,” Jan Hatzius, the chief economist at Goldman, said.
In the coming months, there may well be more positive news for the White House. A slowdown in housing costs and the price of used cars should get reflected in the official inflation data, including the core Consumer Price Index, or C.P.I., which the Federal Reserve monitors closely because it excludes volatile energy and food prices. “We appreciate that much can go wrong with inflation forecasts, even just a couple months ahead, but you don’t need to make any wild assumptions and cross your fingers in order to generate startlingly low core CPI prints over the summer and into the early fall,” Ian Shepherdson, the chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a client circular last week. In July and August, the core C.P.I. could increase by as little as 0.1 per cent each month, Shepherdson told me, and if this were to happen, he added, the core rate of annual inflation would fall from 4.8 per cent in June to 4.1 per cent in August.
With the inflation outlook improving more rapidly than many economists expected, the White House is increasingly sure it can avoid something that all Presidents seeking reëlection fear: an election-year recession. On Monday, the economics team at Goldman Sachs put the probability of a recession in the next twelve months—that is, a broad-based slump in spending, employment, and G.D.P.—at just twenty per cent. “The recent data have reinforced our confidence that bringing inflation down to an acceptable level will not require a recession,” Jan Hatzius, the chief economist at Goldman, said.
Aidan Quigley of Roll Call reports that Republicans struck money earmarked for LGBTQ+-related projects from a Transportation-HUD Appropriations markup.
The three earmarks total $3.62 million, with two in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania. The projects were eliminated as part of a Republican en bloc amendment that advanced a range of Republican cultural priorities, including a provision that would ban flying gay pride flags over government buildings. The vote was along party lines, 32-26. Subcommittee ranking member Mike Quigley, D-Ill., then introduced an amendment to add the three projects back into the bill. It was rejected, 27-30. Earlier in the meeting, Rep. Mark Pocan said the committee’s move to strip the earmarks was “bigoted” and described his own experience getting attacked leaving a gay bar that left him unconscious. “This is what you guys do, by introducing amendments like this,” Pocan, D-Wis., said. “Taking away from people’s earmarks is absolutely below the dignity of Congress, and certainly the Appropriations Committee.”
The three earmarks total $3.62 million, with two in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania. The projects were eliminated as part of a Republican en bloc amendment that advanced a range of Republican cultural priorities, including a provision that would ban flying gay pride flags over government buildings. The vote was along party lines, 32-26.
Subcommittee ranking member Mike Quigley, D-Ill., then introduced an amendment to add the three projects back into the bill. It was rejected, 27-30.
Earlier in the meeting, Rep. Mark Pocan said the committee’s move to strip the earmarks was “bigoted” and described his own experience getting attacked leaving a gay bar that left him unconscious.
“This is what you guys do, by introducing amendments like this,” Pocan, D-Wis., said. “Taking away from people’s earmarks is absolutely below the dignity of Congress, and certainly the Appropriations Committee.”
Nora Neus of Poynter asks whether news sources should be paid.
As a journalist with about eight years of experience, including almost six at CNN, I had never exchanged money for information or a story before working on my book, “24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy.” It was antithetical to the ethics of journalism, at least the way I’d been taught. But soon after I started working on this project, which was very close to my heart as a former Charlottesville resident, University of Virginia student, and local news reporter in town, I started to question this basic journalism tenet.[...] On one level, it was a practical concern; spending hours in interviews is time not spent working for a wage, and you can’t pay for rent and groceries with cable news clout. But it was also a deeper question about the ethics of unpaid labor, and especially of what kind of people we ask for unpaid labor. Too often, it’s women of color. So it was in this context that I started thinking about how I could possibly ask survivors to spend hours speaking to me, reliving the most traumatic days of their lives in intense detail, without any kind of compensation. It sounded like work, work they deserved to be paid for.
As a journalist with about eight years of experience, including almost six at CNN, I had never exchanged money for information or a story before working on my book, “24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy.” It was antithetical to the ethics of journalism, at least the way I’d been taught.
But soon after I started working on this project, which was very close to my heart as a former Charlottesville resident, University of Virginia student, and local news reporter in town, I started to question this basic journalism tenet.[...]
On one level, it was a practical concern; spending hours in interviews is time not spent working for a wage, and you can’t pay for rent and groceries with cable news clout. But it was also a deeper question about the ethics of unpaid labor, and especially of what kind of people we ask for unpaid labor. Too often, it’s women of color.
So it was in this context that I started thinking about how I could possibly ask survivors to spend hours speaking to me, reliving the most traumatic days of their lives in intense detail, without any kind of compensation. It sounded like work, work they deserved to be paid for.
Fred P. Hochberg pens for The Hill an interesting essay about the value of cultural diplomacy.
As the world realigns in the post-Cold War era, our cultural influence is a key factor that will help to determine whether we can build a new international system aligned with American interests. We need to use every resource we can to give our soft power a boost, including state support — something for which there is plenty of precedent in diplomatic history and U.S. policy. On the defensive after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the great diplomat Talleyrand used French cuisine to entice Prussia, Russia and England to the table — quite literally. Begging for support from Paris to his embassy at the Vienna peace conference, Talleyrand is said to have quipped, “Sire, I need saucepans more than written instructions!” Talleyrand got his saucepans, and the result was a treaty that stabilized Europe for a century. At the Cold War’s start, it was Eisenhower himself who added “American” to the name of the Ballet Theatre in New York, creating the ABT, which still tours the world. At the same time, MoMA began to mount touring exhibits of Abstract Expressionist painting to showcase American creativity, which Kennedy later formalized as the Art in Embassies program. Now, the Art in Embassies collection has work by 20,000 artists.
As the world realigns in the post-Cold War era, our cultural influence is a key factor that will help to determine whether we can build a new international system aligned with American interests. We need to use every resource we can to give our soft power a boost, including state support — something for which there is plenty of precedent in diplomatic history and U.S. policy.
On the defensive after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the great diplomat Talleyrand used French cuisine to entice Prussia, Russia and England to the table — quite literally. Begging for support from Paris to his embassy at the Vienna peace conference, Talleyrand is said to have quipped, “Sire, I need saucepans more than written instructions!” Talleyrand got his saucepans, and the result was a treaty that stabilized Europe for a century.
At the Cold War’s start, it was Eisenhower himself who added “American” to the name of the Ballet Theatre in New York, creating the ABT, which still tours the world. At the same time, MoMA began to mount touring exhibits of Abstract Expressionist painting to showcase American creativity, which Kennedy later formalized as the Art in Embassies program. Now, the Art in Embassies collection has work by 20,000 artists.
I think that the heyday for this type of post-Cold War American cultural diplomacy was immediately after The Cold War and ended on September 11, 2001. The U.S. still has worldwide cultural influence.
Nicholas Vinocur and Anne McElvoy of POLITICO Europe interview the head of the British intelligence agency MI6.
In the rare exclusive interview, Richard Moore issued a thinly veiled recruitment call to Russians who’ve become disillusioned with their leadership while assessing that President Vladimir Putin was “under pressure” internally after a mutiny by mercenaries exposed his weakness. “Join hands with us — our door is always open,” Moore — known as “C” inside the agency — said in a speech at a POLITICO event hosted by the British embassy in Prague. [...] Moore offered an upbeat assessment of the battlefield situation in Ukraine, noting that Kyiv’s forces had taken back more ground in the past month than the Russians had done in a year. And he issued a warning to African leaders who are relying on Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner PMC mercenary army, to keep them in power. “If Russian mercenaries can betray Putin, who else might they betray?” he said in the speech, the only public one he plans to give this year. Moore’s remarks come as MI6 is increasing its public outreach efforts. Founded under another name before World War I, MI6 — Britain’s equivalent to the U.S.’s CIA, whereas MI5 is more like the FBI — operated for many years completely out of public view. The British government only officially acknowledged its existence in 1994.
In the rare exclusive interview, Richard Moore issued a thinly veiled recruitment call to Russians who’ve become disillusioned with their leadership while assessing that President Vladimir Putin was “under pressure” internally after a mutiny by mercenaries exposed his weakness.
“Join hands with us — our door is always open,” Moore — known as “C” inside the agency — said in a speech at a POLITICO event hosted by the British embassy in Prague. [...]
Moore offered an upbeat assessment of the battlefield situation in Ukraine, noting that Kyiv’s forces had taken back more ground in the past month than the Russians had done in a year. And he issued a warning to African leaders who are relying on Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner PMC mercenary army, to keep them in power.
“If Russian mercenaries can betray Putin, who else might they betray?” he said in the speech, the only public one he plans to give this year.
Moore’s remarks come as MI6 is increasing its public outreach efforts. Founded under another name before World War I, MI6 — Britain’s equivalent to the U.S.’s CIA, whereas MI5 is more like the FBI — operated for many years completely out of public view. The British government only officially acknowledged its existence in 1994.
Finally, Fardin Eftekhari of Middle East Eye reports on rising diplomatic tensions between Russia and Iran.
As of now, Russia has failed to accomplish its goals in Ukraine and has been unable to halt Nato's expansion. As well as supporting Sweden's Nato membership, Turkey has also declared its support for Ukraine's membership. Ukraine still receives comprehensive support from the West with no immediate prospects of concessions to Moscow for peace. While Iran continues to support Russia through military, political and diplomatic means, Moscow fears that Tehran will use this support as a bargaining chip in the negotiations to revive its nuclear talks, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with the United States and Europe. A recently reached "informal and unwritten agreement" between the US and Iran, which has already started to be implemented, appears to have raised Russian concerns. Iran has pledged to not only “expand its cooperation with international nuclear inspectors” but also to “refrain from selling ballistic missiles to Russia” and to “stop lethal attacks on American contractors in Syria and Iraq”. As Iran's primary security partner and a party to the JCPOA, Russia interpreted the latter provisions entirely with suspicion.
As of now, Russia has failed to accomplish its goals in Ukraine and has been unable to halt Nato's expansion. As well as supporting Sweden's Nato membership, Turkey has also declared its support for Ukraine's membership. Ukraine still receives comprehensive support from the West with no immediate prospects of concessions to Moscow for peace.
While Iran continues to support Russia through military, political and diplomatic means, Moscow fears that Tehran will use this support as a bargaining chip in the negotiations to revive its nuclear talks, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with the United States and Europe.
A recently reached "informal and unwritten agreement" between the US and Iran, which has already started to be implemented, appears to have raised Russian concerns. Iran has pledged to not only “expand its cooperation with international nuclear inspectors” but also to “refrain from selling ballistic missiles to Russia” and to “stop lethal attacks on American contractors in Syria and Iraq”.
As Iran's primary security partner and a party to the JCPOA, Russia interpreted the latter provisions entirely with suspicion.
Have the best possible day everyone!