Harry Litman/LA Times:
The special master order for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents is perverse and potentially disastrous
Nevertheless, some observers are suggesting the bottom line is not so worrisome, and that the best counsel for the Department of Justice is to take its lumps and go through the process Cannon has prescribed.
As a former prosecutor and Justice Department official, I can’t see it. The Cannon order is not only grievously flawed, it threatens inordinate delay and potential scuttling of the entire criminal investigation.
Brandon Van Grack/Twitter:
For yet another week, attorneys from Counterintelligence & Export Control Section (CES) led the Mar-a-Lago investigation. While CES’s involvement is expected, the absence of local prosecutors is surprising. 🧵on DOJ staffing and what to look for as the investigation advances. 1/
Within DOJ there are subject matter experts who work directly at the headquarters of DOJ (called Main Justice attorneys) and local prosecutors who work in one of 94 districts across the country each led by a US Attorney (called Assistant US Attorneys (AUSAs)). 2/
Main Justice attorneys only work on cases involving their subject matter, but work on such cases throughout the country. AUSAs handle every criminal case in their district, although they individually often specialize in a particular subject matter. 3/
...
At some point, if DOJ needs to put witnesses in the grand jury to collect evidence or begins drafting charges, it is inconceivable that a US Attorney’s Office/AUSAs would not become more integrated in the investigation and play a more prominent role. 13/
But until that happens, until we learn about or see AUSAs involved in hearings, named in filings, and participating in interviews, this investigation is likely in its early stages. 14/
The practical effect of Trump’s judge shopping may turn out to be less than it appears given the arc of how long things take in the real (legal) world.
Meanwhile:
WaPo:
Steve Bannon faces state indictment in N.Y., will surrender Thursday
The former Trump strategist, convicted of contempt of Congress this summer, was pardoned by Trump on federal charges in 2020
And, oh btw, there’s this from WaPo today:
Material on foreign nation’s nuclear capabilities seized at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago
Some seized documents were so closely held, only the president, a Cabinet-level or near-Cabinet level official could authorize others to know
Nukular documents, you say? Makes Judge Cannon’s work even more outrageous. And also btw that the info comes “according to people familiar with the matter” doesn’t make it the Feds who are leaking. As often as not, it’s a witness or a person of interest. That Trump’s interest can be hurt was a major factor in Cannon’s reasoning. Yeah, right.
The above is a big story, but the pundits need time to write it up.
Oh, and this, too:
Judge Cannon can’t stop all of it.
David Frum/Atlantic:
Biden Laid the Trap. Trump Walked Into It.
At his Pennsylvania rally, the former president gave exactly the narcissistic display his Democratic nemesis tried to provoke.
For the 2022 election cycle, smart Republicans had a clear and simple plan: Don’t let the election be about Trump. Make it about gas prices, or crime, or the border, or race, or sex education, or anything—anything but Trump. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost control of the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in 2020. He lost both Senate seats in Georgia in 2021. Republicans had good reason to dread the havoc he’d create if he joined the fight in 2022.
So they pleaded with Trump to keep out of the 2022 race. A Republican lawmaker in a close contest told CNN on August 19, “I don’t say his name, ever.”
David Frum/Atlantic:
The Justification for Biden’s Speech
So much of it was true.
During his presidency, Trump repeatedly used places of national memory for partisan purposes. He gave a slashing partisan interview to Fox News from the Lincoln Memorial. At Mount Rushmore, he denounced “a new far-left fascism” that seeks “to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.” Accepting the 2020 Republican nomination on the grounds of the White House, he predicted that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, would be “the destroyer of American greatness.”
These deviations from past custom elicited some tut-tutting from a few who cared. But the complaints were ineffectual; Trump did it again and again.
So last night, President Biden followed the old adage: If you can’t beat them, join them. He briefly drew a distinction between those Trump-loyal Republicans and the bulk of the Republican Party. But that was a mere courtesy, because he almost immediately added, “There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.” Biden presented the 2022 ballot question as a stark choice between right (his party) and wrong (the party that has become Trump’s party).
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American. They’re incompatible. We can’t allow violence to be normalized in this country. It’s wrong.”
NRSC spokesperson complains to the wrong person about Rick Scott blowing through millions of campaign dollars to build voter lists that people suspect are about his own ambition:
CBS:
Americans increasingly concerned about political violence — CBS News poll
The prospect of violence is tied in part to a perception of widening divisions: a whopping 80% of Americans believe the U.S. is more divided now than it was during their parents' generation. (And here, older Americans are even more likely to say this, and their parents' generation would have lived through the upheaval of the '60s.) Just as many say tone and civility have gotten worse.
Then, when they look forward, a majority believe that a generation from now the U.S. will be less of a democracy than it is today.
Noah Smith/Substack:
Putin's war and the Chaos Climbers
The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that “Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime, he intends to create space to move up in the world. In the same way, I see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe ideologies to advance their power.
This might sound wildly accusatory, but it’s not — it’s just a description of what has been actually happening over the last decade.
It was the failure of conservatism that gave rise to the Trumpist movement and the alt-right. Bush’s muscular interventionism ran aground in Iraq, laissez-faire economics crashed the economy in 2008, and Christian conservatism failed to halt the gay rights movement. The conservative paradigm that had taken over the GOP in the 70s and 80s failed all at once, and fringe elements — the alt-right, conspiracy theorists, Trump — sort of took over the party.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the socialist Left that started to revive itself with the antiwar movement and Occupy blossomed into a full-blown generational movement with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign that revived the DSA, spawned a new generation of activist orgs like the Sunrise movement, and created a new (though still modest) socialist media. So far, despite fierce factionalism, the socialists have not yet succeeded in taking over the Democratic party like Trump took over the GOP. But in highlighting the failures of centrist Dems to curb inequality, revive unions, fix health care, or save the welfare state, they clearly hope to be able to pull off a takeover at some point.
Houston Chronicle:
Editorial: America banished polio. Anti-vaxxers brought it back.
Former University of Texas at Austin historian David M. Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Polio: An American Story,” believes that the success of vaccines in eradicating so many deadly diseases, including polio, has had the ironic effect of lulling us into complacency.
“These vaccines have done away with the evidence of how frightening these diseases were,” Oshinsky told The Guardian in 2020.
Willful ignorance has given rise to the dangerous anti-vaxx movement, responsible for stirring up unfounded fears about all manner of life-saving vaccines, including for COVID. Disinformation campaigns wage relentless war against vaccines.
Former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie, stoking doubt and distrust not only about the 2020 election but also about public health agencies and American institutions in general, also has contributed to vaccine hesitancy. His administration bears a modicum of responsibility for thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths.
Kyle Whitmire/AL.com:
Is America a democracy or a republic?
America is not a democracy! It’s a republic!
I’ve heard that all my life, and I used to think it was one of those haughty things people said to show how smart they were — when really they were repeating something they heard someone else say, without any consideration whether it was true.
Like, “It can’t really be Champagne unless it comes from the Champagne region of France.”