Jack Smith turned in his report about his investigation of Trump. The report has two parts: one, Trump’s theft and concealment of important, classified documents; two, his efforts to overturn the election and hold onto the Presidency.
Trump flunkie and federal judge Aileen Cannon inserted herself into the question of the release of Smith’s report. She ruled that the Justice Department could not release Smith’s report. She previously ruled that the job of Special Counsel was illegitimate, so Jack Smith’s report was invalid. Her ruling was reversed by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, at least as it applied to the second part of the Smith report.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has said he will release only the second part of Smith’s report, and he would redact information that was controversial or offensive to Trump.
If Smith’s report is left for the Trump administration, it will never see the light of day. Trump’s defense attorneys have been selected for the top jobs in the Department of Justice. They are there to protect Trump.
It is my review of Trump’s plans for K-12 education.
NYRB is the most distinguished literary-political journal in the nation. It has a huge readership. It reaches a different audience than education journals.
If you subscribe to NYRB, you can open it in full. If you don’t, it costs $10 for 10 issues. Or, if you wait, I will post it in full in a few weeks.
For-profit healthcare companies, many of which are owned by private equity, are aggressively expanding their efforts to trick seniors into abandoning their enrollment in traditional Medicare and joining for-profit Medicare Advantage plans.
About half of all seniors are now enrolled in Medicare Advantage. The pitch for MA plans is seductive. They offer bells and whistles that are not part of Medicare. If you enroll in a MA plan, you will get free gym membership, prescription drug coverage, dental coverage, and a variety of other attractive benefits.
What’s wrong with MA? It’s great when you are not sick. It’s very bad when you have a serious illness.
When you have surgery or other serious illness, Medicare and your secondary pays almost all of your medical costs. MA may or may not. MA has panels to decide whether to pay your bills. You may be denied and stuck with huge bills.
Privatization produces worse service because the corporation must turn a profit. Make no mistake: MA is privatization.
How does MA make a profit? By denying the claims of patients.
I had open heart surgery in 2021. I was hospitalized for a month. I spent a week in the ICU (intensive care unit). When the total hospital bill arrived many weeks later, I almost had a stroke: it was over $839,000! After Medicare negotiated with the hospital, the actual cost to me was $300. That’s a miracle. Why give up that kind of coverage?
A new Medicare privatization scheme developed under President Donald Trump and now being expanded under President Joe Biden is forcing hundreds of thousands of seniors onto new private Medicare plans without their consent.
The development represents a troubling new dimension in the fight by corporate interests to privatize Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people 65 or older. Medicare Advantage, which allows for-profit health insurers to offer privatized benefits through Medicare, already results in unexpected costs for routine procedures and wrongful denials of care. Private plans have cost Medicare an astonishing $143 billion since 2008, and are now drivingsome health insurers’ record profits.
The new Direct Contracting Entity (DCE) program similarly adds a private-sector third party between patients and Medicare services. Medicare allows these intermediary companies to offer unique benefits, like gym membership coverage. But as for-profit operations ranging fromprivate insurers to publicly traded companies to private equity firms, these intermediaries are incentivized to limit the care that patients receive, especially when they are very sick.
While Medicare Advantage patients choose to sign up for private insurance plans, patients are being enrolled in these DCE health care plans without their informed consent. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) noted in a January op-ed, “Seniors in traditional Medicare may be ‘auto-aligned’ to a DCE if any primary care physician they’ve visited in the past two years is affiliated with that DCE. That means Medicare automatically searches two years of seniors’ claims history without their full consent to find any visits with a participating DCE provider as the basis for enrollment.”
Dan Rather, the fearless reporter for “60 Mibutes,” now retired, writes about Jeff Bezos’ ham-handed interference with the editorial independence of The Washington Post. The moral of the story is that newspapers should not be owned by billionaires with other financial interests, especially those who need a good relationship with the President, like Bezos. Why should Bezos cut staff because the Post is losing money? His net worth is more than $200 billion. Why destroy one of the nation’s greatest newspapers to recoup $77 million in losses? That’s chump change for Bezos.
When a journalistic institution is the one making headlines, it’s rarely good news. Such is the case for a revered American newspaper, The Washington Post. A mothership of American journalism, whose reporters helped topple an American president and inspired generations of young reporters, is listing and taking on water.
As Donald Trump and his army of “alternate” truth-tellers get ready to take the reins of government again, the country desperately needs the best and brightest journalists watching and reporting on their every move. And yet we wake to news that the Post is expected to lay off dozens more staffers the very month Trump returns to power.
The 147-year-old newspaper is apparently bleeding money, a problem of its own making. When billionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos pulled the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the election, a reported 250,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions in protest. That accounts for 10% of the paper’s online audience.
“I just cancelled my Washington Post subscription. The web site asked why, and the closest option was ‘concern with the content.’ There was no option about surrendering to fascism, but that’s the real reason,” a former subscriber posted on X.
For Bezos, founder of Amazon, the Post’s financial losses are peanuts considering his $200 billion plus net worth. But his love of the paper and his passion for quality journalism seem to be shrinking.
Back in 2013, when Bezos bought the Post from the family of venerated publisher Katharine Graham, he said he wanted to transform it from a regional newspaper to a global one. He provided money — big money — to expand the newsroom and encouraged reporters to extend their reach by embracing the “gifts of the internet.”
Over the ensuing decade, his interest in the paper ebbed and flowed, but he mostly stayed out of the editorial decision-making. Then he pulled the Harris endorsement causing an exodus of top editors, opinion writers, and reporters.
But Bezos wasn’t done burnishing his rep with the former president. After the election, he pledged $1 million to help pay for Trump’s inauguration and agreed to stream it live on Amazon Prime (an additional $1 million in-kind contribution). Just before Christmas, he was seen at Mar-a-Lago, kissing the ring with fellow super-rich guy Elon Musk. And he has green-lit a documentary about Melania Trump to air on Prime. I’m guessing it will be what’s known in the trade as a “sweetheart profile.”
While it isn’t great that the owner of one of the most important papers in the country is cozying up to an incoming president who says he will be a dictator on “day one,” Bezos’s actions aren’t surprising. He didn’t become a billionaire by being selfless.
But on Friday, things took another turn at the Post. Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit in protest after a cartoon of hers was killed.
In a piece she published on Substack, Telnaes explained that “there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press…”
Since 2005, a third of newspapers in the United States have folded, and two-thirds of newspaper reporters are gone. On an Axios podcast, Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania, explained that “We no longer have a commercial market that can support the levels of journalism that democracy requires.”
Another model needs to be found, and fast. We’ve learned the hard way that benevolent billionaires aren’t going to rescue American journalism. Smarter people than I are working on ways to do just that … an important topic for another Steady down the road.
In the meantime, fingers crossed. As I have said over the years and repeat now for emphasis: A free and independent — fiercely independent when necessary — press is the red beating heart of democracy.
We now have a U.S. Supreme Court that is hypocritical. On one hand, it claims to interpret cases in alignment with the original language of the Constitution and the original intent of the authors of that document. But it ignores that principle when it conflicts with their personal beliefs. This is certainly true with the Court’s treatment of relations between Church and State. For more than 200 years, the Court respected the separation of Church and State, with only minor exceptions. The present Court, however, has taken a sledgehammer to the “wall of separation,” especially in relation to funding religious schools.
Our reader who uses the name of “Quikwrit” wrote the following:
Freedom FROM Religion
The constitutional principle of a “wall of separation” between government and religion in America goes back even far further than our 1797 Constitution: Already back in 1635, Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island Colony, declared that a “wall of separation” must forever separate American government from any religion. In Thomas Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter to the Connecticut Baptist Convention, Jefferson quoted Williams’ “wall of separation” phrase to explain the meaning of The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
Jefferson, author of our Declaration of Independence, also compiled his own version of the Bible, known as The Jefferson Bible, that basically treated Jesus as an admirable philosopher, but not divine. Jefferson’s non-Christian edition of the Bible became widely popular in the new United States, and for decades every new member of Congress was given a copy of The Jefferson Bible when sworn in to Congress.
Our Founding Fathers’ insistence on separating government from any and all religion came about because England had imposed mandatory Anglican church membership in the colonies for anyone who wanted to participate in government; so, although many of our Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians, they were compelled to join the official British government’s Christian Anglican religion in order to be able to vote or take any part in government.
James Madison, whom we honor with the title “Father of our Constitution” because so many of our Constitution’s key principles are derived from his ideas, wrote that “the purpose of the separation of church and state is to keep forever from our shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries”.
That bloody “ceaseless strife” of religious war in Europe was well known to Madison and to our nation’s other Founding Fathers because they had recent ancestors who had suffered and been killed because of the endless warfare between Christian religions throughout Europe during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Those centuries of bloodshed and misery followed the Protestant Reformation which led to the establishment of dozens of warring Protestant religions, none of which agreed with each other in their dogma, and all of which disagreed with the Catholic church.
Thousands and countless thousands of people died as each Christian religion tried to force their version of religious beliefs on the others.
George Washington, whom we honor with the title “Father of our Nation”, was in complete agreement with the Establishment Clause and wrote that “the United States government is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” He was compelled to attend Anglican church services but never took Communion because he refused to be hypocritical.
Today, some who argue against the separation of church and state claim that when the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause says that government shall make no law “respecting the establishment of religion” it means only that the government shall not establish a religion and that government is free to provide all manner of support for existing religions. However, in the grammatical syntax of the time in which the First Amendment was written, the phrase “the establishment of religion” refers to “established religions”, not to establishing a government religion. Written in the grammatical syntax of our current times, the First Amendment would state that the government shall make no law “respecting established religions”.
Correctly read, and knowing the intent of Our Founding Fathers which they clearly expressed, the First Amendment provides Americans with freedom FROM religion.
And yet, today, self-righteous religious zealots — some of whom are even on the U.S. Supreme Court — are driving our nation toward a time of bloody religious warfare in America; warfare that will divide and weaken our nation and allow our enemies abroad to destroy us. That destructive division is already on the stage with the demands that The Ten Commandments be posted in schools and public places and that public schools must teach the Bible: The coming conflict looms with the question of whose version of the Ten Commandments will be displayed and whose version of the Bible will be taught.
Protestants and Catholics each have their own version of the Ten Commandments and their own version of the Bible. Whose version of the Commandments and whose version of the Bible would be posted and taught in public schools?
In the Protestant version of the Commandments, the Second Commandment says that it is sinful to make “graven images”, such as statues — the Catholic version of the Commandments says nothing about graven images, so Catholic churches are filled with statues of Mary and the saints. Will Catholic children in public schools be shamed by their classmates as sinful because Catholic churches contain statues of Mary and the saints?
If America doesn’t remain true to the constitutional rule established by Our Founding Fathers that our government must be separated from all religion by a solid wall, bloody conflict will ultimately follow…and a weakened America will then be conquered by its international enemies.
President Biden is battening down the hatches before Trump returns to the White House. Today he extended protection to nearly one million immigrants currently in this country.
The Biden administration on Friday extended temporary humanitarian protections for nearly 1 million immigrants living in the United States, announcing the move days before the start of a possible deportation campaign by the incoming Trump administration.
Immigrants from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine and Sudan who have a form of provision residency known as temporary protected status will be eligible to renew their permits for 18 months, the Department of Homeland Security said.
Lawmakers and immigrant advocates had been urging the department to extend the protected designation for these nationalities and others under a 1990 law that shields immigrants from being deported to countries engulfed in conflict or natural disasters.
Angela Kelley, a former Biden official who is now an adviser to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the extension was “right over home plate” because it met DHS’s legal requirement to assess conditions in beneficiaries’ home nations. “These countries merit it,” Kelley said, “and these people are already here.”
Mr. Trump has derided the program and vowed to end it, at least for certain countries. Immigrant advocates had been urging the Biden administration to extend it for many of those countries before he takes office.
In his first term, Mr. Trump terminated the status for about 400,000 people from El Salvador and other countries, and then faced legal challenges.
According to the Congressional Research Service, more than a million migrants from countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East had Temporary Protected Status as of 2024.
The move makes it legally difficult for Mr. Trump to roll back the protections for citizens of the four countries, at least until they expire some time in 2026.
“Because President Biden has extended protection for the nationals of all these countries, President Trump will be unable to deport these individuals any time soon, “ said Steve Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.
”Trump can’t ignore what Congress wrote into law in 1990,” he said.
About 600,000 Venezuelans who currently have the protection will be allowed to renew and remain in the United States until October 2026, and approximately 232,000 immigrants from El Salvador will be able to do so. More than 100,000 Ukrainians will be able to remain in the United States until August 2026. Some 1,900 people from Sudan will also be allowed to renew their status.
The program was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush to ensure that foreign citizens already in the United States can remain in the country if it is not safe for them to return to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict or other upheaval.
Jeff Tiedrich’s blog on Substack is called “Everyone Is Entitled to My Own Opinion.” He uses language that I ban from this site. But he’s so exceptional in his insights, his humor, and his ability to weave incidents into a narrative that I have to post him despite his flagrant use of the F word.
The judge who presided over Trump’s criminal trial, Juan Merchan, issued a sentence of “unconditional discharge”, meaning the president-elect will be released without fine, imprisonment or probation supervision for his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. While the sentence makes Trump a convicted felon, he will face no penalty other than this legal designation.
in the end, A Very Special Boy received the slightest possible punishment, being told in effect to go think about what a bad boy you’ve been. but at least Donny will go down in history as America’s only convicted felon president. you know the big grievance-baby is never going to stop letting it gnaw away at his insides — and for that, ha fucking ha. sucks to you be you, Donny.
Donny had tried like hell to put off his sentencing until how about never, running first to the New York Court of Appeals and then to the New York State Supreme Court, insisting that the imaginary doctrine of “pre-presidential immunity” meant that he couldn’t be sentenced for any crimes at all.
both courts told Donny to get stuffed — and so he went scampering off to his besties on the Supreme Court. late last night, the Supremes surprisingly did the right thing, and ruled 5-4 that Donny could eat an entire bag of dicks.
three of the four dissenters were Luxury Vacation Clarence, Fishin’ Trip Sammy, and Blackout Brett — the bought-and-paid-for Federalist Society hacks who vote the way their oligarch overlords tell them. the fourth was Nihilist Neil, whose own motivation is that he hates government and just wants to see everything burn.
wrap your mind around that. there are four Supreme Court Justices willing to go beyond the already-corrupt concept of ‘presidential immunity’ and insist that Donny is A Super-Duper Extra-Special Boy who can do all the crimes he wants, any time, for any reason, with no accountability at all, ever.
one vote is how close Donny came to escaping even the limited form of justice that was meted out this morning.
“if you noticed yesterday, the hydrants were empty. they didn’t have any water, any of them. they said twenty percent but now I just heard fifty percent and now none of them have water and that fire’s still raging. when he turned that down, I was going to give him unlimited water, it would come down, it really comes down from the north, way up north, including parts of Canada, it’s so much water that they wouldn’t know what to do with. just the opposite would have happened. but and uh, that’s the reason that this happened. he wouldn’t do what we wanna— and we’re gonna force that upon him now, but it’s very late.”
where do you even begin with this nonsense?
Donny somehow believes that Gavin Newsom rejected an imaginary offer of water that apparently comes from some mysterious source “way up north.” (Donny stopped short of repeating his ‘big Canadian faucet’ fairy tale.)
“There was no ‘water restoration declaration’ for him to sign,” Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow in the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California think tank, said in a Wednesday interview.
“There was never a ‘water restoration declaration’ in California that the Governor refused to sign,” Brent Haddad, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a Wednesday email.
let’s go back to the clip.
“we’re gonna force that upon him now.”
he’s going to force water on Gavin Newsom? how does that work?
“Governor Newsom, there’s a delivery man here with a hundred million tons of water, he wants to know where to put it.”
Donny’s never been all that big on the concept of consent. remember when he promised to quote-unquote “protect women,” whether they like it or not?
“I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,’” Trump said. “I’m going to protect them.”
how fucking creepy is that? “I’m doing this to protect you” is the kind of thing the serial killer says as he handcuffs you to the radiator.
Donny famously bragged about grabbing women by the pussy — because when you’re a star, they let you. now Donny’s going to hydrate California — because when you’re a president, they let you.
reporter: “what’s the price tag?” Donny: “well, maybe no price tag. y’know, look, we’re going to have to see what happens. because Denmark — we need this for national security. we need Greenland very badly. you look— the Russian ships, the China ships, they’re all over the place, they’re surrounding. now they have for a long time, that’s a lane. but uh, we need that for national security. so, I don’t know that Denmark has any right title and interest, so we’re going to find it— but I can tell you, you saw the clips that were released. the people of Greenland would love to become a state of the United States of America. I— we were greeted with tremendous love and affection and respect. the people would like to be a part of the United States. now Denmark maybe doesn’t like it, but then we can’t be too happy with Denmark, and maybe things have to happen with respect to Denmark having to do with tariffs. because they have to do this, I think, for the free world. we need that to protect the free world.
listening to Donny try to form coherent thoughts on the fly is like watching a chimpanzee play with a hand grenade. you know it’s going to end badly, but you can’t look away.
what is this nonsense? “I don’t know that Denmark has any right title and interest.” that Greenland is a territory of Denmark is not open to conjecture. there’s no maybe they and maybe they aren’t. it’s a fact, and facts are not malleable. Donny lives in a fantasy world of his own construction.
now, as to these people in Greenland who are so fucking psyched to become Americans — are they in the room with us right now? because when Cokey McSniffles Jr. and that weird little garden gnome Charlie Kirk did their failed Greenland photo op earlier this week, they had to bribe unhoused locals to wear MAGA hats and pretend to be supporters.
Danish public media organization DR News reports that many of the Trump supporters pictured dining with the president-elect’s son were unhoused and “socially disadvantaged” people asked to wear MAGA merch and offered a free dinner at Hotel Hans Egede in the town of Nuuk.
so yeah, that sounds like a groundswell of enthusiasm right there.
“also in California, you might have recalled a news story from last year. there was some interest in the fire departments and the firefighters in California. and the interest was that there were too many white men who were firefighters. and we need to have a program in California to make sure we don’t have enough white men as firefighters. we have DEI, we have budget cuts, and yet I’m wondering now if your house was burning down, how much do you care what color the firefighters are?”
Scott Jennings seems to care a lot what color the firefighters are. sounds to me that if Scott Jennings’ house were on fire and black firefighters showed up, he’d demand to know where the white firefighters are.
fuck this implication that black people aren’t up to the job of fighting fires, and that they’re being allowed to ride on the firetruck as some kind of unearned favor.
Tex. Rep Jasmine Crockett was having none of it.
“we are looking at qualifications. what diversity, equity, and inclusion has always been about is saying, you know what, open this up. don’t just look at the white men. open it up and recognize that other people can be qualified. if we have been good enough to build this country, we are good enough to serve and die overseas, we are good enough to serve in other ways.”
the Most Unwelcome Man in the World inflicted himself on Jimmy Carter’s memorial service yesterday, and there are two things you need to know.
first, the narcoleptic old dotard immediately drifted off into slumberland — and second, Melania apparently now does her shopping at the Pilgrim Warehouse.
but the real hero of the day was the photographer from the Carter Center, who positioned his camera so that Donny and Melly, who were sitting to the right of Obama, were blocked by a granite column.
As of now, Attorney General Merrick Garland says he will release the part of Jack Smith’s report about Trump’s actions on January 6, but will not release the report about Trump’s retention of documents.
The Trump team is in court trying to block even that partial, redacted part of Smith’s findings.
But doesn’t the public have the right to know the results of Smith’s investigations. Once Trump is in office, his Justice Department will suppress the report. It will never be released. It may be destroyed.
Biden should release the entire report, in the service of the public’s right to know. Biden would be criticized by Trump and his acolytes, but that’s nothing new.
As President, Biden has absolute immunity for any actions he takes in his official capacity.
Will Biden play by the new rules or continue to be a nice guy?
Last writes:
I want to talk about all of the Trump insanity. I want to talk about his insistence on “taking” Greenland. And the Panama Canal. And making Canada a U.S. state. And renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
But guess what: Trump wants us to talk about this bs. He’s trying to dominate the news cycle, get attention, and keep the public talking about nonsense instead of the important story.1 So let’s not do that here?2
Instead, let’s talk about Jack Smith’s report. Because Democrats are poised to let Trump win again because they’re still playing by 2015 rules.
This week Trump’s legal team petitioned the attorney general not to release Smith’s report.
The chutzpah of these guys is off the charts. Because they aren’t saying, “The report should not be released.” At least that would be an argument.
No, Trump’s legal rationale is that the decision of whether or not to release the report should rest with . . . the next attorney general.
The icing on the cake is that they’re making this petition to Merrick Garland, who has some personal experience with Republicans denying a sitting Democratic administration the ability to execute governing decisions.
Fork. That. Noise.
Perhaps understanding how silly this petition is, Judge Aileen Cannon came off the bench (so to speak) to try to force Garland not to release the report. She issued an order forbidding the attorney general of the United States from publishing a report that federal regulations authorize him to publish when it’s “in the public interest.”
What authority does Judge Cannon have over the attorney general in this instance? Why is the publication of a government report in Washington under her purview in Florida, especially since, as Kim Wehle points out this morning, the case is no longer in her hands? And, most importantly, Smith’s report covers his twoprosecutions and Cannon was formerly overseeing only one of those cases—so on what basis is she enjoining a report that covers another judge’s case in another jurisdiction?
These are questions we don’t need to answer because Cannon has proven herself to be nothing more than a naked political actor. Her conduct has been so egregious that Ty Cobb referred to her yesterday as Trump’s “tool” and said, “He [Trump] gets the results he needs from her.”
Reminder: Ty Cobb is not a resistance lib; he does not have TDS. He’s a conservative Republican who served as Trump’s own White House counsel. When one of the most important Republican lawyers in the country thinks a judge is cartoonishly crooked, that’s saying something.
Now you understand why Trump dispatched his kid and Charlie Kirk to Greenland yesterday for photo ops? Better to focus on a stunt than on Trump’s total corruption of the justice system.
2. Fear
Why are Trump and Cannon so desperate to prevent the special counsel’s report from coming out? Trump won. He’s going to be president. They’ve gotten everything they wanted.
Perhaps because Trump’s lawyers recently reviewed the final draft of Smith’s report. They’ve seen what’s in it. If it were a nothingburger—or if it was TOTAL EXONERATION—they’d want it public.
Surely that means something?
Smith’s report should be public. As a matter of tradition (all previous special counsel reports were published) and also as a matter of morality. The country should have a permanent record of Trump’s once-allegedly-criminal actions.
But also as a matter of politics. Remember: 2025 is the year of maximum peril. Every day that can be chewed up forcing the administration to fight on a topic they fear is a day they lose in pursuit of their authoritarian agenda. You would not know it from their current posture, but the Democrats are actually the opposition party. They have a duty to oppose Trump, on all fronts, and inflict political pain wherever they can.
It is not clear that the Democratic party, as an organism, understands this reality. And so the final reason for making Smith’s report public by any means necessary is to force Democrats to come to terms with the new rules of American government.
Government officials are now bound by the law—and only the law. The Republican party has worked hard to create this new order and has spent the last eight years exploiting this dynamic while Democrats have operated under the political arrangements that existed from, roughly speaking, 1974 to 2015.
The law says that Aileen Cannon’s injunction can, at least temporarily, halt the transmission of Jack Smith’s report.
But the law also says that any action a president takes as part of his official duties is, prima facie, legal. This was not formerly the case, but it is now. So if President Biden were to publish the report this afternoon in violation of Judge Cannon’s order, he would do so with total immunity.
Or, if the attorney general were to publish the report, putting himself at risk of being held in contempt of court, he could be pardoned by President Biden. That would all be perfectly above-board.
Yet, amazingly, Biden and Garland seem to still be in 2015 mode.
This morning Garland made clear, in a Justice Department court filing, that he intends to publish the volume of Jack Smith’s report concerning the insurrection case, but will hold back on the volume relating to the classified documents.3
Which means that, unless President Biden acts, it is unlikely that the public will ever see the section of Smith’s report that pertains to the stolen documents case.4 Garland will not publish the volume related to that case. Which probably means that this second volume will never see the light of day.
Can you believe this? Can you believe that, in 2025, Biden and Garland are still operating under Queensberry rules, where nonbinding precedents are controlling and everyone stays hands-off the process? That they are willing to let Trump off the hook again?
Let’s be totally and completely clear: President Biden should publish both volumes of Smith’s report before leaving office. Doing so would serve the public interest and—most importantly—would be legal. Because, as an official action of a sitting president, it falls under the Supreme Court’s blanket of immunity.
Joe Biden didn’t make these rules; but like it or not, the country is now governed by them.
Unilateral disarmament is for suckers and hippies.
Judge Juan Merchan officiated at Trump’s formal sentencing this morning. He sentenced Trump on 34 counts, giving him an “unconditional discharge,” meaning no jail time. The charges stemmed from Trump’s payments to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep her quiet about their sexual encounter. The payments were disguised as legal fees. Trump fought in every possible legal avenue to avoid this confirmation of his status.
He was turned down by appellate courts, even, last night, by the U.S. Supreme Court.
During the hearing, he again denounced the judgment, the judge, and the proceedings.
He insisted that he was “totally innocent.”
The New York Times reported that Trump was using the sentencing as a fundraiser (of course):
Trump mounted a significant legal effort to stop today’s court proceeding. He failed but that has not stopped him from fund-raising off of it. “It’s truly unbelievable that they’re bringing this case today — all designed to bring chaos and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power during this crucial time,” he said in an email blast this morning soliciting donations from supporters.
The ironic claim that the sentencing disrupted “the peaceful transfer of power,” implicitly raising the comparison to 2021, when he summoned his mob to invade the U.S. Capitol to disrupt “the peaceful transfer of power.” The sentencing was in no way chaotic or disruptive, unlike January 6, 2021.
Steve Schmidt, veteran Republican operative turned Never-Trumper, is outraged by Trump’s belittling of Canada, our staunchest ally. There is no more durable alliance than ours with Canada. Trump’s absurd claim that he wants it as our “51st state” is insulting to our friends.
Why does he like to antagonize our closest allies? Why does he defer like a puppy dog to Putin? Someday we will have the answer. Not now. The easy answer is that he’s a sociopath. But there must be more to it than that.
Schmidt begins:
What Donald Trump is doing is foolish in the extreme and deeply immoral. He is the steward of a relationship between two nations that has been forged across centuries. It is sealed by blood sacrifice on freedom’s alter, marriage, commerce and shared values. His bullying is unseemly, shortsighted and a refutation of the combined wisdom of 14 presidents across 82 years.
Heed their words. Take them in to properly appreciate the astonishing stupidity of the venomous Chauncey Gardiner from Mar-a-Lago, who is cheered when he should be jeered, and bowed down to when he should be confronted.
Everywhere one looks these days a capitulant weakling is defenestrating and beclowning themselves.
The obeisance plays out in many forms. For example, the silence around Trump’s outrages towards Canada are a form of capitulation. Where is Hakeem Jeffries? Where is Chuck Schumer? Where is anyone?
Remember this when thinking about the Canadian nation. It was the country in which an American slave could breathe free air.
Trump will debase our nation in a thousand different ways, and while all should be opposed, there are some assaults that must be opposed by the American people.
Donald Trump is not king. He was not elected to harass, destabilize, assail, assault, disrespect or insult Canada….
Trump’s conduct is disgusting. For my part, as an American citizen, I repudiate the coming actions of the Trump administration towards Canada, our ally and friend. This is shameful and embarrassing, but not as much as the silence of all of Canada’s friends across America.
What is happening is no laughing matter. It is wrong, and sometimes that should be enough.
Schmidt goes on to post the speeches delivered to the Canadian Parliament by Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. All were respectful and appreciative of our neighbors to the north.
Trump is like a dinner guest who blows his nose with his dinner napkin, spits in the common soup bowl, and tells the host that the food stinks. Never invite him.
Diane Ravitch's blog 