Friday Round Up! 4/12/24
Let the games begin! Plus, mischief managed (for now) on the Section 702 front.
Like many of you, I am in a tax filing deadline crunch, so I am going to keep this week’s round up short. After all, the real excitement is going to pick up on Monday, when the first of Trump’s criminal trials will begin.
I know that many journalists and legal commentators pooh-pooh the Manhattan case as a little league case which should have never been brought. I strongly disagree. As I have written previously, we need to understand the Stormy Daniels/“catch and kill” operation as the gateway crime in Donald Trump’s serial attempts at election manipulation through information warfare. The Daniels payment helped suppress information critical for voters to make an informed choice in the 2016 election, and helped create a vacuum in which Russia’s disinformation efforts — including the Wikileaks dump of emails hacked from the DNC — could flourish. And the success of these efforts, in turn, set the stage for the Stop the Steal disinformation campaign in advance of the 2020 election. Even now, Trump continues to rely on disinformation as an election tactic, and the Stormy Daniels case, far from being a “minor” crime, played a critical role in the arc of Trump’s efforts to deceive and mislead the public. Failing to see it through that lens does a disservice to democracy. I, for one, am glad that New York picked up a baton that the U.S. Attorney’s Office Southern District of New York failed to do (for reasons that remain unclear) and is vindicating the harm done to New York (and all) voters.
The other big news this week is that the House passed a two-year reauthorization of Section 702, a critical intelligence collection tool that allows the U.S. to identify and thwart nefarious activities by foreign adversaries and terrorist organizations. The legislation does not include a controversial warrant requirement that would have effectively made this collection unusable by the FBI, but we’ll have to wait to see if the Senate adds any restrictions to it. All I have to say is that if your position on intelligence collection is on the same side as Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson, it might be a good time to reassess whether the “problem” you are trying to address helps or hurts the U.S. Anyway, I’ll be writing more about this for my CAFE Insider note this week, but in the meantime, you can get fully up to speed on what the bruhaha is all about in this Substack guest lecture by former NSA litigation counsel, George Croner. Trust me, you will understand Section 702 better than 99.9% of the population (including most members of Congress) after watching it.
In the meantime, you can check out my and Renato’s podcast from last week, in which we discussed the general insanity swirling about in the various Trump cases:
Articles worth reading:
It looks like senators of both parties agree that the practice of “judge shopping” — filing cases in single judge districts where you are guaranteed to get a specific judge to adjudicate your cases (and which has led to some of the more conservative activist litigation in the last couple of years) — needs to stop. This New York Times piece explains forthcoming legislation that will help curb this trend.
For those of you who are just joining The Freedom Academy or are behind on the latest book club selection, here is a great Washington Post review of the book we will be discuss next week with author Andrew McKevitt (see below)! Don’t miss this event — McKevitt offers a sobering, eye-opening account of how we have become the most armed nation on earth and how any reforms must take into account the realities of the insatiable demand, and unlimited supply, of weapons in the U.S.
Relatedly, for anyone who missed it, here is my analysis of how our gun laws and easy access to weapons intersects with right-wing domestic extremism, as exemplified by Timothy McVeigh
Upcoming events:
NEXT WEEK! Freedom Academy Book Club, Friday, April 19, 12 p.m. EDT. We’ll be discussing Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America with author Andrew McKevitt. Drew’s book illuminates how our society became so saturated with guns, and how gun ownership intersects with race, politics, and money. This discussion will be recorded and posted for paid subscribers.
Zoom Office Hours, Friday, April 26, 4-5 p.m. EDT. We’ll discuss the latest, including Trump’s Supreme Court immunity arguments, which will have taken place the day before. Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers at 1 p.m. Office hours discussions are not recorded.
TBA (in May). Professor Jacob Hacker, author of Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality will join us to discuss some of the driving forces behind asymmetrical polarization, a topic we are currently covering in our Substack course. (You can enroll in the course at anytime, and this topic is new — check out the short assignment from last week!)
Have a wonderful weekend (and good luck with your taxes)!
Is anyone surprised that the party of Trump and Putin is also the party that wants to gut our foreign intelligence capabilities? Anyone remember Trump's brilliant plan to make US cybersecurity a joint operation with the Russia? https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN19V1SB/ Can't help but think that gigabytes of phones calls between GOP pols, Trump's inner circle and Russian intelligence targets are already archived at Meade.
This week is the calm before the Stormy Daniels ....I tried to avoid much more than headlines this week, so as usual, my gratitude for the Cliff's Notes (Asha's Notes?) version. My radio silence was not to avoid reality, but mentally digesting the minimum, and still maintain a sense of hope with a positive outlook. The media echo chamber seems to repeat the same lines with the "Stormy Daniels / Hush Money" case nickname sticking, alas, and its to the extent I can't even remember the proper title for this case. That name not only popularizes the case by adding some "naughtiness" to it that attracts the National Enquirer set, BUT it trivializes the gravity of it, as Asha repeatedly reminds us. Glad you are doing your own taxes, Asha. I heard of this one guy who was once President of the United States, and he relied on accounting firms to do such work. Although he always chooses the best as he assures us, somehow that firm inflated his assets for the purposes of loans, and reduced valuations for tax purposes. And now he is on the hook for half-a-billion dollars!! Sometimes bad things happen to good people....but in that case, a good thing happened to a VERY bad person.