Friday Round Up! 4/28/2023

Tucker Carlson got fired. And that was just the beginning of a huge news week.

I have to be honest, I am kind of liking doing my Friday roundups on Saturday morning because by Friday night my brain is fried — I feel like I need a good night’s sleep to make sense of the week.

This week especially was a doozy. Of course, we started off with the amazing news that Tucker Carlson had been fired from Fox News. As a person who has been personally attacked by right-wing minions for criticizing Tucker (including getting death threats and racist emails and phone calls which I can’t reproduce here), my reaction was basically this:

Of course, as Renato Mariotti and I discussed in our podcast this week, celebrations may be premature because Fox News is like a hydra, with more heads growing in when one is cut off — consider that Tucker replaced Bill O’Reilly after he was fired for sexual misconduct. Tucker also has an enormous following that he will no doubt be able to monetize on another platform…and perhaps even mobilize as a potential presidential candidate (sorry I’m just laying out all of the possibilities). Still, it is a true victory for him to be off the air, especially given that he is a vector of Russian disinformation and talking points, as we discussed last week with Russian Media Monitor Julia Davis.

Renato and I also discussed one of the other major news stories this week, the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit against Donald Trump for defamation and battery. (Thank you to a listener who noted that while Carroll’s original defamation lawsuit — for statements made by Trump while he was president — are still tied up in the courts, as we note in the podcast, Trump very stupidly made a defamatory statement after he left office, allowing her to bring a separate defamation claim that is part of this lawsuit, along with battery). Although many people are eager to see Trump in an orange jumpsuit, we shouldn’t discount the power of civil trials to generate consequences for bad conduct: In addition to potential monetary damages, Trump will, if he loses, be an adjudicated rapist. That is not a great look for any presidential candidate. More in our podcast, here:

Those two stories only take us to last Tuesday. On Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Turner, asking him to order Special Counsel Jack Smith the “stand down” his investigation. (Excuse me while I pause to laugh, Tucker Carlson-style.) We also learned from this letter that among the classified documents were briefings for his phone calls with foreign leaders. I’ll just note for no reason in particular that foreign intelligence services would LOVE to get their hands on such types of documents. Juuuuuuust saying.

And then on Thursday we learned that Former Vice President Mike Pence testified in front of a grand jury in Smith’s January 6 probe. This is significant because 1) it signals that Smith might be getting close to the end of his investigation and 2) Pence may have valuable nuggets of information based on his conversations with Trump that Smith may either not already have or have direct evidence of.

Oh, and on Friday we learned that Chief Justice John Robert’s wife made 10 million in commissions working as a recruiter, including from companies that regularly appeared before the Court…and this income was never disclosed. No biggie.

My articles

• I don’t have any new pieces this week, though I am working on one for Just Security on Russia’s ongoing efforts to influence elections — at the local level — so stay tuned. Meanwhile, in honor of Tucker’s firing, here is an oldie but goodie by me and Texas A&M Professor Jennifer Mercieca for Zocalo on what the Greeks would say about disinformation and propaganda

Other articles worth reading:

• This prescient piece (from 2003) in The Atlantic, by James Fallows, about the rise of Rupert Murdoch and the philosophical debate over whether the news ought to be treated as a business or a service provided for the public good. (It’s long but worth the read)

• Another piece from The Atlantic by Monica Potts, about how rural poverty intersects with women’s opportunities. It’s a bit ancillary to the kinds of things I cover but to me this is inextricably connected to the current restrictions on abortion and sex education in schools. I was reading this thinking that these people are likely voting for the same people who are enacting policies that keep them stuck in poverty. It’s just crazy.

Upcoming Events:

• Wine & Fries Happy Hour with Elie Mystal, author of Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution (date and time TBA) — join us for some fun rants and an inside look behind legal TV punditry

• NEW! Our May/June guest speaker for the Substack class will be Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Director of the FBI, who will talk about foreign election interference and how the FBI and IC’s efforts to combat it have evolved since 2016 (date and time TBA)

  That's it for this week — more to come soon!