Mark Meadows' memoir provides evidence supporting allegations that Donald Trump discussed attack plans on Iran while interviewed for the book. The leaked audio tape captures Trump waving around what he admitted was a classified document related to a potential plan to attack Iran during his presidency, contradicting Trump's claims of discussing unrelated topics like golf plans and buildings. The Morning Joe panel discuss.
MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on the meeting between Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger regarding Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference and why Jack Smith’s trip to Georgia is very bad news for Trump and his co-conspirators.
MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on the breaking news that Special Counsel Jack Smith may be ready to charge Donald Trump with more crimes relating to his theft of classified information.
28 June 23
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After the Dobbs decision leaked, the Supreme Court more than doubled its protective detail, despite no evidence of a heightened threat.
The Supreme Court sought millions for security last year, enlisting the U.S. Marshals to provide personal details for the justices. A year later, that security force hasn’t seen a significant increase in threats or attacks, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, but the Supreme Court is asking to continue — and in some cases, even augment — the high level of security.
Last summer, hundreds gathered outside the homes of the conservative justices to protest the Dobbs decision, which effectively eliminated reproductive rights for millions. Top Republicans quickly cast the demonstrations as illegal, arguing that they were tantamount to an attempt to influence a judge, which is a crime.
“It is beyond dispute that far-left activists have launched a concerted and coordinated effort to intimidate the Court into changing the draft Dobbs decision,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland in May of last year. “I urge you to publicly commit to protecting the justices, and to condemn and prosecute anyone seeking to threaten and intimidate the Court into changing its decision.
Though the Supreme Court has its own police force, following Grassley’s letter, the Justice Department dispatched the U.S. Marshals Service to augment their security details. Congress passed the Supreme Court Police Parity Act, which extends security to Supreme Court justices’ immediate family members.
Yet, apart from one bizarre incident last June, when an armed California man traveled to Washington claiming an intent to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh before turning himself in to authorities, there have been no acts of violence attempted or committed against justices. No protesters were arrested. Aggregate data, in fact, shows that threats to the judiciary in general went down in 2022.
In November, Justice Amy Coney Barrett even made light of the protests at a Federalist Society dinner after receiving a standing ovation. “Thank you. It’s really nice to have a lot of noise made that’s not by protesters outside my house,” Coney Barrett cracked.
The Supreme Court has continued to beef up security in response to perceived threats to justices from abortion activists anyway. In the past year, the Court expanded its security detail to include 400 U.S. Marshals through the new SCOTUS Special Security Officer Program, more than doubling the number of officers assigned to the security of the justices and their residences.
The Marshals’ annual report to Congress, released in April, sheds light on their response to the protests, which included “24-hour online threat screening coverage for the SCOTUS, all justices and their residences” as well as “real-time online research” into suspected threats at justices’ homes.
Although a year has passed since the Supreme Court overturned Roe on June 24, the Marshals this year requested an additional $21 million for 46 new positions, including 42 more Marshals, to bolster security to judges in the next fiscal year.
The Court specifically cited overturning Roe v. Wade as fueling an extra need. “As a result of the Dobbs decision,” the Marshals’ budget request explains, in reference to the case that overturned Roe, “SCOTUS contacted the [U.S. Marshals Service] to request assistance in securing their facility,” resulting in “additional security posts and Special Security officers to provide this enhanced level of on-site monitoring and presence of officers.”
During the Trump administration, the U.S. Marshals provided security details of questionable necessity. Former President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, faced criticism after her U.S. Marshals Service protective detail racked up over $24 million in costs, “the largest U.S. Cabinet-level protection detail in [U.S. Marshals Service] history.” Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, ran up over $3.5 million, costs the EPA’s inspector general found were unjustified and were incurred without conducting a threat analysis to determine whether the protection was even necessary.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court also separately requested a budget increase of $5.8 million over the previous year’s budget to augment its own police force, the Supreme Court Police. “This request would expand security activities conducted by Supreme Court Police to protect the Justices,” the budget document explains. “On-going threat assessments show evolving risks that require continuous protection.” The Supreme Court’s police force numbers about 125 officers, according to a 2018 report by Security Today.
But neither the Supreme Court police force nor the U.S. Marshals details the threats that are used to justify millions in extra security, and publicly available assessments point in the opposite direction.
The Marshals’ report cites 260 instances of “concerning communications” that were referred to the Supreme Court Police for further investigation. The previous year’s annual report did not identify any instances of “concerning communications” to the Supreme Court, instead focusing on “inappropriate communications” concerning DeVos, though no number is provided.
But threats against Supreme Court justices were not enough to dent the Marshals’ aggregate data on threats against its judiciary protectees, which actually reflect a decrease in the year of the Dobbs decision. (Annual data specific to threats against justices is not available.)
Though there was a raft of vandalism directed at churches and other anti-abortion facilities after the Dobbs ruling — in a recent case, the firebombing of a vacant anti-abortion clinic — experts say that violence has largely been directed at property.
“I am not aware of any serious bodily injury caused by pro-choice activists,” Michael German, a former FBI agent and fellow with the Brennan Center For Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept.
Even in the case of the man who traveled from California with a plan to attack Kavanaugh, security did not intervene; he called the police and turned himself in. German said that he is not aware of anyone else being charged with making threats against a Supreme Court justice, a felony.
Not everyone in Congress intended their bill to be a blank check for the Court. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., pressed Garland, the attorney general, about the Marshals’ protective detail in a March 28 Senate hearing, asking whether it would “continue indefinitely.”
“So you’re not anticipating this to go on long term then?” Shaheen asked.
“We’re hoping that it doesn’t go on long term,” Garland replied.
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In Chicago today, President Joe Biden gave a historic speech at the Old Post Office Building downtown. In it, he was crystal clear that he has launched a new economic vision for the United States to stand against that of today’s Republicans. As he has said since he took office, he intends to build the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up instead of just the top down.”
His vision, he said, “is a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades now.”
That theory is “trickle-down economics,” the idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy and for corporations while shrinking public investment in infrastructure and public education will nurture the economy. Under that theory the most important metric was a company’s bottom line, Biden pointed out, so companies reduced costs by taking factories and supply chains overseas to find cheap labor, leaving “entire towns and communities…hollowed out.” It also meant cutting taxes, which led to dramatic cuts in public investments in infrastructure, research, social programs and so on, with the idea that concentrating money in a few hands would prompt private investment in the economy. That investment would, the theory went, provide more jobs and enable everyone to prosper.
This is the worldview that the Republicans have embraced since 1980 and that, Biden said, has “failed the middle class. It failed America. It blew up the deficit. It increased inequity. And it weakened…our infrastructure. It stripped the dignity, pride, and hope out of communities one after another…. People working as hard as ever couldn’t get ahead because it’s harder to buy a home, pay for a college education, start a business, retire with dignity. [For] the first time in a generation, the path of the middle class seemed out of reach,” Biden said.
Biden came into office determined to reverse this policy by investing in the American people rather than in tax cuts. With the help of a Democratic Congress, the president backed legislation that invests in infrastructure, repairing our long-neglected roads and bridges, and in supply chains and manufacturing. Rather than scaring off private investment, as the trickle-down theory argued, that public investment has attracted more than $490 billion of private money into new industries. Manufacturing is booming. Together, infrastructure and manufacturing have created new jobs that pay well.
Central to Biden’s vision is the idea that the prosperity of the United States rests on its working people, rather than its elites. In Chicago he emphasized his administration’s focus on training and education, as well as its emphasis on the trades and unions. He also emphasized economic competition, noting that business consolidation has stifled innovation, reduced wages, made supply chains vulnerable, and raised costs for consumers.
To reduce the deficit that has exploded in the past decades and to pay for new programs, Biden reiterated the need for fair taxes on the wealthy and corporations after decades of cuts. “Big Oil made $200 billion last year and got a…$30 billion tax break,” he said, while billionaires pay an average of 8% in taxes, less than “a schoolteacher, a firefighter, or a cop.” He called for “making the tax code fair for everyone, making the wealthy and the super-wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share, without raising taxes at all on the middle class.”
“We’re not going to continue down the trickle-down path as long as I’m president,” Biden said. “This is the moment we are finally going to make a break…. Here’s the simple truth about trickle-down economics: It didn’t represent the best of American capitalism, let alone America. It represented a moment where we walked away… from… how this country was built…. Bidenomics is just another way of saying: Restore the American Dream because it worked before. It’s rooted in what’s always worked best in this country: investing in America, investing in Americans. Because when we invest in our people, we strengthen the middle class, we see the economy grow. That benefits all Americans. That’s the American Dream.”
Biden often points to the New Deal of the 1930s as his inspiration. In that era, under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Congress responded to the economic crash spurred by unregulated capitalism by passing a wide range of laws that regulated business and protected workers, provided a basic social safety net including Social Security, and promoted infrastructure.
In his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, FDR condemned the policies of his predecessors that turned the government over to businessmen, declaring that “the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.” He pledged to give the American people a “new deal” to replace the one that had led them into the Depression, and to lead a “crusade to restore America to its own people.”
But FDR was not the first president to see ordinary Americans as the heart of the nation and to call for a government that protected them, rather than an economic elite. FDR’s distant relative Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, made a similar argument as president thirty years earlier. Responding to a world in which a few wealthy industrialists—nicknamed “robber barons”—monopolized politics and the economy, he called for a “square deal” for the American people.
“[W]hen I say that I am for the square deal,” TR said in 1910, “I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.” He called for conservation of natural resources, business regulation, higher wages, and “social” legislation to create a “new nationalism” that would rebuild the country. Overall, he wanted “a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.”
But TR didn’t invent the idea of government investment in and protection of ordinary Americans either. In his New Nationalism speech, TR pointed back to his revered predecessor, Republican president Abraham Lincoln, who believed that the government must serve the interests of ordinary people rather than those of elite southern enslavers. When South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told the Senate in 1858 that society was made up of “mudsills” overseen by their betters, who directed their labor and, gathering the wealth they produced, used it to advance the country, Lincoln was outraged.
Society moved forward not at the hands of a wealthy elite, he countered, but through the hard work of ordinary men who constantly innovated. A community based on the work and wisdom of farmers, he said in 1859, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” In office, Lincoln turned the government from protecting enslavers to advancing the interests of workingmen, including government support for higher education.
Biden has recently embraced the term “Bidenomics,” a term coined by his opponents who insist that their embrace of tax cuts is the only way to create a healthy economy. But Bidenomics is simply a new word for a time-honored American idea.
—
Notes:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/joe-biden-tries-to-change-the-narrative-on-the-economy
https://www.americanantiquarian.org/Manuscripts/cottonisking.html
https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm
28 June 23
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This weekend, the country saw someone other than Putin act politically and—even more important—wield force.
Stage 1: Mutiny. It had been brewing for months. All through the winter and spring, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose private army, the Wagner Group, was fighting the Ukrainian military for control of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, had been accusing the Russian Defense Ministry of sabotaging his actions and failing to supply enough armaments. Prigozhin and his men—many of them convicted felons conscripted from prison colonies, an approach he didn’t invent but was the first to apply during this war—alternated between being plaintive and menacing. They threatened to abandon Bakhmut. On social media, they hurled insults at military brass, including the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov. In response, the Ministry of Defense, Russia’s official, taxpayer-funded Army, which has been fighting alongside Prigozhin’s private force, apparently moved to limit Prigozhin’s power. For months the Ministry of Defense has reportedly been drafting from prison colonies, appropriating Prigozhin’s know-how and presumably cutting off his supply of able-bodied men with nothing to lose. In mid-June, the state military tried to put its house in order by requiring all fighters to sign identical contracts with the Ministry of Defense. It wasn’t clear if the measure applied to the Wagner Group—if it did, Prigozhin could effectively lose control of his army. On June 23rd, Prigozhin accused the Ministry of Defense of striking his bases and, in a series of statements, declared an armed rebellion. “The evil being wrought by the military leadership of this country must be stopped,” he said. “Justice in the ranks of the military will be restored—and then justice for all of Russia.” His men crossed the border from Ukraine into Russia. He claimed that they numbered twenty-five thousand. “This is not a military coup,” he said. “This is a march for justice.”
Prigozhin was not challenging Putin. In fact, he was acting in accordance with the power structure and the mythology constructed by Putin, whereby Putin alone makes all the decisions and, if those decisions are bad, then it’s someone else’s fault—it means that he was misinformed. In a video released on June 23rd, Prigozhin said that war in Ukraine had been unleashed under false pretenses—because, he said, the Ministry of Defense had lied to Putin, making him think that Ukraine and NATO were about to attack Russia. Prigozhin was apparently marching to the capital not to depose Putin but to enlighten him.
Stage 2: The Sit-Down. Prigozhin’s men and their tanks entered Rostov-on-Don, a city of more than a million people and the seat of Russia’s Southern Military District. There Prigozhin talked, over what appeared to be tea, in what appeared to be the courtyard of a military building, with the Deputy Minister of Defense, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, and a deputy chief of the general staff, Vladimir Alekseyev. The genesis of the meeting was unclear. Had the two generals flown in to speak with Prigozhin? If so, this was a negotiation. Were they in Rostov when Prigozhin’s men occupied the city? That would make them more like hostages and less like negotiators. Prigozhin sat, manspreading, on a narrow bench, his Kalashnikov dangling against his right knee as he used both hands to gesticulate. “We want the chief of the general staff and Shoigu,” he said. “Until they are handed over to us, we will stay here and blockade the city.”
“Take them,” Alekseyev said, smiling and spreading his arms wide, as though waving Shoigu and Gerasimov away. He seemed to have as little regard for Shoigu as did Prigozhin. This is not surprising. Shoigu did not come up through the ranks of the military. In the Soviet Union, he was a Party functionary. In post-Soviet Russia, he became the Minister of Emergency Situations. What primarily qualified him for the job of Minister of Defense, which he has occupied since 2012, was a sort of adventurous friendship with Putin: the two camped together and hiked together and ran the Russian Geographic Society together, Shoigu as president and Putin as chairman of the board.
Stage 3: The Coup. Prigozhin’s men began their march toward Moscow. Along the way—perhaps even before entering Rostov—the Wagner Group shot down some number of Russian military aircraft. Now Prigozhin’s mutiny was looking like a coup—not because Prigozhin was challenging Putin directly but because he was fighting Putin’s actual Army. In the morning on the second day of Prigozhin’s insurgency, Putin addressed the nation. He compared the “armed rebellion,” as he called it, to the revolutions of 1917, which, he claimed, cost Russia its victory in the First World War and caused it to lose vast territories. He did not name Prigozhin, referring, rather, to “organizers of the armed rebellion,” whom he called traitors. He vowed to punish them, and to defend Russia.
Several Russian regions declared states of emergency or introduced various restrictions. The mayor of Moscow gave the city a day off on Monday. (It was still only Saturday at this point.) The Russian capital prepared for battle. Putin’s plane left Moscow and disappeared from the radar. Prigozhin had to face that, rather than speak to Putin, he would likely die when he attempted to enter Moscow—because, whatever he had intended, he had ended up attempting a coup.
Stage 4: It Ends the Way a Hostage-Taking Might. On Saturday evening, about thirty-six hours after the mutiny began, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka’s press service announced that he had negotiated an end to the crisis. Prigozhin’s people would reverse course. Prigozhin would go to Belarus. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said that all criminal cases against Prigozhin had been closed. Lukashenka’s press statement said that the agreement was mutually beneficial.
Rumors swirled that Lukasheka, empowered by Putin, had promised Prigozhin Shoigu’s head on a platter. There is no way to know if this is true, or if Putin had any intention to keep whatever promises Lukashenka doled out, but one of several impossible dilemmas that Putin is facing now is, indeed, what to do with Shoigu. He can hardly afford to keep a Defense Minister who allowed all of this to happen—the public spats, the mutiny, the siege of what is arguably the country’s most important military city, the apparent failure to stop Prigozhin’s armored column, and, most of all, the disrespect evident during Prigozhin’s sit-down with the military brass. On June 26th, Prigozhin issued a ten-minute audio statement on the mutiny. He stressed that his troops were able to incapacitate all Defense Ministry troops along the route of the “march for justice.” He added that in twenty-four hours, the Wagner Group covered the equivalent of the distance from Ukraine’s eastern border to its western one, saying, “If the Special Military Operation had been undertaken by troops as well trained and disciplined, it could have lasted a day.”
Putin may be similarly stuck on the issue of Prigozhin himself. The Wagner Group may or may not be essential to the Russian effort in Ukraine, especially during the ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensive. But, even if Putin doesn’t need Prigozhin on the battlefield, he must decide what to do about him. The conceit that Prigozhin is going into exile in Belarus is absurd, mostly because this wouldn’t be exile. With charges against Prigozhin dropped, he is functionally free to return to Russia (in contrast to anti-Putin activists and independent journalists, many of whom are forced to stay in exile for fear of being arrested in Russia). Belarus, the junior member of the Russian-Belarusian “Union State,” is not exactly a sovereign state. The border between the two countries is functionally open. Lukashenka depends on Putin to help in his continuous crackdowns to prop up the Belarusian regime. Lukashenka was once fickle, playing Russia against Western European countries, but, ever since Putin helped Lukashenka put down pro-democracy protests in 2020, Lukashenka has stayed in line. Having the head of a large private army live in Belarus should seem to Putin like an extremely risky proposition. What if Lukashenka replaces Putin’s muscle with Prigozhin’s?
Historically, among Russian élites, Putin has followed the rule to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. No one leaves this mafia family intact. Putin has the option, and perhaps the instinct, to bring Prigozhin back into the fold (and out of Belarus). That should be easy, since Prigozhin never actually wanted to leave the fold. In his June 26th statement, Prigozhin reiterated that he had no desire to bring down the government. Putin addressed the nation later that day, promising to deal decisively with those who inspired the mutiny that threatened the country. But he chose to frame the rebellion as a kind of terrorist attack, blaming it on neo-Nazis in Kyiv and unnamed enemies in the West, vowing never to cave in to blackmail, and praising Russian national unity. He did not mention Prigozhin by name and, indeed, praised Wagner fighters as brave patriots, and invited them to join the regular Ministry of Defense forces. This invitation back into Putin’s good graces does not necessarily exclude Prigozhin himself. A return to Putin’s circle would probably require Prigozhin to appear on television and express contrition for going a bit overboard in his conflict with Shoigu. Absurd as this prospect may seem, what with the siege of Rostov and the destroyed aircraft and their dead pilots, it falls within the bounds of the imaginable for Russian propaganda.
What would the Russian people think of this? In general, the Putin regime, like all totalitarian regimes, aims to prevent people from thinking. But this past weekend Russians—not just the Russians who consume independent media but all Russians who watch any TV or read or watch anything online—saw something extraordinary. They saw real political conflict. They saw someone other than Putin act politically and—even more important—wield force. Can all the propagandists and censors make them unsee it? They will try. Russians should probably gear up for an extreme information crackdown.
Will Russians then forget what happened? Some things that shocked Western observers, such as Prigozhin’s statement that the war in Ukraine was started under false pretenses, will probably easily vanish from consciousness. The specifics of what he said matter little. What’s important is that he tapped into a reservoir of bitter suspicion: Russians always suspect that they are being lied to, yet they have no choice but to support those who lie to them. Prigozhin gave them a choice, by driving tanks through the streets of Rostov.
If Putin’s regime ends before Putin dies, that end will look much like the events of this past weekend: sudden, bloody, and ridiculous at first. Most coups seem absurd at the beginning. Every coup is a confidence game. The ultimate question is: How many people will believe that Person A, not Person B, has power? Prigozhin’s gambit wasn’t intended as a coup, but it functioned as one. Regular military forces didn’t stop him, and indeed the defense officials negotiated with him, because they apparently believed that he had power. Not the power to bring down Putin but the power to influence Putin. They were not wrong. Putin greeted the mutiny by calling Prigozhin a traitor and accusing him of sticking a knife in his back, and ended the coup by absolving Prigozhin of charges.
Even though, in the short term, it may look as if Putin survived Prigozhin’s accidental coup attempt, something has changed in Russia. One of the most intriguing scenes of the wild weekend was Prigozhin’s troops’ departure from Rostov. People applauded and thanked them. For what? For voicing their resentments. In the American imagination, these are specific, possible to verbalize. In the Russian reality, they are felt more than spoken (as, indeed, they are here)—they require someone to come along and give voice to them (as, for example, Donald Trump does for millions in the U.S.). Prigozhin did that. He even broadcast his conversation with the Deputy Minister of Defense and the deputy chief of the general staff. This was the first unscripted top-level political conversation that Russians had seen in years. It sounded like two thugs haggling over the terms of their protection racket, but it was a negotiation —it was politics—and it was possibility. Most Russians I know wouldn’t want to live in the country that this exchange portended, but it’s different from the one they live in now.
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This year, MAGA GOP activists in Georgia attempted to disenfranchise hundreds of students by trying to kick them off the voter rolls. De...
