Showing posts with label SEARCH WARRANT. Show all posts

Saturday, May 25, 2024

Donald Trump is LOSING it!

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Saturday, September 16, 2023

Trump’s CRIMINAL INTENT Exposed in New Records UNSEALED by Judge

Twitter search warrant revealed! See how Jack Smith has left no stone unturned in his effort to collect evidence in the sweeping Jan 6th trial that will start in early 2024 in front of Judge Tanya Chutkan. Legal AF host Karen Friedman Agnifilo reports.

Thursday, August 10, 2023

POLITICO Nightly: Biden sold farmers on climate change. Now his sights are set on Wall Street.

BY GARRETT DOWNS

A worker uses a cranberry boom in a flooded bog to coral floating cranberries to a pump as they are harvested at Mann Farms in Buzzards Bay, Mass., on Oct. 9, 2022. | Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

SELLING THE FARM — President Joe Biden’s plan to address agriculture’s emissions has the powerful, conservative Beltway farm lobby smiling ear-to-ear. Next stop: Wall Street.

This spring, a $3 billion initiative dubbed Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities started doling out funds , testing farming methods that are lighter on carbon emissions.

The projects will be scrubbed for data to find out what works best, akin to a large-scale science experiment, and the Agriculture Department estimates the results will produce emissions benefits equal to taking around 12 million cars off the road. The USDA used its internal bank to bankroll the efforts.

The Biden administration hopes the influx of cash will produce an impressive feat: turning some farmers, generally a conservative group, around on Biden.

When he assumed office, Biden had a long way to go with farmers and their backers on the Hill. Only a month into his presidency, a Farm Journal Foundation poll found 75 percent of farmers disapproved of his presidency. Another poll found 72 percent opposed his plan to slash emissions in half, fearing that new regulations — which farmers hate — would follow.

But the deluge of climate-cop regulations farmers feared hasn’t happened under Biden. Instead, in addition to the $3 billion carrot that his administration has dangled to create new climate-smart markets and revenue streams, he’s also signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which will grow the incentive-driven climate-ag space by nearly $20 billion.

That’s enough investment to turn the agricultural lobby around on Biden, for now. But the administration acknowledges it still has a long way to go in proving to climate advocates that its plan will reduce the effects of global warming in a meaningful way.

Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities has plans to invest in projects that will reach over 60,000 farms and span 25 million acres. Government officials estimate that this could sequester 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. But they have even broader hopes for the new $3 billion initiative: that Wall Street will see the financial possibilities of turning farms green and make their own investments in similar projects.

“This can’t just be government money, we have to attract private investment,” said Robert Bonnie, the USDA’s undersecretary of farm production and conservation who helped devise the plan. “Part of the real interest in the Partnerships program is a way to provide seed money to entice more folks in the private sector to come in … the government’s not going to do it alone.”

In the past, Wall Street has been nervous about investing in green supply chains — and in particular in purchasing carbon credits under government programs designed to quickly offset pollution from farms.

Last year, a Bloomberg article exposed that scores of companies claiming to be eco-friendly actually purchased carbon credits that turned out to be bogus.

“A lot of folks are still staying on the sidelines because there’s headline risk that you’re going to make a pledge, purchase credits, and then end up in a POLITICO or Bloomberg article about carbon credits that didn’t work,” said Kris Covey, a co-founder and President of USDA grant-recipient The Soil Inventory Project.

But after USDA provides significant monetary incentives to farms around the country to go green, Wall Street will have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t — and which carbon credits and sustainable farming tools are worth the money.

TSIP, which counts former Vice President Al Gore as a senior adviser, has farmers bag up soil and send it to their labs for testing on carbon content. The data it produces, USDA hopes, will help corporate titans feel comfortable to pay vast amounts of money to farmers for their emissions reductions in the form of credits. They also hope the results will encourage companies to invest private money in farms that are climate smart.

If the Biden administration can secure significant private investment in farms and programs that are going green, it might just be able to thread the needle of keeping farmers happy and hitting emission goals.

With Biden hitting the campaign trail for the 2024 election, he and his administration are now eager to draw comparisons to the leading Republican candidate — former President Donald Trump. Trump has already raised hackles within his own caucus for threatening to slap new tariffs on exports to China, with one Republican calling it “suicide” for rural communities. His last batch of tariffs in 2018 drove farm income to record lows and resulted in a record bailout.

Biden will likely highlight how in addition to his massive and potentially lucrative incentives for green agriculture, he’s also largely avoided imposing the regulations that scare farmers away and has taken a much lighter touch on trade. Biden’s message of stability will target farmers in swing states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania. According to Bonnie, a regulatory approach won’t happen under a second Biden administration, either.

“If we’re going to maintain agriculture and forestry support for this, it’s got to stay voluntary,” Bonnie said. “And if we can prove that this approach works, we have a high probability of doing that.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at gdowns@politico.com or on Twitter at @_garrettdowns .

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WHAT'D I MISS?

— Special counsel obtained search warrant for Trump Twitter: Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant for Donald Trump’s Twitter account , @realDonaldTrump, earlier this year, according to newly revealed court documents. Twitter’s initial resistance to complying with the Jan. 17 warrant resulted in a federal judge holding the company, now called X, in contempt and levying a $350,000 fine. A federal court of appeals upheld that fine last month in a sealed opinion. Today, the court unsealed a redacted version of that opinion, revealing details of the secret court battle for the first time.

— Feinstein released from hospital after fall: Sen. Dianne Feinstein fell in her San Francisco home and went to the hospital Tuesday , according to her office. “Senator Feinstein briefly went to the hospital yesterday afternoon as a precaution after a minor fall in her home,” said her spokesperson, Adam Russell. “All of her scans were clear and she returned home.” Russell described the fall as very minor and not involving any serious injuries. Feinstein went to the hospital for about two hours, he said.

— Abortion rights activists set their sights on Arizona after Ohio win: A top progressive group wants to build on the huge success Democrats are having with abortion-related ballot initiatives — this time in Arizona . Fresh off their 14-point victory in Ohio on Tuesday, progressive groups are eyeing the Southwest battleground state as the next place to ensure abortion rights after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Arizona currently bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. “National Democratic donors and stakeholders should look to Arizona as the next state with a serious, layered return on investment for putting abortion on the ballot,” says a memo from the progressive organizing group Indivisible.

NIGHTLY ROAD TO 2024

Donald Trump participates in a 2016 primary debate, along with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) hosted by Fox News. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

OUTFOXED — The Republican National Committee has picked Fox Business to host the second GOP presidential primary debate , which is set to be held next month at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi Valley, Calif, reports POLITICO’s Alex Isenstadt.

The decision means that Fox networks will televise the first two debates. The first debate, to be held Aug. 23 in Milwaukee, will be broadcast on Fox Business’ sister station, Fox News.

The committee also announced that Univision and Rumble will be partners for the second debate. Rumble, a conservative-leaning competitor to YouTube, is also set to broadcast the first showdown.

By tapping Rupert Murdoch-run Fox for the first two debates, the committee is looking to reach a broad swath of Republican voters who regularly tune into the network’s stations. But Fox News’ specific role in the first debate has gotten pushback from former President Donald Trump, who has warred with the network over what he has called its unfair coverage of him since leaving the White House.

‘POLITICALLY MOTIVATED’ — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis today once again suspended an elected Florida prosecutor from office , this time removing a central Florida Democrat that the Republican governor contended was too lenient with criminals and was endangering the public, reports POLITICO’s Gary Fineout.

The move drew sharp criticism from the target of the suspension — State Attorney Monique Worrell — as well as Democrats, who called DeSantis a “dictator” and said his actions were designed to draw attention to his struggling presidential campaign.

The governor’s office had been telegraphing dissatisfaction with Worrell for months, including raising questions about how her office had handled past arrests of a 19-year-old man who was ultimately arrested for allegedly killing three people in Orlando, including a television reporter.

Worrell, who talked to the media just outside the Orange County courthouse today, called DeSantis a tyrant and said she remained a “duly elected” prosecutor who the governor removed for political reasons.

AROUND THE WORLD

TRAGEDY AT SEA — Forty-one migrants, including three children, have died in a shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa , after a small boat which had set off from Sfax in Tunisia capsized and sank in the Strait of Sicily, writes Elena Giordano .

Four people survived the shipwreck, three men and one woman originally from Ivory Coast and Guinea. They were rescued by a Maltese cargo ship and taken to Lampedusa by the Italian Coast Guard, according to Italian newswire ANSA.

The four survivors told the Coast Guard that 45 people had left Sfax. After about six hours of navigation, the 7-meter metal boat capsized due to a large wave and all 45 migrants ended up in the sea. Authorities have not yet recovered the bodies.

According to the International Organization for Migration, since the beginning of the year, 2,387 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean while trying to reach European shores.

In Brussels, Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Italian government has been pushing to review rules on how the EU welcomes and relocates migrants, asking for more authority to remove rejected asylum seekers.

Last month, the EU finalized a deal with Tunisia — a common departure point for people seeking asylum in Europe — which essentially offers the country millions of euros in exchange for help blocking the boats that have been carrying a growing number of people to Europe.

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NIGHTLY NUMBER

Nearly 4 million

The number of Americans who have been cut off their Medicaid plans in the last three months , as states purge Medicaid roles after Covid-era policies meant to prevent people from being quickly kicked off their health insurance expired this spring. Official estimates suggest the number could balloon to 15 million by this time next year, and some experts worry it could be higher than that. The mass terminations together represent the biggest reshuffling of the health insurance landscape since Obamacare.

RADAR SWEEP

HANGING ON BY A CABLE — Over 95 percent of internet traffic runs through shockingly thin cables that line the bottom of the ocean . In the cold depths of the ocean, signals are traveling rapidly through cables about the size of garden hoses. And they’re vulnerable; it wouldn’t be hard to break these cables, a bad actor could do it fairly easily. In 2017, now UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sounded the alarm on this issue, arguing the subsea cables are both “indispensable” and “insecure”. For CNET, Stephen Shankland explains the history and origin of these cables and what role they play in the future of the internet.

PARTING IMAGE

On this date in 1982: A terror attack on the Jewish restaurant and deli, Jo Goldenberg, located on the corner of Rue des Rosiers and Rue Ferdinand Duval in Paris, left six dead and many injured. | Aulnay/AP Photo

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Friday, August 26, 2022

Trump favorite throws hilarious fit after primary loss

It's Our Democracy!

Today’s Action: Make plans to take action during congressional recess!

Today's Top Stories:

MUST READ!

Defeated GOP extremist Laura Loomer: 'I'm not conceding, because I'm a winner!'
Reap what you sow. Professional racist Laura Loomer refused to concede following her primary loss in Florida's 11th district, claiming the "Republican Party is broken to the core." Well, she's right about that last party anyway.

Take Action: Tell Facebook to crack down on dangerous Republican lies about the IRS!

VIDEO OF THE DAY: Republican sinks himself with dumbest answer possible to incriminating question
Foot, meet mouth!

MY NOTE:

MANDELA BARNES is running to replace RON JOHNSON.

PLEASE SUPPORT HIM!

Take Action: Expel Ron Johnson for trying to overturn the election with fake Trump electors!

STUNNING new midterm polls signal good news for Democrats
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen: Whoa.

Court upholds Mississippi’s 1890 Jim Crow voting law
A law that one of its drafters explicitly said was designed to "eliminate the n****r from politics" has been upheld by an appeals court. It permanently disenfranchises those found guilty of a slew of minor property crimes.

Take Action: Tell Congress to force political groups to disclose their wealthy backers!

Florida pair plead guilty to stealing Ashley Biden's diary, selling it to Project Veritas
That's MAGA for you: stealing a diary full of intimate thoughts, and then selling it to the highest bidder to be exploited for delusional political conspiracies. Aimee Harris stole the Biden diary from a mutual friend's house and then sold it to scumbag fake news organization Project Veritas, who paid $40,000 for it. Their bumbling attempts to verify the contents of the diary led to the whole scam being exposed.

Take Action: Tell the Justice Department to hold Trump accountable for his crimes!

Missouri school district adopts opt-in corporal punishment policy
Child beating will resume "only in reasonable form" and when "all other alternative means of discipline have failed," and only with the approval of the parents, but still, it's beyond parody for those proclaiming they care so much about fetuses that they'll beat them once they are born and begin growing up.

US deploys helicopters, gunships, and airstrikes against militias in Syria
In response to rocket attacks against US defensive positions around the oilfields (of course) of Deir-ez-Zor in northeast Syria, the US made a show of force against the Iranian-backed Liwa Fatemiyoun militia, a group of Afghan Shia warriors who fought on behalf of Bashar al-Assad's Syrian government to clear the region of ISIS forces in 2017.

If young people vote in November, Democrats keep Congress. It's that simple!
NextGen: The youngest generation of adults is the largest and most progressive in US history, but they also vote in low numbers. That’s the only thing giving Trump Republicans a chance at taking back Congress this year. NextGen is doing the work to make sure that doesn’t happen, creating the largest youth mobilization effort in US history. But they can’t do it alone! Can you chip in to protect our Congressional majority?

Justice Department ordered to release redacted Mar-a-Lago search warrant affidavit
The Justice Department must release a redacted version of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant affidavit by noon on Friday, a federal judge ruled. The affidavit lays out why investigators believe there was probable cause that crimes had been committed. The government has been fighting to redact the order to ensure that information pertinent to its grand jury investigation of Donald Trump is not compromised.

Top staffer for major anti-abortion group arrested for soliciting a minor
Lucas Bowen, the former political director of the Texas Right to Life group, is the latest to follow the time-honored tradition of right-wing "family values" zealot turning out to be a sexual predator who preys on the young. He was charged with a second-degree felony for soliciting sex from a minor.

The NLRB accuses Starbucks of withholding pay raises, promotions from workers at unionized stores
This is just the latest outrage that the coffee giant has perpetrated on its employees. NLRB offices have filed at least 20 complaints against Starbucks as it continues bullying its workers out of unionizing — proving just why they need that union in the first place.

$386M veteran retraining program only gave jobs to 397 vets
In yet another colossal waste of taxpayer money, an investigation found that a pandemic-era veteran retraining program was simply used as an opportunity by for profit "training schools" to scam money out of the government, which they will almost certainly never see consequence for.

Get a load of these jabronis

GOP Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance appeared with podcaster who said "feminists need rape"

GOP Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Oz exposed for telling the Trump administration to push useless hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 cure

GOP Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters quietly backtracks on abortion, scrubs his website

GOP Washington Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley tries to sit the fence on abortion by claiming she's pro-life but opposes federal ban

That's a lot of bad apples

Philly cop gets his job back after sending beastiality porn to two women

Arlington police officer goes on trial for killing woman while he was trying to kill her dog

Police exonerated after killing mentally unstable man with fake gun

NY city of Yonkers spends $5.5 million settling police misconduct complaints

Hope...

Biden admin ends paywalls for publicly funded research

MIT professor wrongfully accused of spying for China helps make a major discovery

Chipotle workers in Michigan vote to form the franchise's first union

A New Jersey city achieved 0 traffic deaths in 4 years with quick, high-impact ideas

Today’s Action: Make plans to take action during congressional recess!

We’re nearing the end of another congressional recess, but just because there’s a break in the legislative action doesn’t mean there’s not a way to make our voices heard!

Various members of Congress are holding town halls, taking meetings, and attending local events — which gives us plenty of opportunities to make our demands face to face. Make a commitment during this recess to get personal with at least one of your congressional reps, in whichever manner you feel most comfortable.

Ask for a one-on-one meeting. Contact your rep’s local office to make your meeting request, and follow up after a few days if you haven’t heard back! Arrive with your three biggest requests prepared, and ask for clear action on each (e.g., cosponsor a bill, make a public statement, join a caucus). Type up your requests in a letter to deliver to your rep at the end of the meeting, just in case they don’t take notes!

Attend a town hall. If your reps are offering a public forum, this is a great opportunity to make your demands with witnesses. Contact their office and ask if any town halls have been scheduled (and if not, why not?). Visit Town Hall Project to search for events near you.

Organize a protest visit. Is your rep refusing to hold a town hall and declining private meetings? No problem. Ask their offices if they’ll be attending ANY public events during recess, and join them there to ask your questions. Be sure to film it and broadcast it on social media! No events? Make the signal loud and clear: you cannot hide from your constituents. Gather your friends, family, and community to protest at their offices.

And the topics? There are so many, but here are a few to get you started:

Demand they abolish the filibuster so meaningful legislation can be passed
Call for them to champion strong, progressive climate action
Fight for crucial voting rights legislation to protect the most marginalized constituents’ right to vote
Raise the national minimum wage to $15/hour – cosponsor and pass the Raise the Wage Act
Pass the transgender bill of rights
Secure equal rights protections with the Equal Rights Amendment for women and the Equality Act for the LGBTQ+ community
Pass the PRO Act in support of striking workers across the country

A congressional recess isn’t time off — it’s your opportunity to remind our leaders who elected them and what our communities’ needs are!

PS — Please consider a small monthly contribution of as little as $5 to help us elect Democrats and fight back against the Trump-Republican agenda. We can't do it without you. Keep fighting the good fight!

@advocacy | 1002 Hull St., Louisville, KY 40204

Saturday, August 13, 2022

August 12, 2022 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

August 12, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 13

Today, the House of Representatives passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping bill that will invest more than $430 billion in climate change and extended subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. It will raise about $737 billion over the next ten years by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, adequately staffing the Internal Revenue Service after years of cuts so it can catch people cheating on their taxes, and raising the tax rate on rich corporations to require them to pay a minimum of 15%.

The vote was 220 to 207, along party lines, although the measures in the bill are widely popular. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) didn’t lose a vote, even among those Democrats concerned the measure doesn’t go far enough. For their part, Republicans have been misrepresenting the bill to justify their opposition: Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) has called it a “war on seniors” because he says it cuts Medicare spending. That’s a misleading read on a provision that is expected to save $265 billion by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

This bill is a huge deal for the country and for the Biden administration, launching us into a new era in which we take serious steps to address climate change, start to rein in the costs of healthcare, and begin again to ask the very wealthy to pay their share of the costs of running our country, and yet it has been overshadowed by today’s other big story.

After days of attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department by former president Trump and his supporters for the Monday search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, today a federal judge unsealed the search warrant and the property receipt for that search. The warrant shows that agents were investigating whether Trump violated the Espionage Act.

The property receipt reveals that agents reclaimed for the United States more than 26 boxes of documents, including ones labeled “classified/TS/SCI,” which means “top secret/sensitive compartmented information.” This is highly classified material that is available only to those necessary to the project, and must be discussed, used, and stored only in secure locations because its release to the public would cause “exceptionally grave” damage to our national security.

Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb, who is also an anchor for the right-wing One America News Network, signed the property receipt.

Even before the release of the warrant, Trump had offered a number of excuses for taking documents to Mar-a-Lago and then keeping them despite a subpoena for their return. First, he blamed FBI agents for planting them on the premises, riling up his base against the FBI. That effort continued today: before the judge unsealed the documents, it appears Trump leaked them to Breitbart, which published them without blacking out the names of the agents who executed the search warrant, evidently intended to menace them.

Then he claimed that while he had taken only a few documents, former president Barack Obama had taken 33 million. This afternoon, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) put out a statement clarifying that it took possession of all Obama’s presidential records when he left office in 2017 and that it moved about 30 million unclassified pages of them to a “NARA facility in the Chicago area where they are maintained exclusively by NARA. Additionally, NARA maintains the classified Obama Presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, DC, area. As required by the P[residential] R[ecords] A[ct], former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his administration.”

Now he and his allies are saying that he declassified all the documents he took out of the Oval Office, so the recovered documents were no longer classified. The fact they were not marked declassified, as required, was simply because White House counsel didn’t get the paperwork done.

But there is a process for declassification; a president can’t just say something is declassified. Further, as legal analyst and former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa clarified, a president cannot unilaterally declassify nuclear secrets.

Legal analyst Joyce White Vance said, “Even if this is true & it holds up (I’ve got significant doubts) what does it say that Trump declassified materials that put our national security in grave danger? And that the Republican Party continues to support him?”

—

Notes:

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/12/1117151056/fbi-collected-multiple-sets-of-classified-documents-from-trumps-mar-a-lago-home

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/12/house-to-vote-on-inflation-reduction-act-tax-and-climate-bill.html

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22131425-mar-a-lago-search-documents

https://apnews.com/article/florida-donald-trump-mar-a-lago-merrick-garland-government-and-politics-f63c018b600e1539ff3660a896a132d0

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/12/politics/trump-mar-a-lago-investigation/index.html

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fbi-recovered-more-top-secret-docs-mar-a-lago-wsj