Friday, August 12, 2022

Today's News: Going Nuclear

Ain't we havin' some fun now?  
So Garland threw down the gauntlet to Trump - put up or shut up. 
He told Trump he was applying to the court to release the search warrant and evidence list from Monday's raid, and dared Trump to oppose it - which I fully expect he will try to do somehow. Two days ago, I said this raid was either: 
-a major national security scandal about a trove of top-secret documents that Trump was trying to sell to Putin or the Saudis; OR 
 -a nothing-burger Got Junk? cleanup of old presidential souvenirs that the Trumps had been too lazy to box up themselves and get to the National Archives. 
On Tuesday, it seemed like the nothing-burger story might be credible, By Wednesday the GOP started realizing maybe it wasn't so they started smearing the FBI. 
Today, the seriousness of the national security scandal came into focus.
In his nightly newsletter, CNN's Brian Stelter provides a timeline of commentary from Garland's press conference at 3 pm. Up until 8 pm, it was business as usual for the GOP and their sycophant networks -- defund the FBI, Trump is just a memento guy, "This was just a fishing expedition." etc. 
Then at 8 pm, BOOM - the Washington Post broke the news that the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for stolen nuclear documents. 
All of a sudden, the story changed - even though Fox News still tried to minimize it, the whole world took the story much more seriously:
Now people are also remembering all the sketchy Trump and Kushner behaviour we saw ever since 2016. With Trump, its a truism that every story will always be worse than it looks at first: As I understand it, the Two Hop Rule in an investigation of a subject allows additional investigation of people contacted by the subject and also of anyone THOSE people contact. Here's the tweet of the day:

Moving on to the latest news from Ukraine, the impact of that Ukraine strike on the Crimea airfield is significant: Here is the British Defense Intelligence summary: The spirit of Ukraine is extraordinary:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Trump claimed that the FBI raid on his home was proof that the US had become a third-world country. He couldn't be further from the truth. First world countries like France adhere to their laws and charge, try and jail corrupt former presidents.

What makes the US third world is its inability to hold the president to the same laws as everyone else. How was White House security so lax that a truckload of highly classified documents was able to leave the building bound for Mar-a-Lago? Why has it taken a year and a half to recover those documents? Why is Trump being treated differently from Reality Winner, John Kiriakou and Chelsea Manning? Why is Garland pussyfooting around with him? Trump is a twice impeached lawless president. He deserves no benefit of the doubt or special treatment at all. Lock him up.

Cap

Cathie from Canada said...

I agree - we have watched the US pussyfoot around Trump for 7 years now, ever since he came sailing down that escalator.