January 14, 2023

Afternoon Update:

Drippity-Doo-Dah. Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "President Biden's aides found additional pages of classified information at his Delaware home this week, the White House said on Saturday, bringing the tally to six pages uncovered this week. The additional pages, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said, were discovered hours after a White House statement on Thursday that cited only one that had turned up in a storage area adjacent to the garage of his Wilmington home. Justice Department employees had gone to retrieve that page, which Mr. Biden's aides had discovered the night before. The revelation came as Mr. Biden's lawyers provided new details about their unfolding discovery over the past two months of classified materials from his time as vice president at his house and an office he used before beginning his 2020 campaign for the White House." Savage goes into those details, including adding to the timeline & providing a rationale/explanation for the initial delay. ~~~

     ~~~ Zeke Miller of the AP: "Lawyers for President Joe Biden found more classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged Saturday. White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden's private library. The White House had said previously that only a single page was found there. The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Biden's garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president."

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Edward Wong of the New York Times: "President Biden and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan vowed Friday to work together to transform Japan into a potent military power to help counterbalance China and to bolster the alliance between the two nations so that it becomes the linchpin for their security interests in Asia.... Besides military issues, Mr. Biden, Mr. Kishida and their aides discussed the close economic ties between the two nations and the challenges in maintaining secure global supply chains."

Alan Rappeport & Jim Tankersley of the New York Times: "Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen warned on Friday that she would have to begin employing 'extraordinary measures' on [this coming] Thursday to continue paying the nation's bills if lawmakers did not act to raise the statutory debt limit and that her powers to delay a default could be exhausted by early June. Ms. Yellen's letter to Congress was the first sign that resistance by House Republicans to lifting the borrowing cap could put the U.S. economy at risk and signals the beginning of an intense fight in Washington this year over spending and deficits. 'Failure to meet the government's obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans and global financial stability,' Ms. Yellen wrote.... Republicans ... have insisted that any increase to the debt limit be accompanied by significant spending curbs, most likely including cuts to both the military and domestic issues.... President Biden has said that he will refuse to negotiate over the debt limit, and that Congress must vote to raise it with no strings attached." CNN's report is here. ~~~

~~~ Jeff Stein, et al., of the Washington Post: "House Republicans are preparing a plan telling the Treasury Department what to do if Congress and the White House don't agree to lift the nation's debt limit later this year, underscoring the brinkmanship newly empowered conservatives will bring to the high-stakes negotiations over averting a U.S. default.... The plan, which was previously unreported, was part of the private deal reached this month to resolve the standoff between House conservatives and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over the election of a House speaker.... The GOP proposal would call on the Biden administration to make only the most critical federal payments if the Treasury Department comes up against the statutory limit on what it can legally borrow.... Even if it were enacted [which it won't be because Senate], a debt prioritization plan could still jeopardize the trustworthiness of the U.S. government, some experts say." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: This is rich. In order to win the speakership, Kevin had to agree to wingers' dangerous plan to try to mitigate their dangerous plan to blow up the world economy. Since few of them really care about the national debt (witness their votes for Trump tax cuts for the rich), they're going through with this farce because they can rely on their own voters to be too damned stoopid to understand what "debt limit" means. (The law itself, IMO, is an irresponsible invitation to abuse of power.)

John Wagner of the Washington Post: "House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Friday invited President Biden to deliver the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 7." MB: It was sort of a fuck-you letter, IMO: "The American people sent us to Washington to deliver a new direction for the country, to find common ground, and to debate their priorities.... Your remarks will inform our efforts to address the priorities of the American people." Biden wrote back a nice letter accepting the fuck-you invitation. (Also linked yesterday.)

In this segment, Ari Melber of MSNBC notes that many experts agree that the Department of Justice was at its nadir under Donald Trump. So why is AG Merrick Garland repeatedly choosing Trump alumni to run investigations? Melber suggests that, like James Comey, Garland foolishly believes that he can assuage right-wing critics. Garland seems to think he can "stage-manage inherently political reaction to law or facts":

There has been a question about where a classified document President Biden's lawyers found this past Wednesday was located. Dareh Gregorian & Michael Kosnar of NBC News sort of clear that up: "In brief remarks to reporters Thursday, the president said the documents were found in 'storage areas and file cabinets in my home, in my personal library.'... A source familiar with the ongoing review later told NBC News that Biden's lawyers searched his personal library at the Wilmington residence, and no classified documents were found there. The library is not the room adjacent to the garage where one classified document was found among stored materials.... It's unclear why Biden's homes were just being searched now." (Also linked yesterday.)

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post: The "new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, or, as Democrats call it, the 'Tinfoil Hat Committee[,' is, in substance..., the QAnon committee, with a remit to probe the 'deep state' and other wacky conspiracy theories. With the panel's creation, QAnon completes its journey from message board for the paranoid to official policy of the House Republican majority.... [Republicans] are going to govern by fantasy and legislate on the basis of fiction. On Monday, their first day of legislative business, they voted to repeal funding for a fictitious '87,000 IRS agents' who don't exist and never will. On Wednesday, they approved legislation purporting to outlaw infanticide, which is already illegal and always has been."

GOP Extremists Say They Ignored Trump. Will Steakin, et al., of ABC News: "Moments after clinching the House speakership, Kevin McCarthy headed to the cameras to 'especially thank' one person he said helped him get the gig: Donald Trump.... The former president ... was also quick to take credit for McCarthy's eventual victory after publicly and privately pressuring members to back him. 'The Fake News Media was, believe it or not, very gracious in their reporting that I greatly helped Kevin McCarthy attain the position of Speaker of the House. Thank you, I did our Country a big favor!' Trump wrote on his social media platform. However, some of the Republican holdouts ... told ABC News that their decision to back down had nothing to do with Trump. 'President Trump had no influence on the votes, myself or any of my colleagues,' Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., one of the initial five so-called 'Never Kevins' who pushed for major changes to how the House functioned, told ABC News when asked what influenced his decision.... GOP Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana[, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) & Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.)] ... also told ABC News that the former president had nothing to do with [their] speaker vote[s]." (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Are the worms turning? Not only do these ultra-wingers dare to disagree wit the Orange Jesus, some of them sort of belittle him. Publicly.

Oh, They Knew. Nicholas Fandos of the New York Times: "In late 202..., George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.... When the report came back on Mr. Santos, the findings ... were ... startling, suggesting a pattern of deception that cut to the heart of the image he had cultivated as a wealthy financier. Some of Mr. Santos's own vendors ... urged him to drop out of the race, and ... members of the campaign team quit.... It remains unclear who else, if anyone, learned about the background study's contents at the time, or if the information made its way to party leaders in New York or Washington.... Mr. Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party.... But in each case, rather than denounce Mr. Santos publicly, the Republicans looked the other way." Democrats did a lousy vetting job. "In the run-up to the 2022 contest, Dan Conston, a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy who leads the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main House Republican super PAC, also confided in lawmakers, donors and other associates that he was worried information would come out exposing Mr. Santos as a fraud...."

Hannah Rabinowitz of CNN: "Attorney General Merrick Garland and Steve Dettelbach, the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), announced new regulations Friday that would subject pistol-stabilizing braces to additional regulations, including higher taxes, longer waiting periods and registration. Gun control proponents argue that stabilizing braces -- which can be attached to pistols -- effectively transform a pistol into a short-barreled rifle, which are heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act (NFA). The rule will go into effect as soon as it is published in the Federal Register.... According to the Justice Department, manufacturers, dealers and individual gun owners have 120 days to register tax-free any existing short-barreled rifles covered by the rule. They can also remove the stabilizing brace or surrender covered short-barreled rifles to the ATF, the department said."

Jonah Bromwich, et al., of the New York Times: "... Donald J. Trump's family real estate business was ordered on Friday to pay a $1.6 million criminal penalty for its conviction on felony tax fraud and other charges, a stinging rebuke and the maximum possible punishment. The sentence, handed down by a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, caps a lengthy legal ordeal for Mr. Trump's company, the Trump Organization, which was convicted in December of doling out off-the-books perks to some of its top executives.... The financial penalty is a pittance to the company, and the former president, who collected hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year while in office. But the verdict branded the company a lawbreaker, exposed a culture that nurtured illegality for years and handed political ammunition to Mr. Trump's opponents. Prosecutors also continue to press a criminal investigation against the man himself.... The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, called in a statement for the state to change the law 'so that we can impose more significant penalties and sanctions on corporations that commit crimes in New York.'" CNN's report is here. (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

~~~ Kara Scannell & Devan Cole of CNN: "Investigations into the Trump Organization's business practices are entering a new chapter and will 'go as long as the facts and the law require,' Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told CNN on Friday, even as he stressed that 'a very important chapter' of the probe ended after the company was convicted and sentenced in a tax fraud scheme."

"Absurd." Benjamin Weiser of the New York Times: "A federal judge on Friday rejected ... Donald J. Trump's effort to dismiss a lawsuit in which the writer E. Jean Carroll accuses Mr. Trump of raping her in a dressing room at a Fifth Avenue department store in the mid-1990s. In letting the suit proceed, the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, upheld a 2022 New York law that gives adults who claim to have been sexually assaulted years ago a one-time window to sue those they say abused them even if the period for doing so under the statute of limitations has long since expired. In his ruling, which the law's chief State Senate sponsor described as a first in New York, Judge Kaplan labeled 'absurd' Mr. Trump's argument that the legislation violated the state's Constitution." ~~~

~~~ Shayna Jacobs & Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post: "Donald Trump used a sworn deposition in a case brought by his sexual assault accuser E. Jean Carroll to continue calling her a liar and to claim she is mentally ill -- denying that he sexually assaulted her even as he falsely claimed Carroll said in a CNN interview that she enjoyed being raped." ~~~

     ~~~ Dareh Gregorian of NBC News: "... Donald Trump unleashed a slew of insults against writer E. Jean Carroll when he was deposed in her civil suit accusing him of rape, newly unsealed court filings show." ~~~

     ~~~ Here you can read portions of Carroll's & Trump's depositions. MB: I read some of Trump's testimony in the excerpt. It's 100 percent Crazy Uncle Fred stuff.

Half of New UFOs Are Still U. Dan DeLuce of NBC News: "The Defense Department has received 366 new reports of UFOs or 'unidentified aerial phenomena' since March 2021, and about half of them appear to be balloons or drones, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.... About half of the new cases could not be explained and 'appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,' it said.... But the report also noted that an 'initial characterization does not mean positively resolved or unidentified.'... A classified version of the report was submitted to lawmakers, as mandated by a defense spending bill passed by the last Congress." (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

~~~ Remy Tumin of the New York Times: "An amendment tucked into this year's $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which funds the Defense Department's annual operating budget, requires the department to review historical documents related to unidentified aerial phenomena -- government lingo for U.F.O.s -- dating to 1945. That is the year that, according to one account, a large, avocado-shaped object struck a communication tower in a patch of New Mexico desert now known as the Trinity Site, where the world's first atomic bomb was detonated that July. Experts said the bill, which President Biden signed into law in December, could be a game changer for studying unidentified phenomena." (Also linked yesterday.)

A Leak about a Leak. Brad Reed of the Raw Story: "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that investigators in the United States Supreme Court have narrowed down the identity of the person who leaked its landmark decision last year to overturn the decades-long precedent set by Roe v. Wade. According to WSJ's sources, investigators have whittled their list of culprits down to a 'small number of suspects' that include some clerks who work for some of the Supreme Court justices. However, the investigators still have yet to definitively pin down the identity of the leaker." MB: The irony of the WSJ report is that a Supreme Court leaker is its source. (Of course it's possible that this was one of those "approved" leaks.)

Beyond the Beltway

Virginia. Denise Lavoie of the AP: "Administrators at the Virginia school where a first-grader shot his teacher last week learned the child may have had a weapon in his possession before the shooting but did not find the 9mm handgun he brought to school despite searching his bag, the school system's superintendent said.... The student's backpack was searched after school officials received [a] tip [that the boy might have a gun], but the gun wasn't found before the shooting...."

Way Beyond

Ukraine, et al. The Washington Post's live briefing of developments Saturday in Russia's war on Ukraine is here: "Russia and Ukraine disputed control of the eastern salt mining town of Soledar, with the Kremlin claiming to have seized it after a bloody battle even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asserted that his forces were continuing to fight.... A Russian takeover of Soledar and Bakhmut would not 'have a strategic impact on the war itself,' said John Kirby, communications coordinator for the White House National Security Council.... Russia is deliberately slowing down the inspection of ships leaving Ukraine's Black Sea ports and delaying crucial grain shipments to the developing world, according to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield." ~~~

     ~~~ The Guardian's live updates for Saturday are here. The Guardian's summary report is here.

Iran. Patrick Wintour of the Guardian: "Alireza Akbari, a British-Iranian dual national who had previously held a senior position in the Iranian government, was executed on Saturday morning, despite urgent calls for his release by the UK foreign secretary, James Cleverly. The UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, called it a 'cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric regime with no respect for the human rights of their own people'."

Sweden. Eureka! Stanley Reed of the New York Times: "A Swedish mining company said this week that it had found Europe's largest known deposit of coveted rare earth metals, critical to many green technologies including electric vehicles, in a far northern part of the country within the Arctic Circle. The world's production of rare earths is dominated by China. The discovery by LKAB, a state-owned company, creates the prospect that Europe could over time develop a domestic source of these minerals.... LKAB said it could take 10 to 15 years or more before the metals were delivered to market because of the lengthy environmental studies and other work required to open a mining facility in Europe." China is the global leader in extracting these rare earth metals, followed by Russia.

News Lede

The New York Times is liveblogging the latest California rainstorm.

Comments

[Ken Winkes]

Would like to get away from thinking about classified documents on the loose and return to yesterday's more pleasant contemplation of female arms, but…

This one is short on the numbers I prefer, but the history implies the classified document web in which Biden (and even perhaps the Pretender to a lesser degree) is now entangled has been forming for a long time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/opinion/biden-trump-classified-documents.html

Have tried time and again to come up with an estimate of how many classified documents actually exist, how many are created each year and how many declassified and have filed utterly in the attempt.

Did learn that last year 147,000 were de-classified (not including the Pretender's thought wave declassification system), which by the iceberg analogy which says what we see is not the half of what exists suggests that far more than that number are created each year...

And this from 2012 attests that keeping track of all those floating pieces of paper has long been difficult or impossible

https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2012/05/wnrc_missing/

Not excusing Biden here, but would hope someone notices his situation is symptomatic of a much larger problem.

If transparency is in any way linked to democracy (and I believe it is), we gotta big one.

[RAS]

The Trump Organization may have been convicted of tax fraud, but crime sure does pay if the only penalties are a 1.6 million dollar fine and a single underling going to prison for 6 months.

[Forrest Morris]

Unfortunately, New York state has a maximum penalty of 1.6 million
dollars for any case like this, no matter if trump cheated their
treasury out of billions.

Fortunately, there will be other cases, but he still comes out ahead.

I would be in jail I'm sure, not being a crook and billionaire.
Is there such a thing as a thousandaire?

[RAS]

Yeah, just this week they realized that the law may not be working on the big time crooks. Rewarding people for cheating more on their taxes is probably not the message we should be sending. But of course Trump takes advantage of our poorly written laws again.

[Bobby Lee]

@Forrest Morris: I don't know if "Thousandiers" are a thing or not, but you can find "Owethousandniers" in every place you look.