F**king Mondays: It's Worse Than You Can Possibly Imagine
Trump's indictment has been unsealed and it is utterly insane.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays”! Here’s your roundup to start the week:
Trump is going down
We recorded the podcast on Friday, hours before the full details of Trump’s indictment dropped. When we said that things were looking very, very bad for the former president, that now appears to be a gross understatement. Now that the federal indictment has been unsealed by the Justice Department, you can see for yourself how airtight the case is against Trump. The criminal activity outlined in the case led by special counsel Jack Smith is, well, jaw dropping.
It’s a 49 page document outlining 37 felony counts, but even the first few are grounds for an incredibly lengthy prison sentence. Just look:
On at least two occasions, Trump also showed highly confidential documents including a classified map to people without any security clearance:
The obstruction charges also damning, with prosecutors showing a clear record of Trump’s blatant disregard for subpoenas and astonishing levels of deceit that included asking his lawyers to “hide or destroy” documents:
As Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr said on Fox News Sunday, “if even half of it is true, then he's toast”.
“It's a very detailed indictment. And it's very, very damning,” he went on. “And this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, a victim of a witch hunt, is ridiculous. Yes, he's been a victim in the past. Yes, his adversaries have obsessively pursued him with phony claims, and I've been at his side defending against them when he is a victim. But this is much different. He's not a victim here. He was totally wrong.”
The penalties are severe; each willful retention of records charge carries a potential 10-year sentence, obstruction charges a 20-year maximum sentence, and false statements charges are five-years apiece. Given 83% of federal indictments end up in conviction, the chances of Trump going to prison are now incredibly high.
Fox News vs Tucker Carlson
The Fox News/Tucker Carlson fallout continues, with Deadline reporting that Fox is gearing up for legal action against their former host should he continue broadcasting his new show on Twitter:
Fox News has sent a cease and desist letter to Tucker Carlson over his Twitter show that launched last week…
Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney representing Carlson, said in a statement, “Fox News continues to ignore the interests of its viewers, not to mention its shareholder obligations. Doubling down on the most catastrophic programming decision in the history of the cable news industry, Fox is now demanding that Tucker Carlson be silent until after the 2024 election. Tucker will not be silenced by anyone — whether it be Media Matters, the ADL or Fox News.”
Carlson’s legal team is apparently arguing that Fox News’s non-compete provision is no longer valid because they are in breach of contract, not Carlson. The details/merits of each side’s legal arguments are not particularly interesting, but the fact that they are still fighting is. Carlson is wealthy, but he’s not Rupert Murdoch wealthy, so a protracted legal battle with his former employer likely won’t end well for him.
Carlson cannot bear to be silenced, so his dangerously out of control ego is getting him into a war he cannot win. I’ve long maintained that without Fox, Carlson is an internet no-body, another Alex Jones with a big mouth and a video camera. He might be racking up the Twitter views with his weird little show that appears to be shot in a shed in his back garden, but he’s largely irrelevant without the Fox News’s brand and prestige. Fox isn’t going to back down from a fight with Tucker, and they’ll need to make an example out of him so no one else tries it on. Carlson is set to release another conspiracy filled Twitter show about Trump’s indictment later today, so the stakes are getting high and higher each week. Watching Carlson bled dry by the network that made him is going to be pretty fun, so grab the popcorn and enjoy.
Tulsi the hack
I’m continually amazed by the ability of Alt Left/Right grifters to take any crime committed by Trump, and make it President Biden’s fault:
Gabbard is many things, but she is not stupid, so she knows this argument is despicably dishonest. Further more, to tweet something like this after the indictment was unsealed shows a truly Orwellian skill for disinformation. Gabbard isn’t interested in the merits of the case against Trump because it doesn’t fit in with her narrative that President Biden and the “corporate Dems” are responsible for all evil in the world. If Trump shot someone on live television, you could imagine Gabbard calling for all Americans to condemn the Biden administration for “creating the hostile environment that forced Trump to murder someone”.
Gabbard of course never questioned Trump’s real and very blatant weaponization of the Justice Department while he was in office, because you know, Hillary Clinton and Benghazi/her emails etc, etc…
Lock her up
Now it seems clear Trump is almost certainly going to jail, his supporters are now threatening civil war. Here was totally sane and normal Trump ally Kari Lake speaking to Georgia Republicans on Friday:
“I have a message tonight for [US attorney general] Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, and Joe Biden. And the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one’s for you. If you want to get to president Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That’s not a threat – that’s a public service announcement. We will not let you lay a finger on President Trump. Frankly, now is the time to cling to our guns and our religion.”
Threats against the Republic like this should be taken extremely seriously, and Lake should be investigated for attempting to incite an insurrection. Lake appears to have a deeply held conviction that America’s laws don’t apply to gun waving, violent white Republicans. It’s about time she found out they do.
See you next week!
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Last Week Was Catastrophic For The Republican Party
Republicans needed two things to even have a chance of winning 2024 legitimately: they lost them last week.
by Justin Rosario
May 2023 ended on a high note for the United States and, tellingly, was catastrophic for the Republican Party. The 2024 election was already going to be tough, going up against an incumbent president always is. But the GOP has started the election cycle on its knees and the road ahead is paved with broken glass.
The amazing part of the pain the GOP is suffering is that almost all of it is self-inflicted. Let’s take a look at the, ahem, “American Carnage” and how it impacts the Republican dreams of turning the country into a fascist hell hole.
Dark Brandon strikes again
Two things happened around the debt ceiling, one of which surprised me and the press doesn’t want to talk about and one which didn’t surprise me and the press really doesn’t want to talk about.
First, Kevin McCarthy showed some spine and more or less ignored the screeching zoo that is the MAGA wing of his caucus. When all of this started, that is not at all how it looked. Back at the beginning of the year, the House GOP looked, for all intents and purposes, to be run by raving lunatics and Kevin McCarthy was simply a meat puppet.
House Republicans were going to demand massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the sacrifice of the first-born child of every East Coast liberal or they were going to burn the economy to the ground. The press was super eager to aid them in this endeavor and America was playing chicken with a political party of imbeciles and nihilists. I was convinced that Republicans were going to follow through on their threat to crash the debt ceiling, either intentionally or through sheer incompetence. So much so that my wife Deb and I spent 6 months preparing for an extended government shutdown and brutal recession…
Trump has more lives than any ten cats and is harder to kill (politically) than a cockroach. He has survived things that would have destroyed the careers of anyone else. As well, let's not forget that his case is now in the hands of Judge Aileen Cannon. She already tried to do him a solid once, and here, all she has to do is delay anything from happening until after January 20, 2025, and if a Republican takes office (even if it's not the Former Guy), they will immediately pardon him. If it IS the Former Guy, he will immediately order the Justice Department to drop the case.
Interesting that the Tucker Carlson statement reads first like a threat (”if the shareholders only knew what Tucker knows...”) then segues into a Trumpian rant as if Carlson were running for office. How is that a response to a cease and desist letter regarding a non-compete clause?