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We know a Jack Smith indictment of former president Donald J Trump for the January 6 insurrection is coming any day now. We don’t know when, but it probably comes next week. We don’t know if it’s only Trump, or whether it includes accomplices, but everyone is on the edge of their seats waiting (especially them).
There’s other news, but that’s the big news.
Well, at least it was the big news until the new obstruction superseding indictment in the separate Mar a Lago case dropped last night.
What’s that about?
Oh.
Specifically:
This is the first time in years that the Rose Mary [Woods] stretch came to mind. As well, of course, as every mob movie you ever saw.
So what will Republicans do?
The Messenger:
Republicans Reframe 2024 as a Race Versus Harris – Not Biden
GOP White House hopefuls are warning a vote for the 80-year-old president would be a vote for his unpopular running mate
Republicans view President Joe Biden as ripe for defeat in 2024. But recently, they’ve been zeroing in on who they see as an even easier target: Kamala Harris.
As Harris has stepped up her role as campaign trail attack dog, GOP presidential candidates are leaning even harder into attacking the vice president as a way to highlight voters’ wariness over Biden’s age. Given that the 80-year-old Biden is the oldest person to ever occupy the Oval Office, the argument goes, a vote for him is equivalent to elevating Harris — who by many measures is even less popular than her boss — to commander-in-chief.
Joyce Vance/”Civil Discourse” on Substack regarding Hunter Biden:
On Being Wrong
The first of the two issues that emerged today seems to come down to a basic difference in the understanding of what benefits the agreement gives Hunter Biden—what the scope of the immunity he was receiving from future prosecution is. Hunter Biden’s team seemed to believe once he pled guilty, there would be no further prosecution coming out of the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s investigation. The government’s view seemed to be that its investigation was ongoing, and it wouldn’t make that commitment.
That’s unusual. There’s little incentive for a defendant to plead to “some” charges knowing an investigation is ongoing and others could be coming. Typically, you’d wait to the end and look at all of the potential charges together before conducting plea negotiations. Plea agreements often give a defendant immunity for further prosecutions stemming from conduct the government is investigating, the stuff it knows is going on. So if a defendant is being investigated for participating in a drug conspiracy, the government would agree that once he pled guilty, there’d be no future charges stemming from that conduct. But if the government learned later he committed a murder, he could still be prosecuted for that. That’s the normal expectation with a plea agreement. Here, the government seems to have contemplated that Biden would plead to some aspects of their investigation, but that there could be more charges stemming from that investigation in the future. That wasn’t the deal Biden appears to have believed he was getting.
There’s something unusual going on here, and we don’t know precisely what it is yet.
…
That leaves the second issue, which is related and involves the interplay between the plea agreement on the tax issues and the pre-trial diversion agreement on the gun charge—a drug user in possession of a firearm. If Biden fulfills the terms of that agreement, whose terms include seeking employment and avoiding drug and alcohol use for two years, the charges against him are dismissed and it’s as though they were never filed. They won’t be a part of his permanent record, although given his notoriety, they will obviously continue to follow him regardless of the outcome.
It was the Judge who balked here, expressing concern that the role assigned to her went beyond her constitutional role. Under the Constitution, decisions about whom to indict and on what charges are reserved to the executive branch and put into the hands of the Justice Department. Judges don’t make those decisions. The Judge was concerned that, because the agreement gave her the authority to oversee decisions about when a breach of the agreement occurred and charges could be brought to trial, that the parties were forcing her out of her constitutional lane.
Greg Sargent/Washington Post:
Fed-up teachers in Tennessee find a novel answer to anti-woke hysteria
Proponents of GOP state laws restricting classroom discussion of race sometimes fall back on a seductive-sounding line of defense: These directives, they proclaim, allow for the “impartial” discussion of difficult historical topics, merely restricting teachers from foisting “biased” views of history on kids to protect them from “woke indoctrination.”
This argument advances the premise that a purely “impartial” version of history is hovering out in the ether that most reasonable people will agree upon once it’s located. But this idea is deeply flawed. An outbreak of resistance to anti-woke hysteria in Tennessee shows how.
This week, a group of teachers filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate Tennessee’s law limiting the teaching of race and gender. The statute, signed by Republican Gov. Bill Lee in 2021, is absurdly vague: It prohibits pedagogy that includes allegedly divisive concepts without defining what that means, leaving teachers fearful that even neutral mentions of such concepts could violate the law.
See Rudy Giuliani concedes he made ‘false’ statements about Georgia election workers from NBC News, then see this from the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Republicans behind Giuliani’s Georgia election hearings mum on his false statements
Over the course of three legislative hearings at the Georgia Capitol, Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani promoted falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the state’s election at the behest of key Republican leaders.
Facing a defamation lawsuit, Giuliani filed a motion this week saying he was no longer contesting accusations that he made false statements about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss – two Fulton County workers he wrongly accused of committing voter fraud.
And the GOP lawmakers who welcomed him to those December 2020 hearings have so far declined to comment.
Mediaite:
Yale Business Guru Gushes to MSNBC: Bidenomics Most Successful Intervention Since FDR’s New Deal
Sonnenfeld, the senior associate dean for leadership studies at Yale’s School of Management, joined MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell to talk about Morgan Stanley crediting Bidenomics for a surprising economic growth that forced the bank to re-evaluate its GDP forecasts. Between the job numbers and Biden’s efforts to counteract inflation, Sonnenfeld rejected recession predictions and the “manufactured malaise” from the GOP.
As O’Donnell praised the Biden Administration’s active involvement in the economy, Sonnenfeld agreed that “across the board, we are seeing the results.” He compared the Bidenomics cynicism to last year’s midterm election predictions of a red wave that failed to live up to the hype.
Two pieces on Ukraine and the view of how war is waged, from Phillips P OBrien.
First from Foreign Affairs:
The War That Defied Expectations
What Ukraine Revealed About Military Power
In fact, the entire shape of the war is very different from what experts imagined. Rather than the fast-moving conflict led by phalanxes of armored vehicles, supported by Russia’s advanced piloted aircraft, that the analytical community imagined, the invasion was chaotic and slow. There has never been a quick armored breakthrough by the Russians and only one by the Ukrainians—last September’s surprise advance in the province of Kharkiv. Instead, almost all of the war’s gains have come gradually and at great expense. The conflict has been defined not by fighter jets and tanks but by artillery, drones, and even World War I–style trenches.
Ukraine’s successes and Russia’s losses have prompted experts to intensely reevaluate both countries’ military prowess. But given the unexpected shape of the conflict, military analysts must also reconsider how they analyze warfare in general. Defense experts tend to think of conflicts in terms of weapons and plans, yet the invasion of Ukraine suggests that armed power is as much about a military’s structure, morale, and industrial base as it is about armaments and blueprints.
Next from “Phillips’s Newsletter” on Substack:
The Failure to Understand War–A Call for a Reassessment
latest Foreign Affairs Piece explained: Complex Systems and the US Air Force
The Myth of the Fast, Decisive War
This is not an article that just attacks the pre-war analysis. I’m sure most of you have heard about that in detail from me. That analysis was often terrible (and I would argue some of the worst offenders have continued to make the same mistakes in their well-publicized analysis since Feb 24, 2022) in its assumptions of what the Russian and Ukrainian militaries were as institutions. However, maybe the greatest analytical failure was how war was portrayed, as I indicated at the start. War was shown as quick, and far too many assumed that it would be easy, and in particular that the Russians would be able to undertake some of the most difficult complex operations a military could undertake.
From Cliff Schecter on Tommy Tuberville:
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