The Washington Post has an interesting detail:

Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart read the affidavit and approved the search on Aug. 5. Three days later, FBI agents dressed in polos and khakis executed the search warrant at the Palm Beach estate, carting away an additional 20 boxes of items from a bedroom, office and a first-floor storage room, according to an inventory of what was retrieved from the property that was made public earlier this month.

A bedroom and an office. I guess we should rejoice they didn’t find any in the lobby or the hotel dining room?

The affidavit says federal agents sought permission to conduct the search after reviewing the contents of 15 boxes Trump returned

Former Trump people tell us he never did bother to learn how to handle documents.

A former Trump official told CNN that they were not surprised to hear that the National Archives found boxes with classified records that “were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly (sic) identified.”

According to this source, the former President was known to walk around both the White House and Mar-a-Lago and pull documents out of boxes and look at them, then put them in other boxes or to the side, often with no method or reasoning to it. One source said that Trump was constantly putting things into stacks and leaving them around his office to go through later. These stacks often

Ah isn’t that adorable.

(He didn’t really get it from Marks & Sparks.)

Can you imagine if a female MBE behaved like this and publicly boasted about it?

But doing this under the protective label "trans" means you can get away with anything. pic.twitter.com/hqWImyW7Vh

— gender is harmful (@genderisharmful) August 26, 2022

Hur hur.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on 9 a.m. Pacific time.

After reviewing the affidavit (it’s here, the link @6 is to something else), I would say it’s not a completely uninformative nothingburger, but not terribly illuminating or new.

My notes:

— A criminal investigation was opened after the return of the 15 boxes. In other words, it’s not just the discovery that Trump continued to withhold documents that triggered a criminal inquiry.

— Of the 15 boxes that Trump voluntarily turned over, there were 67 documents marked confidential, 92 marked secret, and 25 top secret. Many also carried other designations, including those relating to human intelligence (i.e. sources)

— According to the FBI agent, many of the … Read the rest

The BBC offers some summaries:

The Department of Justice – which obtained the search warrant – described its work as a criminal investigation over the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorised spaces.

A criminal investigation of Trump, that is.

The 38-page affidavit said there was “probable cause” to believe that “evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed” breaking federal laws would be found at Trump’s home.

Not a coincidence.

Trump is truth socialing his views.

Affidavit heavily redacted!!! Nothing mentioned on “Nuclear,” a total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ, or our close working relationship regarding document turnover – WE GAVE THEM MUCH. Judge Bruce Reinhart should NEVER have allowed the

What Judicial Watch had to do with it:

Not long after the National Archives acknowledged in February that it had retrieved 15 boxes of presidential records from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, Trump began fielding calls from Tom Fitton, a prominent conservative activist.

Fitton, the longtime head of the legal activist group Judicial Watch, had a simple message for Trump — it was a mistake to give the records to the Archives, and his team should never have let the Archives “strong-arm” him into returning them, according to three sources familiar with the matter.Those records belonged to Trump, Fitton argued, citing a 2012 court case involving his organization that he said gave the former President authority

Hmmmm.

Hungary’s state audit office has issued a report about the risks of the country’s education system being “too feminine”, saying it could hurt the development of boys and create demographic problems.

…

“The phenomenon called ‘pink education’ has numerous economic and social consequences,” states the report by the state body, which is seen as close to the nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

Why is it called that though? What color is “masculine” education? Does “masculine” education also have numerous economic and social consequences?

“If education favours feminine traits” such as “emotional and social maturity” and “provokes the overrepresentation of women in universities, equality (of the sexes) will be considerably weakened”, the report concludes.

Seriously? They’re going with … Read the rest

Tomorrow is going to be interesting.

A federal judge in Florida on Thursday ordered that a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain a warrant for former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida residence be unsealed by noon on Friday — paving the way for the disclosure of potentially revelatory details about a search with enormous legal and political implications.

It will be heavily redacted to protect people Trump is going to want to have killed.

Justice Department officials had previously suggested they will abide by [the judges’] general guidance but push hard to scrub anything that could expose witnesses in the case to intimidation or retribution by Mr. Trump’s supporters. After the search at Mar-a-Lago, the F.B.I. reported

Following up on Screechy Monkey’s tip about a target letter – Google turns up nothing current but Twitter is more helpful.

If Trump didn't get a target letter, I'm not sure how much further he can melt down if he does get one.

— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 25, 2022

https://twitter.com/PrincessBravato/status/1562843489372499968 … Read the rest

Trump is melting down on his pretend-twitter. I took a deep breath and went directly to the source to collect his exclamations.

Even though I am as innocent as a person can be, and despite MY campaign being spied on by the Radical Left, the FISA COURT being lied to and defrauded, all of the many Hoaxes and Scams that were illegally placed on me by very sick & demented people, and without even mentioning the many crimes of Joe and Hunter Biden, all revealed in great detail in the Laptop From Hell, it looks more and more like the Fake News Media is pushing hard for the Sleaze to do something that should not be done!

All very convincing.… Read the rest

People are having a lot of innocent fun with this –

We support everyone across the gender spectrum. If you're transphobic, please feel free to block. Thanks!

— Popular Science (@PopSci) August 25, 2022

Ah, that's how avocado babies are made! pic.twitter.com/MYs0YSjjEB

— Rachel Rooney (@RooneyRachel) August 25, 2022

I’m just a girl, standing before a popular science magazine, begging it to accept humans aren’t actually avocados

— Frances Weetman (@francesweetman) August 25, 2022

… Read the rest

Prepare to shed a tear.

Alix Fitzgerald takes a deep breath, conscious of articulating* her point in the clearest possible terms. “The only way I can describe this,” she begins, her voice tinged with sadness, “is that it’s like grief. “It’s like something has been ripped away.”

*[conscious of the need to articulate]

Fitzgerald, a proud trans woman, is mourning the loss of rugby. She had been an active member of East London RFC women’s team, but the Rugby Football Union’s ban on players “assigned male at birth” in female contact rugby last month prematurely spelt the end of her career.

I don’t give one single teeny tiny shit. Why should I? What about the woman who isn’t on … Read the rest

Same old smoke and mirrors:

Trans golfer sparks outrage as she attempts to qualify for ladies PGA tour

Outrage why? Because the golfer is not a “she.” Lying in the headline is not a good look for a newspaper.

A Scottish golfer who is attempting to qualify for the ladies’ PGA tour has sparked a fresh row over whether transgender athletes should compete in women’s events.

The row is over whether men should compete in women’s events.

Hailey Davidson, who became the first trans golfer to win a professional tournament last year, is trying to earn a Ladies Professional Gold Association (LPGA) tour card.

If successful, Davidson will become the first trans golfer to earn the card.

He’s not a … Read the rest

Jon makes an important point.

Observation: This is so often couched in terms of a kind/cruel or virtue/vice dichotomy. That's so obviously wrong & misdirected.
Obvious example: I'm not remotely interested in being '*kind*' to female athletes.
This is about fairness.
Deal with it.
Stop mis-translating

— Jon Pike (@runthinkwrite) August 24, 2022

Politics, justice, freedom struggles, equal rights campaigns – none of that is about “kindness.” Keep your damn kindness and just give us what’s rightfully ours.

Kindness is a good thing in its place, but expanded out of its place it can be intrusive and patronizing and ultimately infuriating. Give us our due and then don’t bother us.… Read the rest

Helen Lewis says social justice crusades are a kind of substitute religion for The Young.

In the U.S., the nonreligious are younger and more liberal than the population as a whole. Perhaps, then, it isn’t a coincidence that they are also the group most likely to be involved in high-profile social-justice blowups, particularly the type found on college campuses. They’ve substituted one religion for another…

…Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values.

See also: those annoying yard signs (I bet you don’t have them in the UK – you luckies) that advertise the … Read the rest

Could it be that forced pregnancy will keep Republicans from taking over?

Abortion and Donald Trump will both appear on November’s ballot. On Tuesday, Pat Ryan, a Democrat and a decorated Iraq war veteran, upset Republican Marc Molinaro in a special congressional election in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. Ryan won 52-48 after pre-election polls had painted him as the clear underdog.

…

On the campaign trail Ryan made abortion a central issue. “Choice is [on] the ballot, but we won’t go back,” he posted to Facebook hours before the polls opened. “Freedom is under attack, but it’s ours to defend.”

…

There is a clear backlash against the US supreme court’s evisceration of the rights to privacy and

From last week:

A female comic and healthcare worker says she has been spat at on the street and shunned by long-time colleagues for daring to put on a performance about biological women.

Award-winning funny woman Elaine Miller’s Fringe show Viva Your Vulva: The Hole Story has been the target of abuse from those judging her as a “transphobe”. She says that at the end of the Edinburgh show she makes a reference to the importance of language in getting across healthcare messaging.

Like not saying “people” should get tested for cervical or testicular cancer? That kind of importance of language?

Her crime she says is not mentioning transwomen because they are “not relevant to the topic” of female

Trump thinks “executive privilege” is something like a guarantee of absolute monarchy – a magic holy term that empowers him to have take keep do say deny lie about whatever he wants. He thinks all he has to do is say the documents are covered by “executive privilege” and that’s the last word on the subject. In short he has a child’s idea of what being president means and what having been president means.

That’s why his exchanges with the National Archives were at cross-purposes.

The National Archives and Records Administration recovered more than 100 documents bearing classified markings, totaling more than 700 pages, from an initial batch of 15 boxes retrieved from Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, according to newly

Once again the question arises: what about copies? Why isn’t the reporting explaining to us why there is so much agitation over The Documents with no mention of copies?

Anyway. Rolling Stone reports:

IN THE WEEKS after the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, former President Donald Trump repeatedly made a simple-sounding but extraordinary ask: he wanted his lawyers to get “my documents” back from federal law enforcement.

Trump wasn’t merely referring to the alleged trove of attorney-client material that he insists was scooped up by the feds during the raid, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The ex-president has been demanding that his team find a way to recover “all” of the official documents that Trump has long

Oh dear. That sounds way too much like “What is this drivel, throw it away and hand in the actual assignment by tomorrow or you get an F for the course.”

NEW: Judge Aileen Cannon's first substantive step in Trump's Mar-a-Lago lawsuit is to ask for multiple clarifictions and explanations about what he's seeking — and on what legal basis he thinks she can act.

w/ @joshgersteinhttps://t.co/gqEbPopWQX

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 23, 2022

federal court judge asks: WTF?

— Jen "get knocked down, get back up " Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) August 23, 2022

… Read the rest