Some of Trump’s lawyers may live to regret being his lawyers.

Two lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump are likely to become witnesses or targets in the investigation into how he hoarded documents marked as classified at his Florida estate — and secretly held onto some even after they claimed all sensitive materials had been returned, legal specialists said.

The lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, handled Mr. Trump’s interactions with the government over a subpoena in May seeking additional material marked as classified. In a court filing late Tuesday, the Justice Department strongly suggested that people in Mr. Trump’s circle concealed documents in defiance of that subpoena, putting a spotlight on the role of his lawyers and raising questions about whether they had misled department officials and the F.B.I.

It’s because of all those hidden documents, you see.

During the visit, Mr. Trump’s representatives turned over 38 documents with classified markings and indicated that all the records had been kept in a storage room, that no other records were stored elsewhere and that all available boxes had been searched, prosecutors said.

According to the statement, Ms. Bobb signed on behalf of Mr. Trump that “based upon the information that has been provided to me,” all documents responsive to the subpoena were being returned after a “diligent” search.

Yet on Aug. 8, the F.B.I. found more than twice as many documents marked as classified than had been turned over in June, including some in Mr. Trump’s office. That fact, the Justice Department wrote, “calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification” — which also included a claim that no copies had been made of any files — “and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”

Lesson: never lie to the police or the FBI on behalf of Trump.

In its filing late Tuesday, the Justice Department noted that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had not been as cooperative as they could have been at the June 3 meeting, relaying what it considered a suspicious interaction.

“Critically, however, the former president’s counsel explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained,” the filing said.

The Justice Department’s account clashes with that of Mr. Trump’s legal team. A complaint filed on Aug. 22 and signed by Mr. Corcoran and two other lawyers describes Mr. Trump and his team as providing “complete cooperation.” The complaint also claims that after Mr. Bratt asked to inspect the storage room, investigators were escorted there, and once their inspection was completed, an F.B.I. agent said: “Thank you. You did not need to show us the storage room, but we appreciate it. Now it all makes sense.”

Hmmmmm. Does that sound like something an FBI agent would have said? Or does it sound like something Trump would pretend an FBI agent said? Does it sound more like FBI-speak or Trump-speak? In my opinion it sounds more like the latter. A lot more. It sounds more like all those “Sir oh sir we can’t say enough about how amazing you are sir” remarks he was always reporting to us. That “You did not need to show us the storage room” sounds downright ludicrous in the circumstances.

Sarah Palin LOST.

The Democrat Mary Peltola has won the special election for Alaska’s only US House seat, becoming the first Alaska Native to serve in the House after beating candidates including the Republican Sarah Palin.

Peltola, 49, who is Yup’ik, is also the first woman to hold the seat and the first from her party to gain the seat in more than half a century. During the campaign, she emphasized her support for such issues as abortion rights. She will serve the remaining months of the late Republican US Representative Don Young’s term until a general election in November.

Palin, the state’s former governor, had the backing of Donald Trump and was hoping to make a political comeback. Along with Peltola and the other Republican candidate, Nick Begich, she will run again for a two-year term in November.

Let’s hope she LOSES again.

Lord of the Flies in Lancs:

Children as young as 11 have been subjected to brutal attacks by teenagers in a Lancashire town – with the assaults filmed and shared on social media.

Victims’ mothers say police aren’t doing enough to stop the group and have taken matters into their own hands.

They shared the videos with the BBC and urged showing them.

The videos show children being dragged to the ground – squealing and crying out as they try to shield their heads from kicks and punches. Voices of others can be heard, off-camera, egging-on the attackers.

Filming such violence and humiliation, and then sharing it online, has become known by the term “patterning” – with the aim of embarrassing victims even further by forwarding the videos across the web.

One woman called the police while her daughter was being beaten up, and nothing happened.

It’s a depressing story. It’s not clear whether the police don’t have enough people to deal with the problem, or don’t think it’s serious, or don’t care, or what, but it’s a depressing story whatever the reasons are.

It turns out that Trump’s attempt to stall the Justice Department gave them an opportunity to hang him out to dry.

Former President Donald J. Trump may have thought that he was playing offense when he asked a federal judge last week for an independent review of documents seized from his residence in Florida — a move that, at best, could delay but not derail an investigation into his handling of the records.

But on Tuesday night, the Justice Department used a routine court filing in the matter to initiate a blistering counteroffensive that disclosed new evidence that Mr. Trump and his legal team may have interfered with the inquiry.

Like that photograph for instance.

In what read at times like a road map for a potential prosecution down the road, the filing also laid out evidence that Mr. Trump and his lawyers may have obstructed justice.

Like when they promised that was all there was, and when they wouldn’t let the Feds investigate the storage room.

[T]he Justice Department’s objection to Mr. Trump’s request for a special master to review the retrieved material was nothing if not expansive. Unfolding over 36 pages, it combined complicated legal arguments with an easy-to-read narrative of how, in the course of more than a year, Mr. Trump and his lawyers repeatedly dodged the government’s attempts to get the documents back.

Aka a narrative of obstruction of justice.

While Mr. Trump’s lawyers have sought to portray the former president as the harried victim of government persecution, they have also claimed that he cooperated fully with the government’s attempts to get the documents back.

Which is a silly thing to claim because he was never supposed to have them in the first place. They don’t get to take the papers with them when they go.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers said that in May, the former president “voluntarily” accepted a grand jury subpoena seeking documents still in his possession that bore “classification markings.” 

Again – “voluntarily” is a silly word to use in this context. He doesn’t have a choice.

One month later, according to the lawyers’ account, Mr. Trump met with a top federal prosecutor and three F.B.I. agents who had gone to Mar-a-Lago to pick up the materials demanded by the subpoena.

Greeting them in the dining room of his estate, Mr. Trump assured the men that he was there to help. “Whatever you need,” the papers quoted him as saying, “just let us know.”

Again: silly. They’re there to find the papers he stole and then concealed. He’s not “there to help,” he’s the suspect. They’re not there to get his help finding some lost stuff, they’re there to seize what he’s been hiding from them.

In its filing on Tuesday, the Justice Department took issue with this obliging portrait of the former president, offering a cinematic picture of how Mr. Trump and his legal team had stymied efforts to retrieve the documents.

When the delegation from the Justice Department arrived at Mar-a-Lago on June 3, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers handed over a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape, explaining that the records inside had come from a storage room. Another lawyer — identified as Christina Bobb, according to people familiar with the matter — signed a certification letter, the filing said, swearing that “a diligent search” had been conducted and that all of the classified materials on the property had been turned over.

But when the delegation tried to visit the storage room, the filing said, one of the lawyers “explicitly prohibited” officials from opening or looking into any of the other boxes there. That, the filing said, stopped them from confirming that no materials with classification markings had been left behind.

So much for “anything you want, just ask us.” I can’t help wondering how that scenario went down.

Investigators soon discovered evidence — possibly from interviews with witnesses — that classified documents remained at Mar-a-Lago. Eventually, the filing said, the Justice Department came to believe that government records had likely been “concealed and removed from the storage room” and that efforts may have been taken “to obstruct the government’s investigation.”

So back they went on August 8, and darned if they didn’t find twice as many records as had been “voluntarily” handed over to them.

Matthew Miller, a former spokesman for the Justice Department, said the final product was a perfect distillation of Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s oft-repeated belief that if the department needs to say something, it should only speak through its filings.

“That has been the difference between Trump and D.O.J.,” Mr. Miller said. “Trump keeps saying things publicly he can’t back up in court while D.O.J. waits in the grass and then shows up with a knockout blow.”

“And because Garland has been so conservative in his approach to the job,” he added, “those punches land even harder.”

Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.

Some said motte and bailey, I said bait and switch, others said it’s just plain lying.

Anyway. What Chris Bryant said. Caller asks: “What does it actually mean to transition?”

Chris Bryant replies:

I think I’ve answered your question and [shaking head in sorrow] I’ll tell you – something that really frightens me at the moment – is politicians who want to use this issue to stir division – because for me – there – your right to live your life the way you want, and that you feel comfortable, is absolutely intrinsic to a decent society.

Well, yes and no. Yes up to a point. To put it more brutally, nobody can live her life exactly the way she wants in every single particular. We can’t, because we’re not independent. We can’t feed ourselves or avoid freezing to death or dying of heat stroke, or be cured of diseases or have our injuries repaired, without other people, and once you add other people, you’re no longer free to do whatever you want no matter what.

It’s a stupid slogan and it was a mistake for the trans movement to treat it as sacred. Sometimes things you want to do interfere with what other people want to do, and it’s not written in the stars that you’re the one who always gets to win.

Sure, if men want to think of themselves as women in their own heads, they should be free to do that. When they want women to agree that they’re women, it’s not so simple. See pp 1-47 billion for details.

Why does Trump think it helps him to claim that he “declassified” all the documents? That would make it worse, not better. The issue isn’t one of nomenclature, or cataloging.

Donald Trump is repeating his assertion, debunked in the justice department’s legal filing, that he “declassified” the top secret documents seized by the FBI in their raid on his Florida home.

He “declassified” them so that he could do whatever he wanted with them. Yeah that’s not exculpatory. This isn’t some empty ritual; the point is that the documents are secret and meant to remain secret.

Among a series of posts by the former president on his favored Truth Social platform on Wednesday, he also accused federal agents of “haphazardly” scattering the documents on the floor to photograph them:

Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see.

Thought they wanted them kept Secret? Lucky I Declassified!

Why would that be lucky??? The goal is to keep them secret!

Great god almighty.

He’s “always been drawn to things that are deeply impactful” – like mutilating children’s genitals.

“We try to live with our values thirty to forty years in the future,” he says. “So and that puts us in a mindset of extreme affirmation cuz affirmation at that time is a foregone conclusion.”

Does he then explain how he knows that? No, of course not, he just assumes that he somehow has a magical ability to know that in 30 or 40 years everyone will think it’s fine to carve up and drug children to make them resemble the opposite sex. Not a word about how the emergencies of global warming will by then be making surgical “affirmation” a hobby of interest to absolutely no one.

In the future, he blithely tells us, “gender is just a thing, nobody makes a big deal out of it, children and adolescents are being screened for their gender journey.”

Guy’s a nightmare. Listen to the whole thing.

That Times piece on the perjury and treason of Trump and his lawyers is too dense for one post.

Investigators developed evidence that “government records were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago after the Justice Department sent Mr. Trump’s office a subpoena for any remaining documents with classified markings. That led prosecutors to conclude that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the government filing said.

The DoJ said give us the documents. Trump and his people hid two thirds of the documents, and his people told the FBI “That’s all of it.” Under oath.

You have to wonder what his people were thinking. Maybe Trump had convinced them that he still had such absolute powers that the FBI would never be able to find the remaining documents, because they wouldn’t be allowed to search.

The Justice Department effort began in May, after the F.B.I. examined 15 boxes of documents the National Archives had previously retrieved from Mar-a-Lago after months of asking Mr. Trump’s representatives to return missing records. The bureau found 184 classified documents in that initial batch.

On May 11, department lawyers obtained a subpoena to retrieve all materials marked as classified that were not turned over by the former president.

How did they know there were more? Perhaps they had a list, and there was a lot missing from the list. Perhaps they just had a number, and it was a lot bigger than 184.

On June 3, his team presented F.B.I. agents with 38 additional documents with classified markings, including 17 labeled top secret.

Ok I’d love to know how that conversation went.

“Sir, this is not all of them.”

“Sorry! Here’s 38 more.”

“Sir, thanks very much, have a nice day.”

Like that? Or was there any “Why didn’t you include these in the 15 boxes we’ve already searched? What part of ‘Hand over all the classified documents’ don’t you understand?”?

At any rate, there apparently was a request or demand to check all the documents, which the Trump people refused.

But one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers present during that visit “explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained,” the filing said.

I guess the Feds didn’t have the right paperwork with them to tell Trump’s lawyer to go fuck himself, they were going to open all the boxes in the storage room.

Mr. Trump’s team also provided the department’s national security division with a written statement on behalf of his office by one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers who was serving as the formal “custodian” of the files. While that person’s name has been redacted in government filings, multiple people have identified her as Christina Bobb.

What the hell is a formal custodian of stolen files?* You can call it formal all you like but the files remain stolen.

Ms. Bobb’s statement was attached to the department’s filing on Tuesday. In it, the lawyer wrote that “based upon the information that has been provided to me,” there had been a “diligent” search and all documents responsive to the subpoena were being returned.

With her fingers crossed. Cute.

So they got the paperwork and found – oh looky here what a surprise – lots more documents.

The filing noted that “the F.B.I., in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former president’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform,” a fact that it said “calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”

Polite for “these crooks lied to us under oath.”

*It’s a term of art in subpoena-world.

New information about Trump’s systematic lying and concealment:

The Justice Department sought a search warrant for former President Donald J. Trump’s residence in Florida after obtaining evidence that highly classified documents were likely concealed and that Mr. Trump’s representatives had falsely claimed all sensitive material had been returned, according to a court filing by the department on Tuesday.

In other words Trump’s people lied to the feds about highly classified documents.

The filing came in response to Mr. Trump’s request for an independent review of materials seized from his home, Mar-a-Lago. But it went far beyond that, painting the clearest picture yet of the department’s efforts to retrieve the documents before taking the extraordinary step of searching a former president’s private property on Aug. 8.

“You want an independent review? We’ll give you an independent review, motherfucker.”

Among the new disclosures in the 36-page filing were that the search yielded three classified documents in desks inside Mr. Trump’s office, with more than 100 documents in 13 boxes or containers with classification markings in the residence, including some at the most restrictive levels.

Meaning Trump and his stooges are on the hook not just for having and hiding the documents but for lying about having them to the feds. Under oath.

That was twice the number of classified documents the former president’s lawyers turned over voluntarily while swearing an oath that they had returned all the material demanded by the government.

They turned over only a third of the documents and perjured themselves about it.

The investigation into Mr. Trump’s retention of government documents began as a relatively straightforward attempt to recover materials that officials with the National Archives had spent much of 2021 trying to retrieve. The filing on Tuesday made clear that prosecutors are now unmistakably focused on the possibility that Mr. Trump and those around him took criminal steps to obstruct their investigation.

Stay focused, prosecutors.

Well Jackson, Mississippi is only the state capital and the largest city.

Some 180,000 residents in Jackson, Mississippi have “indefinitely” lost access to reliable running water after excessive rainfall and flooding.

That happened to New Orleans after Katrina, too. Remember? People desperately begging reporters for water to drink. Many people died because there was no drinking water.

Rising floodwaters over the weekend breached the city’s main water treatment facility, bringing it to the brink of collapse.

…Both the city and state are distributing bottled drinking water to residents as well as non-potable water via tanker truck.

I hope they’re distributing the drinking water in mass quantities and very fast. Death from dehydration is swift.

The southern state’s capital is more than 80% African American.

Could that have anything to do with an underfunded infrastructure? Anything at all? Hmmm?

Mississippi is our worst state in many ways. It was the best state for growing cotton, so it had a huge population of enslaved people, and then of people who were theoretically free but in reality still enslaved via “vagrancy” laws and similar that forced them to work on plantations just as if nothing had changed. It’s not an accident that that’s where Emmett Till was murdered or that that’s where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered. I doubt it’s an accident that Jackson has a weak infrastructure.

Even if we turned it around right this second the sea levels would still rise. Also: we’re not turning it around right this second. We’re not even slowing it.

Research based on satellite measurements of ice losses from Greenland and the shape of the ice cap from 2000-19 has allowed scientists to calculate how the climate crisis has pushed the ice sheet from an equilibrium where snowfall matches the ice lost.

They found that a minimum 10.6in sea-level rise is inevitable regardless of action to limit carbon emissions after 110tn tonnes of the Greenland ice cap melted. A multi-metre sea-level rise also appears likely as the trajectory of environmental damage continues.

“The minimum of 27cm is the sea-level rise deficit that we have accrued to date and it’s going to get paid out, no matter what we do going forward,” said Dr William Colgan, from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (Geus). “Whether it’s coming in 100 years or 150 years, it’s coming. And the sea-level rise we are committed to is growing at present, because of the climate trajectory we’re on.”

We’re too clever and not clever enough. We’re so clever we invent all these technologies, and we’re so unclever we can’t stop using them even when it becomes clear we’re destroying our own habitat.

Also the floods in Pakistan aren’t just “floods” – that is, not just expanses of water or torrents of water. They’re torrents of ROCK. Take a look.

Much of Pakistan is under water.

Heavy rains over two months have caused the worst flooding in more than a decade and damaged more than 1m homes.

[UN secretary general António] Guterres said on Tuesday that south Asia was a hotspot for the climate crisis and that the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan that has left tens of millions needing help was a warning to every nation of the destruction wreaked by human-caused global heating.

…

Flash floods fuelled by the climate crisis have affected more than 33 million people, officials have said. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDA) said on Monday the death toll from the monsoon rains and floods in Pakistan had reached 1,136 – with 75 killed in the last 24 hours.

Not a drill.

The absolute minimum sea level rise that’s already inevitable, even if we stopped burning fossil fuels right this second, is bad enough. We are, of course, not stopping the burning right this second, or tomorrow, or in ten years.

Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight.

…

“It is a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” said Prof Jason Box from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (Geus), who led the research. “Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.”

…

Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and the Alps are already on course to lose a third and half of their ice respectively, while the west Antarctic ice sheet is also thought by some scientists to be past the point at which major losses are inevitable. Warming oceans also expand, adding to sea-level rise.

“There is growing support in the scientific literature for multi-metre levels of rise within the next 100 to 200 years,” said Colgan. A collapse of the colossal east Antarctic ice sheet, which would lead to a 52-metre rise in sea levels if it all melted, could be averted if rapid climate action is taken.

But it won’t be. It never will be. We didn’t evolve to be able to react to future global threats, we evolved to be able to react to the right here right now.

All these years I thought, or assumed without thinking about it much, that “custard powder/instant custard” was actually custard in powder form. Today I learned otherwise. I saw this –

Those two packets above the porridge oats are custard powder. Even though we were told to ignore the custard, I became curious about how much protein was actually in the custard powder, figuring it was not much. (There’s been some chat about Monroe’s food advice over the past couple of days, and she does seem to me to have some odd ideas, or at least say odd things, like that oats and mushrooms are good sources of protein.) SO I looked it up, and was mildly shocked to find that the stuff never sees an egg, not even a tiny fraction of an egg. Eggs have nothing to do with it. But but but, said I, in all my bumpkin ignorance, how can they call it custard when zero egg? I have no idea, but they do.

What’s the stuff made of?

Custard powder and instant custard powder are the generic product names for similar and competing products. The product is a powder, based on cornflour, which thickens to form a custard-like sauce when mixed with milk and heated.

Cornflour and milk (and lots of sugar, I’m betting). Paste, basically. Not food.

Also in Trump today: demanding an immediate re-do of the election.

Philip Bump asks innocently what is the difference between warnings and threats.

…there is an important difference between understanding the existing threat and leveraging it.

In an interview on Fox News on Sunday evening, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) rationalized why Trump supporters would be furious at an indictment.

“There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump,” Graham told host Trey Gowdy.

As we’ve already noted, of course there isn’t. Hillary Clinton didn’t take boxes of White House documents home with her in January 2001 or 2016, much less spread them around a large golf club and brag about them on social media. Hillary Clinton didn’t steal top secret documents and refuse to give them back when asked politely and repeatedly. However mistaken or reckless her handling of the email situation was, it wasn’t remotely comparable to the crimes Trump has committed.

“If they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement,” Graham said, “there literally will be riots in the street. I worry about our country.”

Now, is that a worried prediction, or is it a threat?

I’m gonna go with threat.

Soon after the segment aired, Trump shared a clip of it on Truth Social, without comment.

Threat.

A whopping catch-22:

A judge ruled this morning that Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp must testify before a special grand jury that’s investigating possible illegal attempts by then-president Donald Trump and others to influence the 2020 election in the state – but not until after the November midterm election, the Associated Press reports.

See, this is a problem. It’s clear enough why it’s not desirable to have criminal investigations of political candidates happening close to an election, but, and this is a huge “but,” it’s also not desirable to remain in ignorance of the criminality or complicity in criminality of political candidates until it’s too late. You see what I mean? We get why Kemp doesn’t want to be investigated or testify two months before an election, but we don’t want to remain in ignorance of exactly how criminal or implicated Kemp is until it’s too late.

It’s really not clear to me why the first want outweighs the second.

If Kemp is dirty, shouldn’t Georgia voters learn that before the election rather than after? Isn’t it relevant?

The move now is to threaten violence if the criminal Trump is treated like the criminal he is.

Amid growing fears about political violence in the US, a senior Republican senator predicted “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is prosecuted for mishandling classified information.

For “mishandling” top secret classified information by stealing it and keeping it in his hotel, including leaving it lying around in the open while fake Rothschilds wandered around the place.

Graham said: “Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him. There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump.”

Really. What other ex-president has stolen whole boxes of top secret documents and stashed them in their resort hotels while Russian spies wandered in and out? Name one.

Alleging a failure by the FBI to investigate Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, Graham added: “I’ll say this, if there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”

Hunter Biden is a sleaze and Joe Biden absolutely should have done whatever it took to keep him Hunter from profiteering off his Joe’s job, but the fact remains that the two items are radically different.

Law professor and former White House ethics chief Richard Painter referred to Trump supporters’ deadly attack on the Capitol when he said: “A senator who calls for ‘riots in the streets’ if Trump is indicted should be expelled from the Senate. He’s inciting January 6 all over again.”

The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, said the “prediction that violence may follow any prosecution of the former [president] may not qualify legally as incitement but it is irresponsible all the same as it will be seen by some as a call for violence. Public officials are [obliged] to call for the rule of law.”

But

Trump indicated his approval, posting video of Graham’s remarks to Truth Social, the platform Trump set up after being suspended from Twitter over the Capitol attack.

Of course he did.

In snooker news –

Jamie Hunter has won her first ranking title with victory in the US Women’s Snooker Open on Sunday in Seattle.

The Englishwoman secured the biggest triumph of her career so far with a 4-1 defeat of pre-tournament favourite Rebecca Kenna in the final.

Hunter comfortably advanced from the initial round-robin phase with four successive 2-0 wins to earn a spot in the quarter-finals.

There’s just one tiny detail not mentioned in the article – Hunter is not a woman. The Daily Star is more forthcoming, aka more honest.

WPBSA chairman Jason Ferguson has congratulated Jamie Hunter after she became the first transgender player to win a ranking event.

Hunter, who came out as transgender in 2019, defeated pre-tournament favourite Rebecca Kenna 4-1 to win the US Women’s Open on Sunday. The topic of transgender athletes in sport has become a major talking point in recent years, with swimming, rugby union, rugby league banning transgender women from competing.

All sports should ban trans women from competing in women’s sports, because women’s sports are for women.