A feature of Trump’s presidency is he’s been able to torque everyone in proximity to him to tell transparent lies. The point of the lies is not necessarily that they be believed but that they demonstrate the authoritarian power that compels the subordinates to pronounce them.
This transparent lying has happened famously in the National Park Service’s estimation of crowd sizes at his inauguration, in the military, in the intelligence community, at the Justice Department, at State, at NOAA weather forecasting centers, etc.
It also happened at the White House Medical Unit, where Dr. Ronny Jackson gave a patently BS account of the president’s health to the press in 2018 and Trump attempted to reward him with a cabinet post.
Nevertheless, a lot of people—myself included—were holding out hope that practicing physicians in a hospital setting treating the president as a patient would not fall into the same pattern of transparent truckling lies. As it turns out, they have, and it feels terrible to watch.
The medical profession is a trusted institution in American society, and producing a doctor who will give plain, reliable facts to the public in an emergency is one of its institutional roles. That utterly failed today, presumably because these doctors are in orbit around Trump.
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It appears the Special Counsel’s office filed under seal its support for a Garcia hearing to evaluate Walt Nauta’s lawyer’s alleged conflicts, and Judge Cannon has decided to have it out in public.
The issue is that discussing Stanley Woodward’s representation of three potential witnesses in the secret documents case would reveal the fact of their grand jury testimony. Cannon has decided in a conclusory line that isn’t reason enough, but it’s not clear why she thinks so.
It’s also kinda weird to strike not only the proposed sealed supplement but also the motion for leave to file under seal from the docket. Cannon has denied that motion, which presumably might be an appealable issue, but then excised what she denied from the record. Strange.
By popular request, I will try to explain. According to the govt’s motion, they proposed a protective order, Trump responded with an entirely different form, and then the govt came back with a form based on a case before Judge Nichols.
Transactional lawyers like myself call this the battle of the forms. You just keep sending each other different templates for an agreement, and consequently you delay the work of marking up the other side’s language and isolating the substantive issues between you.
What I find lamentable about DeSantis’s curriculum is the strong echo of antebellum pro-slavery ideology it contains, apportioning credit to the slaveholders and the slave system for supposedly improving enslaved people. I’ll explain.
The chattel slavery practiced in the southern states and the colonies before them was a hideously cruel cradle-to-grave form to bondage. The contemporaneous pro-slavery ideology held that slaveholders were civilizing and improving a savage race from a state of pagan incivility.
The historical record reveals this pro-slavery ideology to be nonsense. Enslaved peoples were the bearers of their own traditions and evidently resourceful and innovative without the intervention of the enslavers, and often to their great frustration.
It's unfortunate to let unserious MAGA lawyers vamp with background statements like this. No attorney who has gone on the record that I've seen has said the case is weak—including Tim Parlatore, who represented Trump. Prima facie, it's founded on a lot of documentary evidence.
There are the classified docs themselves, found in his house. There are text messages and photos his employees and his family sent to one another. There are notes written down by Trump's own attorney. There is audio tape of Trump consensually recorded by Meadows' ghostwriters.
It should take more than a just-so line about your wife and kids to gain admittance to the copy of a news article and call that veritable mountain of evidence weak sauce.