I’m trying to puzzle out how the Meadows story plays into it. One theory: Trump and his COS were at odds over what message to give to the public, Conley chose the President’s implausible sunnier version, and Meadows leaked a darker one.
A more peculiar theory I guess is that Meadows released a second message undercutting the doctors somehow with Trump’s approval. Both would be staggering stories.
Meadows as Chief of Staff to a frail, hospitalized president could presumably prevent a misleading press conference from going forward outside. He could certainly have stepped up to the mics himself to say these things. Is he just a chaos agent?
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.