In about five minutes DOJ is scheduled to start a briefing on “a matter of national security,” which could be anything from plans to deal with ISIS detainees to, you know, a major intervention in the political process.
It is in fact the ISIS detainees; DOJ announcing indictments of members of the ISIS hostage taking call that became known as The Beatles.
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The move by the Trump/Barr DOJ to indict these ISIS members and try them in the United States won’t be top news in such momentous times, but it reflects an important change—the abandonment of an element of Republican politics from the Bush era that stretched through Obama’s term.
In those times, Republicans attacked the idea that dangerous terrorist suspects could be brought to the US and tried in Article III courts. It was part of the rationale for the Bush/Cheney extralegal system of black sites, gitmo, etc. and the ad hoc mess of military commissions.
Liberals argued that Article III courts and regular prosecutions were not only the right and moral way to deal with terrorist suspects but the most effective way too. We’ve been proved right again and again, especially as the 9/11 military commission system at gitmo flounders.
This is sometimes what winning a policy argument looks like. You watch your opponents give up their fear-mongering and do what you recommend, and everyone calls it a nothingburger. But it’s not nothing that this is headed to a US trial rather than Guantanamo or a black site.
As always there are tweets from the before times
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An official photo of an event at the White House with military on Sunday 9/27, one day after the ACB announcement ceremony in the Rose Garden, indoors, no masks.
Trump sitting in the indoor, maskless, military event.
This is a good thread and it’s right; making $400k per year objectively relieves you of the deprivation and stress of poverty and the lion’s share of middle-class annoyances. It is flat out rich.
I think it’s also worth describing briefly why imo the CNBC article scratches that hate click itch. There are more than four levels of wealth.
The rare rich people who makes $400k/yr by and large spend their daily lives in close proximity to the even rarer people who make millions of dollars per year; those are their bosses and clients. They spend probably way more time thinking about what those richer people have...
That’s the White House communications shop saying on the record that the doctors’ on-camera briefing to the American people presented a false picture of his health to boost his mood, but the WH COS leaked the truth anonymously to reporters afterward to provide “transparency.”
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?
Also, as indicated in the NPR story, Garibaldi’s “48 hours ago” was counting backwards from the current time, not forward from the diagnosis, so even leaving aside that Conley’s memo incorrectly attributed the statement to himself, the “day 2” explanation doesn’t make any sense.