McGahn's father was taught by Roy Cohn in law school, which I suppose is mildly amusing
ironically, the R side seems to be chafing a lot more than the D side at the constraints imposed by the committee agreement w DOJ. Steve Castor (remember him?) keeps trying to get McGahn to say that the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt and so on and McGahn keeps not biting
practically beckett
on page 125, the first piece of new information! McGahn was the source for the Washington Post story clarifying that he hadn't directly told Trump he would resign if Mueller was fired (in response to a slightly-less-accurate NYT story for which he was not the source)
if this seems like inside baseball to you, well, that is exactly what it is
One way to understand some of the recent Supreme Court reporting is that the justices live in the very small, very rarified world of elite legal circles, which reporters are now newly interested in covering
The point where these buddy-buddy dynamics shade into bad behavior (eg Crow's jet) is a bit uncertain, imo, and everything being reported on isn't equally bad, but for folks saying "this isn't news, this is just how things work": the fact that it's how things work is itself news
at least to the vast majority of people who will never occupy these spaces. Certainly all this should be contextualized & no one should be letting the liberal justices off the hook. But saying "there's no story" just emphasizes how little scrutiny this world has received
Timeline appears (??) to be:
-June 3: DOJ & FBI show up at MAL—with a subpoena—to obtain records
-"A few days later" per WSJ, DOJ asks MAL to put a lock on the door (lol)
-June 22: Trump Org gets a subpoena for surveillance footage at MAL and turns it over
-Aug 8: search of MAL
it took Milley until fall 2019, AFTER he accepted the job as chairman of the joint chiefs, to realize that Trump might have "a screw or two loose"? newyorker.com/magazine/2022/…
The level of self-delusion among people working in the Trump administration—as also described in the incredible and harrowing Atlantic piece on child separations—is truly something else theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
A lot of people working under Trump told themselves that they were doing a service by preventing something much worse from happening—preventing the red line from being crossed. But being in that environment itself erodes your ability to identify where the line is.
Dobbs has obliterated my well-honed instinct to explain why it's Actually A Bit More Complicated, because it's not, and the thing is that the Dobbs majority doesn't seem to really believe it is either
The shoddy reasoning of the majority in Dobbs and Bruen is clarifying. If we're operating in a place where Alito can snark about abortion as eugenics or the uselessness of gun laws re Buffalo, why should we be required to evaluate those opinions on the level of cold reason?
I have been thinking about this in relation to the question of public opinion about the Court and the legitimacy-destroying aspect of Dobbs. Of course we don't know where public confidence in the Court might go now. But it's not on a good trendline.
Trump’s intent is irrelevant morally, but it’s quite important for the legal aspect. Whether or not it should be, it just is, and any prosecutor is going to have to consider that
You saw this again and again in the Mueller report. Whether Trump fired Comey to hamstring the Russia investigation or whether he did it because he just didn’t like the guy speaks directly to his potential criminal exposure.
And the fact that his … unique mode of self expression makes this difficult to untangle is part of why it’s a hard case to charge