(📢) Wow! Someone has combined my 2,500-page NYT-bestselling Proof trilogy (2018-2020) and my reporting for HuffPost about the NYC field office of the FBI (2016-2017) into a Twitter thread. Journalists: please do make sure to say “if only someone had told us” in the comments.

👇

https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1618309363084718080

(PS) Tim Snyder is great. I like his work.

The Trump-Russia story was broken by David Corn in October 2016. The New York City FBI field office story was broken by me in December 2016. Craig Unger has done the most—and most important—work on Trump-Russia ties. My tweet was not...

Matty also forgot that in 2006 Manafort inked a $10M/year contract with a Putin pal who says he “doesn’t separate himself from the state”—Deripaska—to “advance Putin’s interests in America”

We don’t know if the deal ended

First thing Manafort did? Move to Trump Tower

Google it

https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1615128301542014977

The breadth and depth of the lies Taibbi has told about Trump and Russia, all of them told because he knows that the people paying for his “journalism” barely know how to read and don’t honestly care what the truth is anyway as long as they own the libs, is actually breathtaking

(THREAD) I really hadn’t thought about how I’d want to spend my last hours on Twitter, if that’s what these are. But I told a filmmaker once that my favorite part of any day I spend here is sharing music. That’s always been true. So maybe I’ll share a few favorites, if that’s OK. 1/ Here is the first song I ever published at RETRO. (RETRO—my second substack—is where I post all my music and writing on music. Many folks do not know that I was a radio DJ specializing in 1960s psychedelia back in the 1990s.) This cheers me up a little.

(📢) LIVE THREAD: I’m live-tweeting Donald Trump’s announcement of his 2024 presidential campaign tonight at Mar-a-Lago. I’m an attorney, journalist, and Trump biographer who has published three national bestsellers on Trump’s political career. I hope you will RETWEET and follow. 1/ At times I may reference, in this thread, information previously published in the 200+ reports on Trump that appear at PROOF (link below). About half of these reports are free at PROOF, while the other half are for subscribers ($5/month). PROOF is here: sethabramson.substack.com

(🔐) PROOF EXCLUSIVE: The Latest 2024 “Trump v. Biden” Polls From 32 States Don’t Show What You Think

Donald Trump is just hours from announcing his third presidential candidacy—and the polls are telling us a different story than media is. Please RETWEET. sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-latest-2… 1/ When I set out to curate all the state-level 2024 polls from the last three months, I expected to find what major media was implying I would find. I did not.

(🔐) PROOF EXCLUSIVE: On the Eve of Trump Announcing His 2024 White House Run, It’s Clearer Than Ever That the Patriot Party Could Soon Transform American Politics

You need to read this before tomorrow—a day that will change *everything*. Please RETWEET. sethabramson.substack.com/p/on-the-eve-o… 1/ I’ve said before and will say again, now echoed by Trump family members and other Trump biographers: in 2024 Trump will either be the GOP nominee, be in prison, or have made a series of choices that led to the end of the GOP.

Short of a natural death, it’ll be one of those 3.

So much wishcasting. Journalists who actually believe the Republican Party will quit Trump this time—*this time*, after all the times they *should* have, but did not—are like Charlie Brown absolutely convinced this time Lucy won’t pull the football away. 🤦🏻vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/d… Every other time Trump ran for office or inserted himself into an election cycle it was entirely different from the 2024 presidential election cycle, because this time he is *literally trying to stay out of jail*. He will threaten *anyone and anything* to be the GOP nominee.

(📢) UPDATE (CNN): There are 25 House races yet to be called. If Democrats can win 19 of those 25, they’ll hold the House. It’s a steep hill to climb, but it’s doable. (PS) NBC News believes Democrats will get 16 of the 19 seats they need and end up at 215 (218 seats are needed for a majority). But that projection comes with a “+/- 7” caveat, meaning that NBC thinks it wholly possible that—with some luck—the Democrats do get to 218 House seats.

🔓| NEW at PROOF: Have the Odds of a Biden Impeachment Changed?

With control of Congress still up in the air, the question of whether Republicans will try to impeach President Biden is at once hard to answer and essential to resolve.

Hope you’ll RETWEET. sethabramson.substack.com/p/have-the-odd… 1/ This article comes at the question above from every angle: Will the GOP take the House? If so, who will lead it? Will that new leader agree to an impeachment? What are the obstacles? What would the purported grounds be? Would it be successful? What would be its actual purpose?

BREAKING NEWS: Trump Appointee Takes $10,000 From Tens of Millions of Americans in GOP-Orchestrated Tax Hike; Marjorie Taylor Greene Can Get Her Business Loans Wholly Forgiven But You Can’t Get Any Student Debt Relief Whatsoever, Decree Wealthy Republicans reuters.com/legal/us-judge… People needed this help. There was no legal justification for blocking it. But wealthy, powerful Republicans—men of means—across the country banded together out of their sheer contempt for middle-class and poor Americans who needed to take out crippling loans to get an education.

(1 of 3) Back during the Trump-Russia scandal, there was a popular pro-Russia troll account that used the image of a young brunette to pretend to be a real person. I watched “her” feed sow havoc and disinformation for *months* back in 2017-18. This same account just came at me... (2 of 3) ...with disinformation on Musk’s plans for Twitter—contradicting widely reported news to make his plans sound benign, then trying to start a war between legacy-blue and new-blue checkmark feeds.

This pro-Russia troll now has a verified badge. Not sure how long I am...

(📢) A MESSAGE TO FOLLOWERS OF THIS FEED: Hi, everyone! I want to say that now would be a good time to sign up as a *free* subscriber to PROOF, where I expect I’ll be more regularly going forward. (You can decide later if you want to be a paid subscriber.) Sethabramson.substack.com (Obviously you can sign up now to be a paid PROOF subscriber with full access to the site, I just figured that with Twitter collapsing and everyone asking where I’ll be going forward it makes sense to underscore that one can also get less but still some access to PROOF for free.)

BREAKING: Elon to Kill All Identity-Verified, Public-Figure Badges, Leaving Twitter With Only Non-Identity-Verified, $8/Month Anonymous Users Impersonating Celebrities; It Turns Out a Billionaire Alt-Rightist Really Did Buy Twitter for $44 Billion Just to Own the Libs and Kill It (PS) Well, I was wrong. I admit it. I believed Elon Musk would be a rational actor, as I figured no one could amass that much wealth being a puerile, corrupt, addled-brained turdstick without half a lick of common sense.

But Musk is just an alt-right troll with cash. That’s all.

This is what I see when I click on my “verified” badge. If you click the badge of someone who purchased verification without confirming identity or being selected for verification, a different message appears. Twitter could use this to distinguish official/public-figure accounts. Alternately, Twitter could use a different color badge for verification that was purchased without selection or identity confirmation. Unless the sole purpose of all these changes is to denigrate the work—which raised enormous revenue for Twitter—of currently verified accounts.

These people either don’t understand Donald Trump or don’t want to accept what they understand.

Trump is an abuser, a criminal, and a con man. In his view, *he* decides when he’s done with you, you don’t decide when you’re done with *him*.

Abandon him and he will get dangerous.

https://twitter.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/1590460902469668867

The GOP had *one opportunity* to stop Trump—and it was at the RNC in Cleveland in 2016. I wrote about this at the time, and foolishly believed the GOP would take the chance to save itself. It didn’t.

Now it’s stuck with a parasite who will implode the party if it displeases him.

Some big, under-covered news coming out of the election may be—if it comes to pass—that all 6 insurrectionists running for Secretary of State in major 2024 battleground states lost. We’re on our way to that eventuality. And it’d mean that voters had *made safe* the 2024 election! It can’t be overstated that Trump isn’t merely going to announce a third presidential run in 6 days to avoid indictment, but also because he believed he’d positioned election deniers in key states to help him steal the 2024 election. That option may now be off the board for him.

I’m going to turn in, but I do want to underscore that for all that tonight has been a *great* night for Democrats, nothing has yet been decided. The GOP could still take both the House and the Senate, and if they do so even by a single vote they will declare victory. Stay tuned. We no longer live in a time when people cross the aisle, so controlling a house of Congress by one vote is basically total control. The nation will only have been made safe if Democrats hold both houses of Congress. That may still happen—but it’ll take days or weeks to determine.

Readers of this feed will know that I never made any predictions about how tonight would go, and I’m certainly not going to pretend I did. But what I said—and many others said—was that the focus *should* be on democracy and women’s rights. And that does seem to have been correct. Both democracy and women’s rights are meta-issues—they encompass both emotion and logic, economics and morality, patriotism and self-interest.

When professional Democratic consultants said Democrats should ignore these issues and focus narrowly on inflation, many of us demurred.

(🧵) A brief note on journalism.

Voters can say they have any priorities they want to have. That’s what it means to be a voter.

What it is means to be a *journalist* is to reveal whether or not voters’ preoccupations have *any correlation to what’s happening in the real world*. The economy isn’t in recession and is headed in the right direction. Only one party did *anything* to aid the economy in the last 18 months: the Democratic Party. It’s the responsibility of journalists to provide data—in this case, data showing a GOP “economy voter” is a paradox.

Republicans have been lying to their voters for years using the idea that the government will take your guns away. It has never happened or come close to happening. Meanwhile, Democrats warned Roe could go away and it did. A real lesson on the comparative integrity of each party. Likewise, Joe Biden’s closing argument involved citing things he *actually literally did* to fight inflation and improve the economy—and then citing actual known GOP attempts to weaken our democracy.

*Trump’s* closing argument was a series of lies about illegal immigration data.

BREAKING (CNN): Wisconsin GOP Senate Candidate Ron Johnson Reveals He May Try to Steal the 2022 Election in Wisconsin, Admitting He May Not Accept Election Result If He Loses; Johnson, Who Lied About Abiding By Term Limits, Is Also a 2020 Election Denier and January 6 Conspirator (PS) I’ve been saying for weeks that Wisconsin is no longer a democracy—and it appears that Johnson’s plan to steal the election if he loses depends upon the complicity of the already lawless Republican-led Wisconsin state legislature. This is extremely ugly, authoritarian stuff.