Substacks
October 24, 2023 Heather Cox Richardson
Another of Trump’s lawyers has pleaded guilty to charges as part of a cooperation agreement with the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s office. This morning, Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting false statements and writings as part of the plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. She is the fourth of the 19 people charged in the Georgia racketeering case to plead guilty.
In late September, bail bondsman Scott Hall, who helped to breach voting equipment and data in Coffee County, Georgia, pleaded guilty; lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty last week.
Ellis opposed Trump’s 2016 nomination but supported him after his election in frequent television appearances as a “constitutional law attorney” although she had not worked on election law. After Trump saw her on the Fox News Channel, Ellis became a “senior legal advisor” to Trump’s reelection campaign.
After he lost, she was a very visible television spokesperson for the Big Lie that the election was stolen. On November 19, 2020, she joined Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee to insist that Democrats had rigged the voting in majority-Black cities and that communist forces in Venezuela had tampered with U.S. voting machines. She also peppered her social media feed with MAGA statements, mixing it up with anti-Trump figures, making her a more public figure than the other lawyers.
Nonetheless, Trump declined to cover her legal fees after her indictment as a co-defendant in the Georgia racketeering case, possibly because she had supported Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid. While Ellis said she had stopped supporting the former president because of his “narcissistic” tendencies, she continued to echo Trump’s rhetoric. In September she raised more than $216,000 for her legal defense fund from crowdfunding, claiming she was fighting “a weaponized government and the criminalization of the practice of law.”
Today, in a court of law rather than in front of the television cameras, she sounded quite different.
“As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously, and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings,” a tearful Ellis told the court. “I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” (Ellis worked closely with older Trump lawyer Giuliani; she will be 39 on November 1.)
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis said in court. “I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse. For those failures of mine, your honor, I have taken responsibility already before the Colorado bar, who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.”
Ellis’s plea agreement spelled out the statements she made that were lies. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, this means the court has identified the specific lies that made up the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and that Ellis will testify that they are lies. Those claims include the lie that there were 96,000 fraudulent mail-in ballots, that 2,506 felons voted illegally, that 66,248 underage people illegally registered to vote, that 2,423 unregistered people voted, that more than 10,000 dead people voted, that Fulton County election workers counted ballots with no oversight.
In the civil case in New York in which Trump, his older sons, two employees, and the Trump Organization are on trial for fraud, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen testified today that he and the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, would reverse engineer Trump’s financial statements to meet whatever number Trump wanted.
His testimony suggested that the alleged massive fortune on which Trump based his identity, as well as his presidential bid, was an illusion.
In a series of motions filed overnight, Trump’s defense team appears to be throwing anything it can at the wall to challenge the election conspiracy case in Washington, D.C.
But as Trump’s legal peril escalates, Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to reject any House speaker who does not embrace Trump. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) today said, “We need a speaker of the House that reflects the values and the views of Republican voters across the country, and they support President Trump and they support his agenda.” Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX) suggested nominating Trump himself for the job.
CNN’s Jake Tapper has had enough. “I’m covering life and death issues, serious tragedies, serious momentous occurrences here in Israel and of course in Gaza,” he said today. But, he said, “We have to interrupt this for one moment to cover the complete and utter clown car that is the House Republicans’ Speaker’s race.”
House Republicans today selected Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN) as their choice for the post, only to have him drop out of the race after Trump, apparently angry that Emmer had dodged a question about whether he supported Trump’s nomination for president, turned on him.
Trump went on social media to call Emmer, whose work in Congress has earned him a 79% lifetime approval rating from the right-wing Heritage Action for America, a “Globalist RINO,” meaning “Republican In Name Only.” Trump warned that Emmer “never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA…. I believe he has now learned his lesson, because he is saying that he is Pro-Trump all the way, but who can ever be sure? Has he only changed because that’s what it takes to win?”
Trump ally Ohio Representative Jim Jordan’s failure to win the speakership even after threatening his colleagues showed that Trump cannot put his chosen candidate into the chair, but Emmer’s failure to win the speakership suggests Trump’s opposition can keep a candidate out of it.
Just hours after Emmer dropped out, the House Republican conference threw up a fourth candidate for speaker: Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson is a self-described Christian and staunch Trump ally. He defended the former president during both of his impeachment trials and fought for Texas v. Pennsylvania, the key lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election (the Supreme Court decided that Texas did not have standing to sue). He voted against certifying the 2020 election results.
Johnson won the conference’s nomination with 128 votes to 29 votes for Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, who only entered Congress in 2021. In an interesting sign that Republicans might be reconsidering their rejection of former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) three weeks ago, 43 Republicans voted for him even though he was not standing for the position. Johnson told reporters he expects a floor vote at noon tomorrow.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has offered a bipartisan deal in which Democrats would help Republicans elect a speaker. In exchange for their help, Democrats have said they want a candidate who is not an election denier and who agrees to hold up-or-down votes for bills that have broad support across the parties. Such a deal would mean some security for future elections. It would also mean that a measure funding Ukraine, which is popular across Congress but which the extremists oppose, would get a hearing.
So would funding the government.
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Notes:
https://www.newsweek.com/maga-wants-their-money-back-after-jenna-ellis-pleads-guilty-1837356
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/us/georgia-trump-scott-hall-guilty-plea.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-lawyer-jenna-ellis-tears-up-court-georgia-guilty-plea-2023-10
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-trump-train-finally-crashed-for-jenna-ellis
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/trump-motions-to-dismiss-jan-6-case
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/24/politics/takeaways-michael-cohen-donald-trump/index.html
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24079495-criminal-accusation-for-ellis-102423
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/24/mike-johnson-house-speaker-republican-candidate
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/house-speaker-vote-live-updates-10-24-2023/
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Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.
→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”
→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.
That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.
And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.
Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”
→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.
Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.
Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.
Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”
Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.
People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.
Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.
“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”
Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”
With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”
The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.
That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.
Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.
Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”
Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”
Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”
Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.
The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”
Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”
CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.
Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”
Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037
https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4790180-gop-funding-house-recess/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/18/health/dr-sanjay-gupta-analysis-trump/index.html
https://newrepublic.com/post/184238/jd-vance-rumor-fact-check-couch-sex
https://19thnews.org/2024/07/win-with-black-women-zoom-call-harris-organizers/
https://www.rawstory.com/kamala-harris-2668817109/
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