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Another whirlwind day for disgraced former president Donald Trump and his cadre of similarly-disgraced lawyers.
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Trump’s legal team met with prosecutors from DOJ special counsel Jack Smith’s office on Thursday morning, more than one week after Trump announced he had received a target letter from the Justice Department telling him he should expect to face criminal charges in connection with his very public efforts to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection.
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This meeting was yet another signal that a grand jury indictment is imminent. The grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the case also met on Thursday at the federal courthouse in Washington, DC, where a prosecutor from Smith’s office was spotted as well. Prosecutors told Trump’s legal team to expect an indictment according to two sources, though Trump denies this.
- Imminent does not mean today, alas. The courtroom deputy told reporters that no grand juries returned indictments today, and none were expected by close of business. So…what the hell? Well, according to legal analysts, it’s possible that an indictment has been returned and is now under seal, which would be in alignment with standard procedure in federal grand-jury investigations. Did the grand jury vote for a public indictment, a sealed indictment, or were they not asked to vote at all (at least not yet)? The public indictment option is unlikely, because it would likely have already made its way to, you know, the public were that the case.
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But wait, there’s more (indictments)!
It’s unclear what the Mar-a-Lago case developments mean for the 2020 election case, but boy is it a full-time job keeping up with this guy’s myriad crimes!
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Guess which presidential candidate stopped by Pod Save America this week for a sit down with Lovett? Hint: Hint: He’s a passionate advocate for blocking bridges and tanning on closed state beaches. Yep, you guessed right! It’s Chris Christie - former governor of New Jersey and the first presidential candidate of the 2024 cycle to appear on the show. You’re definitely not gonna wanna miss this one. Check out the episode right now on the Pod Save America feed, wherever you get to your podcasts.
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Apart from being a rapacious, sociopathic buffoon groveling in desperation to try to convince people he is funny, Elon Musk’s willful incompetence has created real-world dangers for consumers. According to a Reuters report, employees at Musk-owned electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla were instructed to divert customers complaining about their vehicles’ driving range (the distance an individual could drive their car on a fully-charged battery) from bringing their vehicles in for service, even when the range was half of what the company had advertised. The company went so far as to create a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas specifically dedicated to canceling as many range-related appointments as possible. Managers told employees that they were saving Tesla about $1,000 for every canceled appointment. This was a problem Tesla had created with a mix of false advertisement and faulty instrumentation. Years ago, Tesla began misrepresenting driving distance by rigging its own range-estimating software to show drivers inflated projections for the distance their car could travel on a full battery. Then, when the battery fell below 50 percent charged, the software would re-adjust to show more realistic projections to prevent routinely stranding drivers with prematurely empty batteries. According to the report, the directive to present the false range estimates came directly from Musk himself. Tesla was fined earlier this year by South Korean regulators who found that the cars delivered as little as half of their advertised range in cold weather. They required Tesla to publicly admit misleading consumers, which Musk and two local executives did on June 19, releasing a statement acknowledging “false/exaggerated advertising.”
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A new investigative report from the New York Times shows that despite the fact that the British government outwardly vowed to freeze the bank accounts of Russian oligarchs living in the United Kingdom, many of them have been allowed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on super-rich guy shit like private chefs, chauffeurs, and domestic staff. These “licenses” granted to Russian business tycoons in Britain are an example of the U.K.’s precarious new financial-sanctions system that was assembled post-Brexit. In some cases, these oligarchs were allowed more than $1 million a year in living expenses, while in others, criminal investigations and sanctions were scrapped altogether. Freezing bank accounts of Russian oligarchs living abroad was an early measure meant to, as the British foreign secretary put it, “cut off funding for the Russian war machine.” Even individuals described by the British government as “pro-Kremlin oligarchs” were permitted allowances of as much as £60,000 per month. The British Treasury granted 82(!) such licenses last year to Russian oligarchs, and many more are still pending. Tally-ho, corruption!
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The United States economy continues to grow, defying expectations and further staving off fears of a recession.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt penned an op-ed for the Washington Post arguing that if artificial intelligence uses someone’s work or writing as “training data” those parties should receive residual compensation.
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