Of Course a Mar-a-Lago Worker Drained the Pool Into Room Where Surveillance Video Was Kept

There’s been a flood of evidence coming out about Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate—and now there is also flooded evidence.

A resort employee drained the pool last October, straight into a room full of computer services used to store surveillance footage from around the property, CNN reported Monday, citing anonymous sources. It is unclear whether the room was intentionally flooded, but smart people generally try to drain water away from buildings.

You can see here just how far the pool is from the main property:

Federal prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump over the classified documents, have asked at least one witness about the flooded room. They were told that none of the equipment was damaged (have they tried putting the servers in rice, just in case?).

The timing of both the flood and the news report are remarkable. The server room was flooded just two months after FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago and seized hundreds of classified documents. Prosecutors had subpoenaed surveillance footage before the raid, and they requested more video afterward, in order to determine how the documents were moved around the property.

At least two dozen people have been subpoenaed to testify in the investigation, ranging from resort employees to members of Trump’s inner circle. One person who spans both categories is Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta. Notes from Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran reveal that both Trump and Nauta knew exactly where and when Corcoran was planning to search for documents at Mar-a-Lago. Nauta had previously testified that Trump asked him to move boxes out of the storage room, both before and after they knew the Justice Department was seeking the return of classified documents.

According to Corcoran’s notes, Nauta had offered to help him look through the boxes in the storage room, which Corcoran declined. But Corcoran took breaks during the multiday search, leaving the storage room unattended multiple times. Prosecutors are reportedly possibly investigating whether Nauta knew exactly what was in the boxes he was moving.

Another employee who has been subpoenaed is a maintenance worker who helped Nauta move the boxes of classified documents. The maintenance worker is the same person who flooded the server room, according to CNN’s sources.

CNN’s story broke the same day that Trump’s legal team met with the Justice Department to argue that the former president should not be charged for keeping classified material after leaving office. They gave no indication of how the meeting went, but Trump took to Truth Social after, demanding to know “HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG.”

Smith has been circling ever closer to Trump, and many experts are speculating that he will issue criminal charges soon. In the meantime, Trump has plenty to keep him busy: He is under investigation in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and he was indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump was also found civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll—and two weeks ago, she sued him for defamation again over comments he made about her during a CNN town hall.

Florida Republicans passed a bill criminalizing the transport of undocumented people into Florida, requiring hospitals to ask about immigration status on intake forms, invalidating out of state driver’s licenses or other forms of government ID issued to undocumented people, and preventing local governments from issuing identification cards to undocumented people.

Now, after sparking backlash among thousands of immigrants (who make up a great deal of Florida’s economy), some Florida Republicans are trying to backpedal and do damage control.

On Monday, Representatives Alina Garcia, Rick Roth, and Juan Fernandez Barquin appeared at an event sponsored by Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo, also a Republican. The trio, all of whom voted to pass the anti-immigrant bill, clumsily attempted to appeal to the thousands of people their party has alienated.

“This bill is 100 percent supposed to scare you,” said Roth. “I’m a farmer, and the farmers are mad as hell. We are losing employees. They’re already starting to move to Georgia and other states. It’s urgent that you talk to all your people and convince them that you have resources, state representatives, and other people that can explain the bill to you,” he added, essentially begging Florida’s labor force to not leave the state that cares little for them.

“This is more of a political bill than it is policy. It does give more police state powers going forward to deal with immigration, but still this is mainly a political bill,” Roth concluded incoherently. It’s just politics and messaging, but also it ramps up the police state, but also it’s just all politics. OK.

“We had the best president in my life, the last 30 years, and I’m still supporting Donald Trump,” Roth continued. “I love my governor. He’s the greatest governor,” he said of Ron DeSantis, who led the charge to pass a bill stigmatizing and targeting the some 772,000 undocumented workers, students, and community members in Florida.

“I really didn’t prepare anything,” Garcia said while beginning her remarks, adding that she agreed with everything Roth said. “This is a bill basically to scare people from coming to the state of Florida, and I think it’s done its purpose.”

The pleading by Republicans who are reaping what they sowed comes after Latin American truck drivers began rallying behind calls to strike and not enter Florida, while thousands of workers and families have marched across the state protesting the bill and threatening to leave the state.

A spokesperson for Barquin provided a statement after publishing, assuring that the Florida representative does not see the bill as a mistake, or some messaging bill. “During [the] forum, some of my colleagues dismissed SB 1718 as merely a ‘scare tactic,’” Barquine says. “I, in no way, share their opinion.”

“I voted for this bill, support this bill, and applaud our Governor for making this a priority,” Barquin said.

This post has been updated.

Leading anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spent almost an hour heaping praise on Elon Musk Monday during a Twitter Space meant to discuss his campaign.

Kennedy announced in April that he would join Marianne Williamson in running against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. An environmental lawyer, Kennedy has promoted the scientifically discredited link between vaccines and autism since 2005 and founded an anti-vax advocacy group.

Musk had proposed the Twitter Space so Kennedy could talk about his campaign platform. But the first 50 minutes of the conversation consisted almost entirely of Kennedy praising Musk for how he has run Twitter and fought back against “censorship.”

“I just want to tell you how much I admire you for that and how grateful I am on behalf of my country,” Kennedy said. “You would come here from another country and be a key instrument for rescuing American Democracy and freedom of speech.”

Kennedy specifically mentioned the so-called Twitter Files, which Musk released in December, claiming to have proof that the social media platform had previously censored Republicans.

“I was so surprised and delighted when you did that on your own,” Kennedy said of the files’ release, “and clearly you’ve been portrayed as somebody [with] this sinister agenda, but you’re doing step after step that is not in your self-interest and that is clearly designed to protect freedom of speech.”

Kennedy talked about how his personal Instagram account, and that of his anti-vax organization, were blocked for sharing misinformation. He insisted that his posts only contained real facts and said parent company Meta initially refused to reinstate his account. His profile was allowed back online after he announced he was running for president.

If Kennedy has embraced Musk’s version of free speech, then we should all be very worried. Musk doesn’t love free speech—he actually blocked certain content on Twitter during Turkey’s recent election—so much as the unfettered ability to say whatever you want, regardless of its effect on the rest of society. That’s why hate speech has spiked dramatically since he took over Twitter.

Musk has let Nazis back online, and posts that contain abusive, homophobic, and antisemitic language have proliferated—sometimes thanks to Musk himself. It would be even more dangerous to have a president who doesn’t see an issue with that.

Cornel West is among the eminent thinkers and voices of our time. Speaking truth to power while synthesizing a politics driven by love and solidarity and care for those you share society with are hallmarks of West’s legacy. And that’s why it is puzzling that he has announced his campaign for president under the banner of the not so aptly named People’s Party.

“In these bleak times, I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States as a candidate for the People’s Party,” West announced in a video on Monday. “I enter in the quest for truth, I enter in the quest for justice. And the presidency is just one vehicle to pursue that truth and justice, what I’ve been trying to do all of my life.”

“I come from a tradition where I care about you. I care about the quality of your life, I care about whether you have access to a job with a living wage, decent housing, women having control over their bodies, health care for all, the escalating of the destruction of the planet, the destruction of American democracy. Democracy creates disruption. It creates an eruption. It creates an interruption wide from below, the energies of everyday people is manifest,” West said in trademark fashion.

West, born in Oklahoma before the civil rights era, has been an outspoken voice who has bridged the schools of socialist tradition to Christianity and spiritualism more broadly. He carries a history of fierce advocacy for racial and economic equality, and a strong rejection of blaming material or social misery on the marginalized, as opposed to the elites and structural forces actually responsible.

And he is now running on a party ticket that purports to embrace similar ideals but has had trouble on the execution side of things. While the party began in 2017 with noble roots to form a new political party independent from corporate money and influence, it has been mired in troubling allegations, as well as broader organizational dysfunction.

Numerous sources have corroborated sexual harassment allegations against party founder Nick Brana. Last year, former party member Paula Jean Swearengin told journalists Eoin Higgins and Jordan Chariton that she had witnessed Brana try to force himself onto former party executive director Zana Day, who confirmed the allegations herself. Numerous party board members were apparently forced out for encouraging investigations into the allegations and questioning whether Brana was still fit to lead the party.

“We were removed [from the board] because we were concerned about Nick remaining in his position,” one former board member, Regina Clarke, said. “As the investigation went on, it was clear there was sexual harassment going on; for other alleged acts, there was debate on whether it was harassment or extended further.”

After the allegations were made public, the party’s social media accounts attacked and smeared those questioning the party leadership’s actions.

Other former party volunteers and members have accused the party leadership of lacking democratic organizational processes, having opaque finances, and being generally disrespectful, manifesting sometimes in ableism and racism.

As of now, the People’s Party has ballot access in barely a handful of states. The party’s central website has little direction for those interested in joining the party’s effort to gain ballot access elsewhere, nor to organize and elect candidates on a local level. The policy platform includes six admirable goals, but with little more than a few sentences related to each plank.

West’s decision to run with the party calls into question his instincts, and perhaps even his intentions. It’s not as if he had to run with this party. The Green Party was an option, at least in terms of ballot access. He also could have run as a Democrat, to give Democratic voters another real option to choose or to put more pressure on Biden to engage with West’s arguments. So too could he have used the party as a vessel to expose even more traditional Democratic voters to his legacy and vision for better politics.

Instead, West is lending credence to an organization that has not earned it, while hamstringing his own electoral potential. In carrying his presidential candidacy through the auspices of the People’s Party, West will have to mobilize a movement and build a political apparatus in the arms of a party that has seldom exhibited a sustained ability to do either.

The war on woke is putting me to sleep.

On Saturday, Ron DeSantis joined a slew of other 2024 Republican contenders at Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride,” an annual Iowa Republican fundraising event.

While there, the Florida governor delivered remarks about his vision for the party—one that has clearly gone so well for it over the past few years.

In this clip alone, DeSantis said “woke” seven times in some 26 seconds.

Of note is that DeSantis’s own general counsel has defined the term “woke” as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” While it’s obviously clear the far right uses “woke” as a catchall for anything they don’t like (which usually refers to anything contrary to white, conservative, capitalist-glorifying ideals), it’s funny to imagine a candidate who purports himself to be a hardscrabble guy denying the possibility of systemic issues in America needing to be addressed.

Kind of hard to be a populist if you disagree with the notion that systems of power need to be confronted.

Meanwhile, Republican frontrunner and DeSantis role model Donald Trump, who once sold an entire line of woke merchandise, now says he doesn’t like the term.

If that all wasn’t enough, DeSantis also seems to have copied his brave “war on woke” remarks from a famous speech against fascism, an ideology he has embraced.

American historian Heather Cox Richardson noted that DeSantis’s speech exhibited sharp similarities to Winston Churchill’s remarks during World War II, in which the British prime minister spoke about the relentless struggle against fascism. “We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”