Panicked Trump Wants Georgia Evidence Tossed to Stop Third Indictment

When you get impeached twice, found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and indicted numerous times it’s a lot easier to go ahead and try asking the courts to stop investigating you. Such is the strategy of Donald Trump.

CNN reports that the former president is seeking a new court order to pretty much stop the Fulton County, Georgia, investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump’s lawyers are filing to try throwing out all the evidence collected last year by a special grand jury, ban prosecutors from presenting that evidence to a new grand jury, and disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from court proceedings.

The brazen demands come from a legal team that claims that allowing the investigation to proceed would lead to “a violation of [Trump’s] fundamental constitutional rights,” as he “seeks his Party’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States.” The lawyers filed petitions to both the Fulton County Superior Court and the Georgia Supreme Court.

It makes sense that Trump’s legal team is getting desperate: the Georgia grand jury is expected to announce on Tuesday whether Trump and his associates should face criminal charges for trying to overthrow the election.

The Georgia investigation has been going on for the better part of two years, hearing from 75 witnesses, including Trump advisors, his former attorneys and aides, and Georgia officials. The special grand jury, which heard evidence for some seven months, recommended indicting more than a dozen individuals—of which Trump is suspected to be among.

All to say, the process has been a long and arduous one, not something flippant nor inherently infringing upon Trump’s constitutional rights, just because it took so long that he’s now running for president for the third time in a row.

Trump’s lawyers have made similar filings in other legal cases he faces. Earlier this week, his legal team asked for a delay in the trial where he faces 37 charges for seizing and mishandling top secret government and military documents. They have argued that it’s impossible to try the case in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the Justice Department deemed Trump not immune from E. Jean Carroll’s second defamation lawsuit against him, dating back to 2019.

The Biden administration announced Friday it will forgive $39 billion in student debt, just weeks after the ultraconservative Supreme Court tried to block such a move.

The Supreme Court in June ruled 6–3 against Joe Biden’s original student loan forgiveness plan, but it appears the president refuses to give up. His administration implemented a series of fixes to the student loan repayment system that is expected to help more than 800,000 people with student debt.

The Biden administration counted payments for borrowers who had made partial or late payments, and for people who had paused their payments under certain circumstances, such as if they were a student or unemployed, but continued to pay the interest. These types of payments previously went uncounted, according to the government.

“For far too long, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that failed to keep accurate track of their progress towards forgiveness,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

The fix has a far more limited scope than Biden’s original plan, which would have canceled up to $20,000 of student debt for up to 43 million people, but the move is still noteworthy.

Biden had originally cited the Heroes Act of 2003 as the law that gave him the authority to cancel student debt. That measure permits the secretary of education to “waive or modify” student loan provisions under the circumstances of a national emergency. Debt relief opponents had argued that the act was not applicable because it was no longer a national emergency.

The new plan hinges on the Higher Education Act, which allows Biden to direct the education secretary to “compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances.”

Republicans are furious that Biden has found a way around both them and the Supreme Court. Biden “is intentionally thumbing his nose at the U.S. Supreme Court and our Constitutional separation of powers,” tweeted Virginia Representative Ben Cline.

Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, “This administration has no respect for our institutions.”

But Democrats hailed the move, especially Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who had previously pushed the HEA as the law to underpin student loan forgiveness. “This action is what it looks like when the Education Department is on the side of working people,” she tweeted.

California Representative Mark Takano called to keep up the momentum. “I applaud the Biden Administration’s commitment to student debt forgiveness, despite the Supreme Court’s efforts to rip away desperately needed relief from millions of borrowers,” he said. “We must continue to fight for student loan borrowers and get them the relief they deserve.”

It was always leading up to this. The rife misinformation, the skewed financial incentives, the promises for something greater, something worthwhile, something of purpose: Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is now, for all intents and purposes, a multilevel marketing scheme:

Musk’s explanation comes after a stream of Twitter’s verified users—often far-right and conspiratorial ones—received thousands of dollars for helping bring eyeballs to embedded ads within Twitter’s interface.

As per Musk, the apparent big catch is that verified users only make money off of other verified users, creating what amounts to the combination of an MLM and conspiratorial echo chamber.

While some users like Brian Krassenstein—known first as an anti-Trump content factory, now as a generically liberal voice is also quite friendly toward the rest of the Twitter Blue community—have made money, many of the Twitter payments to “content creators” seem to have gone to users who have whipped up hateful and dangerous conspiracies. These users have also been at the forefront of implicitly or explicitly prodding more people to join the subscription program helping keep Musk’s Twitter Blue afloat.

Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right user who once used his massive platform to falsely identify an innocent Black man as the “number one suspect” in the shooting of two police officers, said he received over $16,000 from Twitter.

“I hear some asking, ‘Why aren’t liberals and leftists getting paid for Twitter? Why is it just people Elon seems to like?’” Cheong tweeted when announcing the news. “Oh I don’t know, could it be because they boycotted Twitter Blue, refused to sign up for monetization, and staged failed walkoffs to Mastodon and elsewhere?”

“Twitter Monetization For Creators Is REAL,” sensationalist provocateur Benny Johnson also celebrated, announcing his nearly $10,000 paycheck from the Big Tech elite billionaire.

“That’s insane! I need in on this,” one user tweeted in response.

“Just sign up for subscriptions in Twitter Blue — the rest happens automatically,” Johnson responded, spreading the good word about the product. “Really easy! Do it,” he urged. Johnson repeated such assurances of the billionaire’s lackluster product to similarly wistful repliers.

And such is the undergirding framework of Twitter: the few profiting most from Musk’s takeover ambling to enchant the many into buying into the whole scheme too. A scheme whose promises grow bigger the more that people join, but whose actual rewards remain largely at the top. Twitter, indeed, is an MLM.

The first rollout of paychecks comes after Musk’s competitor, Zuckerberg’s Threads, announced over 100 million sign-ups. Musk has maintained that the timing is coincidental, but something else to keep in mind is Musk often has not told the truth and is making up Twitter policy as he goes. “Any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model,” one former Twitter executive who worked on creator partnerships said. “This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”

A Florida Republican politician suggested that Pride images are “anti-Christian” hate symbols and called for the government to immediately “crush” Pride Month.

Anthony Sabatini, who currently serves as the chair of the Lake County Republican Party, slammed Pride Month as “anti-American” and proposed ways the state government could effectively end LGBTQ pride celebrations.

“There’s a great reset going on. And I say, well, if you look around, really, I think the great reset is a gay reset. I mean, if you look at Pride Month, that’s pretty much, like, the whole program,” Sabatini, who is running for Congress, said at an event. It is not clear when the event took place, but video of his speech was posted to Twitter on Friday by liberal activist Lauren Windsor.

“We have to end Pride Month, okay?” Sabatini continued to applause from the audience. “We have to crush Pride Month. It has to go away.”

“It’s time to crush Pride Month and the businesses that promote that toxic anti-American garbage.”

Sabatini suggested the Florida government should pass a law banning all counties, school boards, city commissions, and even businesses from promoting Pride Month in any way. He pointed to the city of Mount Dora, which marked Pride by hanging rainbow banners along the streets.

“First we need to crush Pride Month” by banning people from spending state or local funds on it, Sabatini said. “We need to bend our civil rights laws to make it actionable legally for when they do do that because it’s an anti-Christian hate symbol.”

Republicans across the country are steadily making the U.S. more hostile to LGBTQ people, and Florida is leading the charge. State lawmakers have passed laws expanding “Don’t Say Gay,” banning discussions of personal pronouns in schools, and prohibiting transgender people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender on any public property. Meanwhile, Governor Ron DeSantis earlier this month shared what is possibly the most bigoted ad ever for his presidential campaign.

And it’s not just at the state level. The Supreme Court ruled in June that businesses can refuse to serve LGBTQ people, which has already spurred more discrimination. And on Friday, the House of Representatives passed a defense budget that bans the Department of Defense from flying Pride flags or reimbursing travel costs for service members who seek gender-affirming care.

The House of Representatives on Friday passed a defense budget that was loaded with Republican amendments aimed at furthering their culture wars.

The House voted 219–210 for the newly extreme bill, which now bans the Department of Defense from flying Pride flags, funding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and reimbursing travel costs for service members who need to get an abortion.

Four Democrats broke ranks to vote with Republicans. Here are the Democrats who voted for the defense budget in all its bigoted glory.

• Donald Davis of North Carolina
  
• Jared Golden of Maine
  
• Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington
  
• Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico
  

This is not the first time that some of these members have sided with Republicans. Golden and Perez voted in May to repeal President Joe Biden’s student debt relief program and to end the federal student loan repayment freeze. Davis also voted Thursday to include the Pride flag ban amendment in the defense budget.