Note: I made a mistake in this. It wasn’t Mike Flynn himself who met with Kyrill Dmitriev in the Seychelles. It was Erik Prince, who was very excited about the tie to the Emirates in the meeting.
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Kamala Harris’ first couple of stump speeches as Presidential candidate included three parts:
Last night’s speech (at least until CSPAN’s feed crapped out) swapped the second part — the tribute to Biden — and replaced it with an attack on Trump’s role in tanking the border bill.
That swap came after the Vice President’s campaign released this ad, similarly targeting Trump for his role in killing the bill.
To be sure — this is the same approach Biden has taken: imputing from Trump’s deliberate tanking of the border bill opposition to fixing the border. It was undoubtedly one of the reasons Biden spent so much time negotiating the border bill, only to have Congress tank it.
But when Biden used that approach, he explained it. Harris turned it into an attack on Trump’s selfishness.
These ads will not deflate Republican efforts to turn Harris’ role in working with Central America to try to decrease the flow of migrants, which they’ve spun into being the border czar in charge of the entire border, into fear about her approach to the border. But it succinctly flips the script.
It holds Trump accountable for things he made other Republicans do at his behest.
The same is true of the departure of Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, from Heritage Foundation.
Trump’s campaign managers — Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — released a statement crowing after Dans’ departure.
Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.
And Dans booked, then no-showed, an appearance with Kaitlan Collins show.
But ultimately, if you’re making the personnel decisions, as it appears Trump’s campaign did on Dans’ departure, then you own it. It only serves to reaffirm Trump’s role in the project.
And none too soon. Multiple outlets are publishing the forward that JD Vance did for Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, including his adoption of Roberts’ call to “circle the wagons and load the muskets” to take out government.
Vance has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, and in particular to Kevin Roberts, who has been president of the right-wing think tank since 2021 and is the architect of Project 2025. Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism” and has endorsed elements of Project 2025. Vance is also the author of the foreword to Roberts’s upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light, which The New Republic has obtained in full even though the book’s publisher, HarperCollins’s Broadside Books, has apparently tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts.
The subtitle and cover of Roberts’s book were softened as scrutiny of the Trump campaign’s ties to Project 2025 grew. The book was originally announced with the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and featured a match on the center of its cover. The subtitle is now “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match is nowhere to be seen. Promotional language invoking conservatives on the “warpath” to “burn down … institutions” like the FBI, the Department of Justice, and universities has also been removed or toned down, though it is still present in some sales pages.
But the inspiration for that extreme language can be found in Vance’s foreword, which ends with a call for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” and describes Roberts’s ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” (The New Republic downloaded Dawn’s Early Light earlier this month from NetGalley, which provides advance copies of books to reviewers and booksellers. Copies were removed from the platform earlier this month.)
Trump might yet replace Vance — though he has only a few weeks before ballot finalization would make that far more difficult.
But he can’t disown the hundreds of top Trump aides associated with this project.
Because of Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party, Kamala Harris is in a sweet spot: She can claim credit for Joe Biden’s successful policies. But she can also treat Trump as a near-incumbent, holding him accountable for all the things Republicans have been doing to help Trump beat Joe Biden for the last two years.
That may turn out to be a serious vulnerability for Trump going forward.
Update: Roger Sollenberger confirms that LaCivita pushed Dans out.
The Trump campaign forced the architect of the ultraconservative Project 2025 manifesto out of his job on Tuesday as it sought political cover from a controversy dogging Republicans, the Daily Beast can report exclusively.
Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita “put the screws” to mastermind Paul Dans in an effort to force him out and shut down the right-wing shop behind Proejct 2025, a sprawling blueprint that sought to overhaul the federal government and implement an array of far-right policies for a potential second Trump administration, a well-placed source told the Daily Beast.
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As always with DC’s gossip press, they exercise almost none of the scrutiny with Donald Trump that they do with others.
One recent example comes in the treatment of Joe Biden and Trump’s sons’ involvement in campaign decision-making.
There was a whole flood of stories because Hunter Biden was part of his father’s decision on whether to stay in the race, as he has been involved in past such decisions.
Hunter Biden has joined meetings with President Joe Biden and his top aides since his father returned to the White House from Camp David, Maryland, on Monday evening, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The president’s son has also been talking to senior White House staff members, these people said.
While he is regularly at the White House residence and events, it is unusual for Hunter Biden to be in and around meetings his father is having with his team, these people said. They said the president’s aides were struck by his presence during their discussions.
A federal jury in Delaware found Hunter Biden guilty last month on gun-related charges. He remains under indictment accused of tax-related felonies, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Shortly after the jury found him guilty, he returned to his home in California.
One of the people familiar with the matter said Hunter Biden has been closely advising his father since the family gathered over the weekend at Camp David after Thursday’s debate. This person said Hunter Biden has “popped into” a couple of meetings and phone calls the president has had with some of his advisers.
Another person familiar with the matter said the reaction from some senior White House staff members has been, “What the hell is happening?”
The insinuation, of course, is that no convicted felon should be involved in such decisions.
The gossip press exhibited no such qualms that Paul Manafort — whose tax fraud was an order of magnitude greater than what Hunter is accused of, and who was hiding the foreign clients with whom he was sharing campaign strategy — was back advising Trump.
Crazier still, the gossip press seems to have little awareness that since May 30, there’s always a convicted felon involved in strategy meetings involving Trump.
I’m more interested in the double standard regarding the involvement of Trump’s sons in campaign decision-making.
Sure, in the Mueller investigation, Don Jr avoided charges for accepting campaign help from the Agalarovs because Mueller rightly figured the failson could argue he had no idea you shouldn’t do that. But both sons have been implicated in their Daddy’s fraud, first when they misused charity donations to benefit Pops, and then when they fiddled with real estate valuations.
Hunter Biden undoubtedly sold on his father’s influence — though he has not been criminally charged with doing so — but Trump’s sons have been involved in fraudulent claims about their father so he’d get that influence. They’re just conmen like their Daddy, selling the brand.
And on top of the fact that Don Jr has long been targeted by foreign spies and Neo-Nazis, he’s painfully stupid. As Michael Cohen testified, “Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world.”
Yet, in all the reviews (or, in some cases, shameless beat sweeteners) of the sons’ involvement in Trump’s recent decisions, there has been no question about whether their cooperation in Dad’s fraud or their poor judgment should disqualify them from such a role.
That’s particularly true given their decisive role in picking JD Vance. The stories describe how the sons, especially Don Jr, were able to convince their Dad to ignore the counsel of actual political consultants like Kellyanne Conway and instead pick an inexperienced extremist who once called Trump America’s Hitler as his running mate.
With the clock ticking to the Republican National Convention last week, Donald Trump met privately to discuss his running mate search with two of his closest advisers: his sons.
The conversation quickly turned tense when the former president indicated that he was leaning toward Doug Burgum, until recently the largely unknown governor of North Dakota — but someone whose low-maintenance, no-drama personality would never threaten to outshine Trump.
That’s when Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump chimed in.
“Don Jr. and Eric went bats— crazy: ‘Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing,’” a longtime Republican operative familiar with the discussion told NBC News.
“They were basically all like ‘JD, JD, JD,’” the operative said.
Trump ratified his sons’ recommendation here Monday, selecting Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential candidate. Trump called Vance with the news 20 minutes before announcing it on social media, a source familiar with the call said.
In choosing Vance, Trump made a different calculation than he did in 2016 and leaned fully into his MAGA base. Back then, he looked to his daughter and her husband — the more establishment-friendly Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — for strategic advice. This time, his red meat-throwing sons have a more central role. And instead of going with a longtime traditional Republican like Mike Pence, Trump chose the MAGA warrior Vance.
Apparently, Don Jr — he of the poor judgment — was impressed by Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir that treats Trump’s people as deplorables.
The eldest Trump son, who had been a fan of “Hillbilly Elegy” before the campaign, had come to like Vance personally, and the two developed a close friendship after Vance won his Senate race.
And so, in spite of the fact that JD Vance actually underperformed Republicans in his Senate race, Trump was convinced that Peter Thiel’s errand-boy will help him win the Rust Belt.
Thanks to Vice President Harris’ accession to the candidacy, media outlets are stumbling over each other to invite Andy Beshear on to explain how furious he is that Vance monetized calling people from Eastern Kentucky, “lazy.”
I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is, what they look like, because — let me just tell you — that JD Vance ain’t from here. The nerve that he has to call the people of Kentucky, of Eastern Kentucky, lazy.
Listen, these are the hard-working coal miners that powered the industrial revolution, that created the strongest middle class the world has ever seen, powered us through two World Wars. We should be thanking them, not calling them lazy.
And in his first solo appearance, JD Vance attempted to make a joke about Diet Mountain Dew, which flopped.
Which has led superstars like AOC …
… and Mallory McMorrow to make fun of him.
There are already reports that, in light of Biden ceding the ticket to Kamala, the campaign may be regretting that decision.
Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.
Even in Pennsylvania or Michigan, JD’s extremism, especially on choice, will be a liability. And only a spoiled brat like Don Jr would have missed that Hillbilly Elegy insulted Trump’s deplorables, it didn’t celebrate them.
I suppose I should take solace from the fact that NYT is wasting beat sweeteners pretending that Don Jr is anything but a less effective conman than his Daddy.
By all means let Don Jr steer Daddy into stupid decisions.
It just gives smart girls one more thing to laugh at.
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Vaughn Hillyard caught Paul Manafort in a victory lap on the floor of the RNC the other day.
Hillyard: Mr. Manafort, how is it to be back?
Manafort It’s great to be back.
And so it is that eight years after getting advance warning of the DNC release from his long time buddy Roger Stone, almost eight years after Stone emailed Manafort telling him he had a way to win the race, and just short of eight years after Manafort met with Konstantin Kilimnik in a cigar bar and discussed the outlines of a quid pro quo: campaign information for debt relief in exchange for a commitment to carve up Ukraine (Manafort insists he rejected the plan to carve up Ukraine, though the plan nevertheless remained active until at least 2018).
Aside from Hillyard and Robert Costa’s tweets marking Manafort’s arrival, his presence made barely a blip in the news coverage.
Why should it?
Among all the other criminals and insurrectionists, Manafort no longer sticks out.
And with JD Vance’s selection as VP, Manafort’s support for a pro-Russian Ukraine also looks banal, rather than alarming.
But there is likely a backstory few want to pursue.
Back in May, when Paul Manafort’s return was first reported and then denied, 24sight described how (as he had done in 2016), Paulie had been and kept working the back channel.
Manafort has quietly been passing strategic advice back to Trump through co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and longtime Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, the Republican sources said. Manafort has been analyzing polling results and advised on the organization of state Republican parties and selecting delegates to the Republican nominating convention — one of his specialties — according to two Republicans familiar with the dealings.
But LaCivita and other Trump campaign officials vehemently denied Manafort’s involvement.
LaCivita called questions about huddling with Manafort for Trump’s benefit “manufactured horseshit,” in a text message to 24sight News. Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes endorsed LaCivita’s reply, adding some context to the pushback.
“There was clearly a moment of consideration about using Manafort specifically for the convention,” Hughes said Wednesday. “But Manafort very publicly withdrew himself.”
Asked if Manafort had discussions with Fabrizio about helping steer the campaign, Hughes said he was unaware of everything that people talk about outside the campaign.
Three Republicans familiar with the dealings said that LaCivita met with Manafort in suburban Washington last fall. LaCivita denied details of the meeting to 24sight News, but declined to answer additional questions.
LaCivita was denying Manafort’s centrality as vigorously as he is now attempting to deny the (Orbán-aligned) Project 2025, as vigorously as Steve Bannon denied Manafort’s ongoing role in 2016, in spite of receiving plans on how to secure the victory, plans which led Bannon to worry about the appearance of Russian involvement in the victory.
But all these pieces go together.
That is, Trump is running not just as someone who explicitly wants to be a Dictator from Day One, someone who supports all the same policies as a Project that targets divorce and birth control along with the very idea of civil service.
He is running with Russian help on a plan to give Russia what it wants, starting, but not ending, with Ukraine on a silver platter.
Trump, and the guy Trump pardoned for lying about what happened with Russia in 2016, are simply picking up where things left off.
A jury found Robert Menendez guilty on all charges yesterday, including those alleging he accepted payments from Egypt and Qatar (I didn’t follow the trial closely enough to figure out which country ultimately provided the gold). The verdict marks DOJ’s first successful conviction under 18 USC 219, basically, working for a foreign country while serving as a member of Congress.
Henry Cuellar faces the same charge.
While the RNC largely overshadowed the verdict, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, and Governor Phil Murphy have all called on Menendez to step down.
The reasons why he should resign seem obvious: You can’t continue to serve the people of New Jersey after a jury determined you were actually using your position of power to serve two wealthy foreign countries.
And yet we are two days into Trump’s nomination party, and no one has asked — much less answered — whether Donald Trump is a business partner, paid foreign agent, or merely an employee of Saudi Arabia.
This is not a frivolous question. Since Trump left office, his family has received millions in four known deals from the Saudis:
These Saudi deals come on top of Trump’s testimony that Turnberry golf course and his Bedford property couldn’t be overvalued because some Saudi would be willing to overpay for them.
But I believe I could sell that LIV Golf for a fortune, Saudi Arabia. I believe I could sell that to a lot of people for numbers that would be astronomical because it is like — very much like owning a great painting.
[snip]
I just felt when I saw that, I thought it was high. But I could see it — as a whole, I could see it if this were s0ld to one buyer from Saudi Arabia — I believe it’s the best house in the State of New York.
And while Eric Trump, not his dad, is running the company, Eric also has a role in the campaign and his spouse Lara has taken over the entire GOP.
Trump never fulfilled the promises to distance himself from his companies in the first term. A very partial review of Trump Organization financial records show the company received over $600K from the Saudis during his first term. As far as I’m aware, no one has even asked this time around.
Which means as things stand, Trump would be the sole beneficiary of payments from key Saudi investors if he became President again. Trump would be, at the very least, the beneficiary of a business deal with the Saudis, as president.
Admittedly, under the Supreme Court’s latest ruling on gratuities, it might be legal for Trump to get a bunch of swank branding deals as appreciation for launder Saudi Arabia’s reputation (one of the things for which Menendez was just convicted).
But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored, politically. It doesn’t mean American voters shouldn’t know these details. It doesn’t mean journalists (besides NYT’s Eric Lipton, whose most recent story on this was buried on page A7) shouldn’t demand answers.
At some point at the RNC, Don Jr claimed that his Daddy would get poor coverage from real journalists because “they lied about Russia Russia Russia.”
Only, they didn’t.
In guilty pleas, Trump’s people confessed that they were the ones lying. George Papadopoulos lied to hide when he learned of the Russian hack-and-leak operation. Mike Flynn lied to hide his efforts to undermine Barack Obama’s foreign policy with Russia. Micahel Cohen lied to hide his contact with the Kremlin during the campaign in pursuit of the kind of Trump Tower deal Trump has since inked with the Saudis.
Don Jr was spared charges, in part, because he’s too dumb to be expected to know he shouldn’t accept campaign dirt from Russian nationals.
Robert Mueller found that Trump’s campaign manager briefed someone Treasury has since labeled a Russian spy, Konstantin Kilimnik, on his plan to win the Rust Belt, even while discussing a deal to carve up Ukraine and get tens of millions in benefits. Kilimnik passed on polling data and the campaign strategy to Russian spies. Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Paul Manafort lied to hide that.
At the time the FBI obtained Roger Stone’s cell site location in August 2018, they had reason to believe he had gotten advance notice of both the dcleaks and the Guccifer 2.0 releases. Stone had multiple contacts with Trump about the releases and prosecutors hoped to obtain a notebook where Stone documented all of those conversations. A jury found that Stone lied to hide whence he learned all this.
Trump pardoned all but Cohen and Jr for the lies they told to hide what really happened with Russia. And we still don’t know why the clemency for Roger Stone Trump stashed in his desk drawer had a Secret document on Macron associated with it.
And Trump has only gotten more shameless since. In 2019, during his impeachment for extorting Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his kid, Trump was warned that among the Ukrainians from whom Rudy Giuliani was soliciting dirt on the Bidens was at least one Russian agent, Andrii Derkach.
Trump did nothing to stop Rudy from sidling up to a Russian agent. And when Rudy came back, Bill Barr set up a side channel to ingest that dirt — a side channel the resulted in an FBI informant with self-professed ties to Russian spies attempting to frame Joe Biden for bribery, an attempt to frame Biden that likely goes a long way to explain why the plea deal against Hunter Biden collapsed.
Once upon a time, it was a big deal that Trump refused to let an activist make the RNC platform’s defense of Ukraine more hawkish.
Now, however, Trump no longer hides that he’s willing to let Putin dismember Ukraine. He welcomed Viktor Orbán’s pitch of a plan to do just that — but there has been no readout from Trump’s side of what happened. Orbán, however, has told other EU nations that Trump will moved for “peace” immediately after being elected — a replay of what Flynn lied to cover up in 2017 — largely by withdrawing US support for Ukraine.
In the past, Trump has gone even further than this, suggesting he’ll do nothing as Putin invades NATO states.
Meanwhile, JD Vance is, if anything, even more pro-Russian than Trump, as are some of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who now back Trump’s campaign since the Vance pick.
Trump’s plan of capitulation to Russia will go a long way to ending the Western rules-based order, the greatest wish of Putin and Xi Jinpeng.
And thus far we know just one of the things that Russia seems to be doing to help Trump’s campaign: detaining WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich until Trump gets elected, just as Iran held onto hostages to help Reagan get elected. Avril Haines recently made clear Russia is planning on helping in other ways as well.
That’s how “Russia Russia Russia” has worked. It’s a shameless lie that Mueller found nothing, a lie built off years of propaganda. Indeed, Trump’s willing acceptance — or, in Rudy’s case, outright solicitation — of Russia’s help to get elected has only gotten more brazen. Yet rather than call Don Jr on his “Russia Russia Russia” lie, reporters simply let the pressing question of whether Trump will end the alliance of democracies in a second term go unasked.
Amid the focus on Aileen Cannon’s stall then dismissal of Trump’s stolen documents charges, something has been missed: There appear to be documents missing. Here’s what we know:
Given FBI’s failure to do a complete search adn Parlatore’s failure to find documents at Bedminster, the most likely way to learn what happened to them would be to get Walt Nauta to flip, something that, as I suggested here, his indictment might normally have done. But (correct, as it turned out) expectations that the prosecution would go away kept Nauta from cooperating.
And as a result, we have literally no idea how many documents Trump managed to withhold from the FBI’s search, or what he did with them.
Again, this kind of betrayal of America once mattered in Trump’s campaigns.
No longer.
It’s not happening because journalists are so cowardly they can be cowed with a mere “Russia Russia Russia” chant.
And it’s not happening because journalists have lost all sense of proportion — and for many of them, all sense of public good.
Journalists are making much of a confrontation between Jason Crow and Biden, related by Julia Ioffe, in which Biden insisted he had been great on foreign policy.
The campaign did not, however, dispute this next part, about Crow and his Bronze Star. In a video of the Zoom that I was able to view, you can hear Biden chastising Crow, who asked about the importance of national security to voters. “First of all, I think you’re dead wrong on national security,” the president says, the emotion at times garbling his words. “You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who the hell that is! Tell me who put NATO back together! Tell me who enlarged NATO, tell me who did the Pacific basin! Tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son—and I’m proud of your leadership, but guess what, what’s happening, we’ve got Korea and Japan working together, I put Aukus together, anyway! … Things are in chaos, and I’m bringing some order to it. And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever—”
“It’s not breaking through, Mr. President,” said Crow, “to our voters.”
“You oughta talk about it!” Biden shot back, listing his accomplishments yet again. “On national security, nobody has been a better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me one! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”
It’s another instance where Biden responds stubbornly when Democrats try to push the president to drop out of the race. And that’s why reporters are gleefully dunking on Biden’s comments.
But it’s also an instance where Biden is making a really good point: He has restored America’s alliances to what they were before Trump destroyed them.
And the press is only telling that story — and doesn’t even realize that they are only telling that story — as part of their singular obsession with Biden’s age.
It’s a confession, really, that they have abdicated any concern for the kind of accomplishments of which Biden is justifiably bragging (ignoring Gaza). They have been bullied out of covering any of Trump’s glaring betrayals of the country the leadership of which he wants to monetize.
Trump might literally be an agent of a foreign power — just like Robert Menendez has been adjudged — and this mob calling themselves journalists would exhibit the least interest, much less persistent concern. Journalists don’t even care that both of Trump’s most suspect foreign allegiances involve the exploitation of journalists for political gain, first Jamal Khashoggi and then Gershkovich. Journalists have ignored that recent history, even after he picked Vance, someone who formally asked Merrick Garland to criminally investigate Robert Kagan (a neocon whom Vance called left wing) for inciting insurrection because he discussed liberal states resisting Trump in a second term.
Trump might literally sell out the next journalist who opposes him to be chopped up by some foreign dictator. And yet the press corps seems not to give a rat’s ass.
Because Joe Biden is three years older than Donald Trump.
Bronzer/Eyeliner 2024: MakeUp America Great Again
Consider this an open thread.
Aaron Blake looks at how JD underperformed fellow Republicans in Ohio.
Robert Kuttner on JD’s false compassion.
A video with some of JD’s criticism from 2016.
This goes to a trusted Google page with tons of links on JD.
Bulwark on Vance’s embrace of Russian disinformation.
Nolan Finley is a conservative Detroit News commentator originally from Kentucky; he demands an apology from Vance for his slurs against Appalachia.
Yesterday, Ohio Senator JD Vance gave a speech explaining that he is holding up the confirmation of a US Attorney candidate for his own state because Donald Trump is being prosecuted for stealing classified documents but — Vance claimed in an earlier version of this rant — “the President and his family [go] completely untouched.”
Meanwhile, yesterday’s version of Vance’s harangue claimed that “it is Joe Biden’s border policies that have invited this fentanyl into our country at record levels.”
It’s an interesting take, given that Republicans keep dragging law enforcement away from fighting the fentanyl crisis so they can explain that the conspiracy theories right wingers believe about the investigation into Hunter Biden are false.
In a July hearing where both Jim Jordan and now-Speaker Mike Johnson complained — relying on Terry Doughty’s badly misinformed opinion — that (they claimed) the FBI had prevented millions of people from sniffing Hunter Biden’s dick pics before the 2020 election, Chris Wray pointed to the impact two drug busts had had in Marion, Ohio.
Just last month, for instance, the FBI charged 31 members of two drug trafficking organizations responsible for distributing dangerous drugs like fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine throughout the area around Marion, Ohio. In that one investigation, run out of the FBI’s 2-man office in Mansfield, we worked with partners in multiple local police departments and sheriff’s offices to take kilos of fentanyl off Marion’s streets, enough lethal doses, I should add, to kill the entire population of Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, combined.
As I noted at the time, this was good staff work. Marion, Mansfield, and Lorrain are all in Jim Jordan’s district (and so all obviously constituents of Vance, as well).
Jim Jordan took time out of Chris Wray’s day so he could complain about Hunter Biden’s dick pics, while ignoring the drug problems facing his own constituents.
It’s not just Wray.
In testimony last week before Jordan’s committee, the US Attorney for Los Angeles, Martin Estrada, struggled to explain to Jordan’s staffers why his own top AUSAs didn’t think it smart to reallocate prosecutors to partner on the Hunter Biden investigation at a time his office was 40 prosecutors short of the number they’re supposed to have. As Estrada explained, instead, CDCA granted Special AUSA status to some prosecutors from Delaware and had done so even as Gary Shapley wailed that nothing was going on in LA.
Jordan’s top aide Steve Castor was incredulous that Estrada wouldn’t know specific details about what the Delaware prosecutors granted Special Assistant status to pursue a case against Hunter Biden in LA were doing.
I mean, this is a potential prosecution of the President’s son. If the lawyers from the District of Delaware were out in your district discussing the case, don’t you think you’d know about it?
When Estrada tried to get Castor to understand how different the priorities looked when you were running the country’s biggest US Attorney’s office, fentanyl was the first thing he raised.
I think a little context would be helpful. So, as I said, we have the largest district in the country. We have a Fentanyl epidemic which is one of the worst in the country’s. We’ve done more death-resulting cases than any other district in the country. We’re on pace to do more this year than we ever had before.
[snip]
There are a lot of high-profile cases, so I don’t meet with attorneys on every single high-profile case.
[snip]
We have a fentanyl epidemic. That includes not just death-resulting cases, it includes going after cartels which are distributing these pills, not just in powder form but in pill form. We routinely seize over a million pills at a time from vehicles, and we need to prosecute those cases. Each pill could be a death. And routinely now we’re finding cartels transporting fentanyl in liquid form, which is a new thing that they’re doing. So we have to do those cases.
Republicans claim to care about the fentanyl crisis. But in reality, they keep proving that they care more about Hunter Biden’s dick pics than they do about their troubled constituents in Marion, OH.