Politics Plus

Yesterday, it was still cool – a high of 73F. It’s supposed to be warmer today, but still only in the high 80s. Also yesterday, Andrew Weissman said this on MSNBC: “The exact words because this is the provision that the court has to find to release someone on bail in Georgia, is that the defendant poses no risk of intimidating witnesses.” The reference is to the specific lehal language used in the Georgia criminal code. Federally and in most states, the burden of proof is on the government, but Georgia is different. I can tell you this caused a virtual party at Democratic Underground, with a plethora of jokes of various degreess of taste.  And also yesterday – last night, really – after 9 p.m. my time – an alert came in that Trump** and 18 others had been indicted by a grand jury in Georgia.  (I had heard earlier that they didn’t keep a 5:00 quitting time, but sent everyone to dinner and then re-convened into the night.)  The alert didn’t name the 18 others, nor were they listed in the linked story at the time, but Axios usually develops these stories, so they may (or may not) be there now.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

CNN – Exclusive: Georgia prosecutors have messages showing Trump’s team is behind voting system breach
Quote – Investigators in the Georgia criminal probe have long suspected the breach was not an organic effort sprung from sympathetic Trump supporters in rural and heavily Republican Coffee County – a county Trump won by nearly 70% of the vote. They have gathered evidence indicating it was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, according to people familiar with the situation. Trump allies attempted to access voting systems after the 2020 election as part of the broader push to produce evidence that could back up the former president’s baseless claims of widespread fraud.
Click through for details. The nitty-gritty details of evidence are almost never anywhere near as much fun as the sweeping descriptions of the crime. But in order to prove stuff- prosecutors must dig through them.

Daily Kos (MargaretPOA) – Of Course Republicans are Angry. They Have Been Out Gamed… AGAIN.
Quote – As usual, Republicans acted on the assumption that Democrats would behave as dishonestly and unethically as they, themselves and so would never in a million years appoint a Special Counsel, even though the Democrats are as aware as anybody else that there is no evidence of wrongdoing because there was no wrongdoing. Republicans thought that they were safe to loudly and publicly demand a Special Counsel because they would never get one because they, themselves would never grant that if their positions were flipped. The fact that Republicans have long used a partisan DOJ to do their dirty work means that they can’t imagine an independent DOJ.
Click through for all the reasons – the quote is the first one. I like it because we all know it’s so, but it’s said so concisely and still in enough detail to be satisfying.

Food For Thought