Florida parents outraged after teacher tells kids that saying Trump lost the election is an example of media bias

 Travis Gettys Via Raw Story

A substitute teacher used news coverage of Donald Trump's election lies as an example of media bias in a Florida classroom, outraging parents.

The teacher assigned a take-home sheet titled “How Does a Historian Work?” to prepare sixth-grade students for a test, including a list of vocabulary words such as primary and secondary sources, and one mother told The Daily Beast she was shocked by the topic cited by the teacher as an example of bias.

"The media is often biased and will add words that persuade you to think one way or another. Read these two statements made by reporters after the 2020 election," the worksheet read. "President Trump made claims that the 2020 election was stolen. President Trump made false claims that the 2020 election was stolen."

"The first sentence is just giving you information," the sheet added, "while the second leads you to believe he is wrong before you have all the facts."

The mother showed the paper to her husband, who shared her concern, and she was among several parents who called R. Dan Nolan Middle School in Bradenton to complain, and the principal promised to look into the matter.

“It’s actually the most biased example of bias I’ve seen,” the mother said. “It seems pretty out of place for a sixth-grade class.”

“We’re laughing," she added, "but it’s not funny."

Another student's father issued a statement expressing his disapproval of the assignment.

“I am very unhappy that the teacher would choose such a controversial example in an assignment supposedly teaching bias in a world history class," the father said. "There are so many other examples that could have been used. And the way this question is phrased would lead a student to believe that the media was incorrect in their assessment that the president’s claims were false.”

“And I would also add it is inappropriate to be using this example at a time when Trump is STILL disputing the results of the 2020 election two years later and demanding a do over!" he added.

The Manatee County School Board issued a statement saying the homework assignment did not meet their standards, but also pledged support for state standards set forth by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has campaigned against left-wing "indoctrination" in schools and has refused to say whether the 2020 election was stolen.

“It’s like, indoctrinating who?” the mother said, adding that she's awaiting the results of Thursday's test. “I’m interested if he had to use his own example of bias, and if they had to use Trump to get extra points.”

DOJ worried Trump's 'criminal confederates' might flee or tamper with evidence in Mar-A-Lago case

 Travis Gettys via Raw Story

The Department of Justice wanted to keep the Mar-A-Lago affidavit sealed because investigators were concerned about tipping off additional suspects in the case.

A federal judge ordered the affidavit supporting the search warrant to be unsealed, with redactions of sensitive material, and the document showed that investigators were concerned about revealing the scope of their probe and their sources of evidence, arguing that witnesses could be threatened and their work could be obstructed.

"It is respectfully requested that this Court issue an order sealing, until further order of the Court, all papers submitted in support of this application, including the application and search warrant," said the FBI agent who signed the affidavit. "I believe that sealing this document is necessary because the items and information to be seized are relevant to an ongoing investigation and the FBI has not yet identified all potential criminal confederates nor located all evidence related to its investigation."

RELATED: Read the redacted FBI affidavit that resulted in Mar-a-Lago search warrant

They cited concerns about notifying those "potential criminal confederates" that their involvement was under investigation, which could give them a chance to interfere with the probe.

"Premature disclosure of the contents of this affidavit and related documents may have a significant and negative impact on the continuing investigation and may severely jeopardize its effectiveness by allowing criminal parties an opportunity to flee, destroy evidence (stored electronically and otherwise), change patterns of behavior, and notify criminal confederates," the affiant wrote.

DOJ releases unredacted Barr memo on Trump obstruction in Mueller probe

By Ryan J. Reilly and Dareh Gregorian via NBC News

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Wednesday released the unredacted version of a 2019 memo that made the case to then-Attorney General William Barr that President Donald Trump should not be charged with obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation.

The nine-page memo from Mar. 24, 2019, was written by then-Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steven Engel and Ed O’Callaghan, who served as the DOJ's principal associate deputy attorney general. Barr, a critic of then-special counsel Robert Mueller's probe, had announced that DOJ would not prosecute the case the same day the memo was sent to Barr.

Released in response to a lawsuit by a government watchdog group, the memo states that volume II of Mueller's report "is not, in our judgment, sufficient to support a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt that the President violated the obstruction-of-justice statutes." It was made public following a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Even if there weren't any constitutional barriers to charging a president, the memo argued, the DOJ should decline to charge Trump.

The Mueller probe did not establish any "underlying crime related to Russian interference" and it wasn't clear that Trump didn't want the investigation, the memo's authors wrote in their rationale against bringing charges.

"In the absence of an underlying offense, the most compelling inference in evaluating the President's conduct is that he reasonably believed that the Special Counsel's investigation was interfering with his governing agenda," the memo states. "Even if the President were objectively wrong about the intentions of the Special Counsel, many, if not all, of his actions could be viewed as lacking the intent element under the relevant statutes."

Barr cited the memo by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel as a reason for not pursuing the charges against Trump after he received Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The portion of the memo that Barr cited was released last year.

When the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sought the memo under the Freedom of Information Act, the DOJ argued it wasn’t required to release the document under an exception covering materials intended to aid senior officials in making decision.

In a ruling last year, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson criticized the government's position, saying the memo did not fit the exemption for “deliberative” documents. In an earlier ruling, she said Barr's mind had already been made up before the memo was written.

The Justice Department appealed the decision ordering the release of the full document, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against DOJ last week. “Because the Department did not tie the memorandum to deliberations about the relevant decision, the Department failed to justify its reliance on the deliberative-process privilege,” the ruling said.

The Mueller report identified 10 episodes that could be considered potential obstruction of justice, but did not come to a conclusion on whether to charge the president for them.

After reading the Mueller report, many people had strongly disagreed with the analysis laid out in the memo. Hundreds of former federal prosecutors argued in an open letter that Trump would have been charged with obstruction were he not president.

In a statement Wednesday, CREW said the unsealed portions of the memo present "a breathtakingly generous view of the law and facts for Donald Trump. It significantly twists the facts and the law to benefit Donald Trump and does not comport with a serious reading of the law of obstruction of justice or the facts as found by Special Counsel Mueller."

Trump Kept More Than 700 Pages of Classified Documents, Letter From National Archives Says

 By Alan Feuer via New York Times

The letter, which was sent to the former president’s lawyers, described the state of alarm in the Justice Department as officials began to realize the nature of the documents kept at Mar-a-Lago.

President Donald J. Trump took more than 700 pages of classified documents, including some related to the nation’s most covert intelligence operations, to his private club and residence in Florida when he left the White House in January 2021, according to a letter that the National Archives sent to his lawyers this year.

The letter, dated May 10 and written by the acting U.S. archivist, Debra Steidel Wall, to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran, described the state of alarm in the Justice Department as officials there began to realize how serious the documents were.

It also suggested that top department prosecutors and members of the intelligence community were delayed in conducting a damage assessment about the documents’ removal from the White House as Mr. Trump’s lawyers tried to argue that some of them might have been protected by executive privilege.

The letter was disclosed on Monday night by one of Mr. Trump’s allies in the news media, John Solomon, who also serves as one of the former president’s representatives to the archives. The archives then released the letter on Tuesday.

The New York Times reported on Monday that investigators had recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club, with each document potentially comprising multiple pages.

The letter from the archives was made public shortly after Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed a legal motion on Monday asking a federal judge in Florida to appoint an independent arbiter, known as a special master, to weed out any documents protected by executive privilege from a trove that was removed during an F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8.

The motion, filed in Federal District Court in Southern Florida, came as a different federal judge was deciding how much — if any — of the underlying affidavit used to justify the search warrant should be publicly released.

Mr. Solomon, appearing on Tuesday on a podcast run by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former White House aide, tried to suggest that Ms. Wall’s letter somehow implicated President Biden in the struggle over the classified documents. At one point in the letter, Ms. Wall told Mr. Corcoran that Mr. Biden had agreed with her and others that Mr. Trump’s attempts to assert executive privilege over the materials were baseless.

But the letter never indicated that Mr. Biden was in charge of the decision rejecting Mr. Trump’s claims of privilege or that he had anything to do with the search of Mar-a-Lago, as Mr. Solomon suggested.

In fact, the letter could further implicate Mr. Trump in a potential crime. It confirmed, for instance, that the former president had kept at Mar-a-Lago documents related to Special Access Programs, some of the nation’s most closely held secrets, before the F.B.I. searched the property.

The Times had previously reported that the investigation stemmed in part from an effort to recover documents related to special access programs, a designation that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States abroad or for closely held technologies and capabilities.

The search was more broadly part of an inquiry into whether the former president had willfully retained highly sensitive national defense papers and obstructed a federal investigation.

The letter also deepened understanding of the back-and-forth between the archives and Mr. Trump’s lawyers over how to handle retrieving the papers.

It described how archives officials had “ongoing communications” with Mr. Trump’s representatives last year about presidential records that were missing from their files. Those communications, Ms. Wall wrote, resulted in the archives retrieving 15 boxes of materials in January, some of them containing highly classified information marked top secret and others that were related to Special Access Programs.

But even after the archives retrieved the records, the letter said, Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in consultation with the White House Counsel’s Office, asked for time to determine whether — and how many of — the documents were protected by executive privilege, leading to negotiations that delayed the F.B.I., the Justice Department and the intelligence community from assessing the materials.

Those negotiations continued through April, even as Ms. Wall alerted Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the “urgency” of the agencies’ request to see the documents, which touched on “important national security interests,” the letter said. Ms. Wall ultimately rejected Mr. Trump’s claims of executive privilege after consulting with a top Justice Department official — a decision that Mr. Biden deferred to. As Ms. Wall wrote to Mr. Corcoran, before alerting him in May that the archives would soon hand the documents to the F.B.I., “The question in this case is not a close one.”

“The executive branch here is seeking access to records belonging to, and in the custody of, the federal government itself,” Ms. Wall wrote, “not only in order to investigate whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner but also, as the national security division explained, to ‘conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported.”

Mr. Solomon’s decision to release the letter did more than confirm that Mr. Trump had kept some of the country’s most highly guarded secrets in his relatively unsecured beachfront club in Florida. It also revealed that well before Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued in their court filing on Monday that many of the records were protected by executive privilege, the same argument had been rejected by the White House and a top official at the Justice Department.

The court filing also appeared at times to make arguments that could ultimately harm Mr. Trump.

One long section of the motion, “President Donald J. Trump’s Voluntary Assistance,” was devoted to portraying him as having fully cooperated with the archives and the Justice Department from the outset. But read in a slightly different manner, the facts laid out in the section could be construed as evidence that Mr. Trump had instead obstructed the investigation into the documents.

The section noted how he willingly returned the first batch of 15 boxes to the archives, then — one day after Ms. Wall’s letter was sent to Mr. Corcoran — “accepted service of a grand jury subpoena” seeking to reclaim more documents with “classification markings.”

It also described how even after a top national security prosecutor went to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the papers sought by the subpoena, the Justice Department felt compelled to issue a second subpoena. That was for surveillance camera footage at the property, suggesting that prosecutors were concerned that Mr. Trump and his lawyers had not been entirely forthcoming.

Why the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago feels like a shift in the tectonic legal plates

From MSNBC.com by Glenn Kirschner,

 A legal barrier of sorts has been broken: The FBI obtained and executed a search warrant on the home of a former president of the United States. This represents the kind of maiden legal voyage by the Department of Justice that has been prompted by the conduct of Donald J. Trump.

There are few things we know — and much we don’t know — about Monday’s search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home. Let’s start with what we do know.

First, the decision to request a search warrant was undoubtedly vetted through the uppermost ranks of the Justice Department, likely all the way through Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Second, a federal judge authorized this search. When the FBI, an agency within the Justice Department, decides that a search warrant should be pursued as part of a criminal investigation, agents will draft and swear to the truthfulness and accuracy of an affidavit in support of a search warrant. That sworn affidavit will include evidence the agents believe satisfies the burden of proof for warrants to be issued: probable cause.

Whereas precisely defining what evidence satisfies the probable cause standard is challenging, we know it lies somewhere between “reasonable articulable suspicion,” the standard set by the Supreme Court for an officer to “stop and frisk” an individual, and a preponderance of the evidence, that is, more likely than not. Importantly, the preponderance of the evidence standard is higher than the probable cause standard (which is the standard to issue search warrants, arrest warrants and grand jury indictments).

An FBI agent submits an affidavit in support of a search warrant to federal prosecutors for review. As the chief of the homicide section in the District of Columbia U.S. Attorney’s Office, I reviewed countless affidavits to determine whether they contained adequate evidence of probable cause. If I determined they did, I signed the search warrant application paperwork, and the agent was then permitted to meet with the judge to formally apply for the warrant. However, if I determined the affidavit contained insufficient evidence of probable cause, I would inform the agent that additional evidence would be necessary before I would authorize the warrant application. So in a very real sense, prosecutors put their names and reputations on the line when making the weighty decisions to approve applications for search warrants.

Once given the go-ahead by a federal prosecutor, the FBI agent presents the application for the search warrant to a federal judge. Judges often will ask follow-up questions about the evidence contained in the affidavit. I imagine the judge who reviewed a search warrant application for the home of a former president having more questions than usual. Although the legal standard doesn’t change based on the nature of the place to be searched, because the request was to search presidential property, I suspect the agents and prosecutors had very strong evidence, likely well above probable cause.

It’s clear that the judge agreed with the evidentiary assessments of both the agent and the prosecutor that there was reason to believe there was evidence of a crime at Mar-a-Lago. Hence, the judge authorized law enforcement agents to conduct the search.

This beat-by-beat breakdown of what goes into obtaining a search warrant is important to combat the disinformation already being put out by Trump. He issued a statement Monday, the content of which ranges from misleading to comical. He says the “raid” on his “beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago” was “unannounced.” First, it wasn’t a raid. It was a court-authorized search warrant. As for it being “unannounced,” every search warrant is unannounced, so the occupants don’t have an opportunity to move or destroy evidence. I’ll leave his assertion that his home is “beautiful” to the eye of the beholder.

Trump then absurdly compares a court-authorized search warrant to the Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

What do we not know? We don’t know what agents were looking for. There is some reporting that this search warrant is related to Trump’s unauthorized removal of government documents and records from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. This makes some intuitive sense given the location of the search. But consider: The National Archives reportedly retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago in January and had been negotiating with Trump for months before that for the return of those records. So, law enforcement authorities have known about Trump’s possible misconduct in this regard for a long time. Why seek search warrants for improperly retained documents now?

It may be because the documents are classified and raise national security concerns. If the lengthy negotiations with the National Archives did not result in Trump relinquishing the documents, it seems imminently reasonable, indeed necessary, for the FBI to obtain them via a search warrant.

Moreover, if a crime has been committed involving the removal, retention or concealment of government records, it could have serious consequences for those involved. There have not been any arrests or indictments of anyone regarding documents taken to Mar-a-Lago, but if anyone is charged with and convicted of concealment or removal of government records, part of the authorized punishment includes “forfeit[ing] his office and be[ing] disqualified from holding any office under the United States,” pursuant to 18 United States Code, section 2071.

Some might say that it would be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump himself “removed” or “concealed” the documents. Indeed, it is hard to envision Trump himself packing up boxes as he was leaving the White House before Joe Biden’s inauguration. But here is where Trump’s every statement and press release is potentially useful evidence for federal prosecutors. In Trump’s Aug. 8 missive, he says of FBI agents, “They even broke into my safe!” In the event illegally concealed government documents were found in “his” safe and there’s an indictment that follows, then this Trump admission will be quite helpful at trial. In the long run, Trump may prove to be his own worst enemy.

Even if the Mar-a-Lago search warrant is “only” about Trump illegally possessing government documents, if feels like a shift in the tectonic legal plates. With Garland’s Justice Department reaching the conclusion that it’s time to begin using search warrants as part of its criminal investigation of a former president, it seems that things may be snowballing in the direction of accountability, and maybe even justice.

Fox repeatedly mentions Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton after FBI search Trump's Mar-a-Lago

 

• From Media Matters by ROB SAVILLO

• Since news broke that the FBI executed a search warrant at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Fox News has incessantly invoked Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton in its reporting.

  The network has mentioned Biden at least 58 times and Clinton at least 46 times since 7 p.m. ET yesterday while MSNBC and CNN each mentioned Biden at least once and Clinton at least 13 and 8 times, respectively.

  Fox contributors and guests were quick to bring up Biden and Clinton in conversations about the breaking news. Appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox contributor Lara Trump ignorantly claimed that “nobody bats an eyelash about” Clinton deleting emails. On Fox & Friends, former Trump acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker complained that there is “a continued two-tiered system of justice where people like Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, and others get away, it appears, with nothing for consequences for their activities.” 

  The FBI investigation reportedly centers on the mishandling of presidential records, and possibly classified documents, brought to Trump’s home after his presidential term ended. The National Archives, which handles all such material, previously recovered 15 boxes from the estate.

• 

• Methodology

Conservatives use Trump’s Mar-a-Lago search to scare audiences into falling in line behind their proto-fascism

 From Media Matters by JOHN KNEFEL 

Right-wing media figures have reacted to the news that the FBI searched former President Donald Trump’s home at his Mar-a-Lago resort by calling for mass purges of any individual or agency they deem responsible for holding the former president, his associates, or his supporters accountable for their potentially criminal actions.

This new development turns the right’s recent history of election denialism and January 6 revisionism into an all-encompassing electoral strategy in the coming midterms and 2024 presidential election. Conservative media is drawing a line in the sand and calling for total fealty to Trump. Any deviation is tantamount to treason.

“The next president of the United States needs to prosecute everyone. Needs to clean house everywhere,” conservative YouTuber Steven Crowder said. “Any Republican right now in office or running for office who does not actively champion the defunding, the dismantling of our intelligence agencies, I will not vote for.” 

“The term skeleton crew should be a generous application to what the FBI will be when the next president is through with him,” Crowder continued.

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CitationFrom the August 9, 2022, edition of Louder with Crowder, streamed on YouTube

Right-wing radio host Jesse Kelly simultaneously called for defunding the FBI and investigating Republicans’ political enemies.

Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, echoed the point on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle.

“They are now telling with clear and convincing evidence to a Republican political class that has been unwilling to fight back against this with the leverage that they have,” Vought said. “And I think this is a wake-up call for those in Congress to be able to use the tools at their disposal to defund the FBI, to ask the right questions, and to prepare for a Church-style commission next year, if given a Republican majority, to dismantle the FBI into a thousand bits.”

Fox News was also quick to link the Mar-a-Lago search with recent news that the IRS is getting additional funding to go after wealthy individuals and corporations.

CitationFrom the August 8, 2022, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

Though those topics appear disconnected, right-wing media outlets have spent months claiming that conservatives are being singled out by the FBI and IRS for politically motivated prosecution, a manufactured narrative with no evidence to support it. They’re now latching onto this latest development to escalate that rhetoric and whip conservative voters into a frenzy in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, with many claiming that President Joe Biden targeted Trump personally or that Trump was the victim of a deep state “witch hunt.”

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CitationFrom the August 9, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

But beyond the defenses of Trump as an individual, many on the right attempted to turn what appears to be a lawful investigation of a powerful person into a story of David and Goliath, with the former president cast as the underdog against an all-powerful state set on eliminating its opponents.

In this Bizarro World version of events, Trump is the canary in the coal mine. If the FBI could search his house, the argument goes, then that meant that no conservative was safe. “The real target of this investigation isn't Trump,” said Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “The real target of this investigation is you or anyone who dares to call out and take on the rank corruption of the D.C. establishment.”

Right-wing radio host Buck Sexton offered almost the exact same talking point. “They’re sending a message now to President Trump and his supporters that they’ll come for you if you stand against the machine,” Sexton said. “This is a chilling moment in the country's history.”

Others on the right put forward a related argument that Trump is being targeted by the FBI specifically because he stands as the lone protector of the forgotten man.

Both of these claims are a way of turning any attempt to hold Trump accountable for crimes he may have committed into an imagined assault on his faux-populist supporters. If “they” – an unnamed, state-sponsored enemy – can target someone relatively as powerful as Trump, then “you” – the right-wing media consumer – will soon be ground to dust by the same forces. Trump’s legal battles, then, aren’t his alone. They belong to his entire movement.

Conservative pundits have spent months recently laying this groundwork, though a larger persecution narrative on the right goes back decades. In the days prior to the Mar-a-Lago search, conservatives reacted to news that landmark legislation known as the Inflation Reduction Act would include $80 billion for the IRS by claiming the new funding would turn the agency into a militarized, political police force. 

The reality is the exact opposite. The new funding is specifically designed to provide the IRS the resources it needs to target powerful people and organizations, instead of the low-hanging fruit the agency has gone after following decades of conservative sabotage. Just like in the responses to the Mar-a-Lago search, however, the right reflexively transformed the issue from one of higher tax collection aimed at billionaires and transnational corporations into a wholly manufactured narrative about a supposedly out-of-control government bureaucracy coming for Trump supporters.

“They’re going to weaponize the IRS, use the government to intimidate every single Trump supporter and MAGA supporter in America,” conservative pundit John Fredericks said.

In July, Tucker Carlson devoted his entire opening monologue to similarly arguing that prosecution of anyone associated with Trump’s January 6 attempted coup was, by definition, an example of totalitarian overreach. Carlson spent about 16 minutes of the most watched cable show on prime time mischaracterizing 14 investigations into right-wing media figures or politicians, positioning the FBI as an explicitly political secret police force targeting conservatives. 

“The signature tactic of the Biden administration … has been the criminalizing of American politics,” Carlson said. 

Again, this characterization could not be more absurd. Both presently and historically, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have disproportionately targeted, investigated, and prosecuted left-wing people and organizations. The FBI is more conservative than the population in general, and current FBI Director Christopher Wray was appointed by Trump. If anything, the United States has a history of allowing rampant lawbreaking by powerful people to go unchecked. No high-level officials involved in the torture program under President George W. Bush were ever prosecuted, for example, and many went on to successful careers inside and outside government.

The conservative response to all of these developments – the Mar-a-Lago search, new IRS funding, the prosecution of insurrectionists – underscores a basic tenet of their philosophy. As the classical music composer and internet commentator Frank Wilhoit wrote in 2018: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” 

This pithy remark has almost become a cliche at this point, but it explains a great deal about the last several years. Conservatives constantly claim to “back the Blue,” but when a movement can seamlessly pivot from Blue Lives Matter to Defund the FBI, there is clearly an operating principle at work other than an abstract respect for “law and order.” Their real commitment is to a certain kind of order – one defined by social hierarchies across race, class, and gender.  

Neither the FBI nor the IRS actually threaten to subvert those hierarchies, but the conservative imagination transforms them into all-powerful entities that can. Conservative pundits reacting to the Mar-a-Lago search are arguing for a system that protects them, their donors, and their sponsors, no matter the charges against them. The David versus Goliath narrative they’re now pitching to viewers is merely a useful fig leaf toward that end.

Meltdown in stupid town

 I  admit I'm a big fan of wingnut Twitter because when wingnut Twitter gets angry and starts lashing out, they let their hypocrisy fly. From the self-hate queen, Candace Ownes, to mutant manchild Dan Bongino, they're screaming about how this country is becoming a banana republic because their beloved Orange Dummy has his lair raided by the FBI. They forget that Orange Dummy wanted AG Bill Barr to indict Vice President Biden weeks before the election. The idea goes back further about Trump wanting his political rivals locked up.

I suspect driving the fear and rage from the right is that the guy they're defending has a history of snitching on other criminals as a get out of jail or reduced penalty card. There are probably some documents that point to other high-ranking Republican officials knowing criminal wrongdoing, and that scares them. Between the Roe decision and Republican government overreach, and President Biden and the Democrats racking up the Ws, Republicans don't need to have their former president looking like the two-bit crime boss he is.

And if Republicans think threatening retaliation is going to boost their falling chances of winning back the house, I don't know how. If you follow me on Twitter, I've been saying this since January there's no red wave, and what happened to the Orange Dummy last night is more of that. The voters who are angry about what happened to the Orange Dummy last night are already voting Nazi in the fall.

My prediction is when the more shit is revealed, the more it's going to damage the Republican Party.