Jul.22

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Of Course We Want to Release the Files, and... Hey! Look Over There!

Another news cycle, another day of life for the EpsteinYZ Affair. Fun fact: 95.6% of people who enter graduate school, regardless of discipline, do so hoping they will one day have an excuse to write 20,000+ words on a dead sex offender. So, we're just living the dream at Electoral-Vote.com these days.

Last week, the Trump administration's main strategy for coping with the story was to lean hard on right-wing media to peddle the "nothing to see here" narrative. That was an abject failure, and so this week's strategy is to create a distraction. Here's a rundown of the various efforts on that front:

• See You in Court: We already covered this yesterday, but there have been new developments. Donald Trump apparently bought into the narrative, promulgated by Steve Bannon in particular, that the MAGA troops would rally behind the President if facing a common enemy, like The Wall Street Journal. So, Trump acted on his instincts, and sued the Journal, demanding eleventy bajillion dollars in damages (note to editor: double-check that figure).
  
  A judge has been assigned to the case, and it's not the sort of judge Trump was hoping for. In fact, you might describe it as judicial déjà vu. The jurist selected is Darrin Gayles, who is gay, Black, and an appointee of Barack Obama. The déjà vu is that Gayles has overseen a Trump case before, namely Trump's attempt to silence former fixer Michael Cohen with a claim for $50 million in damages. Trump eventually dropped the Cohen suit, the day before discovery was set to begin.
  
  It is a very good guess that Trump will drop the WSJ suit on the same timeline, for the same reason. For now, however, the White House is doing everything it can to scapegoat the newspaper. For example, the President will be in the U.K. this weekend, where he is not likely to get a warm welcome from anyone not named Nigel Farage. The Wall Street Journal had a reporter, Tarini Parti, who was going to be part of the press pool for that trip. Now, Parti's credential has been revoked, despite the fact that she had nothing to do with the Epstein story.
  
  
• But, Barack Obama!: We also noted this yesterday, but just to make sure our list is thorough, DNI Tulsi Gabbard tried to shift the narrative to Barack Obama and his administration by sending a "criminal referral" to the Department of Justice related to Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the investigations therein. Trump jumped all over this over the weekend, using his much-smaller-than-Elon's social media platform to post all sorts of Obama-related memes, including an AI-generated video of Obama being arrested and sent to prison, to the tune of "Y.M.C.A." by the Village People.
  
  To say that this is unserious would be underselling how ridiculous the whole thing is. First, as Trump has done much to establish, government employees—particularly presidents—have very broad leeway when it comes to actions undertaken in their official capacity.
  
  Second, Gabbard neglected to identify any actual crime, referring only vaguely to "a years-long coup against President Trump." This would be the same President Trump who was not in office in 2016, and who was duly sworn in on January 20, 2017. It would seem that Gabbard is not clear on what "coup" means.
  
  Third, and finally, there is such a thing as a statute of limitations, something that has worked substantially to the advantage of one Donald J. Trump. Some federal crimes cannot be charged after 3 years, for most it's 5 years. Even terrorist acts have a limitation of 8 years. So unless the administration is arguing that Obama and his administration committed a capital offense, or tax fraud, or that they violated immigration law, or that Obama, et al., have been running from the law as fugitives, the statute has run.
  
  Gabbard apparently realizes that the attack on Obama went nowhere, and so she tried a different approach yesterday (keep reading).
  
  
• But, Joe Biden!: Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), by contrast, prefers a more recent subject for his distractions. So, he posted a video to eX-Twitter yesterday that features various clips of Democrats defending Joe Biden's mental acuity. In case the Speaker's point was not crystal clear, he helpfully pointed out that this was "the largest political cover-up in U.S. history." Bigger than the Epstein cover-up, it would seem.
  
  
• But, Adam Schiff!: Trump also took aim at Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), latching onto a claim that Schiff misrepresented his house in Maryland as his primary residence so as to get a more favorable mortgage rate, and declaring that Schiff should therefore be sent to prison.
  
  Inasmuch as Schiff knows he's under a very powerful microscope at all times, we very much doubt that there was anything untoward about the transaction, and we believe that Schiff is telling the truth when he says that he hired a lawyer to review everything, and the lawyer said it was all OK. Let us also recall that the interest charged on a mortgage is (largely) a reflection of the risk that the lender is assuming, and if push somehow comes to shove, it is rather easier to get money out of a United States senator as opposed to John Q. Public. In other words, a low mortgage rate appears to be justifiable on multiple bases here. Oh, and let's not fail to note the irony of Donald John Trump kvetching about someone abusing the process by which money is borrowed in order to purchase real estate.
  
  In any case, as a distraction, the Schiff story has not caught on. This is not a surprise. First, Schiff is a huge bugaboo for Trump, because it was Schiff who was a lead manager of the first impeachment. However, the Senator does not make the Top 25 bugaboos for the base. Maybe not even the Top 50. On top of that, a squabble about mortgage rates is just a little too abstruse to be effective as red meat.
  
  
• Enemies at the Gate: Mortgage rates may not get the base's blood boiling, but brown-skinned immigrants sure do. It would seem that the administration has gotten as much mileage as it can out of Los Angeles, and so half of the National Guard troops were discharged over the weekend, and yesterday, orders were issued to withdraw all 700 of the Marines that had been deployed.
  
  However, despite the fact that the Battle of Los Angeles does not appear to have paid much in the way of political dividends, the administration is not giving up. In fact, there will be a new target, namely New York City. The plan, over the next few days, is to "flood the zone" with ICE Agents.
  
  Is New York City somehow a better target than Los Angeles? On one hand, there are considerably fewer Latinos there than there are in L.A. On top of that, a lot of the Latinos who ARE there are Puerto Rican, and so are U.S. citizens. That could lead to an increased number of false arrests, which is bad P.R. for the administration, even if Tom Homan, et al. pretend otherwise.
  
  On the other hand, NYC is not L.A., and so picking a "fresh" target might generate a new round of news coverage. Meanwhile, unlike L.A., New York has a pliant mayor in Eric Adams, who is not going to use all of his powers to push back against the administration, the way that Karen Bass has done.
  
  So, it could go either way. We guess that when you're desperate, and "desperate" appears to be an increasingly on-point descriptor of Donald Trump, you rolls the dice and you takes your chances.
  
  
• The Culture Wars: If we had to choose, we would probably say that this was the most desperate, and most transparent, attempt to create a distraction. As part of his social-media meltdown this weekend, Trump also re-opened a culture wars battle that was theoretically over, and demanded that the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, and the Washington Commanders football team, revert to their previous names:

  The Washington "Whatever's" should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!

  Trump did not give a source for his claims. Presumably he talked to "people."
  
  Anyhow, the ownership of the Cleveland Guardians quickly made clear that their position is "Thanks, but no thanks." The brand-new leadership of the Washington Commanders also appears to be uninterested, but has to tread a bit more lightly, because they are working on a stadium deal right now, and Trump could torpedo it if he really tried.
  
  Incidentally, many social media users took note of a tweet from 12 years ago, in which an aspiring politician declared: "President should not be telling the Washington Redskins to change their name—our country has far bigger problems! FOCUS on them, not nonsense." That aspiring politician, of course, was Donald Trump.
  
  
• Ok, We Will Release the Files: Once Gabbard realized she had failed with her Obama Gambit—which is not a chess move, but totally should be—she bowed to reality and announced that OK, she has decided to release the files. Not the Epstein files, mind you. No, 230,000 pages of files related to the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination.
  
  King is dead, so he's a little bit more similar to Epstein than Obama, we suppose. We guess that next up will be the FBI's files on Sammy Davis Jr., who is both dead AND Jewish. In any case, how delusional do you have to be to think that anyone will be distracted by the release of information that is nearly 60 years old, and that approximately nobody was clamoring for? Incidentally, here is how Bernice King, who is the civil rights leader's last living daughter, and who did not want the files released, responded on social media:
  
  
  
  We suppose Gabbard might just be pandering for Trump's benefit, and doesn't actually expect that her sleight-of-hand will accomplish anything beyond pleasing the boss. But if that is NOT the case, and she has really persuaded herself that she can change the narrative, it's yet another good reason to conclude she's not fit to serve, and should be removed from her post.

That is quite a long list of distractions. And, by all indications... none of it is working. The folks who track right-wing podcasts and right-wing talk radio report that it's wall-to-wall Epstein. Although even if you didn't know that, the amount of energy being expended on trying to change the narrative tells you that the White House is really worried here.

Meanwhile, Mike Johnson's kowtowing to Trump is not limited only to posting Joe Biden videos. In an extremely predictable outcome (indeed, we warned of this possibility on Friday), the Speaker announced that dad gum it, there just isn't going to be time to vote on releasing the Epstein files before the recess, which means that the earliest he could possibly bring the matter to the floor of the House is September. Darn the luck!

There are a couple of problems with this approach. The first is that many Republican members WANT a vote, because they don't want to spend the next month dealing with constant Epstein-related questions and complaints from constituents. The second is that Democrats are not bound by Johnson's choices, nor are mavericks like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). So, these folks have made clear they intend to force votes on the matter by proposing "release the files" amendments to every matter that comes up for a vote this week.

If you're not going to hold a floor vote on the matter AND you don't want to compel members to be stuck voting on these damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't amendments, that leaves only one option: conduct no business. And so, it looks like the House will basically twiddle its thumbs this week, before fleeing Washington for 39 days (from this Friday through Monday, September 1).

That is going to make things extra-fun when the members get back to town. They may have to deal with the Epstein situation, assuming it has not dropped off the radar. Meanwhile, the recent budget fight was over the 2024-25 budget. If the Congress does not adopt a budget, or at least a continuing resolution, by October 1, then the government will shut down. Why does anyone ever run for Congress, again? (Z)