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The TAKE with Rick Klein

A party remade by former President Donald Trump is in the process of being remade again.

Republican officeholders and office seekers aren't keen to admit it, but for most of them Russia's invasion of Ukraine has them publicly agreeing more on the substance with President Joe Biden than with Trump.

That comes through in the raucous bipartisan reception Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy got in front of Congress and also in Biden's agreement with a unanimous Senate that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a "war criminal."

The crisis has been coursing through GOP primaries in unexpected ways. Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance -- among those pursuing Trump's endorsement in the May 3 primary -- labeled the invasion a "tragedy" after first saying on Steve Bannon's podcast last month that "I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another."

Former President Donald Trump speaks to the crowd during a rally at the Florence Regional Airport, March 12, 2022, in Florence, S.C.

In North Carolina, Trump's favored candidate, Rep. Ted Budd, is on the receiving end of a harsh attack ad from a rival Republican featuring a clip with Budd calling Putin "a very intelligent actor." (Some quotes in the ad are taken out of context, though the issue only came up because Trump called Putin "pretty smart" for trying to overrun Ukraine.)

Even where Republicans are offering sharp critiques of Biden -- blasting the president for not moving enough lethal aid quickly enough to Ukrainians -- there are limits that speak to how the GOP is changing. Virtually no major Republican figures are calling for perhaps the most hawkish action Zelenskyy wants -- American enforcement of a no-fly zone.

It has fallen to some of the staunchest Trump loyalists to offer major differences of opinion. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., on Wednesday blasted "neocons both on the left and in my party who clamor for war at every chance they get" -- a week after calling Zelenskyy a "thug."

The RUNDOWN with Averi Harper

A couple of House progressives are taking the Biden administration to task for its treatment of Haitians who seek asylum in the United States.

In a letter, Reps. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., have called on the Department of Homeland Security to halt deportations and expulsions of people to Haiti. The Biden administration has continued to invoke Title 42, a policy started under the Trump administration, which allows migrants to be turned away without a chance to have their asylum claims heard.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley addresses demonstrators participating in the "Stand with Ukraine" march in Boston, March 6, 2022.

The pair of lawmakers cited the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Mose and the aftermath of the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that rocked the island nation in August as reasons they believe returning migrants to Haiti is dangerous. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has previously claimed it is safe enough for asylum-seekers to return.

The lawmakers contrasted the ongoing expulsions to policy changes intended to welcome Ukrainian refugees.

"Recently, on March 3, Immigration and Customs Enforcement suspended deportation flights to Ukraine in response to the 'ongoing humanitarian crisis' there a justified and important exercise of your enforcement discretion," wrote the lawmakers. "There is every reason to extend that same level of compassion and exercise that same discretion to suspend deportations to Haiti."

The Biden administration has deported or expelled more than 20,000 migrants to Haiti since Biden was inaugurated, according to the advocacy group Washington Office on Latin America.

The TIP with Hannah Demissie

The idea of disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo making a political comeback is starting to look like a real possibility.

After he resigned last year amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment, Cuomo is now considering a run for his former job against the very woman who replaced him, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, according to reporting by CNBC published Wednesday.

Aides of Cuomo have been conducting internal polling on how he would perform against Hochul in the New York primary.

Governor Andrew Cuomo holds press briefing and makes announcement to combat COVID-19 Delta variant in New York, Aug. 2, 2021.

Cuomo entered 2022 with a $16 million campaign war chest. But even though his supporters are encouraging him to run for office, many leaders in his own party do not support the idea.

New York Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs told CNBC he thinks "it would be a bad mistake."

Talk of a Cuomo bid comes as an audit released Tuesday shows the Cuomo administration did not publicly account for the deaths of nearly 4,100 nursing home residents during the pandemic.

NUMBER OF THE DAY, powered by FiveThirtyEight

18. That's the number of districts where Latinos constitute a majority of the voting-age population in California, which marks an increase of five districts since the 2010 redistricting cycle. This makes California by far the biggest source of new Latino seats in the country. More broadly, it underscores the growing political clout of Latino voters in this redistricting cycle, accounting for more than 51% of the country's growth from 2010 to 2020. But as FiveThirtyEights Nathaniel Rakich writes, thats essentially the extent of this redistricting cycle's gains when it comes to the representation of people of color. In fact, there are many districts where nonwhite voters' power -- particularly Black voters' power -- has been eroded.

THE PLAYLIST

ABC News' "Start Here" Podcast. Start Here begins Thursday morning with ABCs Mary Bruce on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyys emotional address to Congress. Then, ABCs Elizabeth Schulze breaks down what to expect from the first interest rate hike in more than three years. And, ABCs Christine Theodorou details the aftermath of the strong earthquake that hit Japan. http://apple.co/2HPocUL

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Download the ABC News app and select "The Note" as an item of interest to receive the day's sharpest political analysis.

The Note is a daily ABC News feature that highlights the day's top stories in politics. Please check back tomorrow for the latest.

Originally posted here:
Ukraine revealing GOPs drift from Trump: The Note - ABC News

Some members of City Council want to punish former President Donald Trump, and we get it.

Trump is a playground bully with a big ego and a cult-like following, despite being voted out of office. His ongoing attempts to perpetuate the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election are not just indefensible and a threat to democracy, they are tiresome.

But he thrives on attention. Dont give it to him.

Which is why that proposed City Council ordinance intended to stop Trump from doing any future business with the city because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attempted insurrection at the Capitol seems a waste of time and energy.

City Council should move on, to the many far more important matters facing our city.

The ordinance, sponsored by Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th) and approved by the Committee on Contracting Oversight and Equity, says the permit for that Trump sign downtown which must be renewed annually shall be denied, or such permit shall be revoked, if the applicant or any controlling person of the applicant has been convicted of a crime of treason, sedition or subversive activities.

Dont hold your breath for that conviction, despite the ongoing investigation by the House select committee on Jan. 6.

... [W]hether you are Donald Trump, or one of the many traitors who stormed the United States Capitol on Jan. 6th, the City of Chicago is not interested in doing business with traitors or those who perpetrate hate crimes, Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd), co-sponsor of the ordinance, said. Will the ordinance have a sweeping effect? No. But I think it sends a clear and important message to two groups that are doing great harm to our country today.

Sending a moral message is a fine idea. But as a mayoral spokesman confirmed to us, the citys Law Department says convicted felons already cannot do business with the city.

Besides, anything that keeps Trump in the news or gives him the chance to puff out his chest and play the victim is counterproductive.

Fight the Big Lie, not just the liar.

Send letters toletters@suntimes.com.

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Dont feed the bully Donald Trump - Chicago Sun-Times

Weeks after the 2020 election, at least one Trump White House aide was named as secretly producing a report that alleged Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden because of Dominion Voting Systems research that formed the basis of the former presidents wider efforts to overturn the election.

The Dominion report, subtitled OVERVIEW 12/2/20 History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties, was initially prepared so that it could be sent to legislatures in states where the Trump White House was trying to have Bidens win reversed.

But top Trump officials would also use the research that stemmed from the White House aide-produced report to weigh other options to return Trump to the presidency, including having the former president sign off on executive orders to authorize sweeping emergency powers.

The previously unreported involvement of the Trump White House aide in the preparation of the Dominion report raises the extraordinary situation of at least one administration official being among the original sources of Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The publicly available version of the Dominion report, which first surfaced in early December 2020 on the conservative outlet the Gateway Pundit, names on the cover and in metadata as its author Katherine Friess, a volunteer on the Trump post-election legal team.

But the Dominion report was in fact produced by the senior Trump White House policy aide Joanna Miller, according to the original version of the document reviewed by the Guardian and a source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The original version of the Dominion report named Miller - who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly, the source said.

The involvement of a number of other Trump White House aides who worked in Navarros office was also scrubbed around that time, the source said. Friess has told the Daily Beast that she had nothing to do with the report and did not know how her name came to be on the document.

It was not clear why Millers name was removed from the report, which was sent to Trumps former attorney Rudy Giuliani on 29 November 2020, or why the White House aides involvement was obfuscated in the final 2 December version.

Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Dominion report made a number of unsubstantiated allegations that claimed Dominion Voting Systems corruptly ensured there could be technology glitches which resulted in thousands of votes being added to Joe Bidens total ballot count.

Citing unnamed Venezuelan officials, the report also pushed the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems used software from the election company Smartmatic and had ties to state-run Venezuelan software and telecommunications companies.

After the Dominion report became public, Navarro incorporated the claims into his own three-part report, produced with assistance from his aides at the White House, including Miller and another policy aide, Garrett Ziegler, the source said.

Ziegler has also said on a rightwing podcast that he and others in Navarros office seemingly referring to Trump White House aides Christopher Abbott and Hannah Robertson started working on Navarros report about two weeks before the 2020 election took place.

Two weeks before the election, we were doing those reports hoping that we would pepper the swing states with those, Ziegler said of the three-part Navarro report in an appearance last July on The Professors Record with David K Clements.

The research in the Dominion report also formed the backbone of foreign election interference claims by the former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who argued Trump could, as a result, assume emergency presidential powers and suspend normal law.

That included Trumps executive order 13848, which authorized sweeping powers in the event of foreign election interference, as well as a draft executive order that would have authorized the seizure of voting machines, the Guardian has previously reported.

The claims about Venezuela in the Dominion report appear to have spurred Powell to ask Trump at a 18 December 2020 meeting at the White House coincidentally facilitated by Ziegler that she be appointed special counsel to investigate election fraud.

Millers authorship of the Dominion report was not the last time the Trump White House, or individuals in the administration, prepared materials to advance the former presidents claims about a stolen election and efforts to return himself to office.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack revealed last year it had found evidence the White House Communications Agency produced a letter for the Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark to use to pressure states to decertify Bidens election win.

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Trump White House aide was secret author of report used to push big lie - The Guardian

On 8 March, a jury took three hours to render a guilty verdict against Guy Reffitt, a January 6 insurrectionist. Donald Trump could not have been pleased. DC is where Trump would be tried for any crimes relating to his admitted campaign to overturn the election.

Jurors there would have no trouble finding that the evidence satisfies all statutory elements required to convict Trump, including his criminal intent, the most challenging to prove. That is our focus here.

A 3 March New York Times story asserted that [b]uilding a criminal case against Mr Trump is very difficult for federal prosecutors ... given the high burden of proof ... [and] questions about Mr Trumps mental state.

The clear implication is that justice department leaders may simply be following the path of prudence in hesitating to indict, or even to robustly investigate, Mr Trump. But based on the already public evidence and theres undoubtedly lots more thats not yet public no vigilant prosecutor would be deterred by the difficulty of convincing a jury about Trumps state of mind. Full speed ahead is now the only proper course.

The former president is vulnerable to charges of conspiring to defraud the United States, 18 USC 371, and obstructing a congressional proceeding, 18 USC 1512(c)(2).

Regarding 371s intent requirement, the US supreme court has ruled that conspiracies to defraud the United States include plots entered for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful functions of any department of Government using deceit, craft or trickery, or ... means that are dishonest.

The mental state required for 1512 is a corrupt intent to obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding. In Arthur Andersen v United States, the supreme court said corrupt meant dishonest or wrongful, immoral, depraved, or evil.

The mountain of already public evidence would surely lead a DC jury to reject Trumps defense that that he honestly believed his own big lie that widespread ballot fraud had deprived him of victory, and therefore that his intent was innocent.

First, Trump knew that the 60-plus court cases seeking to overturn the votes in contested states had failed.

Second, as the former Michigan US attorney Barbara McQuade has compellingly shown, five of Trumps top officials told him unequivocally that all the fraud claims were false.

Third, Georgias secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, told Trump the same thing during the infamous recorded call in which Trump asked Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes, exactly one more than needed to overturn the states election.

That call alone screams corrupt intent. And the barely veiled way Trump threatened Raffensperger in that call reinforces Trumps evil state of mind.

Fourth, Trumps speech immediately preceding the Capitol attack included a provable, telling lie that he would join the Capitol march with the crowd even though his pre-speech schedule showed no such plan and Trump did nothing of the sort. A properly instructed jury would likely conclude that this lie reflected Trumps desire to remain far from the violence he had encouraged, giving him both physical safety and plausible deniability and further evidencing a corrupt state of mind.

Fifth, Trumps failure for three hours to call off the siege after it began, notwithstanding violent televised images and entreaties from his children, advisers and allies despite his undoubted duty to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed was manifestly depraved.

Sixth, when Trump belatedly asked the insurrectionists to go home, he called them patriots who should remember this day for ever. A federal judge wrote in an 18 February opinion that a reasonable observer could read that tweet as ratifying the violence and other illegal acts that took place that day.

Seventh, willful ignorance of incriminating facts is equivalent to knowledge. Drug couriers cannot escape conviction by having chosen not to ask what was inside the heroin-containing package they were handsomely paid to import. In Trumps case, his purported belief in election-changing voter fraud was at the very least willfully blind to the facts before him.

Finally, another of Trumps anticipated innocent intent defenses that he was relying on his lawyer John Eastman would fail. Eastman has stated that it was on his advice that Trump sought to have Pence reject electoral votes for President Biden or to delay the entire vote.

Even if Trump and Eastman had the requisite attorney-client relationship, which is dubious as a matter of fact, the defense has a gaping hole: under the law, Trumps reliance must have been reasonable.

Far from being reasonable, Eastmans claim that that Pence was the ultimate arbiter of the electoral count was utter nonsense. Trump would be unable to produce any lawyer who supported that constitutionally absurd theory and could withstand even amateur cross-examination.

A concluding point. Some observers have expressed fear that a single Trump-supporting juror could hang the jury, suggesting that the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, might just deem that risk to be too great to be worth running. But as the BBCs observer of Guy Reffitts trial noted, every juror there saw through the smoke the defendant was blowing. Jurors are instructed to use their common sense, and the jury in Reffitt did just that.

A DC jury would do the same in a trial of the conspiracys central actor. Once all the evidence is expeditiously gathered, with or without the special counsel that we recommend, the justice department must indict him.

Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb university professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University. Follow him @tribelaw. Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy

The rest is here:
The evidence is clear: its time to prosecute Donald Trump - The Guardian

The media have been quick to rubbish Attorney General Merrick GarlandMerrick GarlandGOP senators seek probe of 'egregious' conditions at NJ nursing home The post-Trump era has begun Biden signs reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act MORE for his failure so far to indict former President TrumpDonald TrumpGOP talking point could turn to Biden's 'underwhelming' Russia response House Oversight Committee opens investigation into New Mexico 2020 election audit Hunter Biden paid off tax liability amid ongoing grand jury investigation: report MORE over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. They have tarred him with epithets worthy of Trump himself, such as Merrick the Mild and Merrick the Meek. And a host of former prosecutors and law professors have criticized his inaction, saying that Garland needs to indict Trump to vindicate the rule of law.

We dont know for certain, but it appears that Garlands Justice Department has yet to convene a grand jury to investigate the affair. Were they subpoenaing witnesses before the grand jury, we would have heard something about it from reporters hanging around the court house or from the witnesses lawyers.

Justice appears to be riding the coattails of the House select committee, which has served a flurry of subpoenas, and has already referred two recalcitrant witnesses, Stephen Bannon and Mark MeadowsMark MeadowsNC investigators open probe into Mark Meadows voter registration Is Merrick Garland finally ready to indict Donald Trump? Jan. 6 panel subpoenas Trump campaign adviser Cleta Mitchell, five others MORE, to Justice for criminal prosecution only to see Bannon indicted for a misdemeanor and Meadows so far uncharged some fourscore and seven days after the criminal reference.

The case against Meadows is a simple one, and the long delay is vexing. It is possible that Justice is using the time to investigate, but this seems unlikely in light of the Doric simplicity of the facts. Meadows refused to testify. Full stop. It is also possible that Justice had decided not to indict Meadows for contempt of Congress; but then, why the silence? If they had let Meadows know he was off the hook, he would have loudly told the press about how he was exonerated. Finally, it is possible that the government and Meadows are crafting a deal, some testimony in exchange for no indictment. Time will certainly tell us the answer.

Garland has vowed to follow the law and the facts wherever they may lead him. But many legal observers have concluded he is timid and overly cautious, fearful that we appear to be a banana republic indicting, and possibly jailing, our former leaders because they are now politically out of favor. Of course, the total answer is that we look like a banana republic if we dont hold our former leaders accountable for the serious crimes they may have committed, such as sedition, incitement to insurrection or conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Frustrated at the inaction, the redoubtable Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe has called on Garland to appoint a special counsel. Tribe argues that a special counsel is the best way to reassure the country that no one is above the law, justice is nonpartisan and fears of political fallout will not determine the decision on whether to bring charges. Tribe says that such an appointment is imperative.

Appointment of a special counsel would give Garland some political cover, even though a special counsel is not institutionally independent of the Justice Department. Yet, so far, Tribes urgent clarion call has fallen on deaf ears.

Trumps strategy of course is to run out the clock. With the midterm elections less than eight months off, and a widely expected outcome that Republicans will take the House, the select committee investigating Jan. 6 may be on its last legs.

Yet, as the man said, it isnt over til its over. Only recently, there have been unmistakable signs and portents that the inquiry into the events of Jan. 6 may have brought Trump to his Watergate moment. The most notable events in recent days are as follows:

If Reffitt receives a stiff sentence, and Tarrio is convicted, they may be incentivized to cooperate with the government as did Oath Keepers member Joshua James, who is cooperating as part of a guilty plea for obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, and for seditious conspiracy culminating in the Jan. 6 attack. Such testimony of co-conspirators could provide evidence supporting broader conspiracy charges against Trump or his closest associates.

As the Washington Post concluded in its article reporting the Reffitt verdict: "The notion that Attorney General Merrick Garland is slow-walking charges against Trump or has decided not to go after him is inconsistent with the departments actions to date. Garland might just be warming up to take on the man whose refusal to accept defeat resulted in the most lethal armed insurrection since the Civil War."

As Trump signaled to the Proud Boys in his September 2020 debate with Biden, stand back and stand by. Garland may not be shooting so many blanks as his critics claim.

James D. Zirin is a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

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Is Merrick Garland finally ready to indict Donald Trump? | TheHill - The Hill