Donald Trump Responds to New Leaked Audio About Secret Docs He Kept

 https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-audio-shows-donald-trump-chatting-about-secret-docs-he-could-have-declassified-cnn-report-says?ref=home?ref=home

Posting to Truth Social after the release of the audio, Trump took aim at prosecutor Jack Smith and claimed, without explaining, that the audio is an exoneration of his alleged crimes.

“The Deranged Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, working in conjunction with the DOJ & FBI, illegally leaked and ‘spun’ a tape and transcript of me which is actually an exoneration, rather than what they would have you believe,” Trump wrote.

The former president added: “This continuing Witch Hunt is another ELECTION INTERFERENCE Scam. They are cheaters and thugs!”

So far, Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ amount to ‘a tempest in a teapot,’ expert says

 https://news.northeastern.edu/2022/12/05/twitter-files-elon-musk/

The info dump fueled longstanding right-wing distrust of “big tech” by suggesting a nexus between pre-Musk Twitter and the Democratic Party. But on the left, it elicited a collective yawn. That’s because the files so far reveal little more than how Twitter bungled the response to the Hunter Biden story, airing disagreements between Twitter employees about how the company handled it initially, which was to block the story and prevent users from sharing it, before correcting course.

The ‘Twitter Files’ Is What It Claims to Expose

 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/twitter-files-explained-elon-musk-taibbi-weiss-hunter-biden-laptop.html

Specifically, Musk delivered a vast trove of internal Twitter documents to two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, who have long endorsed aspects of the GOP’s indictment of the platform. Taibbi and Weiss proceeded to publish a pair of exposés on Twitter’s inner workings. Dubbed “the Twitter Files,” these reports featured a couple genuinely concerning findings about pre-Musk Twitter’s operations. But they were also saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity. Musk’s commentary on the Twitter Files, meanwhile, proved even more demagogic and deceptive than the exposés themselves.

For these reasons, the Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn — that of social-media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends.

Ex-Twitter officials reject GOP claims of government collusion

 https://www.npr.org/2023/02/08/1155491204/ex-twitter-officials-reject-gop-claims-of-government-collusion

"I'm aware of no unlawful collusion with or direction from any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation," James Baker, who served as Twitter's deputy general counsel, told the committee.

Telling lies has become the norm for today’s Republicans

 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/01/politics/republican-party-kevin-mccarthy/index.html

 During Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Biden’s Supreme Court pick, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republican senators including Texas’ Ted Cruz concocted the charge that Jackson had handled child pornography cases with inordinate leniency. The conservative National Review dismissed the attack as “meritless to the point of demagoguery”; Cruz earned a rebuke from an eminent conservative federal judge for whom he once had clerked.

Kari Lake Sued For Defamation By Arizona GOP Election Official She Accused Of Election Sabotage

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/06/23/kari-lake-sued-for-defamation-by-arizona-gop-election-official-who-she-accused-of-election-sabotage/?sh=7437080475b7

The lawsuit against Lake was filed by Maricopa County’s recorder Stephen Richer—who is also a Republican—and it accuses the GOP candidate and her campaign of making repeated false accusations that he “sabotaged the election” to prevent Lake from winning, the Washington Post reported.

To defend Clarence Thomas, GOP senators slander the wrong target

 https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/defend-clarence-thomas-gop-senators-slander-wrong-target-rcna85258

The Republican defense of Thomas is similar: They’re not bothered by Thomas’ alleged misconduct; they’re bothered by anti-corruption officials like Wolf who noticed Thomas’ alleged misconduct.

Rep. Adam Schiff Grills Special Counsel John Durham on Sham Report

Durham accused of cover-up by Matt Gaetz

WSJ editorial board defends Alito, calls ProPublica report ‘non-scandal built on partisan spin’

 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/22/wsj-editorial-board-defends-alito-calls-propublica-report-non-scandal-built-on-partisan-spin-00103093

Meanwhile, a new poll from Quinnipiac published Wednesday found the Supreme Court’s public approval rating sinking to 30 percent among registered voters, the lowest since the poll began nearly two decades ago.

GOP senators want Roberts to take action on Supreme Court

 https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4065348-gop-senators-want-roberts-to-take-action-on-supreme-court/

“These Republicans are caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they don’t want to have to cooperate with Democrats on ethics legislation, because it sort of accepts the premise that the Republican justices are behaving corruptly and there’s a need to rein them in,” he said.  

I did Alito’s ethics prep for his confirmation hearing. His new excuses are nonsense.

 https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/alito-supreme-court-ethics-scandal-vacation-rcna90819

And in any event, the free travel to Alaska had to be disclosed. Alito invokes the “empty seat theory” to say he hitched a ride on Singer’s plane that was headed to Alaska anyway, that it didn’t cost Singer anything additional, and thus was not a gift that needed to be disclosed. This is utter nonsense, of course. In ethics meetings my staff and I also discussed and poked fun of the empty seat theory. No American who is not a Supreme Court justice (or perhaps an ethically challenged governor) can just hitch a ride on a billionaire’s private plane. Try using the empty seat theory to board a plane or a cruise ship without a ticket and see what happens.

Samuel Alito's Justification for Taking GOP-Billionaire-Led Trip: The Seat “Would Have Otherwise Been Vacant”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/samuel-alito-supreme-court-ethics#:~:text=He%20also%20claimed%20to%20have,to%20Alaska%2C”%20Alito%20wrote.

“This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” Republican Lindsey Graham complained during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month on Thomas’s apparent ethics violations.

Moscow has stepped back from civil war with Wagner. But the danger’s not over, experts warn

 https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/25/europe/russia-prigozhin-wagner-insurrection-belarus-explainer-intl-hnk/index.html

Within a remarkable day and a half, Russia faced the very real threat of an armed insurrection, with President Vladimir Putin vowing to punish Wagner fighters marching toward Moscow and occupying cities along the way – before a sudden deal with Belarus seemed to defuse the crisis as rapidly as it emerged.