Not Necessarily Stoned, But Beautiful

An exchange yesterday between Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to oversee the U.S. intelligence community as director of national intelligence, illustrated the dilemma of those trying to force Trump’s lies onto the American people when they are confronted with reality.

Ossoff asked Clayton: “Who won the 2020 election?”

Clayton responded: “Uh, you know, I’m not, I’m not gonna do this with you.

Clayton could not answer because, although all of the claims of Trump and his loyalists that he won the 2020 presidential election have collapsed in court, Trump requires his cronies to claim that the election was stolen in order to have justification for rigging future elections. They know the truth—that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes and by 51.3% to 46.8% in the Electoral College. But they refuse to say so because if they do, they will lose Trump’s favor.

Those loyalists are the people Trump is putting in control of the American government. In his own confirmation hearing today for elevation to the position of attorney general—the person at the head of the country’s legal system, representing the American people—Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche slipped. When asked if he and Trump were friends, Blanche answered, “I’m his lawyer,” before correcting himself to say: “was his lawyer.”

The editorial board of the New York Times called out another problem with Blanche. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams questioned whether Blanche is fit to practice law at all. She found that the slush fund/immunity deal Blanche signed off on with Trump, the Trump family, the Trump Organization, and their associates had been manufactured to give cover to a deal they did not want reviewed by a judge.

Yesterday we saw in real time how, with Blanche’s support, Trump is stacking the courts with loyalists. In Seattle, Washington, a panel of federal judges appointed by five presidents unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff, a former judge and longtime state and federal prosecutor as U.S. attorney. The judges appointed Rogoff to replace the Trump appointee whose 120-day interim position ended in February. By law, an interim U.S. attorney can stay in office for no more than 120 days, but Trump has tried to get around that law by changing the title under which his appointees operate, turning the interim U.S. attorney into an assistant U.S. attorney while leaving the top position empty.

The judges, to whom replacing an interim U.S. attorney falls if there is no presidential appointment, unanimously agreed to Rogoff. He took the oath of office at 8:00 in the morning and, within the hour, received an email telling him he was fired.

Despite the administration’s insistence that addressing climate change is a “scam,” the extreme weather caused by climate change has sparked more than 800 wildfires in Canada and at least a dozen in northern Minnesota. Smoke from the fires is exposing Americans from the Midwest to the Northeast to hazardous levels of air pollution.

CBS News reports that Detroit, Minneapolis, and Chicago today rank in the top five most polluted cities in the world, and that officials in New York City are distributing N95-type masks to commuters. Ben Noll of the Washington Post reported that more than 115 million people are in the plume of unhealthy to hazardous air quality and that conditions are expected to get worse.

At the same time, pouring rain in the Texas Hill Country is causing deadly floods. CNN reported that the Guadalupe River at Comfort, Texas, rose more than 25 feet in an hour as the heavens dropped about half a year’s worth of rain in southern Texas.