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The post Fridays with Nicole Sandler appeared first on emptywheel.

After Desmond Holly shot up Evergreen High School last September 10, severely wounding two other students, the case has gotten very little notice.

In October, there were reports celebrating the hospital release of Matthew Silverstone, the more seriously injured of the two victims. In February, Jefferson County announced the parents would not be charged; Holly used a gun owned by his grandparent, but he did not have access to the safe in which it was stored. Yesterday, Colorado outlets started r...

When I first started this post, yesterday morning, WSJ was presenting the question of whether to bail out Sprit Airlines as a debate between two of Trump’s top advisors. Howard Lutnick told Trump he could be a hero by saving jobs, whereas Sean Duffy argued taxpayers would be buying a dud.

Lutnick argued to Trump that the president would see a political win by coming to Spirit’s rescue months before the midterm elections and that the deal could save thousands of jobs, according to a senior admin...

I want to return to the SPLC Indictment, to explain a bit more about how DOJ appears to have charged this, in part to show that the indictment doesn’t always clarify who was allegedly fooling whom.

The indictment charges:

Six counts of wire fraud (18 USC 1343) tied to payments made on April 25, 2023Four counts of false statements (18 USC 1014) allegedly made to an FDIC-insured bank, tied to statements made by Employee-1 on December 20, 2016One count of conspiracy to commit concealment (18 US...

Todd Blanche and Kash Patel just indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The indictment charges three kinds of crimes:

Paying informants for infiltrating far right groups, which DOJ charged as wire fraud for six payments made in 2023.Making four false representations on December 20, 2016 to set up four bank accounts to make payments that obscured SPLC as the source; on September 2021, those accounts were shut down in 2020 and senior SPLC management corrected the misrepresentations on Septem...

I want to pull together several things I’ve been thinking about of late: this post on Joe DiGenova, several posts and this video on thinking of the Iran war as a World War, especially the one on how Trump let his growing addiction for snuff films overcome his terror of ending up like Jimmy Carter.

For most of last year, I responded to experts opining that Trump 2.0 was worse than they imagined by asserting that it was not quite as bad as I imagined. I’ve barely explained what I meant.

As I’ll ...

One remarkable thing about the Atlantic story alleging Kash Patel drinks a lot seven times, mentioning alcohol six times, and intoxication three is that Atlantic published it just one week after the lead, most detailed incident, one that had nothing to do with booze, occurred on April 10.

On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and ...

Even before WSJ posted this story about the guy legally occupying the position of President, I had gotten worried that Donald Trump is growing addicted to snuff films.

I had been planning on a post describing how Trump really spends his time, in part as a way to convey that he’s really not acting in the role of President. And the WSJ story demonstrates what it looks like for a longtime Trump-whisperer like Josh Dawsey (along with Annie Linksey, who’s doing a lot of WSJ’s Iran reporting) to try ...

Before Todd Blanche was Donald Trump’s defense attorney, he was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney.

Before Todd Blanche was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney, he represented Igor Fruman in his unlawful donation and influence-peddling prosecution, the investigation of which extended to getting Marie Yovanovitch fired, undermining the Mueller investigation, and framing Hunter Biden.

Before Todd Blanche was Igor Fruman’s attorney, he represented Paul Manafort in a successful bid to prevent New York State from pros...

I’ve been closely tracking two sets of cases in Minnesota: (1) the Don Lemon conspiracy case, in which (among other things) DOJ arrested and then dismissed the case against the wrong woman, and (2) the cases against 16 people that Pam Bondi used as trophies in one of her trips to Minnesota, which is one of the things that led the US Attorney’s office to fall apart.

In this post, I talked about some of those 16 cases. In this post, I described how DOJ was putting JAG officers with very little ex...