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There’s a non-zero chance disgraced former President Trump could be left without his main New York City attorney Joe Tacopina on the eve of his all-but-certain indictment as former Defense Department counsel and media lawyer guy Ryan Goodman has dug up a 2018 interview with CNN’s Don Lemon in which Tacopina said pornstar Stormy Daniels had approached him for representation and, although Daniels didn’t retain him and ended up with future convict Michael Avenatti, just the brief consultation likely creates a damning conflict of interest, according to Goodman.

“Under ABA, NYS ethics rules, difficult to see how he can represent Trump; call Daniel’s claim of affair untrue; call her an extortionist (and Trump the victim),” Goodman writes, citing Tacopina’s own words in the interview, saying he “can’t really talk about my impressions or any conversations we had because there is an attorney-client privilege that attaches even to a consultation.”

Presidential crackhead son and genuinely awesome paint artist Hunter Biden on Friday filed a federal lawsuit against blind idiot computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Issac for invasion of privacy for copying his laptop data and giving it to Rudy Giuliani and other MAGA assholes in 2019.

The Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence won’t answer a Freedom of Information Act request from Bloomberg reporters to confirm or deny disgraced former Trump’s claim of a “standing order” to declassify all the documents he stole from the White House while leaving office following his humiliating defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

“The existence or non-existence of the alleged ‘Standing Order’ would bear on whether records with apparent classification markings were in fact classified – a key fact in the investigation,” wrote FBI FOIA chief Joseph Bender in a filing submitted to the DC federal court that on Wednesday ruled in favor of the government. Bender warned that “persons of interest” to the investigation could “alter their testimony… destroy, adulterate, or fabricate evidence, or refuse to cooperate with the government altogether,” adding that they consulted with Jack Smith on whether to confirm or deny the existence of the “standing order” Trump would have made in January 2021.

Of course Trump never actually made such a “standing order” and the claim was a panic move that – as far as we know – was never actually argued in court by his lawyers when they pulled that “special master” scam with his appointee Aileen Cannon. That this isn’t coming out is a sign of how much things have changed since Jack Smith took over the investigation: Before he was appointed the DOJ lawyers were pretty cavalier (not in a bad way) with all the damning details they laid out in court filings. This isn’t to say that Smith hasn’t been fairly generous with keeping the public updated but it’s pretty much all been through leaks to CNN and ABC News about subpoenas and testimony.

Republican Texas state Senator Drew Springer this filed a bill to impose fines equal to the cost of an investigation on any person files three or more complaints with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality about the same issue in one calendar year that result in no enforcement or action by the agency in order to tamp down on “vexatious” complaints, the Dallas Observer reports.

Nice to see Texas Republicans taking the same approach to environmental regulation as they are with voting: Making the process intimidating to the average Joe so they don’t bother participating.

MAGA Florida state Senator Jay Collins on Wednesday tried to claim it was an “error” when he filed an amendment excepting the Confederate stars and bars to a bill prohibiting any other than the American, state, or municipal flags from flying on government buildings, the Daily Beast reports.

Hard to see how including “The flag of the Confederate States” on a list of proposed exemptions was an “error,” but Collins tried his best to disown it tweeting “Any insinuation that Jay is a confederate sympathizer is disgusting.” The entire bill has apparently collapsed as a result of the “error,” with supporters withdrawing amid fears it might be wholly unconstitutional.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! While many today celebrate this Irish holiday, many do not realize the history behind it. This holiday's original intent was to remember the life of St. Patrick who is credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland. pic.twitter.com/DZmmqn5EWa

— Senator Doug Mastriano (@SenMastriano) March 17, 2023

As an outlet where discussions of pudding are usually reserved for Fridays after 10 p.m. Eastern time, we found it difficult to write a headline to express our extreme disgust at Republican Florida Governor and man so dull he makes polenta seem spicy Ron DeSantis.  “For what this time?” you justifiably ask given his assault on…well… teachers, decency, women, minorities, science, fashion, LGBTQ people and non-Christians to list just a few of his targets.  But pudding?

According to the Daily Beast, DeSantis has a team who make his appearance less grotesque due to the presumptive presidential candidate’s horrible interpersonal manners.  Everyone recognizes that DeSantis is socially inept, but apparently the thing that disgusts people the most are Ron’s habit of grossly eating food.

One legendary episode happened in 2019 as he made the mandatory pilgrimage to kiss Trump’s feet in Washington, DC:  on the flight north, DeSantis enjoyed a serving of chocolate pudding by eating it using three of his fingers.  … ’cause you can take the man out of Florida…

A group of 11 financial institutions promised to deposit a total of $30 billion in First Republic Bank, an effort meant to signal the strength of the financial market and the sector’s confidence it will weather the current storm, NBC News reports.

The Platinum Donors, who contributed $5 billion, include Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.  Gold Donors, at $2.5 billion, are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.  Truist, PNC, U.S. Bancorp, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon are the Silver tier at around $1 billion each. The money will stay with First Republic for at least 120 days.  First Republic still has $70 billion in liquid assets of its own, but investors started dumping the stock, which went from $115 last week to close around $34 Thursday.

First Republic is an unusual bank, with a specialty dealing with high-net-worth individuals.  A run on the bank by depositors seeking cash could cripple the institution, and it would further shake up a tenuous industry, so having fellow financial institutions reinforce federal insurance makes sense on a number of levels.  Stabilizing First Republic means stabilizing First Republic’s stock price, which will have calming effects on stocks within the same category, with will prevent panicked depositors which thereby stops a run on their reserves.

Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian convicted felon who attempted to find scandalous information about the Biden family to help Donald Trump win reelection, took to Twitter Thursday to apparently claim Trump operatives obtained the data used as the center of the “Hunter Biden laptop” scandal from Ukrainian FOP (Friend of Putin) Dmitri Firtash, indicating that the files being passed around by Rudy et al were not, in fact, from a blind computer repair shop owner at a strip mall in Wilmington, Delaware.

On October 6, 2019, I attended a meeting with the President of the United States’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, attorneys for Dmitri Firtash and Fox paid commentators [Victoria Toensing] and Joe diGenova, Fox paid commentator [disgraced former The Hill reporter John Solomon]AT FOX NEWS HQ in WDC). [sic] The subject was effectuating a swap of Hunter Biden’s Data from Firtash for Rudy Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, and Joe diGenova obtaining an order from Attorney General Barr lifting the US extradition order against Firtash. #LevRemembers

Not to be passed over here is the connection of John Solomon and Fox News to this story, which they each claimed to be covering as independent “journalists,” claims that have been undermined in the meantime.

Tucker Carlson famously reads his scripts directly from a teleprompter, so the fact that the following screw up made it on the air means (1) some writer needed to misread the date of Janet Yellen’s quote as 2007; (2) some video archivist finding the clip filed under the proper year, 2017; (3) a script supervisor or producer approving the video and script; and (4) Tucker Carlson himself reading the script and thinking it all fits together.

But then you go on air, and your on-air producer sees the “2017” bug in the corner and whispers in your ear, “We totally fucked up.  This piece makes no sense.  She said that in 2017, not before Bush’s Great Recession in 2007 like you just said.”  And a normal host would be embarrassed.  But thankfully, we’re talking about Tucker Carlson, who can feel no shame.

Tracking with the Orange God Emperor’s Thursday afternoon Truth Social post ripping on the Manhattan DA’s senior counsel as if he was planted there by Garland and then a statement from his campaign later in the day claiming “the Department of Justice stocked the DA’s office with top people from DC to help ‘Get Trump’ at a local level,” the New York Times reports the Trump teams’s plan for handling the all-but-certain pending indictment for Donald in New York is a “Deep State” plot engineered by Biden and Garland, calling it a “a key aspect of the campaign’s response.”

Which shows they really don’t have a lot else to work with, and given that calling Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg a racist however many fucking times has obviously not deterred him, it’s hard to see how Biden and Garland are going to be dragged into this in a way swing voters will actually buy.

The same can’t be said of Republicans rivals like Tiny D, Mike Pence, and Nimrata “Nikki” Haley, as the Times reports the Trump team plans to squeeze them to go on the record on whether they’re for or against Donald being prosecuted. That’s actually a smart move as it’s hard to see which one would be the “right” answer for them. Says a quite lot that being indicted will help Trump a lot more in the Republican primary than it will in the general against the incumbent president.

“Venus has a geologically young surface, but it is unknown whether it has ongoing active volcanism. From 1990 to 1992, the Magellan spacecraft imaged the planet’s surface using synthetic aperture radar. We examine volcanic areas on Venus that were imaged two or three times by Magellan and identify a ~2.2 km2 volcanic vent that changed shape in the eight months between two radar images. Additional volcanic flows downhill from the vent are visible in the second epoch images, though we cannot rule out that they were present but invisible in the first epoch due to differences in imaging geometry. We interpret these results as ongoing volcanic activity on Venus,” says the abstract of a new report by Jet Propulsion Laboratory eggheads Robert Herrick and Scott Hensley.

Cokehead Larry Kudlow didn’t even have the right figure earlier this afternoon – hours after it was debunked by multiple sources – as it was $73 million, not $75 million the chodes at the Claremont Institute falsely claimed Silicon Valley Bank had contributed to Black Lives Matter.

A three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals – two of them appointed by Trump – on Thursday unanimously ruled heels-wearing Florida Gov Ron DeSantis’s “Stop-WOKE” act restricting how race can be taught in schools is unconstitutional, blocking its enforcement, Politico reports.

“The Court did not rule on the merits of our appeal,” said DeSantis spokesworm Bryan Griffin in a statement and goddamn we could swear we’ve heard that one before from right wingers reacting to a loss in court. “The appeal is ongoing, and we remain confident that the law is constitutional.”

President Joe Biden and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg derailed two more freight trains this week, one filled with corn syrup in Mohave County, Arizona on Wednesday and another filled with some other stuff that isn’t chemically hazardous either in Glendale, Kentucky on Thursday.

Both derailments occurred in heavily pro-Trump counties, but the lack of a toxic spill calls into question exactly what Biden and Buttigieg’s plans are here. Are they so incompetent that they screwed up at genocide and forgot to make sure the trains they derailed were carrying hazardous chemicals that would wipe out the conservative rural white populations of these areas? Probably.

National Zero will resume our regular news coverage now that we’ve sandbagged our right wing readers with having to explain a plot hole in their narrative. We hope they can figure this one out.

More than two dozen Trump minions and Mar-a-Lago staff members have been subpoenaed to testify to a federal grand jury – and at least one of them testified on Thursday – that’s investigating the disgraced former president’s handling of classified documents, sources tell CNN.

Trump communications aide Margo Martin, who worked in the White House during his administration but then moved with him to Florida, testified before the grand jury on Thursday. “They’re casting an extremely wide net – anyone and everyone who might have seen something,” a source said.

Sanofi, one of the three major producers of insulin in the US market, with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, announced Thursday they’ll be capping the price of insulin at $35 month for both insured and uninsured patients, following the other two giants in making the move, NBC News reports.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is seeking to compel Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to testify in front of a grand jury about a call with the disgraced former president on June 24, 2022 while investigators were building evidence that the fat bastard was trying to obstruct justice and hide stolen classified documents sought by a subpoena, ABC News reports. The call would have been on the same day that the feds issued a subpoena for surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago after they had learned Donald had ordered his staff to hide boxes of files.

Back in December Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg announced that Colangelo had joined his staff as Senior Counsel after serving two years in the Justice Department where he “helped to oversee the Antitrust, Civil, Civil Rights, Environment and Natural Resources, and Tax Divisions, including review of significant hate crime matters,” which, maybe aside from the last one (and the Tax Division), doesn’t sound like anything relevant to Trump. So we guess probably the Gateway Pundit or some other dogshit site found that this random dude, for whom there’s no evidence is involved in the current push to prosecute Trump, just happened to take the job in Bragg’s office and that immediately becomes evidence that Merrick Garland is secretly pulling the strings here.

It makes sense when you ignore the fact that Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump for federal crimes that could put him away for the rest of his life rather than a novel state-level prosecution for covering up that he had sex with a pornstar for 90 seconds in 2006.