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Despite ginsuing the leading of the terrorist group using a multibladed Hellfire missile in the country last month, the United States military has concluded the terrorist group al Qaeda has not reestablished its network in Afghanistan and is limited in its ability to conduct complex international attacks, the New York Times reports.

That does not mean that the group cannot support attacks done by local cells in foreign countries, according to the assessment by the US national security community, but the scope and effectiveness of such attacks will be far less than the attacks its undertaken in the past.

The assessment also notes that since the US withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, only a few score al Qaeda fighters remain in Afghanistan, and they are not organized as a fighting force that could take on the ruling Taliban leaders.

Liberals are so cruel and mean toward Trump supporters, all too often dismissing them as uneducated rubes who can’t even write a simple sentence correctly. It’s that kind of elitist snobbery and Ivory Tower mindset that’s turning voters away from the Democrats and solidifying Republican support among the working class. There’s a party of PhDs in sociology and there’s the party of common sense regular Joes who prefer a six pack over a $13.99 organic wheat grass juice. Yet the “smart” ones can’t figure out that screaming at persuadable voters (whom they keep failing to persuade) that they are dumb is not a winning campaign strategy.

After hearing the court read five guilty verdicts on charges of child sexual assault, a Texas man chugged a water bottle that apparently contained a poisonous solution, and he died shortly thereafter, WFAA ABC-6 in Dallas reports.

Edward Peter Leclair, a 57-year-old man from Frisco, Texas, started drinking from the water bottle after the first guilty verdict was read by the judge and continued drinking as the other four were announced.  No one in the courtroom thought anything was amiss, dismissing Leclair’s action as nerves.  One of the attorneys at the prosecutor’s table, however, notice the liquid Leclair was chugging was cloudy.

Minutes later, someone on Leclair’s defense team asked a bailiff to check on their client, who had been taken to a holding cell in the courtroom.   Leclair was found unresponsive and gray; efforts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful, and he was declared dead. 

One of Donald Trump’s personal attorneys signed a statement provided to the FBI attesting that all classified documents had been removed from Mar-a-Lago and returned to federal authorities, Trump’s supper club and seasonal lodging in Florida, the New York Times reports.

The statement, made after a June 3rd visit to the estate by Justice Department attorney working in the national security branch Jay I. Bratt and other government officials who was shown the storage room of documents by two of Trump’s lawyers, Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb.  It’s unclear if either of those two attorneys or if another member of Trump’s patchwork legal team signed the letter to the DOJ.

The existence of the letter further undermines various claims by the Trump camp and his apologists who claim Trump did nothing wrong.  The letter is an apparent acknowledgment that the material stored at Mar-a-Lago were, in fact, government property and that at least a number of the documents were marked with some sort of classification.  Trump has claimed that the material were his personal papers and that they were all declassified.  It also completely undermines the claims of the various and numerous conspiracy theorists, including those on Trump’s legal team and those broadcasting on his propaganda networks, claiming the FBI planted the documents.

In the week since Dallas County, Texas officials declared a public health emergency over the monkeypox virus as superspreader event CPAC was underway in town, the case count has gone up 30.35%, from 221 to 289 cases, per a comparison of last weekend’s and this weekend’s data.

In addition, the count of suspected cases went up from 36 to 45, a 25% increase. All but 3 of the cases were in men, with the number of women infected staying the same from week to week. CPAC officials did not comment on the their right wing fan attendees’ contribution to the case count.

And yeah, while a bedrock principle of ethical journalism is that correlation is not causation, we’re not going to lose any sleep over being unprincipled here with the unsubstantiated conclusion that the Dallas-area caseload increased because of closeted gay Republicans partying while out of town away from their wives. Plus it’s not like anyone can prove it wasn’t due to CPAC. Sure, maybe someone can keep an eye on that Dallas County monkeypox web page over the next month or two and see a similar pace in the case count long after CPAC and argue pretty convincingly that the MAGA fanfest was not a “superspreader event” at all and have the data to back that up, but don’t look at us. Why would we want to spoil the satisfaction of having our own biases confirmed?

Either way, we kind of already won here. It’s not like some right winger coming back to us in like early October, saying the cases went up by roughly 30% every week since CPAC, demanding an apology and a retraction is going to walk away happy. We’ll have long since forgotten about this and found 1,000 other things to shitpost and laugh about at their expense by then.

Republicans have been given a huge advantage in the Midterms after the FBI illegally and unconstitutionally searched Mar-a-Lago for top secret government documents Trump said they had planted there, then that Obama did the same thing when he left office, before finally saying that he had actually secretly declassified all that nuclear weapons stuff and the other vital national security information. The Democrats are so much more fucked now than they were a month ago when it was all about high gas prices, inflation, and the sort of technical recession thing. None of that has anything to do with protecting constitutional freedoms and ensuring integrity of our justice system anyway, which is the kind of stuff regular Americans care deeply about.

Who cares about “open borders” if power-mad federal prosecutors raided Mar-a-Lago while Hunter Biden hasn’t been arrested for taking dick pics? And Hillary did the same thing too with her bathroom server, which proves Trump didn’t do anything wrong. If they can do this to Trump then they can do it to you also if you also stole top secret government documents. How are Democrats supposed to compete for suburban soccer mom vote when Republicans are telling them the Biden-Garland gestapo could just barge into their homes at any time and find the classified nuclear weapons schematics and inventory data they took from a secure government facility?

All the Democrats have is “ORANGE MAN BAD! ORANGE MAN VIOLATE FEDERAL CRIMINAL STATUTES USC § 793, § 1519, AND § 2071!” plus all that legislation they passed, and a nascent pledge to void the Senate filibuster and protect reproductive healthcare if given sufficient mandate by voters. That’s basically nothing. It doesn’t do anything to inspire and motivate voters like trying to find the “informant” that told federal law enforcement that Trump stole top secret documents and making Merrick Garland pay for this crime against America. They are so freaking lucky no cops or FBI agents got killed by that nail gun guy in Ohio on Thursday. That would’ve boosted Republicans even more because it shows what happens when people are angry at grave injustices.

Complete piece of shit former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler on Friday found photos, the home addresses, and the at least one of the social media profiles of the children of the FBI agents who signed off on the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the Daily Beast reports. Ziegler was on able to track this down because, their names were unredacted in the copy of the search warrant posted by Breitbart, obviously leaked from Trump allies (or possibly just directly to Ziegler himself on top of Breitbart).

The scumbag complained that his post containing the agents’ personal info was removed from Truth Social, saying on Telegram the low-rent Trump Twitter clone had done so for “ZERO reason… Didn’t violate 18 USC 119 or anything else.” Justifying his actions, Ziegler then said “We have to have faces. There are people ruining America, and they have names, and emails, and addresses.”

. @JesseBWatters on Mar-a-Lago raid: The Democrats re-elected Donald Trump https://t.co/7AvborLqVp

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 13, 2022

The whole thing backfired. If you look at every single swing state impeachment is now under water. #TheFive pic.twitter.com/U9J5c0lUVA

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) December 3, 2019

Just to make sure there wasn’t any “fraud” that could somehow have caused the MAGA side to lose by 165,000 vote, or 59 to 41 percent, in this month’s Kansas abortion referendum vote, the AP reports All the woman who said she’s “seen data” about the ballot measure has to do is post a surety bond to the Secretary of State’s office. The amount on the bond is not clear.

• A former President of the United States of America is being investigated under the Espionage Act.  Let that sink in.  Jesus fucking Christ…  
• …meanwhile, the sitting president is on the verge of passing landmark economic, environmental and senior care act that will positively impact generations to come.  What a bookend to the week.
• The US is not a “Third World” banana republic as panty-twisted conservatives claimed after the Mar-a-Lago search.  We’re a First World Constitutional Republic, where no one is above the law, and we’re acting like it. 
• The “Lock Her Up” crowd is upset that laws are being legitimately enforced using the justice system.  Cry me a river.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume LXXXII”

According to a statement read on Fox News, Donald Trump claims that he had a “standing order” that any documents he removed from the White House at the end of his term, including all documents that were at Mar-a-Lago (and presumably his Bedminister and New York City residences) were “automatically declassified.”

British UFO (or “UAP” if you want to be a dick about it) nerds are bloody excited about this newly leaked 1990 photo of a really strange looking object that was spotted being followed by an RAF fighter jet over Scotland. It sure is a weird looking weather balloon or experimental aircraft or swamp gas or hallucination or whatever the hell they’re going to say it is now.

Alina Habba, another one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, has admittedly repeatedly given Trump such bad advice, disclosing confidential discussions with her client on Real America News Network…. so maybe she didn’t disclose it to anyone because… I mean, c’mon… who’s watching Real American News, huh?

“Unfortunately, what we’re dealing with here, it’s, I say it 100 times, if he’s not leading in the polls, I’ve sat across from him every time he gets frustrated and I say to him, ‘Mr. President, if you would like me to resolve all your litigation, you should announce that you are not running for office, and all of this will stop.’  That’s what they want.”

I’m not aware of any legal doctrine that wipes away indictments and civil judgments against someone in exchange for not running for an elected office.

Plenty of reports about what Donald Trump allegedly did. Be skeptical. https://t.co/rryWmyXe7C will tell you what's real and what's fictional.

— Bill O'Reilly (@BillOReilly) August 12, 2022

International sanctions and the cost of a protracted invasion of Russia have led to the contraction of the nation’s economy by 4% in the second quarter as the price of sanctions and the cost of supporting a six-month invasion of Ukraine mount, the New York Times reports.

The drop was more than a seven percentage point swing from the first quarter, for which government officials announced a 3.6% increase, prior to most sanctions having an impact.  Western sanctions, put in place in March after the invasion of Ukraine started February 24th.

About half of Russia’s foreign hard currency and gold reserves were frozen in foreign financial institutions, and because of sanctions by more than 30 countries it cannot access around $300 billion held there.   That loss of access to cash caused Russia to default on its foreign debt for the first time since 1917.

US Attorney General Dark Merrick Garland

Conservative Evangelical church syndicate Southern Baptist Convention confirmed Friday it is under federal criminal investigation for sexual abuse, the AP reports. “Individually and collectively each SBC entity is resolved to fully and completely cooperate with the investigation. While we continue to grieve and lament past mistakes related to sexual abuse, current leaders across the SBC have demonstrated a firm conviction to address those issues of the past and are implementing measures to ensure they are never repeated in the future,” the SBC leadership said in a statement, coming at the end of a very long fucking week for MAGAmerica.

“What they’re doing to President Trump is a political persecution [sic].  Merrick Garland has abused his position of power as Attorney General to politically persecute [sic] Joe Biden’s enemies,” The six-toed (on both feet) Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Ga.) asserts as a bunch of people with better things to do cheer the pass of the Inflation Reduction Act in the background.  “The whole purpose of this is to prevent President Trump from ever being able to hold office so Imma my way inta the Capitol right now and I’m introducing articles of impeachment on Merrick Garland because we cannot tolerate this in America where our great institution are welded [sic] and abused in such a way to defeat people’s political enemies.  That’s not what this is for and, and it should never exist.”

I’m not sure what Marge is impeaching Garland for, exactly, given that the search warrant was approved by a (by all accounts) Republican Florida magistrate judge, as the Constitution requires, and it found Trump was in illegal possession of classified documents.  Marge will never, ever be on the right side of history.

Remember when Joe Manchin “betraying” Republicans was like a huge deal? No? That’s okay. But it passed the House on Friday, just a little while ago. Someone tell The Hill, they didn’t report it yet.

Last night while subbing for Tucker Carlson, we showed you an image of Judge Bruce Reinhart w/ Ghislaine Maxwell that was sourced on screen to a meme pulled from Twitter & wasn’t real. This depiction never took place & we wanted to make clear that we were showing a meme in jest.

— Brian Kilmeade (@kilmeade) August 12, 2022

Short story slightly longer: As Charlie Kirk fans know, Tucker Carlson is on vacation this week, so the DOJ and Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart saw their opening to raid Mar-a-Lago, and in response Tucker’s fill-in, Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade went ahead and acted like a pic of Ghislaine Maxwell massaging Jeffrey Epstein’s feet photoshopped with Reinhart’s head over Epstein’s was real. This is because Reinhart defended Epstein on his initial charges back in 2007 – which then-federal prosecutor and future Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta let Epstein off the hook on. But don’t tell the Trump fans that. Definitely don’t tell them their dude Dersh defended Epstein too (and almost certainly was a client of his services). Or that Bill Barr’s dad literally fucking hired Epstein to teach math to high school girls back in 1970.

Actually they hate Bill Barr now. But they didn’t hate him yet in 2019 when Epstein died under extremely suspicious circumstances in a jail operated by his Justice Department.

Update 4:55 p.m. ET:  Former Solicitor General Neal Katyal notes on MSNBC that one of the laws cited in 18 US Code § 1519 relates to destroying or altering documents that are evidence of the crime obstructing a government operation.  Katyal points out that the search of Mar-a-Lago may also have been done to uncover what wasn’t there, i.e., what was destroyed to cover up something like, say, disrupting a session of Congress designated to certify the electors from the 2020 election.

Update 4:18 p.m. ET:  First online PDF found.  Read the warrant and the receipt for property here.

Update 3:58 p.m. ET:. I just need a second to process the fact that a former President of the United States was being investigated under the Espionage Act, which by statute must mean he was looking to illegally alter or steer US policies to benefit a foreign government–and that’s the GOOD scenario.  The BAD scenario is he was an active agent of a foreign government, passing them information.