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One of the more bizarre disclosures of Donald Trump’s deposition in the lawsuit against his company by protesters roughed up by his security team is that Trump seems to be deathly afraid of fruit.

Yes, you read that right:  fruit… like, the stuff you eat.  Or, at least, should.  Trump thinks fruit can kill you.  According to the Daily Beast, Trump testified, under oath, that he believes fruit can kill you.

Okay, that’s a little simplistic.  He’s talking about thrown fruit, not like, bits of grapefruit building up in your arteries causing a heart attack.  And Trump meant the actual fruit, not like, canned fruit.  Or a watermelon dropped from a great height.  Trump testified he thought thrown fruit like a tomato would kill you.  Or another commonly thrown fruit, the pineapple, Trump said.  As if thrown pineapples are a thing.

Alleged child sex trafficker and guy who really wants to be the drive-time deejay on the classic rock station Matt Gaetz, Republican Representative from Floriduh, wants the Fox audience to know how ashamed he is of Republican House Leaders McCarthy, Scalise and Cheney because they called out his inflammatory language after the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress.  He even jokes (?) that McCarthy isn’t trustworthy enough to have an account on Trump’s failing social media app Truth Social, like there’s some sort of application process and the slow start isn’t because Devin Nunes is so stupid he sued a fictional cow.

We really shouldn’t report that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is going to seize Mar-a-Lago from former President Trump and demolish it just because he can. That would be completely irresponsible because we haven’t seen any evidence whatsoever that is DeSantis’s plan. Even though it would make sense and it feels like it’s probably true isn’t enough to go on here.

After all former President Trump is the greatest threat to DeSantis’s ambitions to become the 47th president of the United States, so why wouldn’t he use his powers simply to make Trump’s life miserable? We’re just asking questions here. Wellll now that we bring them up, might as well just go ahead and ask them right? Like it wouldn’t hurt to just throw out a few hypotheticals such as “What if DeSantis’s most loyal Florida National Guardsmen were planning a raid on Mar-a-Lago because DeSantis has false evidence that Trump is planning to assassinate him and therefore it’s more of a preemptive strike”, right? We mean, if we just take that presupposition and stop acting like it’s just a hypothetical scenario but an accepted reality then we haven’t really crossed an ethical line in journalism, have we? We’re still good people who should have no trouble sleeping at night, right?

Justice Department: “The Justice Department announced that Kenneth Pilon, 61, has been charged by information in federal district court with willfully intimidating and attempting to intimidate citizens from engaging in lawful speech and protests in support of Black Lives Matter. According to the filed information, Pilon called nine Starbucks stores in Michigan and told the employees answering his calls to tell Starbucks employees wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts that ‘the only good n***er is a dead n***er.’ Pilon told one employee, ‘I’m gonna go out and lynch me a n***er.'”

“Over the course of the next month, Pilon left four nooses in parking lots and a fifth noose inside of a 7-Eleven store. Pilon attached each noose to a handwritten note, reading: ‘An accessory to be worn with your ‘BLM’ t-shirt. Happy protesting!’ This case is being investigated by the FBI. Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Turkelson for the Eastern District of Michigan and Trial Attorney Tara Allison of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are prosecuting the case.”

Following the revelation of text messages to and from former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows including one in which unfaithful conspiracy-loving housewife Marjorie Taylor Greene begged him to get the fat former president to institute “Marshall Law” just days before the Biden Inauguration, investigators with the House January 6th Select Committee are looking into how close the Trump Administration came to using emergency presidential powers to remain in power even after the Capitol riot in January 2021, the Washington Post reports.

While there’s no evidence yet of exactly how close Trump came to invoking an emergency, the existence of not one but two December 2020 executive orders drafted to seize voting machines and the unverified but pretty fucking solid hypothesis that the Capitol was deliberately left unguarded on January 6th by the Pentagon as to deprive Trump of the manpower to use unrest as an impetus to declare an insurrection and hijack the vote certification in themselves make it clear such possibilities were not just confined to the wet dreams of QAnon fanboys. Per the Post, more of these unrealized coup steps are coming to the fore with Congressman Scott Perry’s helpful suggestions of how to pull it off appearing in Meadows’ texts. “From an Intel friend: DNI needs to task NSA to immediately seize and begin looking for international far related to Dominion,” Perry, a retired Army pilot and Brigadier General, texted Meadows on November 12th, 2020

New Trump Media and Technolgy Group Director Kash Patel told the Post you libs are drinking too much Blue Kool Aid and it’s total TDS. “President Trump never had any intention to abuse emergency powers, I was completely open with the committee. I have also repeatedly asked the committee to release the transcript from my hearing and look forward to that being shared with the American people,” said the guy Trump was going to appoint as Deputy FBI director and then fire Chris Wray so he would become acting director, before he scored his sweet new gig at Truth Social.

Don’t you dare come between Rachel Scheuerman and her flavored bread-type products available at pizza chains, ’cause she’ll put a-hurtin’ on ya!  According to KFOR NBC-4 in Oklahoma City, the woman from Enid slapped a teenage worker at a Little Ceasar’s shop because the store had run out of crazy bread.

The 71-year-old Scheuerman had ordered two pizzas–or what Little Ceasars calls pizza–and her beloved crazy bread, but when she went to pick it up, the teenage boy working the register had to inform her the store was out of her starchy treat.  This sent Scheuerman into a rage during which she screamed a racial slur at the cashier and slapped him across the face through the drive-thru window.

“She proceeds to call him the ‘n-word,’” said attorney Ronald “Skip” Kelly. “She don’t just call him the ‘n-word.’ She prefaces with ‘you f-ing n-word.’”  She asked the boy if the slurs hurt him, to which he replied maturely, “no.”  At that point, Scheuerman got out of her car, walked up to the window and slapped him.

The body of 45-year-old Valentin Broeksmit, a self-described “comically terrible spy,” was found on the campus of a California high school Monday, with authorities unable to determine a cause of death, although there is no foul play likely, KCBS Los Angeles reports.

Broeksmith provided hundreds of pages of documents to Congressional investigators and federal agents detailing information about Deutsche Bank operations, its connections to the Russian government, and hundreds of millions of dollars in loans Trump received from Deutsche Bank at a time when Trump’s financial mismanagement prompted reputable banks to avoid doing business with him.

Broeksmith obtained the documents when cleaning out the property of his recently-deceased stepfather, who had been an executive with Deutsche Bank. 

In a departure from recent presidential clemency grants, President Joe Biden issued three presidential pardons and commuted the sentences of 75 others, but not one of them had a previous position in the White House, played a role in the Biden campaign, nor did any of them have a business relationship with someone in the White House.

As NPR reports, Biden granted pardons to three individuals.  The entire clemency list can be found here.

• Abraham W. Bolden, Sr., of Chicago an 86-year-old former U.S. Secret Service agent and was the first African American to serve on a presidential detail.  In 1964, Mr. Bolden was charged with offenses related to attempting to sell a copy of a Secret Service file; his first trial ended with a hung jury, but he was convicted in a second.  Afterwards, key witnesses claimed they were told to lie on the stand by the prosecutor.
• Betty Jo Bogans is a 51-year-old Houston woman who was convicted in 1998 of possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine in Texas after attempting to transport drugs for her boyfriend and his accomplice, neither of whom were detained or arrested.  Bogans received a seven year prison sentence, a higher than typical sentence for such an offense for a first-time offender.
• Dexter Jackson of Athens, Georgia, a 52-year-old man who was convicted in 2002 for using his business, a pool hall, to facilitate the distribution of marijuana in the Georgia.  Jackson was not personally involved in trafficking marijuana, but allowed marijuana distributors to use his pool hall to facilitate drug transactions.

All of the 72 commutations were for non-violent offenders who received unusually long prison sentences, mandated by minimum sentencing guidelines at the time of their convictions, but which have since been radically reduced.

Telling the judge its investigation is “near the end,” the New York State Attorney General’s Office told the court that it is close to unraveling the “Russian nesting doll” that is Trump Organization’s financial dealings, CNN reports.

Kevin Wallace, senior enforcement counsel at the New York State Attorney General’s Office, told the court on Monday that prosecutors are moving quickly, but they still want to examine two cell phones belonging to Donald Trump and the laptop and desktop of his longtime executive assistant Rhona Graff.

Donald Trump himself and his company, the Trump Organization, have been under investigation for years by the state for shady financial dealings such as manipulating the value of properties to fit their needs:  artificially increasing the stated value to aid with loan applications or lowering the claimed value to lower taxes. 

Gazprombank Vice President Igor Volobuev has quit his job and defected to Ukraine, where he plans to join the Kyiv territorial defense, CNN reports on an interview Volobuev gave to the independent Russian website “The Insider”. “I could no longer be in Russia. I am Ukrainian by nationality, I was born in Akhtyrka, I could no longer observe from the outside what Russia is doing to my homeland,” said Volobuev, adding “My homeland is in danger now, and I cannot live a well-fed, contented life while my father, who lives in Akhtyrka, is being killed, when my relatives, acquaintances, friends are being killed… This is a crime on the part of Putin, the Russian authorities, and, in fact, the Russian people.” Volobuev is the second former Gazprombank exec to fall out with Russian leadership in recent weeks after fellow ex-VP at the bank Vladislav Avayev and his family were found shot dead at home last week, which probably made Volobuev’s decision a little easier.

Republican Michigan state Rep Matt Maddock – husband of state Republican Party Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock and high ranking Trump minion – was expelled from the state House GOP caucus on Tuesday, with no explanation for why given by the leadership, the Detroit Free Press reports. A spokesman for state House Speaker Jason Wentworth said “the caucus doesn’t discuss internal issues,” in a text to the Free Press. Last year the Maddocks were accused, and maybe not baselessly even though the guy leveling the accusation was that Jovan Pulitzer dipshit (famous for the “Bamboo Ballots” conspiracy theory in Arizona), of running a racket in which they were taking kickbacks from Republican candidates in exchange for Trump endorsements.

The nature of these kickbacks was not specified by Pultizer, as in it wasn’t clear if the Maddocks were illegally taking checks personally or if it was an unethical but still technically legal internal shakedown of campaign funds from the candidates to the state party and then to Trump, but it’d be interesting to know if it were a factor in Matt Maddock’s exile. There certainly is something to it, given that out of 18 state legislative endorsements by Trump so far for 2022, 10 of them are for seats in Michigan, with six in Texas and two in Arizona making up the remainder.

As Trump administration scandals go, it was right on brand:  inviting a business associate of the family onto a White House council; in exchange, getting a sweet loan for the family; and then rewarding the associate with a government contract, as was reported here in the summer of 2020.

But Wednesday, the Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a report detailing a potentially corrupt federal coronavirus loan to a struggling trucking company whose chief financier received an appointment to a White House board and gave Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s company a $184 million loan, the New York Times reports.

Created with the merger of Yellow Trucking and Roadway, YRC Trucking received a $700 million loan from the federal government in 2020 for pandemic relief when the company had been struggling mightily in the years prior to the pandemic and being ineligible for the loan prior to the intervention of Trump administration officials. 

“Nearly a year and a half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about. Fewer still understand why former President Donald Trump and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the ‘stolen’ election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen. January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual voting fraud. It was always and only about an election that Trump lost fair and square, under legislatively promulgated election rules in a handful of swing states that he and other Republicans contend were unlawfully changed by state election officials and state courts to expand the right and opportunity to vote, largely in response to the Covid pandemic. The Republicans’ mystifying claim to this day that Trump did, or would have, received more votes than Joe Biden in 2020 were it not for actual voting fraud, is but the shiny object that Republicans have tauntingly and disingenuously dangled before the American public for almost a year and a half now to distract attention from their far more ambitious objective.”

“That objective is not somehow to rescind the 2020 election, as they would have us believe. That’s constitutionally impossible. Trump’s and the Republicans’ far more ambitious objective is to execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in 2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if Trump or his anointed successor loses again in the next quadrennial contest. The last presidential election was a dry run for the next,” writes former US 4th District Court of Appeals Judge J Michael Luttig in a CNN editorial. Both dipshit Senator Ted Cruz and fascist lawyer John Eastman clerked for Luttig, with Cruz once publicly describing Luttig as “like a father” to him. Luttig for his part has already made it pretty clear the prodigal cuck won’t be welcomed back.

The newest Politico/Morning Consult survey asked respondents a series of questions “Consider if a candidate for political office did the following. Would it be a major problem for that candidate to earn your support, a minor problem, or would it not be a problem?” with each transgression separately and man did 2020 Trump voters show their true colors yet again.

27% of Trump 2020 voters said “accused of making transphobic remarks” was “not a problem”, 38% a “minor problem”, and 25% a “major problem”, versus 6%, 23%, and 65% respectively for Biden voters. 12% of Trump 2020 voters said “accused of anti-semitism” was “not a problem”, 28% said it’s a “minor problem”, 48% a “major problem”, versus 4%, 17%, and 72% respectively for Biden voters and even that’s probably inflated by the kind of MAGA asshole who thinks legitimately criticizing Israel is the same thing as anti-semitism. 25% of Trump 2020 voters said “accused of making homophobic remarks” was “not a problem”, 41% said it’s a “minor problem”, 25% a “major problem”, versus 4%, 19%, and 70% respectively for Biden voters. 15% of Trump 2020 voters said “accused of making racist remarks” was “not a problem”, 40% said it’s a “minor problem”, 37% a “major problem”, versus 4%, 12%, and 79% respectively for Biden voters.

4% of Trump 2020 voters said “accused of domestic violence” was “not a problem”, 23% said it’s a “minor problem”, 66% a “major problem”, versus 1%, 12%, and 82% respectively for Biden voters. 6% of Trump voters said “sexual misconduct or abuse” was “not a problem”, 22% said it’s a “minor problem”, 66% a “major problem”, versus 3%, 9%, and 84% respectively for Biden voters.

“Today, we welcome home Trevor Reed and celebrate his return to the family that missed him dearly. Trevor, a former U.S. Marine, is free from Russian detention. I heard in the voices of Trevor’s parents how much they’ve worried about his health and missed his presence. And I was delighted to be able to share with them the good news about Trevor’s freedom. I’m grateful for the tireless and dedicated work of Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens, U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation John Sullivan, and many others across our government to ensure that Trevor came home safely. The negotiations that allowed us to bring Trevor home required difficult decisions that I do not take lightly. His safe return is a testament to the priority my Administration places on bringing home Americans held hostage and wrongfully detained abroad. We won’t stop until Paul Whelan and others join Trevor in the loving arms of family and friends” said President Joe Biden in a Wednesday statement announcing Reed’s return.

Reed, was arrested in 2019 on likely bogus charges of assaulting a Moscow cop one night when he was shitfaced drunk and sentenced to 9 years in prison. In exchange for Reed, US officials returned Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenk, convicted in 2010 of smuggling cocaine. Not a bad deal.

On Tuesday Republican Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos moved extend the contract of fat former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s “review” the 2020 election, caving to a primary threat from fat former President Trump, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. Vos had previously demanded Gableman wrap it up by the end of April after Gableman repeatedly blew deadlines and issued a batshit interim report accusing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of a crime for donating to the budgets of underfunded local elections agencies in the state and concluding the 2020 result could be “decertified” in the state. It can’t be.

The Oklahoma Election Board has ruled Republican state Rep Sean Roberts must use his real name and not “The Patriot” on the ballot when he runs for Oklahoma Labor Commissioner, the AP reports. The board denied the request after determining that because Roberts isn’t generally known as “The Patriot” in other contexts and the nickname appears to be contrived solely for this race.

Meaning they theoretically would have done it if Roberts had run some commercials calling himself Sean “The Patriot” Roberts in previous campaigns. The denial comes a week after Trump fanboy Dave Williams sued Colorado Secretary of State Jen Griswold for denying a request to be listed as Dave “Let’s Go Brandon” Williams on the ballot for the GOP House primary the state’s 5th District.

The Mouse is not worried.  The Walt Disney Company sent a letter to shareholders Tuesday saying that the theatrics performed by the uncostumed characters in Tallahassee was all for naught:  no legislation can void the special jurisdictional district, as the Miami Herald reports.

In its only public statement issued to date about the controversy, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a division of Disney, noted that the original agreement prevented the state from dissolving the district until all debt is paid by Disney.  Disney said it would continue to operate as normal.

This may be a blessing in disguise for Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis–and it may not have been an accidental oversight.  The nullification of the nullification, which was signed by DeSantis last week, will mean residents of the counties around Disneyworld won’t pay an additional up to 25% in property taxes to cover the lost revenue from Disney payments. 

President Joe Biden said Monday that he was considering forgiving a significant amount of the student debt held by Americans in a fulfillment of a campaign pledge to held young, debt-burdened adults, CBS News reports.

During an hour-and-a-half long meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Biden said that he is considering different options to help lighten the financial burden of education loans held by 43 million borrows, owing $1.6 trillion in debt.

“The president never mentioned an amount nor did the president say that he was going to wipe out all student debt,” California Democrat Tony Cardenas, a member of the caucus, said. “He did a dialogue with us about the differential between young people who went to public schools or private schools and we CHC members said he should focus on both. And he said, ‘Okay, good to know.'”