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Transcripts from a top FBI official’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in June but just this week obtained by NBC News reveal the bureau had to assign 10 agents to work full time on tracking down threats from MAGA terrorists against prosecutors and FBI personnel accused of rigging and covering up what’s an already pretty botched criminal investigations into Hunter Biden.

“We have stood up an entire threat unit to address threats that the FBI employees’ facilities are receiving. It is unprecedented. It’s a number we’ve never had before,” FBI Security Division Assistant Director Jennifer L Moore told the committee. “It is unprecedented. It’s a number we’ve never had before.” One specific target of the MAGA threats cited is Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf, accused by those two IRS assclowns of interfering in the investigation and the subject of a June Fox News report claiming she blocked an FBI raid on Hunter’s home in October 2020 as to not interfere in the presidential election, like the Justice Department is supposed to avoid doing.

Wolf was far from alone however. FBI Laura Dehmlow, Section Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, accused by Republicans of falsely deeming the Hunter laptop as Russian disinformation in October 2020, was the target of multiple threats after the committee singled her out.

On Thursday the NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study team released their final report “containing a series of recommendations for how the agency could help to move our understanding of UAP forward.” We skimmed it and it does not appear to cover any new images of potential extraordinary objects in the skies, but we’ll carry the briefing on the off chance they show something interesting – and more credible than the dead bodies Mexican congress saw this week.

“After invoking the statutory right to a speedy trial, Defendants Chesebro and Powell filed motions asking that their cases be severed from each other and the additional 17 defendants. The Court held a hearing to consider their arguments on September 6, 2023, after which the State submitted supplemental briefing on September 12, 2023. Considering the record, law, and arguments of counsel, the Court finds that to the extent Defendants Chesebro and Powell request severance from each other, the motions are DENIED. However, after considering the parties’ filings and without the need for a hearing, the Court further finds that severing the remaining 17 co-defendants is simply a procedural and logistical inevitability, and thus the motions to sever from Defendants Chesebro and Powell are GRANTED IN PART. Finally, the motions to stay the proceedings of this Court pending appellate resolution of any federal removal actions are DENIED,” says a Thursday order from Fulton County, Georgia Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, severing the two MAGA lawyers from the other 17 co-defendants but denying their motions to separate their trials from each other.

Further down the ruling is the date: “To eliminate any doubts that the statutory speedy trial deadline has been met, the Court will endeavor to have a jury selected and sworn by November 3, 2023,” just a little later than the October 23 start originally targeted by Fulton County prosecutors.

I am pleased to continue USA Memorabilia’s tradition of celebrating the season with A Red, White and Blue Christmas. This year, I found myself looking to my love for our great nation for inspiration. May everyone experience an abundance of peace & love during the holiday season.… pic.twitter.com/DZN42LJdLv

— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) September 14, 2023

A new Monmouth University/Washington Post survey of South Carolina GOP primary voters finds fat former President Trump leading former South Carolina Governor Nimrata “Nikki” Haley 46 to 18 percent, with Senator Tim Scott in third at 10 percent and Ron DeSantis at an abysmal 9 percent.

The Biden Administration had been prepared for House MAGA Republicans to come up with a bullshit impeachment inquiry for more than a year, with only really the timing taking them slightly by surprise on Tuesday – two days earlier than they had expected – sources tell Politico Playbook of a White House otherwise fully armed and operational to take on a disorganized, half-assed effort.

Biden’s campaign is readying a PR offensive a source says is centered on “hammering Republicans for… trying to use this impeachment as a way to to help Donald Trump’s political prospects. And telling the American people, ‘This is an effort to damage President Biden. It is all about getting revenge and vengeance,'” for the two times Trump was impeached for trying to derail Biden.

Meanwhile, Colorado Freedom Caucasian Ken Buck still does not appear anywhere near on-board with the effort, telling the Daily Beast it’s a major “self-inflicted wound” for low-testosterone House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “He’s the one that raised the issue of impeachment. Everybody on the outside wants to talk about it, let them talk about it – we have an institution and we have to keep it moving. How do you go to Democrats and say, ‘I need your vote on the [continuing government funding resolution],’ right after I’ve said, ‘I’m going to beat your president?’ It’s crazy,” Buck added.

Two other House Republicans went on record with Beast to express similar wariness of McCarthy’s feckless, ill-advised move. “I wouldn’t be pre-committed to a course of action,” said North Carolinian Dan Bishop. “If there’s no there there, then there’s no there there. Then we say ‘Hey, you were right, we were wrong, let’s move on down the road,’” Oklahoman Kevin Hern said. Of course they are Republicans and this could all very easily change. After all it took McCarthy just 11 days to change his mind about whether an impeachment inquiry required a full floor vote from the House.

Go from the face of the fool; you get no knowledge from such lips.

Proverbs 14:7

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 14, 2023

This is what to expect when conservative leaders eliminate reproductive health care and education:  Texas saw a 22% jump in the number of syphilis cases from 2020 to nearly 26,000 cases in 2022, more than double the number of cases seen in 2017, the Texas Tribune reports.

In 2022, the number includes 950 cases of newborns with syphilis via infections passed along in pregnancy by an infected patient; that accounted for one-third of the 2,850 cases of congenital syphilis recorded in the US that year.

After getting a 90-day extension, New York Republican Congressman and unheralded inventor of sand George Santos failed to file his required financial disclosures with the House Ethics Committee, even after a 30-day grace period subsequent to the 90-day extension expired, the Associated Press reports, meaning he’s four months late on the mandatory filing.

Saying the deadline was missed because he wanted to make sure the disclosed information was accurate–George always makes sure the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed in the signatures he forges–Santos also claimed various deadlines from his legal and tax issues on federal and state levels also contributed to the delay.  The initial deadline was in May.

“Despite my legal team’s and my best efforts to meet the deadlines, additional auditing and tax filing for 2022 remained,” Santos said in an email to the AP. “I still have until November 2023 to submit my 2022 taxes with the IRS in order to avoid legal troubles. Because House filing deadlines conflict with IRS regulations, this misalignment exists,”

“We’re using lethal force against the cartels,” flailing Florida tough guy Ron DeSantis asserts to a cultish studio audience at a supposed news program on a proven propaganda network.  “If they’re bringing fentanyl in, breaking into our country, ah [note the momentary struggle to recall the landing line], we’re gonna leave ’em stone cold dead at the border.  Trust me, they will get the message.”

Set aside the illegality of executing civilians extrajudicially at the border.  Given that most fentanyl comes across the border at authorized border check points, and the people smuggling it in are usually Americans, DeSantis’s authoritarian policy proposal is the red meat the far right craves, but it’s also a felony.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell called out House Oversight Chair James Comer for lying about being stonewalled by Biden after Comer attempted to get Biden’s financial records in a search for anything implicating wrongdoing by Biden’s father.

Lowell came with notes:  “On February 9, we wrote back to you and, while pointing out the concerns about the motive and improper basis for your requests, I specifically said, ‘I would offer to sit with you and your staff, including the ranking member and his staff, to see whether Mr. Biden has information that may inform some legitimate legislative purpose and be helpful to the Committee.’ (Lowell Ltr. at 4). You never responded to that offer. For you to now go on live television and say we did not respond or ignored your Committee’s requests is simply not true. We ask that you correct what you said, but more importantly, we remain available to have the discussion that I suggested some seven months ago.”

While pantomiming either a shrinking orb or grabbing someone by the balls, the last effective Speaker of the House of Representatives, Democratic California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi responds to CNN host Anderson Cooper’s proposal that Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy has painted himself into a corner by negotiating with terrorists by saying, “I think it’s the incredibly shrinking speakership.”

A cruise ship with more than 200 passengers on board ran aground in an isolated stretch of the Northeast Greenland National Park and because it cannot free itself, will be stranded there for days until a rescue ship arrives, CNN reports.

Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command noted that after the Ocean Explorer ran aground Monday, the hope was that Tuesday’s high tide would give the ship clearance to move out, but the water did not raise the ship enough to free itself.  The closest inspection ship that could work to free the cruise ship was 1,200 nautical miles away.

Just because Matt Gaetz is a lying piece of shit with an oversized forehead and a credibly alleged statutory rapist whose main vendetta against his boss, titular Speaker Kevin McCarthy is almost certainly the ethics investigation into those allegations doesn’t mean he’s wrong about McCarthy being “a sad, pathetic man.” He’s just making us uncomfortable for being right about that. Even worse was when he said something pretty funny later in the interview by jokingly mistaking a clip of McCarthy speaking to reporters for “a commercial for low [Testosterone treatments].”

With an end-of-month deadline to fund the federal government looming and the Speaker pro tem angering various factions of his caucus while trying to please others, the Republican leadership of the House pulled two key bills amid intraparty squabbling, Politico reports.

A key agriculture funding bill was suspended as the anti-choice wing of the Party attempted to insert language limiting reproductive health care into the bill.  It’s a goal of the Handmaid Caucus to reduce reproductive health access by inserting provisions in key bills.  The practice annoys conservatives who want the legislature to pass “clean” bills as well as a dozen or so moderate Republicans who have let Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy know they do not support such moves.

Later Wednesday, a $826 billion defense spending bill was suspended because McCarthy did not have the support of some conservatives members of the GOP caucus.  Members of the Freedom Caucus are demanding McCarthy specify budget cuts he’ll include, both inside and outside the defense appropriation, with other members objecting to the Biden Administration supplying arms to Ukraine.

In a motion seeking dismissal of the charges in the Fulton County, Georgia RICO case against her, insane MAGA lawyer Sidney “Kraken” Powell again claimed in a court filing that her goons had authorization from the Coffer County Board of Elections to take whatever they wanted from the Dominion Voting Systems server housed at the Coffee County, Georgia Clerk’s office when they were trying to find proof the 2020 election was “hacked” in January 2021. This time however, she backed off from claiming the decision was “unanimous,” merely calling it authorization and saying one of their MAGA buddies, a former board member named Ed Voyles “likely received a written invitation” from the county board to go check out the machines. Still probably not going to fly.

In related news, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals set a Friday hearing in disgraced former White House cHief of Staff Mark Meadows’ bid to remove his charges to federal court. The judges? Two Obama appointees and one Clinton appointee. That just freaking sucks so badly for him.

Day 7 of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial which we haven’t been as tuned into as we probably should have been given our volume of past coverage of the Picasso-faced fascist criminal. What better time to jump in to the live feed than the expected 3:53 PM CDT appearance of Paxton’s mistress Laura Olson, whose relationship with Pax is the center of a great many of the accusations against him. Fun fact: Though she’s barred from voting in the final verdict in the trial given the very obvious personal conflict of interest, Ken’s wife, Texas state Senator Angela Paxton, will reportedly be present in the chamber while Olson testifies after 3:53 PM CDT. The exact, oddly-numbered minute of her appearance is due to a 24 hour notice rule for the defense before a witness can take the stand. Paxton’s team were informed at 3:53 PM CDT on Tuesday.

Florida MAGA federal Judge Aileen Cannon on Wednesday finally granted the protective order sought by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith in the case against fat former President Trump for stealing and hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, setting forward a process for Donald and his lawyers to review and discuss the top secret shit he took from the White House.

Trump had wanted to establish a SCIF at Mar-a-Lago so Team Orange could huddle and talk about the case against him and at first glance Cannon’s ruling did not actually address that ask while setting the rules for the discovery process. The Hill characterized it as a “sidestep” in their headline, writing Cannon’s order “does not acknowledge a request from Trump to review those documents by redesignating a space in his home as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).”

Sharp-eyed Twitter user @secretsandlaws, purportedly a former CIA attorney looked through the footnotes of the order and found that yeah, Cannon really did rule against Trump by granting a motion opposing that stupid Mar-a-Lago SCIF plan. All it took was a literal national security lawyer to scrutinize every word of the order to find out that Cannon betrayed her Orange Master.

Hunter Biden IRS “whistleblower” Gary Shapley, a guy whom we were willing to hear out and take at least sort of seriously initially before finding out that he’s being repped by that Tristan Leavitt shitweasel, might have kind of perjured himself while testifying to the House Ways and Means Committee about his investigation into Hunter back in May, according to EmptyWheel.

Like a lot of things with this Hunter Biden-David Weiss shitshow, it’s deep in the weeds and hard to grasp the significance. But that Shapley contradicted himself is unmistakeable. Basically, Shapley told a committee investigator he did not know which media outlet published a story based on a leak when literally in his handwritten notes taken during the internal meeting in question say it was the Washington Post. These notes are of course at the center of another frenzied circlejerk in the MAGAverse after Leavitt published them on Wednesday. It is a monumental struggle to focus for even a few minutes on their contents so we really have to question how the fanboys can make it from beginning to end, even with the confirmation bias giving a boost to their attention spans.

“A new investigation with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb’s discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface… The abundance of methane and carbon dioxide, and shortage of ammonia, support the hypothesis that there may be a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere in K2-18 b. These initial Webb observations also provided a possible detection of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, this is only produced by life. The bulk of the DMS in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments,” says NASA in a press release.

South of the border however, Mexican Senators were treated to a presentation in which alleged alien non-life was displayed on stage in a glass case for politicians to gawk at. The very tiny, clay-like “aliens,” said to have been recovered from an ancient dig site in Peru, supposedly have internal skeletal structures and all the other stuff that proves they really were alive at some point.