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Ever the man to run away from a fight, indicted national security threat Donald Trump may hold a rival event at the same time as the first planned Republican presidential primary debate in August, something he’s unlikely to attend, he said in a phone interview with Reuters.

Imagine the line-up:  opening acts include Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz–you gotta include him; he gets the girls–and Sean Hannity.  Intro music by Ted Nugent.  A drag performance by George Santos, and Scott Baio doing…. whatever it is Scott Baio does.

CNN reports Susan Wiles, the “PAC representative” to whom Donald Trump showed a classified map in the summer of 2021, as reported in the federal indictments, has met repeatedly with federal prosecutors, CNN reports.  A longtime Trump aide, Wiles currently works as a senior campaign official for Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Incidentally, Wiles is the daughter of Pat Summerall, the late sports broadcaster perhaps best known as the broadcast partner of John Madden for many NFL games.

The influential Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity SuperPAC has raised more than $70 million it will use to prevent Donald Trump from winning the GOP nomination for president, Reuters reports.  Having largely sat out the 2020 race in which Joe Biden defeated Trump, billionaire Charles Koch is not keeping his powder dry in the upcoming race.  Reportedly Koch believes that while Trump can win the Party’s nomination, Trump would be destined to lose to Biden again, with no chance of defeating a Biden-led ticket in the general election.  “There is a clear sense of urgency around choosing candidates who can win,” an official with the Americans for Prosperity advocacy group said. “Even a significant number of President Trump’s owns supporters are concerned about his electability and open to an alternative.”

Former Trump 2020 campaign operations manager Mike Roman, who was key in coordinating the fake electors scam in seven different states, has reached a cooperation agreement with Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team and will testify against the Trump regime in a future criminal trial over the post 2020 election coup, CNN’s Zachary Cohen reports.

Marco Rubio is, to put it gently, a fucking worm. He’s lied and made up all sorts of bullshit excuses about his Lord and Savior Donald Trump’s crimes. He left out that the campaign “canvasser” of his who got the shit kicked out of him on the street last fall was a Proud Boy-adjacent fascist who goes by “Cuban Confederate.” He’s a just barely closeted anti-semite with links to figures on the Latin American far right, among them the literal son of a Nazi SS officer. So being the right wing conservative politician he is, it isn’t exactly all that out of character for him to be alleging a vast conspiracy by the “Deep State” to keep some explosive information from the public.

Now this is obviously a fraught subject here and one that’s seen some serious friction between National Zero and a large portion of our readership in the comments. And to be fair it was admittedly a big ask to readers to consider that two young men who dialed 911 to report 10 foot tall aliens wandering around their backyard a little less than an hour after a glowing green object had fallen from the sky just might not have been making it up, even if the glowing green object was unambiguously real and its descent was captured on at least three independent cameras.

This time we’ll keep the challenge simple: Where’s the political pushback? Rubio’s the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, subordinate to Democrat Chairman Mark Warner. This NewsNation hit was two days ago. When did Warner come out and say “Rubio is full of shit”?

Neither the Justice Department nor Office of the Director of National Intelligence could locate a standing order indicted information trafficker Donald Trump said he issued mandating all classified material he took from the Oval Office be automatically declassified.

Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold, who’s using FOIA requests like a scalpel to extract information, previously received the standard “can neither confirm or deny” response, but government lawyers sent Leopald notice on Thursday that no order existed in their records.  The notification came after a judge in Massachusetts ordered the agency to reveal similar information in a different case.

Heels-wearing Florida Gov Ron DeSantis on Thursday signed a bill allowing roads in the Sunshine State to be paved with radioactive phosphate byproducts, the Sun-Sentinel’s Dan Sweeney reports.

A MAGA terrorist already wanted on a federal arrest warrant for participating in the January 6th, 2021 MAGA insurrection at the Capitol was arrested Thursday near former President Obama’s house in Washington DC where he apparently had planned an armed attack, CBS News reports.

The suspect was identified as Taylor Taranto, per NBC’s Ryan Reilly, who reports had been identified by the “Sedition Hunters” crowd back in August 2021. Taranto has been living in a van and reportedly surreptitiously showed up to another Capitol riot defendant’s sentencing in recent weeks.

House Oversight ranking member Congressman Jamie Raskin once again on Thursday demonstrated how dishonest and inept his counterpart Chairman James Comer is by using facts to undermine a key claim in the “Biden bribery” allegations made by Comer and his buddies.

Raskin brought the receipts, publishing a transcript of a 2019 interview between Rudy Giuliani’s pal Vitaly Pruss, and Russian intel asset Mykola Zlochevsky, a fugitive from Ukrainian law enforcement. The whole thing is a maze of rehashed shit from Trump’s first impeachment saga, but can be summarized in one key passage when Pruss asked “Please detail any contacts you had with VP Joe Biden and his office from 2013 through 2019. Did Hunter ever facilitate any of those contacts?”

“No one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden’s engagement,” said Zlochevsky. Of course it’s not like Comer’s going to care the shit he spent two months trying to stir up turned out to be vaporware as he’s already moved on to crying about Hunter Biden’s “sweetheart” plea deal and that sketchy “IRS whistleblower” Gary Shapley.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team are readying as many as “30 to 45 charges” to add to the 37-count federal indictment fat former President Trump already faces, with these new charges encompassing the post-2020 election coup attempt, the Independent reports.

In addition, Rudy Giuliani and several other Trump lawyers are looking at charges for their involvement in the coup attempt, per the Independent’s Andrew Feinberg, who earlier this month reported that disgraced former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had reached a cooperation agreement with Smith’s team. That reporting was a little shaky as Feinberg had originally written it was a plea deal, something Meadows’s lawyer Sideshow George Terwilliger had vehemently denied in a follow up. Terwilliger did not say there was no deal at all however.

We kind of get it that they’re probably sort of busy waiting on US and Canadian investigators to identify the partial human remains recovered from what’s left of their Titanic tour submersible and that they don’t have a CEO anymore but… well… This is probably a WordPress or Joomla website and it’d take like 10 minutes tops to remove the pages saying that they’re still selling spots on their 2024 tours of the Titanic’s wreck. And that the 2023 expedition is “currently underway.” At some point it’s just going to seem more than a little distasteful to make it sound like it’s still a thing.

The federal grand jury impaneled in Florida late last month or early this month by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith that has already hit disgraced former President Trump and his minion Walt Nauta with 38 felony counts stemming from Trump’s theft and hoarding of classified documents from the White House is still subpoenaing witnesses, the New York Times reports.

The Times doesn’t have info on who’s been subpoenaed, but suggests one of the witnesses could be Trump campaign aide Susan Wiles, the woman to whom Trump showed a stolen classified map in 2021. The development means that it’s possible the fat bastard and his Diet Coke guy could face additional or superseding counts, to say nothing of other potential defendants getting indicted too.

House GOP circlejerkers James Comer and Jim Jordan on Thursday sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday demanding interviews with a number of Justice Department officials who might be able to tell them something they can milk for more Fox News coverage.

“Our Committees are continuing to conduct oversight of the programs and operations of the Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service within their respective jurisdictions. Recent startling testimony from Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers raises serious questions about the Department’s commitment to evenhanded justice and the veracity of assertions made to the Committee on the Judiciary. In order to fully assess these allegations, testimony is required from several Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation employees. We expect your full cooperation as we arrange these transcribed interviews. From recent testimony before the Ways and Means Committee, we have identified several Department employees who we believe to possess information concerning allegations of politicization and misconduct with respect to the Department’s investigation of Hunter Biden. Specifically, the Committees seek to examine whistleblower claims that the Department’s investigation of Hunter Biden was purposely slow-walked and subjected to improper and politically motivated interference,” and blah blah blah they wrote.

An executive with Russia’s Loko-Bank tragically died of a gravity overdose brought on by sudden high-story windowing at her luxury apartment in Moscow last Friday, the Daily Mail reports.

Kristina Baikova, 28, was having a drink with a colleague in her 11th story home when her inertial mass suddenly and inexplicably dropped to a fatal level, leaving medical personnel unable to administer a life-saving pile of mattresses in time. Gravity overdoses are tragically frequent among the Russian elite due to their risky lifestyle habits and hazardous environment.

Federal prosecutors on Thursday announced three executives with Digital World Acquisition Corporation – the scam operation meant to merge with Truth Social parent Trump Media and Technology Group to turn TMTG into a publicly traded company – for insider trading charges after they leveraged their knowledge of the announcement of the still-pending and probably doomed deal to turn $22 million in illegal profits. Michael Shvartzman, Gerald Shvartzman, and Bruce Garelick bought up millions of shares in DWAC before the Trump deal was announced. All three were cuffed by FBI agents in Florida on Thursday and face decades of shower shenanigans in federal prison.

BREAKING NOOSE: Former Vice President Mike Pence secretly roped his way into Ukraine to talk policy with President Volodymyr Zelensky and tour some of the battlefield, NBC News reports.

“I believe America’s the leader of the free world. But coming here just as a private citizen – being able to really see firsthand the heroism of the Ukrainian soldiers holding the line in those woods, see the heroism of the people here in Irpin that held back the Russian army, to see families whose homes were literally shelled in the midst of an unconscionable and unprovoked Russian invasion – just steels my resolve to do my part, to continue to call for strong American support for our Ukrainian friends and allies,” Pence told NBC as he toured the town once occupied by Putin’s armies.

We don’t like Pence and regularly mock him for almost getting hanged as well as his hyper-religious weirdness. That doesn’t mean we can’t have some respect and appreciation toward him for doing the bare minimum to preserve democracy and for traveling to a war zone while his rivals – especially Trump – openly wish to leave the country for dead at the hands of an evil tyrant.

Taking the position that affirmative action equates to racism against white people, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that considering race in collect admissions violates the 14th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, thus ending race-based admissions criteria for higher education.

Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports the court ruled 6-3 that Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s inclusion of race as a factor in granting admissions illegally discriminated against white people. By including both schools in the decision, the court addresses the practice in both publicly-funded and private institutions. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the majority opinion, stated the ruling levels the playing field for non-minority applicants: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Brought by a non-profit founded in 2014 by Edward Blum, an anti-affirmative action activist who is also is also leading a lawsuit challenging affirmative action in the workplace, the case is the culmination of decades of attempts to overturn the policy, hated by conservatives because, they claim, it rewards underachievers.  Universities have argued racial diversity improves the educational experience. 

The Washington, DC city emergency management office on Thursday issued a “Code Red Alert” for air quality as smoke from raging Canadian wildfires drifted toward the capital, Politico reports

“This means very poor air quality is expected, which may be unhealthy for people with heart or lung disease, older adults, children and teens,” the bulletin said. DC is just the latest city in the nation’s eastern half to be smoked out as Chicago, Detroit, and large swaths of the Upper Midwest have for days suffered from the result of Canadian flaming. New York City is also under an air quality alert on Thursday, however the smoke is not nearly as bad as experienced earlier this month.

In their first rating of the 2024 presidential election, the eggheads at Sabato’s Crystal Ball have found only Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin as toss-ups in a Biden v Trump rematch.

Biden starts out at 260 safe/lean/likely Electoral College votes while Trump begins with 235, putting him in a deeper hole. Winning Arizona, Georgia, or Wisconsin alone puts Biden over the top at 270 (with or without Nebraska’s 2nd District, which Biden won). All three of the states reelected their incumbents last year and Crystal Ball notes “the actual results from recent elections, which suggested significant problems for Trump, seem to be a better guide than off-year polling.”