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“I could say this is a classified document; it doesn’t make it true,” a Newsmax hostess Heather Childers declares about Trump’s recorded declaration that he was showing unauthorized individuals a classified document he was unauthorized to possess.  And then she gets to the root of Trump’s legal dilemma:  “You know how Trump is.  We don’t know [if anything Trump said on the recording is true].  We don’t know.”

This seems to be the rightwing echosphere’s settled reaction to the release of the recording of Trump boasting about classified information he had in his possession after he left the White House:  Trump’s a known liar, so we can’t trust what he’s claiming on the video and what he’s claimed later.  Because while that might be an effective defense in the feeble minds of Trump supporters, proclaiming that you don’t know when he’s telling the truth isn’t a good baseline for a politician.

Republican Presidential candidate Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, apparently plans to capitalize on the GOP’s base’s ongoing thirst for uneducated, underinformed candidates:  during a recent radio interview, Suarez pleaded ignorance about one of the world’s ongoing human rights issues, according to Politico.

“What’s a Uyghur?” Suarez asked a local radio host when questioned about how he would address China’s internal human rights abuses.  The plight of the Uyghur, a Muslim ethnic minority in western China, has been a decades-long subject of international pressure on Beijing, which has ordered Uyghurs into reeducation camps where they’re routinely tortured, beaten and raped.  US-China relations will be one of the key foreign policy issues in the 2024 presidential election in which Suarez thinks he has a chance.

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court ruled against Republican efforts to kill the state’s mail-in voting system, ending the lawsuit that focused on one of Donald Trump’s key conspiracy theories in the 2020 election, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports.

More than a dozen Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers joined the suit claiming state courts had usurped the power of the legislature by permitting changes to the state’s mail-in voting procedure during the 2020 election due to the coronavirus pandemic.  This case specifically focused on the court’s decisions to allow jurisdictions to count ballots that did not have the date properly signed on various parts of Pennsylvania’s complicated mail-in ballot, which requires voters to sign and date various parts of the ballot, an interior security envelope and an exterior envelope.  The 24-page opinion notes that while the courts ruled the ballots should be counted, the ruling did not invalidate state law requiring voters handwrite the date on an exterior envelope; instead, it gave local election officials the discretion to accept a ballot they deem valid despite not having the date signed.

Republicans had used this ruling to claim the entire mail-in voting law, passed in 2019, had to be voided because the law includes a provision that the entire law gets scrapped if a court strikes down any provision of the law.  Because the law required a signature on the outside of the envelope and the court ruled the signature unnecessary, Republicans argued unsuccessfully, then the entire law must be struck down.  However, the court pointed out that its ruling was for exceptional cases; it did not strike down the signature requirement.  Republicans vowed to take the case to the state Supreme Court, which has repeated ruled against GOP attempts to handcuff Pennsylvania voters.

Paul Ryan acolyte Brendan Buck tells Axios there’s still no real path forward for the Republican Party with pro-choice voters, saying the situation’s really only gotten worse for the GOP.

“The last election was surprising to a lot of people in the way that [abortion] really became a lightning rod and had such a significant impact on the outcome of the election. I don’t know that the party has really figured out what to do about that,” said Buck, adding that candidates are “probably hoping that they can avoid the issue to a certain degree, but I imagine we’re going to learn once again, this is not going away and that, once again, this is a liability politically.”

Roseanne Barr is an odd conservative icon:  she’s disgraced the National Anthem, she’s queer, and she became famous thanks to sinful Hollywood.  Yet conservatives flock to her because she’s loudmouthed, rude and regularly outrageously hateful.  Now conservatives can add anti-Semitic to the reasons they love Roseanne.

“That’s the truth.  Don’t you dare say anything against it or you’ll be off YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and all the other ones because, y’know, we have– y’know there’s such a thing as the truth and facts and we have to stick to it.  And, um, y’know,” Barr hesitates as her mulleted co-host chimes in dutifully, “It’s scary,” before Bar drops the bombshell:  “And that is the truth.  And nobody died in the Holocaust either.  That’s the truth. It should happen.  Six million Jews should die right now ’cause they cause all the problems in the world, but it never happened.  It never happened!”  And then the pair wander down the “Jews run Hollywood” trope.

In another blow to Republican efforts to extremely gerrymander representative districts to their favor, the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision has rejected North Carolina Republicans’ argument regarding the “independent state legislature” theory that isolates election governance within the legislative branch of state governments, independent of oversight from judicial, executive or federal rules, NBC News reports.

The court sided with the North Carolina Supreme Court in its ruling to redraw heavily gerrymandered Congressional maps, ruling that the courts had authority to function as a check on the legislature relating to important aspects of election law.

Legendarily uncourageous Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday told CNBC he’s not sure if his owner, disgraced former President Trump, is the “strongest” GOP candidate for 2024.

“Can he win that election? Yeah he can… the question is, is he the strongest to win the election, I don’t know that answer” said McCarthy, who’s going to get a very angry phone call soon.

Fat former President Trump’s co-conspirator Waltine Nauta’s arraignment on six counts related to his concealment of stolen classified documents has been postponed to July 6th as the Diet Coke guy has been unable to find local counsel and thus cannot enter a plea, Lawfare’s Anna Bower reports.

Republican former Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt, a mid-tier villain in MAGA 2020 election conspiracy theories, took another step toward confirmation to the top elections post in the state of Pennsylvania as on Monday a state Senate committee nearly unanimously advanced his nomination, with the only no vote coming from QAnon freak Doug Mastriano, VoteBeat reports.

“​​Philadelphia is not a golden gem of voting integrity,” said Mastriano on Monday. “The lack of action by Schmidt in the recent elections here just gives me pause. It’s easy to say things, but when he had a chance to make a difference and to look into voting concerns, we were stonewalled.”

Schmidt, who is already serving as Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth after being nominated by Dem Governor Josh Shapiro in January, was the target of a shit ton of death threats after not playing ball with the MAGA freaks on the “Stop the Steal” fantasies after the 2020 election.

“Ukrainian Airborne forces have made small advances east from the village of Krasnohorivka, near Donetsk city, which sits on the old Line of Control. This is one of the first instances since Russia’s February 2022 invasion that Ukrainian forces have highly likely recaptured an area of territory occupied by Russia since 2014. Recent multiple concurrent Ukrainian assaults throughout the Donbas have likely overstretched Donetsk People’s Republic and Chechen forces operating in this area,” says a UK Ministry of Defense intelligence update on the war.

Filed in the “Oh, Yeah, I Can Totally See That Happening” drawer:  Trump administration advisor Stephen Miller once suggested using Predator drones to bomb boats carrying unarmed migrants, saying the people would not be covered by the Constitution because they would be in international waters, according to an upcoming book by Miles Taylor, the former Homeland Security Chief of Staff who previously wrote a tell-all under the pen name “Anonymous.”

According to an advance copy read by Rolling Stone, Miller told Taylor the plan in April 2018, saying that was Miller’s solution to a migrant boat that was headed to the US.  Contemporaneous reports show boats loaded with more than 1,300 Haitian and Caribbean refugees were intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard over the previous six months.  When contacted by Rolling Stone, a representative of Miller denied the account.

Lawyers on Donald Trump’s legendary “Elite Strike Force” team, many of whom are now struggling to keep their law licenses, face further problems as Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation reportedly reaches into potential fraud in connection to the fake electors scheme and the lawyers’ thin legal justifications for overturning local results, the Washington Post reports.

Smith’s team is looking into efforts by outside counsel Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Kurt Olsen and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as then-Justice Department lawyer and non-canonical Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, to provide state legislatures with vaguely plausible legal justifications to overturn elections.  Part of the investigation is looking into how those efforts coordinated with the attempts to appoint fake electors by some state officials, while another prong is looking into if both state-level efforts were coordinated by officials in the Trump campaign or administration.  And of course, they’re looking into how much of these efforts Trump knew about and possibly, what did he personally direct. 

“The Deranged Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, working in conjunction with the DOJ & FBI, illegally leaked and ‘spun’ a tape and transcript of me which is actually an exoneration, rather than what they would have you believe. This continuing Witch Hunt is another ELECTION INTERFERENCE Scam. They are cheaters and thugs!” posted fat former President Trump on Truth Social on Monday.

We think the “spun” means he thinks the Deep State faked the damning audio of him showing a stolen classified document to Mark Meadows’ ghostwriters in 2021. Which is pretty impressive considering that in his view it was illegally leaked and exculpatory, which were already kind of mutually exclusive with each other, so why not add a third completely contradictory assertion to it?

Along with auto parts and arrogance, conspiracy theories are another of America’s exports to our friends up north in Canada. Christopher Saccoccia, the candidate self-described as “People’s Mayor of Toronto” Monday’s election to be the city’s leader had declared “the largest act of fraud in Canadian history,” after finally accepting that he was not going to be declared victor.

Finishing with just 1.1% of the vote which landed him third in a 102-candidate race, the anti-vax, anti-government social media personality known as “Chris Sky” conceded the race by tweeting, “I want to thank my supporters and volunteers. You all did great and we know, they lie. Cheat and steal. Never give in to the globalist agenda. No matter what.”  Like his election conspiracy theorists brethren to the south, he presented no evidence to support his claim.

Olivia Chow was elected Mayor, becoming the first Asian-Canadian woman to hold the office.  A member of the New Democratic Party–basically social democrats–Chow has served both as a city councilor in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, as well as a representative in Parliament.

Yeah, ’cause what’s another pandemic.  Public health officials in Florida and Texas confirmed a total of five cases of malaria in their states that were spread by mosquitoes over the last two months, the Associated Press reports.

The four Florida and single Texas cases mark the first time in two decades officials found malaria cases spread by mosquito bites in the US.  All five are receiving treatment and are expected to survive.  About 2,000 malaria cases are treated in the United States annually, with virtually all patients contracting the disease overseas.

Unsurprisingly to people who understand science, warmer temperatures around the world provide better breeding grounds for viruses and the creatures, like mosquitoes, that carry them.  There are treatments for malaria–and even a new vaccine–that can reduce the deadliness of the disease if people take them.  No word if DeSantis or Abbott will be the first to ship the virus to a Blue state.

After investing hundreds of millions of dollars to promote and generate original content, the online platform for the Fox cable propaganda network, Fox Nation, is essentially dead in the water, without a direction or a leading star.  According to the Daily Beast, Fox Nation’s fate may have been sealed when Fox Corporation fired Tucker Carlson, the cable network’s top ratings producer and the leading generator of content on the streaming service.

Carlson’s cable programming was available on the streaming platform, and he did at least three additional interviews for online subscribers, plus Carlson produced a series of conspiracy-minded documentaries, the last of which, on a plot to convert Americans into a nation of bug-eaters–no, really, that’s really what it was about–was promoted in the last moments of Carlson’s time at the network.  “Fox Nation is basically over without Tucker,” a network source told the Daily Beast. “They’re not shutting it down, and probably never will, but they’re really cutting it back.”

During the $787.5 million lawsuit settlement with Dominion, Fox executives found text messages in which Carlson disparaged Fox executives, women and minorities–as well as confirmed that he did not believe the conspiracy theories he was pitching on-air, the basis for the network’s decision to settle with the voting machine company.

The 2021 audio of disgraced former President Trump waving around an Iran war planning document he had stolen from the White House following his defeat has been obtained by CNN. Listen below:

As previously reported, the audio dates to July 2021 when Trump was being interviewed by former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ ghostwriters for Meadows’ stupid memoir The Chief’s Chief. At the time, Trump had an axe to grind with Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley over a July 15, 2021 New Yorker article about how Milley worked to prevent the Orange Ayatollah from ordering an attack on Iran after losing the election. As was his habit, Trump had an aide record the conversation with the ghostwriters, which then famously became Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s smoking gun evidence that the fat bastard knew full well he hadn’t declassified the file and that he wasn’t supposed to still have it after leaving the White House.

“These are the papers,” Trump says, indicating it’s the attack plan. His aide then joked “Hillary would print that out all the time, you know. Her private emails,” before Trump added “No, she’d send it to Anthony Weiner.” Trump then told the people in the room the papers were “Highly confidential.”

A contracted janitorial service worker turned off a laboratory freezer to stop an annoying beeping during a September 2020 shift at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, leading to the loss of genetic research compiled over decades when the contents warmed, a lawsuit by the university alleges.

NBC News reports Daigle Cleaning Systems Inc. was contracted to clean a lab building on campus during Covid shutdowns.  Around September 14th, the alarm on the freezer, which sounds when it neared its boundary temperatures of -82 to -78, started to sound irregularly even though internal temperatures were okay. The team called for an emergency service from the freezer’s manufacturer, and a repair appointment scheduled for the following week.

On September 17th, custodian Joseph Herrington shut down a freezer because, he said, he feared the beeping meant a circuit breaker was tripped.  The following day, researchers arrived to discover the freezer shut down and the temperature at -32 degrees. 

Latah County, Idaho prosecutors filed a motion on Monday informing a court they will seek the death penalty for stabby weirdo Bryan Kohberger, the Pennsylvania native accused in the murders of four University of Idaho students at an off-campus home last November, CNN reports.

Prosecutors wrote they have not “identified or been provided with any mitigating circumstances” against executing Kohberger. “Consequently, considering all evidence currently known to the State, the State is compelled to file this notice of intent to seek the death penalty.”