UPDATE 3/18/2023 9:41 AM: The New York Times reports sources with the Manhattan DA’s office say there’s at least one more witness still to testify to the grand jury and that sources close to Trump say they have no specific knowledge of Tuesday being the big day. The sources say the twice-impeached former president might actually simply be guessing that it’ll be Tuesday.

As part of her ruling finding a crime-fraud exception and forcing scumbag Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to testify to the grand jury investigating Donald’s theft of classified documents from the White House, DC circuit Judge Beryl Howell on Friday also gave Corcoran’s notes to federal prosecutors, a rare step signaling a serious escalation in the investigation, the Daily Beast reports.

“She’s taken all the legal relief out of their hands. If she orders them to do it, they can take up an appeal on an emergency basis. She may have been concerned from what she read in the documents. She may have not trusted them to comply with an order,” said legal expert David Cross.

Days of on-and-off siege of former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s home in Lahore ended on Saturday as the ex-premier turned himself in to court in Islamabad and cops raided his house to look for evidence in support of as many as 94 charges against him, Al-Jazeera reports.

• The biggest item that came out of Hunter Biden countersuing legally-blind Delaware strip mall computer repair shop owner and tam aficionado John Paul Mac Isaac:  Biden categorically denies ever asking Mac Isaac to repair his computer.  Biden is swearing in court documents that he never dropped off computers at the shop, an assertion someone with something to hide would not do. When asked to confirm he sought to get his laptops repaired at the shop, Biden’s response is a definitive “Denied.”  (See paragraphs 18 in both JPMI’s original lawsuit and Biden’s countersuit. And for you pedants, yes, the JPMI lawsuit has been updated, but I cannot link to my source for the updated [January] filing because it’s behind a paywall, so I linked to the original filing.)
• Well, we got an arrest warrant for a president.  Not the one we expected, but also not one that was unexpected.  
• A great number of GOP politicians will breathe easier when Trump’s indictment comes down, believing that it will rid the Party of Trumpism.  They will be wrong.  They will need to actively scrub the shit out of the Party or the maggots will fester.
• Step 1 in holding Republicans (and all members of Congress) accountable:  a rule that every House and Senate session start with members taking the same oath witnesses in trials take:  to tell the truth.  Whenever they’re acting as members of Congress, they should be sworn in under the penalty of perjury.  If they’re lying in Congress, they’re lying to the American People as part of their official business.

At a sentencing hearing for a January 6th insurrectionist, Senior District Judge for DC Reggie Walton warned that the nation must back off political violence because the United States is at a critical point where democracy is at stake, CBS News reports.

“It’s scary going forward as a country where we end up,” Walton, a George W. Bush appointee, said. “Because what happened on January 6 is not something that’s just in the past. It, unfortunately, is something that still haunts us because the individuals who instigated what occurred are still engaging in the same rhetoric that resulted in the frenzy that took place on that day. This is a very serious situation because it goes to the root of what we are supposed to be as a democracy.”

Walton was hearing the case of 21-year-old North Carolinian Aiden Bilyard, who was sentenced to 40 months in prison for actions that included spraying police with bear spray and trying to break a window in the Capitol with a baseball bat, which Republicans claim is a piece of sports equipment, not a weapon.

Addressing Joseph Tacopina, Donald Trump’s latest lawyer, one of Donald Trump’s former attorneys, Michael Cohen, offered some advice:  “It didn’t work out well for me, and it’s not going to work out well for you.  The smartest thing that a lawyer could do if Donald Trump asks to represent him in this nightmare he’s going to be living?  Run!  Run as fast as you can!  And don’t run to Florida, and especially not Palm Beach.  Run someplace east or west, but definitely don’t get involved with Donald.  That’s what I would say.”

Donald Trump will follow “normal procedures” and surrender if indicted by a grand jury, the former president’s latest lawyer Joseph Tacopina told CNBC, a sign that Trump’s legal team is attempting to prepare their client for an upcoming indictment.

“Will follow normal procedures if it gets to that point,” Tacopina told CNBC in a message, with pundits saying as soon as Monday or Tuesday, the indictments sought by the Manhattan district attorney could be handed down.  The New York Police Department and other law enforcement agencies are reportedly preparing for MAGAt backlash when the expected indictment of the ex-president is announced.

Despite saying the Capitol Police reviewed all the footage aired on his program, Tucker Carlson only submitted one of the 40-plus clips he aired last week to the agency, a Capitol Police lawyer said in a court filing Friday, ABC News reports.

Politicians and critics from across the political spectrum have lambasted Carlson’s broadcast of the footage, which attempted to characterize the violent Republican-led pro-Trump insurrectionists as peaceful tourists by airing a total of around four minutes of 40,000 hours of video, footage that depicted specific individuals or groups as harmless.  House Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy has also faced harsh blowback for leaking the footage to Carlson, with critics citing media favoritism and compromising Capitol security as just two of the reasons it was so wrong.

“Since that clip was substantially similar to a clip used in [former President Donald Trump’s second] Impeachment Trial and was publicly available, I approved the use of the clip,” Capitol Police general counsel Thomas DiBiase said. “The other approximately 40 clips, which were not from the Sensitive List [of cameras deemed the most sensitive], were never shown to me nor anyone else from the Capitol Police.”

Disgraced former President Trump’s campaign on Friday announced that the first rally of his 2024 campaign will be held next Saturday, March 25th, in Waco, Texas. It’s just a little bit on the nose considering it would fall almost squarely in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the 51 day Branch Davidian cult siege which lasted from the initial shootout with ATF agents on February 28th, 1993 to the cult’s self-immolation on April 19, 1993 at their compound just outside Waco.

A major schism not seen since that Jew-hating prick nailed his 95 complaints to the door of a church erupted Friday as the Archdioceses of Boston and Chicago found themselves on the opposite sides of whether it was okay for their Irish parishioners to eat corned beef as St Patrick’s Day fell on a Friday during Lent, Boston saying yes and Chicago saying no, ABC 7 Chicago reports.

“Given the importance of this feast in the life of the Archdiocese and in the lives of many Catholics, Cardinal Seán is granting a dispensation from the Friday Lenten abstinence on March 17, 2023, to those who wish to take advantage of this opportunity,” said the Boston Archdiocese in a statement.

“Catholics who find themselves at an event where meat is served in celebrating St Patrick may in good conscience substitute the general rule of abstinence with another form of penance or a significant act of charity that benefits the poor,” said the Chicago Archdiocese, which doesn’t actually sound like a proscription but who are we to interpret the word of “God” without the collar?

DC federal Judge Beryl Howell on Friday ruled in favor of Jack Smith and allowed him to compel Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to testify to the grand jury investigating the Mar-a-Lago docs case.

Local, state, and federal law enforcement as well as the Secret Service in New York City have all been given the heads up to get ready for fat former President Trump to be indicted as early as next week over his 2016 hush money payment to pornstar Stormy Daniels, NBC News reports on lessons from the Capitol riot evidently being learned and more importantly put into practice.

The main focus is on putting a cordon around the Manhattan Criminal Court on Centre Street where Donald will presumably have to be arraigned at some point. “The officials stress that the interagency conversations and planning are precautionary in nature because no charges have been filed,” the article notes as if there’s still any suspense left when they’re reporting this in the first place.

Along with a shit ton of classified documents, fat former President Trump stole gifts from foreign governments valued at as much as $300,000 from the White House upon leaving office in disgrace following his humiliating defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, the Washington Post reports on a State Department report obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.

The State Department is unable to find at least two of the gifts, a life-size painting of Trump from the president of El Salvador and golf clubs from the Japanese prime minister, in any government facility. Gifts from foreign heads of state valued at more than $415 are not the personal property of the recipient and must be rendered unto the government at the end of their service.

The Red Wave happened in Arizona.
They had to cheat and lie to install their frauds in office.
We the People will never go away.
We demand honest elections. https://t.co/E9ZGq5IYDL

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) March 17, 2023

The Justice Department in December opened up a criminal investigation into the owners of TikTok for allegedly spying on journalists who have covered the platform, the New York Times reports.

The Washington Post have reviewed a copy of the findings by an expensive outside consulting firm retained by the Trump campaign in December 2020 to try to find evidence of voter fraud which was delivered to the Donald’s team the day before his infamous “Find 11,780 votes” call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The report by the Berkeley Group – surprise! – did not present any evidence of determinative voter fraud whatsoever and detailed how the researchers found only 23 possible instances of dead people voting in Georgia, well short of Trump’s claim that “dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people” in the call with Raffensperger.

A copy of the report is now in the hands of investigators working on the coup attempt side of Jack Smith’s special counsel probe into the Orange God Emperor’s crimes, according to the Post.

The International Criminal Court on Friday issued an arrest warrant for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his minion Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova for war crimes committed in Ukraine.

“Pre-Trial Chamber II considered, based on the Prosecution’s applications of 22 February 2023, that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.”

“The Chamber considered that the warrants are secret in order to protect victims and witnesses and also to safeguard the investigation. Nevertheless, mindful that the conduct addressed in the present situation is allegedly ongoing, and that the public awareness of the warrants may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes, the Chamber considered that it is in the interests of justice to authorise the Registry to publicly disclose the existence of the warrants, the name of the suspects, the crimes for which the warrants are issued, and the modes of liability as established by the Chamber,” wrote the ICC in their bulletin announcing the warrant.

There’s a non-zero chance disgraced former President Trump could be left without his main New York City attorney Joe Tacopina on the eve of his all-but-certain indictment as former Defense Department counsel and media lawyer guy Ryan Goodman has dug up a 2018 interview with CNN’s Don Lemon in which Tacopina said pornstar Stormy Daniels had approached him for representation and, although Daniels didn’t retain him and ended up with future convict Michael Avenatti, just the brief consultation likely creates a damning conflict of interest, according to Goodman.

“Under ABA, NYS ethics rules, difficult to see how he can represent Trump; call Daniel’s claim of affair untrue; call her an extortionist (and Trump the victim),” Goodman writes, citing Tacopina’s own words in the interview, saying he “can’t really talk about my impressions or any conversations we had because there is an attorney-client privilege that attaches even to a consultation.”

Presidential crackhead son and genuinely awesome paint artist Hunter Biden on Friday filed a federal lawsuit against blind idiot computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Issac for invasion of privacy for copying his laptop data and giving it to Rudy Giuliani and other MAGA assholes in 2019.

The Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence won’t answer a Freedom of Information Act request from Bloomberg reporters to confirm or deny disgraced former Trump’s claim of a “standing order” to declassify all the documents he stole from the White House while leaving office following his humiliating defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

“The existence or non-existence of the alleged ‘Standing Order’ would bear on whether records with apparent classification markings were in fact classified – a key fact in the investigation,” wrote FBI FOIA chief Joseph Bender in a filing submitted to the DC federal court that on Wednesday ruled in favor of the government. Bender warned that “persons of interest” to the investigation could “alter their testimony… destroy, adulterate, or fabricate evidence, or refuse to cooperate with the government altogether,” adding that they consulted with Jack Smith on whether to confirm or deny the existence of the “standing order” Trump would have made in January 2021.

Of course Trump never actually made such a “standing order” and the claim was a panic move that – as far as we know – was never actually argued in court by his lawyers when they pulled that “special master” scam with his appointee Aileen Cannon. That this isn’t coming out is a sign of how much things have changed since Jack Smith took over the investigation: Before he was appointed the DOJ lawyers were pretty cavalier (not in a bad way) with all the damning details they laid out in court filings. This isn’t to say that Smith hasn’t been fairly generous with keeping the public updated but it’s pretty much all been through leaks to CNN and ABC News about subpoenas and testimony.