There are grifters and liars that our base believe. Unfortunately.

These people always claim to know “the truth” and have “sources” but always mislead people and grift for donations.

Can’t wait for the real news tomorrow.

I love being right.

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) February 20, 2023

A number of Trump lawyers have been warning the Orange God Emperor that Evan Corcoran, one of his lead attorneys in the classified documents theft case, is in serious criminal jeopardy for his handling of subpoena for the files in the lead-up to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, viewing the potential obstruction and false statements against Corcoran as “very likely,” Rolling Stone reports.

This tracks with recent reporting that Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team have been pushing for a judge to declare a crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege and force him to answer questions in front of a grand jury and that Corcoran has hired his own criminal defense attorney. Rolling Stone’s sources say Donald was initially “receptive” to their urging he fire Corcoran but alas he remains on the team as of their press time. The whole shitshow stems from Corcoran’s involvement in an attestation to the DOJ that Mar-a-Lago had been thoroughly searched for classified documents that was signed last spring, one we now know to have been false.

Corcoran unsuccessfully defended Steve Bannon in his trial on a charge of criminal contempt of Congress last year, with his closing argument centered on the fact that one of the prosecutors is in the same book club as one of the government’s witnesses and also questioning whether or not House January 6th Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson actually signed the subpoena to Bannon, which should tell you a lot about Trump’s judgment in hiring legal help.

Whoa! Stop the digital presses! Don Lemon has been benched from his morning CNN show we never watch over something something Nikki Haley whatever bullshit we didn’t report because media coverage is lame and fucking Mediaite hasn’t reported it yet! Seriously! Check their site!

They’ve been covering the Don Lemon story non-stop for days and now they’re going to let National Zero get to this first? What the hell’s going on over there? Is there some new non-controversy at The View that’s been hogging all their bandwidth? Did that Ryan Seacrest thing whatever the fuck it was drain all the juice they had? Do they need some more Morning Joe to wake up and get on this?

UPDATE 2/19/2023 8:29 PM EST: Mediaite finally got to it at 8:05 PM EST and, in fairness, did add to the story by getting a denial from CNN who claimed Lemon’s actually on vacation.

A fake anti-war rally called “Rage Against The War Machine” drew a few hundred pro-Russian scumbags to the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, led by speakers including pro-Russians Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein, and Tara Reade, and attended by members of Atomwaffen, the Proud Boys, and the White Students Union, with the “anti-war” crowd waving Russian Federation and Soviet flags, as well as a “SENILE POTUS” anti-Biden sign behind former Congressman Ron Paul when he spoke.

One person was killed and at least ten injured in two shootings early Sunday morning in Memphis police have stated are connected.  Police responded to the report of multiple people shot at a local nightclub and while there, another shooting took place less than a mile away, according to NBC News.

In Linden, New Jersey, three people were killed and a juvenile wounded, with the shooter believed to be one of the dead in what appears to be a domestic murder-suicide.  Police responding to a call at a Union County address found two adults and a juvenile dead, with another juvenile wounded.

Four people were wounded, none seriously, when someone involved in an argument with security at a bar in St. Louis, Missouri reportedly took out a gun and started firing early Sunday morning, KMOV CBS-4 in St. Louis reports.

Officials in Turkey on Sunday stated rescue efforts have been stopped in most areas of the country two weeks after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and a series of strong aftershocks rocked regions of Turkey and Syria, the BBC reports.

With more than 44,000 confirmed dead in Turkey, officials are shifting to recovery efforts in all but two provinces where the quakes were centered.  Officials are centering search and rescue efforts on around 40 multiunit building complexes in those provinces.

Three survivors were rescued from collapsed buildings in Turkey on Friday, but officials warn that the number of confirmed fatalities will rise as wreckage is cleared in coming weeks.  Tens of thousands of people are still listed as missing, with more than 340,000 apartments destroyed but not yet cleared.

Auxiliary Bishop David O’Connell, an Irish-born Catholic priest known as a “peacemaker” for his work within poor and immigrant communities in Los Angeles, was found shot to death in his home Saturday, KABC-7 in Los Angeles reports.

Police say evidence points to a homicide sometime Saturday morning.  Police were summoned to the cleric’s house just before 1 a.m., where they found the 69-year-old man shot in the chest and unresponsive; he was later pronounced dead at the scene.  It’s unclear when he was shot or who summoned the police, and police say they do not have a suspect.

O’Connell was the head of the Interdiocesan Southern California Immigration Task Force, which helped to coordinate assistance various dioceses and parishes were providing to migrants from Central America and Mexico coming into their areas.

Former Trump Budget Reichsminister Russel Vought is pulling the strings of the House GOP in their quest for cruel and rapacious cuts to social safety net programs for the poor ahead of a pointless showdown with Dems over federal spending and the debt limit, the Washington Post reports.

Knowing that cutting Social Security and Medicare are radioactive, Vought’s budget plan for the House GOP instead proposes $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, over $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, over $400 billion in cuts to food stamps, hundreds of billions in cuts to educational subsidies, and gutting the State Department and the Labor Department, among other federal agencies. “America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken. That is the central and immediate threat facing the country – the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish. The battle cannot wait,” the balding, pasty white 46 year-old pencil pusher wrote as if he were some heroic warrior poet of classical mythology.

The Post’s report doesn’t mention any proposed cuts to the FBI or the Department of Justice in Vought’s memo and it’s hard to imagine they would leave that out if he had included it, making all the shit talk from last year – some of it from Vought himself – just that. What a fucking worm.

Far-right election denier 2022 Michigan Secretary of State election loser Kristina Karamo – who believes elites drink children’s blood – on Saturday was elected chair of the Michigan Republican Party, defeating far-right election denier 2022 Michigan Attorney General election loser Matthew DePerno – who is currently under state and possibly federal criminal investigation for stealing Dominion vote tabulators to “prove” the machines were hacked in the 2020 election.

Both Karamo and DePerno had been endorsed by disgraced former President Trump in their respective elections last year, but hilariously DePerno was the one he endorsed this time for state party chair, adding yet another one to his lengthy list of candidate endorsement failures.

A Florida six-year-old who found a loaded gun in the backseat of her grandmother’s car predictably shot her grandmother in the back as she was driving, leaving the 57-year-old woman with non-life-threatening injuries, NBC News reports.  At this point, police have deemed the shooting an “accidental discharge,” but it’s Florida.

After getting shot in the back, the unidentified gramma did what anyone would do, which is to drive home and then call 9-1-1.  First responders treated granny and airlifted her to Sarasota Memorial Hospital.  It’s unclear how, when and by whom the six-year-old was disarmed.

Saying the launch was from a “drill [that] was suddenly organized without previous notice,” the North Korean state news agency KCNA announced a previously unannounced test firing of a new intercontinental missile that made it all the way to the sea off the Korean peninsula, CBS News reports.

The test of the missile, identified as a Hwasong-15 by KCNA, came from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, and according to monitors in Japan and South Korea, it launched on a vertical trajectory but crashed 560 miles off the coast after reaching an altitude of 3,500 miles.

At their first meeting since the American military identified and destroyed a Chinese surveillance balloon flying over the continental US, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said his Chinese counterpart offered no apology for the diplomatic mess that could have escalated under different leadership, according to NBC News.

People’s Republic of China CCP Central Foreign Affairs Wang Yi met with Blinken while the pair attended Munich Security Conference in Germany.  “There was no apology,” Blinken said of his conversation with Wang Yi, director of the People’s Republic of China CCP Central Foreign Affairs office. “But what I can also tell you is this was an opportunity to speak very clearly and very directly about the fact that China sent a surveillance balloon over our territory, violating our sovereignty, violating international law. And I told him quite simply that that was unacceptable and can never happen again,”

Marianne Williamson is quite fascinating.  A self-help guru who grift-switched to create a California mini-mega-church and then switched again into the biggest grift of all–politics–announced that she’s got an announcement coming up, which means she’s either running for president again or the Second Coming is imminent or the aliens are really pissed about the missiles.  According to Politico, it’s likely the presidential thing: “As America gears up for the 2024 presidential election, I’m preparing an important announcement on March 4th in Washington DC,” Williamson said in a statement announcing the announcement, another one of those things, like gender reveals, that is becoming annoying as hell.

Politico reports Democratic former president Jimmy Carter has opted for hospice care rather than pursue further treatment after several incidents led to brief hospital stays lately.  The 98-year-old Georgian has fought cancer, including a 2015 diagnosis of brain and liver cancer.

“After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention,” a statement from the Carter Center reads. “He has the full support of his family and his medical team. The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”

Indictments stemming from the Fulton County, Georgia grand jury investigation into the the Trump 2020-2021 coup attempt could come as soon as early next month, according to an explainer of the layout of the county’s grand jury system and where it’s at now from Lawfare’s Anna Bower.

The special purpose grand jury which was impaneled in early 2022, wrapped up in December, and compiled a final report – of which small sections were made public this week – was not empowered to return indictments. For that, District Attorney Fani Willis will need to present the recommendations to a regular grand jury. According to Bower, there are two grand juries currently meeting twice a week in Fulton County that will wrap up at the end of the month, but she writes it’s unlikely those jurors have been presented with the full report from the 2020 election special purpose grand jury as they’ve been cranking out indictments on an array of unrelated cases.

The next two-month Fulton County grand jury term begins on March 6th. Bower doesn’t go further with speculating how long it might take after that. So really all we’re getting here is a very, very rough timeline that might be the window of the fat orange man’s big day, if it comes. So if you’re just joining us from Palmer Report or Raw Story, sorry. We know some guy on MSNBC said “TRUMP IS SO FUCKED” on Thursday – just like every day for the last six years – but we here at National Zero try to be a little more discerning than that when we pick our analyses to base our articles on and the ones closer to facts than feels are usually the ones that win out here.

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) didn’t mean to attack Canada.  It didn’t expect to require the US military to expend a $400,000 missile at its tiny little balloon with a tracking package on it.  But apparently, that’s exactly what happened, according to NPR.

With Republicans harping on about national defense and Chinese overflights and Hunter Biden’s laptop–when is it not about Hunter’s laptop?–President Biden, in cooperation with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau–shot down an unknown balloon over Canada last week.  Conservatives groaned about how ineffective Biden was at deterring foreign aggression because balloons!

It turns out that “foreign aggression” originated about 40 miles north of Chicago, where the NIBBB launched K9YO-15, a balloon equipped with a Pico transmitter allowing the club to track its whereabouts.  The club lost track of the balloon, likely because of a transmitter malfunction, and it believes it’s possible its balloon (total cost:  <$100) may have been destroyed by the $400,000 Sidewinder–though it’s not sure.  (The Pentagon announced yesterday it called off the search for the wreckage of the object it shot down.)

The panel in charge of the Republican National Committee’s primary debates will meet next week to consider requiring a “loyalty pledge” to support the eventual nominee from all contenders before they’re permitted to take the stage at the debates – likely starting this summer, Fox News reports.

Which is pretty goddamned hilarious that a party built on dishonesty and nihilism would pretend publicly that they expect their malcontent presidential candidates to honor their word. Even better is that it’s obviously directed at one man and one man alone, a man who once said the US Constitution should be declared null and void to restore him to office because Twitter once blocked a New York Post story for a few hours. It says quite a lot that they really think he’s going to honor some fucking “loyalty pledge” and support the nominee – let alone not run third party – if he loses the primary.

Jacksonville, Florida permanent substitute teacher Jason Covey says he was fired this week after he posted photos of empty bookshelves in a school library while the books were being “reviewed” for potential thoughtcrime content, Jezebel reports on an obvious act of political retaliation.

The firing came the day after Napoleonic Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters that the pics were a “fake narrative,” as if they somehow weren’t showing exactly the consequence of his ongoing war on completely manufactured threats to schoolchildren in his state’s education system.

In very much related news, the Daily Beast reports that DeSantis’s recent suggestion that the state do away with the Advanced Placement classes high school seniors can take to earn college course credits early is – surprise! – kind of hypocritical given that Ronnie Meatballs himself benefitted from them before going to Yale. DeSantis was even named “AP US History” student of the year, according to a copy the 1997 Dunedin, Florida High School yearbook the Beast obtained.

Hardcore anti-vaxxer and disgraced former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro probably got secretly vaccinated for COVID-19 in 2021, Brazil’s comptroller general’s office said Friday, per Reuters.

The officials found records from the country’s health ministry indicating Bolsonaro got the shot, but cautioned they weren’t totally sure if the record was real. Which doesn’t really add up as why would Bolsonaro fake it and then have the record hidden? The friggin virus nearly killed him back in 2020, of course he secretly got vaxxed and then lied about it to his fans.