In the final days of his ignominious reign, disgraced former President Trump told associates he needed to preserve government documents related to the Russia investigation that he believed were exculpatory, Rolling Stone reports. The Donald believed these documents would prove him innocent but the incoming Biden Administration would “shred” the evidence the “Deep State” had sabotaged him. It’s not clear why he didn’t simply declassify this alleged proof he was wronged.

The report is the first possible sign of a motive for Trump’s crimes, and tracks with recent public statements by the fat degenerate over the matter. “I think they thought it was something to do with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” Trump said during a recent word salad right wing radio interview. “They were afraid that things were in there – part of their scam material,” the moron revealed.

The day before the Michigan primary, a group of Republican leaders held a training session for poll workers and partisan poll watchers during which they instructed the workers to violate rules in their quest to catch all the “bad stuff happening,” CNN reports.

People working these jobs are barred from using cell phones in polling places, but one of the GOP trainers, Cheryl Costantino, the chair of the Wayne County Republican Party told them to ignore that and just hide what they’re doing:  “I would say maybe just hide it or something, and maybe hide a small pad and a small pen or something like that because you need to take accurate notes,” Constantino said, telling them to also ignore a rule against these people carrying pens.

“None of the constraints that they’re putting on this are legal,” former Michigan state senator Patrick Colbeck told trainees on the call, which happened August 1st, the day before the state primary.

FBI agents paid a visit to Trump acolyte Will Russell on Wednesday, seeking to interview him in the investigation into the failed 2020 coup attempt, ABC’s Katherine Faulders reports. The two agents unfortunately missed Russell, who wasn’t home, but they’ll catch up sooner or later.

One thing to keep in mind as you read/listen to this clip:  This woman’s boss suggested his vice president be hanged–not like in a jokey “ha, ha, yer funny” kinda way; he said it in a “You get the rope; I’ll find a tree” kinda way–and she’s trying to sound like an expert on the dynamics of a successful relationship.

“… as a jab, which makes it all the more interesting that Obama threw in the dog jab today,” former White House Press Secretary and woman who really wants you to know she was good at her job, dammit, no matter what people say Kayleigh McEneny says about a personal relationship she literally knows nothing about.  “It was kind’ve like taking that knife, putting it in an opened wound and twisting it ever-so-slightly, so it’s not even, not a bromance.  It’s something more like um… kind’ve like enemies jousting a little bit.”

“Yeah, or Barack thinks he’s too good for Joe,” the eighth biggest Bro at Fox (and yes, I’m including Laura Ingraham in that) Jesse Watters interjects. “You know guys like that, don’t ya, Kayleigh?”

The surviving brother suspected in a series of stabbings in Saskatchewan that left ten people dead and at least 18 wounded has been captured after a four-day manhunt, the New York Times reports.

“Myles Sanderson was located and taken into police custody near Rosthern, Saskatchewan, at approximately 3:30 p.m. today,” the police said in a statement. “There is no longer a risk to public safety relating to this investigation.”  Rosthern is approximately 80 miles southwest of the James Smith Cree Nation reservation where most of the killings took place.  Six of the dead were all members of an extended family that lived on the Indigenous reservation.

Sanderson’s 31-year-old brother, Damien, was found stabbed to death on Monday.  Officials feared Sanderson would flee to Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, where thousands of people were gathering for a Canadian Football League traditional rivalry over the weekend.

“To confirm your spot and UNLOCK your MAGA Millions Club 500% Increase, all you have to do is contribute just $5. >> The MAGA Millions Club is an EXCLUSIVE group comprised of only President Trump’s MOST DEDICATED supporters and we couldn’t think of a more deserving Patriot to have join. Our team will check your file in 1 HOUR and if you still haven’t stepped up, we’ll be forced to give your offer to the next Patriot in line. Contribute just $5 to unlock your MAGA Millions Club 500% Increase and claim your spot in the MAGA Million Club,” says a Republican Party fundraising email sent Wednesday afternoon. No this is not a joke. Not an intentional one, at least.

A Michigan judge struck down the 1931 state law that banned abortion as the state supreme court sets to decide if a proposed amendment protecting the right to reproductive health care will be on the November ballot, NBC News reports.

Judge Elizabeth Gleicher of the Michigan Court of Claims ruled that the 1931 law, which essentially bans abortion under any circumstances, unless the life of the mother is in immediate danger, was unconstitutional under modern state law.

“A law denying safe, routine medical care not only denies women of their ability to control their bodies and their lives — it denies them of their dignity,” Gleicher wrote in her opinion. “Michigan’s Constitution forbids this violation of due process.”

DC Circuit Court Judge Amit Mehta ignored Oath Keepers founder Stewie Rhodes’s lame attempt to delay the start of his trial on charges of seditious conspiracy over (likely fabricated) disagreements with his lawyers and affirmed the trial will begin September 26th, Marcy Wheeler reports.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday announced he’ll be bringing up a bill to codify same-sex marriage and protect it from the Supreme Court extremists and forcing the GOP – mainly Ron Johnson – to go on record just weeks before the midterms, Politico reports.

Between this one piece on fanboy site TownHall.com, Marco Rubio’s bitching on Wednesday claiming the FBI and DOJ are “selectively leaking” stories to the media about fat Donald’s theft of classified documents from the White House, and shitty unqualified Federal Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling lamenting the “swirling allegations of bias and media leaks” that threatened her client politically, the MAGA Reich seems really unhappy the public is learning bits and pieces about the pretty grave crime against America their Orange God Emperor so carelessly committed.

Cry more, lol.

No doubt this impotent rage is flaring up again after on Tuesday the Washington Post reported that a little birdie told them Trump had been hanging on to documents detailing an unspecified foreign military’s nuclear weapons capabilities, so of course the MAGA kids would be upset over that.

What the fuck are they complaining about though? Seriously. This isn’t really that complicated. Trump’s team should by this point nearly 24 hours after that Post report have gone to the right wing media and leaked something of their own that exculpates Trump, like some kind of proof that he declassified that particular document or have their own source inside the Justice Department saying that story was all made up or something to counter this and get control of the narrative.

Ever wary of potential risks, the Pentagon has ordered Lockheed Martin to suspend production of F-35 fighters after discovering components of magnets used in the aircraft’s turbomachine pumps came from China, Politico reports.

The magnets, which assist in engine operation, are strictly mechanical pieces and do not transmit data or relay signals, so the likelihood of being able to sabotage the aircraft by controlling them from an outside signal is minimal; however, the question of if the magnets were manufactured to specifications will be considered.  The issue is that one of the alloys used to manufacturer the magnets came from China.

The magnets are part of the Honeywell-made turbomachines, and the Pentagon has stated that the issue does not impact the operation or maintenance of the hundreds of F-35 fighters already deployed by the US and its allies. 

Police in Nevada on Wednesday served a search warrant the home of Democrat Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles in connection to last week’s stabbing murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German, the Review-Journal reports.

It’s suspected that Telles targeted German over his coverage of Telles’s dumbassery and alleged affair with another public employee, which is surprising because you’d think it would be a Republican who would murder a journalist for negative coverage. Telles lost his primary amid the negative publicity stemming from German’s reporting, so the motive’s certainly there. What a total DINO. He should be condemned to suffer horribly in prison if convicted for killing a member of the media, which is basically an arm of the Democratic Party.

Detestable worm Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has backed off his tentative support for a bill protecting same-sex marriage from the Supreme Court extremists, apparently having decided to err on the side of leaving Americans vulnerable to having needless suffering inflicted on them rather than acting with basic decency when being presented with a tough choice from Dems during a heated campaign year, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.

Speaking to a crowd of fans, Johnson also denied having indicated support in July. “So you just get hounded on this crap, right? So just to get them off my backs, I wrote a press release, and I said I always supported civil unions. Never felt that we needed to do anything other than that.”

Ukrainian forces are advancing on the northeastern city of Kharkiv, pushing an already thin Russian military back on its heels and putting additional stress on the invaders, who have already experienced a significant reduction of combat readiness due to sustained losses, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The offensive targets Russian supply routes into the currently occupied eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, key industrial and shipping regions of the country.  The Ukrainians are succeeding on the battlefield thanks to arms coming from allies like the United States and European Union nations.  Comparatively, Russia has purchased munitions from North Korea and drones from Iran as its internal military suppliers are unable to keep up with the needs on the battlefield.

Russia’s losses have been far greater than the Kremlin calculated, with estimates of personnel casualties ranging from 15,000 to 50,000 dead.  US intelligence estimates put casualties–those killed, wounded, injured, captured, or missing–at 80,000 during an August assessment. 

A right wing federal judge in Texas on Wednesday ruled in favor of some right wing assholes seeking to ban their health insurance from having to pick up the tab for PrEP, a drug taken to prevent HIV transmission. Basically they’re doing the same thing to gays as they did to women who wanted their contraceptives covered because no one can be happy if MAGA World isn’t.

The latest Yahoo News/YouGov registered voter survey shows Democrats leading Trump’s party 45 to 40 percent on the generic Congressional ballot question. Among respondents who say they “definitely will vote” this year, Dems have a 48% to 45% edge over Trump, who by refusing to shut the fuck up and retire has effectively put himself in the place of virtually every Republican candidate on the ballot and made it the “choice election” GOP strategists far and wide had feared.

In another finding, among all registered voters 18% said they were voting to support candidates loyal to the Orange God Emperor while over twice as many (37%) said they were voting against his candidates. Among voters supporting Democrats, 70% said they’re voting against Team MAGA versus just over half that number of GOP voters (36%) said they’ll be voting to help Trump’s picks.

“I think that the recent special elections are consistent with the idea that we are at something of a neutral political environment. It just seems to me at the moment that turnout is going to be through the roof on both sides. It’s going to be higher than it was in 2018. Both sides have reason to turn out now. Then it becomes a question of which of the two sides ultimately has the upper hand”

– Republican consultant and pollster Patrick Ruffini in an interview with Politico. Ruffini seems a little more than cautiously optimistic for the GOP nonetheless, which is kind of stupid because Republicans tend to get fucking crushed when turnout is high. The 2010 and 2014 midterms saw 41% (90.9 million) and 36% (83.2 million), respectively, of the voting age population show up, with Dems losing 63 House seats in 2010 and 13 in 2014 (smaller hit because they obviously couldn’t lose seats they didn’t already have). The popular vote delta was 6.8% in 2010 and 5.7% in 2014.

In 2018, when 50.3% (118.5 million) of eligible voters showed up, the Democrats took 41 House seats and won the popular vote by 8.6%, making a little weird, to say the least, to see a GOP strategist so sanguine about this, even given the advantages the Republicans still have in the House going into the midterms. While it would be utterly insane to think the Democrats are somehow going to crush the GOP like they did in 2018, it is far less so to also believe they wouldn’t still have a hell of an edge if overall turnout will be bigger than it was in that Blue Wave year.

In a verdict that could only come from a Texas school board MAGA heckler’s fantasies, five Hong Kong unionists were convicted of sedition Wednesday over the content of three illustrated children’s books, one of which, titled Defenders of the Sheep Village, depicted pro-democracy sheep driving totalitarian communist wolves out of their village, AFP reports.

Another one of the books published by Lai Man-ling, Melody Yeung, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan, and Fong Tsz-ho portrayed the wolves as dirty and disease-riddled, which we guess was particularly offensive to the ChiCom Karens. The situation is reminiscent of the McMinn County, Tennessee school board’s January 2022 ban on Maus – an illustrated memoir of the Holocaust in which the Nazis and portrayed as cats and Jews as mice – as well as the overall creeping embrace of cultural fascism by American Red State school and library systems banning books for “objectionable” content – often just simply because an author is Black. This is the direction in which the MAGA Reich wants to take things, putting people in prison for “poisoning the minds of children,” even if they act like they hate the ChiComs when it’s politically expedient.