All the talk about the deficit from the same folks that gave an unpaid-for $2 trillion tax cut to the wealthy and big corporations. It makes you laugh.

Under my Administration, the deficit is on track to come down by more than $1 trillion this year.

— President Biden (@POTUS) August 27, 2022

With the public disclosure that Donald Trump had approximately one thousand pages of classified documents secreted to his Mar-a-Lago bungalow and supper club where they were stored in an easily accessible area, US intelligence agencies are undertaking internal assessments to determine possible exposure based on the information Trump had, the New York Times reports.

Avril D. Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, told leaders of the House Oversight and Intelligence Committees that her office would instruct its agencies to assess potential risks to national intelligence by Trump’s mishandling of classified information.  Trump reportedly had highly classified information involving a variety of sources, from human intelligence to signals collection, which could impact multiple agencies and operations.

Bombastic attorney L. Lin Wood, who made very theatrical, though evidence-free, assertions that the 2020 presidential election victory was stolen from Donald Trump via a series of increasingly confusing conspiracies, has been ordered to appear before the Fulton County grand jury investigating efforts by Trump to undermine the integrity of Georgia’s election, Reuters reports.

Best known as an attorney specializing in slander and defamation lawsuits for people like accused (but innocent) Olympic Park bomber Richard Jewell and smirking MAGAt Kentucky high schooler Nick Sandmann.  (After a couple of early settlements, most of Sandmann’s remaining lawsuits have been dismissed.)

“The devil is after me today!!!” Wood posted on little-used conservative social media platform Telegram late on Friday. “…the Fulton County DA attacks me as you can see from the email below to my attorney, Ibrahim Reyes, by demanding that I testify before the ‘Trump Witch Hunt’ grand jury!!!”

Digital World Acquisition Corp., the company planning on merging with the Devin Nunes-run Trump Media & Technology Group to run Truth Social, Donald Trump’s underperforming Twitter rip-off, advised stockholders this week that the success of the merger is at risk because it depends on Trump’s personal legal, political and public relations problems being resolved, the Washington Post reports.

In a notice to shareholders announcing a September 6th special meeting, DWAC noted that its planned merger with TMTG will hinge on how Trump manages his current troubles. In a paragraph printed in bold to get readers’ attention, the company said in its shareholder announcement, “The success of the Business Combination depends in part on the popularity of TMTG’s brand and the reputation and popularity of its Chairman, President Donald J. Trump. The value of TMTG’s brand may diminish if the popularity of President Trump were to suffer. Adverse reactions to publicity relating to President Trump, or the loss of his services, could adversely affect TMTG’s revenues, results of operations and its ability to maintain or generate a consumer base, as well as the outcome of the proposed Business combination.”

Trump’s Truth Social is roundly regarded as a flop:  it has just two million registered users with only 500,000 using the platform regularly.  Its reputation as a “free speech platform” has been shattered by reports of posts critical of Trump, his family, his presidency and his ongoing legal issues being deleted, demonstrating that it’s simply an echo chamber for MAGAts.  The platform has no plan for generating revenue, nor does it have sufficient high-profile users to generate interest outside of people who are tracking the batshittery posted by Trump lackeys. 

Think back on the outrage over Ginni Thomas’s text messages to Mark Meadows egging him on to overturn the 2020 election, or her emails to Republican Arizona state lawmakers, or her other fascist “activist” work that was reported publicly over the last year or so. A lot of National Zero readers angrily reacted in the comments here, saying she should be prosecuted for it. They were not wrong to be upset. She should burn in hell for being such an evil cow and hopefully she will.

But what did she do that was illegal? More importantly, what did she do that could be proven to a jury in a court of law? We’re not lawyers here, but years of following political legal news have given us a fairly solid understanding of what moves the law against people and what doesn’t. Ginni was nothing more than an angry Karen squealing in frustration over an election that didn’t go the way she wanted. The only difference between her and a Breitbart commenter was her access.

If you don’t think the Republican state lawmakers in Arizona and the other swing states, the White House, the Supreme Court itself, the Justice Department, the Pentagon and all their individual figures didn’t get the same emails from literally millions of other Trump fans ordering them to take action to overturn the election then you probably haven’t been reading this site for very long. Many, probably even most, were demanding they take illegal actions.

Want to be in a Nickelback video? Fans invited to join B.C. shoot https://t.co/b24HDgE0tw pic.twitter.com/T0JrxArgi9

— CTV News (@CTVNews) August 27, 2022

• The sneaky effectiveness of Joe Biden in getting landmark legislation passed regarding taxes, gun control, the environment, energy production, student loan cancelation and health care is the polar opposite of the in-you-face power of Dark Brandon.  Joe’s the train engine that just gets shit down without any fanfare.  
• As much as I like having a president who’s not constantly on social media bragging about his claimed achievements to “own the libs,” Biden’s team needs to get out and celebrate these victories if they’re going to mean anything during the midterms.
• Simple test to see if Trump knew what he had at Mar-a-Lago:  ask him, document by document, what was classified in each and what he declassified.  Match it to declassification orders and classification records.  If Trump can’t specify what he declassified, then that information isn’t declassified.  He can’t say, “Well, everything in that box was declassified.”  It’s the information that’s declassified, not the pieces of paper in the box.  
• Tuesday’s primary results are just the start of a downhill slide for GOP hopes.  The Senate is most likely going to stay in Democratic hands–with more of a majority.  And now, it looks like keeping the House is rising in possibility.

The bones of a 42-year-old father who had gone missing after he jumped in for a swim at night while boating on Lake Mead in 2002 have been identified, the first identification of remains found since the lake’s water level started dramatically receding, the Associated Press reports.

Thomas Erndt, of Las Vegas, jumped in the water as a boatful of family floated in the middle of the lake, recalled his son, also named Tom Erndt.  His father started struggling in the water before disappearing, the son who was 10-years-old at the time, said.  Erndt’s bones were found near a since-shuttered marina on May 7th.  The Clark County coroner used DNA to identify the remains, as well as description of the victim provided by family.

A number of full sets of remains, as well as individual bones, have been found since Lake Mead’s water level started dramatically lowering.  One of the most intriguing was found May 1st:  a man, dressed in clothing from the late 1970s or early 1980s, shot and stuffed in a rusty barrel.

A new report by the Associated Press concerning a plan by the US Department of Agriculture to drop millions of food pellets treated containing a rabies vaccine from helicopters over a wide swath of the Eastern United States’ woodlands was extremely unlikely to fit in the already overtaxed bandwidth of the right wing conspiracy community’s collective imagination.

The vaccines, bearing vaguely ominous names such as “Onrab” and “Raboral V-RG,” have already been seeded in areas of Maine and Pennsylvania known to have high raccoon populations, a fact likely to go almost completely unnoticed by your typical Infowars reader when they’re already freaking the fuck out over the Biden Administration’s supposed manipulation of gas prices, guilty pleas in the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary, the FBI supposedly ordering Mark Zuckerberg to throttle the Hunter laptop story, the failure to find voter fraud in the Kansas abortion referendum, the IRS buying up bullets, not to mention the real life problems for the GOP. All that of course on top of the nightmare at Mar-a-Lago. So something that would probably be a five alarm fire on a regular right wing news day is just going to fly under the HAARP weather radar.

Donald Trump had a significant amount of classified information with highly sensitive intelligence secreted in the basement storage room of his Mar-a-Lago vacation residence and supper club, the affidavit supporting the search warrant of the property shows, startling people at both the National Archives and the Department of Justice.  A timeline of the events relating to the search warrant is at the end of this story.

After the National Archives and Records Administration requested an FBI review of the 15 boxes of material it received from Donald Trump and his lawyers in January 2022, the FBI undertook the review over three days in May, finding “184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.”

Among those documents were some marked with further classification categories:  HCS, “SCI [Secret Compartmented Information] control system designed to protect intelligence information derived from clandestine human sources”; FISA, information collected under a warrant authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; NOFORN, “information that may not be released in any form to foreign governments, foreign nationals, foreign organizations, or non-U.S. citizens without permission of the originator”; ORCON, or “Originator Controlled” information that can only be declassified with the approval of the agency that originally classified it; and SI, for “Special Intelligence,” to protect technical and intelligence information derived from the monitoring of foreign communications signals.

Mitch McConnell’s Senate leadership whatever the hell it is PAC is pulling $8 million in television ad buys for pro-China douchebag Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters – roughly half of the spots already reserved there, signaling the turtle lord is only half-interested in seeing his brother reptile win, Politico reports. Mitch also pulled ads for Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, but for the opposite reason as the other Republican candidate in the confusing as hell ranked-choice general election, Trump-backed mental patient Kelly Tshitkablahblahblah doesn’t pose a realistic threat to the formidable “RINO” incumbent while the Dem is unlikely to come out ahead on a split GOP vote.

What a joke… “Transparency” pic.twitter.com/CErNfa7TR7

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) August 26, 2022

READ IT NOW MOTHERFUCKERS! NATIONAL ZERO WILL UPDATE WITH ALL THE HOTTEST REDACTIONS AND CLUES TO THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING NUCLEAR SECRETS!

UPDATE 8/26/2022 1:05 PM EDT: There’s like nothing in this thing.

The PACER system crashed shortly after noon on Friday, because so many people are impatient to see the redacted Mar-a-Lago search affidavit, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports. All these jerks crowding the site ruined it for those who deserve to see it, like National Zero’s staff and readers.

This is fucking nuts. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette broke a monster scoop on “Anna de Rothschild,” real name Inna Yashchyshyn, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian immigrant who infiltrated Mar-a-Lago last year with a fake ID and at least once posed for a pic with Trump and his homosexual chihuahua.

Yashchyshyn is under federal criminal investigation, however it’s not clear if she was simply hustling for herself or if there’s a connection to the Kremlin and/or the classified intel Trump stole. We will update this article with more details from the Post-Gazette story, but holy shit this is not a good look for him at all with everything else going on with security at his hooker palace right these days.

https://youtu.be/_T0rGIbDfLY

Proud Boys founder Gavin McInness was apparently arrested by the FBI in the middle of a podcast recording on Thursday night. It’s unclear why, but some dipshit buddy of his tweeted McInness is “rotting away in jail because he dared to question authority,” early Friday. Stand back and stand by.

The Wisconsin MAGA asshole who “proved” voter fraud by illegally putting fake names and addresses into an online absentee ballot request form system has been served with a subpoena from the state department of justice after the right wing asshole local sheriff declined to investigate the open commission of a crime, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. The Telegram Channel for “HOT Government” posted a notice Wednesday that the fascist activist group’s leader Harry Wait “has been subpoenaed to felony court September 9th.” Wait also told a local TV station that he was under a gag order and could not share any further detail.

Not very long story short, Wait went to the state’s absentee ballot request website and put in the state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s name but Wait’s address and successfully ordered the ballot to be mailed to him. He did it again with at least 10 other people’s names. It’s not clear if he actually received the ballots, but in any event he did not actually fill them out and try to vote with them in the state’s primary. So basically he did nothing but prove that the ballot request system doesn’t check against voter registrations and wasted at most several dollars of taxpayer money for printing and mailing costs. If he even got the ballots. And now he’s facing felony charges.

This is one of those times where words escape us. Like we don’t know if we can really do this situation justice. Why the fuck didn’t he try to actually vote and then see if the local clerk’s office counted the 11 or so fraudulent ballots? Sure, the request process is evidently vulnerable to frivolous circlejerks like this, but we’re not exactly going to be as impressed by that as we would if this asshole could demonstrate these votes ended up getting counted.

Pro-ChiCom Reptilian Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters quietly scratched some extremist “pro-life” rhetoric from his campaign website on Thursday in a change noticed by NBC News.

Gone from his platform page are support for extremist measures like “a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed” and “the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, the SAVE Moms and Babies Act, and other pro-life legislation.” He even removed “I am 100% pro-life,” as if he’s not really principled on the sentiment and adjusted his campaign platform because Beijing Blake is afraid of losing amid an increasing polling surge for Democrats driven largely by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade.