Angry at being mocked, the Stanford University chapter of the Federalist Society is blocking the graduation of a law school student who posted a satirical flyer for a fictional event supporting the January 6th Capitol insurrection, Slate reports.

The flyer, posted on the university’s student listserv, promoted a fake seminar titled “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection,” which was supposed to be sponsored by the Stanford Federalist Society and was to feature as speakers Missouri Republican Senator Joshua Hawley and Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, people who voiced support for the effort to undermine the Electoral College and the slates of electors certified by the various states.

“Violent insurrection, also known as doing a coup, is a classical system of installing a government,” the flyer read, adding that insurrection “can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”  The flyer was distributed January 25th, more than two weeks after the event was dated on the flyer.  (A copy of the flier can be found here.)

Minnesota prosecutors recently requested a 30 year sentence for Derek Chauvin, the man who brutally murdered George Floyd by suffocating him to death. The recommendation was made in a sentencing recommendation filing by prosecutors earlier today. (Another story on National Zero earlier today referenced the Defendant’s motion, which was filed by Chauvin’s lawyers.) The sentencing recommendation mentions Chauvin’s conviction on second and third degree murder charges, along with second degree manslaughter.

“If Trump is saying August, that is probably because he heard me say it publicly,” Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.

After New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted that Donald Trump has been telling close associates that he believes he’ll be reinstated to the presidency in August, Lindell is taking credit for putting the fallacious idea in Trump’s head.

For the record:  President Joe Biden is the lawful President of the United States.  There is no provision for a sitting president to be ousted absent an Senate guilty verdict in an impeachment.  And there is no Constitutional method for a former president to be “reinstated” after being voted out of office and losing the Electoral College by a so-call “landslide” or any other way.

https://twitter.com/SebGorka/status/1400193480656314370

A Pennsylvania man arrested for assaulting several federal law enforcement officers during the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol has a long history of violence, particularly against women, court documents reviewed by the Daily Beast reveal.

Ryan Samsel, a 38-year-old man from Bristol Borough, Pennsylvania, 23 miles north of Philadelphia, is accused of assaulting a police officer and giving him a concussion.  He faces charges including assaulting a federal officer, obstructing law enforcement, and obstructing a legal proceeding.  He is seeking release on bond pending trial.

According to documents filed with the court on Tuesday, prosecutors allege “a pattern of Samsel choking and beating women to the point of loss of consciousness, of many hospital visits for many victims, of chipped and missing teeth, and of Samsel even breaking into one victim’s home multiple times to assault her.”

As the eyes of Earth are currently focused on Mars, where rovers have been dropping onto the surface seemingly weekly (and a copter takes to the sky), NASA has announced two future missions to Venus to study our slightly neglected neighbor.

The DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) and VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) missions will be taken up by NASA scientists and engineers for anticipated launch windows sometime between 2028 and 2030.

The DAVINCI+ mission will consisting of an orbiting platform as well as an atmospheric entry vehicle.  The orbiter will take high resolution of the Venusian “tesserae”–thought to be the equivalent of Earth’s tectonic plates–which could give insight into the potential that the planet’s surface experience continental drift.  It will also take measurements of the planet to help scientists understand the possibility of past oceans on Venus.

📣And the winners are….Thanks to the creative ideas of #Colorado kids across the state, 20 new plows in the #TeamCDOT fleet will receive names as part of the inaugural #NameThatPlow contest.
📰 https://t.co/lPS0JNyM5e#WholeSystemWholeSafety #snowplow @GovofCO pic.twitter.com/DRIbxSrefS

— Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) (@ColoradoDOT) June 2, 2021

For Coloradan National Zero fans, we’d appreciate your help to make the following 2022 submissions by proxy: “National Ze-Snow“, “Icepicks and Chill“, “Snowminion Voting Systems“, “Raise Plow/Drop Trou“, “MyPlow-ow“, “Truck Fump“, “Snow the Steal“, and “PlowAnon“. Please keep this article handy and cajole your children, nieces, nephews, and others to make the entries on our behalf when the 2022 submissions open up, whenever that is. Thank you in advance.

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd by kneeling on his back and neck for more than nine straight minutes, filed a pre-sentencing motion with court Wednesday seeking a reduction in the length of his as-yet unannounced sentence because, he claims, he is a “product of a ‘broken’ system.”

In the motion to the Fourth District Court for Minnesota, Chauvin argues that the court should either impose a less severe penalty or apply a shorter prison sentence because he was never convicted of a bad act before and, gosh darn it, he just a good man caught in a bad system.

“Mr. Chauvin asks the Court to look beyond its findings, to his background, his lack of criminal history, his amenability to probation, to the unusual facts of this case, and to his being a product of a ‘broken’ system,” the filing pleads. 

“The chairperson of Ra’am, Mansour Abbas, signed a document which allows the chairperson of Yesh Atid, Yair Lapid, to inform the president he has succeeded in forming a government after agreements were reached” reports Jerusalem Post’s Gil Hoffman.

Politico: “Former special counsel Robert Mueller will take part in a University of Virginia law school class covering his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential ties to the Trump campaign, the school announced Wednesday. Mueller, who graduated from the school in 1973, will lead ‘at least one class’ of the course, which is being taught by three former senior Mueller team members, including deputy special counsel Aaron Zebley, according to a release from the school. The ‘short’ class, called ‘The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel,’ will be taught in person this fall. ‘I was fortunate to attend UVA Law School after the Marine Corps, and I’m fortunate to be returning there now,’ Mueller said in the release.”

“‘I look forward to engaging with the students this fall.’ The class is set to begin with the investigation’s origin, and will go on to discuss Roger Stone’s prosecution, obstruction of justice and how a special counsel factors into holding a president accountable, among other things. According to the school’s release, Mueller aims to have top prosecutors from the investigation visit the class as guest speakers. Mueller was notoriously tight-lipped about the investigation, even after it concluded. Outside of congressional testimony in 2019, Mueller was silent publicly on the investigation until July 2020, when he wrote a Washington Post op-ed defending the investigation. The Justice Department named Mueller as special counsel in 2017. According to Mueller’s report, Trump did not respond kindly to his appointment.”

https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1400151308070387713

Security gates left unlocked and unmonitored.  Software updates so flawed they reverted to old systems.  Volunteers on the floor brandishing pens with blue or black ink, the same colors voters used to mark ballots.  These are just some of the security and quality-control violations Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs documented during a recent tour of the Maricopa County recount effort.

On a website debuted Wednesday–probably not coincidentally the same day she announced a campaign for the 2022 governor’s race–Hobbs and election security experts listed more than a dozen significant problems with the process and security of the recount.

“The effort to hand-count the 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County during the 2020 Presidential Election resumed on May 24, after a weeklong pause,” the website states.  “Observers on behalf of the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office continued to note problematic practices, changing policies, and security threats that have plagued this exercise from the start.”

“An adviser told The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey that Trump wanted to open a new ‘platform’ and didn’t like that this platform was being mocked and had so few readers. The individual spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about Trump’s plans” reports The Washington Post.

This wasn’t a hard guess to nail, but nail it we did.

https://youtu.be/Vnl1-lzOP88

President Barack Obama tweeted a preview of his production company’s new series on civics created for Netflix, “Higher Ground: We The People,” which uses music and animation to educate viewers in seemingly much the same way as SchoolHouse Rock did for children in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Katie Hobbs, as Secretary of State the most senior state elected Democratic official in Arizona, has announced that she is running for governor in 2022, CNN reports.

Republican Governor Doug Ducey is ineligible to run for reelection due to state term limits, so the race will be open for both major parties.  However, Arizona saw a swing toward Democrats in the last election, with voters choosing two Democrats to fill their seats in the US Senate as well as voting for Democrat Joe Biden for president.

Arizona Republicans are attempting to undermine the certified elections in the state, however, supporting a going-nowhere private recount of votes in the Democratic stronghold of Maricopa County.  State senate Republicans chose a private company with not election or recount experience, Cyber Ninjas, to manage the recount is a widely mocked effort to somehow switch the outcome of the popular vote to show Donald Trump won.  Hobbs has been highly critical of not just the audit, but of Republican efforts to undermine the election.

Moment from that batshit “Patriot Roundup” in Dallas last weekend.

Barack Obama once privately said “Trump is for a lot of white people what OJ’s acquittal was to a lot of Black folks – you know it’s wrong, but it feels good” according to former speechwriter Ben Rhodes’s upcoming book “After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made”, the Independent reported Wednesday, adding that “Mr Rhodes characterizes the OJ remark as ‘black humor'”.

What’s funny about this is it is essentially almost exactly what a Trump fan wrote to Politico editor John Harris in December 2019, when Harris asked MAGA readers to email him to explain why they opposed impeaching Donald for the Ukraine-Hunter Biden bullshit but why they would also be 100% against it if the circumstances were exactly the same with Hillary Clinton as president. The followup lowlight reel of the reader mail was literally titled “He Is Our O.J.” from that one response:

“With sincerity, candor and even a measure of wistful idealism, people shared their views of a political and media culture they believe is cynical at its core. If almost nothing is on the level, almost anything goes. For Keith Swartz, who is 66 years old and runs a recruiting firm based in Tacoma, Washington, almost anything includes a president he regards as ‘manic, uneducated, illogical,’ and also ‘essentially a horrible person… vulgar, amoral, narcissistic.’ Wait, this a defense of Trump? Yes, hang on. ‘He’s done a fine job on the economy, in particular, in the face of a Democratic opposition that has bent rules and abused process for three years in an implacable bid to thwart him. To those of us who support what he has accomplished… it feels like he is our O.J.’”

“A Florida man who wore a ‘Trump 2020’ T-shirt and carried a Trump flag as he stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 pleaded guilty Wednesday, becoming the second defendant to reach a plea deal in connection with the Capitol attack. Paul Allard Hodgkins, 38, pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of an official proceeding on Wednesday, while four other charges were dismissed as part of a plea deal. Hodgkins told Judge Randolph D. Moss that he had been in counseling through his employer since his arrest. Hodgkins was arrested in Florida on a criminal complaint on Feb. 16 after a witness who knew Hodgkins told the FBI he’d received a copy of a selfie Hodgkins posted on Parler that showed him on the floor of the Senate. Hodgkins told FBI agents that he traveled to Washington alone by bus before the Jan. 6 attack, according to the criminal complaint in his case.”

“Hodgkins was indicted by a federal grand jury March 5 on five counts: obstructing an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building. Hodgkins is the second Jan. 6 defendant to plead guilty in the Capitol attack. Jon Schaffer, a heavy-metal guitarist associated with the Oath Keepers, pleaded guilty to two counts in mid-May. Federal authorities have charged more than 400 defendants in connection with the Capitol attacks, and hundreds of more arrests are expected. The FBI received hundreds of thousands of tips in connection with the Capitol attack, and the unprecedented investigation has at times overwhelmed federal authorities” – Huffington Post.

Republican Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar worked with a Nevada GOP consultant to recruit groups, including the Proud Boys, to boost attendance at post-Election Day protests at Nevada and Arizona ballot-counting locations, the Washington Post reports.

Woodrow Johnston, the vice president of McShane LLC, a firm retained by Republican candidates and causes for strategic planning, contacted Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a progressive activist who was using a mock profile to infiltrate right-wing groups on Facebook.  In a Facebook message sent the day after the 2020 election, Johnston said Gosar, one of his clients, was organizing a “Brooks Brothers” protest in Arizona, referring to a storming of election offices by Republican extremists in Florida to intimidate officials in the contested 2000 Bush-Gore election.

“We might need to do the same here in Nevada,” Johnston wrote, according to messages provided by Ashton-Cirillo to the Post. “Which means we need to get the Proud Boys out.”  Johnston did not contest the authenticity of the messages.

Greg Sargent, Washington Post: “As the Biden administration increasingly resists pressure to release various documents that would shed light on the depths of Donald Trump’s corruption, you’ll be hearing a key excuse a lot: We need to restore normalcy. It’s a terrible excuse. And we shouldn’t stand for it. In an important piece, CNN reports that congressional Democrats are increasingly pessimistic that the Biden administration will release some highly-sought documents that would help settle some big unanswered questions involving the former president.”