A New Hope 🪐 pic.twitter.com/4MNNES4pED

— NCGOP (@NCGOP) May 4, 2024

For those unfamiliar with the Star Wars universe: The Jedi, as in the good guys, wield blue and green lightsabers. Occasionally there’s a yellow one. Samuel L Jackson’s character Mace Windu carried a purple-bladed lightsaber. The Sith, the bad guys, wield red ones. All of them. There may’ve been one in a recent live-action series that fought with an orange-y red lightsaber, but the point is that hateful, genocidal psychopaths like Darth Vader, the Emperor, and Kylo Ren have red-bladed sabers.

Longer ones too. At least twice as long as the one photoshopped above. Length is important.

Well we screwed up again at one of our “bold” predictions. On Friday we wrote that MAGAverse’s line on Texas Dem Congressman Henry Cuellar’s indictment for taking bribes from some Azerbaijani scumbags would be that “the Deep State sometimes goes after sacrificial lambs like Cuellar and Bob Menendez to make their ‘persecutions’ of Donald Trump seem more legitimate.” Now it’s clear that was a failure of imagination, as the actual line is that this is retaliation for Cuellar being a border hawk. Should’ve seen it coming after a similar line developed last year when Eric Adams’s phones got seized. This isn’t going to be all that long given the level of repetitiveness and overlap.

“Cuellar has been very outspoken against the Biden Administration and its immigration policies. Henry has had plenty of time to change his rhetoric but refuse to do so and now the Biden Administration is going to take him down” – Top comment on Fox News’s article.

“Henry Cuellar (D-TX) is one the very few Democrats who is in favor of illegal immigration restrictions. He’s from the Rio Grande Valley and knows his constituents want the border under control. To me, here in Texas, it looks like the administration trying to get rid of him. Show me the man, etc” – Top comment on Twitchy’s article. You were warned these were repetitive.

“Notice that whenever a democrat strays from the party line, he gets indicted” – Top comment on Breitbart’s article. Note that Cuellar had been under investigation for at least two years, long before the “border crisis” was amped up to an 11 by the MAGA propaganda machine a few months ago.

“All of the so-called ‘evidence’ being presented in Court by the Crooked Joe Biden Fascist Prosecutors has NOTHING to do with the phony, no crime case, against me. The Judge is letting things into this Witch Hunt that would NEVER be let in by a fair Judge – Like a decades old event that was already adjudicated by the voters in the 2016 Election – A LONG TIME AGO,” posted disgraced former President Trump on Truth Social on Saturday, crying about the Access Hollywood tape being used to establish his intent in paying off Stormy Daniels just days before the election.

What sticks out however is the “Crooked Joe Biden Fascist Prosecutors” part, which we are certain is referring to Assistant DA Matt Colangelo, a former Justice Department official who now serves on Alvin Bragg’s team. We don’t know how close of a call this is but just going by the time Judge Arthur Engoron fined the fat fuck $10,000 for screaming about “a very partisan judge with a person who is very partisan sitting alongside him,” meaning Engoron’s clerk Allison Greenfield. Trump had been warned not to mention her at all and Engoron determined that, pretty obviously, he was violating the gag order imposed over a post attacking Greenfield as “Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend.”

If Judge Juan Merchan is going to follow Engoron’s lead it’s possible this is a breach of the gag order’s proscription on “Making or directing others to make public statements about (1) counsel in the case other than the District Attorney, (2) members of the court’s staff and the District Attorney’s staff.” So if this puts Trump in jail it will be the plural “s” in “prosecutors” that did him in.

“Marc Shultz has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Atlanta on charges of transmitting interstate threats to injure Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis because of her prosecution of Former President Donald Trump. Shultz made his initial appearance in federal court in San Diego, California on May 2, 2024, and will be formally arraigned in Atlanta in June. ‘Sending death threats to a public official is a criminal offense that will not be tolerated,’ said US Attorney Ryan K Buchanan.”

“According to US Attorney Buchanan, the indictment, and other information presented in court: On October 4, 2023, and again on October 5, 2023, Shultz allegedly posted multiple comments to two separate YouTube live stream videos. His comments threatened District Attorney Willis with violence and murder including a statement that she ‘will be killed like a dog.’ Marc Shultz, 66, of Chula Vista, California was indicted by a federal grand jury on April 24, 2024. Members of the public are reminded that the indictment only contains charges. The defendant is presumed innocent of the charges and it will be the government’s burden to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial,” says a Justice Department press release on more the bullshit Trump has normalized.

Thank you @elonmusk for reinstating my account and upholding your commitment to free speech.

I have been censored on every major platform for +3 years. Much has been said about me in that time by groups like ADL and SPLC…

I look forward to reintroducing myself in my own words!

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) May 4, 2024

The incel fascist last made his re-debut on Twitter back in January 2023, lasting just about 24 hours on the platform after an outcry. Something tells us he might last a bit longer this time around.

• Biden gets laughs at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  Trump turning up noses with farts in a Manhattan courtroom as he drifts off.  Dark Brandon > Sleepy Don.
• Make it known from on high:  Democrats repealed the 1864 Arizona abortion law, with the help of (literally) a handful of Republicans:  Three in the state house and two in the state senate voted with all Democrats to repeal the law after the Democratic governor signed it.  Even after the public ridicule, Republicans did nothing.
• Props to journalists like Susanne Craig and Andrew Weissmann for cutting through the noise and concentrating on issues in their analysis of Trump’s legal foibles.  Unlike some who think this is a drama, they’re sticking to facts and analysis.  
• Conservatives are more angry that a few dozen people took over a building on a college campus than they were when thousands of their supporters violently attacked the Capitol.  House Republicans going to colleges to voice outrage, but they call Jan. 6th attackers “hostages.”  Priorities, people.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CLXXI”

The hosts at Fox are vile.  We know this.  But as a couple fill-in hosts go through lists of people to whom Joe Biden should have given Presidential Medals of Freedom–including the first female Speaker Nancy Pelosi, civil rights icon Medgar Evers, and billionaire Michael Bloomberg–Tweedledum and Tweedledummer decide to list a few of their ultranationalist heroes before the cis female host pops in with “Well, maybe Paul Pelosi needs the hammer instead of the Medal,” Rachel Campos-Duffy about the man who was seriously injured by a deranged MAGAt who broke into his house and assault Pelosi with a hammer.

Prosecutors filed a sentencing recommendation seeking a twelve-year sentence for Leo Brent Bozell IV, the son of conservative advocacy group Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell (LBB3), for LBB4’s participation in the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack.

Saying LBB4 has an “outsized impact on the course of the riot,” prosecutors are seeking a terrorism enhancement for the standard sentence on his ten-count conviction, which includes five felony counts.  Seen in a lot of footage taken during the resurrection, Bozell repeatedly encouraged people to break police lines on the way into the Capitol by coordinating pressure.  In one video, Bozell is seen yelling to a crowd facing police, “ARE YOU READY TO PUSH? LET’S PUSH! . . . PUSH!”

Jack Smith’s team notified Judge Aileen Cannon’s court–and the Trump team–that court records enumerating the documents found at Donald Trump’s waiting room for Hell in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, may not reflect the actual order of the records as they are now, Politico reports, a minor but important concession by prosecutors.

Prosecutors had previously asserted to the court that the records remained in the order they were found at Mar-a-Lago with the exception that classified records were replaced by placeholder sheets.  “The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” the prosecutors wrote.

But defense attorneys noted that the order of the items in boxes did not list the order in which they were scanned.  So why is this a big deal?  Well, first, anything that could be used to cause a delay in the Florida documents case will be used to delay it, and Walt Nauta’s lawyers had asked for a continuance to figure out the proper sequence of the documents.  And second, Smith’s team noted that while the documents were listed in different sequence, they were still government documents found in Donald Trump’s possession, so the order they were found in doesn’t matter much (paraphrasing).

Just to get this out of the way first: We don’t actually believe this stupid poll that shows Trump leading Biden 46 to 45 percent, especially given that it was “exclusive” to the goddamned New York Post. Breitbart does however and their coping over the change in the finding conditioned on a change if the Orange God Emperor is convicted at trial in Manhattan is just too fucking funny.

The headline “Poll: Potential Trump Conviction Would Not Lift Biden’s Lagging Support” is an objectively true statement about the findings. It’s just, ughhhhh, man this is brutal.

“The poll also indicates a small percentage of Trump’s current support would move to the undecided column should a Manhattan jury convict him. Hypothetically, Trump could re-earn those undecided voters back into his column after the shock of a potential conviction wears off. Trump, along with some Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits, believe evidence shows Biden’s White House is involved in the several prosecutions of Trump,” they write, before they get to the actual numbers, laying them out in what looks like the absolute most ass-backwards way possible.

We don’t know what’s happened to Tucker Carlson since he got booted from the Fox network after helping to cost the network $787.5 million in the Dominion defamation lawsuit.  Apparently, whatever happened involved massive amounts of hallucinogenics, and not in a gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson kinda way; for Tucker, it’s the kind of trip where Alex Jones is a secret prophet.

How’d that happen?  (“Ri– How did he do that?” host and anti-intellectual Joe Rogan interjects.) No, [Alex Jones] is channeling something.  There’s like no other– I mean, tell me how he did it otherwise.  I’ve asked him about it:  ‘How did you do that?’ –at length, we had dinner at my barn recently and we were talking about this–‘How’d you do this?’ ‘I dunno.  It just came to me.’  And that’s real.  That is real.  The supernatural is real, and I don’t know why it’s so hard for the modern mind, I guess, because it’s a materialist mind, to accept that, but what you se– and that’s not a new phenomenon.  It’s happened throughout history:  they were people called prophets, and there were people who were prophets who weren’t called prophets but they were people who have information or parts of information, bits of information, visions of information, come to them, and then they relay it.

Long-time Trump aide Hope Hicks took the stand as the final witness on Friday, providing compelling testimony that the Trump team was greatly distressed by the Access Hollywood tape and revelations of more mistresses.

• Judge Juan Merchan started Friday’s session by chiding/correcting Donald Trump for saying he cannot testify because of the gag order, saying he’s free to testify.  
• Georgia Longstreet, a paralegal in the DA’s office, is the eighth witness called.  Longstreet authenticates Trump’s social media posts and other publicly-available material.  
• Longstreet confirms videos and social media posts in which Trump claimed all the women making claims about him are lying.  She also verifies a video of Trump’s infamous “locker room talk” video in which he justi-poligi-fies his “grab ‘em by the pussy” statement heard on the Access Hollywood tape.
  Read More ▶ “Trial day wrap-up: Hope Hicks gets emotional on stand”

“You’ve got groups that are funded by George Soros.  There are Palestinian rights groups that I believe are involved funded by George Soros and they need to be off of our college campuses if they’re committing violence, full stop,” South Carolina’s Republican opportunist in Congress Nancy Mace asserts before being befuddled by a Fox host fact checking her.

“Alright.  Um, there’s no proof these groups are funded by George Soros, by the way.  Their folks have denied that, but we’ll see exactly where all this money is coming from,” Neil Cavuto responds.

“We’ll agree to disagree,” a weirdly-grinning Mace continues with her confusing anti-semitic, pro-Israel message.

It’s difficult to overlook Cricket’s murder, but Republican South Dakota Governor and Cruella DeVille-stan Kristi Noem has at least one major error in her book that questions her memory and her qualifications for office, the Associated Press reports.  Noem relates a vivid story of “staring down” Kim Jong-un, calling him a “little tyrant,” in an encounter for which no other record exists.

“Through my tenure on the House Armed Services Committee,” Noem wrote, “I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders. I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”

The problem:  no record exists of Congresswoman Kristi Noem meeting Kim.  In fact, there’s no record of an official Congressional delegation to North Korea since the GW Bush administration when bipartisan groups led by Republican Pennsylvania Congressman Curt Weldon visited the isolationist country.  (Trump’s then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Kim in October 2018).

We have no idea when this video was filmed or where. It’s possible it was in 2019, when Trump was first impeached for trying to fuck over Zelensky… Or it’s a fake staged by the Russians to incite MAGAmericans against Kyiv (like they need any more help). Still funny to watch.

Federal prosecutors in South Texas are expected to announce a grand jury has returned an indictment against Texas Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar, NBC News reports. Cuellar had been the target of an FBI raid in 2022 over his shady ties to some Azerbaijani scumbags but it’s not clear if the indictment is connected or if it’s from a new investigation into different crimes.

Either way it’s plain that, in order to maintain the appearance that a politicized two-tier system of justice doesn’t exist, the Deep State sometimes goes after sacrificial lambs like Cuellar and Bob Menendez to make their “persecutions” of Donald Trump seem more legitimate. A not-small number of right wing legal pundits and regular schmucks alike will make that argument with a straight face.

UPDATE 5/3/2024 2:03 PM EDT: Cuellar and his wife have been officially indicted on charges of taking nearly $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil company and a bank based in Mexico City.

“The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged audit firm BF Borgers CPA PC and its owner, Benjamin F Borgers (together, ‘Respondents’), with deliberate and systemic failures to comply with Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) standards in its audits and reviews incorporated in more than 1,500 SEC filings from January 2021 through June 2023. The SEC also charged the Respondents with falsely representing to their clients that the firm’s work would comply with PCAOB standards; fabricating audit documentation to make it appear that the firm’s work did comply with PCAOB standards; and falsely stating in audit reports included in more than 500 public company SEC filings that the firm’s audits complied with PCAOB standards.”

“To settle the SEC’s charges, BF Borgers agreed to pay a $12 million civil penalty, and Benjamin Borgers agreed to pay a $2 million civil penalty. Both Respondents also agreed to permanent suspensions from appearing and practicing before the Commission as accountants, effective immediately,” says a press release from the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

What it doesn’t say is, per FT, that BF Borgers is (was) the Trump Media and Technology Group’s auditor responsible for preparing the Truth Social parent’s filings to the SEC and investors. Who the hell knows if this is bad news for a company we already know to be corrupt and dodgy as fuck.

Texas man Collin Davis sounds like he would’ve been a great dad and husband as he’s asking a court to allow him the power to investigate and build evidence for a wrongful death lawsuit against his ex-girlfriend for traveling to Colorado to get an abortion, the Washington Post reports.

Disgraced former President Trump’s longtime top personal assistant Hope Hicks could end up taking the stand on Friday to tell the jury about the events before, during, and after the fat fuck set up an arrangement to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about the $130,000 hush money payoff in the days before the 2016 election. Hicks’s time depends on if and when the prosecution’s tech expert wraps up authenticating the data on Michael Cohen’s phones as real and was not ever tampered with because Team Orange would not agree to its admissibility in the trial.

The US economy added 175,000 jobs in April, falling short of an expected 240,000 expected and the unemployment rate crept up to 3.9 percent in a sign that employers are paying close attention to former President Trump’s newly tightening poll numbers against President Biden and are holding back on new hires since they aren’t so sure the genius businessman will return to office.

Especially those ones last week showing RFK Jr taking more from Trump than from Biden. Those have to be setting off alarm bells inside C-suites all over the country. And the stock market softening too. That’s definitely 100 percent attributable to Biden’s newfound electoral strength.

Trump himself seemed panicked that the slight dip in his numbers had affected the job market, posting “HORRIBLE JOB NUMBERS JUST ANNOUNCED. A BIG MISS FROM FAKE ESTIMATES. THEY SHOULD HAVE ASKED ME TO GIVE THE FORECAST. BIDEN IS DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!!!”

National Zero will resume our regular coverage after “reporting” the very natural upshot to Donald and his fanboys claiming that all positive economic indicators are thanks to his polling numbers.