New York Superior Court Judge Arthur Engoron on Tuesday responded to disgraced former President Trump’s Truth Social post falsely attacking his court clerk as “Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend” by telling Trump to delete it and promptly issuing a gag order, Politico’s Erica Orden reports.

“Personal attacks on members on my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I won’t tolerate it [in my courtroom]… Consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting, emailing, or speaking publicly about any of my staff,” Engoron said in court.

And with that Engoron made Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s task of convincing DC Circuit Judge Tanya Chutkan to slap Trump with a gag order at next week’s big hearing became that much easier. Or Chutkan’s decision to do so got that much easier. Either way this is almost certain to have implications and not good one for Trump in his post-2020 election coup attempt case.

Remember back when we did four days in a row of live coverage of the 15 failed votes to make Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House? Great, so let’s just pick up where we left off because the incredibly weak California Congressman is in the same spot nine months later.

During the recess of his New York State trial on fraudulently manipulating financial statements, indicted former president Donald Trump posted on his failing Truth Social platform a thinly-veiled threat against the court clerk in the case. Trump posted the “truth” shown below featuring a photo of the clerk standing with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, in an unknown place, at an unknown time, in an unknown circumstance.  We also will note that cannot confirm the unknown woman in the photo is actually the clerk.  (We have documented the post, but opt to hide the woman’s face for her protection.)

After the post quickly got traction on other, more popular platforms, Trump deleted it, apparently scared that he would be taken to task by one of the judges in his various legal cases who have warned him against intimidating witnesses and court personnel on social media.

It’s such a great look for a democracy when a former president targets a court bureaucrat for doing her job. To paraphrase Trump, “If he can do it to her, he’ll do it to you, too.”  [UPDATE:  3:10 p.m. ET:  Judge Engoron ordered Trump to remove the post, ordering “Consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff.”]

America’s northerly neighbors on Tuesday displayed that they have their shit together more than we do, as MPs in the House of Commons elected Liberal Greg Fergus to succeed the dipshit Anthony Rota, who resigned after stupidly inviting a 98 year-old Ukrainian Nazi WWII veteran to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to Parliament and saluted him in the chamber, CTV News reports.

“A variety of McCarthy rank and file allies are frantically reaching out to Dems right now to gauge what they want for a possible deal to save his speakership,” Politico’s Meredith Lee Hill reports citing an anonymous House Republican who also tells her “I don’t know if Kevin will take it.”

Which means that, before the vote to vacate the speakership has even happened, Republicans loyal to McCarthy are trying to sue for peace and are willing to form a coalition government in Congress.

QAnon “patriots” are almost certainly to erupt with joy after their Lord and Savior spoke the magic words “Do your own research” as he left court in New York on Tuesday. Trump’s utterance of the creed central to the apocalyptic death cult’s ethos of connecting random bits of information to each other to divine their inane conspiracy theories will no doubt be seen as a validation and encouragement of such lifestyle habits and will spur them to consume massive quantities of court documents and discovery evidence in the hopes of “exonerating” the failed one-term president.

In the real world Trump is simply admitting he was full of shit and is trying to claim there was no real harm caused by his fraudulent business practices, which would be like claiming that he never actually sold any of the classified documents he stole and the government got them back in the end.

Trump also told reporters he would take the stand to testify “at the appropriate time.” Then he accused the court clerk of being Chuck Schumer’s “girlfriend” on Truth Social.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries emerged from an all-hands caucus meeting on Tuesday to inform the media the Dems will “definitively” vote in lockstep against delaying or tabling credibly suspected sex trafficker and statutory rapist Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz’s motion to vacate against titular Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman reports.

“House Democrats will continue to put people over politics and hopefully find some common ground with a reasonable set of Republicans who are committed to breaking from their extremist colleagues and doing the right thing by the American people,” Jeffries said to reporters after the meeting.

Asking around at an Iowa Trump 2024 campaign event this week, NBC News reporters found several MAGA Cornhole Staters willing to talk about the twice-impeached and four-times indicted loser’s recent escalation violent rhetoric with calls for now-former Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley to face the death penalty for treason and for shoplifters to summarily executed on the spot.

“Treason is treason. There’s only one cure for treason: being put to death,” said one woman. “Why was [Milley] not in there before a firing squad within a month?” asked another. “We used to execute or imprison people for all the treasonous actions I see,” said a man, who did not elaborate on all the “treasonous actions,” but added “Now, in this day and age, it’s just throw it underneath the rug.”

One woman “who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020” however told NBC reporters the bloodlust was going “way too far. It’s way too far.” The article then states she “said she plans to back him again,” without going further into the exchange with this supposedly reluctant Trump voter.

Opening day two of the trial in New York Attorney General Leticia James’s $250 million fraud lawsuit against disgraced former President Trump’s corrupt business empire, Judge Arthur Engoron told Team Orange they misunderstood him on his rulings on the statutes of limitation applied to claims, not evidence. “The attorney general is suing over over false financial statements, not over the underlying deals themselves,” Engoron said, per the Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery. “Every use of a false financial statement in business starts the statute of limitations running again,” Engoron continued.

Upon leaving court on Monday, Trump had claimed “Well, I think that went very good… that last five minutes was outstanding, because the judge essentially conceded that the statute of limitations that we won at the court of appeals is in effect. Therefore about 80 percent of the case is over.”

Which means that the fat bastard was entirely wrong and 100 percent of the case is still very much not over. Well except for the part where Engoron ruled a default judgment for the state and ordered a shit ton of business licenses canceled and LLCs under the Trump Organization dissolved.

Earlier on Tuesday Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Judge Engoron has been given false and grossly misleading information about my Net Worth by a lying and incompetent Attorney General, such as Mar-a-Lago being worth $18,000,000 when in fact the number would be much closer to 1.5 Billion Dollars, like other properties, including two that were recently sold for numbers many times those that were listed in the Financial Statements. The NYS Attorney General, therefore, committed FRAUD for Political and Election Interference reasons. This case should therefore be dismissed!” and then continued melting down outside the courtroom, screaming the same to news cameras.

In a long feature on differing health outcomes in the continuous adjacent arc of three demographically and economically similar counties in three different states along the southeastern shore of Lake Erie – Ashtabula County, Ohio, Erie County, Pennsylvania, and Chautauqua County, New York – the Washington Post crunches the numbers and finds a pretty unambiguous reality that people in Ashtabula by and large die younger than those in Erie and Chautauqua.

Data from the 2020 census shows Chautauqua, Erie, and Ashtabula almost in complete lockstep: 86.3, 82.9, and 88.1 percent non-Hispanic white, median annual household incomes of $50,408, $55,949, and $49,680, and poverty rates at 17.2, 15.8, and 15.2 percent, all respectively. Yet the death rate in Ashtabula in 2020 was 650 per 100,000 between the ages of 35 and 65 compared to under 500 in Erie and about 525 in Chautauqua. The Post attributes the disparity to lax seatbelt laws (people are twice as likely to die in car accidents in Ashtabula than in Chautauqua), low cigarette taxes, and lack of Medicaid funding, three policy issues the Republican-dominated Ohio state legislature have refused to do anything about for fear of becoming a “nanny state.”

“Between 2015 and 2019, nearly five times as many Ashtabula residents in their prime died of chronic medical conditions as died of overdoses, suicide and all other external causes combined, according to The Post analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death records,” the Post writes in the article, which is interspersed with a profile of a local funeral director’s long hours. Mike Czup told the Post he recently had to prep the body of a 34 year-old heart attack victim whom the 52 year-old Czup had coached on a YMCA basketball team when he was a kid.

Titular House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNBC on Tuesday the first vote on whether to kill off Matt Gaetz’s palace coup attempt – expected at about 1:30 PM EDT this afternoon – “will tell everything,” and denied he was talking with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to try to gain their support. “I’m not asking for any special deal or anything else,” McCarthy said.

“Proving yet again how hopelessly juvenile Democrats are” – The current top comment on the Breitbart article “Rep Matt Gaetz Formally Makes His Move to Oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy.”

Breitbart’s home page displays it as “Matt Gaetz Files Motion to Oust Kevin McCarthy – Dems Erupt in Laughter – Reports: Blames Speaker for ’Gaslighting’ Ethics Investigation,” emphasis added to refer to what the commenter was so offended by. If you try to put yourself in the Crocs of a Breitbart reader then you actually can kind of see how Democrats laughing at Matt Gaetz trying to take down the Speaker of the House isn’t as funny as “Let’s Go Brandon!” or the time that QAnon-pilled freak bashed in Nancy Pelosi’s husband’s head with a hammer. Those things are hilarious to MAGA folks.

Big news over at Fox:  Donald Trump is expected to attend the second day of his civil trial brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James for fraudulently valuing… well… everything.  Interestingly, Fox touts Trump’s tantrum during today’s lunch recess, when he’s not under oath or in the presence of the judge, in which Trump “rage against Judge Arthur Engoron.”  Because it’s not kabuki theatre at all.  (Cue Lauren Boebert inquiring, “Did someone say ‘theatre’?”)

Original Report:  A report from Nicholas Wu at Politico that a member of Congress was carjacked at the DC Navy Yard Monday evening, with Jake Sherman/Heather Scope co-reporting that the member was Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar.  There are no reports on the status of Cuellar or if he was hurt.

Update:  10:43 p.m. ET:  Sarah Ferris of Politico confirmed with the Congressman’s office that Cueller is unharmed.

Update:  12:02 a.m. ET:  The Associated Press reports that Cueller was driving in the Navy Yard neighborhood when he was confronted by three men.  His office released a statement:  “As Congressman Cuellar was parking his car this evening, 3 armed assailants approached the Congressman and stole his vehicle. Luckily, he was not harmed and is working with local law enforcement.”

It takes a special person to claim that a 6,600% value discrepancy is just “details,” but that’s what defendant desperately trying to get the approval of a co-conspirator Eric Trump calls the difference between what the company he runs listed as the value of Mar-a-Lago in 2020 versus what he claims it’s valued at now.

But then curiously, the unloved Trump… wait, the unloved Trump named Eric (to be precise) goes on a rant about his hometown, denigrating the city where he and his wife live with a Gish gallop of lies and hyperbole.  And more curiously, after asserting the innocence of his political idol, Eric doesn’t assert his innocence.  Maybe someone’s volunteered to take the fall in a fleeting attempt to win paternal recognition, if not love.  [sniff]

The House Republicans’ overt effort to do… something… to politically damage President Joe Biden’s reelection effort will bring in the US Attorney for Washington, DC, Matt Graves, who declined to team with Delaware US Attorney David Weiss to pursue charges in DC federal court against Hunter Biden, Politico reports.

Two IRS agents earlier told the Republican House performance art troupe that Graves refused Weiss’s request, which would have required Weiss to seek Special Counsel status to file charges in a district other than his own on his own.  A US Attorney can refuse to team on an indictment for a number of reasons, including a disagreement on the law,  or because a case can take up too many of the local offices resources for a less-than-worthy charge.  But Republicans claim that it was a cover-up to help Biden.

New York Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman asserted on MSNBC that if Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy wants to remain Speaker, he will have to accept a coalition leadership in the House. Saying that a “deal” to stay in office will have to be a long-term relationship to avoid repeated far-right efforts to oust him to be effective, Goldman pushed a very weak McCarthy.  A deal, Goldman notes, “that may resolve his Speakership right now, but he is going to have to legislate for another year.  Every single time a rule comes up, he’s going to need Democrats to pass a rule.  So he will then have to enter into some form of coalition government.”

Such a prospect is intriguing given that to enter into a coalition with Democrats means McCarthy would have to concede certain issues to Democrats.  Democrats could demand the closure of the impeachment inquiry or better, force a floor vote to authorize the inquiry which would show many Republicans do not support the political effort.

Just did. https://t.co/zdQk3GblbV

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) October 2, 2023

Earlier on Monday our story titled “Defendant says judge should be charged with election interference” featured a video clip of the moment that was accompanied by a description which reads “Fat former President Trump lost his shit during the lunch break on day one of his civil fraud trial in New York State on Monday, screaming that Judge Arthur Engoron ‘should be disbarred. This is a judge that should be out of office. This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he’s doing. He’s interfering with an election’ before [Trump] went to McDonald’s.”

The last part was baseless speculation, for which we apologize to our readers. According to TMZ what actually happened was that Trump sent his bodyguards to pick up at least six large bags of McDonald’s food for him to consume on-site at the courthouse. National Zero regrets the error.

Credibly suspected sex trafficker and statutory rapist Congressman Matt Gaetz on Monday finally followed through on his threats to initiate a motion to vacate against titular Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, throwing the no confidence vote to the chamber, Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman reports, adding that “The Democratic side of the House erupted in laughter as Gaetz left the floor.”

Separate reporting indicates that Gaetz may actually have the numbers to vacate and trigger another vote for the Speakership. It’s extremely unlikely McCarthy will actually be removed, but any need for Democratic support means they can extract concessions from the GOP’s weak figurehead.