“Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr, and Ivan Arvelo, Special Agent in Charge at Homeland Security Investigations, New York, today announced the return of seven artworks to the family of Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian-Jewish cabaret performer whose art collection was stolen by the Nazi regime. The drawings, all from Austrian artist Egon Schiele, were seized by the Office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit in 2023 from the Museum of Modern Art; The Ronald Lauder Collection; The Morgan Library; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Vally Sabarsky Trust in Manhattan.”

“The seven pieces were officially returned to the legal heirs and Trustees of Grünbaum’s art collection at a ceremony in the District Attorney’s Office. All seven drawings were seized and voluntarily surrendered by the holding institutions and estates after they were presented with evidence that they were stolen by the Nazis,” says a press release from the Manhattan DA’s office.

That’s so awesome. Bragg got to be like Indiana Jones while Jim Jordan, who had failed to derail Bragg from charging his Orange Master, just bitched and cried at friggin Merrick Garland for hours.

Just a day after he was hit with the indictment, non-CIA agent Ray Epps on Wednesday pleaded guilty via Zoom to the single disorderly conduct charge he’d been hit with for his participation in the January 6th, 2021 MAGA insurrection at the US Capitol, CBS News’s Scott MacFarlane reports.

It’s not clear why Epps, who’s looking at anywhere from zero to six months in the slammer for the crime, wasn’t allowed to plead down to a misdemeanor. But at most a few weeks in jail and a felony rap probably isn’t going to be a big deal for a guy who can reasonably expect a nine-figure payout after getting defamed over and over and over again by Tucker Carlson and others on Fox News.

Having already won the Arizona Governor’s mansion by over a billion votes in 2022, former newscaster Kari Lake is looking to kick ass in another election, this time for the Senate seat currently occupied by useless “independent” Senator Kyrsten Sinema, sources tell Politico.

Financial news network CNBC on Wednesday left viewers in a state of agonizing suspense over the latest twists and turns of the Federal Reserve Bank’s meeting and their decision to keep rates unch-

“House GOP Chairwoman Elise Stefanik and a Republican and Conservative coalition, which includes members of the New York Republican Congressional delegation, sued Gov Kathy Hochul and the State of New York for attempting to remove basic safeguards on absentee voting and allowing unregulated mass mail ballots in clear violation of the state constitution. You can read the Complaint filed in court here. ‘Kathy Hochul and extreme New York Democrats are trying to destroy what is left of election integrity in New York. Under Kathy Hochul’s failed leadership, elections are less secure and less transparent and will now be unconstitutional. As a New York voter, I am proud to lead this coalition in defending basic election integrity on behalf of all New Yorkers'” says screechy and miserable Republican New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik in a Wednesday press release.

It comes just hours after Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law allowing New Yorkers to vote early by mail and allow same-day voter registration on the first day of early voting which is so totally unconstitutional and definitely cost Trump the 2020 election like Stefanik says it did.

For whatever reason, maybe it’s a catfight, Stefanik doesn’t mention RNC Chairwoman Ronna Not-Romney in her tweet or press release announcing the lawsuit. Ronna tweeted about it too, of course not bothering to explain how its in any way consistent with her stupid “Bank Your Vote” campaign.

Don’t miss my exclusive interview with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tonight on #SpecialReport pic.twitter.com/YmV05agi8o

— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) September 20, 2023

Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson wrote in her upcoming memoir that drunken shitbrain Rudy Giuliani put his hand up her blazer and skirt “like a wolf closing in on his prey” as similarly evil and deranged MAGA lawyer John Eastman leered on while they waited backstage during disgraced former President Trump’s raging speech to his cultists at the Ellipse on January 6th, 2021, the Guardian reports from a preview of Hutchinson’s book Enough.

“I feel his frozen fingers trail up my thigh. He tilts his chin up. The whites of his eyes look jaundiced. My eyes dart to John Eastman, who flashes a leering grin. I fight against the tension in my muscles and recoil from Rudy’s grip… filled with rage, I storm through the tent, on yet another quest for [her then-boss Mark Meadows],” Hutchinson wrote, describing the moment as just another shitty experience amid “a creeping sense of dread that something really horrible [was] going to happen.”

Fat former President Trump has been querying minions about what it’ll be like if (hopefully when) he’s convicted of a major felony and has to be incarcerated, sources tell Rolling Stone.

Chief among Trump’s concerns are if he’ll have to wear “one of those jumpsuits” and whether he would end up in a “Club Fed” or a “bad” prison, with Rolling Stone describing such conversations as “a departure from the air of supreme confidence invincibility Trump has projected” and “it’s clear the gravity of his mounting legal peril is getting to Trump, regardless of whether the former president can admit to it in public,” which of course is the main reason why he’s running again.

Another question Trump has raised is whether he’d be stripped of Secret Service protection and the answer is no, barring an act of Congress which is unlikely or if he voluntarily gives it up, which is definitely not happening. Just to spitball it, our guess is that the fat bastard would ultimately be housed on a remote military base, somewhere like Guam or Puerto Rico, far from where any of his terrorist fanboys would be able to gather to rush and try to break him out.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland will sit for a live session of baseless accusations of politicized federal law enforcement and other such verbal abuse from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee led by jock-strapped fascist Jim Jordan who will no doubt grow angrier and angrier as Garland states facts about the ongoing criminal prosecutions of Hunter Biden and Donald Trump.

Deranged QAnon fan and now former attorney Lin Wood’s name comes up as among the “witnesses for the state” listed in a filing on potential representation conflicts by Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis’s RICO case against disgraced former President Trump and his minions for their failed attempt at overturning President Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 election win in the Peach State.

It’s not clear why Wood, himself having been recommended for indictment in the case, would testify against Trump or, maybe more importantly, what value such a deeply unwell person would have for the prosecution. Just months ago Wood declared himself “probably the second most persecuted person in America” after his Orange Messiah, so it’s also hard to see if or why he would suddenly turn “heel.” But putting two and two together, it’s still worth considering he may have quietly secured an immunity deal. Maybe more likely is that Wood will simply testify against the Kraken and other lower level peons. There were some tensions (including gross sexual ones) in the “Stop the Steal” crew that Wood was for whatever reason very happy to share secretly recorded audio of.

“If I would have made that speech yesterday at the United Nations, for all of the World to see, including the HORRENDOUS delivery, I would have been run out of politics! An EMBARRASSMENT to our Country,” fat former President Trump on Truth Social on Wednesday, still seething over President Biden’s well-received speech to the United Nations General Assembly nearly 24 hours earlier.

He’s definitely mad the other world leaders didn’t laugh at Biden like they did to him back in 2018. That’s really the only explanation for this, like he’s trying to will non-existent ridicule into existence to somehow vindicate the still painful wound of being so brutally humiliated on the global stage.

Having posted tweets like “I’m sad to announce, my father Donald Trump has passed away. I will be running for president in 2024,” and “Fuck @JoeBiden Stupid Ass N*gga” on Wednesday morning, it’s possible Donald Trump Jr’s account was hacked. Or he’s just coked out of his mind. Who knows.

It may end up being the former however since one of the tweets said “Richard Heart is innocent, when I become president I am going to burn down the SEC,” referencing some crypto douchebag who in July was hit with charges by the regulator for “conducting unregistered offerings of crypto asset securities that raised more than $1 billion in crypto assets from investors” and having misappropriated “at least $12 million of offering proceeds.” Crypto chodes are big on hijacking people’s social media accounts, so yeah Don Jr probably was hacked. Probably.

Police find female designer's stolen clothes in ex-Biden official Sam Brinton's home https://t.co/y2e4EFGd88

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 20, 2023

Law enforcement sources tell Fox News exclusively that a search warrant executed at the home of a former Biden Administration official turned up explosive new evidence implicating them in a web of corruption and outright thievery. The metastasizing scandal, to which most of the mainstream media willfully turned a blind eye while Fox and other conservative outlets pursued it diligently, threatens to engulf the entire Biden Administration by the mere association implied heavily by the usage of “ex-Biden official” in the headline of Fox News’s report.

Dem candidates in Tuesday’s special state House elections in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire won by margins exceeding the baselines of prior results, continuing a trend of overperformance that the “horse race” circlejerkers largely have been, unintentionally or otherwise, ignoring going into 2024.

In New Hampshire, Dem Hal Rafter flipped a Republican-held state House seat by 12 points in a district that fat former President Trump won by a slight 49.1 to 48.7 margin in 2020. The win puts the GOP’s 198-197 majority in the (extremely overpopulated) chamber at risk of becoming a tie or, less likely, an outright minority, with four more special elections coming up to fill vacant seats.

Down in Pennsylvania, Democrat Lindsay Powell’s win in the Pittsburgh-area 21st State House District was less of a question mark given her predecessor Sara Innamorato’s 63.6 to 36.4 victory in 2022. Still, Powell outperformed Innamorato slightly, taking 65.26 percent of the vote at 98 percent reporting, per Decision Desk HQ, maintaining the Keystone state House’s one-seat Democratic majority that had been left tied after Innamorato resigned to run for Allegheny County Executive.

You can come up with any number of plausible arguments as to why results in flukey, low-turnout special elections do not matter for the overall national political picture. That doesn’t make the headline factually incorrect though. Either way, the true test of Dem strength will come in November, with statewide legislative and/or gubernatorial elections in New Jersey, Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia,- with the last one’s implications being of particular importance given vest-wearing affable suburban fascist “Diet MAGA” Governor Glenn Youngkin’s plans to pass a 15-week abortion ban should his regime seize control of both chambers of the state’s legislature.

Sources within the Biden 2024 campaign tell Politico that by next spring they’ll have hundreds of communications, legal, digital and rapid response teams at the ready to respond to and squash MAGA propaganda and bullshit as soon as it comes on their social media radar.

In excerpts of his prepared opening statement obtained by CNN ahead of his testimony Wednesday to the House Judiciary Committee GOP led by spandex wearing grapple-freak Jim Jordan, Attorney General Merrick Garland is expected to tell them that he’s “not the President’s lawyer… I will also add that I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people.”

Garland will continue with his other greatest hits like how it’s his job “to pursue justice, without fear or favor” and not “do what is politically convenient” or “take orders from the President, from Congress, or from anyone else about who or what to criminally investigate.”

Alabama Republican coach Tommy Tuberville, who refuses to use his Senatorial title, is plotting with GOP colleagues to use a procedural vote to force a floor vote to approve the pending new Commandant of the Marine Corps, CNN reports.   The move, a parliamentary motion traditionally reserved for the Senate Majority Leader to use to bring emergency legislation to the floor, is rarely used by a rank-and-file member.

The motion requires 16 other Senators to join Tuberville, and a number of Republicans–including Rubio, Graham, and Cornyn–have said they have already joined the motion or they intend to.  The political move to break protocol in the Senate is a shift from the GOP taking fire for Tuberville’s block of hundreds of flag and executive officers’ promotions to blaming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for not bypassing the formal nomination process and bringing the nominations to the floor.

The problem for the GOP is, turtle in headlights Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, has not supported the move in the past, saying it would lead to chaos on the floor of the Senate with gangs of Senators forcing various votes.  There are other Senate rules Schumer can use to cut off Tuberville’s effort, but it would fall into the Republicans’ messaging about Schumer being the problem.

Testimony from several FBI and IRS agents contradicted the claims of IRS agent Gary Shapley that were corroborated by his subordinate Joseph Ziegler that then-US Attorney for Delaware David Weiss told his team about his authority to bring charges against President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

Shapley alleged Weiss told the interagency investigative team that he would be required to get approval to file charges against Hunter Biden and that he had been denied “special counsel” status he requested.  Per CNN, the FBI and IRS officials told the Republican-led panel, saying they did not recall Weiss making such a statement at the October meeting in question.  The trio testified that Weiss acknowledged having trouble finding another district’s US Attorney willing to sign on to a case against Biden to try him in that district, but he was not prevented from bringing charges.

Hunter Biden will plead “not guilty” to the three weapons charges filed against him by Special Counsel David Weiss in Delaware, with Biden’s lawyer saying in a letter Biden would like to enter his plea via videoconference instead of an in-court appearance, ABC News reports.

Having the plea hearing via teleconference, Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell argued, would limit “the financial impact on government resources and the logistical burden on the downtown area of Wilmington. … No matter whether in person or virtual … Mr. Biden also will enter a plea of not guilty, and there is no reason why he cannot utter those two words by video conference.”

Kevin McCarthy’s time as Speaker pro tem will be marked by a number of votes to get the title and a clean cut to dethrone him after his disastrous handling of key bills that have been pulled–again–because of deep crevices in the caucus.  Per NBC News, a defense funding bill failed to get a simple majority on a motion to open debate as five far-right Republicans joined Democrats to block the move.  The bill needs to be passed by the end of the month to continue funding key Pentagon programs.

Later, GOP House leadership pulled a procedural vote on a continuing resolution to fund the government through October 31st that was supposedly a compromise between the far-right Freedom Caucus after a number of Republicans announced they would not support the CR.

South Carolina’s Ralph Norman, one of the five Republicans who voted against the defense bill, did not offer hope for an agreement to fund the government before the September 30th deadline, saying that a shutdown appeared inevitable.