At least 106 people have been confirmed dead a week after a massive wind-driven wildfire torched the historic town of Lahaina, Hawaii, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports. Rescue personnel have searched about 32 percent of the burned area and circa 1,300 remain unaccounted for as of Tuesday morning, so the toll will unfortunately continue to rise. Really hoping it’s not anywhere near 1,300 and those folks are merely scattered in shelters or staying on other islands in the Aloha State.

A thrice-divorced, hair-dye-addicted alcoholic who can’t get his clients to pay his bills is reportedly in dire financial straits as he faces his first criminal indictment on top of a dumpster-full of civil suits that could cost him more than one billion dollars.

According to CNN, Rudy Giuliani is facing $90,000 in court sanctions, along with a court-mandated $20,000 per month electronic records storage fee, a $15,000 records search fee and a separate $57,000 judgment against his company for unpaid phone bills. He ran up a $320,000 past due account with the company preserving his electronic records before the Trump SuperPAC picked up the tab because the records were needed in other cases.

Besides the Fulton County criminal indictment that dropped Monday, Giuliani is facing defamation lawsuits from both Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems that go into the billions of dollars.  And because he admitted to the facts of the case brought in Shae Moss and Ruby Freeman’s lawsuit–admissions which, by the way, may be used as evidence in other cases–the judge in the case just has to rule if Ruby’s lies about the pair are protected political speech.  (Yeah, I know.  I chuckled as I typed it.)

A dump of documents from the Special Counsel’s office shows Twitter turned over a slew of information from Donald Trump’s account, including direct messages and other communications, but only after a furious battle during which the judge accused the company’s owner of slow-walking compliance with a warrant to curry favor with Trump.

Prosecutors ultimately got a load of data from the social media platform, essentially from all the things Twitter collects from all its users, as summarized by Politico:

• Accounts associated with @realdonaldtrump that the former president might have used in the same device
• Devices used to log into the @realdonaldtrump account
•  IP addresses used to log into the account between October 2020 and January 2021.
• Privacy settings and history
• All tweets “created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by @realdonaldtrump, including any subsequently deleted.
• All direct messages “sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with” @realdonaldtrump
• All records of searches from October 2020 to January 2021
• Location information for the user of @realdonaldtrump from October 2020 to January 2021

Right-wing reporter John Cardillo reports that the Save America PAC, which is picking up the legal bills of a number of people swept up in the investigations into the criminal activities of Donald Trump, is refusing to pay any fees amassed by disgraced lawyer and member of Trump’s Elite Strike Force Team Jenna Ellis, who was one of the 18 people who joined Trump on a Fulton County indictment.

While Ellis was all-in for Trump and his Big Lie, she’s jumped ship this cycle and is supporting the failing campaign of Florida short straw Ron DeSantis.  Betraying the cult comes with a price, apparently.

Lara Trump is right to be upset over Hillary Clinton laughing about her father-in-law getting charged a fifth time on Monday for a grand total of 91 felonies. It’s not funny like saying “Let’s Go Brandon!” or “My pronouns are Arrest/Fauci” or Congressman Jim Jordan’s tweets. Those are good examples of conservative-friendly comedy material – wholesome stuff, unlike liberals who mostly just laugh at the misfortune of others facing the justice system or dying of COVID after refusing to get vaxxed.

As much as 80% of the floating barrier Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott constructed in the Rio Grande River to stop migrants from crossing the border is actually located in Mexico, possibly making it an illegal annexation of land, CBS News reports.

The barrier, which is believed to be responsible for at least two deaths according to officials, was surveyed by the US International Boundary and Water Commission and their Mexican counterparts for a lawsuit the Biden Administration filed against Abbott and Texas over the barrier, which the Administration says violates several federal laws.

“A majority of the floating barrier (approximately 787 feet of the 995-foot buoy chain) is located within the territory of Mexico,” the Justice Department said in the court filing.

“You can count on me.  I not going nowhere, and all this stuff about cooperating:  You’re damn right I’m gonna cooperate!” exorts Co-conspirator 1 in the federal indictment and named co-defendant in the Georgia indictment Rudy Giuliani.  “I’m gonna cooperate and show what criminals they [meaning either the prosecutors or the Bidens, it’s hard to tell with Rudy] are and what they’re doing to our Constitution and how they’re destroying it and how they are a disgrace to my profession. That’s what I’m gonna cooperate with.”

Editor’s note:  When Rudy talks about “my profession,” the meaning is unclear.  His law license is currently suspended.

Alleged Trump co-conspirator Mark Meadows, the former White House Chief of Staff, has filed a motion to move the RICO trial involving multi-indicted former President and seventeen other defendants to a federal court, ABC News reports.  A federal rule allows for a case to move from state to federal court if the defendant is supposedly acting “under color” of an official position.

Defense attorneys believe Trump and his henchmen stand a better shot with a jury pool that is less Democratic than Idaho.  Fulton County is far too liberal and… um… ethnic to be fair to Republicans.

(UPDATE 8:50 p.m. ET)  Thanks to an appearance from journalist Anna Bower on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show:  The request to change venue to a federal court means a physical change of venue down the Atlanta street to the federal court building.  Georgia law will still apply; Fulton Co. DA Fani Willis and her team will still prosecute; and the sentence will be done via Georgia law, meaning it is not directly pardonable by the governor.  Major difference is that largely federal filing procedures are followed, and a federal jury pool rules will apply.

We must note that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is indeed prosecuting a rapist.

“Communist gangsters raised 100 fraudulent charges against president Trump to deny the American people their choice for a president, Donald J Trump. This is not just election interference, it is seditious conspiracy and treason” – The current top comment on the Breitbart story “Donald Trump and 18 Co-Defendants Indicted on 41 Charges.” The American people’s choice in 2020 was Biden.

“Better question. Why hasn’t some conservative county in GA indicted her? How are we supposed to fight this, if nobody even bothers to show? It is time to start throwing them in jail. Make them beg us to quit. Then and only then does it stop” – The current top comment on a TownHall.com opinion piece titled “Why Isn’t ‘Stolen Election’ Conspirator Stacey Abrams Behind Bars?”

“Says the cheater who stole his own seat. How’d he win if Biden won GA?” – The current top comment on the Gateway Pundit article “Dirtbag Governor Brian Kemp Responds to President Trump’s Upcoming Press Conference on Election Fraud: ‘The 2020 Election in Georgia was Not Stolen’,” which obviously sort of contradicts the assertion by the previous commenter at TownHall.

“If anyone is smart enough to read all charges, federal and state, you will find that every single one is a charge that Joe Biden, James Biden, and Hunter Biden have committed in spades. Extra treason charges for Joe for the invasion, drug, human, and sex trafficking. As he is Squatter in Chief” – The current top comment on the Fox News article “Trump says Georgia indictment comes during ‘dark period’ for US, vows to fix it by winning,” and man that is almost kind of sad. Almost.

“Let’s go ahead with this indictment a-and let’s go ahead with, with eh, y’know, trying to remove him from office.  We’re not going to, but we oughta, we oughta hang it around his neck,” Republican Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett on the third-tier conservative cable propaganda network.  “Y’know, they haven’t even proved, the IRS hasn’t even shown where they’ve paid any taxes.  Twenty-two million dollars and no taxes?  Hell, you and I g- spend $600 worth of sales on ebay and guess what, we get a letter from the freakin’ IRS.  This is ridiculous.  The American public needs to be irate about and they should, and shame on th-the old school media, they’re just a bunch of lapdogs to the left wing a-and that’s why their ratings are in the tank and your-all’s are soaring.”

Twenty-two million dollars?  Just two months ago, Republicans couldn’t find their witness–a Chinese agent currently wanted for illegal arms dealing–who was definitely going to show Biden took a $5 million bribe.  Now they have evidence of a $22 million bribe?  Perhaps they should disclose this information, if it’s so solid and y’know… national security is at stake and all that.

A Georgia state agency will seek to name a special prosecutor to investigate Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, a total MAGA asshole who served as a fake Trump 2020 elector but was spared from Monday’s RICO charges after a judge forced Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to recuse over her campaigning with Jones’s Dem opponent prior to the 2022 election, the AP reports.

“Ultimately, the special prosecutor will make the decision about whether or not to file any charges,” Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys Council executive director Pete Skandalakis told the AP about the pending investigation. Jones is clearly listed as unindicted co-conspirator 8 in the charges.

A Harris County, Texas jury awarded a woman more than one billion dollars in a lawsuit against an ex-boyfriend who posted compromising photos of the woman online in a case of revenge porn, the BBC reports.

The ex went way beyond just putting them up on a website.  He emailed the photos to her family and friends.  He inserted them into a Dropbox folder her family used to share photos.  He gained access to the victim’s social media account, and he posted them on her profiles.  He also compromised her home security system, capturing videos and photos of her and distributing them as well.

Lawyers for the plaintiff asked the jury for a $100 million judgment; the jury came back at $1.1 billion.  “While a judgment in this case is unlikely to be recovered, the compensatory verdict gives DL back her good name,” said attorney Bradford Gilde, adding “We hope the staggering amount of this verdict sends a message of deterrence and prevents others from engaging in this despicable activity.”

Fresh off his latest indictment, Donald Trump took to his failing social media platform to announce that President Joe Biden is a “Manchurian candidate” who, it’s “been proven,” took $20 million to change US policy.  Trump–who failed to disclose money in Chinese banks, who paid China more income tax than he paid the US Treasury, and whose daughter was granted a series of valuable Chinese trademarks while they worked in the White House–claims China has compromised Biden because they know where all the money is.

Saying “Joe Biden’s greed and criminality is going to get us into World War III–we’re gonna be in World War III with this guy,” Trump goes on to declare the David Weiss, the Special Counsel investigating Hunter Biden, “wasn’t picked in that position by President Trump,” but that in fact the two Democratic Senators made the selection via “blue slip”; this, of course, is a lie.

Trump declares that as soon as he’s elected, he “would appoint a real special counsel, or maybe you’ll call it a special prosecutor … to look at all these bribes, kickbacks and other crimes as well as the shameless attempt at a coverup.”  No evidence of anything claims in the video exists.

One of the more interesting passages of the Georgia indictment of Donald Trump and 18 co-conspirators is a referral of a meeting at the White House in mid-December 2020 in which key players discussed the coup plan.  As Newsweek reports, one of the people listed in the meeting, reported as Act 90, is identified as “unindicted co-conspirator Individual 20”:

Click on a link to the New York Times, Substack or Facebook when you’re on Twitter, the platform Elon Musk wants to rebrand as “X” because he’s a nihilist, and you’ll wait… and wait… and wait for the connection.  Okay, it’s only around five seconds, but when surfing the internet, that seems like an eternity.

As the Washington Post points out, links using the t.co truncated links on Twitter connecting to media outlets the immature and petulant Musk dislikes are being delayed, apparently intentionally, in a petty effort to make people annoyed with the sites that he perceives have been unfair to him, a billionaire who regularly discloses fantasies of autocracy and control.

While it’s simply an annoyance to users, Musk presumably believes that this childish jab at people he believes are unfair to him are merited–much like a certain indicted former president believes urging violence from his supporters is justified–because of some slight he felt.

“Well, I tell ya, I-I-I honestly think Iowans are becoming desensitized to this. I don’t even know that they are paying attention to if it’s the third indictment, the fourth indictment.  What I’m doing here at my town halls, going county to county in Iowa is that Iowans see that there are two systems of justice.  There is one if your name is Trump, and there is one if your name is Biden. But again, it just seems to be politically motivated that Iowans just throw up their hands anymore.”

Yep, that’s true:  the Biden who’s having legal issues, Hunter, worked with investigators to clear up charges related to unpaid taxes and a gun purchase made when he was in the depths of addiction, and he is working his way through the justice system, complying with court orders.  Trump, on the other hand, blocked law enforcement’s efforts and repeatedly lied about national security documents he possessed and shared while he was not authorized to possess them.  Democrats understand Hunter needs to face justice; Republicans claim Trump is above the law.  So yeah, “two systems.”

The FBI arrested an unnamed 17-year-old Philadelphia boy who had been in contact with Islamic jihadist extremist groups, assembling materials to make bombs as members of the groups instructed him, USA Today reports. The FBI announced they are still searching for two people connected with the teen.

Using WhatsApp and Instagram accounts, the boy allegedly communicated with Katibat al Tawhid wal Jihad, an Islamic extremist group that conducted attacks in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2017 and at the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in 2016.  In April and May 2023, the boy used the platforms to get instructions on how to build improvised explosive devices.  On August 7th, he collected the chemicals and other materials needed to build it.  The following day, he received 14 international shipments of military and tactical gear at his home.

Having finally secured an appropriate lawyer who can practice in a federal court in Florida, Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira entered a “not guilty” plea in the federal indictment charging him with four felonies including trying to destroy evidence, ABC News reports.

De Oliveira retained Donnie Murrell, a Palm Beach County criminal defense attorney who appears to run a one-person firm.  With a tagline “When Freedom Is In The Balance,” Murrell’s website describes his career:  “For more than 25 years, the law firm of Donnie Murrell has specialized in handling state and federal criminal defense cases. The firm is also known for its post-conviction work. Attorney Murrell is a Florida Bar Board Certified Criminal Defense Attorney with a reputation for his courtroom abilities and outstanding commitment to his clients.”  [Original emphasis.]

Democratic Hawaii Governor Josh Green advised state officials to protect citizens against profiteers swooping in to make a quick buck off the suffering locals recovering from a deadly wildfire, Newsweek reports, specifically looking at ways to stop real estate speculators from grabbing up destroyed properties.

“I’ve reached out to the Attorney General to explore options to do a moratorium on any sales of properties that have been damaged or destroyed,” Green said in a press release. “Moreover, I would caution people that it’s going to be a very long time, before any growth, or housing can be built. And so, you would be pretty poorly informed if you try to steal land from our people and then build here.”

While the fires on the island are now largely contained, they are still massive:  the 678-acre Upcountry/Kula fire is currently 65% contained while the Lahaina fire has grown to around 2,170 acres and is currently 85% contained.