Former Trump White House Chief of Staff really didn’t want people to see him in a mugshot.  He tried to prevent it from happening through various court maneuvers, but he failed.  Enjoy Mark Meadows’ mugshot.

Stephen Sadow, the newest member of Donald Trump’s legal team, filed his first motion in his client’s Georgia RICO criminal trial requesting Trump’s trial be severed from the case against one-time Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who had exercised his right by requesting a speedy trial, something Trump opposes because he wants to string out the trial until after the 2024 election.

Sadow also noted that Trump would make a similar motion for any of the 17 other co-conspirators who request a speedy trial.  Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee will have to decide how feasible it is to have various trials for each of the defendants, possibly over years, versus a more compact trial schedule.

Two new developments in the Fulton County RICO case against Donald Trump and his 18 co-conspirators:  former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has turned himself in to the Fulton County Jail and is being processed, so we should have a mugshot within two hours.  He will be freed on $100,000 bail after he is processed.

Former Justice Department lawyer and possibly momentary Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, who MSNBC reports is in Atlanta but has not yet made it to the jail, had his bail set at $100,000.

This was no normal flying accident.  Saying it matched Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “long history of trying to silence his critics,” US intelligence officials say the explosion that destroyed the plane carrying the head of the Wagner mercenary force in Russia was intentional, the Associated Press reports.

To demonstrate how obvious that assessment was, even President Biden’s response didn’t try to couch his reaction in the typical diplomat-speak.  The fact he wasn’t shocked by the incident that caused the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who just months ago undertook a coup to topple Putin, was evident. “I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised. There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind. But I don’t know enough to know the answer.”

Disgraced lawyer and newly-indicted felon Rudy Giuliani claims he shouldn’t be prosecuted under RICO laws because he didn’t commit old-fashioned “mob”-style racketeering.  “In any event, there would have had to have been magic words there, words like, ‘if you don’t do it, I’m gonna break your legs.’ ‘If you don’t do it, I’m gonna shoot your wife.”  Those are the [RICO] cases I prosecuted.  Not cases where people are persuading, people are debating, people are even arguing.”

As a reminder of what threats were made, here is what Donald Trump said to Brad Raffensperger when he believed Raffensperger wasn’t going to help his plot:  “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it.  You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis requested an October 23rd, 2023 start date for the RICO trial for Donald Trump and 18 other defendants, CNBC reports. The date is just nine weeks away and would put this trial at the front of the list for Trump’s various legal entanglements.  Trump is expected to turn himself in to the Fulton County Jail sometime Thursday evening.

In a sign that the former Trump White House Chief of Staff will be abandoning his fight to avoid his arraignment, Fulton County officials have set bond for Mark Meadows at $100,000, CBS News’s Scott MacFarlane reports.  The announcement of the bond amount is a prelude to the defendant being processed at the Fulton County Jail, so Meadows will likely meet the Friday 5 p.m. ET deadline to surrender himself.

Rightwing provocateur Clay Travis continues the rightwing playbook of trying to compare President Joe Biden’s response to the wildfires on Maui, where about 1,000 are unaccounted for, versus hurricanes hitting New Orleans and Puerto Rico, when more than 3,000 people died in each.  Lying about the causes for pushback on how GW Bush and Trump handled deadly hurricanes hitting US territory, Travis glosses over the utter ineptitude of the two Republicans.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and state election investigator Frances Watson have been subpoenaed to testify during a Monday hearing in federal court in Georgia to determine if the RICO indictment filed against former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows should be transferred to federal court, Kyle Cheney of Politico reports.

Presumably, Meadows will try to use Raffensperger to bolster his claim that he did not act outside the purview of his official duties and Meadows will try to get the Georgia Secretary of State to claim all Meadows did was arrange phone calls.  Watson explained the vote recount and ballot verification process to Meadows during a December 2020 trip Meadows took to Georgia, and Meadows gave Trump her phone number; Trump called Watson later to pressure her to nullify or “find” votes to give him a victory in Georgia.

“On August 14, 2023, you brought a 41-count indictment against 19 defendants – including a former President of the United States and current declared candidate for that office, his attorneys, a former White House Chief of Staff, and a former US Department of Justice (DOJ) official – related to the 2020 election for President of the United States. Among other things, you have alleged that these 19 individuals, 30 unindicted co-conspirators, and others were part of a ‘criminal enterprise.'”

“And you have identified a number of acts that you claim were committed in furtherance of this purported criminal enterprise, including: (1) the then-White House Chief of Staff asking a Member of Congress for the phone number of the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives; (2) the then-President tweeting that hearings in the Georgia legislature were being aired on a news channel and commenting on those hearings; and (3) numerous acts taking place in other states not involving the conduct of the 2020 election in Georgia or the counting of the votes cast in Georgia. Your indictment and prosecution implicate substantial federal interests, and the circumstances surrounding your actions raise serious concerns about whether they are politically motivated,” writes perpetually miserable Congressworm Jim Jordan in his letter to Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis demanding she answer his bullshit questions about her prosecution of Trump.

Jordan even kind of acknowledges it by writing “acts that you claim were committed in furtherance of this purported criminal enterprise” but still goes full bore into that incredibly fucking lame “OH SO NOW ITS A CRIME TO TWEET SOMETHING?!?” argument the fanboys tried this month to make it seem like Willis’s listing of acts in furtherance were represented as statute violations. That and the weak little “WERE YOU AND JACK SMITH TALKING?!?” on the second page really drive home what everyone already knows: Jordan just sucks so badly at this and he isn’t getting any better.

Here’s a clue:  according to Newsweek, the Federal Aviation Agency ordered airspace over the Fulton County Jail to remain clear between the times of 6:45 p.m. ET and 9 p.m. ET, indicating those are the times Trump is expected to be in the building being processed for his multi-count RICO felony indictment.  The FAA’s announcement said the restriction is due to “VIP Movement.”

Ukrainian Defense Ministry officials on Thursday announced troops have landed in the Russ ian-occupied Crimean peninsula, ABC News reports. It’s not clear yet if this operation was a raid or, probably less likely, they’re undertaking some sort of D-Day type of invasion of “Russian” soil.

Either way any significant assault on the landmass, illegally annexed by the Putin Regime in 2014, could mark the opening of a new front in Kyiv’s grinding counteroffensive in eastern Ukraine.

I'm glad that my Administration’s infrastructure investments are so popular that even Speaker McCarthy is trying to take credit for them, despite voting against them.

That’s alright. I’ll see him at the next groundbreaking. https://t.co/IDmJ4hbSDm

— President Biden (@POTUS) August 24, 2023

Lots of buzz something after first big GOP debate whatever standout moments from candidates on something stage whatever breakout star Vivek Ramaswamy big moment Chris Christie something top takeaways from mainstream media pundits whatever trending. “Whatever the buzz takeaways from debate night coverage shows, it’s still Donald Trump’s party,” say Chuck Todd and Axios something Punchbowl whatever with hot takeaways and play-by-play from expert debate watchers.

Nikki Haley. Pence big moment saying same shit he always did whatever getting lots of buzz. DeSantis something sucked as expected whatever needed big breakout moments and buzz but whatever lol didn’t happen. Biggest storyline of night was Donald Trump not being there whatever did stupid deranged Tucker interview lots of insane bullshit instead. “It’s still Donald Trump’s party,” say Chuck Todd again to reinforce whatever important opinion something. Doug Burgum whatever.

Notorious F.A.T. aka Orange Shorty Shroom aka Prezident Cheato has told Atlanta’s hip hop lawya Drew Findling to peace tha fuck out, CNN reporta Kristen Holmes just blasted out on that racist LSD freak’s social media network. Trumpicana Phatass now says he’s bein repped by some cracka named Steve Sadow when he show up to court on Thursday. “I have been retained to represent President Trump in the Fulton County, Georgia case. The President should never have been indicted. He is innocent of all the charges brought against him,” says Sadow in a weak-ass statement.

Ahem… Yeah it’s always a great sign when you have to fire your lawyer and find a new one hours before you have to show up in court. We would have to wonder if it had to do with Findling’s 2020 campaign donation to Fani Willis, but that was reported a week ago. So who the hell knows.

Spandex-wearing grapple freak Congressman Jim Jordan is expected to do what he always does and interfere in a legitimate criminal investigation into his messiah, fat former President Trump by opening his own into Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, CNN reports on what everyone should’ve seen coming on the day the Orange God Emperor is to surrender in Atlanta.

The song and dance will include subpoenas on whether Willis coordinated in any way with the Justice Department and/or used federal funds to prosecute Trump and 18 of his minions because that’s really the only way Jordan can act like it’s his business to run interference for Donald.

Jordan’s lame attempt to do the same to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg earlier this year failed after former deputy Mark Pomerantz pleaded the Fifth to protect the integrity of the investigation, while the efforts to kneecap Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s twin federal cases against Orange Fatass are – to our knowledge – virtually nonexistent at this point.

Authorities in Hawaii are at the point where they’re going to have to go ahead and release the names of those they believe still missing after the horrific wildfire that wiped out the historic town of Lahaina killing at least 115 earlier this month, deciding that the need to have people who may still be alive on the list to come forward outweighs the insensitivity of skipping a formal notification of those whose loved ones indeed perished in the conflagration, Hawaii News Now reports.

Officials are optimistic the move will significantly weed down the 1,000+ unaccounted for and allow them to come up with a more realistic toll once people come forward. A similar situation happened in the weeks and months after the formerly deadliest blaze of the 21st century, the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California. As many as 1,000 were thought missing after that fire but the number eventually went down to 85 after officials published a list and those unaccounted for came forward.

A Delaware judge on Wednesday ruled against far right propaganda network Newsmax in their bid to narrow the lawsuit brought against them by voting tech company Smartmatic, CNN reports on another tick of the clock toward their likely total destruction at the hands of a jury.

One of the suspects named in a 2018 election interference indictment brought by a federal grand jury impaneled by former special counsel Robert Mueller has remained a fugitive from justice ever since is now even further away from seeing the inside of an American federal courtroom.

Well some other stuff happened with Yevgeny Prigozhin in the last five years leading up to[ let’s not even consider that it was a fucking accident when he died in a fiery plane crash earlier on Wednesday] but before the son of a bitch was a brutal mercenary warlord and a would-be Julius Caesar to Vladimir Putin’s Pompey, he was the scourge of the American political internet with his vast army of trolls helping to stir shit with domestic MAGA mind-slaves to the point where they were scarcely distinguishable from one another during the early-to-mid Trump years.

So yes. While Prigozhin’s more recent history with the invasion of Ukraine is more salient and rightly so at the forefront of most coverage of his demise, we’d been “acquainted” with him for far longer. In a way you could say this National Zero’s got a little of his digital DNA in it: Without his legions of underpaid English-speaking propagandists flooding one particular site on Disqus you may not have seen two red-blooded American shitposters enjoying savaging them so much they took it to the next level by launching this superior product. With that we thank Yevgeny for doing his part in making us harder and meaner than even his most evil underlings and wish his soul the best in Hell.

Post-debate analysis following the first Presidential nominee get-together in Milwaukee.  Some news made by people who won’t see a new elected office next November, but otherwise, just a sparring round as candidates felt each other out.

Doug Burgum:  He succeeded:  he got his name out.  Came closest to going completely off the rails when his closing speech went awry.

Asa Hutchinson: Got a big hit with his anti-abortion stand until you realize Arkansas has the highest maternal mortality rate in the country.  Other than that, largely faded out.

Tim Scott: Good and direct without getting dirty.  Showed up, got to the plate, popped out.