In an interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan recorded Saturday and set to air on Sunday morning, former Vice President Mike Pence denied reporting that disgraced former President Trump had roped him into pressuring then-Arizona Gov Doug Ducey and Georgia Gov Brian Kemp into tossing out enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s extremely close victories in both states in 2020.

“No, I don’t remember any pressure. Look, the president and I- things came to a head at the end, Margaret, I’ve spoken about very openly and the president and I continue to have a strong difference. I’ll always believe that by God’s grace, I did my duty under the Constitution that day in presiding over a joint session of Congress in the aftermath of the mayhem and the rioting. But in the days of November and December, this was- this was an orderly process. You’ll remember there were more than 60 lawsuits underway, states were engaging in appropriate reviews and that- these contacts were no more than that,” Pence said, apparently trying to explain it like “This was a few weeks before Trump tried to get me lynched for not wanting to violate the Constitution and unilaterally overturn the Electoral College vote count. We were still good back then.”

The Saturday Washington Post report on Ducey telling a Republican donor about Trump calling to harass him said Pence had refrained from similarly pressuring Ducey on the election result, but still Brennan asked Pence if he had pulled a “Find 11,780 votes,” which he also denied. “Well, I think the record reflects that I did check in, with not only Governor Ducey, but other governors in states that were going through the legal process of reviewing their election results, but there was no pressure involved, Margaret. I was- I was calling to get an update. I passed along that information to the president and as I said, I think the- I think the record from that time, confirms all of that.”

#FranceRiots: The Croix-Blanche shopping center in the Paris banlieue (suburb) of Mée-sur-Seine was completely destroyed in the race riots. pic.twitter.com/kQ8VPTqXfc

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) July 2, 2023

Near the top of an exclusive Washington Post story Sunday morning–picked up by National Zero–verifying suspected calls Donald Trump made to Republican Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to pressure Ducey to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election, a paragraph gave background on the story:

Ducey described the “pressure” he was under after Trump’s loss to a prominent Republican donor over a meal in Arizona earlier this year, according to the donor, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The account was confirmed by others aware of the call. Ducey told the donor he was surprised that special counsel Jack Smith’s team had not inquired about his phone calls with Trump and Pence as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the former president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the donor said.

The interesting part of the account, as written by a team of excellent journalists–Leigh Ann Caldwell, Josh Dawsey and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez–is that the source for the story is clearly the Republican donor.  (Who else would have disclosed details of the conversation except the two at the meal?  And others confirmed the source’s information.) The donor had the juicy bit of gossip from Ducey and tipped off the Post.  The question is, why?

Demonstrators have taken to the streets of cities around France every night since Tuesday when police shot and killed 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk after fleeing a traffic stop in a Paris suburb, resulting in more than 2,300 arrests over the last four nights, the BBC reports.

Some of the protests have turned violent with property damage reported in some areas.  More than 45,000 police have been deployed in metropolitan areas around the country to quell the unrest, leading to some standoffs with demonstrators where police deployed tear gas.

The officer who shot Merzouk has been charged with voluntary homicide and has apologized to the family.  However, demonstrators expressed their outrage over increasing incidents of police violence, as well as an unpopular 2017 law that allows wider use of firearms by police when drivers fail to stop when ordered.

According to Elon Musk, “blue check” Twitter subscribers will be limited to viewing 6,000 tweets per day, while non-paying users will get just 600 daily for the indeterminate future as the social media platform wages battle against companies that collect information posted by users, the Washington Post reports.

Musk also instituted a rule that users must be signed in to accounts to view tweets, preventing people from simply clicking on a link and viewing the information on Twitter.  Users who join after the announcement was made Saturday will be limited to 300 views per day.  Just another reminder that you can’t exercise your “free speech rights” when someone else controls the spigot.

We joined too late to pick up Lindsey Graham getting booed by his own voters in his home state but you can check out that glorious moment of further humiliation for Old Lindsey here.

House Oversight Chairhick James Comer tells Substacker Matt Laslo that some of the witnesses lined up for future testimony at a hearing on the supposed government possession of alien technology failed their background checks and were deemed not credible enough after Comer evidently applied the sort of scrutiny to people claiming knowledge of Area 51-type conspiracy theories that he does not with those claiming knowledge of Hunter Biden conspiracy theories.

“It’s pretty amazing some of the background checks we’re getting back on some of these folks,” Comer told Laslo. “I know that we had to reshuffle the deck on a few witnesses because of some issues. An old trick in oversight is: whoever the minority witness is or whoever the majority is, first thing the other side does is background checks on ’em to see if they’ve ever been accused of being a racist or if they have a felony. 99.9 percent of the time, nothing comes back.”

Comer however still deems former Army intel officer David Grusch credible, as did the Intel Community Inspector General, and at some point probably within the next few months there’s likely to be at least one public hearing in which Grusch, who claims secondhand knowledge of alien tech in the government’s hands, and possibly other witnesses of similar caliber will testify. As we pledged to readers this week, we eagerly await ranking member Congressman Jamie Raskin’s annihilation of Grusch and other witnesses and will carry said annihilation with alacrity if and when it happens.

Trump-appointed Delaware US Attorney David Weiss on Friday sent a letter to turgid Congressman Jim Jordan to inform him that the “IRS whistleblower” Gary Shapley is full of shit and that everything about Hunter Biden’s plea deal was on the level, no matter how much the House GOP cries.

“This is in response to your June 22, 2023, letter, wherein you renew your request for materials related to whistleblower allegations made in connection with the investigation into [Hunter] Biden, and request additional information related to my response to your initial letter on this topic. At the outset, I would like to reaffirm the contents of the June 7 letter drafted by my office and reiterate that I am not at liberty to provide the materials you seek. The whistleblowers’ allegations relate to a criminal investigation that is now being prosecuted in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. At this juncture, I am required to protect confidential law enforcement information and deliberative communications related to the case. Thus, I will not provide specific information related to the Hunter Biden investigation at this time. But I will provide some general insight on two issues.”

“First, the Department of Justice did not retaliate against ‘an Internal Revenue Service (‘IRS’) Criminal Supervisory Special Agent and whistleblower, as well as his entire investigative team… for making protected disclosures to Congress.’ Second, in my June 7 letter I stated, ‘I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the Principles of Federal Prosecution, and Departmental regulations.’ I stand by what I wrote and wish to expand on what this means,” Weiss wrote.

In December 2020 disgraced former President Trump called then-Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to get him to toss out more than 10,000 legal votes to overturn Donald’s surprise election defeat in the state, the Washington Post reports on another probable crime by the fat bastard. Here’s Ducey on November 30, 2020, famously declining another call from Trump in the middle of signing the documents certifying now-President Joe Biden’s victory in the Grand Canyon State.

The Post’s source is a “prominent Republican donor” who said the former governor remarked earlier this year that he was surprised Jack Smith had never reached out to him for an interview about the call. Ducey also reportedly said former Vice President Mike Pence had called also to talk about the election, but did not pressure him to overturn it. Unlike with the very similar situation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Ducey did not record the call.

• I’m old enough to remember when conservatives hated activist judges.
• The GOP debates won’t be anything more than massive hype battles between the loudest candidates, with their fans alternatively cheering and jeering.  It’s the circus atmosphere the MAGA crowd thrives in.
• Clarence Thomas–who was recruited by a college specifically because he was Black and who said of affirmative action rules, “But for them, God only knows where I would be today”–voted against affirmative action, which should mean we get to reevaluate his credentials because *obviously* he didn’t get into college based on his academic ability.
• Conservatives imagine education as a unidirectional hose:  the teacher or professor talks and you soak in information.  They do not understand that at every level of the system, the majority of education revolves around the people you’re learning with, not the subject discussed.  Instructors give you data; your classroom interactions teach you skills.  Yes, you learn facts; but more importantly, you learn processes on how to solve problems, both academic and social.  And the more variegated the group–teachers and fellow students–around you is, the more diverse the facts and processes you learn are.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CXXVII”

After Waldo without his signature pom-pom cap [I don’t really care enough to find out his actual identification] declares, despite reality, that the election was stolen–and when he talks about “the election,” he actually means any election Republicans lost–Kari Lake clings to her lithium-thin connection to this celestial plane.  This is a classic demonstration of projection.

“The election was stolen.  The elections are being stolen by Democrats because they no longer have the confidence of the American people and they don’t care,” Waldo says.  “They will cheat.”

“And they don’t have, they don’t have policies that the people want,” Lake says in her characteristic urgent breathiness.  “They don’t have candidates people want. I mean, John Fetterman?  Joe Biden?  Katie Hobbs?  These are not serious people for the times.  They’re not, I don’t think they’re intelligent enough, actually, to lead at this time.”  Editor’s note:  Biden, Fetterman and Hobbs all won their elections, as verified by multiple recounts and audits, certified by state legislatures, and confirmed by multiple courts.  They’re in office.  The woman who claims to be the “duly elected” governor of Arizona is, in fact, not.

Abbe Lowell, the lawyer for First Son Hunter Biden’s lawsuit against various parties for distributing his private information, said in a letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith that the screenshots of alleged WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden referencing his father are fake, NBC News reports.

Referred to by two former IRS agents the Republicans refer to as whistleblowers, the screenshots have been passed around the internet and were accepted into evidence by the Republican committee majority without checking their authenticity.  “[Both messages] include a photo of Mr. Biden not from 2017 but from the White House Easter Egg roll in April 2022 (long after the purported message was sent); both images portray the message in a blue bubble, when WhatsApp messages are in green; one image super-imposed the Chinese flag for the contact ID, when surely that was not how a text or contact was kept; and one purports to be a screenshot with the ‘. . .’ of someone composing a text (as in Apple’s iMessage) when that does not happen on WhatsApp.”

Two items of evidence released in the trial of January 6th defendant Jeremy Rodgers show the two ends of the barrel Capitol Police officers faced during the Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress.  Image 23 is a widely-circulated photo from inside the House chamber by Getty photographer Drew Angerer; Image 24 is a still from a video taken by one of the terrorists on the other side of the door who was standing near Rodgers.

A source in the pro-DeSantis “Never Back Down” PAC tells RealClearPolitics they expect Tiny D to skip whichever primary debates his rival the Orange God Emperor does, seeing no upside to taking shots from the would-be future Trump cabinet secretaries without the fat bastard also on the stage.

The rest of the RCP article is a wishful thinking jerk piece with essentially no other useful information in it. The headline “DeSantis Allies Say They Blunted Trump’s Post-Indictment Surge” says enough.

“It’s outrageous to me that Republicans in Congress and in state offices fought so hard against a program that would have helped millions of their own constituents,” a downright angry Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said Friday after the Supreme Court shot down the Administration’s student loan forgiveness program.  “They had no problem handing million-dollar tax cuts to big corporations and the super-wealthy.  And many of them had no problem in accepting millions of dollars in forgiven pandemic loans like Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma had more than $1.4 million in pandemic loans forgiven.  He represents 489,000 eligible borrowers that were turned down today.  Representative Brett Guthrie from Kentucky had more than $4.4 million forgiven; he represents more than 90,000 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.  Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia had more than $180,000 forgiven; she represents more than 91,800 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.  I want all the students and borrowers to know President Biden, Vice President Harris and I will not stop fighting for you.”

The man named in the lawsuit filed by Colorado web designer Lorie Smith as the individual who contacted her to build a website for a gay marriage claims he never attempted to contact Smith nor did he seek to have a website designed to celebrate his upcoming nuptials to his male partner because he was married at the time.  To a woman.

According to court filings, “Stewart”–the name of the person who allegedly contacted Smith’s firm, 303 Design, via email in September 2016–wanted a website designed to celebrate his upcoming wedding to his partner, “Mike.”  According to the New Republic, Stewart’s full name, contact information, and address were listed in the filing.  When New Republic reporter Melissa Gira Grant called the listed number, she reached a man named Stewart who was very confused.  (The outlet did not list the man’s last name to protect his privacy.)

“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he said confused after the reporter told him he was the subject of the pending Supreme Court case. “I’m married [to a woman], I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”

For the second time in as many days President Biden will address the nation in response to a verdict by the MAGA Supreme Court majority’s war on higher education. This time however he may have some cards to play to rain on the parade of the fanboys celebrating the libs getting owned.

Fox Corp. agreed to pay former Tucker Carlson producer Abby Grossberg $12 million to settle her lawsuit alleging the network allowed sexual harassment, misogyny and bigotry in the workplace, NPR reports.

A key witness in the Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit, Grossberg provided the plaintiffs with key recordings and communications showing key Fox staff knew their claims of vote fraud in the 2020 election were false.  Grossberg later made the claim that Fox executives pressured her to change her testimony in the Dominion case, which was later settled for $787.5 million.  Grossberg later filed a lawsuit against Fox claiming Carlson, his staffers and others at the network regularly engaged in anti-Semitic, misogynistic activity that made her employment threatening and untenable.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer lit into the increasingly suspicious “IRS whistleblower” Gary Shapley in a letter sent Friday to House Ways and Means Chairwiener Jason Smith, Axios reports.

“Since taking the majority in 2023, various leaders of the House and its committees have discarded the established protocols of Congress, rules of conduct, and even the law in what can only be called an obsession with attacking the Biden family. Your recent actions and joint statement with Chairmen Comer and Jordan make clear that you have joined this ignoble group, adopting their irresponsible tactics as your own. In fact, yesterday’s press release by the three of you seeking the testimony of a dozen law enforcement personnel based on the unsworn and slanted statements of the IRS agents is now the proverbial card castle – something that looks real but has no foundation.”

“Releasing the transcripts of and exhibits from interviews of self-styled IRS ‘whistleblowers’ who may be claiming that title in an attempt to evade their own misconduct was an obvious ploy to feed the misinformation campaign to harm our client, Hunter Biden, as a vehicle to attack his father. It is no secret these interviews were orchestrated recitations of mischaracterized and incomplete ‘facts’ by disgruntled agents who believed they knew better than the federal prosecutors who had all the evidence as they conducted their five-year investigation of Mr Biden,” wrote lawyer Abbe Lowell.