Dear Commons Community,

On Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith unsealed his latest criminal indictment of Donald Trump, and like the first indictment he filed against the former president, over his handling of classified documents, it was made up of hundreds of hours of grand jury testimony given by Republican witnesses, many of them former members of Trump’s administration.

Trump and his political allies have attacked the indictment as being politically motivated, but as with the House Jan. 6 committee’s final report on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday’s indictment is notable in that the evidence of criminal activity comes almost exclusively from Republicans sympathetic to Trump who testified under oath. Here is a compilation courtesy of Yahoo News.

On the witness list

Among those who sat for questioning from prosecutors and whose answers were reviewed by the grand jury are the following:

• Former Vice President Mike Pence
• Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows
• Pence aides Greg Jacob and Marc Short
• Former White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino
• Former White House speechwriter Stephen Miller
• Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani
• Trump attorney and adviser Boris Epshteyn
• Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone
• Former Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli
• Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe
• Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
• Chairman of the Nevada Republican Party Michael McDonald
• Former White House aide Nick Luna
• Former White House personnel director John McEntee
• Former Trump campaign deputy director Gary Michael Brown
• “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander
• Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger
• Numerous so-called fake electors from multiple states

Dead people voting in Georgia

Again and again, the indictment makes clear, first, that Trump repeatedly lied to the American people that fraud had cost him victory in the 2020 election and, second, that members of his staff, many of whom testified before the grand jury, told him there was no evidence to back up his claims.

When Trump spoke with Raffensperger on Jan. 3, 2021, for instance, he claimed 5,000 dead people had voted in Georgia.

“Well, Mr. President, the challenge you have is the data you have is wrong,” Raffensperger replied, adding, “The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. And so [your information]’s wrong, that was two.”

On Jan. 6, Trump went on to claim publicly and without evidence that 10,300 dead people had voted in Georgia.

‘Yeah, you’re right, it’s too late for us’

At a Jan. 3, 2021, meeting between Trump and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump appeared to acknowledge his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Milley briefed Trump on national security situations, advising that the president refrain from taking any action, since he was only 17 days from leaving office.

“Yeah, you’re right, it’s too late for us. We’re going to give that to the next guy,” Trump allegedly said.

Milley sat for interviews with the House select committee, and Smith has relied on those findings.

‘Just say that the election was corrupt’

On Dec. 27, 2020, Trump called Jeffrey Rosen, then acting attorney general, and Richard Donoghue, acting deputy attorney general, and “raised multiple false claims” about the election, according to the indictment. Donoghue had a meeting with prosecutors but was not called to testify.

“When the Acting Attorney General told the Defendant that the Justice Department could not and would not change the outcome of the election, the Defendant responded, ‘Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,’” the indictment states.

‘You’re too honest’

Although Pence sought to avoid testifying before the grand jury on the grounds that he was acting as the president of the Senate when certifying the Electoral College vote, a federal judge ruled that he must testify and detail his conversations with Trump prior to Jan. 6, 2021.

One such conversation featured in the indictment occurred on Jan. 1, 2021. Trump had called Pence to berate him for not going along with a plan to have him reject the certification of the Electoral College vote.

“The Vice President responded that he thought there was no constitutional basis for such authority and that it was improper,” the indictment states. “In response, the Defendant [Trump] told the Vice President, ‘You’re too honest.’”

Pence should have replied: “And Mr. President you’re too dishonest!”

Tony

Boston  Globe

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump was indicted on felony charges yesterday for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, with the Justice Department acting to hold him accountable for an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power and threaten American democracy.

The four-count indictment, the third criminal case against Trump, provided deeper insight into a dark moment that has already been the subject of exhaustive federal investigations and captivating public hearings. It chronicles a months-long campaign of lies about the election results and says that, even when those falsehoods resulted in a chaotic insurrection at the Capitol, Trump sought to exploit the violence by pointing to it as a reason to further delay the counting of votes that sealed his defeat.  As reported by various media.

Even in a year of rapid-succession legal reckonings for Trump, yesterday’s indictment, with charges including conspiring to defraud the United States government that he once led, was stunning in its allegations that a former president assaulted the “bedrock function” of democracy. It’s the first time the defeated president, who is the early front-runner for next year’s Republican presidential nomination, is facing legal consequences for his frantic but ultimately failed effort to cling to power.

“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” said Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, whose office has spent months investigating Trump. “It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government: the nation’s process of collecting counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

The Trump campaign called the charges “fake” and asked why it took two-and-a-half years to bring them.

Trump was the only person charged in Tuesday’s indictment. But prosecutors obliquely referenced a half-dozen co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside of government who they said had worked with Trump to undo the election results. They also advanced legally dubious schemes to enlist slates of fake electors in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden to falsely claim that Trump had actually won them.

The indictment accuses the defeated president and his allies of trying to “exploit the violence and chaos” by calling lawmakers into the evening on Jan. 6 to delay the certification of Biden’s victory.

It also cites handwritten notes from former Vice President Mike Pence that give gravitas to Trump’s relentless goading to reject the electoral votes. Pence, who is challenging Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, declined overtures from a House panel that investigated the insurrection and sought to avoid testifying before the special counsel. He appeared only after losing a court fight, with prosecutors learning that Trump in one conversation derided him as “too honest” to stop the certification.

Trump is due in court Thursday, the first step in a legal process that will play out in a courthouse situated between the White House he once controlled and the Capitol his supporters once stormed. The case is already being dismissed by the former president and his supporters — and even some of his rivals — as just another politically motivated prosecution.

Yet the case stems from one of the most serious threats to American democracy in modern history.

The indictment centers on the turbulent two months after the November 2020 election in which Trump refused to accept his loss and spread lies that victory was stolen from him. The turmoil resulted in the riot at the Capitol, when Trump loyalists violently broke into the building, attacked police officers and disrupted the congressional counting of electoral votes.

In between the election and the riot, Trump urged local election officials to undo voting results in their states, pressured Pence to halt the certification of electoral votes and falsely claimed that the election had been stolen — a notion repeatedly rejected by judges. Among those lies, prosecutors say, were claims that more than 10,000 dead voters had voted in Georgia along with tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada. Each claim had been rebutted by courts or state or federal officials, the indictment says.

Prosecutors say Trump knew his claims of having won the election were false but he “repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

The document carefully outlined arguments that Trump has been making to defend his conduct, that he had every right to challenge the results, to use the courts, even to lie about it in the process. But in stark detail, the indictment outlines how the former president instead took criminal steps to reverse the clear verdict voters had rendered.

The indictment had been expected since Trump said in mid-July that the Justice Department had informed him he was a target of its investigation. A bipartisan House committee that spent months investigating the run-up to the Capitol riot also recommended prosecuting Trump on charges, including aiding an insurrection and obstructing an official proceeding.

The indictment includes charges of conspiring to defraud the U.S., conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing an official proceeding and violating a post-Civil War Reconstruction Era civil rights statute that makes it a crime to conspire to violate rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution — in this case, the right to vote.

The mounting criminal cases are unfolding in the heat of the 2024 race. A conviction in this case, or any other, would not prevent Trump from pursuing the White House or serving as president, though Trump as president could theoretically appoint an attorney general to dismiss the charges or potentially try to pardon himself.

It may be that Trump’s only reason for running for president is to prevent himself from going to jail!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In June, Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the nation’s first religious public charter school. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa were given permission to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in August 2024.  A group of parents and a public education nonprofit have now sued to stop Oklahoma from establishing and funding what would be the nation’s first religious public charter school.

The lawsuit filed in Oklahoma County District Court on Monday seeks to stop taxpayer funds from going to the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 last month to approve the application by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City to establish the school, and the board and its members are among those listed as defendants.

The vote came despite a warning from Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general that such a school would violate both state law and the Oklahoma Constitution.

The Rev. Lori Walke, senior minister at Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City and one of the plaintiffs in the case, said she joined the lawsuit because she believes strongly in religious freedom.  As reported by the Associated Press and The New York Times.

“Creating a religious public charter school is not religious freedom,” Walke said. “Our churches already have the religious freedom to start our own schools if we choose to do so. And parents already have the freedom to send their children to those religious schools. But when we entangle religious schools to the government … we endanger religious freedom for all of us.”

The approval of a publicly funded religious school is the latest in a series of actions taken by conservative-led states that include efforts to teach the Bible in public schools, and to ban books and lessons about race, sexual orientation and gender identity, said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which is among several groups representing the plaintiffs in the case.

“We are witnessing a full-on assault of church-state separation and public education, and religious public charter schools are the next frontier,” Laser said.

Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt earlier this year signed a bill that would give parents in the state a tax incentive to send their children to private schools, including religious schools.

The Archdiocese of Oklahoma said in its application to run the charter school: “The Catholic school participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church and is the privileged environment in which Christian education is carried out.”

Rebecca Wilkinson, the executive director of the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, said in an email to The Associated Press that the board hadn’t been formally notified of the lawsuit Monday afternoon and that the agency would not comment on pending litigation.

A legal challenge to the board’s application approval was expected, said Brett Farley, the executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma.

“News of a suit from these organizations comes as no surprise since they have indicated early in this process their intentions to litigate,” Farley said in a text message to the AP. “We remain confident that the Oklahoma court will ultimately agree with the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in favor of religious liberty.”

Stitt, who previously praised the board’s decision as a “win for religious liberty and education freedom,” reiterated that position on Monday.

“To unlock more school options, I’m supportive of that,” Stitt said.

On the other hand, the establishment of a school that claims to be simultaneously public and religious — what has been a legal oxymoron in the United States since its founding — violates one of the foundational principles of American constitutional tradition: the separation of church and state. It also threatens religious freedom and undermines public education.

Tony

The supermoon will be even closer on the night of Aug. 30 because it will be a rare blue moon, which occurs when there are two full moons in a single month. A blue moon is not blue in color, according to NASA.

Astronomy fans only get to see blue moons about once every three years on average. The next blue moon after the one on Aug. 30 will be in May 2026.

The last of the four consecutive supermoons this year will be the Sept. 28 “Harvest Moon.

August’s first full moon is called the “Sturgeon Moon” because sturgeon were most readily caught during this part of summer in the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, according to the Farmer’s Almanac. The “Sturgeon Moon” was preceded this year by the “Buck Moon.”

Moonrise for August’s first supermoon will be visible after 8 p.m. . A Farmer’s Almanac web page shows specific times for different ZIP codes.

Enjoy tonight!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today is August 1^st and the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 campaign among presidential candidates is scheduled for August 23^rd.  Seven candidates say they have met the qualifications for a spot on the debate stage to be held in Milwaukee

But that also means that about half the GOP field is running short on time to make the cut.

To qualify for the Aug. 23 debate, candidates needed to satisfy polling and donor requirements set by the Republican National Committee: at least 1% in three high-quality national polls or a mix of national and early-state polls, between July 1 and Aug. 21, and a minimum of 40,000 donors, with 200 in 20 or more states.

Below is a look at who’s in, who’s (maybe) out and who’s still working on making it, courtesy of the Associated Press.

Tony

————————————————————

WHO’S QUALIFIED

DONALD TRUMP

The current front-runner long ago satisfied the polling and donor thresholds. But he is considering boycotting and holding a competing event.

Campaign advisers have said the former president has not made a final decision about the debate. One noted that “it’s pretty clear,” based on Trump’s public and private statements, that he is unlikely to appear with the other candidates.

“If you’re leading by a lot, what’s the purpose of doing it?” Trump asked on Newsmax.

In the meantime, aides have discussed potential alternative programming if Trump opts for a rival event. One option Trump has floated is an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who now has a program on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

RON DESANTIS

The Florida governor has long been seen as Trump’s top rival, finishing a distant second to him in a series of polls in early-voting states, as well as national polls, and raising an impressive amount of money.

But DeSantis’ campaign has struggled in recent weeks to live up to the sky-high expectations that awaited him when he entered the race. He let go of more than one-third of his staff as federal filings showed his campaign was burning through cash at an unsustainable rate.

If Trump is absent, DeSantis may be the top target on stage at the debate.

TIM SCOTT

The South Carolina senator has been looking for a breakout moment. The first debate could be his chance.

A prolific fundraiser, Scott enters the summer with $21 million cash on hand.

In one debate-approved poll in Iowa, Scott joined Trump and DeSantis in reaching double digits. The senator has focused much of his campaign resources on the leadoff GOP voting state, which is dominated by white evangelical voters.

NIKKI HALEY

She has blitzed early-voting states with campaign events, walking crowds through her electoral successes ousting a longtime incumbent South Carolina lawmaker, then becoming the state’s first woman and first minority governor. Also serving as Trump’s U.N. ambassador for about two years, Haley frequently cites her international experience, arguing about the threat China poses to the United States.

The only woman in the GOP race, Haley has said transgender students competing in sports is “the women’s issue of our time” and has drawn praise from a leading anti-abortion group, which called her “uniquely gifted at communicating from a pro-life woman’s perspective.”

Bringing in $15.6 million since the start of her campaign, Haley’s campaign says she has “well over 40,000 unique donors” and has satisfied the debate polling requirements.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY

The biotech entrepreneur and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam” is an audience favorite at multicandidate events and has polled well despite not being nationally known when he entered the race.

Ramaswamy’s campaign says he met the donor threshold earlier this year. He recently rolled out “Vivek’s Kitchen Cabinet” to boost his donor numbers even more, by letting fundraisers keep 10% of what they bring in for his campaign.

CHRIS CHRISTIE

The former New Jersey governor opened his campaign by portraying himself as the only candidate ready to take on Trump. Christie called on the former president to “show up at the debates and defend his record.”

Christie will be on that stage, even if Trump isn’t, telling CNN this month that he surpassed “40,000 unique donors in just 35 days.” He also has met the polling requirements.

DOUG BURGUM

Burgum, a wealthy former software entrepreneur now in his second term as North Dakota’s governor, has been using his fortune to boost his campaign.

He announced a program this month to give away $20 gift cards — “Biden Relief Cards,” as a critique of President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy — to as many as 50,000 people in exchange for $1 donations. Critics have questioned whether the offer violated campaign finance law.

Within about a week of launching that effort, Burgum announced he had surpassed the donor threshold. Ad blitzes in the early-voting states also helped him meet the polling requirements.

WHO HASN’T QUALIFIED:

MIKE PENCE

Trump’s vice president has met the polling threshold but has yet to amass a sufficient number of donors, raising the possibility that he might not qualify for the party’s first debate.

Pence and his advisers have expressed confidence he will do so, noting that most other Republican hopefuls took a month or two of being active candidates to meet the mark. Pence entered the race on June 7, the same day as Burgum and one day after Christie.

“We’re making incredible progress toward that goal. We’re not there yet,” Pence told CNN in a recent interview. “We will make it. I will see you at that debate stage.”

ASA HUTCHINSON

According to his campaign, the former two-term Arkansas governor has met the polling requirements but is working on satisfying the donor threshold. As of Wednesday, Hutchinson marked more than 11,000 unique donors.

Hutchinson is running in the mold of an old-school Republican and has differentiated himself from many of his GOP rivals in his willingness to criticize Trump. He has posted pleas on Twitter for $1 donations to help secure his slot.

FRANCIS SUAREZ

The Miami mayor has been one of the more creative candidates in his efforts to boost his donor numbers. He offered up a chance to see Argentine soccer legend Lionel Messi’s debut as a player for Inter Miami, saying donors who gave $1 would be entered in a chance to get front-row tickets.

Still shy of the donor threshold, he took a page from Burgum’s playbook by offering a $20 “Bidenomics Relief Card” in return for $1 donations. A super political action committee supporting Suarez launched a sweepstakes for a chance at up to $15,000 in tuition, in exchange for a $1 donation to Suarez’s campaign.

Suarez’s campaign did not return a message seeking details on his number of donors or qualifying polls.

LARRY ELDER

The conservative radio host wrote in an op-ed that the RNC “has rigged the rules of the game by instituting a set of criteria that is so onerous and poorly designed that only establishment-backed and billionaire candidates are guaranteed to be on stage.”

His campaign last week declined to detail its number of donors, saying only that there had been “a strong increase the last few weeks.” He has not met the polling requirements.

PERRY JOHNSON

Johnson, a wealthy but largely unknown businessman from Michigan, said in a recent social media post that he had notched 23,000 donors and was “confident” he would make the debate stage. He added that all donors were “eligible to attend my free concert in Iowa featuring” country duo Big & Rich next month.

Johnson, who has reached 1% in one qualifying poll, has also offered to give copies of his book “Two Cents to Save America” to anyone who donated to his campaign.

WILL HURD

The former Texas congressman — the last candidate to enter the race, on June 22 — has said repeatedly that he would not pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee, a stance that would keep him off the stage even if he had the qualifying donor and polling numbers.