Clear and Present Danger

Judge Aileen Cannon — who is slow-walking the federal espionage case against Trump and who was appointed by Trump after the 2020 election — is married to Josh Lorence.

Lorence works for John Rosati.

Rosati is a former New York Mafia boss who moved his operation from NY to Florida.

Rosati is a long-time friend of and donor to Donald Trump who maintains contact with Trump.  Rosati is a frequent guest at Mar-A-Largo and Trump visits Rosati on his returns to NY.

• Salem Media Group has pulled the film and book “2000 Mules” after a Georgia man filed a defamation suit for being falsely depicted as engaging in voter fraud.
• The film, made by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote, falsely showed Mark Andrews depositing ballots, which the Georgia Bureau of Investigation later cleared him of any wrongdoing.
• Multiple allegations in the film have been debunked, and True the Vote admitted to not having evidence to support its claims of voter fraud, despite the film gaining traction among conservatives.

The conservative media company behind “2000 Mules,” Dinesh D’Souza’s thoroughly discredited 2020 election conspiracy film, has pulled both the film and the book from its platforms and has apologized to a Georgia man who filed a defamation suit after the film falsely depicted him as engaging in voter fraud.

Salem Media Group said in a statement Friday that it had not intended to harm the man, Mark Andrews. It also said it will no longer distribute “2000 Mules” or the book of the same title that followed.

“We apologize for the hurt the inclusion of Mr. Andrews’ image in the movie, book, and promotional materials have caused Mr. Andrews and his family,” the company said.

Andrews is seen in the film depositing five ballots into a ballot box as D’Souza says in a voice over: “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.” Andrews’ face was blurred in the footage, but during promotion and discussion of the film, True the Vote’s executives showed video of him without obscuring Andrews’ face, the lawsuit says.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation cleared Andrews after determining that he was legally dropping off ballots on behalf of his  family.  Andrews’ lawsuit against D’Souza, True the Vote and Salem is still ongoing.

Salem said in its statement that it “relied on representations” made by D’Souza and True the Vote that people in the footage they provided were illegally depositing ballots. After its release in 2022, the company hailed the film as “the most successful political documentary in a decade.”

D’Souza and True the Vote did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

Multiple allegations made in the film have been debunked, and in February, True the Vote told a court that it did not have evidence to support its allegations of voter fraud. Yet the film gained wide traction among conservatives upon its release. Trump held a screening of the film at Mar-a-Lago. Rep. Andy Biggs, a member of the House Oversight Committee, pushed for congressional hearings over the allegations in the film.

After the film’s release, Salem published book with the same title, but it was delayed as it was about to hit shelves, with D’Souza citing “a significant error [that] got missed by the publisher.” NPR reported that the new version of the book omitted the names of specific nonprofits that the earlier version accused of illegal “ballot trafficking” and removed “sections of the book that purported to link election fraud to antifa and the Black Lives Matter.”

“2,000 Mules” — which should have been titled “2,000 tons of muleshit” made the following claims.

• The producers obtained cellphone tracking data from several locations around the US.
• They then matched this data to locations of drop boxes where people dropped off mail-in ballots.
• Then, because the same cellphones were regularly in the vicinity of drop boxes, they claimed the owners of these phones were “mules”, dropping off piles of ballots.

Bullshit.  Or, perhaps we should say “Muleshit”.

First:  Cellphone tracking data is not that precise.  The data does not locate a cellphone within a few feet of a location, more like 50 – 100 feet or more.

Second:  The “analysis” completely ignored some facts.

• Drop boxes are located in high traffic areas because that’s where people are and the boxes are placed to be convenient to the most people.
• People carrying cellphones have many legitimate reasons to be in the same place day in, day out:
  • UPS, Post Office, FedEx and other delivery people who deliver on the same route daily.
  • Police on patrol.
  • People who work in or near the drop box location.
  • People whose daily routines take them past the drop box.
  • And any number of other perfectly legitimate reasons for a person with a cellphone to go to or pass by the same place time and again.

The only people who would believe this nonsense in the first place are the same low-intelligence, un-thinking, dumbass goobers who vote for Trump.

Experts on the breakdown of democracy warn us to be ready for when the bright red warning lights start flashing.  And no sign is more ominous than when you have political leaders explicitly promoting violence against whole segments of the population.

That was precisely the message sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott when he pardoned the convicted murderer of a Black Lives Matter protestor.  I looked a bit more deeply into this case in the hope, frankly, of finding some mitigating factor, some reasonable doubt – some excuse for this pardon other than to proclaim: “it’s open season on progressives, boys.”  But there was none.  This was a pretty open-and-shut, fairly adjudicated case of a politically motivated murder – which Abbott decided to overturn after being goaded to do so by the likes of Tucker Carlson.

Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse, the then-teenager who shot three men – two of them fatally – at a racial justice rally in Wisconsin in 2020, the defendant in the Texas case, Daniel Perry, was found guilty by a jury of his peers.  And no, we’re not talking about those liberal-by-definition New York City jurors that Trump and his cronies love to complain about – this was a jury of red-blooded Texans.

The facts of the case were depressingly clear.  Perry, an Uber driver, in July 2020 followed the increasingly common – and Republican-encouraged – practice of driving into groups of protestors. At that point, he came upon marcher Garrett Foster, whom he shot to death.

Now, the only thin reed upon which right wingers have to hang their defense is the fact that the victim, Foster, was open-carrying an AK-47 at the time of the incident.  The hypocrisy of a party that has spent decades touting unfettered gun rights – to the point of Republican U.S. Representatives wearing assault weapon lapel pins on the floor of Congress – saying that progressives deserve to be shot if they have a weapon in their hands is, well, just breathtaking.

Careful accounts of the trial have noted that multiple eyewitnesses stated that Foster did not raise or point his rifle at Perry while only Perry and his defense attorneys claim otherwise.  Eyewitnesses versus a defendant trying to keep his butt out of jail – hmm, tough call there!

The most damning part was actually excluded from trial but released later – a full 82 pages of Perry’s social media messages in which he made or promoted endless racist slurs and made statements like “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”

See what I mean by open-and-shut case?  The justice system worked and that should have been the end of it.

But that’s the point at which Tucker Carlson, then still at Fox, attacked Abbott for allowing the cold-blooded murderer of a progressive protestor to be convicted without a fight.  And like a well-trained dog, Abbott responded with a tweet stating “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney…I look forward to approving the Board’s pardon recommendation as soon as it hits my desk.”

Take just a moment to gawk at the sheer, incoherent nonsense and dishonesty of this statement. “Jury nullification” is the practice of jury members declaring a defendant innocent even when they know he is guilty, as a way of protesting against the criminal justice system. What the hell does that have to do with a case in which a jury found the defendant guilty?  Abbott, by the way, is a former state Supreme Court justice and attorney general who surely knows better.

Furthermore, “Stand Your Ground” cannot be a defense when there is nothing to stand your ground against – you can’t just shoot and kill a victim who does not threaten you.  The clear and disturbing message here is that the sheer existence of members of the political left peacefully protesting is itself a threat justifying right wingers in actually shooting such progressives to death.

The pretense for this pardon could not be thinner. Abbott acted after his self-appointed parole board recommended it – but that board, in an empty three-paragraph statement, did not give a single reason for its recommendation.

So, ultimately, there was no remotely reasonable justification for this pardon.  That leaves only one explanation – it was a political act. And I do not see any way to read this political statement other than to reward the murderer for what he did and to encourage more MAGA types to take up arms and use the threat or reality of violence to stop members of the left from peacefully expressing ourselves.

You’ll know that fascism has arrived at our shores when you have a major political party deciding to throw aside the legal and moral norms and constraints of democracy in favor of outright mob violence as their favored form of political expression.

And that is exactly where we are . . . Republicans calling for mob violence against anyone they don’t like.  Someone needs to remind Republicans that the Second Amendment applies to E.V.E.R.Y.O.N.E. — including us liberals.