clearandpresentdanger.blog

The scene that unfolded today at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a snapshot of politics in the U.S. today. Testifying under oath was Jack Smith, who as special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his retention of classified documents after he left office in 2021.

Questioning Smith were the senators, whose speech in Congress is protected. Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

The courts have interpreted this clause to give lawmakers broad protection for what they say in Congress. Republicans have used this protection to make outrageous accusations and to spread disinformation. That practice was on display in spades today.

Former attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Smith special counsel on November 18, 2022, three days after Trump announced he was running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Garland said that since both Trump and Biden were likely to be presidential candidates, his appointment of Smith was meant to underscore “the Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.”

Trump was not happy about the appointment, calling Smith “a hit man for Obama.”

In June 2023 a grand jury indicted Trump on 37 “felony violations of our national security laws” and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” in his retention of classified documents. Charged alongside Trump was his aide Walt Nauta, who is now the director of Oval Office operations. In December, after Trump was reelected, Smith dropped Trump from the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, has blocked the release of Smith’s report, although it is standard for a special counsel to release a final report.

It is the other case that was the focus of today’s Senate hearing.

On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., charged Trump with four felony offenses “arising from his efforts to unlawfully retain power by using fraud and deceit to overturn the 2020 election results,” as Smith’s final report put it. Trump challenged the indictment on the grounds that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed as part of his official duties and that his actions trying to overturn the election were part of his official duties.

On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court largely agreed with Trump, upending the principle that the United States was a nation of laws, not of men. The Trump v. United States decision sent Smith back to the drawing board to take the case, now stripped of anything that could fall under “official duties,” before another grand jury, and that grand jury returned an indictment for the same offenses. But after Trump was reelected, Smith moved on November 25 to dismiss the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

The case can be resumed once Trump is no longer president.

It’s unclear why Senate Republicans thought it was a good idea to remind people of Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election when the midterms are less than forty days away. Some of them, though, clearly intended to appeal either to Trump or to the MAGA base by using their protected speech to insult and abuse Smith.

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) launched a hit on Smith, setting up the idea he was part of a conspiracy with Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis and her colleague Nathan Wade to persecute Trump.

Schmitt asked Smith: “Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?”

Smith looked confused at the sudden turn in the hearing and asked Schmitt to repeat the question. Once Schmitt did, and asked him if he had ever been to Atlanta during his time as special counsel, Smith answered: “I really don’t think so. It’s possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida, but I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta. I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that.”

“Did you ever meet Nathan Wade or Fani Willis in your time as special counsel,” Schmitt asked.

“No,” Smith answered.

Then Schmitt pounced: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior/Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” A staffer briefly flashed a poster board. Then Schmitt said: “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”

Smith said: “You just took it down really quick. If I could look at that again?”

Schmitt answered: “We’ll put it in a file. You can respond. I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” He went on to call Smith a “villain” and a “dirtbag.”

Smith said: “[I]f this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time…. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think, February of 2024.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) figured it out. Schmitt was accusing Smith of being in Atlanta at an Atlanta Hawks game, where he could hypothetically have met up with Willis and Wade. In reality, he was in Maryland at a game in which Maryland played the University of Iowa: the Hawkeyes.

Klobuchar addressed Schmitt: “Could it then be that University of Iowa’s the Hawkeyes, could that be it, and maybe before we show this kind of thing…that might be the confusion over the names of the team but perhaps you should’ve looked at it more carefully….”

Schmitt exploded, accusing her of “trying to rehabilitate the witness.” And yet, newscasters who reviewed tapes of the games found Smith in the stands at the Maryland game.

“You had the teams wrong, sir,” Klobuchar told Schmitt.

Indeed, although Schmitt’s poster board featured a picture of Fani Willis and another of the Atlanta arena, the messages on it appeared to be between Smith’s deputy special counsel J.P. Cooney and another person, asking, “Is 109 Row 1 reserved for Jack?” Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo notes that the Atlanta State Farm Arena uses letters to denote rows in section 109 rather than numbers. The University of Maryland arena uses numbers.

After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where host Andrew Kolvet cheered Schmitt’s attack on Smith. “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game…in Atlanta,” Kolvet said. “It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”

So Schmitt got his right-wing media hit from a completely fabricated storyline. One newscaster noted: “When a witness lies under oath before Congress, he can face prison. When a senator gets it wrong, he says he was just ‘asking questions’.”

Smith, in contrast, stood firmly on facts and the rule of law. “I have been fortunate to serve a country that I love for nearly 30 years in local, national, and international settings,” he said in his opening statement. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties. My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded.

“I believe that there is no role for politics in the proper administration of justice. A prosecutor’s decisions must be based on the facts and the law. The status, power, prominence, or political affiliation of the subject of an investigation must play no role in decisions to investigate, prosecute, or decline prosecution.”

As special counsel, Smith said, he and his office “took actions based on the facts and the law.” “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” he said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” he said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions…. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power….

“And…President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after he left office in January 2021 and he repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive information was held in non-secure locations, including a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”

Smith promised to answer the senators’ questions truthfully. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the President or others.”

“As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal investigation because they are perceived to have opposed the President. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions, and norms. History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff who served on my team, simply because of their unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial administration of justice without regard for any personal costs.

“I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States.

“I remain confident, however, that the rule of law will endure because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.”

—

Jack Smith kicked off his testimony on the Hill today like this: “I stand by my decisions as special counsel, including my decision to bring charges against President Trump.” He told senators that his investigations developed “proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.” He said, “I will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.”

Then, as Alabama Senator Katie Britt looked on with dawning horror, Missouri Senator (and former prosecutor who apparently never learned the lesson that you don’t ask a question you don’t know the answer to) Eric Schmitt made a fool of himself while attempting to set a perjury trap for Smith.

Schmitt thought, based on texts from Smith’s team that he’d acquired, that Smith was in Atlanta watching an Atlanta Hawks game the day after Fani Willis’ affair with her co-counsel came to light, setting off alarms the Trump camp used to cast doubt on her prosecution of him. Schmitt made the inferential leap that if Smith was in Atlanta, it must have been to meet with Willis; it must have been part of the grand conspiracy the Republicans are still searching for evidence of.

But it turned out that Smith had been to the game between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes to see Caitlin Clark play. Amy Klobuchar used Minnesota nice to wind Schmitt up and he doubled down on his claims long after it was clear to everyone else in the room that he was wrong. Schmitt was left looking like a clown, telling Smith he thought he’d committed perjury when he denied being at a Hawks game in Atlanta. And best of all, he was smirking like he thought he’d scored. That’s the best that they’ve got.

Once again, Republicans proved that there are several levels of STUPID:

1. There’s just plain old normal STUPID.
2. Then there are some people who are REALLY STUIPD.
3. But on a scale of 1 to 10, Republicans are at 10 — REALLY, REALLY, IRREVERSIBLY STUPID.

 

 

🚨FOR FUCK SAKE TRUMP IS LOSING CONSCIOUSNESS ON LIVE TELEVISION.

SOMEONE CALL THE NURSING HOME. pic.twitter.com/YVo7y4jeC3

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) September 28, 2026

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Texas Monthly is a real icon of state-based journalism, but the magazine out did itself this month with its astoundingly deeply researched story on the state of the Rio Grande and water issues on both sides of the border. Just one excerpt here, in a piece as long as your standard New Yorker story in 1955:

Farther downriver in the Rio Grande Valley, cities have been slower to adapt to the crisis, and they’ve run out of time. This year, when the multigovernment Rio Grande Regional Water Planning Group released its official 2026 strategy, local officials from across South Texas admitted that they had no plan in place for what happens if the drought continues to worsen. The report offered the weakest of excuses: “The Rio Grande RWPG chose not to plan for uncertainty or DWDOR [drought worse than the drought of record] on a regional scale at this time because forecasting tools have not been able to provide the resolution needed for water planning on a regional basis.”

The Valley is home to a handful of desalination plants, and officials are scrambling to bring others online. In addition to the high price tag, these facilities will come with immense environmental costs: Toxic saline sludge will get pumped out into surrounding wetlands.

Farmers themselves have actually pushed for more measures to improve efficiency. Galeazzi, the lobbyist, told me he’s spent time in Austin and D.C. arguing for public investment in water infrastructure. Some of the simplest changes, such as lining dirt irrigation canals with concrete, would save millions of gallons of water. But Galeazzi says politicians balk when they learn that those savings will cost billions of dollars.

In the end, there’s no clever technology that can pull us back from the brink. “No matter what we do—desalination, irrigation tech, conservation in cities, rainwater harvesting, aquifer recharge—there is no way out,” Sandoval Solís said. The only thing that can help now is reducing agricultural water use. Everything else is too little, too late.

With the reservoirs in critical condition, Sandoval Solís said it could take just two dry years to wipe out the water that remains. And he fears that on the Mexican side of the river, over a million people could experience Day Zero as soon as next year.

If the reservoirs collapse, South Texas will get thrown back to a more primitive era. Sanchez, the researcher from Saltillo, doesn’t think Day Zero in the Valley will look like it did in Monterrey. It will look worse. “Mexico is actually much more resilient to water scarcity than the U.S., only because they’re used to it,” she said. “I cannot imagine my neighbor in Texas opening the tap and not getting water. What would happen? They would probably sue the city.”

Elsewhere around the world, Day Zeroes have been rare, but they almost always lead to violence. In 2015, São Paulo, Brazil, a city of over 20 million, got within weeks of Day Zero. Caught off guard, the government chaotically announced a strict limit: Water was turned off for twelve hours a day in neighborhoods across the city, leading to mass protests. In 2019 several reservoirs in Chennai, India—one of the world’s largest cities—ran completely dry, and taps stopped flowing for months. The government trucked in water by train and in convoys of tankers, but it couldn’t meet demand for more than 10 million residents. Tankers entering the city were attacked and hijacked. A woman was stabbed while arguing with a neighbor over water. In one of the larger riots in the region that summer, police arrested at least 550 people.

If a similar crisis comes to pass in Texas, governments in Austin and Washington, D.C., won’t be able to offer much more than tanker trucks. For residents, the most important technology will become the bucket, which they will need to bathe, launder clothes, and flush the toilet. Even if the rains return, this sort of deprivation could last for years as residents wait for the reservoirs to refill.

Thousands of Texans already live this way. During one reporting trip, I drove into the brush outside of Laredo until I reached the community of La Presa, known locally as a colonia. One of the residents I met there was Luz Castillo, a retired farmwork manager. She explained that in the nineties, a rancher had sold her an illegally subdivided plot of land, falsely claiming that he had plans to connect electricity and water lines. She was nine months into building her house when she realized he had lied to her. Today, Castillo trucks in her own water using a five-hundred-gallon jug in the back of her pickup. She’s spent thirty years organizing her neighbors and petitioning the county to connect water mains. “They are so hesitant to help you,” she said.

La Presa contains a warning for those on the brink of losing their water: The state is doing little to help its own residents secure this most basic resource.

The collapse of the borderlands’ water system would transform life in the region. Millions of Texans will face the immediate pressure to relocate, fueling the kind of disaster migration Texas saw when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. On both sides of the border, the agricultural system could break down completely.

There will be other more subtle but equally devastating long-term effects. South Texas is already home to some of the poorest counties in the nation, and the water scarcity will discourage investment and new business. Instead of preparing for that future, boosters are conducting business as usual. In fact, the Valley is booming.

One of those boosters is Elon Musk, whose gigantic south Texas investments all require water from the Rio Grande that is probably not going to be there very much longer. My other favorite piece of this is Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum shutting off water to Monterey in order to appease Donald Trump. Not that Mexico really is more responsible with the declining water than the. U.S., but it’s also not less responsible. Also, for all the talk that the ranchers will lose out eventually to the population in terms of water usage, the problem is that the legal mechanism for taking allocated water from agriculture is very very shaky.

This is a slowly ticking time bomb and that excerpt has it right: expect violence over water in the U.S. very soon.

Most reporting on Trump’s speech emphasized either his belligerence — his rejection of global cooperation — or the fact that almost everything he said was a lie. But isn’t the bigger story the fact that the leader of what used to be the world’s most powerful nation — I say “used to be” because America’s power is collapsing before our eyes — has clearly and undeniably lost his mind?

I’m by no means the only commentator to see parallels between Trump’s UN speech and the scene in Bananas. But comparing Trump to a fictional character is unfair — to the fictional character. After all, in Bananas the mad dictator is quickly removed from power. In America today, some Republicans are quietly distancing themselves from Trump. A few are even voicing subtle, elliptical criticisms. But will he be impeached, or face 25^th Amendment proceedings? Not a chance.

Indeed, let’s be honest: the only reason these faint hints of Republican rebellion are newsworthy is that they come after years of slavish obedience and flattery — obedience and flattery that continued even though Trump’s deteriorating mental state has been obvious for a long time.

I read an excellent commentary titled “It’s Sundowning in America,” inspired by Trump’s demented demands that he receive the Nobel Peace Prize several months ago. The damage being done by Deranged Trump Syndrome was already obvious. And that was before Trump squandered America’s military credibility, as well as a dangerously large share of our munitions, on his catastrophic war-of-choice in Iran.

There’s a high probability that Trump’s power will be considerably reduced in the aftermath of the November midterms. Polls point to a blue wave that is highly likely to give Democrats control of the House and more likely than not to deliver the Senate. If that blue wave does indeed materialize, I expect that there will be an enormous sigh of relief across the country because it will be a major, if not fatal, setback for Trumpism.

However, we shouldn’t let the short-term relief of a November victory blind us to the long-term realities. Trumpism did not emerge out of thin air – that is, an unfortunate draw of the democracy cards. Instead, Trump and Trumpism is the culmination of a decades-long threat to American democracy, to the moral, legal and social fiber of this country.

There is a straight line from Koch Brothers money, allied with segregationists and religious fundamentalists, that runs through the Federalist Society and the Roberts Supreme Court, through the MAGA-fied Republican Party, through the crypto-industry and the tech-broligarchy, that leads to Trump. And it will take a single-minded, fearless and incorruptible new generation of Democrats to defeat this many-headed hydra.

We should also recognize that Mad King Donald will still retain a great deal of power even with a Democratic Congress. He won’t feel that he has failed America, he will believe that America has failed him and try to punish the nation accordingly. Thus, he will use his remaining power vindictively not just against the victorious Democrats, but also against the American people.

 

 

I did not comment when Charlie Kirk was murdered, but let’s just say I had thoughts on the matter.

One of Kirk’s many contributions to vile hatred was his evil fascist Professor Watchlist, the “official list of leftist faculty,” who should be targeted by fascists. Among the little things that they can do is destroy your Rate My Professor rating with bullshit, since that  worthless site doesn’t actually require any proof you were in a class to say terrible things about a professor. Among the big things they can do is give murderers a list of targets.

Well, a year after Kirk’s killing, his movement is broke, leaderless, and in shambles — among the casualties is the Professor Watchlist. That story came out a couple of weeks ago. I checked it this morning and it is still no more. Of course, it could come back.  But any step toward reducing the fascist infrastructure of hate is a positive step.

Meanwhile, there’s another benefit to Kirk’s passing:  This year’s “Freedom Fest” was canceled because they only sold 4 tickets.

The question I found myself asking in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death was “Just how much of a piece of shit human do you have to be for your wife’s initial reaction to your passing is to run out and buy a bunch of expensive designer clothes and costumes, then parade joyously on stage as you try to take over your husband’s movement?”

The fact that she then made a pass at America’s third-worst hunk of shit human (JD Vance) really sez something about those family values.