Editors’ Blog

I’m getting a late start this morning because I was up quite late trying to make sense of the various facts, claims, allegations and more contained in the DOJ’s latest filing. And yes, the photo … When I first saw the photo across my Twitter feeds I thought: Oh this is someone showing a photo of what highly classified documents look like, with their stamped and color coded jackets. Then after seeing it a number of times it hit me: wait, that’s a crime scene photo of Trump’s haul! Right down to the tacky carpet.

Our team will keep you up to speed on the details but there are a few points that caught my attention last night.

Go read the Justice Department’s filing or our summary of it here or just look at this darn photo, then consider this:

There’s been quite a lot of coverage in recent weeks of Republican anti-abortion diehards running away from their positions in light of the Dobbs backlash. There’s been particular attention to Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters who scrubbed the portion of his site focused on abortion. But until today I hadn’t seen just how total a change he now claims to embrace all while still claiming not to have changed his position at all.

As my colleague Kaila Philo reported earlier today, Secret Service Assistant Director Tony Ornato retired from the agency this week, leaving plenty of unanswered questions in his wake. The DHS inspector general’s office had reportedly been trying to get him to sit for an interview about matters related to the missing texts scandal; it’s unclear, now, whether that will happen.

There are two layers to recent intrigue surrounding Ornato. His role in whatever tf was going on with the missing Secret Service texts is, of course, one. But secondly, Ornato’s standing as a character of interest to the Jan. 6 committee increased 10-fold after Cassidy Hutchinson gave astonishing public testimony earlier this summer.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, who presided over its failed reform and subsequent collapse, has died at the age of 91. An immensely, immensely consequential life.

TPM Reader LS from Georgia …

Just to let you know I called Jon Ossoff’s office (Atlanta and DC), and got through. I guess nothing has changed. They said he supports The Women’s Health Protection Act, but won’t say what he would do regarding the filibuster. I explained I had 2 daughters with essentially no rights in Georgia. That we are unlikely to ever have 60 votes. But you know they are just taking the message.

Yesterday Rolling Stone published an article about President Trump and French President Macron. The ex-President has reportedly bragged that he had “intelligence” on Macron’s sex life. And these brags seems to coincide with documents seized from the ex-President’s estate which, according to the search inventory, contained a dossier of information about the French President. I’ve been particularly interested in this because a French expat fellow reader of ours has been focusing my attention recently on how the French far-right rumor mill went to town on this subject in 2017 when Macron was first elected. The French far-right and Trumpworld are all part of the same far-right, authoritarian, revisionist world, often more or less openly allied to Russia. People immersed in the world of French politics and the French far-right perked up immediately when they saw that item on the search inventory.

He was several days late to the party, but the former president appears to have finally gotten wind of some remarks that Mark Zuckerberg made during a Joe Rogan podcast that had conservatives up in arms last week.

I want to recommend to you this piece on the global water crisis (a subset of the climate crisis) and how that plays out specifically in the American Southwest and the various areas fed by the fast depleting Colorado River. There’s so much that is easy to get horrified by as the climate crisis not only bears down on us but does so faster than even a lot of pessimists expected. It’s in our nature to think of politics as the present just indefinitely spread out into the future. But this piece, an interview with a water use expert, is a view into the radical changes coming for that whole part of the country. It’s certainly bad news for mega-cities like Phoenix which we’ve essentially built in the middle of the desert. But as this discussion makes clear cities aren’t even the main issue. Where the water really goes is to food production. And that’s about to change dramatically because no matter how politically powerful agro-business may be there simply isn’t enough water now to sustain it.

TPM Reader TS has a different emphasis but a not dissimilar take to DP’s. Holding the documents is power, whether Trump actually uses them in some practical way in the future or not.

Look at it from his perspective: he’s still the rightful president and a bunch of wimpy gnats of bureaucrats are trying to take away presidential stuff he put away and brought to Mar a Lago.  Why? Just because he might enjoy it or find it useful — almost certainly to defend himself against imagined wrongs or to get back at or hold leverage over his enemies at home and abroad (so many of them)!