Politics

An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hiding, and Where

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Exclusive: An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hiding, and Where

On Monday at about 10 a.m. EST, two dozen FBI agents and technicians showed up at Donald Trump's Florida home to execute a search warrant to obtain any government-owned documents that might be in the possession of Trump but are required to be delivered to the Archives under the provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act. (In response to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, Trump himself signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain classified documents.)

The act establishes that presidential records are the property of the U.S. government and not a president's private property. Put in place after Watergate to avoid the abuses of the Nixon administration, the law imposes strict penalties for failure to comply. "Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined" $2,000, up to three years in prison or "shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States."

Indictments from the January 6th Uprising

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Indictments from the January 6th Uprising

The GW Program on Extremism has been tracking court cases from the January 6th Uprising where angry pro-Trump protestors overwhelmed the US Capitol Police, swarming the building, damaging property and leading to heart attacks and other injuries of government workers ill prepared for such a large angry crowd. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at this data and make a random dot-plot map of the indictments to see where the criminal cases were, and provide an interesting visual perspective on the wide-spread participants in the protest from across the nation.

You can get the source data here: https://extremism.gwu.edu/Capitol-Hill-Cases

To be clear, Donald John Trump is one of our nation's biggest jerks, and he got a lot of ordinary, often working-class people in trouble with the law over his asinine protest, over the election he lost, mainly due to his incompetent handling of the Coronavirus Pandemic that lead to hundreds of thousands of Americans dying and millions getting sick. Competence matters in our elected officials, especially our President, and I can't imagine Joe Biden would ever get such an angry mob of protestors amped up to the point where they destroyed property or cause personal or other injury. Protests are an important part of democracy, but they shouldn't result in protestors getting injured, arrested, prosecuted -- nor should they lead to property damage or injury and death to the government workers.

Do you support Trump?

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Youtube Ad from the Donald Trump Campaign: Do you support Trump?

The answer is absolutely not. The guy has proven himself to be a complete buffoon, really not worthy of the presidency. Some people grow into the job, including celebrities and the alike. But the president has proven that he is unable to grow into the job and he’s hardly a reliable conservative to boot. His response to COVID-19 has been a disaster, his stance on the international stage has made our country a laughing stock. We need somebody who listens to scientists and experts for guidance, not somebody who is more interested in ideology then practical solutions to our problems.

Kathy Houchul’s Upstate Problem

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Kathy Houchul’s Upstate Problem

New York State rarely elects governors from Upstate, especially not Western NY. The last elected Upstate Governor was either George Pataki or Franklin Roosevelt, depending on what you consider to be Upstate and both lived in the Metropolitan-area, just a short ride on the Metro North to New York City.

There is no law prohibiting Governor’s from hailing from Upstate but the population is heavily downstate, with nearly 7 in ten 10 New Yorkers residing in the metro area, which George Pataki and Roosevelt, along with all other governors in the past century hail from.

Western New York is far from New York City. Not just distance wise but culturally too. It’s becoming more and more Republican too, especially the rural areas. Kathy Houchul doesn’t hail from Buffalo or Niagara Falls, she was a town council member in Hamburg, and she went on to represent a fairly conservative suburban district in Congress with the endorsement of the NRA.

With political polarization these days I doubt many Western NYers will end up crossing party lines to vote for Houchul just because she is a local favorite. She will probably do as well as Cuomo did in Western NY but but not much better. But can she motivate people in New York City to vote for her in the numbers she needs? Or will many democrats just sit this one out, at best indifferent to that sort of conservative Upstater on the top of the ballot? After all, the New York State elections will be largely decided in the suburbs as that is where the most swing voters live.

New York City suburbs are getting bluer although recent off year elections see that trend slowing. Crime is up in the suburbs, especially property crime and nobody wants their hard earned property stolen or damaged. Hometown advantage and decades of knowledge of suburban politics for Lee Zeldin may help him better connect with voters fed up with incumbents in these inflationary times with high gas prices.