Author: Jon Ponder

Parker Molloy: House Republicans released the 255-page transcript of Jack Smith’s closed-door deposition on New Year’s Eve. You know, the day when absolutely nobody is paying attention to the news. The day when political operatives dump things they don’t want people to see.

Funny how that works.

Smith testified before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17th, spending an entire day answering questions about his investigations into Donald Trump. Republicans had been demanding this testimony for months, framing it as part of their “weaponization” investigation. They got what they asked for. And then they released it when America was busy watching the ball drop.

The Independent: During the testimony, Smith offered a confident assessment of the integrity of his work and his team’s chances of securing a conviction, had they been allowed to go to trial. The former special counsel, who resigned shortly before Trump took office, told lawmakers that the Republican was “by a large measure” the person “most responsible” for the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results and the January 6 Capitol riot that marked its stunning conclusion.

“These crimes were committed for his benefit,” Smith said. “The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit.”

The testimony also highlighted the complicated role Republicans played in the final moments of the 2020 campaign. Smith said much of his office’s conspiracy case rested on evidence from GOP allies, who included senior lawmakers serving in legislatures such as Michigan and Arizona, people who saw firsthand how the Republican was allegedly “preying on the party allegiance of people who supported him.”

“Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party,” Smith said. That same loyalty didn’t extend back from Trump to his top allies, Smith continued.
[…]

Independent: Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has bizarrely thanked Donald Trump for “keeping the hurricanes away.”

Speaking during the final cabinet meeting of the year on Tuesday (2 December), Noem expressed her gratitude to the US president, “Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane… even you kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that.”

No hurricanes made landfall in the United States during the Atlantic hurricane season, for the first time since 2015.

But, last month, Hurricane Melissa became one of the most powerful on record, killing at least 106 people across the Caribbean.”

People: As the president appeared to be frequently closing his eyes, his secretaries showered him with compliments on everything from his sacrifices for the American people to his apparent influence on the weather.

[…]

Times of Israel: Ambassador Mike Huckabee hosted a meeting at the US embassy in Jerusalem with Jonathan Pollard, the former spy who gave reams of classified American documents to Israel, The New York Times reported on Thursday…

According to the Times, it is unclear whether Huckabee got approval from the State Department ahead of the meeting. It said the meeting “alarmed” the CIA station chief in Israel, and the White House was not informed of it….

“It was a friendly meeting,” Pollard told the NYT. He said “a lot of things that came up in conversation,” while calling Trump a “madman who has literally sold us down the drain, for Saudi gold,” in apparent reference to the president’s recent decision to sell F-35 fighter jets to Riyadh.

[…]

Lying liars lie about mail-in voting. After his disastrous peace summit with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, wannabe American dictator Donald Trump
announced on state regime TV that Putin agrees with him that letting voters send in ballots by mail puts honest elections at risk. “Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting,” Trump told Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” after a nearly three-hour meeting between the leaders in Alaska. “He said there’s not a country in the world that uses it now.”

Did Putin really say that? We’ll never know. But whoever said it, it was a lie. According to a CNN fact checker, “Dozens of other countries use mail-in voting, as CNN and others have pointed out when Trump has made such claims before. These countries include Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland.” But the clincher is that Russia legalized mail-in voting in 2020 in a law signed by Trump’s favorite dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Speaking of liars. Like Fox, its cohort in state regime media, Newsmax, has agreed to pay tens of millions in damages to Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems. But while Fox paid Dominion $787 million, Newsmax will pay $67 million.

Fascist fashionista. The producer of the “Trump Show” – the daily reality clown show that masquerades as the U.S. government – has ordered Ukrainian Presiden Vlodimir Zelensky’s to wear a suit to their meeting in the Oval Office today. J.D. Vance, Trump’s lap dog, gave Zelensky an on-camera dressing down for showing up last time dressed as what he is – a war leader. But wait – some of us are old enough to remember when former Friend of Donald, fascist bilionaire Elon Musk showed up repeatedly for Oval Office press avails wearing sloppy T-shirts and jeans, accessorized by a nose-picking four year old. Obviously, hypocrisy is just part of the show.

MAGA sets Soviet-style show trials of prominent Dems for mid-term campaign season. The Trump regime is promising retribution for the Democrats’ investigations into Dear Leader’s multiple criminal activities – inciting an insurrection, stealing dozens of boxes of classified documents, fraud, etc. – by investigating prominent Dems based on rumors, conspiracy theories and disinformation. It looks like MAGA’s Soviet-style show trials will be timed to broadcast during the campaign season next year.