Tommy Carcetti
Tommy Carcetti's JournalDU EXCLUSIVE: AG Nominee Pam Bondi releases complete list of things she cannot recall ever hearing or knowing about
At her Senate confirmation hearing, former Florida Attorney General and President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testified about several matters of which she claimed she had no knowledge or recollection. Such matters included the infamous telephone call between then-President Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where Trump asked Raffensperger to "find" 11,780 votes, as well as FBI Director Nominee Kash Patel compiling a list of people he deemed "Members of the Executive Branch Deep State."In the interests of full transparency--and in the hopes to get ahead of any negative stories that might otherwise emerge--AG Nominee Bondi has released a full and comprehensive list of other events, people and things to which she currently has no knowledge of ever having taken place or ever having existed.
Here at Democratic Underground, we have obtained a copy of this list, and hereby publish it in its entirety:
The January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol
Donald Trump's two impeachments
Donald Trump's four criminal indictments
Donald Trump's 34 felony convictions
Donald Trump's civil judgments for fraud, defamation and sexual assault
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
The 1969 Moon Landing
September 11, 2001
Any September 11th of any year
The location of Jimmy Hoffa's body
Who wrote the Book of Love
Her mother's maiden name
Her father's maiden name
The 2020 Presidential Election
The Gettysburg Address
Algebra
Brown v. Board of Education
The State of Nebraska
The Wizard of Oz
The Law of Gravity
The Democratic Party
Who shot JR Ewing
Area 51
Area 52
Perjury under oath
Eric Trump
Going to college
The fall of the Roman Empire
What level she was parked at in the parking garage
Heliocentrism
The concept of legal ethics
The planet Neptune
That one kegger over at Matt Gaetz's place
The doctrine of Separation of Powers
World War I
Dinosaurs
The 1972 Miami Dolphins' perfect season
John Cena's famed catchphrase, "You can't see me!"
The US Bill of Rights
The position and duties of United States Attorney General
That old Cassandra feeling is back again.
In 2016, after Trump first won, there were a lot of people insisting, "Don't worry. Trump won't be as extreme a President as he was a candidate. He was probably just saying those things to placate his base to get elected. Now that he'll be President, he'll pivot and be more of a moderate figure. He'll use his business skills to negotiate deals with Democrats in Congress and he'll get some meaningful things done."
I personally knew this was not going to happen, and said so at the time.
Trump took office, and he certainly did not pivot. He was just as extreme and divisive a President as he was a candidate. And I knew the "dealmaker" thing was bullshit from the get-go, because I knew Trump was in fact a very shitty and incompetent businessman and the whole "Art of the Deal" thing was a superficial gimmick. He doesn't know how to get along with other people who think differently than him, and he'll just want to tear them down instead.
Flash forward to 2020 after Trump lost the election. I remember hearing a lot of, "Trump will eventually concede his loss, albeit reluctantly, and just slink back to Mar-a-Lago. But then he'll get to relish playing 'Kingmaker' in helping to choose other Republicans for the next round of elections."
Once again, I knew the "kingmaker" thing would never, ever happen. Trump's ego would not allow him to cede the spotlight to others, even if they appeared to have his blessing. And he would never, ever admit to losing because he's incapable of doing that. He'll incite the worst, most violent of his supporters who are willing to act in his name because those are the ones who pay him homage and are truly loyal to him where others are not.
And lo and behold, there was no concession or peaceful transfer of power. And we had January 6th. And Trump was only interested in crowning himself as his own successor and running again.
Now we are in 2024. I've heard a lot of, "Don't take the whole 'retribution' talk seriously. He's not actually going to go after his opponents for real. That's just Trump being Trump. And we survived his last term, so I'm sure we'll be fine again this go around. Maybe he's learned more. Maybe he'll stand up against Putin this time around and defend Ukraine because he'll see Zelensky as strong and determined, and doesn't he like strong leaders?"
None of that is going to happen. He's dead serious about wanting to go after his opponents, and if he gets a troglodyte like Kash Patel into the FBI, he's going to try to make that happen. He hasn't learned a thing about being a good leader. We barely survived his last term only because of a House majority in the second half and guardrails within the White House. There are no guardrails this time, only sworn loyalists. And he's not going to stand up to Putin or other authoritarians. The only "strong" leaders Trump admires are the authoritarian types. He couldn't care less about strong, principled democratic minded leaders such as Zelensky and he'd just as well see them lose.
I hate to sound so pessimistic this morning but I've seen all the same Pollyannaish optimism about Trump dissolve like sugar in tea as reality sets in. Time and time and time again.
He will not get better. He will only try to make things better for himself, and through that, worse for the rest of us.
BREAKING NEWS: Trump's FBI pick pitches new slogan for the agency
BREAKING NEWS: Trump’s FBI pick pitches new slogan for the agency
President-elect Donald Trump’s recent decision announcing he plans to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray (who Trump himself appointed in 2017) with longtime Trump loyalist Kash Patel has made waves both inside and outside of DC. But the man tapped for the job has himself seized on the opportunity to rebrand the 91-year-old agency in his own personal image.
Patel, who served as the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense during Trump’s first term, is no stranger to marketing, as he has used his personal name to sell everything from vitamin supplements to leather jackets to even children’s books. And it is this particular mindset that Patel seeks to bring to the next post at which he intends to serve.
“Behind every memorable brand is an even more memorable slogan,” Patel said on a recent interview with Fox News. “Nike. Coca-Cola. You name it. So why shouldn’t the FBI be any different?”
With that, Patel revealed his proposed new tagline for the agency: Federal Bureau of Investigation—Kash Gets Busy.
“Think about it,” Patel explained. “What’s more reassuring to Americans than to let them know that the FBI has countless busy bodies out there working to take down the oppressive Deep State that’s lurking behind the shadows?”
“FBI: Kash Gets Busy will signal a brand-new era in federal law enforcement,” Patel continued. “No longer will it be restricted to simply investigating normal violations of federal law. Under the new Trump administration, FBI: Kash Gets Busy will be able to expand its powers to go after the people who are the true enemies of the state, and whose treachery has revealed itself through such nefarious means as Russiagate and the January 6th Select Congressional Committee.”
Patel’s FBI: Kash Get Busy project will rely heavily on past methods utilized in the agency’s Hoover era: file documentation on various subjects and the compilation of lists.
“If you are an enemy of President Trump, be warned that no place will be safe for you,” Patel said. “FBI: Kash Gets Busy will be on your phones. In your homes. Tracking your car. In your hotel rooms wherever you travel. We will make sure to get to know each and every one of your neighbors who will report to us on all your activities. And if any of those neighbors don’t want to play ball with us, you can be sure there will be place for their own name to be put on an FBI: Kash Gets Busy list.”
Besides Trump critics, other proposed targets of FBI: Kash Gets Busy activities include media organizations, labor unions, environmental protection groups and civil rights activists. FBI: Kash Gets Busy will also ramp up foreign intelligence operations and will even work to embed secret agents pretending to be native citizens of other countries.
Despite these lofty plans, Patel admits that his vision still remains very much something of a work in progress.
“I’m still not 100% set on the name,” Patel said. “For example, I was also thinking of going with FBI: Now Kash Vanquishes Dissent.”
DETAILS AT ELEVEN
It's back.
That feeling is back.
The feeling of dread and uncertainty that existed for four plus years when we woke up every single morning.
That feeling of "What's he going to do now?" or what person he'll try to antagonize or how he'll plot or conspire to his own selfish ends.
What fresh hell will he bring today?
We had a four-year respite from it. Even President Biden's most staunch ideological opponents would have to truthfully and honestly admit he never put them in any such position himself.
But now we're back to this moment again. Every single morning.
· · · -- -- -- · · · Mayday, Mayday, Mayday
Code Red.
Break glass in event of emergency.
Vnimaniye, Vnimaniye.
Hopefully you get picture.
We are in serious, serious trouble at the moment.
And this is not a drill.
I wrote this for my own personal Facebook feed, but I'm going to go ahead and share it here as well.
Take it as however you will.
My formative years were in the 1990s, and looking back at it, it was a very subtly remarkable time for us here. The Cold War had just ended, the economy was absolutely booming and there was this new thing called the Internet that seemed really cool and exciting. No, we weren’t completely enlightened on everything, but still, we seemed to be trending in the right direction.
That’s not to say the 90s were great for everyone worldwide—ask anyone living in the Balkans or in Rwanda, for example—but here at home, there was really nothing to bother us beyond our own personal internal angst, problems, and crises. Just to give you an idea of how things were, our two biggest news items of the time seemed to be 1) a celebrity murder trial and 2) a presidential affair. We actually fixated on those stories for months as *the* leading national news across the board. It’s amazing how much airtime those things got.
Then came the 2000s, and we had 9-11, and the Iraq War, and the Great Recession. Even still, those things seemed temporal, more or less like speed bumps as we continued to move forward. We elected a black President, and that ended up serving as a Rorschach Test of sorts, with two seemingly very distinct answers emerging.
I would say the time when things really began to change was about a dozen years ago. Maybe a little longer.
The first time I really noticed this darker air was after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. 26 schoolchildren and teachers had just been horrifically murdered. I turned on the news, and what did I see? Lines and lines of people outside of gun shops, all wanting to buy AR-15s, the same gun that the shooter used. People were “afraid” they wouldn’t be able buy them much longer. (Of course, those “fears” were never realized.)
I remember when Columbine happened in 1999 and it seemed unfathomable at the time. Now it’s just an annual to biannual occurrence.
What seemed to be happening was that the Internet started to become more than just merely a means of communication or a handy business tool, but rather the primary source for information.
And the biggest problem was that so many people had been conditioned to think that if someone was in print or something was broadcast, it automatically had credibility. They forgot that there still had to be an editorial process at work, fact checking and vetting, peer review, and that those things would not be a given in our new online era. If anything, they would become increasingly rarer and rarer.
So we got to a point where now you could just pull up on your phone whatever the first garbage it was you see on your Twitter or Facebook feed, repeat it to whoever happens to be sitting next to you as if it were the God’s honest truth, and never even get up off the couch. And suddenly, that was now our new era of information.
Disinformation flourished worldwide, and from that mass misinformation inevitably followed. Autocrats were elected. Autocracies flourished. Migrants and refugees were mocked and demonized for being the “other.” I saw my own ancestral homeland ripped apart by invasion and war. I saw ugliness and division paraded around as virtues and strength.
This continued unchecked for years, in our own country and beyond. Then 2020 happened, and people do seem to forget, but 2020 was actually a bad time. A very, very bad time. And here in the US it was just bad enough that just enough people—really a bare, slim majority of us—were able to momentarily stand up and pull the brakes, and recognize that this really was not who we wanted to become.
But then, we forgot. Or—even worse—maybe we just stopped caring.
After 2020, we thought maybe this was the end of the storm. But as it turns out, we were just in the eye of the hurricane, enjoying a momentary respite of wind until the other side of the storm came barreling through.
January 6th. A 34-count felony conviction. Civil judgments for fraud and even sexual assault. Things that in our prior era would be unthinkable and instantly disqualifying for anyone seeking a position of power. But either too many of us forgot, or too little of us kept caring.
We—our country, our nation—are broken and sick. True, really our whole world can also be described as broken and sick, but that’s always been pretty much a given. But this seismic shift change we’ve had over the past decade and a half has especially hurt us here at home.
And the silver lining is that broken things can get fixed. Sick people can get healed. But it’s got to take some effort, and God knows if we have that type of effort in us right now.
And for now, it appears, we just want it darker.
I am currently as middle aged as I can possibly be.
Barring the onset of some sudden acute and terminal illness or an oncoming Mack truck spiraling out of control, I am more or less at the very midpoint of my life, with half my life lived and half my life left to be lived.
And at this point, after the events of yesterday, I can only think of the two sets of people who will be affected most by all of this--my parents and my children.
My parents raised me right. They instilled in me a true, genuine sense of decency and morals and ethics for which I couldn't have asked for a better possible upbringing. And I'll forever be grateful for that...I know that not everyone has had an uncomplicated, unblemished relationship with their parents, but I certainly have.
And I would like to say I've tried to raise my own children right in turn. It's not always easy to gauge, but when I heard that my youngest stood up for a friend of hers after someone called her friend a racial slur, I couldn't help but be immensely proud of the young woman I've raised. Or when my older one gently patted me on the arm this morning and told me it would be all right. To their great credit, neither of them were at all happy with these unsavory developments.
But my parents are old. Thank God, they are still very much active as possible for octogenarians, but they are old. And even though they are active at the moment, the time will eventually come where they will reach their twilight years. Hopefully it will not be within the next four years, but to be honest I don't know if we as a country will continue to be bound by four-year intervals of hope any longer.
And for someone in their twilight years, I can only imagine that as they look back at their long life, they can see that society as a whole progressed for the better as they aged. And that would give them hope for their next generations even after they pass.
But I feel as though Donald Trump has robbed many of that. The damage he and his ilk have done, and the damage that he will now continue to do for the foreseeable future...the idea that someone would leave their earthly life and that being the last impression that they get. It's terrible and it's tragic.
And my children--growing up their formidable teen years, with all this around them. It has the potential to make anyone cynical and pessimistic for the future. That shouldn't be the case for children, ever. There should always be the promise of great things to come. That things are good, and that they can get even better. But Donald Trump and company suppress that feeling. Their worldview is ugly and hopeless and hateful, with only selfish motives to rule the day.
I grew up in the 90s. The Cold War had ended, the economy was good, and while nothing in the world was perfect (ask anyone living in the Balkans or Rwanda, for example), there was still an overall sense of immense optimism of the times. 9-11 and the Iraq War and the Great Recession quelled that a bit, but we figured it was just a speed bump of sorts. Obama was elected, which made us proud, but then something happened. Roughly 10 years ago, maybe a little longer, but we began to lose that optimism that we once took for granted.
Trump's first election hit us in the gut. Then COVID. Then January 6th. The hope was that the Biden years was the end of the storm, but really it was just the eye of the hurricane, a brief lull of momentary calm before the devastating winds picked up once again.
Whether it's your life's legacy when your old, or your dreams and aspirations when you're young, they don't deserve to be robbed by the dark forces of nature. That's just cruel.
And that's why I'm heartbroken today.
Not for myself, but for my parents and for my children.
They deserve so, so, so much better.
There was no better ally to have on your side at DU than The Magistrate.
I remember 2014-15 very well.
Ukraine had just gone through its Euromaidan revolution, where its former Russian-friendly strongman Viktor Yanukovych had ultimately fled to Russia after having had his thugs kill dozens of protestors in the middle of Kyiv. Just days later, Vladimir Putin moved into and annexed Crimea, and within a month or so he had stoked up a bloody proxy war in the far East of the country.
This was before the 2016 elections, before the full scale 2022 invasion, and Russian disinformation on the internet was a far less known thing. And unfortunately, it hit DU fairly hard when it came to events in Ukraine. People here were convinced that Maidan was a western sponsored coup and not a popular inherent revolution of the Ukrainian people's own will, that the Crimean annexation was somehow legitimate, and that Ukrainian troops were massacring people in the east of the country. All were lies, but they were being fed convincingly by effective channels of Kremlin disinformation.
And it was beginning to show everywhere, including here on the pages of DU. There would be multiple posts claiming that Nazis were running the government of Ukraine, or that CIA had overthrown Yanukovych, or about this supposed massacre or that one. And they'd get a lot of replies and a lot of likes.
I would try to push back, but it was really disheartening to see these false talking points getting so much traction here at this website. At times, I felt very alone and isolated, as if I were a lone voice of dissent on the matter and that I was losing the argument.
Except...I wasn't.
Because where I would post, I'd frequently find at least one other DUer willing to echo the side of truth on the issue of what had happened in Ukraine. Not only that, he had his own particular style...gentlemanly. Never profane or angry. Always referring to his fellow posters as "sir" or "ma'am." Always rational. Always able to bring the facts and express them just so in the way they'd leave others without a reasoned retort to be had.
In other words, the Magistrate was the best ally in a rhetorical argument you could ever dream to have. He was consistent, he was on point, and he was always there when you needed to count on him.
I never actually met the man. I never knew his real name. But in the virtual world of DU, he was as good a friend and wingman as you could get.
Farewell, good sir, and safest of travels to the Great Beyond. 
Yes, the distinction between debris and bullet *is* important.
I am well aware that the shooter--and once again as we'll all point out, a fellow Republican--was shooting at Trump and even if one of his bullets did not hit Trump, that wouldn't disqualify it as an assassination attempt.
Some people--even here--have said that whether Trump was actually shot or merely shot at and injured by debris is nothing more than a distinction without a difference.
But Trump's immediate reaction, his supporters' reactions, and their overall proclivity to lie and distort the truth and thereby control the messaging should not be swept aside.
"Took a bullet" sells much better to the voting public than "took some inadvertent debris." It sounds neater, more cool, more sacrificial for a man who is inherently selfish by nature.
They want people to think Trump is literally bullet proof, that bullets could magically bounce off his body as if it were rubber.
And if it was truthfully a bullet, so be it.
But I've heard from a fair amount of people that a bullet of that type from that sort of gun even providing a side glance to the head wouldn't have done nearly that minimal damage that we saw. That what we saw was more consistent with some sort of debris from the shooting hitting Trump in the process, whether it be glass or something else.
So, yes, we as the American public do deserve to know the truth as to whether Trump was actually shot, or merely shot at and received minor injuries in the process.
Because Trump and his campaign can't be trusted with handling the truth themselves. They never have been.
Oh, for fuck's sake, people.
I did not watch yesterday’s debate; I’m currently on vacation, have already made up my mind as to who I’m voting for, and I wanted to spend the evening enjoying vacation things.
I see everyone is worked up because conventional wisdom is that President Biden had a subpar performance, and now everyone’s talking about how he’s too old and what not. Some even want him to step aside so we can exchange him for some newer, more exciting model like Gavin Fucking Newsome.
This is absurd. Ridiculous. Kafkaesque.
On one side you have people wanting the President to step aside because they thought he was disappointing at a debate. And if debate performances were an accurate barometer of electoral success in November, then we’d have President Gore or President Kerry or President Hillary.
So to freak out now—in June—is just plain silly.
On the other hand, you have a guy who not only was convicted of 34 felonies last month, but also was found liable for fraud, defamation and sexual assault. And who currently stands indicted in 3 other courts on charges ranging from election interference to knowingly withholding classified documents. And who was unprecedentedly impeached twice, with members of his own party voting for his removal. And who had an embarrassingly terrible one term track record as President and never held an average approval rating over 50% and never won a popular vote. And who was elbows deep in involvement with foreign adversaries like Vladimir Putin.
Who incited a violent insurrection at the US Capitol and who not only has never once apologized for that, but now lionizes the criminal participants.
And no one is calling for him to step aside. No one.
No, sorry, this is all fucking bullshit and all the Chicken Littles calling for President Biden to step aside need to calm the fuck down, because President Biden does not need to step aside. And if we’re cowardly enough to insist on someone different, they’ll go after that person just as hard. Maybe not over age, but certainly something.
Trumpism is a scourge on this country, this election is a referendum against it and I’d much rather go with the bird in the hand over the two in the bush.
Seriously, people.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back on vacation now.
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Member since: Tue Jul 10, 2007, 02:49 PMNumber of posts: 43,647