The only way I can keep all the concerts that I’m doing straight is to create a kind of spreadsheet for them. It would probably be easier if it were an actual spreadsheet, but really what it is, is just a series of informational pages. I have a checklist of questions to ask each presenter and I make notes about what the answers are and when I’ve gotten them. If I were more technically minded, I might do it all a bit more formally, but that’s not how I’ve ever been able to work.
For someone who’s made an entire career stage managing, I’m not sure that’s the best thing for me to admit.
As I was out walking yesterday, I was thinking about the news that just came out from the special counsel who had been assigned to investigate President Biden’s handling of classified documents. The counsel found that while there were some improprieties around the handling of some papers, there was nothing prosecutable in President Biden’s actions.
The special counsel in this case is a man named Robert Hur. Hur was appointed to the investigation by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland, if you remember, is the guy that President Obama wanted on the Supreme Court whose nomination the Republicans refused to vote on until the next guy was in office. The next guy installed Brett Kavanaugh, instead, and he appointed Hur as a U.S. Attorney.
It seems to me that Garland was forced to assign someone to the case that the Republicans couldn’t dismiss. Hur seems to have had an impressive career. When interviewed about being made special counsel he said, “I will conduct the assigned investigation with fair, impartial, and dispassionate judgment. I intend to follow the facts swiftly and thoroughly, without fear or favor, and will honor the trust placed in me to perform this service.”
Much of Hur’s resulting report, while exonerating the President from any legal wrongdoing, damns him in many others. Hur’s report says that he did not believe that the evidence met the standard for criminal charges. He then goes on to say that it would be difficult to convict the President in a court of law for what he did because the President would come across to a jury as being, “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
All of that seems to me the work of a partisan desperate to find some indication of criminal activity where there really isn’t any. Without ever having a trial, and without having enough evidence to hold a trial, Hur states what he thinks the likely outcome of such a trial would be.
“I will conduct the assigned investigation with fair, impartial, and dispassionate judgment. I intend to follow the facts swiftly and thoroughly, without fear or favor, and will honor the trust placed in me to perform this service.”
Anyway. The Republicans are still trying to make a false comparison between President Biden’s actions and those of the 45th President. That’s what got me thinking. What are all the criminal things that the former President is currently accused of doing? I need to make a spreadsheet.
So, here’s my almost-spreadsheet. As we speak, the former President is facing 91 separate felony charges across two state courts and two federal districts. Any one of those could land him in jail.
He is also facing a civil suit from the State of New York that could severely impact his future ability to do business here.
Also, separate from all that, in May, he was found guilty of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll back in 1996 in a department store changing room. He was ordered to pay her $5 million. Following that verdict, the former President renewed his online bullying of her, so she sued him again for defamation. About two weeks ago, a jury again sided with her and awarded her an additional $83.3 million.
Yesterday, a federal judge rejected a motion from the former President’s attorneys to declare a mistrial. The attorneys argued that Ms. Carroll had deleted some threatening email messages including death threats. The judge who ruled against them stated that whatever was in the deleted emails would not have aided the accused in his defense. Nice try.
There is no way to say that these judgments were partisan because in both cases the juries were chosen BY BOTH SIDES.
The New York State civil case against the former President and his adult children concluded in September and we are all now awaiting the final verdict. The judge has already said that 45 committed fraud. We are just waiting to see how much he’s going to be fined for it.
Okay. Here, now are the other pending cases with thanks to The Atlantic for laying it all out. (In the interest of being fully informed, The Atlantic is owned by the Emerson Collective, which is run by Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire widow of Steve Jobs):
1. Falsifying Records to provide hush money to women with whom the 45th President had sexual relations. Felony charges were brought against 45 in March of 2023 by Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg. The trial is currently scheduled for March 25, 2024.
2. Removal of classified documents from the White House after he unwillingly left office. Special counsel Jack Smith charged the former President with 37 felony charges regarding this including willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Charges were filed this past June. The trial is set for May 20, 2024. The judge in this case, Aileen Cannon is someone put into office by the former President. There are already people accusing her of sabotaging the trial.
3. Election subversion in Fulton County, Georgia. In August of 2023, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a racketeering case against the former President and 18 other defendants. Several of those have already struck plea deals. The trial is set for August 5, 2024. Remember, this is the state where the former President called Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, and asked him to “find” 11,780 more votes to prove he won the 2020 election. There’s a sidebar drama unfolding because it has just been revealed that Fani Willis is in a relationship with an attorney she appointed as special prosecutor. You can’t make this stuff up.
4. Election subversion in Washington D.C. On August 1 of this past year, a Grand Jury indicted the former President for his attempts to hold onto power after he lost the 2020 election. 45 is charged with four felonies in this case. The trial was scheduled for March 4, 2024, but when the former President appealed using the defense that he had Presidential immunity, an appeals court had to hear the claim. Two days ago, a three-judge panel rejected that claim, but a new date for the trial has not been set. The former President’s appeal was designed to do just this. He is trying to ensure that the trial does not happen until after the election and then after he has left office.
In thirty out of our fifty states, cases have been filed arguing that the former President should not be allowed to appear on the ballot for the 2024 election given his seditious attempt to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021. Colorado and Maine both officially decided that he should be excluded. The Supreme Court, as I write this, is deciding whether Colorado has the right to do that. While the decision has not yet been announced, early indications are that the Justices will say that individual states do not, in fact, have the right to decide who is on the national ballot.
None of this matters in the least to any of the former president’s supporters. Whatever the results are of these various trials will not in any way affect how the man’s base feels about him.
On the other hand, the Republican party’s constant hammering at Joe Biden, even though they don’t ever find any evidence of wrongdoing, does affect how people think about him. The Republicans have figured out that Democrats have a moral compass and care about things like this even though they do not. They are happy to use this against us.
Hillary Clinton endured thirty years of constant Republican onslaught. There are people today who don’t like her but couldn’t tell you why. “I don’t know what she’s done, but she must have done something.” The Republicans are happy to point to her using a private server for emailing during her tenure as Secretary of State and are equally happy to turn a blind eye to General Colin Powell doing exactly the same thing while he was Secretary of State. Never mind that at the time that both were doing this, the practice was not explicitly illegal.
Joe Biden now finds himself in the same situation as Hillary. As my husband said to me last night, what defendant in a trial isn’t coached to say, “I don’t recall” when asked potentially compromising questions? If saying “I don’t recall” is an indication of the state of Joe Biden’s memory, then that exact same barometer should be used against the former President who has said the same thing so often in courtrooms that he should put it on a t-shirt.
Sometimes there are questions for which there are no answers you can give that doesn’t damn you. “Are you still killing immigrant babies?” You aren’t going to answer yes, at least I hope you aren’t. If you answer no, however, that implies that you were killing immigrant babies in the past, but you won’t be doing it now. The question has nothing to do with anything except that now there are people who think that you have something shady in your past. “I don’t remember what he did, but he did something. Wasn’t there that thing about the dead immigrant babies?”
It's only February. There’s a long road ahead of us to November and it’s going to get far muddier and harder to traverse than it is now. As more and more of the actual cases against the former President get resolved, we are going to see more and more non-cases being brought against the current President.
Now, I don’t believe that any politician has completely clean hands. I don’t think that’s possible given our system’s reliance on money. There are devil’s bargains made all the time. The danger, I think, is thinking that they’re all the same. They aren’t. There’s political compromise and then there’s graft.
We need to keep reminding ourselves to pay attention. Listening with half-attention is usually worse than not listening at all.
With that, I am now going to go back to setting up some concerts. The problem with creating a spreadsheet is that you need to remember to constantly look at it and update it. I tend to enter all the information once and then forget all about it. I also then need to remember to share all the updated information with everyone working on the actual events. It’s hard to remember to do that when there’s one concert one week, then a week off, and then two in a row, and then another week off… It is, however, my job, so that’s what I am going to do.
Maybe I’ll go out for a walk first, though, and sort it all out when I get home.
I'm appalled and hate what's going on with our country but love the way you surmise it.