What was adult film star Stormy Daniels doing on the stand for a second day in a criminal trial about Donald Trump falsifying New York state business records?  She may have been called by the prosecution, but it was Trump’s lawyers who put her there, Judge Juan Merchan said today. 

The exchange came in a hearing after testimony today when Merchan denied a second motion for a mistrial by the defense based on prejudicial testimony by Stormy Daniels.  Merchan took time to tell Trump’s lawyers that he went back over Stormy’s testimony on Tuesday, as well as their opening statement. “You denied that there was ever a sexual encounter between Stormy Daniels and the defendant,” Merchan told Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead attorney, so it was the defense that opened the door to her testimony and the “messy details” they object to, such as her statement that Trump refused to wear a condom during sex. 

Additionally, Merchan found that the defense did not object to the “messy details” when they were revealed in direct testimony during questioning by the prosecution, so the testimony they failed to object to cannot now be used as grounds for a mistrial.  Judge Merchan even said he could not figure “why on earth” Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, had not objected to the question that elicited the “messy detail” about the missing condom.

Today’s testimony by Stormy Daniels did not go well for the defense.  Trump lawyer Necheles spent nearly an hour comparing and contrasting Daniels’ testimony on Tuesday with interviews she had given previously, like the one she gave to gossip magazine “In Touch” in 2010.  She accused Daniels of making up the story about sex with Trump in the Lake Tahoe hotel in 2006.  Daniels replied that if she had made it up, “I would have written it to be a lot better.”  In another exchange, Necheles challenged Daniels about her account of the sex with Trump saying that as a porn actress, “You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real.” 

Daniels responded that “the sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”  That ended that line of questioning.

Another line of questioning that went flat was when Necheles challenged Daniels about how she had monetized her relationship with Trump by writing a book and selling a votive candle with an illustration of herself depicted as a saint.  Daniels responded that her attempts to make money with branded products and her strip club tour were “not unlike Mr. Trump,” bringing that line of questioning to a quick close.  The prosecution later called two publishing executives to read into the record from Trump’s books his claims of how much money he made monetizing the Trump brand and how he vowed to always exact revenge on anyone who “betrayed” him, clearly implying that Daniels was Trump’s victim, not the other way around.

The unasked question that hung over the courtroom throughout the testimony of Stormy Daniels and during Judge Merchan’s denial of Trump’s motion for a mistrial was, if Trump didn’t have sex with Stormy Daniels in 2006 in a Lake Tahoe hotel room, why did he have his lawyer pay her $130,000 and have her sign a non-disclosure agreement about what happened between them?

Until the trial for the lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll in which the judge found that under common definitions of the term, Donald Trump had raped her, and this trial, when Stormy Daniels has been able to get her story about her sexual encounter with Trump on the permanent record, Trump has gotten away with his practice of “deny, deny, deny.” 

This time, by causing his lawyers to “deny, deny, deny” that he had a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, he exposed the truth not only to the world, but to a Manhattan jury that will now have to decide who to believe:  Donald Trump, who has relied on his lawyers to deny the story, or a very smart and credible witness who parried every attempt by those same lawyers to poke holes in her story.

The prosecution is nearing the end of its case.  They will call a few more witnesses to establish the facts of how Trump falsified his business records, and then they will call his former lawyer, Michael Cohen.  Jurors have already heard an audio tape of Trump and Cohen discussing making a payoff to Playboy model Karen McDougal, and Cohen is sure to be a deadly witness who will provide more details of the payoff to Stormy Daniels. 

Maybe Michael Cohen will answer the question about why Trump found it necessary to pay off Stormy Daniels to buy her silence, because it’s a sure thing that a stone-faced and silent Donald Trump won’t take the stand to do it.

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In an appallingly authoritarian move, Israel has ordered Al Jazeera to shutter its offices in the country. The network, Israel says, poses a national security threat. This seems to be the first time Israel has shut down an international news network, and it is doing so in the midst of a war in Gaza — a war that Israel has made exceedingly difficult for foreign news outlets to cover. Al Jazeera is far from a perfect news source, to put it mildly. But they are also the foreign outlet doing the most in-depth, round-the-clock, on-the-ground coverage of this war. And whatever you think of their coverage or how their Qatari ownership influences it, it is profoundly undemocratic and, yes, authoritarian to shut down an entire news network because you’re unhappy with how they’ve covered your war. Israel’s arguments that Al Jazeera has put their soldiers at risk, is a Hamas mouthpiece, and is an “incitement network” simply do not justify their actions here.

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Al Jazeera, like many news networks, is a bit of a mixed bag. Many, many of their journalists have reported bravely and admirably through this war and others. Al Jazeera’s coverage of this war has been non-stop, and while I can’t find numbers, the network does seem to have many more journalists on the ground in Gaza than any other foreign news outlet. Israel has been absolutely atrocious about giving journalists necessary access to cover this war, something dozens of the world’s most prominent journalists have publicly objected to. Government actions, and particularly wars, carried out without oversight are ripe for abuses. While camera phones and social media can create something of a check, there are real limitations: “citizen journalists” simply don’t have the credibility that institutional ones do; random social media videos can be said to be any number of things, and disinformation campaigns have been rampant during this war; and in the intensity of conflict, it’s not always possible to tell exactly what one is even seeing, which is why journalistic institutions check and double-check various claims and should only publish what they can confirm. During this war, Al Jazeera journalists have time and again been the only reporters around. Their work has been brave and essential.

This is not the first time Al Jazeera has been targeted by governments. In the past, others in the neighborhood, including Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, have at various times banned the network for reasons similar to those Israel gave: threats to national security, pushing a Qatari agenda, trafficking in bias and misinformation.

Al Jazeera is a Qatari outlet, and while it claims total independence from the government, those claims have at times seemed shaky. Its coverage of this war has been exceedingly hostile to Israel (to be clear, some other outlets have been exceedingly deferential to Israel — bias is not confined to Al Jazeera) and the network has, in my opinion, sometimes been far too deferential and even sympathetic to Hamas, a pattern its engaged in with other fundamentalist groups over the years. I’ve been pretty stunned by the behavior of several Al Jazeera journalists on social media, who don’t seem beholden by many of the same rules of engagement as reporters at, say, the New York Times. I’ve observed many instances of Al Jazeera reporters sharing totally unverified information, using wildly incendiary language, and refusing to adhere to even the most basic standards of journalistic fairness — stuff that would get any reporter fired from a reputable outlet in the US (although probably not from a Fox News, or from an op/ed page). The network has at times veered into the flagrant antisemitic, including Holocaust denial.

Much more often, though, the issue seems to be clear bias rather than blatant bigotry. That said, the network’s center of gravity and its audience is not New York and New York liberals, it’s the Arab world, and their reporting, coverage, and perspective reflect all of that. What seems fair in my eyes is not the One True Definition of fairness, and what seems biased is also defined by where I sit in the world. I have bigger concerns about their transparency and accountability. Al Jazeera has gotten several big, important stories wrong in its coverage of this war, which is not all that unusual given the circumstances (I don’t think any outlet has been correct 100% of the time), but they are not always particularly great at issuing public corrections and retractions, which is a real problem. I’m not particularly confident in their fact-checking procedures or their corrections procedures. I would not make Al Jazeera my sole source of information about this war or anything else. But as one of many sources, they’re an important one. And again, they are a huge and sprawling network, employing hundreds of exceptionally honest, exceptionally talented, exceptionally brave reporters who have been on the front lines of the current conflict, and who have covered many important stories with depth and integrity.

Also: None of that is really material to the matter at hand. I present it only to say that I’m not making this argument because I’m a huge Al Jazeera fan with no qualms about their journalism; I’m making it as a matter of principle, not personal preference.

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It is very, very easy and very, very common in moments of national crisis to cede one’s values in response to what feels like an acute threat. Those of us in the US have certainly seen this play out many times, from McCarthyism to Japanese internment to the “you’re with us or you’re against us” insanity of the post-9/11 era to the invasion of Iraq. Over and over again, the times when we suspend our principles out of fear wind up being among the ugliest and most regrettable moments in our histories.

Israel has become far less democratic since the rise of the broader Israeli right and the empowerment of Benjamin Netanyahu and his greater coalition of extremists, religious fundamentalists, and power-hungry autocrats. But Israel does still fancy itself a democracy even as it behaves less and less like one, and I imagine most people who care about its future, the wellbeing of its citizens, and the wellbeing of its neighbors very much hope it corrects from its current course. Banning a news network, even in the name of national security, is from the autocrat’s playbook, not the democrat’s.

Israel should also want to have the Arab world’s ear. Al Jazeera, for all its flaws, is a bridge — and the network does give Israeli spokespeople and the government their say. Shutting them down and raiding their offices may be a satisfying power play for reactionaries, but it doesn’t set the country on the path to what should be long-term goals: Regional normalization and peaceful coexistence.

Those goals, of course, may not be shared by Netanyahu, who seems primarily interested in staying out of jail and maintaining his grip on power. But what’s best for Bibi, it turns out, is often what’s very much not what’s best for his country.

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You don’t have to like Al Jazeera to support the network’s right to work in Israel, and in any other self-styled free and open democratic country (and in autocratic ones, too). There are a great many news outlets around the world that I think are deeply biased, bordering on dangerous, and sometimes crossing that border. But I also overwhelmingly think it’s a mistake to hand leaders the power to shut news outlets down. And it’s especially dangerous to see Israel shutting down Al Jazeera in the middle of a war in which Al Jazeera journalists have had better access than reporters from any other international network — in part because of Al Jazeera’s round-the-clock coverage of the war, and in part because Israel will simply not let most foreign journalists into Gaza to do their jobs.

Israel is now beginning its incursion into Rafah. There are not enough journalists on the ground. War, always, is hell. But it stands to reason that things get much more hellish if no watchdogs are watching.

xx Jill

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Let me ask you a question: How many all-expenses-paid vacations at luxury hunting and fishing lodges have you enjoyed over the last few years? I’m not talking about a motel in the boonies of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or a drafty log cabin on a lake in Maine or Minnesota. We’re talking about a luxury resort on 1,200 acres alongside the Yellowstone River just outside Yellowstone National Park. We’re talking about a lodge featuring rooms with stone fireplaces that go for upwards of $1,000 a night in high season, meals that include “house-cured meats from local ranches, garden-fresh produce from nearby farms, and, of course plenty of Northwest craft beers and spirits,” as the resort’s website describes the offerings.

It's called the Sage Lodge in Pray, Montana, and it’s where George Mason University sends gaggles of federal judges for a week-long “colloquium” every year or so. Paid for by the Law and Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School, the “colloquium” held at the Sage Lodge in 2021, for example, featured lectures on such subjects as “Woke Law!” – and yes, the exclamation point is part of the lecture topic – by one Todd J. Zywicki, who is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School and a senior fellow at the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives of the Cato Institute. Another juicy topic covered at the Sage Lodge in 2021 was “Unprofitable Education: Student Loans, Higher Education Costs, and the Regulatory State,” also featuring a lecture by Zywicki, a topic that rings what we might call a rather different bell after the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program last year.

The Antonin Scalia Law School, by the way, was established and largely funded by the efforts of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who helped put together $30 million from conservative donors, including Leo himself, to rename the law school after the late legendary right-wing justice, who it will be remembered died of a heart attack in 2016 at another luxury hunting lodge, that one in Texas, while on a trip paid for by wealthy conservative “friends of the court,” I guess we could call them. The other major donor to the Scalia Law School was the Charles Koch Foundation, which threw in a handy $10 million.

Why are we talking about luxury hunting lodges and right-wing “colloquiums” for judges? Because one of our favorite federal judges, Aileen Cannon of Florida, currently presiding over the case against Donald Trump over the secret documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago, was a guest at that same 2021 “colloquium” at the Sage Lodge, and the one held in 2022 as well. The thing is, Cannon failed to file the form known as a Privately Funded Seminar Disclosure Report, which lists whoever paid for the judge to attend the seminar, who the speakers were and what topics were discussed.

This is my weekly Salon column. To read the rest of it, follow the link below:

All-expenses-paid-for Aileen Cannon

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Abortions bans are designed and written to allow for all kinds of horrors: Women losing their organs, women bleeding out without help, women losing their lives. But they’re also written to empower abusive men. After all, the very foundation of an abortion ban is an assumption that a woman’s body does not belong to her. Abusive men agree.

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And so it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that several men have indeed taken advantage of these laws in an effort to control their ex partners. And it’s also not particularly surprising — although it is appalling — that they’ve found support and legal representation from some of the most powerful people in the US anti-abortion movement.

One man in Texas sued his wife’s friends for allegedly helping her to get abortion pills (she was trying to leave him, saying that, duh, he was abusive); Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion lawyer who wrote the Texas abortion bounty law and also represents president Donald Trump, represented him. Another Texas man murdered his girlfriend after she traveled to Colorado for an abortion. And now, a third Texas man found out his ex girlfriend was planning to travel out of state to end her pregnancy, and he also hired Jonathan Mitchell to help stop her. Mitchell has splashed her name all over public court filings, and even though she has not actually broken the law (traveling out of state for an abortion is perfectly legal), he’s seeking to depose her and any of her “accomplices” in what can only be described as a blatant campaign of harassment and abuse, on behalf of an nauseatingly controlling man.

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A commenter to a previous piece on my Facebook page made an observation. I write way too much about the ex-president. That’s a fair criticism. I’ll gladly take that on, acknowledge it, and own it. I do write too much about that man and wish I didn’t have to at all. As much as he might be a subject of this piece, he is not the subject of this piece. This piece is not so much about him, but about you.

Of course, the you in this case is what I lovingly call the pejorative you. That means it’s not about everyone, but just those that still choose to follow him. It has gone well beyond ideology at this point. It has moved beyond ideology and into idolatry. They say the self-own is the cruelest own of all.

Millions of people wear adult diapers. I don’t wear them myself, but I have had occasional bouts with digestive issues. Various medications have had any number of side effects and those were some of the more serious ones. Some people have other health problems that require their use. So, I am not going to judge anyone that has a medical need to wear them.

So, I try really hard not to poke fun. The key point here is that every time someone points out a flaw or human weakness in the dear leader they adopt that as a sign of strength. Trump passes gas and some have suggested (people are saying) that he stinks because he has likely soiled himself. Instead of admitting that maybe he is not the best person for the job we just kind of assimilate this knowledge into our new schema. To translate that into plain English we can simply say “real men wear diapers.”

Thus the continuing spiraling nature of our politics and our culture proceeds without abatement. Therefore if you have control of your bodily functions, have basic knowledge of science, history, and current events then you aren’t really a man. If you have basic empathy for others and compassion for people that might be struggling then you aren’t a real man.

Let me be very frank. Normal people don’t do this. You will not see liberals. progressives, and leftists doing this. We don’t have bumper stickers on our cars. We don’t have signs for the yard. We don’t own any tee-shirts, hats, or flags that we fly from the home or on the back of our pickup truck. We actually don’t have a pickup truck, but that’s not the point.

People in cults do this. So, this isn’t about him. It’s about you. It’s about your desperate need to support everything and anything that comes out of his mouth (or any other portion of his body). I am trying as hard as I can to be respectful here. This is not a good look for you. You aren’t owning the libs. You are owning yourself. The self-own is the cruelest own of all.