It seems that Mark Meadows — that poster boy for the entitled male dipshit — has been spilling his guts to The Guy Who Convicts War Criminals In The Hague.

Former President Donald Trump's final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith's team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Marky Meds, you’ll recall, was one of the chief shit-stirrers in the whole Help Help My Election Was Stolen conspiracy, telling anyone who would listen all about how eLeCtIoN fRaUd wAs RaMpAnT and he had proof and it was all going to come out and that Donald Trump would be restored to the throne back in the White House.

he wrote a whole fucking book about it. well, it looks like Meadows is singing an entirely different tune to the grand jury.

Jack Smith was all “so tell me about what it says in this book of yours” and Meadows was like “hey bro, what book? I told Trump like a million times that there was no election fraud. I said right to his face, man. literally one million times. if Trump thought the election was stolen, he sure didn’t get it from me.”

“as an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously, and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings. in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, I believed that challenging the results on behalf of President Trump should be pursued in a just and legal way. I endeavored to represent my client to the best of my ability.

“I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience to provide me with true and reliable information, especially since my role involved speaking to the media and to legislators in various states. what I did not do but should have done, your honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true, were in fact true. in the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states — including Georgia — I failed to do my due diligence. I believe in and I value election integrity.

“if I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to defend Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse. for those failures of mine, your honor, I have taken responsibility already, before the Colorado Bar, who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia. thank you.”

got that? Jenna is blaming her woes on “lawyers with many more years of experience.” here’s a hint as to whom she’s talking about: his name rhymes with ‘Rudy Giuliani.’ but instead of getting sound legal advice, she got farted on.

IF YOU ASK advocates for abortion rights where the most critical elections will be this November, they’re likely to name four states: Ohio, the site of a high-stakes referendum; Virginia, the last state in the South where abortion remains widely accessible (and where the governor has promised to “gleefully” ban the practice if his party gains control of the legislature); Kentucky, where the most outspoken advocate of the state’s near-total abortion ban is running against a pro-choice Democrat; and Pennsylvania, where a key seat on the Supreme Court is on the line.

One major Republican donor is pouring millions into groups funding the anti-abortion candidates in three of those contests: Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. He is also one of the largest personal shareholders in the viral social media network, TikTok.

According to a widely circulated origin story, Jeff Yass’ investing career started with a poker game in a SUNY-Binghamton dorm room. Yass went on to found the options trading firm Susquehanna Investment Group, and is now worth a cool $28 billion. One of Susquehanna’s richest bets was purchasing a 15 percent stake in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, in 2012; according to the Wall Street Journal, Yass’ personal stake in the company is about seven percent.

A longtime member of the advisory board at the Cato Institute and a top donor to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Yass, 67, self-identifies as a libertarian — a political philosophy that would seem to be at odds with the desire to increase government control of women’s health care decisions.

Little Donny Fuckface is — and I’m going to use a very precise legal term here — super fucking fucked. Donald Trump’s very bad week got a lot worse yesterday morning, as the writers threw in a plot twist that no one saw coming: Sidney Powell decided that she absolutely did not want to go to prison for Trump, and pleaded guilty for her part in the Big Georgia Election Fuckery Conspiracy.

Sid was sentenced to six years’ probation and agreed to pay a $6,000 fine and $2,700 in restitution. Powell was looking at 5 to 20 long and lonely years in the slammer. that she got probation and a few thousand in fines instead is extremely bad news for Donny. here’s why: she also agreed to turn over documents and testify truthfully in her co-defendants’ trials.

and oh fucking boy, does Sidney ever have all the goods on Donald Trump. she was right there in the Oval Office for all the secret meetings where all the cockamamie ideas for breaking into voting machines and stealing the data were cooked up. Fani Willis is nobody’s fool. you know that she yours-in-serviced the fuck out of Powell until she was satisfied that Sid could deliver every bit of incriminating evidence on Trump — and that’s why Powell got such a sweetheart deal.

Sidney’s going to get up on the witness stand and sing like a bird against Donald Trump — because if she doesn’t, per the terms of her guilty plea, she goes right back to looking at that 5-to-20 prison stretch. everything is going badly for Donald Trump right now, and there’s no good news on the horizon. every one one of his trials is pointing to a big fucking guilty verdict. if I were Donny, right now I’d be screaming at the butler and the pool boy to google for “countries with no extradition treaties.”

As the House goes into the third week of not having an elected leader due to GOP chaos, progressive Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pennsylvania) is condemning Republican members for continually nominating speaker candidates like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) with an extensive background of peddling antisemitism and white supremacy.

In a scathing press statement released Tuesday, Lee’s office referred to Jordan as a “white supremacist antisemite” and listed a litany of instances in which Jordan has spread antisemitism and white supremacy as a House member and chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Republicans’ support for Jordan as speaker — and for Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) last week — is especially damning amid Israel’s apartheid and war and Hamas’s attack on Israelis, Lee said.

“At a moment when our Jewish communities are in so much pain, I am horrified that days after attempting to elect a Speaker who spoke at a white supremacist convention hosted by a group whose website said that ‘Jews will attack us for wanting to restore white America,’ Republicans are now planning to elect [a] Speaker who has used his official role as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to spread antisemitic tropes and replacement theory online and on national TV,” the progressive said.

Lee’s office then cited a number of antisemitic actions taken by Jordan: He supported and helped stoke the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which was carried out by a crowd of far right extremists including neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In a 2019 tweet that is still up today, Jordan’s official Twitter account referred to Jewish Democratic megadonor Tom Steyer as “Tom $teyer.” According to a Media Matters for America analysis, Jordan appears on Fox News to peddle the virulently antisemitic “great replacement theory” more often than any other Republican Congress member. He’s refused to condemn fellow GOP members Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) and Mary Miller (Illinois) when they’ve spewed antisemitism.

A county judge has ruled that the owner of Century III Mall [West Mifflin, Allegheny County] must pay $150,000 in fines to West Mifflin Borough for failing repeatedly to remediate a litany of safety hazards.

Common Pleas Judge Thomas E. Flaherty imposed the penalty against owner Moonbeam Capital at a hearing Tuesday morning for three code violations: unsafe structures, sanitation problems and rampant weed growth. Judge Flaherty lowered the fines from $240,000, first ordered in July by a district judge.

Butch Anthony, the borough’s community development director, said he was “unsatisfied” by the outcome. Borough representatives had asked the judge to raise the fines to $324,000 as Moonbeam has failed to pay the original fine or address the violations first cited three months ago. The mall’s condition has only worsened since summer. In August, the roof caved in where a fire had raged in April, leaving piles of debris. The collapse occurred just weeks after a teenage trespasser fell through the roof and sustained serious injuries.

A separate case over the mall’s condemnation status is ongoing, with a closed hearing scheduled for next Monday. Local officials hope that case will lead to demolition, which they estimate would cost $10 million to $15 million. Borough council voted to condemn the structure in July, citing myriad hazards, including collapsed roofs, rampant mold and broken glass throughout the building.

the wonderful world of lecterngate
every now and then, I remember that noted cosmetics influencer Sarah Huckabee Sanders is actually the governor of Arkansas, and my brain starts to hurt. how the fuck did this happen? how did a mediocre press secretary with a penchant for lying and practically nothing else on her resume get herself elected governor of an entire state — and then the veins in my head start to throb and I have to go lie down in a dark room.

Shuckabee’s governorship so far has been boilerplate Republifascist rule — book bans, transgender fearmongering, getting rid of those pesky child labor laws — but it wouldn’t be a truly Republican administration if there weren’t also a shitload of clumsy corruption going as well.

welcome to lecterngate. it goes like this: Sarah, using state funds, spent $19,000 on a lectern. that’s a lot of money, so you might be asking yourself: what’s so special about this lectern? is it magical? does it shit rainbows?

no, it doesn’t do anything. it’s just a lectern. it just stands there being very lectern-like. here it is:
(screenshot)

HARRISBURG — Leaders of several public pension systems in Pennsylvania continued to work with an investment adviser, his company, or a company for which he consults after he settled allegations of violating antifraud laws, a Spotlight PA investigation has found. That includes three counties [Somerset, Tioga and Wyoming] and at least two municipal systems [Economy Borough and Monongahela City] that received payments from the adviser as result of the federal settlement.

The SEC case and the lack of transparency from local government agencies afterward highlights how these systems make crucial decisions about people’s finances and retirement funds, but often face little public scrutiny.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged William Vescio [sole owner of Vescio Asset Management or VAM Group] caused clients to invest in a class of mutual fund shares with higher fees, most of which he received, instead of a lower-cost option. For some clients, federal authorities alleged William Vescio negligently failed to disclose information and those “inaccurate disclosures gave the misleading impression that the overall fees were lower than they actually were.”

The Allegheny County adviser settled with the agency in 2020, agreeing to be censured and pay $275,000 in disgorgement, $40,000 in civil penalties, and interest. In the settlement, he did not admit or deny the commission’s findings. A new release from the agency said he “agreed to distribute the funds to harmed investors.” He made final payments as recently as June of this year, records obtained by Spotlight PA show.

WASHINGTON — Republicans’ choice for their next House speaker played an active role in trying to overturn Pennsylvania's 2020 presidential election based on disproven claims of voter fraud.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out votes that gave Joe Biden a victory in a state Donald Trump had carried four years earlier, accused Pennsylvania Democrats of trying to steal the election, voted to reject the state’s certified electoral votes hours after the Capitol was overrun by pro-Trump insurrectionists, and spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally in Harrisburg shortly after Election Day.

“In my view, Jim Jordan is tainted,” said Ross Baker, a congressional expert and political science professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “He carries the taint of being a collaborator with Donald Trump in trying to overturn an honest election and has never backed off from that. He has tenaciously held onto that false belief. This guy is Trump through and through. He is an advocate and somebody who pushed aggressively for the election fraud myth.”

It remains to be seen if Mr. Jordan, who Republicans nominated last week, can secure the 217 votes he needs to win the post in a roll call vote scheduled for Tuesday. With Republicans holding a razor-thin House majority and Democrats sure to unanimously oppose him, he can lose only five GOP lawmakers.

we live in a shitty world full of shitty people doing shitty things, and lately, things have been even shittier than usual. let’s try to forget about that for a bit and start the week with something we can all laugh at: Little Donny Fuckface’s ever-worsening legal situation.

today, in a courthouse in Washington DC, Judge Tanya Chutkan is expected to wedge her shoe just a little bit farther up Donald Trump’s ass.

- snip -

Jack Smith will be at the hearing, armed with evidence and sound legal reasoning. in his own words, “The defendant knows that when he publicly attacks individuals and institutions, he inspires others to perpetrate threats and harassment against his targets.”

Trump’s ace team of parking garage lawyers will be there too, waving their arms and pounding the table, insisting that Donald has a FiRsT AmEnDmEnT rIgHt to threaten witnesses and harass prosecutors and judges. spoiler alert: he doesn’t.