Kate and I discussed the ongoing Graham Platner controversies on last week’s episode the podcast. As I explained, having never fallen hard for Platner as so many did I come at the matter from a different perspective. I was basically a soft skepitc. Not against him but also not wowed. Because of that I wasn’t really let down by any of the scandals because I wasn’t up in the first place. As I half jokingly put it, as long as he agrees not to be a Nazi going forward and stays off any dating apps until November, I’m basically fine with this candidacy.
In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said that yes, President Trump could decide tomorrow to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and no one could stop him.
Welcome back to Aakash Singh Points Memo. It turns out there’s even more. Earlier I mentioned the growing evidence that Singh is the point man, the conduit for White House/DOJ orders to corrupt grand juries and bring political retaliation indictments. But there’s so much more.
Yesterday the Times reported that on May 13 the DOJ convened a teleconference with most or all U.S. attorneys or senior assistant U.S. attorneys around the country to demand more prosecutions of non-citizen voters. The problem, of course, is that countless official tabulations, even in red states under Republican officials, have shown that such voting is close to non-existent, as TPM has reported literally for decades.
In recent posts I’ve been explaining how corrupt leadership of the Justice Department has been seeping down into U.S. Attorneys Offices across the country, sometimes through direct interventions, other times through the general message from the top that using U.S. Attorneys Offices to settle personal vendettas is fine. Our new information comes from a new filing out of the Broadview Six case — specifically, from attorneys for the final four defendants who are now seeking leave of the court to do discovery to get to the bottom of the corruption behind the case and seek sanctions or compensation for legal fees.
Graham Platner’s scandals just keep piling up. This week, news emerged that the likely Democratic nominee to face off against Susan Collins in the Maine Senate race had sexted with several women who were not his wife shortly before he launched his campaign. The New York Times followed up with a piece talking to several women who alleged that had volatile and “toxic” relationships with Platner. This is, of course, after reports emerged that he has a Nazi symbol tattoo. (Platner denied knowing about the tattoo’s significance when he got it as a Marine years ago, and got it covered up during the campaign).
TPM executive editor John Light, publisher Joe Ragazzo and reporter Kate Riga got together to talk it all through. Check it out below.
@johnalight.bsky.social @kateriga.bsky.social + @jragazzo.bsky.social get into the latest Platner scandals, how this is all playing out in Maine, and how bad things could get.wherethingsstand.talkingpointsmemo.com/p/tpm-live-h…
I’ve been bringing you updates on the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago, the current U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros and the expanding grand jury misconduct corruption scandal enveloping the office. Of course, this is not limited to Chicago. It’s highly likely, though defense attorneys haven’t yet been able to pry free evidence, that the Broadview Six indictment came down under pressure from Washington, whether that was from the White House, Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security. The deeper corruption of the DOJ is a story me and my colleagues have been reporting on for the last year and a half — cover-ups, retaliation against political adversaries, various flavors of corrupt and criminal conduct.
So it’s everywhere. It’s starts at the top and it trickles down everywhere. But in most cases we’re talking about corruption and misconduct directed from above, from Trump and his top fluffers. But the DOJ is a big, big institution. Lots of people. There are 93 U.S. Attorneys Offices. So there are many flavors of corruption. And I wanted to share with you a slightly different kind. This is courtesy of TPM Reader LS who shared this article from Bloomberg Law (which David also flagged in Morning Memo today). It’s about Sigal Chattah, the acting U.S. Attorney in Nevada’s single U.S. Attorney’s office. It’s a wild, wild article. Totally bonkers stuff I was surprised I hadn’t heard about before. But it kind of makes sense since it’s hard to get attention for wild levels of corruption and misconduct and simply absurd behavior in a semi-out-of-the-way U.S. Attorneys office when we’re seeing examples of the same every day at Main Justice.
TPM Publisher Joe Ragazzo is joined by TPM Executive Editor John Light as they talk about The News, literally, figuratively, and even kind of spiritually.
Kate and Josh discuss Ken Paxton’s primary win, redistricting developments in South Carolina and Alabama and fissures between congressional Republicans and the White House.
