The Past Week's Polls

As of mid-April, the conventional wisdom had been that Biden was closing the gap with Trump. But as of this past Sunday, things changed, first with CNN:

Donald Trump continues to hold an advantage over President Joe Biden as the campaign – and the former president’s criminal trial – move forward, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. And in the coming rematch, opinions about the first term of each man vying for a second four years in the White House now appear to work in Trump’s favor, with most Americans saying that, looking back, Trump’s term as president was a success, while a broad majority says Biden’s has so far been a failure.

Trump’s support in the poll among registered voters holds steady at 49% in a head-to-head matchup against Biden, the same as in CNN’s last national poll on the race in January, while Biden’s stands at 43%, not significantly different from January’s 45%.

This, of course, is a six-point lead, although this is in a theoretical national popular vote match, which doesn't take place in the real world. However. this has turned out to be the low point for Trump in the week's resuilts. As of yesterday,

Despite being on trial in New York City, former President Donald Trump has widened his lead over President Joe Biden during the past month.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, in a three-way contest between Biden, Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 46% of Likely U.S. Voters would choose Trump, 36% would vote for Biden and nine percent (9%) would vote for Kennedy. In April, Trump led by 6 points, 44% to 38% for Biden, with RFK Jr. at 10%.

The Washington Examiner provides some analysis:

While the [Rasmussen] analysis does not mention why Trump is surging, the results come during a week when he has used a New York City hush money trial against him to give daily press conferences outside the court that the media, especially left-leaning TV outlets such as CNN, cover. What’s more, he has been more focused on his second term agenda and telling MAGA what he wants to do should he return to the White House.

Biden, meanwhile, has been rocked by the economy, inflation, and the public’s anger over paying high prices. He has also been hurt politically by the raging campus protests in response to his Middle East policies.

The big point this take misses is that the campus pogroms are unique. A writer named Michael A Cohen (not the former Trump lawyer) points out on MSNBC,:

the increasingly omnipresent talk about how the pro-Palestinian anti-war protests roiling American college campuses today bear similarity to those protests 56 years ago opposing the war in Vietnam. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., even suggested that the war in Gaza “may be Biden’s Vietnam.”

. . . Not only is the war in Gaza not a primary issue of concern for voters; it doesn’t even crack the top 10. Indeed, according to the recent Harvard poll of voters aged 18-29, Israel/Palestine ranked 15th out of 16 on their list of the most important issues facing America. (Oddly the only issue that ranked lower was student debt.)

. . . As CNN’s polling guru Harry Enten recently pointed out, Biden’s declining support among young voters predates the war in Gaza — and the war has had practically no effect on 2024 presidential polling.

This suggests a basic tone-deafness in the Biden campaign. which seems to want to triangulate over Gaza and Israel in hope of keeping pro-Palestine voters on board, where this doesn't really make a difference. The MSNBC piece continues, "Perhaps Biden will pay a price with Arab voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan." But another poll from this past week makes that issue moot:

Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden by 15 points in Michigan six months before the presidential election, one poll has shown.

According to a Kaplan Strategies survey of 804 people, the former president is leading the incumbent by 51 percent to 36 percent in the key battleground state. The margin of error for the survey was 3.5 percentage points.

Most other polls show a closer race, although few of them show Biden ahead, and as of today, the Real Clear Politics average shows him ahead by 1.2 points.

It seems to me that comparisons among the 1968 urban and college riots, the 2020 George Floyd riots, and the 2024 college pogroms all miss an important point. There were diosorders over the Viet Nam war in 1968, both on campuses and in Chicago at the Democrat convention, but there were also urban riots following the King assassination in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City.

In other words, there was an important race and class component to the general unrest, and it was an early manifestation of the alliance between the urban underclass and the Ivy League upper crust -- keep in mind that many in the leadership of the Students for a Democratic Society had at minimum prosperous backgrounds, but Thomas Ayers's father was the wealthy CEO of Commonwealth Edison.

The 2020 George Floyd riots mirrored this alliance, with upper middle class students declaring protest zones in cities like Seattle in alliance with African-American protesters, and Black Livea Matter lawn posters appeared in many prosperous suburban neighborhoods.

What's unique about the 2024 campus pro-Palestine riots is that urban African-American support has been minimal. Notably.

MSNBC host Al Sharpton compared anti-Israel protests to the events of Jan. 6 on Thursday and said Democrats were losing the “moral high ground” by not calling out the demonstrations on college campuses.

. . . “ How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side say Jan. 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses, you lose the moral high ground,” Sharpton said.

This is turning out to be a boutique issue that isn't uniting the left. The big subtext in 1968 was the draft, which affected young men across the board, who didn't want to be conscripted for cannon fodder. As it happened, upper middle class college students were most aggrieved, as it offended their sense of entitlement, but working-class whites and African-Americans were just as much affected. Nixon quickly defused the problem by winding down the war and instituting the draft lottery.

But in 2024, there isn't the equivalent class alliance, and as the polling above suggests, Gaza and Palestine aren't issues on which many in the electorate are basing their decisions.

Instead, there are two big factors. One hasn't been acknowledged as much as it should be: the more Trump goes to court, the higher he rises in the polls. It's beginning to emerge that with rthe New York criminal trial, he isn't just holding his own against Biden with a lead of a few points, he's starting to widen the gap. As Jonathan Turley put it in a different context, Alvin Bragg is Trump's best lawyer.

The second issue is that the public has now grown plenty familiar -- indeed, overfamiliar -- with Joe Biden. The electorate is tired of the stumbles, the slurring, the malapropisms, the repeated embroidered stories of Uncle Bosey and such. The investigations of the Biden family grift haven't revealed bombshells, but the overwhelming impression on the public has been that he's shallow, venal, weak, vindictive, and lazy. I doon't see how he can turn this around. He is what he is, and that's all his handlers have to work with.

Back To The Trump Wiretap

BREAKING – EXPOSING THE CIA: “So the agencies kind of, like, all got together and said, we’re not gonna tell Trump…Director of the CIA would keep [information from Trump]…” A project manager working in Cyber Operations for the @CIA and an @NSAGov contractor with top-secret… pic.twitter.com/TXq8ZjJEBq

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) May 1, 2024

In a story even the alt media has either ignored or quickly passed over, James O'Keefe released undercover video of a CIA contractor saying agency bigwigs withheld information from Trump and spied on him. The video showed Amjad Fseisi, a project manager working in Cyber Operations for the CIA with top-secret clearance:

Amjad reveals to OMG’s Undercover American Swiper that intel agencies not only kept intelligence information from a sitting United States President and Commander-In-Chief, they also used FISA to spy on President Trump and his team and are still monitoring President Trump according to Amjad who says, “We monitor everything.” Amjad adds “we also have people that monitor his ex-wife. He likes to use burner phones” – information only an insider with access to highly sensitive information would state.

“We steal it [information]” and “We hack other countries just like that,” Amjad, who states he currently works on the CIA’s China Mission Center, explains how intel agencies obtain information. He also describes a broken intelligence system where “We don’t share information across agencies” because the CIA is “very reluctant” to share information with the “careless” NSA.

I would note, as someone who's had top secret clearance in some jobs, that the clearance itself means very little -- basically, anyone who works in a facility where material at any level of classification is handled gets "top secret" clearance in case they inadvertently see something. But even with the clearance, you still have to have further clearance for any specific project, so it's not as though you have a license to just snoop around, and it certainly doesn't mean Fseisi got any privileged information just because he had the general clearance.

It appears that Fseisi's contract with the CIA was immediately terminated when the video was released. Watching it, it's plain that the guy is listening to himself talk and doing all he can to impress the female undercover reporter, so we should factor this in -- but what interests me nevertheless is that this story seems consistent with previous allegations that the deep state had been spying on Trump. The Gateway Pundit quotes O'Keefe at the link:

O’Keefe Media Group’s bombshell undercover footage supports earlier reports by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag that revealed how the American intelligence community illegally ran a spy operation against then-candidate Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and illegally acquired intelligence that was later used to justify the Federal Bureau of Investigation (@FBI) official probe, “Crossfire Hurricane,” which in turn led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that ultimately did not find evidence of Russia collusion by the 2016 Trump campaign.

This in turn takes me back to the allegation that the intelligence community "wiretapped" Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. There's even a Wikipedia entry for this episode:

On March 4, 2017, Donald Trump wrote a series of posts on his Twitter account that falsely accused former President Barack Obama's administration of wiretapping his "wires" at Trump Tower late in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump called for a congressional investigation into the matter, and the Trump administration cited news reports to defend these accusations. His initial claims appeared to have been based on a Breitbart News article he had been given which repeated speculations made by conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch or on a Bret Baier interview, both of which occurred the day prior to his Tweets. By June 2020, no evidence had surfaced to support Trump's claim, which had been refuted by the Justice Department (DOJ).

The original story, which appears to have been assiduously scrubbed, was that National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers met with Trump after the election to inform him that Trump Tower wasn't secure, and as a consequence, Trump moved his transition headquarters to his Bedminster, NJ golf club. The record does reflect that a meeting between Trump and Rogers did take place in mid November, 2016:

And a lot of people have been paying Donald Trump a visit at Trump Tower in New York City, mostly people being considered for jobs in the new administration. But one meeting stands out. Navy Admiral Mike Rogers sat down with Trump. He is head of the National Security Agency. He's in the military chain of command. And it appears he never told the current commander in chief he was doing this.

And Trump did in fact move his transition headquarters from Trump Tower to Bedminster on November 16:

President-elect Donald Trump is moving the transition meetings Friday from Trump Tower in New York to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, said transition team officials.

The transition team did not provide details of who Mr. Trump will meet with at the exclusive private golf club about 35 miles west of Manhattan.

There was no mention in any of the reports about what Rogers discussed with Trump in the meeting, nor why the move to Bedminster took place. Exactly what kind of surveillance was involved, on whom, and who ordered it has never been clear, but the Wikipedia entry linked above is full of weasel wording:

On September 18, 2017, CNN reported that the FBI wiretapped Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, from as early as 2014 through an unspecified time before the 2016 election, and also after the election through early 2017, pursuant to two separate FISA court orders. It has not been confirmed whether Trump's conversations with Manafort were intercepted as part of this surveillance. CNN acknowledged that prior to this disclosure, "speculation has run rampant about whether Manafort or others associated with Trump were under surveillance". The CNN report noted that it was unclear if Manafort was under FBI surveillance while he resided in Trump Tower.

. . . David A. Graham of The Atlantic responded to claims that the Manafort wiretap report vindicated Trump's March 2017 tweets: "This is not true—Trump claimed he had been the subject of Obama-ordered, politically motivated surveillance, for which there remains no evidence." While acknowledging that "it does make for a more complicated picture than previously known"[.]

Wikipedia concludes,

Trump's wiretap claim dominated TV news coverage in March 2017 for several weeks, overshadowing every other discussion about Trump's policy agenda. Late night talk show hosts Trevor Noah, James Corden and Stephen Colbert all made fun of President Trump for his wiretap accusations.

. . .The "wiretap" tweets are included on multiple lists of Trump's most controversial tweets. In 2020, commentator Eli Lake called it the "most consequential tweet of his presidency".

As with many other things Trump, this is looking better for the orange guy in retrospect. What we have with the Amjad Fseisi undercover video is a contractor for the deep state talking big about how the deep state spies on Trump on its own initiative, without the need for any authority to approve it. This would deflect from statements made in 2017 that Obama or his staff knew nothing about it, or that at least there wasn't evidence that they did -- the deep state would have been doing this on its own.

I suspect this matter will be on Trump's agenda in a second term.

The Stages Of Democrat Grief

I've remarked here on how early in this campaign cycle we've seen Democrat insiders sounding alarms about Joe's campaign, especially in comparison to earlier epic defeats for McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis. and Kerry.

In 1972, especially after the Eagleton fiasco, there was never any serious expectation that McGovern could beat Nixon, so that election is an outlier -- but even then, the real pessimism didn't even take hold until McGovern was nominated. In the 2024 cycle, we're seeing gnashing of teeth and rending of garments a full year before the election.

There was a brief surge of optimism in the middle of last month, when prognosticators like Sean Trende and Nate Silver thought they saw Joe closing the gap on Trump, but oddly, a single poll from CNN over the past weekend seems to have ended those fantasies. But something seems to be replacing the previous pattern of unattrributed insider discomfort we used to see during the summers before the election: now we're looking at much clearer auguries of disaster, still months before the ones we used to see. Even Sean Trende, backing off his earlier sanguine view, had this to say on Tuesday after that single CNN poll:

The problem is that the political science literature is pretty consistent that this is the time when the electorate’s views about the election start to harden, particularly with respect to the economy.

. . . We can repeat “It’s a long time until Election Day,” and that’s true in a sense. But Election Day is also fast approaching; we’re almost in May, and people start voting in September in some states. If voters still have a favorable view of Trump’s presidency in a few months and think the incumbent president is a failure, the situation will quickly turn critical for Biden and the Democratic Party.

We know the stereotypcal stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, with the implication that people progress from one to the other in the process. I'm starting to think that something like this is happening with elite opinion, although the stages aren't the same. What we had beginning last fall was the usual unattributed concerns about Bidenomics, Joe's age, and to a lesser degree Hunter and the family business deals -- except again, these were a full year before the election. But worse, big names like David Axelrod and James Carville began to attach themselves to the warnings.

But even then, the subtext was always, "We still have time to turn things around, bad as they may look." But I think that was always with the implication that by early this year, the lizard people could sit Joe down and explain to him that he had to drop out in favor of, say, Kamala, Gavin Newsom, J B Pritzker, or Gretchen Whitmer. But as Sean Trende now says, here we are in May, Joe's still running, and none of the alternatives look like serious choices.

Beyond that, last fall, the bedwetters were pointing just to the economy and Joe's age, while now we have the border, crime, and campus pogroms as well, while the first two haven't gone away at all. Here's ther assessment in Time's cover story on what we face if the orange guy brings it off again:

Six months from the 2024 presidential election, Trump is better positioned to win the White House than at any point in either of his previous campaigns. He leads Joe Biden by slim margins in most polls, including in several of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome.

Here's The Atlantic in an excerpt from behind its paywall:

“I think Gaza could matter for a number of reasons,” Michael Tesler, a political scientist at UC Irvine, told me. The war, he explained, had produced a powerful brew of political forces—all of which bode ill for Democrats.

It is a divisive issue within the party, which is home to both dedicated pro-Palestine constituencies and committed pro-Israel ones. It is prominent enough, across news platforms and social media, that people are thinking about the conflict when they focus on current affairs and politics. For many younger progressives, protesting against Israel has become part of a fight for social justice: To them, the Palestinian cause is tied up with such domestic issues as racial discrimination.

. . . The war in Gaza has also helped create a perception that Biden is hapless.

Here's Michael Moore in an interview with Kaitlan Collins on CNN:

COLLINS: There's a CNN poll that showed today 81 percent of voters, who are under the age of 35 disapprove of how President Biden has been handling this war. I mean, we're seeing it on campuses. There is a question of what we're going to see in November.

I wonder what you think he should be doing differently to change those numbers.

MOORE: Thank you for asking that question, Kaitlan.

This is why I was so, when I got the call, asking if I'd like to come on tonight. I really was coming on. I know we're speaking to millions of people. But I'd like to speak to one particular individual. And that is President Biden.

I wanted to say this on your show tonight that his chance of not being reelected, I think, at this point, is so great, because of those numbers. Because he's losing the youth vote. He's lost the Arab American vote in Michigan. So even Michelle Goldberg in a column, in The New York Times, last month, said that you lose Michigan, you lose the election.

Clearly CNN, having released its negative poll, is on board with the idea that Joe could well lose the elecion, although it seems to have no answer to the campus pogrom conundrum into which Joe has backed himself: if he denounces the elite-school anti-Semitism, he loses Michigan, but if he doesn't, he looks feckless, and by the way, he loses the Jews. Here's today's asssessment from the Washington Free Beacon:

Biden wants to blend into the curtains. In a mirror image of his approach to the Israel-Hamas war, Biden aims to straddle the unbridgeable divide between the lawless and the law abiding, the intolerant and the tolerant, the virtuous and the contemptible. "I condemn the anti-Semitic protests," he said late last month. "I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their—how they’re being… ." He didn’t finish the sentence.

. . . The president’s choice is to act in the national interest and pay a political price or to continue to hide under his desk and be forced, like Shafik, to pay the same price later—with interest.

On one hand, the campus pogroms have drawn a certain amount of attention from Trump's New York trial, which is bad for Biden, but it's starting to look like the New York trial is misfiring badly for Biden as well. If it gets back in gear, we'll be hearing from Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, and the evidence has been that every one of the Trump New York trials has been a major factor that's driven his continuing rise in the polls.

Received opinion seems to be on some sort of via dolorosa along a route through grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, or something like that. And it's been taking place,as I've observed since last fall, remarkably early in the election cycle.

The Conventional Wisdom Average

More than a week ago, I pointed out Sean Trende's blunder when he hopped on the bandwagon that "President Biden’s standing in the polls has improved". Another arbiter of the conventional wisdom, Byron York of the Washington Examiner, pointed out late yesterday,

Biden did rise a bit in the polls. According to the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Trump has led Biden in head-to-head matchups since September 2023. (They were tied for one brief moment in October.) During his March-April “bump,” Biden’s deficit shrank, coming within two-tenths of a point of catching Trump. Democratic hopes rose.

“Biden’s position in the polls is improving against Trump,” declared the polling analyst Nate Silver on April 18. “It looks to me like Biden’s numbers against Trump have improved by a hair, probably to a degree that isn’t just statistical noise.” Even a slight improvement was like manna from heaven for Democrats and their allies in the media.

Alas, it didn’t last long. On Sunday came a poll from CNN that was simply devastating for the president’s reelection hopes. Remember, a poll is just a freeze frame of the race at this moment. It doesn’t mean things won’t change in the future. But it gives us an idea of where things stand right now. And the CNN poll showed Biden’s standing deteriorating before our eyes.

The same day, Sean Trende himself quietly backed off his earlier prognostication:

As a general rule, whenever people ask me about my thoughts on poll “x” or poll “y” my response is the same: Throw it in the poll average. Remember, not only are error margins real, but they’re intrinsic to sampling. An error margin of plus-or-minus three percent means that 95% of the time, the true population will be within three percentage points of the published “topline,” but that one time in twenty it won’t be. That’s not a pollster quality thing, that just comes with the territory of asking a fraction of the true population of interest.

So the fact that CNN’s latest poll has Trump up six points isn’t that interesting to me, in and of-itself. It’s marginally interesting that this is happening in the midst of the one criminal trial that is likely to occur before Election Day, but it’s more interesting that his standing in the poll averages has held with the trial under way.

But wait a moment. Trende himself in the piece I linked on April 19 relied on his own poll average to come up with just the conclusion he sorta-kinda now thinks was misleading:

As of today, Trump’s lead [in the RCP average] sits at just two-tenths of a percentage point.

And this was to substatiate his explicit view in the piece's title, "What To Make of Biden’s Rise in the Polls?" As of today, he's relying on his own poll average to say that well, after all, Trump has led in these since last year -- but then, of all things, he relies on the old chestnut,

Will this continue? Obviously it’s hard to say, as polls are just snapshots in time.

On April 22, still pondering that strange consensus that Trende had endorsed the previous week, I linked to this piece at The Hill, It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling.

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

The aphorism is intended to suggest impermanence — that polls taken weeks or months before an election have limited predictive value. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked as the 2024 presidential election race has unfolded. It will be heard many times before the campaign ends.

. . . [T]he phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

But it's worse for Trende, because in mid-April, he was claiming that not just an individual poll, but his own average of polls, was proving that Biden's lead was evaporating. But what's the cure? W Joseph Campbell, who denounced the "snapshot in time" cliche on which both Byron York and Sean Trende are falling back in the wake of new findings on the electorate's real-world views, offers no real remedy. He basically just says we should stop saying "snapshot in time":

[I]t may be time to retire the “snapshot in time” cliché, which polling analyst G. Elliott Morris has described as “more excuse [for pollsters] than anything else.” It’s been recognized as an irritating phrase, too: Several years ago, Politico ranked “snapshot in time” among the worst of America’s political clichés.

But doesn't this miss the point? What Prof Campbell is actually saying is that pollsters and prognosticators say a lot of dumb things that turn out not to be true. If we simply retire lame excuse A, "snapshot in time", with nothing else changing, all we'll get is lame excuse B, whatever that turns out to be, and we'll hear that one for decades until someone finally calls it out, and with no other changes, we'll just move to lame excuse C, having learned nothing.

I'm an Aristotelian, which means I look for causes. The situation where we're just permanently casting about for lame excuses for why pollsters and prognosticators are so consistently wrong says we aren't asking why this is the case. Let me propose an answer in the image of Sean Trende below:

This man is clueless, an empty suit, and a stuffed shirt. But let's see if we can tease out more about his background. Via his thumbnail at the American Enterprise Institute,

Mr. Trende has a law degree and a master’s degree in political science from Duke University and bachelor’s degree from Yale University. He is currently pursuing a PhD in political science at The Ohio State University.

Given the current state of unrest at many of the elite schools where people like Trende get their qualifications, there's been an increased tendency to question the value of the degrees they award. But this is nothing new. Looking back, I think one of the formative events in my life was arriving at an elite-school campus to begin my undergraduate studies and realizing, against everything I'd been led to believe by my parents, my friends' parents, my school counselors, the elite-school admissions staff, and all respectiable opinion, that my new schoolmates were anything but the crème de la crème.

If you got right down to it, every one of them was the soul brother or sister of the bizarrely clueless Sean Trende in the photo here, clueless empty suits and stuffed shirts in training. Within a couple of weeks, I made an appointment with the dean of freshmen to tell him I couldn't quite figure out what it was, but there had been a terrible mistake. I was in the wrong place. The dean calmed me down and convinced me to stick it out, but decades later, I basically think I was right.

Somehow our educational system is seeking out and rewarding the people who beome each generation's Sean Trendes.

Judge Cannon's Recent Releases

US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the District of Southern Florida is overseeing the United States v Trump case regarding the mishandling of classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. Beginning Monday, April 22, she has been releasing versions of documents in the case that had previously been heavily redacted.

The unredacted court filings published on April 22 revealed, among other things, the code name Plasmic Echo for the FBI investigation into those documents, and I covered this development here last Friday. In that post, I linked to a Washington Examiner story that described the release as covering "hundreds of pages of exhibits, motions, and other filings, underscored the close communication the Biden White House and the National Archives and Records Administration had in the year before Trump was indicted".

Alt journalists have since been combining through those files. One result has been a not-fully-explicated theory that many of the documents seized by the FBI in the August 8, 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid had been removed from the White House by the General Services Administration and sent to the National Archives during the transition on January 20, 2021, placed on pallets and kept in the Archives' possession, but then sent to Mar-a-Lago prior to the FBI raid. Just this past Sunday, Matt Margolis at PJ Media reported,

Investigative journalist Julie Kelly found something interesting in the documents that could change everything. The first things [sic] is testimony from an FBI agent who testified that the General Services Administration (GSA) had been in possession of Trump's boxes in Virginia before ordering Trump's team to come get them.

. . . So, it appears that the Biden administration may have been responsible for shipping classified information to Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. This development is significant because Trump has previously blamed the GSA for packing the boxes that contained the classified documents, only to later accuse Trump of essentially stealing them and using that as pretext for sending the FBI to raid his Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022.

. . . While this may not prove the Biden administration set up Trump in the classified documents case, considering the way the Biden administration has abused the legal system against Trump, no one can confidently say they wouldn't.

Even so, it still raises other legitimate questions. For example, if the GSA had been in possession of the boxes, why wasn't a review of the materials conducted before they instructed Trump's team to get them? When it comes to classified information, they wouldn't have expected Trump and his staff to be responsible for ensuring that classified documents weren't among the records. Perhaps they did review the contents of the boxes and knew classified documents were contained in them before they told Trump's people to come get them.

Yesterday, Judge Cannon authorized the release of unredacted, or less-redacted, versions of previously sealed defense motions to dismiss the United States v Trump (and others) case for vindictive or selective prosecution. The first motion released, altbough apparently others will follow, is from Trump's co-defendant Walt Nauta. According to the Washington Examiner,

Nauta’s defense attorneys said their client’s decision to exercise his Fifth Amendment rights at one point during the initial stages of the investigation had prompted the DOJ to punish Nauta by prosecuting him, when others had engaged in the “same type of conduct” that Nauta did, the attorneys wrote.

Nauta made the dismissal request in February, but it had been sealed until Friday evening. The Florida court docket shows Trump filed a similar argument that his charges should be dismissed on the grounds that they were “selective and vindictive,” but the actual filing remains sealed.

Judge Aileen Cannon has over the past week unsealed several previously nonpublic filings, and she has indicated that three of Trump’s dismissal arguments, including the selective and vindictive one, will be unsealed by May 2.

According to this site,

Vindictive prosecution occurs when the government, typically the prosecuting authority, retaliates against a defendant for exercising their legal rights. These rights may include requesting a trial , asserting the right to remain silent, or challenging the government's actions by filing a motion to suppress, filing a motion to dismiss after preliminary hearing or filing a motion to dismiss at arraignment. Vindictive prosecution undermines the integrity of the criminal justice system by discouraging defendants from exercising their rights for fear of facing additional, unwarranted charges.

While the site goes on to say that vindictive prosecuiton can be difficult to prove, a successful motion can result in dismissal of the charges or reduction in charges. The Washington Examiner story indicates that the basis for Nauta's motion is Nauta's eventual assertion of his Fifth Amendment rights, after he had been cooperating with the investigation, at which point the Justice Department prosecuted him, when it hadn't prosecuted others who had been doing similar things.

The criminal defense attorney Robert Gouveia has reviewed Nauta's now unsealed motion in detail in this YouTube presentation. This contains among other things the same allegation covered in last week's unredacted documents concerning an alleged attempt by one of Jack Smith's prosecutors, Jay Bratt, to intimidate Stanley Woodward, counsel for Mr Nauta, but it provides the additioonal detail that Nauta's attorney Woodward was asking to have a "filter" applied to data in Nauta's phones, which could contain e-mails covered by attorney-client privilege.

The attempt by Bratt is interpreted here as an effort to get Woodward to drop the request in return for the promise of a federal judicial appointment.

On one hand, it appears that various investigative journalists are still reviewing the hundreds of pages that Judge Cannon ordered unredacted last week. On the other, we still have at minimum the additional motions from Trump and another defendant that will be unsealed on Thursday. Gouveia and others are speculating that the unsealings and unredactions by Judge Cannon could be a leadup to other actions related to the defense motions to dismiss, but as Gouveia says, we'll simply have to wait and see.

Why Are The Lizard People Allowing These Polls?

News about two sets of polls over the weekend brings me back to the question I raised a week ago, in which I cited Rush Limbaugh's often-expressed view that the polls aren't meant to report the news, they're meant to shape it. So in that context, what are we to make of the weekend's new polls showing Trump trending ahead of Joe once again? For CNN:

Former President Donald Trump has opened his biggest lead ever captured in the CNN poll of the American electorate, enjoying a six-point advantage over incumbent Democrat President Joe Biden.

Trump, at 49 percent, is six percent ahead of Biden’s 43 percent when the two are polled head-to-head.

For Gallup,

President Joe Biden averaged 38.7% job approval during his recently completed 13th quarter in office, which began on Jan. 20 and ended April 19. None of the other nine presidents elected to their first term since Dwight Eisenhower had a lower 13th-quarter average than Biden.

. . . Jimmy Carter is the only other president with a sub-50% average in his 13th quarter. Three of the four prior presidents who had 13th-quarter approval averages below 50% lost their reelection bids, with Obama the exception.

On April 19, I quoted Sean Trende, the supposedly Republican-leaning Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics, for the conventional take on how the polls were going for Joe:

There’s little doubt at this point that President Biden’s standing in the polls has improved. In late January of this year, former President Donald Trump led Biden in national head-to-head polls by as many as 4.3 points. As of today, Trump’s lead sits at just two-tenths of a percentage point. Why might we be seeing this?

My view at the time, expressed in the post, was that several outlier polls showing Joe wildly ahead had come out in recent days, and National Authority Sean Trende (or his munchkins) simply cranked them into their average -- and voila, Trump led by just two-tenths of a percentage point. As of yesterday, Trump was back ahead by a full point, but that's still an average. Recent commentators have been handicapping polls by the 3% overestimate of Biden's 2020 popular vote results, so a 1% lead in the RCP average might be closer to a 4% lead in the real world, except of course, the popular vote doesn't elect the president, so this is all an elaborate fantasy no matter what.

But why are the polls even allowing us to see this development if Limbaugh's theorem is true? Why not just keep Republicans in the doldrums, at least until the actual election outcome proves them wrong? I can think of several reasons. One, an election analyst on Fox several weeks ago whose name I can't remember, suggested that in February and March, the lizard people senior Democrats had been pressuring Biden to drop out using poll numbers showing him trailing Trump, but it hadn't worked, Joe stayed in, so they reverted to cooking the numbers in Joe's favor in hopes of swaying the electorate anyhow.

Certainly this has had its effect on Joe's outlook. Via NBC News, as of just this past Saturday,

Over the past several weeks, President Joe Biden has privately expressed confidence that he’s going to win the November election, according to three people familiar with his comments, in a shift from the frustration with the status of his campaign that he was venting to aides just a couple months ago.

The turnabout in Biden’s mood has been propelled in part by recent polling that shows him gaining ground against former President Donald Trump, these people said.

Well of course, even Republican Sean Trende said this is happening! The piece goes on,

The president’s positive outlook on his re-election prospects is a significant reversal of his views for much of the past year since his campaign launched. For months, the president has privately expressed frustrations, which at times have boiled over into anger and outbursts at staff, over his diminished standing with voters.

. . . [Meanwsile,] Trump now has been in a criminal courtroom in Manhattan stewing in unflattering courtroom sketches and scandalous headlines over allegations he paid off a porn star during his 2016 presidential run.

Biden himself referred to this view in his remarks at the Saturday evening White House correspondents' dinner:

“Donald has had a few tough days lately. You might call it stormy weather,” Biden quipped, referencing Trump’s current hush money trial.

But Limbaugh also understood the need for pollsters to preserve an aura of credibility, especially if their predictions turn out to be wildly out of line. On October 17, 2016, in the runup to Trump's upset victory over Hillary, he said,

Here we are three weeks out and the ABC/Washington Post poll shows Hillary leading Trump by four. Even if that were outside the margin of error, stop and think of this now. This is four points. Here’s what the Washington Post says.

“The poll was conducted during one of the most tumultuous periods of Trump’s candidacy, after the release of a video in which he spoke about taking sexual advantage of women and during a time when numerous women have accused him of sexual misconduct. … Nonetheless, the controversy appeared to have had only a minimal impact on his overall support.”

. . . In other words, if Trump is at four points after withstanding this barrage, then they have to be scratching their heads. Now, I want to remind you of one more thing. We’re getting close now to the period of time where the pollsters are going to have to start showing the race as it is. Now, I’m of the opinion they’re not yet. I’m of the opinion that they’re still using their polls to make news, to shape public opinion, rather than reflect it.

But as we get closer to the election — we’re not there yet, by the way. But as we get closer to the election, all of these polling companies are gonna want to be right when it’s all over.

Limbaugh went on about the evidence of enthusiasm at Trump rallies and the mood of the electorate that contradicted the conventional poll results:

But there still is this professional reputation. So we’ll see if other polls start to tighten and get closer as we near Election Day. But the conventional wisdom is that Trump’s toast, he’s had it, he’s unhinged. He won’t stop talking about these women. He won’t stop reacting. He won’t stay on issues. Except when you go to one of his rallies he’s totally on issues. And the people are as revved as they’ve ever been, and more people are showing up at Trump rallies than ever before, and more people are being turned away because they can’t fit in than ever before.

And everybody tells you, “You can’t judge it by that, Rush. That’s not scientific data. That’s anecdotal. That’s just people talking.” Well, it’s not just people talking; we see it.

So I think if Limbaugh were still talking now, he'd be pointing out that the New York trial is backfiring, the Atlanta trial was backfiring, and at minimum, the the pollsters can't keep enabling the media to sustain a narrative that Biden is gaining ground, and they're worried about damaging their franchise. I've got to imagine that if any senior Democrats were ever serious about getting Biden to drop out earlier this year, they've lost hope, so that can't be behind the latest unfavorable polls. So here's Gallup commenting on its own poll results:

In this election year, when Biden is hoping U.S. voters reward him with a second term, he is needing some positive momentum to put him in a stronger position to be reelected. However, that didn’t occur during the past three months, with Americans no more positive about how Biden is doing his job than they were in his prior quarter, or for most of the past three years. This is the case even after Biden delivered his election-year State of the Union speech in March, a chance for him to sell his accomplishments directly to the American people.

With about six months remaining before Election Day, Biden stands in a weaker position than any prior incumbent, and thus faces a taller task than they did in getting reelected.

I've got to think this is more about sheer survival, but also, let's keep a couple of other developments in mind:. First, the New York Times isn't happy:

The New York Times issued a scorching statement on Thursday blasting President Joe Biden for avoiding media interviews as establishing a “dangerous precedent,” as liberals criticized the paper in response to a POLITICO report detailing friction between the Times and the White House.

Second, William Barr, the deep state mole, son of an upper-class prep school headmaster, who did all he could to undermine Trump as Attorney General, has done a 180:

Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who previously said that Donald Trump shouldn’t be near the Oval Office, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday that he would vote for the former president over President Joe Biden in the 2024 election.

Limbaugh, if pressed, would probably say that the lizard people establishment will get their way no matter what. Of Trump in the dark days of his 2016 campaign, he said,

I think a lot of people would have crumbled by now if they had been dished the treatment Trump has gotten. I think a lot of people would have caved and said, “You know what? I’ve got a life after all of this is over and I don’t want these people destroying what I’m doing here.” They would have caved. They would have quit. They would have ceded or what have you.

Trump has not done that and I think the establishment is kind of surprised and shocked and a little not sure what’s going on here. Because the one thing they know is that their hold on power is, as this is demonstrating, they are a minority.

The lizard people may even be recalibrating. As I've been saying, Joe's a puppet, everyone understands that -- but he came with factory defects. You pull a string and expect his hand to move, instad, his knee goes out of joint. Some people may be starting to think even Trump is a better choice than Biden.

All Of A Sudden, The Trump Trial Is Slowing Down

Let's recall that a week ago, Judge Merchan wasn't going to let Trump take any days off from his New York trial:

The New York judge overseeing former President Trump’s hush money trial said Monday that Trump cannot attend arguments on presidential immunity at the Supreme Court next week.

It came after the judge earlier delayed a decision on allowing Trump to attend his son Barron’s high school graduation in May.

The attempts by Trump to take off certain days of his hush money trial that is expected to last weeks, if not months, came as the first day of trial was officially underway in Manhattan.

. . . “Arguing before the Supreme Court is a big deal, and I can certainly appreciate why your client would want to be there, but a trial in New York Supreme Court . . . is also a big deal,” Judge Juan Merchan said to Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, rejecting his request to let the former president play hooky.

“I will see him here next week,” the judge added.

While the judge clearly implied the trial should have the highest priority, at least for Trump's time, so far, it's been held only three-and-a-half days a week, and next week looks like it will be even less. On Friday, the trial broke for the weekend and will return on Tuesday at 9:30 am. Wait a moment. What happened to Monday? I've looked for the reason the judge is taking Monday off and can't find any.

I've been a juror in two criminal trials myself, and I've reported on several civil trials as a blogger-journalist at my old blog. Judges normally want to move things along, and there's normally a morning and afternoon session five days a week, with judges threatening to go longer if things don't move on schedule. This past week with Judge Merchan, there was an early quit for a juror's toothache Monday, a delay for a contempt hearing Tuesday morning, and another early quit later that day for Passover.

My experience of judges has been that with those initial delays, Judge Merchan would be eager to move things along, but no -- now no trial Monday, no reason given. On top of that, he'd originally scheduled another hearing on Trump's contempt charges for this coming Wednesday, a day he'd previously reserved for other business without a trial that day, but now he's moved the hearing to Thursday, which would normally be a trial day.

With a decision on one contempt motion pending, Judge Juan Merchan has scheduled a hearing on Thursday for prosecutors to argue that Trump has committed more violations of the judge’s gag order against disparaging or intimidating witnesses, jurors and other trial participants.

At the first contempt hearing on Tuesday [April 23], prosecutors sought fines for ten Trump online posts blasting witnesses Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen and calling prospective jurors “liberal activists.” Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Chris Conroy said that next week’s hearing will cover four more alleged gag-order violations.

So in the coming week, we've got Monday off for an unknown reason, at least part of Thursday taken up by a contempt hearing, which had previously been scheduled for the normal Wednesday off day. So it looks like at best, next week will be maybe two and a half days of trial, Tuesday, part of Thursday, and Friday, that is, unless somebody else has a toothache. This is worse, not better, than last week. This is simply not my experience of trials. Just this past Wednesday, I cited the American Bar Association's statement on the Special Functions of the Trial Judge:

(a) The trial judge has the obligation to avoid delays, continuances, and extended recesses, except for good cause. In the matter of punctuality, the observance of scheduled court hours, and the use of working time, the trial judge should be an exemplar for all other persons engaged in the criminal case. The judge should require punctuality and optimum use of working time from all such persons.

These new delays, while they continue to make me question whether Judge Merchan is in over his head, also lead me to ask if there might be another reason behind them. For instance, Jonathan Turley commented on Fox,

He says Trump's defense attorneys

are doing a good job, largely allowinmg the case to collapse on its own weight. This case thus far is about as good a model for prosecution as the Titanic is a good model for navigation. I don't understand why they would start with Pecker. In my view he is disastrous. First of all, I'm speaking as a criminal defense attorney. What most good prosecutors, if they know the criminal defense attorney will bring up something damaging, will bring it up themselves. The most damaging aspect of Pecker's testimony is that he did the same thing with a wide variety of celebrities. That is really quite damaging, and by not revealing that to the jury in your direct, there is a sense that there was some hiding of the ball here. You can lose credibility with the jury. That is really quite remarkable.

In fact, there seems to be a consensus of commentators outside legacy media that the trial isn't going as expected, with others pointing out that the defense had been able to establish that "Catch and Kill" was a common business practice employed by celebrity publicists and was not a crime.

However, a web search for accounts of Friday's trial brings up mostly references from ABC, NBC, CBS, the Washington Post, and the New York Times suggesting, for instance,

Former presidents typically spend their post-White House years writing memoirs, making well-paid speeches and cementing their place in history. By becoming the first former president to face criminal trial, Trump is instead sitting in court, watching someone else try to define his legacy even as he campaigns for a second term in the Oval Office.

Over four days of testimony this week, former National Enquirer executive David Pecker told the jury not just how deeply involved Trump’s team was in using the supermarket tabloid to fuel his 2016 presidential campaign, but also how celebrities and politicians generally try to buy, trade or bully their way out of scandalous stories.

But all the accounts minimize that Pecker testified he had been doing this for many years, for celebrities who were not presidential candidates, and indeed for Trump himself when he was a celebrity with no political ambitions -- and none of this was a crime.

It's hard for me not to think that Merchan has concluded -- or actually, since the guy seems pretty obtuse, he's been told -- that the trial isn't going as planned, he needs to take the spotlight off the testimony in the trial and redirect it to the contempt hearing. Although we keep hearng the trial is expected to last six to eight weeks, with Pecker, the prosecution's best witness, failing to build a basis for the subsequent testimony of Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, who will likely be chewed up by the defense, I'm not sure it can go that long. This may be another reason for Judge Merchan to slow things down.

Let's keep in mind that over the past months, the New York hush money case was regarded as the least important and weakest of Trump's four pending trials. More recently, it's developed that at minimum, none of the other three now seems likely to begin before November, with the possibility that the US Supreme Court may eliminate them in a decision on presidential immunity, or they may be dismissed for other reasons.

As a result, it looks as though the New York case is the last hope for the Biden campaign to be able to campaign against Trump as a "convicted felon" -- but even this possibility is beginning to recede. So they're now casting about for a Plan B -- if they can't get a guilty verdict from the jury, at least they can somehow pile up contempt charges. Thus the delay and Thursday's big contempt hearing. We'll have to see how this goes.