'I Did Everything Right and They Indicted Me,' Says Defiant Trump in Post-Arraignment Speech
Plus: The FTC takes on Microsoft, RIP Cormac McCarthy, and more...
Fresh off his arraignment on federal charges, former President Donald Trump denied any and all wrongdoing in what he described as the "boxes hoax." On Tuesday, Trump traveled from Miami—where he pleaded not guilty to 37 charges relating to the retention and storage of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home—to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and delivered a fiery defense of his actions.
"I did everything right and they indicted me," he said.
Trump alleged a double standard, tearing into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, former President George W. Bush, and President Joe Biden.
"Bill Clinton lost the nuclear codes," said Trump. "Joe Biden broke the law in many ways, we're finding out, and so far has not gotten indicted."
Trump repeatedly referenced the bribery allegations against Biden, which were reported to the FBI by a confidential source in 2020. That matter has recently come to the attention of congressional Republicans, who have said that a "highly credible" source told national law enforcement that Biden received a $5 million bribe from Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden. These allegations have not been confirmed.
The idea that Biden, Clinton, and other political figures have committed crimes and not faced justice is the central theme of Trump's public defense—and the most common line of attack being deployed by Trump's Republican allies—though this will matter very little from a legal standpoint: No judge or jury will weigh the purported Deep State's treatment of some other political figure when passing judgment on whether Trump broke the law.
During his remarks at Bedminster, Trump promised his supporters that he would return to the White House in 2024 and finally purge the federal government of the tyrants who have pursued them.
"We will obliterate the deep state, and we know who they are," said Trump. "They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you. They're not coming after me, they're coming after you—I'm just standing in their way."
It's a line from a popular pro-Trump meme that the former president evidently enjoys.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2019
The New York Times reports that special counsel Jack Smith is likely to quickly move forward with the case while Trump's attorneys will attempt to slow down the proceedings—even delaying them beyond the 2024 election, if possible:
The one unusual aspect of Mr. Trump's case will be its pacing.
Prosecutors working for the special counsel Jack Smith will most likely seek to drive the case forward quickly, all too aware that the prosecution is playing out as Mr. Trump pursues his presidential campaign. Mr. Trump's lawyers will surely try to slow the case down, perhaps with an eye toward dragging it out until after the 2024 election. That has been Mr. Trump's M.O. in nearly ever legal case he has faced over the years, and this one is not likely to be an exception.
Mr. Trump is expected to continue with a fairly steady stream of political events in the coming months, although the needs of the court calendar in the Florida case will in some ways dictate his actions. Unlike when Mr. Trump chose to opt out of personally appearing at the civil rape and defamation trial brought against him in New York by the writer E. Jean Carroll, he is unlikely to be permitted the same flexibility by the federal judge who hears his criminal case in Florida.
At this point, it remains unclear whether Mr. Trump will attend the first Republican primary debate, which is scheduled for Aug. 23 in Milwaukee.
Trump's co-defendant and personal aide, Walt Nauta, will enter his plea on June 27.
FREE MINDS
Famed American author Cormac McCarthy, whose work explored the darkest and loneliest edges of humanity, has died at 89. Though he had lived in relative seclusion—rarely granting interviews or participating in public life—the success of his novels, especially No Country for Old Men and The Road, which both received major film adaptations, had brought him considerable renown. According to the New York Times obituary of him:
Mr. McCarthy had in recent years been discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and called Mr. McCarthy's novel "Blood Meridian" (1985), a bad dream of a Western, "the greatest single book since Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying.'"
Saul Bellow noted Mr. McCarthy's "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences."
Acclaim for Mr. McCarthy's work was not universal, however. Some critics found his novels portentous and self-consciously masculine. There are few notable women in his work.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2005, James Wood praised Mr. McCarthy as "a colossally gifted writer" and "one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner."
But Mr. Wood accused Mr. McCarthy of writing sentences that sometimes veered "close to nonsense," of "appearing to relish the violence he so lavishly records," and of being hostile to intellectual consciousness.
Themes of rugged individualism permeated his books; his characters often came to embrace the futility of trying to make sense of the larger picture or bringing any order to their world. There is undoubtedly a tend-your-own-garden ethos at work in the novels—one that tracks with McCormac's own reclusiveness. RIP.
FREE MARKETS
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is attempting to stop Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard, the video game company. The Verge reports:
"Both a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction are necessary because Microsoft and Activision have represented that they may consummate the proposed acquisition at any time," reads the FTC's complaint.
The FTC filed its complaint just as Microsoft is progressing with its appeal against UK regulators' decision to block its proposed acquisition. The timing, just weeks before the July 18th deal deadline, shows the FTC is concerned Microsoft may be preparing to close its acquisition regardless of the block in the UK. European regulators gave the deal the go-ahead last month, so Microsoft could technically close without the UK and without an injunction in the US preventing the deal from closing.
"Press reports began circulating suggesting that defendants were seriously contemplating closing the proposed acquisition despite the pending administrative litigation and the CMA orders," says the FTC complaint. That, mixed with an ongoing CMA appeal, could have forced the FTC to try and attempt to secure an injunction.
James Czerniawski of Americans for Prosperity notes that FTC chair Lina Khan has no real argument for objecting to the acquisition.
As a gamer of well over 20 years (owning Sony consoles and using Windows on my gaming PC), this case was always a silly proposition for Lina Khan to chase. When she loses this case (and she will), this won't be a "loss that's awkshully a win", it's an L.https://t.co/6vdRwLBSOa
— James Czerniawski (@JamesCz19) June 13, 2023
The Washington Post describes the FTC's intervention in this manner as a "gamble," given recent legal setbacks for Khan's cases:
Earlier this year, a judge in Northern California ruled against the agency when it attempted to block Facebook parent company Meta from acquiring the virtual reality company Within. Apple recently scored a win as a federal appeals court ruled that Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, failed to prove that Apple's App Store policies constituted anticompetitive conduct in violation of federal antitrust laws. And a federal appeals court in April upheld a judge's decision to dismiss a multistate antitrust lawsuit against Meta.
Microsoft president Brad Smith said he welcomed "the opportunity to present our case in federal court." The deal is critical to the company's ambitions in gaming, and it would give the Xbox maker control of popular titles including "Call of Duty."
"We believe accelerating the legal process in the U.S. will ultimately bring more choice and competition to the market," he said.
Read more here.
QUICK HITS
- Long shot GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is calling on all other presidential aspirants—both Republicans and Democrats—to pledge to pardon Donald Trump if he is convicted.
- Are Senate Republicans beginning to turn on the former president?
- MSNBC decided not to broadcast Trump's post-arraignment remarks because the network did not want to air "untrue things." CNN made a similar decision. Fox aired the remarks in full.
Maddow: We do not intend to carry Trump's remarks live. As we have said before in these circumstances, there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things. pic.twitter.com/MVv5LgDzc9
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 14, 2023