Politics

Hunter Biden's decision to fight fire with fire in his ongoing laptop scandal is apparently not sitting well with the administration officials who work for his father. The president's son has brought on several street fighters, including famed white-collar defense attorney Abbe Lowell and Media Matters founder David Brock, to defend him against House Republican investigations into the contents of his laptop hard-drive. House Oversight chair James Comer and Judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan are probing whether Hunter traded access to Joe for fat paychecks from foreign corporations. In response, Hunter's attack dogs are resurfacing claims that Comer abused his ex-girlfriend and that Jordan turned a blind eye to sexual abuse when he coached high-school wrestling.

Justice for Gwyneth Paltrow! The former Avengers and Shakespeare in Love star is one nepo baby that Cockburn has no trouble defending. Paltrow has had a tough PR week. First, she was vilified for her rather meager diet. Paltrow said on a podcast that she skips breakfast, sips coffee and bone broth in the afternoon, and eats a paleo meal with "lots of vegetables" for dinner. Yes, our Goop queen is looking a bit frail these days, but can we blame a gal who rose to prominence during the Kate-Moss-heroin-chic era? Even Jessica Simpson is still recovering from being called "Jumbo Jessica" in 2009 when she appeared on stage with a slight muffin top. Paltrow also finds her skinny self in court this week over a near-decade old skiing accident at the Deer Valley resort in Utah.

Well, no indictment, but there were developments! Vocabulary word of the week: “exculpatory.” “Something that shows that someone is not guilty of wrongdoing.” Now, use it in a sentence: “Soros-funded Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg neglected to reveal hundreds of pages of exculpatory evidence to the Grand Jury pondering whether to indict Donald Trump.” What does it mean? It means that the orange suit that Bragg was hoping to order up for Trump may have to be retailored in a larger size, one big enough to fit him. Some context: when a prosecutor conceals exculpatory evidence from a Grand Jury or defense attorneys he is guilty of prosecutorial abuse.

For being what Politico describes as a “politics-averse prosecutor,” the Democratic Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, reportedly set to indict Donald Trump any moment now, has certainly spent a fair bit of time targeting the former president and pondering his indictment. Bragg is purportedly on the verge of ordering Trump’s arrest over so-called “hush money” that Trump allegedly had his former attorney Michael Cohen (who served time in prison) pay to porn star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign to keep her quiet about an affair they are said to have had. If he does so, Bragg will become the first prosecutor to bring criminal charges against a former president.

Powell pays for past mistakes In the summer of 2020, Fed chair Jerome Powell could not have been clearer. “We’re not thinking about raising rates,” said Powell, before doubling down: “We’re not even thinking about thinking about raising rates.”   Things, as we now know, turned out a little differently. The months marched on, and with the Biden administration determined to spend, spend, spend, inflation went from “high class problem” to “transitory” to the biggest problem facing the US economy. Powell and his Fed colleagues went from not thinking about thinking about raising rates to, well, raising rates. From virtually zero around this time last year to 4.75 percent as of January.

Here are six things to think about ahead of any indictment and arrest of Donald Trump: 1. What is Trump going to be indicted for? Trump may soon be indicted on a campaign finance law violation. This means Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has convinced a grand jury there is enough evidence to charge Trump with the crime (federal prosecutors seem to have long abandoned the cheesy political revenge fantasy). 2. But I thought this was all about Trump having an affair with some porn star? Stormy Daniels allegedly had sex with Trump in 2006, which he denies, and which she and Michael Cohen also once denied. She then took money in 2016 to sign a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, to keep silent.

It’s getting Stormy for Donald Trump. In a lengthy message on his TruthSocial site on Saturday morning, Trump announced that he expects that the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, will indict and arrest him on Tuesday for his hush money payment scheme to his former, if brief, inamorata Stormy Daniels. “Protest, take our nation back,” he urged. But Trump’s urges may not be widely shared. It's hard to avoid the feeling that Trump misses the shock and awe of January 6, when his loyal followers stormed the Capitol to try to overturn the election of Joe Biden. That rebellion turned Trump into the ultimate Washington outsider, a revolt against the very government he was supposed to lead.

Would you like CHIPS with that? When Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law last August, the White House heralded legislation that “will poise US workers, communities, and businesses to win the race for the twenty-first century” and help Americans “compete in and win the future.” Cut through this hype and the real point of this bipartisan, $52-billion legislation was no less significant: to reinvigorate a semiconductor industry that was born in America but moved overseas in recent years and, in doing so, to strike a major technological and economic blow in the new cold war with China.  However admirable the goals, there were always reasons to worry that the CHIPS Act may not live up to the hype.