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March 22, 2023, 9:35 AM ET
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MSNBC host Joy Reid began her show on Monday by paraphrasing former FBI Director James Comey, saying, "Lordy there are tapes."
She cited the New York Times report revealing Donald Trump's lawyer Evan Corcoran has several recordings of his notes that he took about meetings he had with Trump. Those have since been subpoenaed by the special counsel.
Reid asked former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks what she makes of the fact that there are tapes with his lawyer telling Trump he can't have the documents and he can't keep them.
"This is, again, an accumulation of evidence mounting to the point where I can't see how you can avoid an indictment," said Wine-Banks. "It has to go to trial. It has to be seen by a jury. You have a situation where you have the president on tape, we think. You know, I haven't heard the tape, but based on the reporting, there's a tape where he is saying, 'I have a classified document, so I can't show it to you, which means he knows, A: he has classified documents, and B: he can't show them to anybody, and he hasn't declassified them."
Lawyers are saying that he has to turn over the subpoenaed documents, which Wine-Banks said was a very broad request for "all classified documents." All of the non-classified documents are still the property of the National Archives.
"So, this shows his knowledge, his intent in keeping it, and then you have the fact that this is supposedly a document that is to rebut Gen. [Mark] Milley and show that he was right, he Donald Trump, was right about the Iran situation. That's really serious. That means it's at a classification level that is guaranteed to hurt the government and our security if the information is released. And we hear the rustling of papers. We don't know, it could be he's just holding up a piece of paper. It could be he's lying, and the paper he's discussing isn't about Iran. We don't know. But isn't it a shame that we have a former president of the United States where we can't tell whether his best defense is I was lying and we would believe him because he lies so often, or whether it's actual proof he did it."
Reid also mentioned that she was unaware that there were two grand juries, one in Washington, D.C. and one in Florida.
New York Times reporter Katie Benner explained that the reason that one would have a Florida case is that was the location in which Trump allegedly obstructed justice. The other charges about the documents themselves could be in Washington. She explained it wouldn't be the first time the DOJ brought charges in two different jurisdictions.
Her example was Paul Manafort, who was charged in both Virginia and Washington, D.C.
See the discussion below or at the link here.
Watergate prosecutors www.youtube.com
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How CNN's Trump town hall could influence whether he will be indicted in Florida or Washington
June 06, 2023
There was a debate throughout yesterday about whether Donald Trump's possible trial for the stolen documents would be in Washington, D.C., or in Florida.
New York Times reporter Katie Benner explained Monday that one would have a Florida case because it was the location in which Trump allegedly obstructed justice. The other charges about the documents themselves could be in Washington. She explained it wouldn't be the first time the DOJ brought charges in two different jurisdictions and cited Paul Manafort as another.
Andrew Weissmann, the former lead prosecutor on Robert Mueller's team, explained that "it is conceivable that Donald Trump would be charged in Florida and not D.C. I don't think that will be the case. But I do think the one thing I'm pretty confident of is that we are going to see charges with respect to the classified documents case, and it seems by all accounts it's going to be this week because I think that DOJ will feel that internal pressure to move this along."
It's an issue that has been debated on "legal Twitter," the group of lawyers that debate the law and cases.
Secrets and Laws, an account that purports to be run by a former CIA lawyer, mentioned that there has been little conversation about the potential venue. Brandon Van Grack, a former Justice Department national security official, hopes for Washington, while national security analyst Marcy Wheeler expects Florida to be the location. Another commentator, LegalNerd, walked through the potential charges and what the law says about the venue.
Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal explained that crimes may have occurred in Florida, but it doesn't necessarily mean the trial would be there.
"If the news reports are to be believed, it looks like Trump is better at draining the pool than he is at draining the swamp," Katyal quipped, speaking to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell Monday. "You are absolutely right; this all occurred in Florida. But that doesn't make the venue for the criminal charge reside only in Florida. The overall criminal case is based on one kind of central set of facts, his mishandling of classified information, and then lying about it, and obstructing the investigation afterward. That took place both in D.C. and in Florida. Prosecutors will have their pick of where to indict this entire ball of wax."
But Katyal thinks that it will be in Washington — and here's why:
"I suspect all of it will be in Washington, D.C. There was an argument up until a couple of weeks ago that maybe Florida was the relevant place, but then, you had Donald Trump doing what he always does, putting his foot in his mouth on national TV in the CNN town hall. He says I made these decisions in Washington, D.C. Prosecutors must have been smiling when he said that and said, yes, that's when you make that decision. That's where the case is gonna be indicted."
See the discussion below or at the link here.
Former White House lawyer explains how Trump's CNN town hall could influence the trial's venue youtu.be
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Climate crisis is on track to push one-third of humanity out of its most livable environment
June 06, 2023
Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life. By late this century, according to a study published last month in the journal Nature Sustainability, 3 to 6 billion people, or between a third and a half of humanity, could be trapped outside of that zone, facing extreme heat, food scarcity and higher death rates, unless emissions are sharply curtailed or mass migration is accommodated.
The research, which adds novel detail about who will be most affected and where, suggests that climate-driven migration could easily eclipse even the largest estimates as enormous segments of the earth’s population seek safe havens. It also makes a moral case for immediate and aggressive policies to prevent such a change from occurring, in part by showing how unequal the distribution of pain will be and how great the improvements could be with even small achievements in slowing the pace of warming.
“There are clear, profound ethical consequences in the numbers,” Timothy Lenton, one of the study’s lead authors and the director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in the U.K., said in an interview. “If we can’t level with that injustice and be honest about it, then we’ll never progress the international action on this issue.”
The notion of a climate niche is based on work the researchers first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, which established that for the past 6,000 years humans have gravitated toward a narrow range of temperatures and precipitation levels that supported agriculture and, later, economic growth. That study warned that warming would make those conditions elusive for growing segments of humankind and found that while just 1% of the earth’s surface is now intolerably hot, nearly 20% could by 2070.
The new study reconsiders population growth and policy options and explores scenarios that dramatically increase earlier estimates, demonstrating that the world’s environment has already changed significantly. It focuses more heavily on temperature than precipitation, finding that most people have thrived in mean annual temperatures of 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
Should the world continue on its present pathway — making gestures toward moderate reductions in emissions but not meaningfully reducing global carbon levels (a scenario close to what the United Nations refers to as SSP2-4.5) — the planet will likely surpass the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting average warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and instead warm approximately 2.7 degrees. That pathway, which accounts for population growth in hot places, could lead to 2 billion people falling outside of the climate niche within just the next eight years, and 3.7 billion doing so by 2090. But the study’s authors, who have argued in other papers that the most extreme warming scenarios are well within the realm of possibility, warn that the worst cases should also be considered. With 3.6 degrees of warming and a pessimistic climate scenario that includes ongoing fossil fuel use, resistance to international migration and much more rapid population growth (a scenario referred to by the U.N. as SSP3-7), the shifting climate niche could pose what the authors call “an existential risk,” directly affecting half the projected total population, or, in this case, as many as 6.5 billion people.
The data suggests the world is fast approaching a tipping point, after which even small increases in average global temperature will begin to have dramatic effects. The world has already warmed by about 1.2 degree Celsius, pushing 9% of the earth’s population out of the climate niche. At 1.3 degrees, the study estimates that the pace would pick up considerably, and for every tenth of a degree of additional warming, according to Lenton, 140 million more people will be pushed outside of the niche. “There’s a real nonlinearity lurking in there that we hadn’t seen before,” he said.
Slowing global emissions would dramatically reduce the number of people displaced or grappling with conditions outside the niche. If warming were limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius targeted by the Paris accords, according to a calculation that isolates the effect of warming, half as many people would be left outside of the optimal zone. The population suffering from extreme heat would be reduced fivefold, from 22% to just 5% of the people on the planet.
Climate research often frames the implications of warming in terms of its economic impacts, couching damages in monetary terms that are sometimes used to suggest that small increases in average temperature can be managed. The study disavows this traditional economic framework, which Lenton says is “unethical” because it prioritizes rich people who are alive today, and instead puts the climate crisis in moral terms. The findings show that climate change will pummel poorer parts of the world disproportionately, effectively sentencing the people who live in developing nations and small island states to extreme temperatures, failing crops, conflict, water and food scarcity, and rising mortality. The final option for many people will be migration. The estimated size of the affected populations, whether they’re 2 billion or 6 billion, suggests an era of global upheaval.
According to the study, India will have, by far, the greatest population outside of the climate niche. At current rates of warming, the researchers estimate that more than 600 million Indians will be affected, six times more than if the Paris targets were achieved. In Nigeria, more than 300 million citizens will be exposed, seven times more than if emissions were steeply cut. Indonesia could see 100 million people fall out of a secure and predictable environment, the Philippines and Pakistan 80 million people each, and so on. Brazil, Australia and India would see the greatest area of land become less habitable. But in many smaller countries, all or nearly all the land would become nearly unlivable by traditional measures: Burkina Faso, Mali, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Niger. Although facing far more modest impacts, even the United States will see its South and Southwest fall toward the hottest end of the niche, leading to higher mortality and driving internal migration northward.
Throughout the world, the researchers estimate, the average person who is going to be exposed to unprecedented heat comes from a place that emitted roughly half the per capita emissions as those in wealthy countries. American per capita emissions are more than twice those of Europeans, who still live a prosperous and modern existence, the authors point out, so there is ample room for comfortable change short of substantial sacrifice. “The idea that you need the level of wasteful consumption ... that happens on average in the U.S. to be part of a happy, flourishing, rich, democratic society is obviously nonsense,” Lenton said.
Each American today emits nearly enough emissions over their lifetime to push one Indian or Nigerian of the future outside of their climate niche, the study found, showing exactly how much harm Americans’ individual actions can cause (1.2 Americans to 1 future person, to be exact). The lifestyle and policy implications are obvious: Reducing consumption todayreduces the number of people elsewhere who will suffer the consequences tomorrow and can prevent much of the instability that would otherwise result. “I can’t — as a citizen of a planet with this level of risk opening up — not also have some kind of human and moral response to the figures,” Lenton said. We’ve all got to deal with that, he added, “in our own way.”
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