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The House Republicans have been promising that the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden was going to be filled with fireworks from the word go. We would see evidence of bribery and extortion and payoffs from foreign companies in the tens of millions of dollars, the "Biden Crime Family" would finally be exposed as the international gangsters they are Donald Trump would be exonerated. Or something. They held their first hearing yesterday and all those fireworks blew up in their faces.

Keep in mind that they decided to hold this preposterous hearing two days before the government is set to shut down because a tiny rump faction of extremists in their party is demanding that they get everything they ever wanted or they'll hold their breath until they turn blue. Nobody knows exactly what that is other than to torture Speaker Kevin McCarthy and make America miserable again. It's been reported that they have no plans to table their "inquiry" when the government is shut down even though their staff won't be paid and all regular business is usually curtailed until an agreement is reached. Not this time. It's full speed ahead.

It would be one thing if they had even bothered to prepare for this silly hearing. But clearly they did not. The day before the hearing we caught a glimpse of just how bad it was going to be when Jason Smith, R-Mo., the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, one of the committees tasked with pursuing the "inquiry," was asked a question by NBC News reporter Ryan Nobles during a press conference.

That was a perfect preview of what was to come in the hearing the next day. They have been blatantly manufacturing what look like WhatsApp messages based upon IRS summaries of what was allegedly in them. In the hearing on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., caught them red-handed creating a fake Whats App message that totally distorted the actual text.

Even though, once again, Joe Biden wasn't in office at the time which these Republicans don't seem to realize means that he wasn't in a position to commit treason or whatever they think he's done, they sure made it sound suspicious.

The fabricated text message implied that back in 2018 Joe Biden's brother James told Hunter Biden that he would "work with" his father alone for some nefarious purpose to give Hunter a "safe harbor." Even though, once again, Joe Biden wasn't in office at the time which these Republicans don't seem to realize means that he wasn't in a position to commit treason or whatever they think he's done, they sure made it sound suspicious.

But more importantly, the rest of the summary, which they left out, showed that Hunter (then in the throes of substance abuse disorder) needed help from his father to pay for his alimony and his kid's school tuition and his uncle Jim was offering to talk to his Dad to help out. This had nothing at all to do with business of any kind. It's a personal text dealing with a family matter. They knew that and they purposefully doctored the text to make it sound fishy. I doubt it's the only time their "evidence" has been similarly manufactured.

That was pretty much how it went all day long with Republicans stepping in it over and over again. The Democrats, led by the extremely competent Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin and aided by excellent committee members, Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, Jasmine Crockett, D-Tx., Maxwell Frost, D-Fl., and more all of whom obviously did much more homework than any of the Republicans who babbled their way through the hearing, casting aspersions and throwing out innuendo with no evidence that the president had done anything wrong.

Even their "star witnesses" who had no evidence of their own to present, testified that a president could not be lawfully impeached with the evidence that has been presented although one of them, the perennial GOP impeachment witness Jonathan Turley, did say it was absolutely fine to go on a fishing expedition to see if they can find something that would fit the bill. (He didn't say it quite that way, but that's the gist of it.)

It's clear that the plan is to use the hearings to curry favor with their Dear Leader, smear Biden and hope that a smoking gun emerges that they can use as an excuse to vote to impeach. But it seems that they themselves have lost the thread and no longer even know what they are accusing the president of doing. When confronted with facts, they can't explain it.

Their Republican colleagues were dismayed.

Stephen Neukam of The Messenger reported that one GOP aide told him "Comer and staff botched this bad. So much confusing info from Republicans and Dems are on message. How can you not be better prepared for this?"

The right-wing media, or certain elements of it, also seem to be shocked that the hearing was such a train wreck. Fox News' Neil Cavuto seemed somewhat befuddled by what he'd just watched:

I don't know what was achieved over these last six-plus hours. The way this was built up — where there's smoke there would be fire…but where there's smoke today, we got more smoke...The promise of explosive testimony and proof …did not materialize today. The best they could say now after this six-plus hours of testimony back and forth is that they're going to try to get more bank records from Joe Biden and his son. Said that they're needed to determine if a crime was committed. Understood. But none of that was presented today, just that they would need those records to further the investigation after months of Republican probes that failed to provide anything resembling concrete evidence.

That is exactly correct. On the other hand, some of his colleagues were convinced that this was all part of a master plan:

I think we can all agree that blowing witnesses at a House inquiry would be a risky strategy. That's something you definitely want to save for the trial.

Sadly, this will not be the end of it. It's very likely that they will proceed to an impeachment vote and it's also quite likely it will fail which is going to make Donald Trump very, very unhappy. They'd better hope that he is so busy with the two civil cases and 91 felony indictments he's juggling that he doesn't have time to pay close attention to this farce.

One of Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia lawyers is moving to withdraw himself from representing the former New York mayor and Trump co-defendant.

David Wolfe filed notice Thursday to withdraw from the Fulton County 2020 election conspiracy case.

Giuliani was among the 19 individuals, including former President Donald Trump, indicted in a sprawling Georgia racketeering case centered around the group’s efforts to subvert the state’s 2020 election results.

Earlier this month, Giuliani pleaded not guilty to 13 charges related to his role in the alleged conspiracy. Still, the charges in Georgia are just a splash in the bucket amid a growing torrent of legal problems.

Last week, Giuliani’s former attorneys sued him for almost $1.4 million worth of unpaid legal fees, all accumulated through a myriad of lawsuits, investigations, and litigation brought against their ex-client. These include the Georgia case, an investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation, his disbarment proceedings, and 10 other civil lawsuits brought against Giuliani.

In May, Giuliani’s former assistant Noelle Dunphy sued him, alleging she had been subjected to sexual harassment and abuse while under his employment. On Monday, an excerpt of former White House aid Caddisy Hutchinson’s upcoming book included claims that Giuliani had groped her as they waited backstage during Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 2021.

Earlier this year a D.C. disciplinary committee recommended Giuliani be disbarred. The committee wrote that “Mr. Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy. His malicious and meritless claims have done lasting damage and are antagonistic to the oath to ‘support the Constitution of the United States of America’ that he swore when he was admitted to the Bar.”

The way lawyers are Ditching Giuliani, he soon may find himself struggling to find representation, even his own.

House Republicans really don’t want to hear from Rudy Giuliani.

Though their impeachment crusade grew out of the former New York City mayor’s anti-Biden machinations, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee spent much of Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing voting down repeated efforts by Democrats to subpoena Giuliani and Lev Parnas, his former sidekick.

But Republican attempts to limit what they hear about Giuliani’s activities apparently go further than a few committee votes, according to an FBI whistleblower. In a memo obtained by Mother Jones, Johnathan Buma—an FBI agent who says he conducted foreign influence investigations— alleges that investigators working for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told him in June that they were not interested in what he knew about Giuliani potentially being “compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.

The memo suggests that Republican investigators privately imposed the same fact-finding limitations Democrats highlighted on Thursday: GOP lawmakers say they want to investigate allegations about Joe Biden, but they appear reluctant to scrutinize the origin of their own probe or turn up details that undermine their preferred narrative. Judiciary Committee staff dispute Buma’s allegations, telling Mother Jones that his account of his interactions with House investigators isn’t accurate. (The Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees are working on the Biden investigation with the House Oversight Committee, which held Thursday’s hearing.)

As Insider, the New Yorker and others have previously reported, Buma—who originally filed a whistleblower complaint with the FBI last year—submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee in April 2023. He sent another statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. (Here is Buma’s full statement to the House committee, which recently became public.)

In both statements, the active FBI agent said that his own experience belied claims by GOP lawmakers that the Justice Department obstructed efforts to investigate Hunter Biden while more zealously probing Donald Trump and Trump’s allies. Buma, who says he personally developed leads that helped launch federal probes into Hunter Biden, said his bureau bosses welcomed his Hunter-related information. By contrast, Buma says, his efforts to investigate potential Russian influence over Giuliani were thwarted by FBI higher-ups during both the Trump administration and the Biden administration. The FBI declined to comment on his claims.

Buma, as Mother Jones has reported, said in his July statement that he learned that Pavel Fuks, a wealthy Ukrainian developer who hired Giuliani in 2017, paid Giuliani $300,000, supposedly for security consulting work. But Buma says that the FBI suspected Fuks was a “co-opted asset” of a Russian intelligence service and that his payments were potentially part of an effort to gain influence over Giuliani, who in 2018 became Trump’s personal lawyer.

Fuks denies working for Russia. “Mr. Fuks has never cooperated with Russian intelligence,” a spokesperson says. A Giuliani spokesperson did not respond to questions about Buma’s account.

Giuliani working for a Russian agent would be an obvious security risk. Buma’s allegations are an additional data point, among many, suggesting that America’ Mayor may have been manipulated by Russian agents as he scoured Ukraine for political dirt that could damage Trump’s top rival.

The memo Mother Jones obtained is Buma’s account of his interactions with the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican staff. It details a June 14, 2023, phone call during which Buma made his case to two former FBI agents working for the committee.

Buma writes that after one of the ex-agents referred to the FBI supposedly “slow playing” its Biden probe, “I explained that I was perhaps the first FBI Agent to collect and report information from Ukrainian sources concerning Hunter Biden.” Buma says he told the investigators that his FBI superiors were “happy to receive the information” and that “I never experienced any intelligence suppression when I collected and reported information concerning the Bidens.”

Buma reports that he then described information he received indicating that Giuliani had “collected money from a Ukrainian agent who had been co-opted by the Russian Intelligence Service, Pavlo Fuks…, as well as a group of political operatives located in California, in and around 2020. I said that reporting concerning Giuliani was corroborated extensively by follow up investigations.”

Buma says he told the investigators that “my reporting concerning Giuliani and those surrounding Giuliani was suppressed and my reputation was also blackballed.” That’s when the committee staffers cut him off, according to Buma: “When I tried to explain what was actually going on in Ukraine and where I actually experienced suppression, [the investigators] interjected and said that they were only interested in matters pertaining to Biden.”

A Judiciary committee spokesperson said the staffers involved remembered the phone call differently. “This is not an accurate depiction and misrepresents the Committee’s exchanges with Mr. Buma,” the aide said. “Their discussions with Mr. Buma covered a wide range of topics under the Committee’s purview, including the FBI and Hunter Biden.”

The spokesperson did not specify exactly what the committee disputed. Still, in Buma’s account, committee staffers were explicit: They only wanted to hear about the Bidens. That suggests they didn’t want to consider evidence indicating that a key adviser to Trump might have been compromised by Russian agents. And they didn’t want to deal with the possibility that the president’s lawyer was used to pass along phony claims that helped launch the investigation House Republicans are now pursuing.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said at Thursday’s hearing that lawmakers should hear from Giuliani because he an author “of the lie on which this sham impeachment is based.” Republicans clearly contest that, but they don’t seem too interested in the details of how their investigation really got started.

Ever since debt was invented in ancient Sumer, there have probably been people enriching themselves through bad investments. The trick is to make these investments using other people’s money.

Suppose, for example, that a wheeler-dealer uses borrowed funds to make risky investments in New Jersey casinos. If the investments somehow end up making money, he can pocket the profits. But if the investments fail, he may — if he’s been tricky about the wording in his loans or manages to persuade his creditors not to go after his other assets — be able to walk away and leave other people holding the bag. That is, it’s heads he wins, tails the creditors lose.

He may also be able to siphon off some of the borrowed money, say by having the casinos pay him or businesses he owns large sums for various services before they go bust.

As readers may have guessed, this isn’t a hypothetical example. It is the story of Donald Trump’s New Jersey casino empire, a venture ending in multiple bankruptcies that was a disaster for outside investors but appears to have been quite profitable for Trump.

The problem for someone who wants to play that game is how to persuade lenders to play along. Why would any people risk their money in such dubious ventures?

Well, there are a couple of ways to pull this off. One, perhaps the main story with those casinos, is sheer power of persuasion, perhaps supported by a cult of personality: Convince lenders that these dubious ventures are actually good investments or that you’re a uniquely effective businessman who can turn straw into gold.

Alternatively, you can try to persuade lenders that they’re safe by offering collateral that seems sufficient to protect them but isn’t, because you’ve inflated the value of the assets you put up and possibly also inflated your personal wealth to make it seem you are both a brilliant businessman and a reliable borrower.

Which is why making false claims about the value of assets you control is illegal. And on Tuesday, Justice Arthur F. Engoron ruled in New York that Trump did, in fact, persistently commit fraud by overvaluing his assets, possibly by as much as $2.2 billion.

Trump and his lawyers offered, as I read it, three main defenses against accusations of fraud.

First, they argued that the value of real estate is, to some extent, subjective. Indeed, if you own a building, you don’t know for sure what it’s worth until you try to sell it.

But while there’s some wiggle room in valuing real estate, it’s limited. And Engoron ruled that Trump went far beyond those limits, creating a “fantasy world” of indefensible valuations. For example, the Trump Organization treated rent-regulated apartments as being worth as much as noncontrolled apartments. The judge made special note of Trump’s claim that he had a 30,000-square-foot residence in New York, when the true number was only 11,000; square footage isn’t subjective.

Second, Trump’s lawyers argued that banks that lent to him got repaid in full, so there was no harm done. Of course, that wasn’t true for lenders caught up in Trump’s earlier bankruptcies. More generally, playing heads-I-win-tails-you-lose based on fraudulent valuations isn’t legal even if sometimes the bets come up heads.

Finally, Trump declared on social media that “my Civil Rights have been taken away from me” and that he borrowed money from “sophisticated Wall Street banks” that presumably wouldn’t have been easily deceived by fraud. If you know anything about Wall Street’s attitudes toward Trump, that’s a real hoot. For years, only one major Wall Street player, Deutsche Bank, was willing to deal with him at all, leading to much puzzlement about that bank’s motives. And eventually Deutsche Bank also pulled the plug, citing concerns about his financial claims. Trump did manage to pay off that debt, although it’s a mystery where he found the cash. But as I just explained, getting lucky is no excuse for fraud.

What’s remarkable about Engoron’s finding that Trump committed large-scale fraud (it’s now a ruling, not a mere accusation) is what it says about the man who became president and the voters who supported him.

Back in 2016, some observers warned conventional political analysts that they were underrating Trump’s chances because they didn’t appreciate how many Americans believed that he was a brilliant businessman — a belief based largely on his role on the reality TV show “The Apprentice.” What we now know is that the old joke was, in Trump’s case, the simple truth: He wasn’t a real business genius; he just played one on TV.

But the truth is that this was obvious, to anyone willing to see, from the beginning of Trump’s political rise.

I’d like to predict that this ruling will finally destroy Trump’s public persona. In reality, however, his supporters will probably brush this ruling off, partly because they’ll view it as the product of a left-wing conspiracy, partly because at this late date, few of those who backed him will be willing to admit that they were taken in by a charlatan.

But they were. And the fact that so many Americans were and remain fooled should lead to some serious national soul-searching.

The most remarkable and unique feature of American politics is one that is rarely discussed: the Republican Party’s extreme anti-statist ideology. The Republican party is the only major conservative party in the world whose governing doctrine rejects higher taxes on absolute principle, refuses to acknowledge anthropogenic global warming, and denies that health insurance should be a right of all citizens. This last point surfaced during the second Republican presidential debate when Ron DeSantis was asked to explain why his state ranks near the national bottom in health insurance coverage. Because these moments occur so rarely, it was highly revealing.

The backdrop is that the Affordable Care Act provided health insurance to poor people by expanding Medicaid. A conservative Supreme Court ruling gave states the right to opt out of the expansion, turning down free funding from Washington if they wished. Originally, just 24 states joined Medicaid expansion. Over time, the sheer economic logic brought more states into the program. Turning down the money not only hurts people who can’t get health coverage, but it also hurts hospitals, which legally must treat people who show up in the emergency room, even if they lack coverage.

In other words, states were not choosing between spending money and hurting people. Helping people get insurance was practically free. (The federal government covers 90 percent of the cost, and the economic benefit of getting health care for the uninsured, both to covered workers and their health providers, easily exceeds the remaining 10 percent cost, paying for itself.) The states that refused to join Medicaid expansion literally had to accept economic sacrifices in order to pay for the privilege of denying health insurance to low-income citizens in their state.

Florida is now one of only ten states that reject Medicaid expansion. DeSantis almost never has to explain or justify this position. Shockingly, he had to do so at the debate.

Stuart Varney asked DeSantis why 2.5 million Floridians lack health insurance, which is a rate much higher than the national average. (Florida ranks fourth from the bottom in residents with health insurance). DeSantis first tried deflecting the problem to overall inflation:

DESANTIS: Well, I think this is a symptom of our overall economic decline. Everything has gotten more expensive. You see insurance rates going through the roof. People that are going to get groceries, I’ve spoken with a woman in Iowa. And she said, you know, for the first time in my life, I’m having to take things out of my grocery cart when I get to the checkout line …

This is obviously a total non sequitur. The uninsured rate in Florida did not get worse due to inflation. Indeed, it got temporarily much better because the Biden administration made emergency COVID-19 funds available to people in non-expansion states, like Florida. In any case, inflation is a national phenomenon that could not possibly explain why Florida ranks near the bottom in health insurance coverage.

Varney, amazingly, pointed this out. He asked DeSantis why Florida’s health insurance rate was “worse than the national average.”

“It’s not,” DeSantis replied. This was a pure lie. (Florida’s uninsured rate is in fact well above the national average, according to the Census Bureau).

But then, DeSantis proceeded to give something like an explanation for his position:

“Our state’s a dynamic state. We’ve got a lot of folks that come. Of course, we’ve had a population boom.

We also don’t have a lot of welfare benefits, in Florida. We’re basically saying we want to — this is a field of dreams, you can do well in the state. But we’re not going to be like California and have massive numbers of people on government programs without work requirements. We believe in your work, and you got to do that. And so, that goes for all the welfare benefits.

And you know what that’s done, Stuart? Our unemployment rate is the lowest, amongst any big state. We have the highest GDP growth events (ph) of any big state. And even CNBC, no fan of mine, ranked Florida the No. 1 economy in America.”

In the middle of this word salad, some coherent thought can be extracted. Florida is a “field of dreams.” It rejects “welfare benefits.” DeSantis never uttered the word “Medicaid” or “Obamacare,” which explains why his state’s citizens lack health insurance at such high levels. Yet he did manage to express his belief that health insurance ought to be an earned benefit, not a right. If people get jobs working in construction or day care or at a convenience store, and those jobs do not have employer-provided health insurance, the state should not step in. Those people should work harder.

Indeed, to give them subsidized access to medical care will sap their incentive. Poor people need motivation to work hard, and denying them the ability to see a doctor and get medicine is part of that necessary motivation. And while Florida is now a minority among states refusing Medicaid expansion, DeSantis’s fanatical stance lies comfortably within the heart of conservative movement thinking. Indeed, this is what is considered “normal” conservatism.

The horrifying nature of this normality is generally invisible. It fell to Fox Business host Stuart Varney, of all people, to make DeSantis explain himself.

Reddit rolled out some changes this week as its continues its push for revenue and profitability jumpstarted by its API rule changes in July. Among the most controversial, the company will no longer allow users to opt out of ad personalization based on their Reddit activity and started a program that lets users exchange virtual rewards for their posts for real money.

On Wednesday, Reddit announced plans to "improve ad performance," including by preventing users from opting out of personalized ads except for in "select countries." Reddit didn't specify which countries are excluded, but the exceptions could include countries falling under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard declined to provide further clarification when reached by Ars Technica for comment.

Reddit's announcement, authored by Reddit's head of privacy, going by "snoo-tuh" on the platform (Reddit has refused to confirm the identity of admins representing Reddit on the site), said that its advertisers look at "what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals" to gauge your interests.

Snoo-tuh wrote:

For users who previously opted out of personalization based on Reddit activity, this change will not result in seeing more ads or sharing on-platform activity with advertisers. It does enable our models to better predict which ad may be most relevant to you.

Still, Reddit users have expressed concern over suddenly losing a privacy control they've long had. Meanwhile, Reddit's policy update aligns with its outspoken goals to become profitable and its plans to eventually go public. Reddit has already sacrificed other aspects of the user experience, as well as some community trust, in an effort to drive revenue. Reddit declined to provide comment regarding privacy concerns related to this latest update.

Other privacy policy changes announced Wednesday include allowing users to choose to see "fewer" ads regarding alcohol, dating, gambling, pregnancy and parenting, and weight loss. Reddit didn't commit to all ads being removed initially since its system of "manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads" may not be totally accurate at first. Snoo-tuh said things should get more accurate "over time," though. Reddit’s Contributor Program

Also this week, Reddit announced its Contributor Program, launching in the US only for now. Reddit users with 100–4,999 karma can earn $0.90 per gold received. Users with over 5,000 karma can get $1 per gold received. Users can pay for gold to award to other users.

The scheme is reminiscent of the Creator Ads Revenue Sharing program by X, formerly Twitter, where premium subscription members can get a portion of ad revenue generated from their posts. Elon Musk announced the program in February, and it launched in July.

X's program has been criticized for potentially encouraging spam-y, bait-y posts and posts that are controversial and offensive, just for the sake of generating reactions and comments that will lead to the user making money. But that hasn't stopped Reddit from enacting a user payment scheme of its own (after all, Huffman has said Musk's X is an example for Reddit.)

However, clickbait and shock value posts are a strong deviation from what people tend to treasure most about Reddit: real human advice, discussions, and insight.

In an interview with BBC, social media analyst and consultant Matt Navarra noted that Reddit was incentivizing and providing opportunity for its top users but that it could also jeopardize Reddit's content quality.

Navarra told BBC:

[X's ad sharing program] incentives X users to post content that sparks the most replies, and the characteristics of content that typically generates the most replies is content that is divisive, polarizing, provocative, and controversial... exactly the sort of content that brands do not want to have their ads placed amongst. This has been problematic for Elon Musk, and it could become a new problem for Reddit's founders too.

When I reached out to Reddit about these concerns, spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt pointed me to Reddit's blog post about the program. It says that users have to be at least 18 years old and verified by Reddit to participate and that:

All monetizable contributions are subject to Reddit’s User Agreement and Content Policy. In addition, Reddit will take the same enforcement actions against contributions breaking Reddit’s rules and withhold any earnings on content that violates the Content Policy or the new Contributor Monetization Policy and Contributor Terms for the program.

A support page says Reddit's Contributor Program will avoid "fraud, spam, bad actors, and illegal activities" by putting users through Persona's Know Your Customer screening. It also points to "Reddit internal safety signals," "new monetization policies with enforcement and repercussions," "daily gold purchase limits," "automated detection and monitoring via Reddit’s safety tools and systems," "user reporting," and "admin auditing."