It's still kind of hilarious that the Republican Speaker of the House this week, in announcing an impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden for...(fill in actual crime here when available)...described the Democratic President as "the picture of a culture of corruption". It's particularly amusing given the bulk of today's news on The BradCast. [Audio link to full show follow below this summary.]

Among our stories today...

• The unspeakable death toll from flooding in Libya is now expected to be in the tens of thousands as bodies line the streets in the eastern coastal town of Derna, where 16 inches of rain fell in one day over the weekend resulting in the collapse of two dams. Given some of the horrifying new numbers from Berkeley Earth this week, however, suggesting that the planet has a good chance of exceeding the 1.5 degree Celsius increase of warming since pre-industrial times which the Paris Climate Agreement seeks to avoid, we could be in for many more such horrific disasters in the years ahead.

• Following a nearly 5-year probe by a Trump appointed U.S. Attorney and a recently failed plea agreement, Hunter Biden was charged today with 3 felony counts related to using illegal narcotics while buying a gun. These are crimes which almost nobody is ever charged with, especially when they have never fired or even loaded the gun, which Hunter reportedly had for only 11 days. But that must be a part of the "special preferential treatment" the President's son has received, if you hear Republicans tell it. Try not to laugh.

• The state judge overseeing the sprawling, 41-count racketeering conspiracy indictment [PDF] against the former President of the United States, Donald Trump and his 18 co-conspirators for their attempts to steal the 2020 election in Georgia, has determined that all 19 defendants will not be tried in a single group beginning in October, as Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis had sought. So far, former Trump attorneys Ken Chesebro and Sidney Powell will stand trial next month, but a trial date for all of the others will be set later, likely for some time next year --- if a slot when Trump isn't standing trial on felony charges in three other jurisdictions can be found.

• The civil trial Trump faces --- along with his two eldest sons, his company and two top executives --- via New York state Attorney General Letitia James, for falsely and unlawfully inflating his company's net worth by billions of dollars in order to fraudulently receive bank loans and other benefits, begins on October 2. Just mentioning that since it seems few others are doing so these days for some reason.

• The Fox Corporation was sued yet again this week, related to the knowing lies Fox "News" told about the 2020 election being "rigged". The latest suit comes courtesy of New York City's huge pension funds. They charge neglect of corporate duty to protect shareholders by opening themselves up to defamation suits like the one from Dominion Voting Systems. That one cost the pretend news outlet $787.5 million to settle earlier this year. The state of Oregon, on behalf of their public employee retirement fund, has joined the suit. All of which begs the question as to why anybody's money is actually invested in a company known, for years. to be as corrupt as Fox. I might suggest that those whose retirement funds are being handled by NYC and Oregon (and elsewhere) demand the funds pull their money from similarly irresponsible and corrupt corporations --- such as the major fossil fuel companies --- before they too face the huge financial liabilities that await them.

• Are Wisconsin state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and his fellow corrupt Republicans in the state's obscenely gerrymandered Legislature blinking in their recent threats to impeach newly-seated state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz before she has even heard a case? The High Court's new liberal majority will soon be hearing two citizen petitions challenging the GOP's corrupt state district maps, which have ensured Republican majorities in both the Assembly and Senate for most of the past decade. But this week, just after state Dems announced a $4 million ad buy to let voters in the Badger State known what Republicans are up to in advance of 2024, Vos floated a new legislative "deal" to create new maps. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers immediately rejected the proposal as "bogus". We explain.

• Remember that Kentucky County Clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples back in 2015? Kim Davis will now have to pay one of those couples $100,000 for having refused to do so, according to a decision this week by a federal jury.

• Ken Paxton, the unspeakably corrupt Texas state Attorney General and close Trump ally who is facing trial in the Republican-dominated state Senate on 20 articles of impeachment brought by the state's Republican-dominated House this week, may have dodged at least one bullet. A last-minute deal was struck between the opposing attorneys to skip testimony from Paxton's mistress on Wednesday. She's the one who was given a job by a Paxton donor to make it easier for them to continue their secret affair. The impeachment trial of the state's top law enforcement officer continues in the Senate, which will soon decide if the Republican should be removed from office based on charges of bribery, unfitness for office and abuse of power. Paxton's wife is a state Senator and has been present all week at the trial. She will, however, be barred from voting on his fate.

• Washington Post reports today that Florida's corrupt Republican Governor Ron DeSantis enjoyed a whole bunch of unreported and undisclosed private plane flights, luxury resort accommodations and meals with wealthy donors after being first elected in 2018. With his Presidential aspirations now failing, he must be angling for a Supreme Court nomination.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest 'Green News Report' with more on the horrific news out of Libya; the record costs of U.S. weather-related disasters so far this year; more bad news for Texas water drinkers; and a bit of encouraging news courtesy of Biden and the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act. Oh, we're also still keeping an eye on the powerful, slow-moving Hurricane Lee, a monster storm in the Atlantic which is currently brushing by Bermuda and threatening New England, Canada and Newfoundland over the next several days...

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It's been a few months since she's been on BradCast, but she returns today, for the first time since the sprawling RICO indictment against Donald Trump and 18 co-conspirators for attempting to steal Georgia's 2020 Presidential election. The indictment includes charges based on a phone call she received --- and was smart enough to have recorded --- from a Team Trumper who essentially confessed to the now-notorious breach of the state's voting system software in Coffee County. She deserves, and receives, a bit of a victory lap today, while breaking still more news about the breach which, she warns, has yet to be investigated by the state's Secretary of State or its Board of Elections in advance of 2024. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

But first up today, a few somewhat related items...

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that E. Jean Carroll's upcoming civil trial against Trump will only be on damages --- how much he will have to pay the former magazine columnist who accused him of raping her in the 1990's and then lying about her years later. A civil trial that ended in May found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamatory remarks made about Carroll in 2022. Today, the judge found that the previous finding of assault and defamation already establish Trump's liability regarding defamatory comments he made about her in 2019, while serving as President and, therefore, the only question to be resolved in this separate suit is how much he will have to pay her. She is seeking not less than $10 million in this case and the judge has allowed her to add defamatory comments Trump made about Carroll on a CNN Townhall the day after he was found liable in the earlier case.

Picking up on our detailed coverage on yesterday's show of the various chief election officials around the country now grappling with whether Trump is even eligible for the 2024 ballot next year, based on his violation of the U.S. Constitution's "Insurrection Disqualification Clause" (14th Amendment, Section 3), the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a lawsuit challenging Trump's eligibility for the ballot in Colorado on Wednesday on behalf of six Republican and unaffiliated voters there. The matter is likely to move quickly all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, given that the state must settle its 2024 Primary ballot by January 5th!

A hearing was held on Wednesday in Fulton County, Georgia in Fanni Willis' RICO case [PDF] against Trump with co-defendant attorneys Ken Chesebro (alleged architect of the fake electors plot) and Sidney Powell (alleged organizer of the Coffee County voting system software breach) each seeking to be tried quickly and alone. The judge appears to have agreed on "quickly", setting a trial date for both beginning on October 23. But he he denied their motion to have their cases severed from each other. Still to be determined, however: the question of whether all 19 co-defendants must be tried at the same time, as Willis' team argues, given that guilt for any one defendant in the covert actions listed in the RICO charge (Count 1 of 41) means that all co-conspirators are guilty under state law. Prosecutors told the judge today that they expect the trial to take at least four months and will include more than 150 witnesses. (One of whom might be our guest on today's show!)

At the same time, a filing last week in the case by Powell claims she had nothing at all to do with the scheme to unlawfully breach, copy and distribute Georgia's state voting system software in the rural, Republican-leaning Coffee County. A report last week at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, however, which (literally) has the receipts, suggests otherwise.

But all of that --- including the receipts --- is only known publicly thanks to our guest today, MARILYN MARKS of the small, critical non-profit, Coalition for Good Governance. As first aired on this program in May of last year, Marks received a phone call from an Atlanta bail bondsman named Scott Hall, who, essentially, confessed to the entire Coffee County scheme. That is how we even know that the breach happened at all, and why four people involved with it --- one of whom is Powell, another of whom is Hall --- were charged last month in the scheme that still endangers elections both across the entire state of Georgia, where the same systems will be used again next year, and in more than a dozen other states.

Marks explains today how Hall originally "confessed" to the breach after calling out of the blue to bully her into turning over documents from her long-running civil lawsuit which is challenging the use of GA Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger's unverifiable, wildly insecure touchscreen voting systems. Hall claimed he had actually "hacked" into her group's legal documents.

"Instead of slamming the phone down, which was my first inclination, I instead decided to go into playing the sweet little old lady mode," Marks explains today, noting that she "kept him on the phone for about an hour" before he "just blurted out" the fact that he and other MAGA folks were allowed in to the Coffee County elections building to scan, image and copy everything. Two local officials, Coffee's then Election Supervisor Misty Hampton and the County's GOP chair Cathy Latham, have also been indicted in the same RICO conspiracy. (In addition to helping facilitate the software breach, Latham is also charged for her role as a fake elector in Georgia.)

Marks quipped that Hall has likely by now "realized that he, unlike Trump, had not made a 'perfect phone call."

In the meantime, Marks warns that, despite the indictments, the threat posed by the breach has still not been fully investigated by either federal or state officials. Two and a half years since the breach, which she believes Raffensperger learned of almost immediately afterward and has been covering up, "the Secretary and State Election Board have not even begun an investigation of Coffee County," Marks emphasized, telling me that "there are so many people that were involved in the Coffee County Breach that have not been held to any kind of accountability."

"What they did was just turn the criminal aspects of this over to Georgia Bureau of Investigation," she asserts. "But they are doing nothing at all. They have not even conducted one interview. They have not picked up the first piece of paper. They have not done anything to consider what are the impacts on the voting system? What are the impacts for future elections? How did this go wrong? What kind of better rules should have been in place? What kind of reporting structure should we have had? They have still not put in a single rule or requirement for reporting a security incident. If Coffee happened today, they would not have to report it."

That, Marks warns, remains a serious threat moving forward, especially since the software still remains in the wild and Raffensperger has refused to install Dominion touchscreen voting system security patches certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and strongly recommended by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the wake of the January 7th, 2021 breach in Coffee County until after the 2024 elections.

Marks' long-running lawsuit seeking to replace Raffensperger's Dominion touchscreens with verifiable hand-marked paper ballots is finally set to go on trial in January. "We are really looking forward to putting on all of this evidence," she tells me, after explaining why the Coffee County breach is so key to her case. "And, certainly we are hoping for a decision that will at least protect the November elections for 2024. After all, these breaches that happened in Coffee County --- they are still ongoing."

"Remember, all that software was posted on the Internet. Lots of people took it. Nothing has been done to mitigate it. So, if you think about it, every day that people have their hands on that software, sharing it with others, the breach continues."

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On today's BradCast, it's special coverage of the first GOP Presidential Primary debate of the 2024 campaign. It featured eight candidates, none of which were named Trump, But he was there anyway. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

The raucus two-hour debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was sponsored by Fox "News" and held before a rowdy audience of booing and cheering Republicans who, at times, resembled a pro wrestling crowd --- or a lynch mob --- more than supporters of an American political party.

The actual participants on the stage were (in order of polling popularity before the debate): Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; 38-year old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who, if you hadn't heard of him before last night, you probably have now); Former Vice President Mike Pence; Former South Carolina Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley; Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie; South Carolina U.S. Senator Tim Scott; Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson; North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (who, if you hadn't heard of him before last night, you may still have no idea who he is today.)

We're joined today by some favorite BradCast special coverage guests to try and make sense of it all. (Which was no easy feat, frankly!) HEATHER DIGBY PARTON is a longtime, award-winning columnist at Salon and founder of Digby's Hullabaloo blog; "DRIFTGLASS" is otherwise known as both @Mr_Electrico on the site formerly known as Twitter and occasional as just "Bill" back at home in "Flyover Country, Illinois" where he produces the weekly Professional Left Podcast.

Among the questions asked, answered and/or discussed today...

• Who and what is Vivek Ramaswamy? And why was he both the target and obnoxious star of the evening?
• What did all those red ties worn by everyone but Christie, Hutchinson and Haley actually mean?
• What happened to Great White (Non-Trump) Hope DeSantis? Why was he largely ignored? And why was he screaming?
• Holy crap! Was that a question about Climate Change on a Fox 'News' sponsored debate?!
• Has Pence been underestimated after so many years in Trump's shadow?
• Did Haley help or hurt herself in calling for a "new generation" of GOP leaders (while clearly being part of the old generation of GOP leaders)?
• Wait, they all think Pence did the right thing on January 6, 2021, but almost all of them would support Trump next year even if convicted on felony crimes?
• Have Christie and Pence figured out how to use the Constitution as a weapon against Trump?
• Remember when even Republican debates included actual policy issues?
• Who on that stage would be more likely than Trump to defeat Joe Biden next year?
• If Trump is somehow removed from contention, who becomes the party's front-runner?
• Was Trump right or wrong to stay out of the debate?

All of that and many more questions asked, answered, discussed or dodged on today's special edition of The BradCast, as Trump heads to a jail in Atlanta to be booked on his fourth criminal indictment of the year and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis asks the Court [PDF] to begin his racketeering trial just two months from now in October(!) and as the once Grand Ole Party continues its long, dangerous descent into madness.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: The judge quickly approved Willis' request for an October 23 trial, but only for Trump attorney Ken Chesebro (alleged architect of the fake electors scheme), who invoked Georgia's speedy trial law. The other defendants do not yet have a trial date. So The Cheese stands alone...

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: The BradCast and Green News Report are standing down until after the Labor Day Holiday! See you in September!...

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Today's BradCast might be best summarized by matching up the mugshots and court appearances this week (most of them just today!) of Republican attorneys who are being held accountable for felony crimes, most related to election fraud. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

From left to right of the rogues gallery pictured above...

• Ohio attorney and Trump donor James Saunders was found guilty on Tuesday of two counts of election fraud for having voted twice, once in Ohio and once in Florida, in both the 2020 and 2022 general elections. The judge immediately sent him to jail after the verdict, even before his sentencing next week. Saunders apparently committed the same crimes in 2014 and 2016, but the statute of limitations had already run before Cuyahoga County prosecutors nabbed him.

• Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's trial on 20 impeachment charges in the state Senate is scheduled to begin on September 5. The photo above (second from left) is his mugshot from 2015 when he was charged with state felony Securities Fraud which he has yet to be tried for. TX voters elected him twice since then, nonetheless. As to the charges for which he has now been impeached, Texas House impeachment managers this week released new details about Paxton's abuse of office as the state's top law enforcement official, which include abuse of office to help his friend and donor Nate Paul, his use of a fake Uber account, burner phones and secret personal emails accounts used, in part, to facilitate his secret visits with his mistress who Paul's firm hired in order to make it easier for Paxton to visit her in Austin. All of that, even as Paul was secretly paying to renovate Paxton's home in McKinney. Paxton, who led the failed U.S. Supreme Court lawsuit attempting to toss out every vote cast in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, in the 2020 Presidential election, is also under federal investigation for many of the crimes he has been impeached for in the Lone Star State where he is now serving his third term as A.G.

• A whole passel of Donald Trump co-defendants --- many of them also Republican attorneys --- were in the news today, as many surrendered to felony charges in Fulton County, Georgia, after being charged in the state racketeering conspiracy indictment along with Trump for their efforts to steal the 2020 election in the Peach State. Seen in mugshots above (slots 3 through 6) are Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman (booked yesterday), Ken Chesebro, and Sidney Powell. Also surrendering today in Atlanta was Misty Hampton, the Republican Election Director of Coffee County, GA who invited Powell, and a bunch of other MAGA folks in to the Elections Office in the rural, Republican-leaning GA county to make unlawful copies of the state's sensitive voting system software. Also in related news today were Trump's former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Trump DoJ attorney Jeffrey Clark. Both are co-defendants in the RICO case, currently seeking to move their trials to federal court. Both had moved in federal court to postpone or cancel their surrenders in Fulton County. Both motions were rejected by the federal court today just before airtime after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis made clear that they had both been given more than enough time before this Friday's deadline to turn themselves in.

In other, occasionally related news on today's program...

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Russian mercenary Wagner military battalion and leader of a short-lived coup against his former close ally, Vladimir Putin, earlier this year, reportedly died along with 9 others in a private jet that crashed shortly after takeoff approximately 60 miles north of Moscow on Wednesday. The plane was video-taped falling out of the sky after something appears to have caused an explosion after the jet had reached cruising altitude.

• Milwaukee Public Schools were closed today in Wisconsin due to a dangerous heat wave. The closure comes on the same day that eight GOP candidates --- none named Trump --- are to appear in Milwaukee this evening for the party's first Presidential Primary debate of the 2024 season. Pretty much all of these candidates, many of whom pretended to be furious about school closures due to COVID, are also climate crisis deniers. Nonetheless, they are unlikely to raise the issue of our climate emergency at tonight's debate, despite the school closures today due to climate change in the very city in which they will be debating tonight.

• The newly all-male state Supreme Court in South Carolina reversed the Court's own ruling from earlier this year today, regarding the state Legislature's near total abortion ban, even though the majority opinion concedes the new law infringes "a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy." The 5 men now serving as Justices --- following the lone female Justice's mandatory retirement earlier this year --- just don't care, apparently. Unlike the now-retired female Justice who wrote the majority opinion blocking the new law earlier this year, the dudes now sitting on the state's High Court believe those state Constitutional interests of women do not outweigh "the interest of the unborn child to live."

And finally...

• Trump says he will go in for booking at the Fulton County jail on Thursday evening, during TV's prime-time, of course. As he is set to be arraigned for his fourth criminal indictment of the year (his second one for attempting to steal the 2020 election), musical satirist Randy Rainbow returns with an all new, hilarious tune to mark the occasion and close today's program...

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There is no small amount of irony throughout today's BradCast, as Republican lawmakers threaten to impeach a newly elected state Supreme Court Justice just days after she was sworn in. Do they think we don't remember how they pretended to be outraged(!) in 2020 and 2021, charging Democrats were offending voters with attempted "election nullification" by twice impeaching the former President at the end of his four-year term?

Before we get to that mess in Wisconsin today, speaking of The Former Guy, two of his co-defendants in his fourth criminal indictment of the year (the RICO case in Georgia for his attempted to steal the 2020 election there) surrendered at a Fulton County jail on Tuesday. John Eastman and Scott Hall both turned themselves in after arranging to be released on bond after booking.

Eastman is the far-right Trump attorney and architect of the unlawful/unconstitutional failed scheme to have then Vice President Mike Pence toss out legitimate Electoral College votes on January 6th, 2021. Hall, little known to most of the nation but well known by now to longtime BradCast listeners, is the Atlanta bail bondsman (well, that'll come in handy!) who confessed to frequent guest on this program, Marilyn Marks of the Coalition for Good Governance, that he helped run the unlawful MAGA breach of Georgia's sensitive voting system hardware and software in Coffee County, GA on January 7th, 2021.

Marks had the wherewithal to record Hall's phone call to her. We aired it for the first time on this program last year and have been closely covering the Coffee County breach ever since (even as GA Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger appears to still be covering it up.) That scheme, part of a multi-state conspiracy, was allegedly hatched in Trump's Oval Office in December of 2020, and paid for by another co-defendant, Trump attorney Sidney Powell, and plays a key role in the 41-count grand jury RICO indictment [PDF] secured last week by Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis. More surrenders, including Trump's own, are to come this week before the Friday deadline, after which Willis has vowed to seek arrest warrants.

As that plays out in the Peach State, desperate Republican lawmakers in the Badger State may be seeing the writing on the wall. Their 15 years of autocratic, partisan gerrymandered majority rule of both chambers of the Wisconsin state Legislature may finally be coming to an end following the statewide landslide election victory last April of Janet Protasiewicz to the state Supreme Court.

On August 1, Justice Protasiewicz was finally sworn in (as pictured above), giving liberals on the High Court a 4 to 3 majority for the first time in some 15 years. The next day, August 2, the first of two petitions was filed with the Court seeking a ruling that the GOP's extreme partisan gerrymandered Legislative maps for both the state Assembly and Senate are unlawful violations of the state's Constitution. Plaintiffs seek not only new, fair maps in advance of the 2024 elections, but they are also asking the Court to order an emergency special election for all seats in the Senate next year. According to plaintiffs, current office holders "lack legal entitlement" to hold those seats due to the unlawful maps in place since 2011, as first approved by the state's hard-right radical then-Governor Scott Walker.

Republicans are both furious and terrified about the two new lawsuits filed by voters, leading current, far-right Assembly Speaker and autocracy fan, Robin Vos (arguably one of the biggest benefactors of the states "rigged" maps), to float the idea of impeaching Protasiewicz if she fails to recuse herself from both cases. Vos argues that, during her campaign earlier this year, Protasiewicz "prejudged" the cases by describing the obviously unfair maps as both unfair and rigged.

There are a whole bunch of problems with Vos' argument, one that was laughably shared in a recent "intemperate dissent" penned in response to these cases by Walker-appointed Justice Rebecca Bradley.

Longtime BRAD BLOG legal analyst ERNEST A. CANNING has been closely following and writing about the matter. He joins us today to detail the allegations against Protasiewicz, the hypocrisy of Bradley, and the constitutional crisis that could occur in the Badger State if Vos moves ahead with impeachment and removal by the state's Republican gerrymandered Assembly and Senate.

"For the Republicans to hold on to a 2/3rds majority in the Senate, even when they received as little as 45% of the vote, tells you what they've done. This is a deeply anti-democratic project," Canning explains. "If they're willing to impeach simply to hold on to power, that in itself is a direct assault on democracy. Particularly when you consider the argument that they really don't have a legal basis for the seats they are holding right now."

We also share a comment today on this entire fine mess from friend of the show, national affairs correspondent at The Nation and WI favorite son, John Nichols.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report as hurricane season suddenly kicks into full gear in the U.S., wildfire season continues unabated across Canada, and extreme drought partially shuts down operations at the Panama Canal. Also, before we close today, some grim news out of this year's climate change-fueled wildfires in Greece, and a quick update on Wednesday night's upcoming "Trump-free" 2024 Republican Presidential debate in Milwaukee...

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We've got more Special Coverage on today's BradCast of the fourth --- and, theoretically, last, but who knows? --- criminal indictment of our disgraced former President for the Summer season. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

On Monday's show this week, just hours in advance of the massive new criminal charges out of Georgia, we detailed the dangers to next year's elections of the illicit Coffee County, Georgia voting system software breach carried out by Trump supporters beginning on January 7, 2021 (and covered up in the many months that followed by Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger). The scheme --- which we helped break last year and have been covering ever since --- is now known to have been just one part of a multi-state conspiracy organized by Trump attorney Sidney Powell and hatched inside Trump's Oval Office in December of 2020. It remains a huge threat to the security of next year's Presidential elections across the entire state of Georgia and in more than a dozen states with jurisdictions using the same breached, proprietry hardware and software that was stolen from Coffee County.

On Tuesday's show, we detailed the sprawling 97-page RICO indictment [PDF] of Donald John Trump and 18 co-conspirators charged with 41 felony counts by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia late on Monday. The charges are related to Trump's alleged (and failed) criminal enterprise to steal the 2020 Presidential election in the Peach State (and elsewhere) and comes out of the two-year probe by Fulton County, D.A. Fani Willis. We broke down all of the charges, detailed those who were indicted, along with a focus on the specific charges brought against Powell and the three others facing several counts related specifically to conspiracies to commit Computer Theft, Computer Trespass, Computer Invasion of Privacy ("with the intention of examining personal voter data") and Conspiracy to Commit Election Fraud as part of the Coffee County scheme.

The new indictment brings the number of criminal felony charges that our disgraced former President is now personally facing in four different jurisdictions at both the state and federal level to a gob-smacking 91!

And then on today's program, our hot indictment summer continues, with both legal and political analysis of the new indictment with two old friends. Former attorney KEITH BARBER of Daily Kos (who joined us last week for a splendid preview and explanation of what RICO charges are!) is with us again today, along with award-winning Salon columnist and Hullabaloo blogger HEATHER DIGBY PARTON.

Among the many topics discussed on today's program related to the latest Trump Indictment and what it means moving forward into next week's first-of-the-season GOP Presidential debate and next year's election...

• General thoughts on and surprises from the new indictment.
• Barber on "the power of RICO".
• Parton on her article on whether former Trump Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows may be cooperating in Special Counsel Jack Smith's federal case on Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election.
• Barber on Meadow's motion to move his indictment from state to federal court.
• How and why did Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) escape indictment from Willis, despite his participation in the criminal enterprise to steal the Peach State election for Trump?
• The still wildly under-investigated matter of the scheme to replace Mike Pence as President of the Senate overseeing the Electoral College certification on January 6, 2021 with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). (Willis refers fleetingly to this scheme in her indictment, see p. 44; Barber wrote a bit about this as "Trump’s Plot To Kidnap The Vice President" back in April of 2022.)
• Trump's post-indictment Tuesday morning claim that next Monday he will release an "Irrefutable REPORT" on "Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia" in 2020 which he claims will be a "complete EXONERATION!" for him. (Giggle.)
• How that "REPORT" is likely to be an unlawful continuation of the same criminal enterprise under RICO that he is already charged with.
• What we should expect from next week's first-of-the-season 2024 GOP Presidential debate in Milwaukee and whether Trump will (or should) show up for it.
• My continuing --- if, apparently, controversial --- Spidey Sense (not a prediction...just a sense, as explained today) that Trump will, ultimately, not end up being the GOP Presidential candidate on next year's ballot...

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We thought it possible that the news might break during yesterday's program, as we were covering some very related news. It happened, instead, later in the evening, just a few hours after we signed off from The BradCast. And it was just about as broad and sweeping as we've been arguing that it was likely to be. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

A Fulton County, Georgia grand jury handed up a sprawling 97-page indictment [PDF] on Monday evening, detailing 41 criminal felony counts for its 19 named defendants. Leading the case, of course, are the 13 new charges against Donald John Trump, who is alleged by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to have run a racketeering (RICO) scheme with the other 18 defendants. The purpose of their criminal enterprise, the indictment details, was to steal the 2020 election from Joe Biden, Georgia voters and the American people. Happily, his racket failed.

The charging document details the counts related to the many different unlawful ways in which Trump and his co-conspirators attempted to flip the 2020 results in the Peach State, including by strong-arming state officials from members of the Legislator to the Secretary of State; lying to them all about non-existent voter fraud; threatening election workers into making false confessions; creating fake Trump electors as part of the scheme to pressure the Vice President into discarding the legitimate Electoral College results on January 6, 2021; and more, including the notorious voting system software breach in Coffee County which we had a hand in breaking on The BradCast more than a year ago.

Trump's indicted co-conspirators include his disgraced attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro and Sidney Powell; his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; former DoJ official Jeffrey Clark; a number of GOP operatives who conspired to threaten election worker Ruby Freeman; former GA GOP chair David Shafer; sitting GOP state Senator Shawn Still; former Coffee County GOP chair Cathy Latham; former Coffee County Director of Elections Misty Hampton and Atlanta bail bondsman, Scott Hall.

It was Hall's ill-considered phone call to frequent BradCast guest Marilyn Marks of the Coalition of Good Governance, bragging about his role in the entire illicit scheme to image hard drives on voting and tabulation systems made by Dominion Voting Systems in Coffee County, which initially helped reveal the unlawful plot last year. That phone call was aired for the first time on our show in May of 2022. We've been covering the entire plot --- a multi-state conspiracy hatched in Trump's Oval Office in December of 2020 and organized by Powell --- ever since on this show and at The BRAD BLOG, even as GA's Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger appears to have been working hard to cover it up ever since. That, despite the ongoing dangers to next year's Presidential election.

The breach plays a major role in Willis' indictment. She charges Powell, Hampton and Hall with seven conspiracy crimes each related to Computer Theft, Computer Trespass, Computer Invasion of Privacy ("with the intention of examining personal voter data with knowledge that such examination was without authority") and Conspiracy to Commit Election Fraud. Latham was also charged with those same seven counts and another four related to her dual role as one of the fake electors in Georgia.

All of that and more is detailed on today's program, including Willis' late night announcement of Trump's fourth criminal indictment in just over four months. He is now, personally, facing 91 charges in four different jurisdictions at both the state and federal level.

Finally today, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, which also happens to include some landmark good news for a happy change (along with the usual amount of grim news), to end today's program...

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New indictments did not yet come in Georgia as of airtime on today's BradCast. But, as the nation awaits the former President's almost certain fourth criminal indictment in about as many months --- and this could be the broadest and most sweeping yet --- a somewhat related "exclusive" by CNN on Sunday seems to have made a lot of folks suddenly pay attention to a story we've been covering in great detail on this show and at The BRAD BLOG for the better part of the past year.

The Coffee County, Georgia voting system breach by Trump supporters is likely to play a role in the expected new indictments from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, even though there was largely nothing "exclusive" at all about CNN's weekend report. At least to those of us who have been paying attention and reporting on it ourselves for the past year. But, that's okay. If CNN's coverage makes people sit up and pay attention to this critical issue, we'll take it.

If it helps people --- including other media outlets --- notice that the multi-state conspiracy is still either being ignored or actively covered-up by the folks who SHOULD be investigating it --- from GA Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI) and even the Dept. of Justice --- then, okay, bring on more such "exclusives".

CNN's Sunday report, deceptively headlined "Exclusive: Georgia prosecutors have messages showing Trump’s team is behind voting system breach," repackages material already reported long ago by outlets like Washington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta's NBC affiliate 11-Alive and, yes, The BradCast and BRAD BLOG. Almost all of CNN's material comes thanks to information discovered in a long-running federal lawsuit challenging the use of Raffensperger's new, unverifiable and insecure touchscreen voting systems, as filed years ago by the Coalition for Good Governance (CGG). CNN didn't even have the decency to name the nonprofit group in their "exclusive", referring simply to material "originally unearthed as part of a long-running civil suit focused on election security in Georgia."

As to the content of the story well, see our program from April headlined: "The Multi-State MAGA Conspiracy to Breach Voting Systems Was Hatched in Trump's Oval Office: 'BradCast' 4/24/2023". That show, from four months ago, features most of what CNN describes in their weekend "exclusive".

On that program, we were joined by guest SUSAN GREENHALGH, a election integrity and transparency expert who now serves as Senior Advisor on Election Security at FreeSpeechForPeople.org. Greenhalgh had discovered admissions in sworn testimony given to the U.S. House January 6 Committee revealing that the plot to have MAGA activists unlawfully obtain and copy sensitive, proprietary voting and tabulation system hard drives in multiple states (Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania) was a scheme dreamt up during Trump's crazy December 18, 2020 meeting in the Oval Office with attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, disgraced National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO and billionaire Patrick Byrne and others. Yes, the breaches in several states were not over-zealous local MAGA activists. It was a scheme hatched with the President of the Unites States himself.

Greenhalgh joins us again on today's program to continue connecting dots in the multi-state criminal scheme which remain uninvestigated or prosecuted to this day. (Pay attention, or wait to read them at CNN in about 6 months as "exclusive".)

Were it not for folks like Greenhalgh and CGG founder Marilyn Marks --- who had the wherewithal to hit the record button when one of the apparent MAGA breachers (Atlanta businessman Scott Hall) called her to essentially confess to the crimes in Coffee County --- we might not even know about it today. Lord knows Raffensperger and his friends in the Peach State have largely been covering it all up ever since the breach first occurred on January 7, 2021, the day after Trump's insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

"Who knows if there were other counties that they went into in Georgia?," Greenhalgh observes. "There might have been similar breaches in other counties. Because we've lacked a real, robust investigation from the people that are paid to protect our citizens and our government from these types of illegal activities, they haven't uncovered it!"

Charges were recently brought against some of the participants in Michigan's several breaches --- at least five of whom are also known to have been involved in the Georgia breach --- and charges may soon be brought against some of them by Willis in Georgia in the coming hours. But, as Greenhalgh argues, the threat posed by theses breaches to next year's 2024 election --- and accountability for all of the people who allowed it to happen --- is crying out for a federal conspiracy probe of this organized crime that took place in multiple states following the 2020 election.

"There's no deterrence," Greenhalgh asserts. "What we saw happen in Coffee County --- if these people do not face any consequences, the message that is being presented is, 'It's okay. Go ahead and do this. If you can get a complicit election official, go in and do whatever you want to the voting machines and nothing is going to happen to you.' This crime happened on videotape. There's no question about it. If this was a corner store robbed by some kids, they'd be in prison by now."

There is a lot more of note in my conversation with Greenhalgh, and she offers much more in a well-sourced and linked "Background Briefing" document published late last week.

Finally today, some very good news out of Montana, where a landmark legal challenge by young plaintiffs, aged 5 to 22, challenging Republican state lawmakers for failing to follow the state constitution's mandate guaranteeing a "clean and healthful environment," was victorious! The court found that the Montana Environmental Policy Act, which weakened environment protections on behalf of the state's fossil fuel industry, is unconstitutional. The first-of-its-kind ruling by a judge in the U.S. may very well affect similar suits by youth plaintiffs as now filed in all 50 states and nations around the world...

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For some reason, it seemed like a good moment on today's BradCast to bone up on exactly what "racketeering" or RICO charges are. I have a feeling it may come in handy in the days ahead. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

But, FIRST UP, it's Election Day in Ohio. One single statewide ballot issue, in the middle of August. That's because Republican lawmakers were hoping to undermine a ballot measure set for this November which, if successful, will codify protection for reproductive freedoms into the state Constitution.

For more than 100 years in the Buckeye State, Constitutional Amendments were adopted via the ballot with a simple majority vote. Today's measure, Issue 1, would raise the requirement needed for passage to a 60% super-majority. Of course, the GOP's Issue 1 on the ballot today would require just 50% + 1 for passage.

As we've been reporting, despite the state Republicans' attempt to sneak their anti-democracy Amendment past voters (after, earlier this year, adopting legislation to ban August Special Elections), early voting has been huge. Today's Election Day turnout was reportedly higher than expected as well. Happily, there were, so far, only a few reported problems at the polls. We'll see if that changes and we'll have reported results on this critical measure tomorrow.

THEN, over the weekend, Donald Trump's top attorney on his new indictment by Special Counsel Jack Smith for his many failed attempts to steal the 2020 Presidential election, was all over the news shows offering absurd defenses for his client's crimes. John Laura told Meet the Press, for example, that "a technical violation of the Constitution" isn't actually unlawful.

Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who happens to be a Constitutional law professor (as well as both the Lead Manager for the U.S. House during Trump's second impeachment for insurrection and a member of the bipartisan House Select Committee investigating it) strongly begged to differ. Critically, he noted in his response to Lauro's remarks, there are people serving years in jail in this country for falsifying one single vote, whereas Trump "tried to steal the entire election."

Thank you, Congressman!

NEXT, we continue to await what is almost certainly going to be Trump's fourth criminal indictment in about as many months. This one will come any day now, likely this week or next, courtesy of Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis in relation to Team Trump's failed attempts to steal the Peach State's election in 2020 from Joe Biden and the state's voters.

Her case, for reasons explained on today's program, could be expansive, including many charges and many conspirators acting in concert with Trump. Exactly who will be charged and what they will be charged with remains unknown.

Among the many questions about Willis' case: Will she invoke the state's "Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations" (or RICO) Act or just simple conspiracy charges? And, oh, by the way, what are the difference between the two, as RICO is best known for use against organized crime by the mafia, etc.?

Luckily, KEITH BARBER, former attorney, former Republican and current Daily Kos contributor on law and Constitutional matters, recently wrote about exactly that and joins us today for a helpful RICO primer and insights into Willis' likely imminent indictments.

Short version of the difference between "conspiracy" and "RICO", as Barber wrote last month: "Conspiracy requires an agreement between the co-conspirators to commit what are usually specific crimes. RICO does not require proving any such agreement. So long as the parties commit the required predicate offenses, as part of the same 'enterprise,' acting 'in furtherance of a common purpose,' RICO can be satisfied."

As Barber tells me today: "The mob boss doesn't necessarily plan anything with the guy who is running the protection racket He may not even know him. But they are both engaged in the same broad criminal enterprise. That's the distinction between RICO and conspiracy. You don't have to show the connections that are shown in the [Jack] Smith indictment of Trump between the co-conspirators. It's sufficient if they engage in a pattern of racketeering activity in furtherance of the same general objective."

If you'd like a more detailed explanation, tune in to today's show, when Barber also offers his thoughts on who is likely to be indicted. "All indications are, all the hints are, that it's going to be a whole lot of people, with a whole lot of charges. It's kind of mind-boggling how many people it could be."

Also discussed: last night's court ruling in columnist E. Jean Carroll's rape and defamation case against Trump and his counter-suit for defamation against Carroll. Short version: Trump's suit was tossed as the judge confirmed that, yes, Trump was found by a jury to have been a rapist according to common vernacular, and Carroll's second civil trial against him (she already won $5 million from him during the last one, now she's suing for at least $10 million) is scheduled to begin early next year and could be a very very short trial given everything that was already established as a fact in the first trial.

FINALLY, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as the death toll rises under prolonged extreme heat in Arizona; climate change unleashes a brand new flooding problem in Alaska; President Biden moves to protect a million acres from uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, and extreme rains and deadly flooding continue to pummel parts of Europe...

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Ten years ago, a BradCast like today's would have been unimaginable. Today, it's just our latest BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Among our many stories covered (some of which we've been trying to get to all week but for all the breaking news that kept bumping them!)...

• The former President of the United States pleaded "not guilty" to felony crimes in his third arraignment in four months. This one at the federal courthouse in D.C., on four alleged charges [PDF] brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith related to Donald J. Trump's failed conspiracies to steal the 2020 Presidential election before, during and after his January 6, 2021 insurrection. Defendant Trump was reportedly warned by the magistrate judge overseeing his arraignment about committing more crimes, tampering with jurors or communicating with co-conspirators while he was freed pending trial.

• Congressional Republicans still pretend they are "fiscal conservatives". Shamefully, the media still allows them to do so. But their brand of "fiscal conservatism" is, once again, costing the Government and American people untold billions. This week, the Fitch Rating service downgraded the U.S. credit rating from top tier AAA to AA+, citing principally the GOP's recent brinkmanship threatening to allow the U.S. government to default on its debts for the first time in history, and even due to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The newly lowered credit rating led the stock market to dive in response, is already increasing the cost of government borrowing and mortgage rates for homeowners.

• On Tuesday, the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin officially flipped to a liberal majority for the first time in about 15 years after the election of Milwaukee Judge Janet Protasiewicz to the high court back in early April. The new era in the critical Presidential battleground state comes not a moment too soon, as Republicans in the gerrymandered state Senate are attempting to oust Elections Administrator Meagan Wolfe from the state's Election Commission after unanimously appointing her four years ago. When Trump lost the state in 2020, state Republicans decided the experienced administrator who has successfully overseen thousands of state election jurisdictions and is well-respected by clerks and experts of all parties, had cheated --- or didn't cheat enough --- or something. And now, amusingly, Democrats on the Election Commission are citing a ridiculous, 4 to 3 opinion by the state Supremes from last year, when the court had a rightwing majority, which allowed agency heads to remain in place after their term had ended. (The ruling was meant to support a sleazy GOP scheme to prevent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers from being able to appoint his own nominees to state agencies.) The 2024 election in the critical battleground state now hangs in the balance and may --- or may not --- as Bolt's Cameron Joseph reports, lead the Court's liberals to change their position on the issue when this matter, almost certainly, makes it's way to the newly liberal high court.

• Michigan's failed 2022 Republican candidate for Attorney General, Matt DePerno, was indicted this week along with a former GOP State Rep. on state charges related to accessing and tampering with voting systems. The Trump-endorsed Matt DePerno was a 2020 election denier already under investigation for the alleged crimes when he was nominated by his party to become the state's top law enforcement official last year. State Attorney General Dana Nessell then referred the probe to a Special Prosecutor who brought charges this week against DePerno, former State Rep. Daire Rendon and, as we've learned since getting off air, GOP attorney and Trump ally Stefanie Lambert. The Special Prosecutor, D.J. Hilson, suggests more charges are likely coming as part of a scheme by the MAGA Republicans to take voting system tabulators from several counties in order to "test" them for...something or other. Lambert and four others targeted by the probe, also participated in the breach of sensitive voting system hardware and software in Coffee County, Georgia, a story which we broke on this show last year and have been covering in detail ever since.

• Speaking of Georgia, election deniers, voting system breaches and GOP attempts to steal the 2020 election, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, over the weekend, said she is "ready to go". She made the remarks to a local news outlet, suggesting she will be bringing indictments in her broad conspiracy probe of Team Trump's failed attempt to steal the Peach State's 2020 election "before September the first of 2023". Willis recently warned County officials to "stay alert" and keep staffers "safe" as barricades have now been erected around the County Courthouse in anticipation of new indictments. In her warning to County Commissioners, she shared a sample of the appalling, racist threats her office has received recently. All signs suggest that Trump --- and perhaps many others --- are about to be indicted in her probe. It would be Trump's fourth such criminal indictment in the past four months. We told you long ago accountability would be coming. Now, it finally is. Bigly!

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with a climate in crisis that couldn't care less about politics. A new study finds that man-made climate change is getting very costly for small businesses; record high temps are, ironically, forcing the shut down of oil refineries and raising gas prices in the bargain (neat trick, eh?); and, speaking of Georgia, the state has finally opened the nation's first new nuclear plant in decades. It is already costing state ratepayers a lot more money...

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As the nation awaits new, almost-certainly coming indictments of the former President at both the federal and state level within the next few days and/or weeks, we were able to catch up on several related and unrelated items on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

Among today's stories...

• Congrats to AP for coming up with yet another novel way to not report directly on the fact that Donald Trump tried to STEAL the 2020 election! I'm fairly certain theirs is the first reference I've seen over the past two and half years of media trying to avoid the most accurate term for what he did by, in this case, reporting on his efforts to "unravel" his 2020 loss. Really, AP? Unravel?

• Meanwhile, we've been reporting for well over a year now, in detail, on the dangerous, unlawful, MAGA-led breach of wildly vulnerable statewide voting systems in Coffee County, Georgia beginning the day after the January 6 insurrection in D.C. We've come at it from all angles over that year, and are still digging in to critical, uninvestigated elements of the story --- including the attempts to cover it all up by the County itself and GA's Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger. But I've been asked by a number of readers and listeners of late if I know whether or not Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis is probing that breach --- which could help unravel the 2024 election --- as part of her broad conspiracy investigation into Trump's various attempts to steal the 2020 election in the Peach State. The short answer is "sorta". The Guardian's Hugo Lowell has been reporting of late that "computer trespass", in reference to what Team Trump did in Coffee, is likely to be included among the charges for some named in Willis' "imminent" indictments. (See here today and a few more details four days ago from Lowell here. For more details beyond that, tune in to today's show!)

• While the odds are getting longer by the day, there is still a chance that Trump will not ultimately be the GOP candidate for President in 2024. I explain why that could still be the case and, with that in mind, which of the many GOP also-rans appear likely to qualify for the first GOP Presidential debate next month in Milwaukee.

• As to the "imminent" indictments expected from Special Counsel Jack Smith in relation to Trump's attempts to steal the 2020 election before, during and after January 6, 2021, new polling suggests a majority of Americans (if not Republican voters) believe that a third indictment would be a good enough reason for the disgraced former President to drop out of next year's race. Not that he will.

• While our fossil-fueled climate continues to wreak havoc across the globe this Summer, it seems as if a switch has been flipped in recent days, with Fox "News" and the Republican Party suddenly launching a last-gasp, desperate attempt at preventing the quickly accelerating global transition to clean, Electric Vehicles. Now who could possibly be behind such an effort? We discuss and debunk the everything-old-is-new again attacks on EVs coming from the Fossil Fuel industry's tools on the right.

• Finally, speaking of climate havoc, Desi Doyen has our latest Green News Report as the Summer of 2023 continues to break records for record-breaking heat, fire and flooding. Oh, and Fox "News" has found their newest dumb thing to pretend to freak about in the bargain: saving money with more efficient water heaters! Sigh...

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Today on The BradCast: It's taken longer than it should have to get here, but Accountability Season for Trump World is finally beginning to fire on all pistons, even as his stooges in Congress, pretending to bring "accountability" for..."Biden crime family" something or other...continue to step on rakes. That part is hilarious. [Audio link to show follows this summary.]

First up today, the GOP House "whistleblower" face-plants...

• Yesterday, we quickly detailed a supposed "IRS whistleblower" claim that Trump-appointed and Biden-retained U.S. Attorney David Weiss was somehow blocked by Biden's DoJ from bringing anything more than a couple of minor misdemeanor charges against Hunter Biden for under-paying two years of taxes. In a letter sent to Sen. Lindsey Graham, however, Weiss made clear that the GOP argument was completely false and that he was given full agency to investigate and prosecute anything he wanted.

• Then, just after airtime last night, there was news about yet another supposed GOP "whistleblower" blowing up. This one has long been touted by House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer...at least until the guy, Gal Luft, suddenly went missing a few months ago. Still, Comer, claimed the dude was ready to spill the goods on a massive bribery scandal regarding the Bidens and illicit payoffs from China. Comer appeared on Newsmax just three days ago with a host describing Luft as "well connected in intelligence circles in Washington" and "not just some weird guy who popped up out of nowhere." Comer agreed that Luft was "very credible" and that people on MSNBC who said he looked like a fool would be sorry. Well, the guy is still on the lam, but on Monday, we learned why. The DoJ unsealed an 8-count indictment against Luft, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, related to working as an unregistered foreign agent for China; brokering illicit Chinese weapons and Iranian oil deals; and unlawfully trafficking arms to places like Libya, UAE and Kenya. Other than that, he's "very credible" and will soon be cracking open the Biden Crime Family case with House Republicans who don't look like "fools" at all.

In news today of actual accountability for real crimes...

• Grand jurors are being convened in Atlanta today, where they will soon be voting on indictments in Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' broad criminal probe of the attempt to steal the 2020 Peach State election by Donald Trump and his henchmen, including Rudy Giuliani, fake electors, and likely many others. Let the accountability begin!

• Accountability is already under way for a number of Trump's top 2020 legal henchmen. In recent days, a panel of the D.C. Bar found Rudy Giuliani should be disbarred in the District for bringing "frivolous" and "destructive" lawsuits after the 2020 election that falsely alleged fraud. The formerly respectable NYC Mayor turned disgraced Trump attorney has already had his license to practice law suspended in New York, but still has a few more chances to appeal his case in D.C., even after the panel determined that his misconduct was so disgraceful that it "sadly transcends all his past accomplishments."

• L. Lin Wood, a formerly respected Georgia attorney turned Trump wingnut was allowed by the State Bar of Georgia last week to transfer to "Retired Status effective immediately," rather than face disciplinary charges from the state Bar for his part in attempting to steal the 2020 election for Trump with bogus lawsuits. The retirement is "unqualified, irrevocable, and permanent," and bans him from practicing law in Georgia or any other jurisdiction. But it allows the seemingly mentally unstable, formerly high-profile 70-year old attorney to retire to his $16 million South Carolina plantation without consequence.

• John Eastman, the disgraced, far-right Trump attorney responsible for dreaming up the unlawful and unconstitutional scheme to have then Vice President Mike Pence block Joe Biden's Electoral College certification in Congress on January 6, 2021, is in an ongoing trial with the California Bar Association facing 11 disciplinary charges likely to result in the loss of his license to practice law in the Golden State.

• Late last week, disgraced, deadbeat Trump advisor and former Campaign Chair Steve Bannon was ordered by a New York Judge to pay his own former attorneys nearly $500,000 after stiffing them for legal fees related to representation in his unsuccessful trial for Contempt of Congress after refusing to answer subpoenas from the House Jan. 6 Committee (he was sentenced to 4-months in prison, but is currently free pending appeal) and many other crimes and grifts.

• MyPillow, the Minnesota-based company founded and run by 2020 election fraud conspiracist Mike Lindell, is reportedly auctioning off factory equipment and sub-leasing manufacturing space after, according to Lindell, losing $100 million in business following his continuing, evidence-free claims that the election was stolen from Trump. Now he's mad at "the box stores, the shopping networks, the shopping channels" because "all of them did cancel culture on us." We're all crying in our Bud Light beer for ya, Mike.

And finally...

• While Accountability Season is finally beginning, Climate Season is, sadly, fully underway all across the globe and, as Desi Doyen details in our latest Green News Report, here at home with record temps broiling the U.S. Southwest and hurricane-like downpours drenching the U.S. Northeast. (Rainfall in Vermont over the past 24 hours has now reportedly outpaced 2011's Hurricane Irene.)

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Today's BradCast is dedicated to the good people (and not the bad ones) of the great state of Georgia. The entire program, in one way or another, is devoted to the Peach State and the real patriots who live there --- as opposed to the fake ones who describe themselves as part of the so-called "Patriot Movement" while dedicating themselves to actually undermining democracy. [Audio link to full show follows this brief summary.]

I'm gonna try to keep this short today, because you've got plenty to both listen to on today's show and read in a BRAD BLOG investigative exclusive published on Tuesday.

FIRST UP, actual patriots, Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman --- the Atlanta election workers who Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump despicably and falsely declared to have committed fraud in 2020, as they bravely worked unspeakable hours in a pandemic to help safely carry out the election --- were fully cleared of any and all wrong doing. That, according to a long-overdue report issued Tuesday by the state's Board of Elections (BOE), Bureau of Investigations (GBI), the FBI and GA Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger. The pair's defamation lawsuit, however, against Giuliani continues. We hope it is successful. They deserve it.

THEN, we're joined by journalist DOUGLAS LUCAS to discuss his detailed investigative report today headlined: "A Secret Meeting Within a Secret Meeting: Unspooling the Coffee County, Georgia Voting System Breach and Continuing Cover-Up."

Lucas takes a deep dive into the bizarre and continuing machinations by the local County Board of Elections and County Commissioners in Coffee County to continue the cover-up of what actually happened when a group of Sidney Powell funded and organized MAGA conspirators breached the local Elections and Registration building in January of 2021 to make unlawful copies of the sensitive and proprietary software on the state's new and wildly vulnerable Dominion Voting Systems computers.

The intruders, as we have learned, were invited in to the elections office by Coffee's then Election Supervisor, Misty Hampton, with the help of several local GOP officials in the right-leaning rural County. The breach began the day after the Trump-incited January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, though was hatched in Trump's Oval Office in December of 2020. There has been a wild effort to hide the truth of what really went on there, how it came about, the threat it now poses to next year's Presidential election in the critical battleground state and in more than a dozen other states where the same Dominion systems are now used.

Lucas' report involves lies and cover-ups by local officials, members of a major national law firm that represents the County, and even from Sec. of State Raffensperger who appears to want to make the entire matter simply disappear. The still ongoing tale also includes a bizarre cameo appearance from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who, for some reason, landed his plane at the tiny airport in Coffee County for a few hours late one night, after a long and circuitous trip from Mar-a-Lago to D.C. and back down to Douglas, Georgia the night before the local Election Supervisor was to resign (or be fired) in February of 2021, the month following the breach.

With nobody yet held to account, County officials are still obfuscating and refusing to answer questions about secret meetings in Coffee the day after Lindell's brief visit, but Lucas breaks a few key nuggets of the story to help crack the wall of silence, with confirmation from local officials who are finally beginning to talk. At least a little.

"Raffensperger should be the bulldog on this," he tells me today. "The best you could say is that he is slow-rolling this, which is not a legitimate thing to do when we're talking software for elections, including the 2024 general elections and Presidential election...He should absolutely be pursuing this harder than he has." But Lucas is being more generous to the SoS than evidence suggests he deserves. An investigator from Raff's office was actually caught on surveillance footage walking in during the MAGA breach. Yet, we are still waiting for Raffensperger to take any real action about whatever happened --- and is still happening --- in Coffee County.

Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis is believed to be investigating some of the players in this story. But, with her hands more than full, there is much more that she has yet to show any sign of probing. That's where we come in with today's report, along with help from some of the local residents of Coffee who now find themselves in a battle for the very soul of their beloved county.

Tune in for the full story on today's show and see Lucas' deep-dive at BradBlog.com today for all the details!...

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At first glance, a closed-door executive session of the Board of Elections at the Coffee County Courthouse in the battleground state of Georgia appeared to involve nothing more than discussion of that day's resignation letters from then-Election Supervisor Misty Hampton and her assistant over their purported cheating on timesheets.

But the previously undisclosed, simultaneous presence of an unacknowledged quorum of County Commissioners at that executive session --- a secret meeting during a secret meeting, a game-changer confirmed by The BRAD BLOG --- combined with curious doth protest too much efforts the County is still using to defend its secrets about the supposedly humdrum assembly, indicate the February 25, 2021 meetings (now known as meetings plural) and surrounding events were the nexus of a much broader statewide, perhaps even nationwide, cover-up.

That night, the very same reputedly run-of-the-mill Thursday in February when the elections board gathered at the Courthouse, MyPillow founder and close Trump associate Mike Lindell --- a chief Stop the Steal bankroller --- landed his private jet in the county's tiny seat of Douglas, population 11,685. A few hours earlier, flight records show, he landed in D.C. A few hours before that, his plane took off from a runway not 15 miles from the private Mar-a-Lago club belonging to a certain twice-impeached Florida Man named Donald J. Trump. Why did Lindell fly so circuitously from the Palm Beach area to the nation's capital and then back down south to rural Coffee County, of all places?

And why did he want to speak with Misty Hampton, Coffee's resigning Election Supervisor? Evidence yielded from a years-long lawsuit by actual election experts challenging Georgia's Dominion voting system has revealed that the far-right bedding baron's lawyer, Kurt Olsen, tried to get ahold of Hampton the previous evening to talk, as word spread that she'd be dismissed the next day. Why would he want to do that?

Over the January prior to the unexplained meeting(s) --- in fact, beginning just the day after armed and violent Trump supporters assailed the U.S. Capitol in hopes of preventing Joe Biden's 2020 election victory --- a motley mix of mostly MAGA operatives illicitly entered the Coffee County elections building on multiple occasions. The breach was funded and organized by Trump attorney Sidney Powell, that prolific and since-sanctioned filer of failed lawsuits seeking to steal Biden's 2020 win.

One client of the breach-funding Powell, it turns out, was "fake elector" Cathy Latham, the former Coffee County GOP chair. Latham was found to have helped facilitate --- and to have lied about her presence during --- the breach at the elections office, where the invited intruders copied Dominion's proprietary software that is still to be used in the 2024 Presidential election in Georgia and numerous jurisdictions beyond.

Hampton, as director of elections for the Republican-leaning county, welcomed the Powell-paid team into the local elections office to have at the voting equipment, tabulators and sensitive election management systems.

With statewide voting systems gravely compromised by the ensuing breach --- Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger forces every county to use the same touchscreens, also employed in more than a dozen states nationwide --- and with traces of top Trumpers everywhere, the scandal is, as the county seat's Mayor Pro Tem recently put it, "only getting bigger."

Indeed, Atlanta-based District Attorney Fani Willis is reportedly investigating the Coffee County breach, along with Team Trump's multistate plot to gain access to and copy data from voting systems in other states as well. The scheme, as we have since learned, was hatched during a notorious December 2020 meeting in the Oval Office with Trump present. That fact came to light in testimony to the U.S. House subcommittee that investigated January 6th.

Frustrated, fighting back tears, Douglas Mayor Pro Tem Olivia Pearson, a lifelong Coffee resident and voting rights activist in the majority black seat of the majority white county, said at a recent gathering as the reality of the breach finally began galvanizing local residents, "We have got to make it right. We can't keep covering it up!"

Starting in earnest last month, local residents have increasingly attended the Board of Elections' open meetings, only to be told, more than once, by its unapologetic Chairman Wendell Stone --- who some locals are said to describe as "Chairman Stone(wall)" --- to stop asking questions.

Of course, that makes us want to ask many more questions about what really happened among the cows and cornstalks in the rural Peach State county. Such as: Why did Hampton and her assistant who helped facilitate the unlawful Trump/Powell/MAGA breach to illicitly copy and distribute Coffee County's sensitive voting system software actually tender their resignations on February 25, 2021?; Did local and state officials know about the breach and attempt to cover it up with secret meetings? What on Earth was Mike Lindell doing there for several hours that night?; And why has the office of Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, heralded by some as a 'moderate Republican' hero for not helping Trump steal the state's election in 2020, denied the severity of the breach and lied by both omission and commission to aid in covering it all up?

And, yes, all of this matters at the national level --- not only to the Coffee residents, who have lately found themselves in a fight they never asked for over their beloved county's soul...

We have been reporting for at least two years now on the analysis by the plaintiffs' expert in a Georgia voting system lawsuit said to reveal vulnerabilities so alarming that the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the federal case actually sealed the report, even from the plaintiffs themselves! On today's BradCast, that report is finally unsealed. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

But, first up, just a quick reminder of what some folks on the right seem willing to do to try and game elections anyway they can possibly think of, even if it involves the Republican candidate for Secretary of State in Michigan using nonsense claims to sue to prevent voters in the state's largest city (Detroit) from being allowed to vote by mail. That's what Trump-endorsed SoS candidate Kristina Karamo did last year, before losing to the incumbent Sec. of State Jocelyn Benson by nearly 15 points. After losing, the conspiracy theorist Karamo "failed up" to be elected as GOP state chair. And, this week, she and several top state Republican lawyers and candidates were sanctioned for more than $58,000 for their wildly frivolous attempt to use the state courts to steal the 2022 election.

Meanwhile, some of us actual election integrity advocates continue to fight for actual election integrity that doesn't prevent any legal voter from casting a vote, and that attempts to make sure that all of those votes are known to have been counted as per every voter's intent.

Which brings us back to Georgia once again today, and the lawsuit that we have been covering for years now. In 2019 it resulted in a federal judge banning the state's 20-year old Diebold touchscreens after finding them to be (as we'd long argued), insecure and unverifiable. Shamefully, the state's Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger defied the no-uncertain-terms advice from the nation's top voting system and cybersecurity experts and replaced them with new unverifiable touchscreen systems in 2020, rather than a simple, inexpensive, verifiable hand-marked paper ballot systems. Instead, Raffensperger purchased a $150 million touchscreen system made by Dominion with many of the very same vulnerabilities as the state's old Diebold touchscreens.

Frequent BradCast guest, Marilyn Marks of Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff in the case that succeeded in banning the old Diebold systems, expanded the suit to challenge Raffensperger's new Dominion systems, seeking to ban them as well (other than for disabled voters who wish to use them) in favor of hand-marked paper ballots. The expert for plaintiffs in the so-called Curling case, Dr. J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, was then allowed to examine the new Dominion touchscreen Ballot Marking Device (BMD) systems. His report, however, finding multiple vulnerabilities was said to be so damning that it was sealed by U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg and kept from both plaintiffs and the public for the past two years.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) --- which oversees the nation's critical infrastructure, including computerized voting and tabulation systems --- was allowed to review Halderman's sealed report last year. They were so alarmed they issued an advisory citing “vulnerabilities...that should be mitigated as soon as possible.” And yet, as we reported exclusively on The BradCast last month, even though Dominion has now completed and certified the necessary upgrades, Raffensperger's office has told Judge Totenberg that they plan to wait until 2025 --- after the critical 2024 Presidential election in the battleground state --- to install the security enhancements on the state's 35,000 voting machines and more than 35,000 printers, scanners, and election management computers that support them.

All of that is made even more alarming by the fact that the day after the January 6th 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol --- as we have also been reporting on in detail over the past year --- a group of MAGA folks, organized by Trump attorney Sidney Powell, were allowed by members of Georgia's Republican Party and the Coffee County Board of Elections to breach the Dominion voting systems in the small rural county to make unlawful copies of the system software before distributing it over the Internet. It was part of a multi-state scheme that we now know to have been hatched in Trump's Oval Office in December of 2020. The matter is believed to be under investigation as part of the broad conspiracy probe by Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis into Trump's efforts to steal the state's election in 2020. But, in the meantime, the Coffee County breach has allowed these lawless rightwingers to find and potentially plan to exploit all of the vulnerabilities that Halderman discovered and lawfully documented two years ago.

These same flawed Dominion systems are also now used in more than a dozen states, though only Georgia mandates that every county use the same system and requires that every voter at every polling place cast their vote on one of these terrible, unverifiable touchscreens.

Which brings us to today's very big news. The U.S. District Judge overseeing the Curling case has finally allowed Halderman's report to be unsealed! It is now posted here along with a simplified, summarized analysis of his own report that he has now published here. The Coalition for Good Governance's press release and additional context on the unsealing is here. (They all take care to note that Halderman's report neither alleges nor supports any claims of election fraud in the 2020 election.)

Among just some of the report's disturbing findings, according to Halderman today: "We discovered vulnerabilities in nearly every part of the system ... The most critical problem we found is [a] vulnerability that can be exploited to spread malware from a county's central election management system to every BMD [touchscreen Ballot Marking Device] in the jurisdiction. This makes it possible to attack the BMDs at scale, over a wide area, without needing physical access to any of them."

He adds, "Our report explains how attackers could exploit the flaws we found to change votes or potentially even affect election outcomes in Georgia."

One vulnerability allows an attacker to simply place a USB drive into a slot to install malicious code that could modify the election definition file to change election results. Another allows voters to print as many ballots as they like. Another allows malware to change both QRCodes printed on the ballots, which are used by the system to tally votes, and to even change the text of the printed ballots themselves.

We're joined today to discuss all of this by longtime cybersecurity and voting system expert RICHARD DEMILLO, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he recently founded Georgia Tech's new School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. He formerly served as Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett-Packard, in a leadership position at the National Science Foundation, and on the board of the Verified Voting Foundation. He has also advised plaintiffs in the Curling case.

"What we learned," from Halderman's report, he tells me today, "is that these voting machines are approximately like every other computer that we have in our daily lives. They don't work all the time, they're subject to being hacked, they get misconfigured easily, they get lost, they get stolen, sometimes people use them for illegal activities. And all the assurances that we have from voting machine companies and Secretaries of State --- about how well these machines are curated, vetted and tested --- is what experts have known all along as just a bunch of crap."

"The level of naivete, I think, involved in managing this technology is mind-boggling," DeMillo argues, citing Raffensperger's resistance to hardening the systems --- or, better yet, moving to hand-marked paper ballots --- "as a personal affront to his abilities."

"The headline here is that the things that you worry about --- and, kind of embarrassingly, the things that the election deniers are setting their hair on fire about --- is pretty close to what the vulnerability is. With modest capabilities, someone who had resources could attack, in the case of Georgia on a statewide basis, and install malware that could change votes."

"The Sec. of State's office in Georgia is tied emotionally to this idea of Ballot Marking Devices," says DeMillo. "You would think that saner minds would prevail and they would step back and say 'Why don't we move to a technology that is safer? We know how to manage the risk that is hand-marked paper ballots.' Which, by the way, 70% of Americans use to cast their votes anyway."

So, will unsealing Halderman's report make the system more vulnerable or less so? That, and much more, is part of today's must-listen conversation with DeMillo...

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