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@politics on kbin.social is a magazine to share and discuss current events news, opinion/analysis, videos, or other informative content related to politicians, politics, or policy-making at all levels of governance (federal, state, local), both domestic and international. Members of all political perspectives are welcome here, though we run a tight ship. Community guidelines and submission rules were co-created between the Mod Team and early members of @politics. Please read all community guidelines and submission rules carefully before engaging our magazine.

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Ukrainian Soldiers Unleash Fury: Liberating 3 Square Kilometers on Bakhmut!Get ready for an awe-inspiring saga of valor and triumph! In this gripping video, ...

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Posting credit to georgetakei@universeodon.com

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The indictment is here. I’m going to keep updating this page as I go, so refresh for the latest version. There’s a number of different people getting charged for various sub-schemes within the overall attempt by Trump and his coconspirators to corruptly overturn the Georgia election for President in 2020, so I’ll take them as a few different sections.

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ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump and 18 allies were indicted in Georgia on Monday with scheming to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state, with prosecutors turning to a statute normally associated with mobsters to accuse the former president, lawyers and other top aides in a sweeping criminal conspiracy aimed at keeping him in power.

The 97-page indictment details dozens of acts by Trump and his allies to undo his defeat in the battleground state, including hectoring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to find enough votes to keep him power, pestering officials with bogus claims of voter fraud and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of electoral college electors favorable to Trump. It also outlines a scheme to tampering with voting machines in one Georgia county and steal data.

“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” says the indictment issued Monday night by the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Other defendants included former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani; and a Trump administration Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, who advanced his efforts to undo his election loss in Georgia. Multiple other lawyers who devised legally dubious ideas aimed at overturning the results, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, were also charged.

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Trump—already charged in New York, Florida, and D.C.—now appears to be facing an indictment in Georgia.

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A panel of federal judges on Monday began a review Alabama’s redrawn congressional map which opponents argue blatantly defies the court’s mandate to create a second district where Black voters have an opportunity to influence the outcome of an election.

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Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia are in possession of text messages and emails directly connecting members of Donald Trump’s legal team to the early January 2021 voting system breach in Coffee County, sources tell CNN.

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The Biden administration has requested the US Supreme Court review Florida and Texas laws restricting how social media companies like Facebook moderate the content users post on their platforms.

In briefs filed on Monday, the US solicitor general urged the court to take up a pair of lawsuits led by the tech trade group NetChoice. Both Florida and Texas passed laws making it illegal for large social platforms to suspend or punish users, citing long-standing allegations that major platforms are biased against conservatives. A series of temporary injunctions have left the future of these laws in limbo, and Monday’s briefs add new pressure on the Supreme Court to resolve the suits.

“The platforms’ content-moderation activities are protected by the First Amendment, and the content-moderation and individualized-explanation requirements impermissibly burden those protected activities,” the briefs read. “The Court should not, however, take up NetChoice’s separate contentions that the laws’ general-disclosure provisions violate the First Amendment and that the laws were motivated by viewpoint discrimination.” That means it will not support overturning a Florida court decision that allows transparency-focused portions of the rules to stand.

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Vladimir Putin's attempts to justify the invasion of Ukraine as a just war to reunite historically Russian lands reflect the expansionist ideology at the heart modern Russia's imperial identity, write Glenn Chafetz and John Sipher.

To understand Russia’s current obsession with Ukraine, it is important to recognize that Russia was never a state in the common usage of the term. Unlike the modern Turkish state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire, or Great Britain, which acquired and lost an empire, Russia never had an identity separate from empire. As British historian Geoffrey Hosking observed, “Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire.”

The Kremlin’s preferred narrative of Russia rising from present-day Ukraine (“Kyivan Rus”) is a Moscow-concocted fairy tale. The officially endorsed 1000-year history of Russia is a self-created and self-perpetuated myth that generations of Russian dictators have promoted to justify their external expansion and internal repression.

Instead, what we think of today as Russia started out as a loose collection of independent city states that included Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, Tver, and Moscow, the last of which attained particular significance toward the end of Mongol rule a little over 500 years ago. Kyiv was no more a part of Russia then than it is now. There was no common language, no common administration, and no joint identity. Indeed, it would be centuries before the rulers of Muscovy attempted to assert their dominance over Kyiv and the lands of today’s Ukraine.

It was the era of Mongol rule and not the Kyivan Rus inheritance that paved the way for the rise of the Russian Empire. Under Ivan III (“The Great”), Muscovy established itself as the strongest of the city states to emerge from the Mongol period. Ivan called himself “Tsar of all Rus,” but he was actually more like the mayor of Greater Moscow. It was Ivan who started the expansion of Muscovy, initiating the so-called “gathering of Russian lands.” His expansionist vision has been embraced by virtually every subsequent ruler of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation.

Ivan III’s quest to acquire new territories, often under the guise of “reuniting the lands of the ancient Rus,” continues to this day and has had a profound impact on world history. As Historian Stephen Kotkin has noted, “Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of fifty square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass.”

Few of the peoples inhabiting the lands Ivan III and his successors claimed saw themselves as Russian, at least not before they were “gathered.” At the time of Ivan III’s death, Muscovy covered less than a fifth of the area of today’s Russia; notably, it did not include the territory of modern Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, or all of Siberia. Crimea, about which Vladimir Putin rhapsodizes, was not part of the Russian Empire until Catherine II took it from the Crimean Khans in 1783.

If Putin is concerned with righting historical wrongs, he should give Crimea back to the Crimean Tatars. He won’t do this, of course, because the dynamic of imperial conquest and Russification is a key component of legitimacy for Putin, as it has been for almost all of Russia’s rulers (Yeltsin and Gorbachev partially excepted). Russia expands because its rulers need an external threat to justify their autocracy. This was as true for the Soviet period as it had been for Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.

Putin’s Russia laments the loss of imperial glory, and has never come to terms with its repressive past. The security-expansion paradox driving Russia’s foreign and domestic policies is a vicious cycle that all empires experience to one extent or another. Acquisition creates threats inside the newly acquired territories and on the expanding borders of the growing empire. Expansion demands inward Russification and repression, and further outward expansion. As Catherine the Great famously said, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.”

This dynamic can end in two ways: Either through external containment or internal democratization. The latter has proved problematic for the Russian people, and is not something Russia’s neighbors should count on happening any time soon. The former has worked before, during the Cold War.

Modern Russia remains an empire and does not see itself as a Great Power unless it dominates its neighbors. Consequently, Russia will continue to threaten, attack, and absorb its neighbors until the West acts collectively to contain it.

Russia and its apologists will complain that containment ignores Russia’s legitimate security concerns. This is a canard because Russia’s security concerns constantly expand. In reality, Russian leaders have absolutely nothing to worry about if they return to their country’s internationally recognized 1991 borders. The West has always respected these borders; it is Russia that has not. Until modern Russia moves beyond its deeply ingrained imperial identity, this is unlikely to change.

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Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez is nothing like her backers expected.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — After Ohio voters repealed a law pushed by Republicans that would have limited unions’ collective bargaining rights in 2011, then-GOP Gov. John Kasich was contrite.

“I’ve heard their voices, I understand their decision and, frankly, I respect what people have to say in an effort like this,” he told reporters after the defeat.

The tone from Ohio Republicans was much different this past week after voters resoundingly rejected their attempt to impose hurdles on passing amendments to the state constitution — a proposal that would have made it much more difficult to pass an abortion rights measure in November.

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A statewide committee is looking at doing something that hasn’t been done in Florida in more than 50 years — redrawing the boundaries of the state’s 20 circuit court districts, a projec…

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Right-wing activist Anton Lazzaro has been sentenced to 21 years after being convicted of sex trafficking minors.

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Aaron and Lacey Jennen’s roots in Arkansas run deep. They’ve spent their entire lives there, attended the flagship state university, and are raising a family. So they’re heartbroken at the prospect of perhaps having to move to one of an ever-dwindling number of states where gender-affirming health care for their transgender teenage daughter, Sabrina, is not threatened.

“We were like, ‘OK, if we can just get Sabrina to 18 ... we can put all this horrible stuff behind us,’” Aaron Jennen said, “and unfortunately that’s not been the case, as you’ve seen a proliferation of anti-trans legislation here in Arkansas and across the country.”

At least 17 states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors, though judges have temporarily blocked their enforcement in some, including Arkansas. An Associated Press analysis found that often those bills sprang not from grassroots or constituent demand, but from the pens of a handful of conservative interest groups.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s campaign is seeking to blunt the efforts of a super PAC supporting rival Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign by sending a letter to all state Republican parties on Thursday arguing that they cannot work with a super PAC as if it is representing a candidate.

David Warrington, an attorney for Trump’s 2024 campaign, contends in the letter that a super PAC, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, should not be allowed to undertake traditional campaign activities that directly benefit a candidate or “act as de facto campaign arms.”

While the letter does not specifically cite the well-funded Never Back Down organization, it’s aimed at the super PAC, which has been taking on an expansive role supplementing DeSantis’ campaign, such as helping voters fill out cards pledging to support him in Iowa’s caucuses and hosting the governor as a “special guest” on multi-city bus tours.

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We’re keeping track of the recent pileup of revelations regarding secret financial arrangements between the justice and his rich friends.

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It may be the dog days of August, but elections never sleep. Today in Mississippi, voters head to the polls to pick their nominees for state and legislative off…

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OKEANA, Ohio - As Kristen King’s husband lay dying in their yard from three gunshots to his head, the 911 operator asked her: Did she know who killed him – or why?

Sobbing, King identified the shooter as her neighbor in the small Ohio town of Okeana. “His name is Austin Combs,” she stammered. “He’s come over, like, four times confronting my husband because he thought he was a Democrat.”

Then she broke down. “Why?” King wailed on the 911 recording, struggling for breath. “He’s the love of my life!”

The Nov. 5 killing of Anthony King was among 213 cases of political violence identified by Reuters since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by supporters of former President Donald Trump on the U.S. Capitol. Three academics who reviewed the cases say they add to growing evidence that America is grappling with the biggest and most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s.

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A key memorandum drafted by Chesebro -- which might otherwise appear relatively innocuous even in how it is discussed in the indictment -- laid the foundation for the scheme grounded, in part, on misrepresenting my work.

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Russell Moore criticized Donald Trump and the Southern Baptist Convention's response to a sexual abuse crisis. Then he found himself on the outside.

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WINDHAM, N.H. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday kept up his attacks on special counsel Jack Smith and vowed to continue talking about his criminal cases even as prosecutors sought a protective order to limit the evidence that Trump and his team could share.

In the early voting state of New Hampshire, Trump assailed Smith as a “thug prosecutor” and a “deranged guy” a week after being indicted on felony charges for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The former president lobbed the insults at Smith just days after the Department of Justice asked a judge to approve a protective order stopping Trump from publicly disclosing evidence. Federal prosecutors contend that Trump is seeking to “try the case in the media rather than in the courtroom.”

The judge overseeing the case has scheduled a hearing over the protective order for Friday morning. Trump, after his rally on Tuesday, made a post on his social media network attacking the judge, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio voters on Tuesday resoundingly rejected a Republican-backed measure that would have made it more difficult to change the state’s constitution, setting up a fall campaign that will become the nation’s latest referendum on abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned nationwide protections last year.

The defeat of Issue 1 keeps in place a simple majority threshold for passing future constitutional amendments, rather than the 60% supermajority that was proposed. Its supporters said the higher bar would protect the state’s foundational document from outside interest groups.

Voter opposition to the proposal was widespread, even spreading into traditionally Republican territory. In fact, in early returns, support for the measure fell far short of former President Donald Trump’s performance during the 2020 election in nearly every county.

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Special Counsel Jack Smith‘s investigation appears to include the reportedly millions of dollars Donald Trump‘s PAC raised – and spent – after the 2020 election, with legal experts suggesting if the massive amounts of money raised were based off fraudulent claims, the federal government might “seize” those funds or require them to be returned.

“This isn’t over yet,” says NBC News national security analyst Frank Figliuzzi, a former top FBI official. “When you raise millions based on a fraudulent claim, you’ve committed a crime. And, you just might have to give those millions back.”

Figliuzzi’s remarks are based on a Tuesday report from Politico that reveals, “Special counsel Jack Smith’s probe of efforts by Donald Trump and others to subvert the 2020 election remains ongoing — with at least one interview this week that focused on fundraising and spending by Trump’s political action committee.”

Top Rudy Giuliani ally Bernard Kerik, the disgraced former NYPD Commissioner who was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2020, was interviewed by Jack Smith’s investigators in “a closed-door interview on Monday.”

Kerik was “asked multiple questions about the Save America PAC’s enormous fundraising haul in the weeks between Election Day and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to Kerik’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who was present for the interview and shared details with POLITICO.”

“It’s a laser focus from Election Day to Jan. 6,” Parlatore told Politico.

NYU Law School professor Andrew Weissmann, the well-known MSNBC/NBC News legal analyst and former FBI General Counsel, offered this advice:

“Keep your eyes peeled for a criminal case about the Trump PAC and forfeiture allegations/seizures. Case wd [would] not need to go all the way up to Trump before Jack charges folks and seizes assets.”

Professor of law Jennifer Taub responded with a bit of snark: “Wire fraud? Delicious.”

Last year in June NPR reported that, according to the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, “the Trump campaign took $250 million in donations from supporters that it said would go to an election defense fund to pay for legal fees to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. But the fund was never actually created, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the committee members, said … in the panel’s second public hearing.”

“Instead, the money went to the Save America political action committee,” NPR reported.

And in September of last year, Vanity Fair reported, “Two of Trump’s former top aides, Stephen Miller and Brian Jack, were issued subpoenas this week,” in an article noting that a “federal grand jury is now looking into former President Donald Trump’s Save America PAC.”

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