News of Rodgers' claims reached attorney Mark Bangston, who posted an open letter aimed at the quarterback in a 12-part rant on X, where he called the former Green Bay Packer "defective, " a "freak" and "broken in a fundamental way."

Bankston began by noting he represented several grieving Sandy Hook parents before writing, "Hey Aaron, not sure if you’ll see this, but I figure the best chance is to put it here on Twitter, where it will hopefully be sandwiched between a tweet claiming the measles vaccine makes children gay and an ad for a cryptocurrency scam. To start, I can’t say it really surprised me to see you had been spreading nonsense about Sandy Hook because although I have not followed your sports career closely, I am quite aware that you are a slow-witted, gullible person."

Continuing in that vein, he added, "Sadly, I’d have to live under a rock not to notice the frequency in which the media reports on whatever screwball propaganda you most recently swallowed like a hungry trout confronted with a shiny lure," adding, "Being a poor schmuck who latches onto claptrap maybe isn’t the biggest sin in this day and age, but I can’t fathom how on earth you manufactured the confidence to think you have something useful to offer to any of these discussions.".....

"It means you can’t be trusted with important decisions. It means nobody benefits from listening to you. It means you’re broken in a fundamental way. It means you’re weak, and you’re desperate to believe what a grifter will happily sell you. It means you’re not a leader and will never be one. You’re not cut out to be an influencer, a role model, or even an amusing iconoclast. Because you’re not eccentric; you’re defective. And that’s not a funny joke," he wrote before concluding by suggesting, "Could you please shut the f--k up?"

As Jets’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers continues to be floated as a possible running mate for presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an attorney who represented Sandy Hook parents has some thoughts for the guy who people have said embraces some dark conspiracy theories.

According to a CNN report, that includes the notion that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was fake. The network reported Rodgers told a journalist he believed the massacre was staged and that the children were “crisis actors. Twenty children and six educators were killed in the mass shooting.

Last year, Sandy Hook families who sued popular conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over similar claims won nearly $1.5 billion in legal judgments.

“As I’m on the record saying in the past, what happened in Sandy Hook was an absolute tragedy. I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place. Again, I hope that we learn from this and other tragedies to identify the signs that will allow us to prevent unnecessary loss of life. My thoughts and prayers continue to remain with the families affected along with the entire Sandy Hook community.”

As Judge Lew Kaplan (who oversaw both E. Jean Carroll trials) explained in the lead-up to last year’s trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, it’s a collection of evidence that a defendant uses to raise reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind as to whether prosecutors have adequately demonstrated his intent to commit the crime or crimes in question. Specifically, it consists of proof that a defendant:

“made a complete disclosure to counsel [concerning the matter at issue];”
“sought advice as to the legality of his conduct;”
“received advice that his conduct was legal;” and
“relied on that advice in good faith.”

And significantly, when a defendant invokes the advice of counsel defense, that typically waives any privilege he or she could claim over communications with their lawyers about the matter in question.

In the New York criminal trial, however, Trump wants to point to his lawyers’ involvement in the Stormy Daniels settlement and related events as proof that he lacked intent, while at the same time disclaiming a “formal advice-of-counsel defense” and insisting that he is not waiving any attorney-client privilege. Instead, Trump announced in Tuesday’s filing that he “intends to elicit evidence concerning the presence, involvement and advice of lawyers in relevant events giving rise” to the 34 felony counts with which he has been charged. And he makes clear how he intends to elicit that evidence: through the testimony of witnesses, including former executives of the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., and his former lawyer-turned-archnemesis, Michael Cohen. Collectively, Trump argues, those witnesses are expected to testify to “Trump’s awareness of counsel’s involvement in the charged conduct.”

The question now is whether Trump’s attempt to thread the needle will succeed. After all, in one of the cases he cites to support his kind-of, sort-of advice of counsel defense — the same Kaplan opinion cited above, in fact — the defendant declined a formal advice of counsel defense, opting instead to highlight Bankman-Fried's awareness that attorneys were involved in certain decisions at his companies that related to the charges against him. That involvement, the defendant insisted, could show “his good faith and lack of criminal intent.” But the government objected, and the court reasoned that merely pointing to the “presence or involvement of lawyers at or for” the defendant’s companies “without any degree of specificity about what they were present for or involved in, what their tasks were, what exactly they knew, and what the defendant knew about what the lawyers knew and were doing” could confuse the jury and prejudice the government.

In the New York criminal trial, however, Trump wants to point to his lawyers’ involvement in the Stormy Daniels settlement and related events as proof that he lacked intent, while at the same time disclaiming a “formal advice-of-counsel defense” and insisting that he is not waiving any attorney-client privilege. Instead, Trump announced in Tuesday’s filing that he “intends to elicit evidence concerning the presence, involvement and advice of lawyers in relevant events giving rise” to the 34 felony counts with which he has been charged. And he makes clear how he intends to elicit that evidence: through the testimony of witnesses, including former executives of the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., and his former lawyer-turned-archnemesis, Michael Cohen. Collectively, Trump argues, those witnesses are expected to testify to “Trump’s awareness of counsel’s involvement in the charged conduct.”

The question now is whether Trump’s attempt to thread the needle will succeed. After all, in one of the cases he cites to support his kind-of, sort-of advice of counsel defense — the same Kaplan opinion cited above, in fact — the defendant declined a formal advice of counsel defense, opting instead to highlight Bankman-Fried's awareness that attorneys were involved in certain decisions at his companies that related to the charges against him. That involvement, the defendant insisted, could show “his good faith and lack of criminal intent.” But the government objected, and the court reasoned that merely pointing to the “presence or involvement of lawyers at or for” the defendant’s companies “without any degree of specificity about what they were present for or involved in, what their tasks were, what exactly they knew, and what the defendant knew about what the lawyers knew and were doing” could confuse the jury and prejudice the government.

In any event, the jurors might also receive an instruction that goes something like this: “[N]o man can willfully and knowingly violate the law and excuse himself from the consequences of his conduct by pleading that he followed the advice of his lawyer”— or that his lawyer was involved directly in his conduct.

“We have the first-ever election integrity division at the [Republican National Committee],” Lara Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday evening. “That means massive resources going to this one thing. If people out there, Sean, don’t feel like their vote counts, they don’t trust the system we have, then we are no longer the country we once thought we were.”.....

People like Trump’s longtime attorney Rudy Giuliani. People like Christina Bobb, onetime host on the fringe-right cable channel One America News and, now, the RNC’s senior counsel for election integrity.

Until this appointment, Bobb’s legacy from this era was likely to relate to her service as one of Trump’s enormous, evolving coterie of attorneys. Bobb signed the June 2022 document asserting that Trump had turned over to the government all material marked as classified in his possession. (He had not.) But now she has a chance to make her mark on Trump’s signature electoral issue.

She has a robust pedigree, at least as far as Trump is concerned. Soon after the 2020 election, she began working with Giuliani and others to elevate baseless or later-debunked claims about the results in various states having been tainted by fraud. She was involved in the “audit” of votes in Arizona, working with Trump campaign official (and Georgia co-defendant) Mike Roman. She wrote a book, published in January 2023, cataloguing familiar (and baseless or debunked) criticisms of the results. It’s all there, from Antrim County to State Farm Arena to True the Vote. (The book’s forward was written by Stephen K. Bannon; Jim Hoft of the conspiracy-promoting site Gateway Pundit wrote a blurb.).....

The most important part of all of this, of course, is that in-person fraud of the sort that these efforts are meant to combat is vanishingly rare. The odds that someone “watching” a polling place and uncovering someone trying to vote illegally are near-zero. The odds that those poll-watchers will, instead, hassle someone trying to vote legally or scare off people uninterested in being similarly hassled are much, much higher.....

Even things like requiring voter identification have been shown to disproportionately affect turnout among Black and younger voters, groups that vote more heavily Democratic. In the pre-Trump era, there was often an understanding on the right that the advantage of making it harder to vote wasn’t that it prevented fraud (given how rare it was) but that it offered a perceived advantage in suppressing Democratic votes. By all appearances, the new GOP actually thinks that fraud needs to be combated.

It’s against this backdrop that the House Republican Conference left the nation’s capital this week for an annual retreat, held this year at a historic luxury resort in West Virginia. According to an Axios report, the gathering is “aimed at unifying the conference.”

That goal might be easier to achieve if more GOP members were willing to show up. Roll Call reported:

The first order of business at the House GOP’s annual retreat, which kicked off Wednesday, was a press conference on expanding the majority, though less than half of that majority planned to attend the retreat. ... [A] spokesperson for the Congressional Institute, which sponsors the Republican Issues Conference, said just over 100 members of the 218-member majority had RSVP’d they were going.

One lawmaker told reporters for Axios and Politico this week, in reference to the conference’s retreat, “I’d rather sit down with Hannibal Lecter and eat my own liver.”....

Evidently, party leaders focused on “unifying the conference” will have to try again some other time

"Let's sort through that," Scarborough said. "'Mr. President, you've been treated worse than anybody in history.' Let's start with a couple. Jesus Christ was crucified, little worse. Joan of Arc burned at the stake. That's two we can notch above there. Abe Lincoln assassinated. Martin Luther King assassinated, Bobby Kennedy assassinated, JFK assassinated – that's a little worse. Black Americans, let's see, did anything happen to them? Yes – ripped from their country, ripped from their homes, put in chains, dragged across in slave ships to America where they were slaves from 1619 until 1860 -- that's a little worse. Yeah, I think that's worse than what Donald Trump is going through."

Even worse, Scarborough said, were the former president's supporters who revel in Trump's self-pity.

"These sad, sad people who are so freakish to try to elevate this -- you know, he plays like a strongman, [but] he's such a poor, pathetic, weak, snowflake," Scarborough said. "He's a snowflake. I want Dr. Evil to start talking about his father and how all the things his father did to him, and Donald Trump will next take that on board. 'He accused chestnuts of being lazy.' But it's just so insane that he is -- here, you have this billionaire, was president of the United States, and he's just such a victim, he's so weak. Everybody is picking on him, everybody is trying to play right into the victimhood."

"Listen, we Republicans used to -- I mean, when I was a Republican, we were like, you know what?" Scarborough added. "Don't be the victim, don't be weak, you know, the pull yourself up by your bootstraps type nonsense, that's what Republicans used to be about – personal responsibility. Now it's all victimhood. Look what they've done to me. They're such babies– such whiners."

WASHINGTON — In the most significant criticism made by a U.S. leader against the Israeli government since its war with Hamas began, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday called for new elections in Israel to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the U.S., said in remarks on the Senate floor that “the Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7.”

“The world has changed — radically — since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” Schumer said in what was billed as a major address by the Democratic leader from New York.

Netanyahu has “lost his way,” Schumer continued, “by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” Schumer said that Netanyahu has aligned himself with “far-right extremists” like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who he said are “pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.”

“Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah,” the majority leader said.