August 22, 2023

Wednesday, August 23,2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

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Trump update.

Trump Fulton County charges: Major developments Tuesday in the election subversion case | CNN Politics.

John Eastman made a statement to members of the press alongside his attorney, David Wolfe, outside the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, where he was booked on Tuesday.

CNN) — The first two of former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants surrendered at the Fulton County jail on Tuesday, while a pair of defendants sought to move their cases to federal court – signs of how the sprawling case will progress in multiple directions this week.

And two former Trump administration officials – including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows – asked a federal court to intervene to block their pending arrests in Georgia.

First defendants surrender.

John Eastman, a right-wing lawyer who advised Trump on plots to disrupt Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results, turned himself in Tuesday morning, shortly after Scott Hall, a bail bondsman in Atlanta.

Both Eastman and Hall, who reached bond agreements on Monday, were processed at the Fulton County jail in roughly an hour and released on Tuesday.

“I am here today to surrender to an indictment that should never have been brought,” Eastman said in a statement Tuesday. “It represents a crossing of the Rubicon for our country, implicating the fundamental First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances.”

Meadows, former DOJ official seek to avoid arrest

Both Meadows and Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official indicted after trying to use his federal law enforcement powers to overturn the 2020 election, have asked a federal judge to block them from being arrested by local authorities.

Meadows asked a federal court to issue an order that would prevent Willis from seeking his arrest after the passage of the Friday self-surrender deadline that she has set out for the defendants in the election subversion case.

Prosecutors issue subpoenas

The Fulton County district attorney’s office, meanwhile, issued subpoenas Tuesday to two people who had listened in on Trump’s January 2021 call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as prosecutors plan to counter Meadows’ bid to get the case tossed.

According to court filings, the subpoenas issued to two lawyers – Kurt Hilbert and Alex Kaufman – requested that they appear to testify in federal court on Monday at a hearing on Meadows’ request.

Bond agreements continue to be discussed.

Additional bond agreements were reached Tuesday afternoon, including a $50,000 bond for Trump campaign official Mike Roman; a $75,000 bond for Cathy Latham, who acted as one of the “fake electors” in Georgia; a $100,000 bond for attorney Jenna Ellis; a $50,000 bond for Georgia-based trial attorney Robert Cheeley; and a $75,000 bond for Stephen Lee, an Illinois-based pastor accused of intimidating a Georgia election worker after the 2020 election.

One more thing.

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Trump classified document case.

One more thing.

The witness who switched seems to be Yuscil Taveras — who held the title of director of information technology at Mar-a-Lago (Trump Employee 4).

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Trump announces plan for dangerous import tariffs. This will surely alienate America’s allies (and anyone with a brain).

Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war.

Even in the face of growing personal legal peril, Donald Trump summoned his top economic advisers to his private golf club in New Jersey for a two-hour dinner last Wednesday night to map out a trade-focused economic plan for his presidential bid.


Trump and top aides, including former senior White House officials Larry Kudlow and Brooke Rollins, as well as outside advisers Stephen Moore and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, spent the dinner discussing how Trump could attack President Biden in the 2024 election on the economy, amid a recent spate of positive economic news that has buoyed Biden’s fortunes, according to three people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private event.


Among the ideas they discussed was Trump’s plan to enact a “universal baseline tariff” on virtually all imports to the United States, the people said.

This idea, which Trump has taken to describing as the creation of a “ring around the U.S. economy,” could represent a massive escalation of global economic chaos, surpassing the international trade discord that marked much of his first administration.

Trump advisers have for months discussed various potential levels to set the tariff rate, and they said the plan remains a work in progress with major questions left unresolved, the people said.On Fox Business on Thursday, the former president called for setting this tariff at 10 percent “automatically” for all countries, a move that experts warn could lead to higher prices for consumers throughout the economy and could likely lead to a global trade war.

“I think we should have a ring around the collar” of the U.S. economy, Trump said in an interview with Kudlow on Fox Business on Thursday. “When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let’s say a 10 percent tax … I do like the 10 percent for everybody.

The proposed expansion of the tariff policy, which aides said is expected to be a central 2024 campaign plank, reflects how Trump is aiming to expand the power he wielded in the White House, eyeing sweeping authoritarian measures for his second term that range from deploying the military to fight street crime to purging the federal workforce. Trump is opting not to explain this vision to voters at the first Republican presidential primary debate, being held Wednesday. Trump said he will not attend.

Economists of both parties said Trump’s tariff proposal is extremely dangerous. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank, called the idea “lunacy” and “horrifying” and said it would lead the other major economies around the world to conclude the United States cannot be trusted as a trading partner. Although aimed at bolstering domestic production, a 10 percent tariff would hurt the thousands of U.S. firms that depend on imports, while also crippling the thousands of U.S. firms that depend on foreign exports, Posen said.

The United States today imposes an average tariff on imports of just above 3 percent, according to Posen. That number is higher for some countries, with goods coming from China facing an average import duty of 19 percent. “You would be depriving American families of an enormous amount of choice, making their lives much more expensive, and putting millions of people out of work,” Posen said.

Trump could use unilateral authority to exempt whatever countries he chooses from the automatic import tariffs. It would create enormous opportunities for influence-peddling, Posen said, following four years of a Trump presidency in which Saudi Arabia and other nations sought to steer Trump by frequenting his private businesses. “It is a recipe for corruption,” Posen said. “They will decide that whoever cozies up to Trump, or whoever his commerce secretary is, will get the exception.”

Even former Trump economic officials were sharply critical of the idea. “A tariff of that scope and size would impose a massive tax on the folks who it intends to help,” said Paul Winfree, an economist who served as Trump’s deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council and is now president of the Economic Policy Innovation Center, a center-right think tank. “It would get passed along through higher prices at a time when the Federal Reserve has had difficulty limiting inflation.” (Washington Post).

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Let’s beat all the Red Meat Republicans in Florida too.

Let’s start with Republican Senator Rick Scott.

Former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell jumps into Florida Senate race.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.) will challenge incumbent GOP Sen. Rick Scott in a race that could prove pivotal in attempts by Democrats to retain control of the U.S. Senate.

Mucarsel-Powell, who immigrated from Ecuador at the age of 14, is a Spanish-speaking Hispanic candidate from Miami-Dade who gives Democrats an opportunity to reassert themselves in one of the most crucial counties in the state. She’s jumping into the race amid a steady stream of encouragement from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and others.

Mucarsel-Powell will likely have to deal with a Democratic primary ahead of a November 2024 election. Former Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) is already in the race, as is Navy veteran Phil Ehr, who unsuccessfully challenged Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) in 2020.

But state Rep. Fentrice Driskell, the lead Democrat in the state House, announced on Monday that she will not challenge Scott. Driskell, whose decision was first reported by NBC News, said in a statement that while Scott “does not deserve to represent Florida in the U.S. Senate,” she added she “realized that my work in the Florida House is not done yet.”

Driskell said she needs to continue to fight against policies she said have eroded education, taken away “women’s freedoms, and doing nothing as Florida become too expensive for Floridians.”

Many have viewed Florida as a battleground state for the past two decades, but it has been trending more and more Republican in recent elections. Former President Donald Trump won the state in 2020 — and Gov. Ron DeSantis won reelection by more than 19 points last year. National Democratic groups last year did not invest large amounts of money in either the governor’s race or the Senate race between former Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

When asked whether national Democratic groups will bolster her campaign, Mucarsel-Powell said that “I’m not naïve at all to think everyone is going to come to our rescue here in the state of Florida.” She added, however, that she’ll work to show “that this is a race worth investing in.”

Still, Democrats contend that Scott is vulnerable. He has narrowly won all three of his races for office, including his razor-thin victory over then-incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) in 2018. Scott has never run during a presidential election year when turnout is expected to be higher.

Scott has also gained outsized attention — and criticism from fellow Republicans — for his Rescue America plan. The proposal initially called for all Americans to pay income tax and for federal legislation to sunset in five years, including social security. Scott wound up backtracking his proposal and has insisted he would never support getting rid of social security.

During the interview, Mucarsel-Powell brought up Scott’s convoluted positions on entitlement programs, but also took aim at his business past by noting his ouster as CEO of a company that later paid a $1.7 billion fine to settle allegations of Medicare fraud. Scott was not personally charged with any wrongdoing.

Scott will likely have to run in a primary as well, although no well-established Republicans have declared their intention to challenge him. Keith Gross, an attorney and businessman, has raised nearly $700,000 for his GOP primary challenge. (Politico).

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Do you think an exhibit at the Met on the Harlem Renaissance will outsell Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination or the Treasures of Tutankhamun?

The Met Announces Harlem Renaissance Exhibition for 2024.

Artworks on loan from historically Black institutions will make the show one of the largest surveys of the era in nearly 40 years.

A Black woman wearing a blue dress sits sideways on a chair, looking straight ahead with her left arm draped over the chair’s back.

“Woman in Blue,” by William H. Johnson, is being lent by the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum for the Met’s exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.”Credit...via Clark Atlanta University Art Museum.

Even before joining the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the curator Denise Murrell was dreaming up an exhibition dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance — one that would unite Black artists dedicated to “radical modernity,” as she described it, from New York to Paris and beyond.

On Tuesday, the museum announced that very exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” It will open on Feb. 25, run through July 28 and include a trove of paintings from historically Black colleges and universities around the country. The Met said it would be New York’s first major survey in nearly 40 years dedicated to one of the most influential artistic movements to have originated in the United States during the early 20th century.

“Becoming painters of modern life within their own communities was key to what the Harlem artists were attempting,” said Murrell, who joined the Met in 2020 and is now its curator at large. “It was an act of radical modernity, for example, to make portraits of an elder Black woman who would have been born into enslavement. And to make them in such a dignified way — those images simply did not exist in previous periods.”

Major museums, for the most part, did not begin collecting such works until decades after the Harlem Renaissance, which spanned roughly two decades, from 1918 to 1937. Met officials said the museum’s own collection was spotty, with some acquisitions occurring in the 1940s and again within the past 15 years, though it includes masterpieces by Samuel Joseph Brown Jr. and Charles Henry Alston. Instead, many of these cultural gems went to private collections and to historically Black colleges and universities.

Murrell spent the past two years working with those institutions on conservation and archival research projects; in exchange, significant loans are coming to the “Harlem Renaissance” exhibition from places like Howard University, Fisk University, Hampton University and Clark Atlanta University.

About half a dozen artworks are currently in the Met’s conservation studio, and in preparation for the show, the museum sent photographers around the world to take new pictures of artworks from collections in cities like London and Chicago. That includes significant works by overlooked female artists like Laura Wheeler Waring, whose portraits of women cast their deep interior lives onto canvas.

One standout in the exhibition is the 1943 painting “Woman in Blue” by William H. Johnson, who spent the 1920s and 1930s in Europe learning the techniques of modernism. He headed back to New York in 1947 after having a mental breakdown following his wife’s death in Denmark. He was confined in Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, unable to paint, until his death in 1970.

Murrell said the portrait of a woman sitting sideways, with one arm draped over the chair, staring pensively, was rarely exhibited, although an earlier study of the picture is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The painting will be the exhibition’s signature image.

“The colors are striking,” said Danille K. Taylor, director of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, which has contributed five paintings to the exhibition, including the Johnson painting. “It’s the angle that she looks at you. The colors and texture give it a three-dimensional quality.”

Until recently, the painting had large cracks across its surface and was in desperate need of restoration; the Met financed the portrait’s conservation, allowing it to travel outside the university.

Murrell said she hoped “Harlem Renaissance” would be the start of long-term partnerships between the Met and historically Black colleges and universities to help preserve and exhibit their collections on a national scale.

The Met acquired “Self-Portrait,” by Samuel Joseph Brown Jr., in 1943.

But the exhibition also comes with some extra baggage at the Met, whose 1969 exhibition “Harlem on My Mind” drew angry protests because of its exclusion of Black painters and sculptors in favor of newspaper clippings and documentary photography that captured the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood.

While the new exhibition is not a direct response to that show, Murrell said she would address its legacy by including work from James Van Der Zee, a leading photographer of the Harlem Renaissance whose pictures were included in the 1969 show. Many of the photographs come from an archive that the Met and the Studio Museum in Harlem acquired from the artist’s widow in 2021.

The curator also pointed out that the exhibition would focus on painting and sculpture, mediums that had previously been excluded. That includes the sculptor Augusta Savage, who opened the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in 1931, which trained over 1,500 students including Charles Alston, Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence. (New York Times. Zachary Small is a reporter who covers the dynamics of power and privilege in the art world. They have written for The Times since 2019.More about Zachary Small).

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