A federal judge in Florida has cleared the way for the release as early as Tuesday of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his investigation into alleged election interference by President-elect Donald Trump.

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In an order Monday, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon said the Justice Department could proceed with plans to make public Smith’s findings detailing Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

But she barred the government from releasing — even to select members of Congress — a separate volume detailing Smith’s investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and obstruction of government efforts to retrieve them.

Two of Trump’s former co-defendants in the classified documents case — longtime employees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira — have said they could be unfairly prejudiced if that part of Smith’s report is made public. Cannon scheduled a hearing Friday to hear their concerns and said she would decide the fate of the classified documents volume after that.

Any part of her order could be immediately appealed by Trump, his co-defendants or the Justice Department.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has said he intends to make public the first volume of Smith’s report, on the election-interference case, but would share the classified documents findings only with leaders of certain congressional committees to protect Nauta and De Oliveira while litigation in their case continues.

Time is running out for Garland to execute that plan before Trump takes office and his administration assumes control of the Justice Department next Monday.
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Under Justice Department regulations, special counsels must submit a final report to the attorney general at the conclusion of their investigations, detailing their findings and decision-making process. The attorney general is required to give that report to Congress and to decide whether it should be made public. Smith, who resigned his post Friday, submitted the two-volume summary of his findings in both investigations to Garland last week.

Neither case went to trial, and Smith’s report is expected to provide the fullest possible accounting of the evidence gathered by investigators and the strategy prosecutors would have used in court.

Smith asked a judge to dismiss the election-interference charges after Trump’s election victory in November, saying he stood by the facts of the case but recognized that Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president.

Cannon tossed the classified documents case in July, ruling that Smith had been unlawfully appointed. After the November election, the Justice Department dismissed Trump from its appeal of that decision, which is pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Nauta and De Oliveira are still parties in the case.
Last week, lawyers for all three men urged federal courts to prevent the Justice Department from releasing the special counsel’s findings on either investigation. Trump’s lawyers maintain that doing so would interfere with the president-elect’s orderly transition. Attorneys for Nauta and De Oliveira say releasing the report would prejudice the public against them if the 11th Circuit revives the classified-documents indictment and they are put on trial.

The U.S. government is barreling toward yet another pointless, unforced crisis: a federal shutdown just ahead of Christmas. No one planned it, exactly. Yet it seems almost inevitable.
Why? Because President-elect Donald Trump and his unelected co-president, Elon Musk, have accidentally “Art of the Deal”-ed themselves.

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Trump is widely expected to “shake things up,” which appears to be a euphemism for indiscriminate destruction. He hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but with another erratic egomaniac billionaire now assisting him in his shake-up (and occasional shakedown), he’s already ahead of schedule.

Funding to keep basic government operations running expires on Saturday. Lawmakers have spent the past few weeks negotiating a relatively banal, bipartisan spending agreement to keep the lights on until March 14 at current funding levels with a handful of other elements added in (hurricane relief funding, a potential cost-of-living adjustment for lawmakers’ pay, etc.).


Until recently, Trump had ignored these negotiations entirely. But early on Wednesday, Musk decided it was time to start breaking things, so he posted a tirade of incoherent and often outright false complaints about the deal, demanding that it be nuked.

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He then added that no legislation should pass until Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20. This would mean a federal government shutdown for about a month (at least). He might get his wish: The original bill died; a replacement bill failed in a House vote Thursday night; and Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump seemed to cheer on the wreckage, suggesting maybe a shutdown isn’t so bad after all. “If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration,” Trump posted on TruthSocial.
It might seem difficult to understand how Musk or Trump could possibly view an extended shutdown — especially one lasting through the inauguration — as a favorable outcome. Shutdowns cost the government money, since winding down operations (and then ramping them back up) is expensive. They also weigh on the overall economy; a five-week, partial government shutdown starting in December 2018 reduced U.S. gross domestic product by $3 billion, the Congressional Budget Office estimated. This was the lasting cost even after everything was turned back on.


A shutdown would probably also present political challenges. Usually an incoming administration wants some breathing room in its first few days to focus on its own priorities, not to enter office amid chaos. It’s also unclear how a government shutdown might affect the pageantry of the inauguration, which clearly matters to Trump. (I’ve asked several budget experts this question, and no one seems to know. No administration has ever had to decide which parts of a presidential inauguration are considered “essential” government services during a shutdown.)
Nevertheless, this sequence of events makes complete sense if you’ve read Trump’s best-selling memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” or looked at any of his prior business, political or diplomatic negotiations. His favorite negotiating tactic is blowing up an (ostensibly) settled deal at the 11th hour. He thinks that’s how he gains the “leverage” he needs to force a counterparty to make some painful, valuable concession.
But there are (at least) three problems with this strategy in the context of the stopgap spending package.


The first is that the counterparty in this scenario is his own party. Trump and Musk are negotiating against their fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), who appears to have been blindsided by the last-minute Musk eruption. Johnson put together the deal, after all, with necessary Democratic support because the GOP house majority is so slim (and the Senate is still controlled by Democrats).
The second problem is that Trump and Musk do not seem to understand the concept of “repeated play.” If you can’t be trusted to keep your word on a handshake deal, people act accordingly the next time they negotiate with you. Or maybe they refuse to negotiate with you at all. Which might be an indicator of how congressional negotiations will go next term, when Trump returns to office and Republicans have an even thinner margin in the House.
Finally, the biggest problem is that Trump and Musk seem to have no idea what their demands are. They want leverage for a concession, but they struggle to articulate what that concession would be. How do you negotiate with someone who doesn’t know what they want?


This has been a problem before with the modern Republican Party. GOP lawmakers often know they don’t like some offer on the table, but they can’t come up with a desirable counteroffer. They just think making an ultimatum is a cool power flex, something that might impress their voters. In this case, maybe the concession is an increase in the debt limit (which some GOP lawmakers have shot down). Or maybe, as Musk tweeted, it’s just … doing nothing at all? At least until Trump moves into the White House again.
So congrats, Co-Presidents Trusk. You’ve already ultimatumed yourselves into oblivion.

West High Grad and former Hawkeye Justin Wieck bringing in his UMD Bulldogs....thoughts? He has some solid experience/success at a fairly high level. I love the idea of a former player/resident(same as Gatens) coaching the Hawks.

via @Eliot Clough

Three Thoughts on the Iowa's addition of Bryce Hawthorne out of the transfer portal:

- Iowa's options at DT heading into 2025
- Iowa's overall depth on the DL for next year
- going after Hawthorne's SDSU teammate, QB Mark Gronowski

MORE HERE:

To fight the great wars of Greenland, Canada and Panama. God trump is dumb as ****. Online maga thinks it’s all cute and a joke with his rhetoric.

Voting no on the Social Security Fairness Act...Thank goodness other members of Congress saw the unfairness in the WEP(Windfall Elimination Provision) & GPO( Government Pension Offset) laws and said good by to those ideas !! You three get a lump of coal in your christmas stockings from me!! Merry Christmas everyone !! Here are some receipts in case you didn't know...
In case you don't know about WEP & GPO....heres what they did:
Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP):** This provision reduces the Social Security benefits for individuals who receive pensions from jobs not covered by Social Security, typically affecting public sector employees like teachers, police officers, and firefighters who worked in states or municipalities that offer their own pension plans instead of contributing to Social Security.

- **Government Pension Offset (GPO):** This affects the spousal or survivor benefits of someone who also receives a government pension from work where they did not pay Social Security taxes. It can significantly reduce or eliminate these benefits, particularly impacting widows, widowers, and spouses.

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Doing Jack Campbell things

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Shortly after 1 a.m. on Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump took to social media to attack one of his long-standing foes, someone whose power had long frustrated the former president. Then, having excoriated NBC's Seth Meyers for some jokes, Trump turned his attention to former special counsel Jack Smith.


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Smith’s report documenting the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election had been publicly released shortly before. The president-elect — without having read the report, we can safely assume — disparaged Smith’s probe as simultaneously political and tired. Smith’s report was “based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs” — that is, the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot — “ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED,” Trump wrote. He added that this material had been destroyed (it wasn’t) because it “showed how totally innocent I was,” which would suggest that Smith’s report also shows how totally innocent he was (it doesn’t).
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This scattershot approach to spin is by now familiar. Everything that is good for Trump is exceptionally good, the best, while everything that’s bad is fake and dishonest and illegal in its own right. Trump didn’t need to read the report to craft his social media post any more than we needed to read his post to know what it said. It said what it always says: He did nothing wrong but Smith et al did.


Americans, though, should read Smith’s report. What it lays out entirely undercuts the idea that Smith’s actions were political, detailing instead precisely how and why charges against Trump were warranted. Not because he was a threat to Biden’s reelection (as Trump insists) but because he engaged in an exceptional effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
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It’s striking to consider the extent to which even the most obvious elements of that effort have been successfully bogged down in partisan debate. For example, Donald Trump (as the report notes) called on people to come to a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. That morning, he stoked the anger of a large crowd and told them to head to the Capitol. They did, attacking police and pushing into the building, delaying the final step of confirming Trump’s loss. Trump watched on TV, waiting hours before he called on the protesters to leave.
All of that is obviously true. The scattershot response — it was the feds; it wasn’t that bad; Trump told them to be peaceful; it wasn’t his fault — has nonetheless effectively convinced millions of Americans that Trump bears no culpability for what unfolded.


Smith’s report doesn’t focus specifically on that event. Instead, it delineates Trump’s broader effort to retain power, an effort that culminated in the riot. That effort …

“included attempts to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force Justice Department officials and his own Vice President, Michael R. Pence, to act in contravention of their oaths and to instead advance Mr. Trump’s personal interests; and, on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol”

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… as the report explains.
Smith insists that his team was prepared to prove Trump’s culpability in these efforts and that he would have obtained a conviction. But the Justice Department has prohibitions against prosecuting sitting presidents and, in one week, that’s what Trump will once again be. So he ended his probe and released his report.
There are mandated elements to the report, according to the statute that dictates how special counsels conduct their work. One element is that the counsel must explain any charges they brought or any that they declined to bring. So Smith’s report walks through the charges Trump faced in the election-subversion case, explaining that they met the requirements of prosecution: serving a “substantial federal interest” that couldn’t be prosecuted in another jurisdiction and which couldn’t be addressed with non-prosecutorial action.


The most striking — and, with Trump’s re-inauguration looming, most disconcerting — articulation in Smith’s report of the “federal interest” served in bringing charges against Trump is the threat that his power posed to his critics and opponents.
“Consistently, when elected officials refused to take improper actions that Mr. Trump urged, like discarding legitimate votes or appointing fraudulent electors, Mr. Trump attacked them publicly on Twitter, a social media application on which he had more than 80 million followers,” the report states. “Inevitably, threats and intimidation to these officials followed.”
The end of the prosecution means the end of accountability for that deployment of power — and therefore, no disincentive not to engage in similar deployment in the future.

As he did in a filing last year, Smith also establishes that Trump’s efforts to subvert the election results were not consistent with past efforts to challenge the election results. None of the examples of past challenges offered by Trump’s attorneys, though, involved attempts “to use fraud and deceit to obstruct or defeat the governmental function that would result in the certification of the lawful winner of a presidential election.” Trump’s push was exceptional.

That’s a central part of Smith’s case: This wasn’t normal. The special counsel “would not have brought a prosecution if the evidence indicated he had engaged in mere political exaggeration or rough-and-tumble politics,” the report states. Trump’s effort went far beyond that, from repeated lies about the election results — one 1,000-word footnote lists more than 30 examples of Trump’s lies being refuted in real time — to pressuring allies to acquiesce to his attempts to retain his position.
There was one charge that Smith’s team contemplated but didn’t charge: a violation of the Insurrection Act. As explained in the report, the stumbling block was less that Trump hadn’t attempted to subvert the transfer of power but, instead, that it wasn’t clear what legal standard for “insurrection” needed to be fulfilled to obtain an indictment.

There isn’t much that’s surprising in Smith’s final documentation of Trump’s actions, mostly because those actions have been explored and explained in the media and by the House select committee for years now. What the report adds instead is a forceful rebuttal to the idea that Trump’s indictments weren’t deserved, given his actions.

Trump best bet to beat the prosecution for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election was always to win the 2024 one. He did. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!” he wrote to conclude his social media post, suggesting that this was the only verdict required.
Now, Smith has also spoken. It’s safe to assume that history will reflect that his presentation of Trump’s actions is more accurate and fair than Trump’s presentation.

I clipped my toenail and slightly cut my big toe 10 minutes before this post. It bled a little. Instead of putting a huge bandage on it, I'm going to sleep with my socks on so I don't bleed on my blanket during the night. My blanket is white.

I tried sleeping with my socks on when I was a kid and it felt weird. I always sleep with my socks off.

CSB.

How about you?

Last night at a middle school basketball game the opposing coach threw a tantrum that would make Fran McCaffrey blush. This idiot not only started cussing out the officials but also started cussing at our boys while flailing his arms and turning psychotic. It got so bad they ended the game with :14 seconds left and a police officer had to escort him off the court.

Middle. School. Basketball.

I won’t mention the number of stupid parents who reeked of marijuana and knew about as much about basketball as MAGAs know about inflation.

Over the years, I have seen this type of behavior get worse and worse. I’m curious what others have seen. Any anecdotes?

So when they hang a picture up in the East Wing, will it be a group picture of his staff instead of Biden?

The WSJ comes out with some details of how bad it really was with Joe. The constant lies from the left about his mental capacity

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My favorite however will always be this dickbag going after Hur for something that was actually true

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I just watched the hilites of the usc vs Tx A&M bowl game. USC just loaded with receivers, how did they go 6-6 this year. And the other thought is how can Iowa not get at least one stud 6-3 type fast receiver with great moves, fast and with great hands?

This is the key to a much better hawk passing attack as one receiver like that who can make 6-8 grabs a game, draw double coverage at times which opens up your other receivers is a huge need.

Yes, we need the QBs who can put the ball on them also but I think that part is starting to materialize.

Maybe Buie and Howard become those types of receivers but the portal might be the quickest way to find one

I got my MIL posted up at the Whiteys on 41st street in Moline.

Poor woman can barely stand but I told her it Kirk can make $10 million a year to 💩 his pants on live TV, she can muster the courage to fund his salary by standing out in the rain and ring her swarm bell.

Please bring change or fiat currency. We tried setting up Venmo but she got scammed by some Tijuana Ladyboys for $150. Long story, don’t ask.

Massive lawsuit drama.

Any Skip Bayless fans here?