Fulton County investigators have another recording of a Trump phone call pressuring a Georgia official

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. [Click here to read the full web version.]( - [Fulton County investigators have another recording of a Trump phone call pressuring a Georgia official]( Fulton County investigators have another recording of a Trump phone call pressuring a Georgia official, Kristen Holmes and Jason Morris, CNN The recording adds to what’s known about the pressure campaign by Trump and his allies on Georgia officials. It’s the third audio recording of the former president’s phone calls to Georgia officials that is known to exist. The special grand jury recently concluded its work and recommended multiple indictments, according to the foreperson who has spoken out publicly. Now it’s up to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to make charging decisions. Ralston, who died last year, described his December 2020 call with Trump during an interview the following day. Trump “would like a special session of the Georgia General Assembly,” Ralston said. “He’s been clear on that before, and he was clear on that in the phone conversation yesterday. You know I shared with him my belief that based on the understanding I have of Georgia law that it was going to be very much an uphill battle.” According to the Georgia Constitution, not only can the governor convene a special session, the General Assembly can call itself into a special session, though that requires the signatures of 3/5 of the Georgia House. - [Republicans Blame the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse on ‘Woke’ Climate Financing. Economists Disagree]( Republicans Blame the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse on ‘Woke’ Climate Financing. Economists Disagree, Kristoffer Tigue, Inside Climate News Republicans are blaming the collapse of two major banks over the weekend on “woke” investment practices, once again dragging the effort to address the climate crisis into America’s increasingly polarizing culture wars. But their reasoning doesn’t align with assessments from leading economists who have mostly tied the bank failures to risky bets on cryptocurrency—not clean energy—and the plummeting value of government-backed securities amid rising interest rates. [...] According to analyses by Baker and other well known economists, the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, which held some $220 billion in assets and was America’s 16th largest commercial bank before its collapse Friday, was tied largely to the bank’s decision to buy up government bonds amid the tech boom between 2019 and 2022, when many Silicon Valley companies were flush with cash.[...] With deposits skyrocketing and demand for loans relatively low, the bank chose to invest the bulk of that money in government bonds, he said, which tanked in value as the tech boom faded and the Fed raised interest rates to curb inflation. As clients began asking for their money back, Silicon Valley Bank was forced to prematurely sell $21 billion in bonds at a $1.8 billion loss, triggering an old-fashioned bank run, Rubinstein concluded. Signature Bank’s collapse can be explained even more simplistically. As the finance trade publication Barron’s noted in its apt analysis, “the bank’s connections with cryptocurrency seem to have spooked depositors after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, prompting a run on the bank’s deposits which, in turn, prompted action from regulators.” - [2023 has gotten off to a rough financial start for Daily Kos. Our revenue is down and we need to lean more and more on our readers and activists to cover our expenses. Can you help by donating $3 right now?]( - [Fox News fears competitors will steal its ‘journalistic processes’]( Fox News fears competitors will steal its ‘journalistic processes’, Erik Wemple, The Washington Post ...a motion that Fox News filed on Friday may outpace all the internal correspondence for sheer risibility. It argues that the Delaware court presiding over the case should maintain the confidentiality of discovery material already redacted by the network, shielding it from the public’s curious eyes. As anyone who has read through the Dominion filings can attest, swaths of black lines cover passage after passage in briefs and exhibits. Could the redacted text be as scandalous as the public text? Fox News lawyers say one reason for the confidentiality is that competitors will pounce: “Prematurely disclosing these other details on Fox’s internal and proprietary journalistic processes may allow competitors to appropriate these processes for their own competitive advantage, to Fox’s detriment, and may chill future newsgathering activity,” the filing reads. Hold on here. Given the revelations that have emerged thus far from the litigation, what “journalistic processes” are in place at Fox News, proprietary or otherwise? And if another media organization moved to “appropriate” them, wouldn’t its editor in chief be sacked? - [War as the new normal]( War as the new normal, Maxim Trudolyubov, Meduza It has become a habitual gesture for Vladimir Putin to divest himself of responsibility. One of his oft-repeated phrases, “we didn’t start this war, but it is our job to end it,” might have sounded less out of place if spoken by Volodymyr Zelensky. In fact, it did come from Zelensky’s 2019 inaugural speech, in which the newly-elected Ukrainian president said precisely this, referring the Russian-occupied Donbas. Putin has coopted Zelensky’s maxim without so much as crediting the source. Coming from Putin, though, the phrase rings hollow and false, not just because he did, in fact, “start this war,” but also because he is utterly incapable of ending it. This incapacity is rooted in the political system Putin himself has created, part of which is the disorganized, unwieldy, and uncontrollably violent military that doesn’t stop at crimes against civilians. No leader can conduct a war marked by atrocities like those that shocked the world when the Russian army retreated from the Kyiv region, without forfeiting his chances of shaping the conditions for peace. As a leader, Putin cannot extricate himself from this war without facing the gravest accusations and possibly even threats to his life. As a result, his only way out of warfare is to crush the adversary, if he can. But given how big an ‘if’ this is, his best option is to perpetuate the war, since any conditional peace would probably mean Putin’s removal from power, followed by severe repercussions. - [Unlike a certain tacky red hat, Daily Kos hats are made in the USA and union decorated. Click here to get yours now.]( - [Donald Trump Must Be Prosecuted]( Donald Trump Must Be Prosecuted, Charles Blow, The New York Times Last year, around the time the House Jan. 6 committee was holding hearings, Elaine Kamarck, the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, wrote: “Prosecuting Trump is not a simple matter of determining whether the evidence is there. It is a question embedded in the larger issue of how to restore and defend American democracy.” I don’t see it that way. Any case against Trump must hang on the evidence and the principle that justice is blind. The political considerations, including gaming out what might be the ideal sequence of cases, across jurisdictions and by their gravity, only serve to distort the judicial process. The justice system must be untethered from political implications and consequences, even the possibility of disruptive consequences. For instance, could an indictment and prosecution of Trump cause consternation and possibly even unrest? Absolutely. Trump has been preparing his followers for his martyrdom for years and evangelizing to them the idea that any sanctioning of him is an attack on them. This transference of feelings of persecution and pain from manufactured victimhood is a classic psychological device of a cult leader. - [‘Financial Regulation Has a Really Deep Problem’]( ‘Financial Regulation Has a Really Deep Problem’, Jerusalem Demsas, The Atlantic Sarin thinks that many of us are asking the wrong questions. Instead of focusing mostly on what to do after banks suffer this type of financial distress, federal regulators need to get better at forecasting errors before they become crises. And to do so, they’re going to have to update how they determine whether banks are in good standing. In our conversation, Sarin described a regulatory system that failed to detect the market’s growing trepidation with SVB and similar banks. In part, regulators were hobbled by 2018 changes to financial regulations that exempted banks with assets below $250 billion from some oversight measures, including the yearly stress testing that larger banks undergo. In lobbying for those changes, SVB and other regional banks argued that they weren’t systemically important. But clearly, the federal government now disagrees, having guaranteed deposits above the official $250,000 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation threshold out of concern that failures at SVB and Signature Bank could spiral across the system. In fact, despite federal regulators’ steps to restore confidence, on Monday, the stocks of several regional banks plummeted, reflecting ongoing fear and uncertainty working their way through the market. If regional banks are not systemically important, the level of public intervention in the SVB crisis is hard to justify. The other possibility is that our laws don’t match reality—making the current regulatory regime untenable. 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