Eric Trump Insists Trump Org. Will Survive Criminal Charges Because Daily Mail Commenters Say So

By now you’ve likely heard that on Thursday, the Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, are expected to be criminally charged by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The news is undoubtedly unwelcome within the Trump clan, given that (1) personal charges for Weisselberg may up the odds of his deciding to cooperate with prosecutors against Donald Trump in order to save himself, and (2) as the company’s lawyers argued on Monday, such an indictment would do serious harm to the family business. In an appearance on MSNBC last week, Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, said charges against the Trump Organization would “be almost a death blow” to the company, adding on Twitter: “I can’t underscore enough how devastating an indictment would be to the Trump Org. Every lender would call their loans and no way Trump Org can pay them all, likely leading to bankruptcy. Weisselberg may not cooperate without more serious charges, but any charge will doom the TO.”

According to Eric Trump, though, the company is going to be just fine, and he knows this because commenters on the Daily Mail say so:

Yes, some may scoff at the ex-president’s adult son citing internet comments as part of his legal defense, but that’s simply because they are unaware of the Daily Mail School of Law, an institute of higher learning that commenters are required to graduate from before they’re allowed to write on the site. (Speaking of academia, remember the late Trump University, which had a handbook with guidance for students on what to do if a district attorney showed up? Those were the days.)

Trump himself does not yet appear to have commented on the expected charges, though he’s previously claimed Democrats have been trying to take him down since he descended that escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015. On Monday he called prosecutors “rude, nasty, and totally biased,” so he’s clearly taking things in stride.

If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe.

Bill Cosby, monster, has gone free thanks to one of Trump’s impeachment lawyers

Remember Bruce Castor? One of the attorneys Trump hired for his second impeachment trial after no legitimate person would represent him? Thanks to a questionable deal Castor struck as a former prosecutor, Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction has been overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court:

The ruling was the product of a deal Cosby had made with a district attorney in 2005 in which the prosecutor promised Cosby he wouldn’t be charged in a case involving Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee who accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her in 2004. That prosecutor—Bruce Castor, then the Montgomery County district attorney—made headlines this year when he represented former president Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.

Under the terms of his deal with Cosby, Castor asked the disgraced comedian to testify in a civil lawsuit filed by Constand in exchange for avoiding prosecution. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that Castor’s deal with Cosby should have prevented Cosby from being charged in the case, which ultimately landed him behind bars.

In his testimony in the civil suit, Cosby—who has been accused of sexual assault or harassment by 60 women—admitted to giving quaaludes, a type of sedative, to women he was trying to have sex with. (Cosby has denied the sexual assault and harassment allegations.) In addition to making the 2005 agreement, Castor served as a witness for Cosby in 2016, telling a judge the ex-entertainer “was not getting prosecuted at all—ever—as far as I was concerned,” adding that, in his opinion, he “had the power to make such a statement.” Which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court apparently agreed with. (Others do not.)

Janice Baker-Kinney, a former bartender who says Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her in 1982, told The Washington Post she was “stunned” and “sick to my stomach” that Cosby “can go free over a ‘technicality.’”

Anthony Fauci saying it one more time for the cheap seats: Get the damn shot!

Unless you’re actively trying to get the more contagious strain of COVID-19, in which case, as you were? Per CNN:

With the Delta variant accounting for more than a quarter of COVID-19 cases, there could soon be “two Americas”—one where most people are vaccinated and another where low vaccination rates could lead to case spikes, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned. The stark disparity between places with low and high vaccination rates is something Fauci is “very concerned about,” he told CNN on Tuesday. “When you have such a low level of vaccination superimposed upon a variant that has a high degree of efficiency of spread, what you are going to see among undervaccinated regions—be that states, cities, or counties—you’re going to see these individual types of blips,” he said.”It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas.” But spikes in coronavirus cases are “entirely avoidable, entirely preventable” with vaccination, said Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fauci’s remarks come as the Delta variant, which is more contagious and aggressive, has reached nearly every state and accounted for 26.1% of U.S. COVID-19 cases as of Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I’m concerned about the Delta variant,” U.S. surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy told CNN on Wednesday. “And I am worried that what we are seeing in terms of a plateauing of cases nationally but also an increase in cases in many small sections of the United States, that that is, in fact, being driven by the Delta variant.” There is still a lot of virus circulating in the U.S., and close to 300 people—“just far too many”—are still dying daily from the coronavirus, Murthy said, citing data from recent weeks. “This is not over, and the virus wins when we let our guard down, when we take our eye off the ball,” he said. “We’ve seen many times that it’s fooled us in the past. We’ve got to stay vigilant, got to get vaccinated. We’ve got to talk to other people about getting vaccinated.”

As the Associated Press reported on Tuesday, virtually all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. are now among people who have not been vaccinated, meaning the daily death toll could likely be almost zero if people would just get their shot. Remarking on the effectiveness of the vaccine, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said that “nearly every death, especially among adults, due to COVID-19, is, at this point, entirely preventable,” calling such deaths “particularly tragic.”

The NSA bursts Tucker Carlson’s paranoid, self-aggrandizing bubble

No, the spy agency is not wasting its time and resources trying to get his show off the air, though, to be fair, that would actually be a great use of taxpayer dollars. Per NBC News:

The National Security Agency on Tuesday denied spying on Fox News host Tucker Carlson after he accused the agency of monitoring his electronic communications in an attempt to take his show off the air. “Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air,” the NSA said in a statement on Twitter. “NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States. With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting,” the agency added.

Carlson, a frequent critic of President Joe Biden, alleged on his show Monday night that “a whistleblower within the U.S. government” informed him that the NSA was “monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.”

“The Biden administration is spying on us,” he said.

Carlson, of course, has a history of making baseless, demonstrably false statements, which a U.S. District Court judge noted last September. In a ruling dismissing a defamation suit against Fox News, she wrote that Carlson does not state “actual facts” about the topics he covers, adding, “Given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statement he makes.” In other words, he’s full of shit and everyone knows it.

Elsewhere!

Biden moves to raise federal firefighters’ pay as wildfire season kicks off (Axios)

New Results Expected in NYC Mayoral Race After Tuesday Count Rescinded (NYT)

Day of Rage: An Investigation of How a Mob Stormed the Capitol (NYT)

Donald Rumsfeld dies at 88 (The Washington Post)

Husband-and-Wife Team Worth $2.2 Billion After Bubble Tea IPO (Bloomberg)

Rep. Paul Gosar keeps hanging out with white nationalists, and GOP leaders don’t do a thing about it (Insider)

Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball in Exchange for Cryptocurrency (Bloomberg)

New York Assembly OKs subpoenas in Cuomo impeachment probe (Politico)

Facebook Critics Regroup in Bid to Reshape the Digital Behemoth (WSJ)

Trump said, ‘Yeah, okay,’ and hung up the phone when his health secretary warned him about the coronavirus in January 2020, a new book says (Insider)

Octopus paints work of art at aquarium in Florida (UPI)

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair       

— Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With Leslie Wexner
— Trump’s Deranged Replacement Theory Might’ve Lost Him the Election
— Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk Want to Burn Their Cash in Space
— Three Texans Bust Myths About the Alamo’s Famous “Last Stand”
— The Guy Who Could Send Trump to Prison May Soon Cooperate With the Feds
— Bill and Melinda Gates’s Epic Divorce Saga Enters Its Next Phase
— Juneteenth, Critical Race Theory, and the Winding Road Toward Reckoning
— Trump Is Now Urging People Not to Vaccinate Their Kids Against COVID
— From the Archive: Microsoft’s Odd Couple, in the Words of Paul Allen
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.