Modern America’s Most Successful Secessionist Movement

In rural Oregon, voters fed up with their state’s leftward turn have embraced a simple and outlandish idea: What if we were just Idaho?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/12/oregon-secession-idaho-move-border/621087/

In the summer of 2015, a chimney sweep in Elgin, Oregon, redrew the map of the American West. “Imagine for a moment Idaho’s western border stretching to the Pacific Ocean,” Grant Darrow wrote in a letter to the editor of his local paper. Rural Oregon, he insisted, should break its ties with the urbanites of Portland and liberals of Salem, and join Idaho. “The political diversity in this state is becoming unpalatable,” he argued. “Rural Oregonians in general and Eastern Oregonians in particular are growing increasingly dismayed by the manner in which Oregon’s Legislature and Oregon’s urban dwellers have marginalized their values, demonized their lifestyle, villainized their resource-based livelihoods, and classified them as second-class citizens at best.”

In the half decade or so since Darrow’s diatribe, a simple and outlandish idea, percolating in rural Oregon since the 1960s—what if we were just Idaho?—has grown into a grassroots secession movement. Last month, Harney County, in the high desert of eastern Oregon, became the state’s eighth to pass a nonbinding ballot measure supporting Darrow’s proposal. Move Oregon’s Border signs now dot the region’s empty highways, and Mike McCarter, a retired agricultural nurseryman and gun-club owner who runs a group pushing for the boundary reshuffle, travels the state in a bright-red trucker hat bearing the slogan. “We don’t care to move, because we’re tied to our land here,” he told me recently. “So why not just allow us to be governed by another state?” He mentioned a supporter so certain that her property will become part of Idaho that she already flies its state flag on her lawn. “We’re going to be Idaho,” she told him.

Scenes from Portland, where Black Lives Matter protesters have sparred with the Proud Boys in paintball brawls over the past year, and worries that liberal lawmakers in Salem will outlaw diesel fuel and artificial insemination of animals, have calcified many rural Oregonians’ sense of total alienation from the west side of the state. “This is not the Oregon I know,” Sandie Gilson, one of Move Oregon’s Border’s “county captains,” told me. “We were farmers and ranchers and loggers. None of those values are left.” Today, half of Oregon’s population lives in the Portland metropolitan area alone. In eastern Oregon, Gilson pays for two emergency helicopter-airlift insurance plans in case she has to go to a hospital hundreds of miles away in Bend or Boise. “That huge drift of country is pretty much nonexistent in the American imagination,” the author William Kittredge wrote about this part of the state in Hole in the Sky, his 1992 memoir of his family’s life on a ranch. “It is hard to exaggerate the vastness of that barren playa. The whole of it—Lake and Harney and Malheur counties in Oregon, each as large as some states in the East—is still populated by no more than a few thousand people.” The geographic point in the continental United States farthest from any interstate lies in Harney County, a contemporary frontier so remote that, in 1990, a pair of census takers went missing for four days in the sagebrush trying to find a person.

It’s easy to scoff at the idea of honoring the proposed borders of “Greater Idaho,” not least because it’s almost inconceivable that both Idaho’s and Oregon’s legislatures would sign off on the proposal and send it to Congress for the necessary approval. Many conversations about the subject focus on “freedom” and diesel fuel, breezily dismissing questions of staggering importance in the West—water rights, public lands, the rights of Indigenous people—as details that will be ironed out later. The Greater Idaho proposal would grant Idaho more than three-quarters of Oregon’s land, more than 870,000 of its residents, and access to the ocean; most specifics beyond this have yet to be envisioned. “Idaho fits with what I feel,” Mike Slinkard, a fifth-generation Oregonian who makes high-stealth hunting clothing, told me. “Oregon left us out in the cold. We don’t exist.”

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The reasoning comes across as amorphous and quixotic, but the Greater Idaho referendums have passed in eight out of ten counties where they’ve been proposed, making Move Oregon’s Border the most electorally successful secessionist movement in America today. Two more counties will vote on the measure next year, and this month, state Senator Lynn Findley begrudgingly said he’d consider introducing legislation related to the border move. Over the past decade, every state has flirted with a secessionist petition of some sort. Two-thirds of Republicans in the South are in favor of secession; elsewhere, Illinois counties are asking to be free of their directorate in Chicago, and West Virginia has just offered to take in three conservative-leaning, rural Maryland counties. Even this part of Oregon is nestled between areas that some people hope will become entirely new states: the State of Jefferson, in California, and the Liberty State, a libertarian utopia pushed by former Representative Matt Shea, in Washington. The Greater Idaho solution appeals in part because of its political pragmatism; moving a border is hard, but it’s easier than creating a new state.

McCarter, the main organizer behind the ballot measures, lives in a mobile home in La Pine, half an hour south of Bend, the eco-chic outdoor-destination town in central Oregon. When I visited last month, a sign outside his property advertised his concealed-carry-permit business, and an American flag flew above the door. Jason Mraz played on Sirius radio from a TV flanked by two paintings of McCarter’s black Labrador; a Bible and a box of Milk Duds sat on the end table. If the border reflected the lines as McCarter envisions them, Bend, with its cashew milk and Teslas and mandatory masking at craft breweries, would be in a different American state from his home. For McCarter, such a severing is commonsense, and the map of Greater Idaho, carefully carving out Bend, doesn’t look any more puzzling than a gerrymandered congressional district. The urban-rural divide is so intense that separating the two is the most sensible path forward, he told me.

Joining Idaho would keep rural Oregon the way America used to be, McCarter explained. In his narrative, Salem is the villain forcing eastern Oregon counties to comply with laws that seem irrelevant or offensive to their rural setting, rules that have no bearing on their lived reality. Recent redistricting only compounded the sense that representation would never skew in their favor; McCarter feels his supporters’ voices are drowned out by urban ones—the culture over the hill, across the Cascades. Portland is in the midst of its most violent year ever, including more than 1,000 shootings so far. Struggling economically and anticipating the full collapse of industries that used to sustain them, McCarter and his group clamor for popular sovereignty.

Move Oregon’s Border’s true purpose is threefold, McCarter told me: First, obviously, to move the border. Second, to send a message to the state legislature “that you’ve got some very unhappy people, and here are the reasons why.” But the third is more subtle: “It provides a vent for all this anger.” McCarter sees himself as a peaceful guy proximate to violent movements. When he retired from working in plant nurseries and started running a gun club, members of the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and the Project Appleseed prepper group practiced at his shooting range. People’s Rights, the anti-government activist Ammon Bundy’s new far-right network, has asked him to speak at its events. “I know there’s some people that have talked about ‘If this continues on, people are going to pick up their guns,’” McCarter said. “Rural people—their values, the way they live, their faith, their freedom—are closely tied to what Idaho is, so why not adjust the border? Just let us go peacefully.”

That this part of the world would find secession and separatism so compelling makes sense, Richard Kreitner, a historian and the author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union, told me. The idea of separation as a solution to intractable political disputes is part of the history of Oregon; even at its formation, some were certain that it would eventually fragment or join California. Perhaps we needn’t be so precious about redrawing borders, Kreitner told me. “State lines aren’t written in stone, and the Oregon proposal shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand,” he said. “The idea of secession is being normalized in an unwinding and degrading country … This is considered a peace proposal, or a way to avoid war.”

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Greater Idaho supporters I met often articulated the movement’s aims in the same terms McCarter and Kreitner used. “This is actually very American, choosing our own government,” Gilson, the county captain, told me. “It was all about choosing our government when we left England in the Revolutionary War.” Some proponents of Greater Idaho swiftly offer another American revolution—or another civil war—as the backup plan if moving the border doesn’t work out. The aesthetic of armed politics is still ingrained in recent memory in eastern Oregon; just five years ago, in Harney County, Bundy led a 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge that led to a standoff with the federal government. (The state police shot and killed LaVoy Finicum, a leader of the occupation, at a roadblock between the refuge and the nearby town of John Day; they claim he was reaching for a gun.) Eighty-five percent of people in Harney County carry a concealed weapon.

In McCarter and his allies’ eyes, they’re preserving a version of the last American frontier—lands still unfettered by the progressive ideas from cities such as Portland that are seeping into every place in America and threatening rural life. It’s a charming myth. “The frontier fantasy of armed white men who made the West and can remake it because they are autonomous or independent from political forces back east is something that really probably fires the imagination of a lot of people,” the historian Joe Lowndes, of the University of Oregon, told me. Localism, autonomy, and regionalism are entrenched in the literary imagination of Oregon—take, for example, Don Berry’s Trask and Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Greater Idaho is adjacent to the bioregion of Cascadia and the environmental utopia of Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, as well as to the “American Redoubt,” a supposed haven for survivalists in the sparsely populated lands of Montana, Idaho, and the eastern sides of Washington and Oregon—“the last refuge of the American patriot,” as a Redoubt-centric real-estate company describes it. (“Rural America gives you ultimate freedom and safety far away from the Sanctuary City,” the firm promises.)

Oregon was itself founded in dispossession. Its constitution banned free Black people from living in the state. “It’s difficult to disentangle the nonthreatening parts of this group from the threatening white-supremacist aspects, because the region gained a reputation as a safe home for these ideas,” Steven Beda, a historian at the University of Oregon, told me. “It’s about articulating a rural identity, a return to a rural past; and ruralness is frequently used as a synonym for whiteness. Nostalgia is often rooted in white-supremacist ideals—‘we were all better off before people of color started demanding rights.’” Most supporters I spoke with skewed toward retirement age; they diligently collected signatures at farmers’ markets and gun shows and chatted in small groups at thinly attended meetups in church basements, peddling a far-fetched cause among their neighbors. But McCarter mentioned to me in passing that some supporters had gone to Washington, D.C., on January 6. A conservative-leaning separatist movement isn’t definitionally exclusionary or violent, but movements like Greater Idaho can’t be entirely decoupled from the context of menacing and violent right-wing organizing in the region. The Patriot movement, a set of anti-government conspiracist militias, remains active today, and Timber Unity, a rural solidarity group with extremist connections, gives money and support to county-commissioner candidates, including many who go on to win.

Much of Oregon’s history was “driven by an understanding of violence as a commonplace method of solving problems,” Kittredge, the rancher memoirist, wrote. The Greater Idaho movement’s more avid supporters say Darrow’s idea is the only thing keeping them from an insurrection. “A flash point is coming,” Gilson told me. “People are ready to fight; I’m hoping that it’ll be a push for Move Oregon’s Border—that it won’t be violent. Moving the border is a civil answer. Eastern Oregon is known for its guns.”

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The weekend before Harney County voted on the referendum, McCarter held a rally at a sporting-goods store in Hines. He called to warn me not to expect a huge crowd. Midday on Saturday, he set up a round table with Black Rifle coffee and a neatly arranged array of Move Oregon’s Border hats and leaflets. He stood smiling in the empty shop with a pistol on his hip, surrounded by rifles and fishing gear. “Portland this year looks like when I rolled into Baghdad for the first time,” Dean Brizendine, a former cop who owns the shop, told me from behind the gun counter. Toni Foster, Move Oregon’s Border’s Harney County captain, made snickerdoodles and drove over from the auto wrecking yard in town, where her repair shop and mobile home sit amid rows of half-scrapped classic cars and trucks. Her husband, Gary, a former heavy-machinery operator, stood in the corner, scrolling on his phone. “They just overrun us on the other side of the mountain,” he said.

The first visitor to arrive was a woman wearing a shirt that said BE MORE AMERICAN who came to yell at McCarter, with her daughter and granddaughter in tow. “Idaho doesn’t want us—I moved out of Idaho for a reason!” she shouted, standing over the table. Her son has seizures and needs medical marijuana, which is legal in Oregon, but not Idaho. (Marijuana came up nearly as often as diesel fuel in my conversations about the border move.) “I’ll still vote for it, though, because of the values,” she said. She shook McCarter’s hand and went to buy a gun at the register. A few others filtered in and out over the next hour to either purchase a firearm or approach the table and ask about Greater Idaho. Nancy Cronin had driven down Highway 395 from where she lives on a ranch, retired and off the grid, to find out more about the movement and whether she would end up becoming a resident of Idaho. McCarter stood and talked with her. She said she was undecided.

“There’s no death tax in Idaho,” McCarter said.

“That’s a plus,” she responded.

“And Idaho has a balanced budget,” he said. Another plus.

She asked whether Idaho would accept her daughter’s beautician license. McCarter told her those are the sorts of questions they’d still have to work out.

“Is this going to happen in our lifetime?” Cronin asked. “Texas has been dealing with this for 20 years. I’m 70.”

“Look,” McCarter said, “it’s a vent, instead of people picking up their guns.”

“If it gives people a place to put our energy, our frustration—I’m for it,” she said.

Cronin turned to me. “And people are getting close!” she said. “Anarchy! Not just in Oregon. But what happened down on the refuge at Malheur is a symptom of it. It’s a passion of the people who live in rural Oregon—and this is an avenue for folks instead of doing something illegal that wouldn’t get you where you want.” She leaned on the counter.

“It’s not perfect,” McCarter said. “And it may morph into something else.”

“We just need to show the Oregon legislature that it’s possible,” Cronin said.

“They haven’t listened in 20 years,” McCarter responded.

“We have to reinstitute the Founding Fathers’ fire, because we’re back there again,” Cronin told me. “And this seems like a place to take intellectual ideas, instead of a violent way. It would finally feel like we have some control and stake.” She left with one of McCarter’s pamphlets featuring the map of Greater Idaho.

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Plenty of rural Oregonians balk at the suggestion of becoming Idahoans. I spoke with many who see themselves as the less vocal majority, and some who’d never even heard of the measure. “We would only lose by becoming part of Idaho,” Isabelle Fleuraud, a yoga teacher who helped establish the Harney County Democrats during the Bundy standoff, told me. “It’s like a John Wayne movie, that imaginary ideal past of Harney County.” She told me she was exhausted by Greater Idaho supporters’ tendency to blame faraway Democratic overlords—Oregon Governor Kate Brown in Salem, and the federal government in D.C.—for all of the region’s ills.

Joining Idaho is a “mind-bogglingly oversimplified” notion, Steve Grasty, a retired Harney County judge, told me. Counties such as Harney are hugely dependent on federal funding; Oregon’s second congressional district, which covers the entire eastern swath of the state, was the nation’s biggest recipient of Affordable Care Act funds. But even Grasty, who used to travel to Salem to advocate for the county, admitted that the legislature there didn’t seem interested in the stories and problems he brought from rural Oregon. “Over and over, I worked to put that rural perspective into focus, and it really didn’t get heard.” He could have changed parties, but stayed a Democrat just so people on the west side of the state would talk to him, he told me.

The border move might seem preposterous: a peaceful rebellion fantasized about by a handful of people sitting around a sporting-goods store eating cookies and practicing amateur cartography. But some are bluntly resigned to another conclusion—one of my last stops in Harney County was a visit to Ben Holloway, the owner of Spent Cartridge, the local gun shop. He thinks the border question “will probably boil more down to a revolution rather than even worrying about moving this and that,” he told me. “It would just be right out to war, a civil war or splitting her up.” He went on, “And that’s the rise and fall of every civilization in history. The United States has been at the top for a long time. We’re where Rome was when Rome was at its peak, and eventually everything comes crumbling down. It will be pretty much just like the Civil War back when, North versus South. It might be more East versus West, urban versus rural. It will be absolutely horrible and terrifying and frightening. A lot of people dying for no reason. But eventually they’re going to push a group far enough that they have no other recourse, in their mind.”

I asked Holloway how it would feel if the border move somehow shook out—if at the end of a prolonged political process, he and I could factually say we were standing in Idaho, not Oregon, that afternoon.

“I don’t think it would hardly change a thing, to be honest with you,” he said.

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https://t.me/PepeDeluxed/15626

Pepe Deluxe ⭐⭐⭐, [24.12.21 05:27]

[Forwarded from ElectionEvidence.com/UnmaskingTruth.org Official Telegram Channel]

[ File : icc-complaint-7 (1) (1).pdf ]

Here's the 46 page legal filing that Dr. Mike Yeadon and others are filing to the International Criminal Court for violating the Nuremberg code.

There's a LOT to unpack with this one but here are a few takeaways…

1) Fauci, Bill and Melinda Gates, Borris Johnson, and the CEOs of the 4 main vaccine manufacturers are listed as defendants; among others.

2) The vaccines, PCR tests, gain of function, the US funding gain of function research, graphene hydroxide (PAGE 7 IS MUST READ MATERIAL), inflated covid figures, ineffectiveness of masks, alternative treatments, and many more reasons for mass concern are all listed in the complaint.

3) Event 201, Agenda 21/30, and parallels to 1930s Germany are also cited.

This is a BOMBSHELL of a filing and if you were to read it from start to end, you would have a SOLID understanding of how the last 30 years were shaped to lead us to this single "Covid" event.

Highly recommend taking a half hour and powering through this filing when you can.

@ElectionEvidence

FROM: >>>/deepdigs/3300/

https://twitter.com/jsolomonReports/status/1474352925925335045

Two state attorneys general ask court to require Biden administration to finish border wall | Just The News

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton | (Kirk Irwin / Getty Images)

https://justthenews.com/nation/states/paxton-schmitt-ask-court-require-biden-administration-finish-border-wall

Two state attorneys general ask court to require Biden administration to finish border wall

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt sued the administration in October.

7:15 AM · Dec 24, 2021·

From: >>>/deepdigs/3344

>>3399

https://twitter.com/USACEHQ/status/1209609839623716865?

Unlike deciduous trees that shed their foliage during winter, evergreen trees keep their leaves year-round. Thousands of species are considered evergreens, including conifers, palm trees and most trees found in the rainforest. Evergreen tree

Camera: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, West Hill Dam

6:00 PM · Dec 24, 2019·

DELTA

From: >>>/deepdigs/3399

‘Have I Hit Bottom?’: Michael Avenatti and the Fall of a Trump-Era Antihero

The man once seen as a leader of the Trump resistance is now fighting prison — and historical obscurity.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/22/michael-avenatti-rise-and-fall-house-arrest-profile-525301

VENICE, Calif. — Inside a two-bedroom apartment, 11 blocks from the ocean, there is a man in free fall, though he has nowhere to go. He wears a monitor on his right ankle, government-issued, blinking green beneath his tapered track pants. He doesn’t leave, except for court appearances and medical appointments. He makes calls on a red flip phone, designed for seniors by a company called Jitterbug: big buttons, no internet, cell service from Cricket Wireless. His old iPhone — the one where he handled his TV bookings, tapped out tweets and called reporters, wresting each story into the version he wanted, with charm, with pure aggression, with whatever the day required — now goes straight to voicemail. Maybe you had his number. Back then, for a while at least, who didn’t?

Behind a tall fence in the backyard, he can hear the lilt of brunches on Rose Avenue, laughter and music. There’s an ice cream parlor he likes on the corner, 482 feet away, but to get delivery, as with anything requiring internet access, the order must come from his roommate Jay Manheimer, the childhood friend from St. Louis who took him in almost two years ago when he was released on home confinement. The apartment sits beneath the flight path to the Santa Monica terminal where he used to fly jets. Engines roar overhead. The last time he flew private, in January 2020, he was shackled. Federal marshals chartered a plane to take him to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, where he spent 74 days in solitary confinement, in the high-security cell once occupied by El Chapo, one level above the unit where Jeffrey Epstein was held.

The last time he drove a race car, his most beloved and expensive habit, was 1,411 days ago. The last time he had a Grey Goose martini (up, two olives) and a New York strip at Craig’s, his preferred hangout in West Hollywood, was 709 days ago. The last time he wore his five-figure Patek Philippe Nautilus watch, before it was seized by the government, was 708 days ago. The last time he talked to his former client, Stormy Daniels, was February 2019. The last time a reporter asked him about running for president was March 24, 2019, the Sunday before his arrest. The last time he saw his parents was Thanksgiving 2019. His Twitter account, where he once held the attention of nearly 900,000 followers (now 680,000), sits frozen in September 2018: In the video that plays on loop in his last pinned tweet, he is on MSNBC, attacking the president and his party: “They want to make me the issue.” He’s staring into the camera, eyes level, talking fast. “I noticed earlier tonight, in fact, Don Jr. got in the mix by calling me a ‘porn star lawyer.’ Evidently he forgot that his father was the one that had unprotected sex with my ‘quote’ porn-star ‘close-quote’ client while his stepbrother was four months old at home with his stepmom.”

This Michael Avenatti doesn’t exist anymore.

That much is evident when you sit across from him in this small backyard, miles from the nearest green room. I spent several days this fall interviewing Avenatti about his role in a national moment — nine months in front of the camera — that feels as distant as it does unresolved. From March to December 2018, Michael Avenatti was a central figure in the most important political story in America: the fate of Donald Trump’s presidency. He was an unlikely resistance hero, maybe the first. His credentials were pure hot celebrity and a willingness to get in the mud and fight, filling a vacuum in the Democratic Party at a time when people were still afraid to use the words “liar” and “lies.” He was, by some unspoken consensus, serious enough to merit the platform. The words “potential Avenatti presidential run” were not a joke. In a world where the president established a zero-sum style of civic discourse, a talent for public combat was seen as its own justification. It propelled Avenatti, and it can be argued it also undid him. Almost as quickly as Avenatti arrived, he disappeared, undone by scandal, his enemy still in the White House. The only question left is whether the “cage fight” mentality he embraced so willingly — the thing that made him famous — will be what saves him from prison and obscurity.

To ask Michael Avenatti to explain what happened is both vivid and vexing. The details of the last three years come easily — dates, names, locations, tweets, dinners, his thoughts at the time. It’s the big picture that causes difficulty, and certain topics in particular: why he put himself on the nation’s largest stage, when he owed millions in taxes, according to federal prosecutors; when he had financial disputes with his former law partner; when his house (in the most general terms) was not in order, despite assuring informal advisers, two of them told me, that he had no skeletons in his closet. “Not a goddamn thing,” two people remember him saying at dinner in 2018, though he disputes “any suggestion that I led anyone to believe that I led a pristine life.”

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Avenatti is now a convicted felon, found guilty of attempting to extort Nike in a scheme the government describes as a desperate shakedown. He is facing two and a half years in prison, pending his appeal. He is juggling three federal indictments, claims of fraud, embezzlement, and attempted extortion, the details of which he commands as if he were representing himself, which he did in the second of the three cases, in California, where federal prosecutors accused him of stealing millions of dollars from his own clients. Remarkably, the case ended in a mistrial after Avenatti successfully argued that federal prosecutors withheld evidence favorable to his defense. He spends his days now filing legal briefs, motions, appeals, letters to the court(s), and reviewing evidence. The second-floor apartment is filled with boxes of files labeled things like “CONTEMPT MOTION,” though they could very well say “BULLSHIT” — boxes and boxes of “It’s Bullshit” and “I Don’t Traffic In Bullshit” and “The Whole Premise Is Complete Bullshit” — which is generally where he lands on the case against him, both legally and in the public eye.

His main contention, his genuine belief, is that he would never have been pursued by federal prosecutors in three separate cases, on two coasts, held in solitary confinement alongside suspected terrorists and national security threats, if his name were not Michael Avenatti.

This is not to say that he doesn’t admit to mistakes — he does. But these regrets are often punctuated by his own preoccupations and obsessions, some of them significant, some of them seemingly irrelevant: The way his partner in the Nike negotiations, a prominent criminal defense attorney, never faced charges. The way Andrew Yang keeps mocking Avenatti’s performance at an Iowa Democratic Party dinner that happened three years ago. The way Stormy Daniels, the central figure in the third federal case against him, in which prosecutors say he stole some of the proceeds from her book deal, now works as a paranormal private investigator, which his lawyers say undermines her credibility. And finally, the way Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, served his own house arrest in his “multimillion-dollar luxury apartment,” Avenatti says, “with his Miró f---ing painting on the wall behind him when he does his YouTube interviews and his cable TV hits.”

When I suggest to Avenatti that he could do his own live hits, launch his own podcast, reconnect with his friends at MSNBC and CNN — his old dinner partners in New York — he stops me.

“I don’t think it would be smart. I don’t think it’d be a good look, and, you know, why risk it?” To hear other people bring up his name without being on set to challenge them, to yell like he used to — “it’s not killing me,” he says, “but it’s — it’s infuriating.”

Avenatti always performed best with others watching, and no one has been watching for a very long time. He has endless days and weeks to think about the downward trajectory of his life, which he doesn’t like to do when he is alone, which, inconveniently, is most of the time. “If I start thinking about the relationships I had that I no longer have, the opportunities I had that I no longer have, the freedom I had that I no longer have, the wealth and things I used to have that I no longer have, the notoriety and the adoration I used to have that I no longer have — I mean, it’ll destroy me,” he says. “I have to push it out of my mind, because it’s been such a gargantuan fall.”

Avenatti is fighting for the most basic reason a person could have, which is his freedom. But there is a more ineffable struggle going on inside the Venice apartment — one to preserve a sense that he mattered, not as a cartoonish figure in our political circus, but as a player of substance who cannot be dismissed. He helped create the binary media environment of the Trump era — but as he falls, eyeing the uncertain landing ahead, he is now desperate to be seen as a figure of complexity, to establish a public perception that will withstand the impact.

“I am not a Boy Scout, and I am not a serial killer,” he says. “It’s easier for us when it comes to judging other human beings, to say, ‘He or she is 100 percent good, or he or she is 100 percent bad.’ Right? Because that makes it easy.”

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It wasn’t hard to get in touch with him again.

A friend reached out to another friend, and within minutes, he called me from his Jitterbug. “The last time we talked I was deciding whether to base my presidential campaign in St. Louis or Los Angeles,” he said as soon as I picked up. This was a joke, and not exactly true: The last time we’d spoken was in the fall of 2018, when things were starting to go bad. But Avenatti was doing what he always did with a reporter on the other line — massaging, doling out bits of color, inserting himself not just into the writer’s story, but the making of it.

He’s done it so many times before. Even in the beginning, when he was a little-known plaintiff’s attorney in California, before his license was suspended, he had cases appear on “60 Minutes” three times in five years. “It’s never been done,” he says. In front of a camera, he is at ease. In 2016, during his second appearance on the program, representing hospitals that claimed they’d been sold ineffective personal protective equipment, when asked to respond to one of the health care executives, he surprised himself with an ad-libbed line: “Evidently he forgot the 11th commandment,” Avenatti told Anderson Cooper. “Do not lie to ‘60 Minutes.’” As soon as he said it, he knew it would make the final cut.

A week after we first spoke in September, Avenatti stood waiting for me outside the second-floor apartment in Venice. He looked smaller in person, though he still stands just under six feet tall. He still talks close to your face. He still has veins on his temples that ripple with intensity. This was the favorite detail of the writers who profiled him in 2018 — a suggestion of the “cage fight” he promised against Donald Trump. He knows how they would write the detail today: defensive, bitter, defiant. Sitting in the small backyard of Manheimer’s apartment, he can be all those things at points, but also charming and plainly smart. As soon as we sit down, he shifts easily back into the mode of a trial attorney, every audience a jury with a checkbook.

“You can have what you perceive to be the greatest fact in the world, and if it’s not gonna resonate, then it’s worthless,” he says. When he got into the public arena, it was the same: “All I was doing was speaking to another jury. Instead of 12 people, it was millions.” At other times he compares it to racing cars, introducing a level of danger to the routine act of persuasion. “If you’re good, you don’t just go barreling into the corner and hope you make the corner, right? If you are on the edge of the envelope, you’re taking in all these sensory moments around you. You’re putting 100 inputs into the steering wheel, the throttle — constantly looking ahead.”

And so it was that Avenatti who came down around the track in March of 2018, hoping he’d make it.

In the beginning, at least, when he agreed to represent Stormy Daniels, it went well. “It could not have gone better, frankly,” Avenatti says. “I would love to see anyone do better. Hundreds, thousands of decisions went into this thing along the way. And we also had a lot of good luck. But this wasn’t just some f---ing accident that happened.”

In 2018, he refused to tell the story of how he and Daniels met, so much so that writers started describing it as “a secret.” He did this, he says, because of (1) attorney-client privilege, and (2) control. “I didn’t want the focus to be on anything other than what I wanted the focus to be on in 2018,” he says. But when he told me the story in Venice this fall, it was clear that their relationship did contain an element of chance. Avenatti only met Daniels, in February 2018, because another lawyer passed on the case. Just before the 2016 presidential election, Daniels had taken a $130,000 payment from Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, to stay quiet about sleeping with Trump in 2006. Now she wanted out of the NDA, upset that Cohen was talking about the agreement in an effort to deny the affair. Avenatti told her they had something bigger on their hands than a simple NDA dispute. He agreed to represent her, immediately taking control of her media strategy. Daniels had been in on a “Make America Horny Again” tour across the country, and was in talks with the Lifetime channel to do a five-part series, Avenatti says. He told her to pull out of everything: “You need to do a solid interview for free, and that’s how you need to tell your story in order to push the reset button,” he remembers saying. “Suburban housewives in middle America aren’t going to identify with the ‘Make America Horny Again’ girl.”

“Ideally, you need to go on ‘60 Minutes.’”

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On March 6, he filed the first lawsuit on behalf of Daniels, alleging the hush-money payment constituted a campaign violation. You could see the Avenatti fandom develop in real-time. As he walked away from the mics after a press conference in New York, a woman screamed: “GOD WILL PROTECT YOU, MICHAEL!” Less than three weeks later, “60 Minutes” aired their interview with Daniels and Avenatti. Twenty-two million people watched.

In April, he was invited to a “top 100” media event in New York at the Seagram Building. Gayle King was there, he says, Don Lemon, Anthony Scaramucci, Megyn Kelly, Sean Hannity (“he was very complimentary towards me, actually”) — all of them new “friends.” Martha Stewart came running up to him to ask for a picture. “You’re going to be our savior,” he remembers Stewart saying. (A spokesperson for Stewart did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It was very heady at the time,” Avenatti says.

It is worth pausing here to remember this exact moment, just over a year into Trump’s presidency, with Democrats out of power in both chambers of Congress, the Mueller investigation carrying on out of view. There was so much energy in the party — and it poured daily into a vacuum. Obama was gone. No one wanted to hear from Hillary. The leaders in the party were — who? Tom Perez, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi. Democrats frequently miscalculated: On the day of the women’s march in January 2017, the party’s leading strategists weren’t in Washington, shoulder-to-shoulder with tens of thousands of enraged voters. They were at a donor summit at a Florida resort instead. By the time Avenatti came on the scene, impeachment talk was still fringe. Democrats couldn’t decide whether they would call him a liar on TV.

Avenatti appeared to be an answer to the problem for Democrats who feared their leaders weren’t fighting on Trump’s terms. If part of Trump’s attraction to his supporters was that he said what they were thinking, Avenatti performed a similar function for Democrats. He had in his hands a case that not only validated their instincts about the character and quality of Donald Trump, but seemed to promise more bombshells to come. People saw him as a vessel for their animus; they sent him information.

It was only a few weeks before the Daniels case started to grow into something bigger — not for his client, who only did a fraction of the appearances he did, but for Avenatti himself. He welcomed the attention, becoming a regular on cable news, once hitting five networks in a single day. On Facebook, a “Hottie Avenatti” page appeared. Before attending night classes at George Washington University Law School, Avenatti had spent six years working on Democratic campaigns in opposition research, and he now had an audience for his commentary on the party’s failings. “Off topic,” he wrote on Twitter that June, “the candidate in 2020 better be a take no prisoners street fighter who is prepared to go 15 rounds in a VERY brutal campaign.” The tweet spun into stories about “Avenatti 2020.” If reporters believed they were in on the joke, Avenatti wasn’t. The more he went places other Democrats wouldn’t, the more the coverage bent in his direction. He seemed to prove his own premise.

At the “top 100” media event that spring, he remembers standing at the bar with MSNBC host Ari Melber, another new friend. As people came up to Avenatti, Melber leaned over and said, “You’re the belle of the ball.” An MSNBC spokesperson confirmed the exchange.

“Yeah,” Avenatti replied.

“I’m going to look back some day and say, ‘This was the peak. It was all downhill from here.’”

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Actually, the “peak” came later, in August 2018.

By this time, the adviser had his own advisers — a small group of informal political operatives helping him think about running for president. He had his own super PAC, formed under the name “Fight PAC,” which took in more than $100,000, about a third of which went directly to Avenatti for reimbursements, according to election filings. He visited Youngstown, Ohio, on his own sort of listening tour. He appeared at more than 20 political events, not as Daniels’ lawyer, but as a possible presidential candidate. He came unannounced to the Democratic Party’s annual summer meeting in Chicago — it was never clear exactly for what purpose — and reporters swarmed. He had meetings with operatives like Rahm Emanuel, his colleague from the old days in opposition research. Emanuel walked into the meeting, sat down at a conference table, and before a “hello,” snapped, “You’re not f---ing running for president,” according to Avenatti. The two parried back and forth. “I said, ‘OK, then you tell me who you think is going to beat this guy, and if you can make a case for them, then I agree with you, I’m not going to run.’” Later that summer, Avenatti appeared as the headliner at his first major Democratic Party event, the Wing Ding dinner, held every presidential season in an Iowa town called Clear Lake.

Reporters rolled their eyes, he says. “They all kind of have this attitude of, ‘So, uh, Michael, like, what are you doing here? Isn’t this a publicity stunt?’” That night on stage, he told Democrats they needed to “fight fire with fire,” playing off Michelle Obama’s line at the Democratic convention two years earlier: “When they go low, I say, we hit harder,” Avenatti said. The crowd gave him multiple standing ovations. (“As I remember, there were five.”) Through his eyes, the reporters in the press gallery looked ashen. “I will say this is one of the highlights of my life,” he says. “It was so f---ing great seeing the look on all of these reporters’ faces.” Afterward, Avenatti says he finished off a bottle of Fireball with Tim Ryan, the Ohio congressman, at a house party in Clear Lake. (A spokesperson for Ryan did not respond to a request to confirm the incident.)

If he could stop time anywhere, it would be at the Wing Ding. He doesn’t believe he would have made the best president, but he could have been a great candidate, he says. “That was really when I thought to myself, ‘I’m pretty decent at this. Give me six months, and I’ll be f---ing great.’”

He didn’t have six months, as it turned out. He barely had four.

The signs were there: He was in a lengthy dispute with his former law partner. Journalists wrote about his failed venture as the owner of Tully’s Coffee, the Seattle-based company he purchased in 2013, working alongside the actor Patrick Dempsey. As he headlined political events in the summer of 2018 he talked to at least one friend, that person told me, about how he needed money. He had multiple race cars, a private jet, an expensive divorce from his second wife, a $13.5 million house on the water in Newport Beach, an apartment in Ten Thousand, the West Hollywood apartment complex popular with celebrities. Avenatti denies that he was living above his means at the time. “I was not desperate for money anytime in the fall of 2018,” he says.

He was combative in public, and people liked that. But he wasn’t just fighting Trump. He started arguments on Twitter with random users, with reporters, with other Democratic operatives. He was the kind of subject who “can be extremely aggressive in pushing back,” Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Finnegan said on a podcast after Avenatti’s arrest. He could “oscillate between charming and aggressive,” another reporter told me. “He wants to manage the story.” Later, in a Vanity Fair piece in May 2019, cable news bookers would complain he was aggressive and rude. This is another preoccupation of Avenatti’s. He says he prided himself on his good relationships with bookers. “I never became a diva. I never thought I was better than other people. I wasn’t rude to people.” If he had been, he says, they wouldn’t have invited him back again and again.

Around that time, two political advisers told him that the next step in any serious presidential campaign would be a self-vetting process. On at least two separate occasions, they recalled, he promised them he had nothing to hide. One time was at a small dinner in 2018 in Washington, where a member of the party told me they remember asking Avenatti if he had had any “skeletons in his closet.” Avenatti, the person told me, looked around the room, took a “pregnant pause” and said, “Nope, not a goddamn thing.” Avenatti denied he ever told people that he was “as pure as the driven snow.” He says the only time he can remember someone asking him a question about “skeletons in his closet” was in October 2018, at a Vanity Fair event with the writer Emily Jane Fox. “I think everyone’s got some baby skeletons rolling around under the floorboards,” he told her. In an August appearance on ABC News, he promised to release his tax returns. At the time, according to federal prosecutors, he owed millions to the IRS.

On one trip to Florida, after an appearance at a Democratic Party dinner, one former adviser said, he bought drinks for everyone at the hotel bar, charging the bill to his room. A few days later, the former adviser got a call from the hotel saying the credit card on file had been declined. The bill was for a couple thousand dollars. The former adviser ate the charges. (Avenatti says he doesn’t remember the incident, “because it never happened.”)

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Christine Carlin, Avenatti’s first wife and the mother of his two daughters, said her ex-husband could be loose with particulars. “I worried sometimes that he was always a bigger-picture person,” she told me. “He was just off doing the big things. And I don’t know if he kept his eyes on the little things as much as he should have.”

What came next happened quickly. In September, Democrats accused him of damaging their case against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was contending with allegations he had sexually assaulted a woman in high school. A new client of Avenatti’s, Julie Swetnick, said she had witnessed Kavanaugh and his friend getting girls drunk “so they could be gang raped.” She later contradicted parts of her account in an interview with NBC News, giving conservatives ammunition to disparage the accusations against Kavanaugh as a smear campaign. (“I deserve no blame for what happened in connection with Kavanaugh. Period,” Avenatti says now.)

In November, he was arrested by police on suspicion of domestic violence in an incident with his ex-girlfriend, who accused him in a Vanity Fair report of verbal, psychological, and physical abuse. “He has two extremely different personalities,” she told the magazine. Avenatti denies he has ever been violent. No charges were ever filed by prosecutors in connection with the arrest.

In November, his relationship with Stormy Daniels was starting to unravel in public view: She claimed that the defamation case Avenatti had filed that summer against Donald Trump had been brought without her approval. “Michael has not treated me with the respect and deference an attorney should show to a client,” she told the Daily Beast. (Daniels later pursued the case to the Supreme Court with new counsel.) Weeks earlier, Daniels had defended Avenatti and his political aspirations in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon. Yes, people were sending her messages about all the attention he was getting — “they think that Michael has abandoned me, or I’m not important to him anymore,” she told Lemon — but they still spoke every day, she said. “He always puts me first.” In early December, Daniels said she and her lawyer had “sorted shit out.”

By February 2019, he was no longer representing her. (Avenatti provided a copy of the termination letter he sent Daniels late that month, citing a “lack of communication” and a “general lack of appreciation for our work.”)

At the time, federal prosecutors in California were already investigating allegations that Avenatti had stolen from clients. “In the back of my mind, was I thinking: ‘Oh, I’ve stolen millions of dollars from people, and that’s gonna come to light?’ No. Because I haven’t stolen millions of dollars from people,” he says. He won’t discuss the details of the California case beyond saying he should have exercised better judgment. He has had years to think about this crisis point, and he has concluded that he was naïve — not necessarily about his own actions, or the way he handled his business, but rather about the consequences he would come to bear as a result.

“Of course I made mistakes — you don’t end up in this situation without making mistakes. Whether those mistakes should put me where I am now is a different story,” he says. “I haven’t been naïve in a long, long time, but I was naïve about this.”

In the spring of 2019, he hastily took on the case of Gary Franklin, a coach who alleged he had evidence of a big problem at Nike: the company, in partnership with Franklin, was paying parents of recruits. Avenatti teamed up with Mark Geragos, a criminal defense attorney who had worked with Nike before, to negotiate a settlement, including a pitch for the two lawyers to lead a well-funded internal investigation to clean up the problem “because we didn’t trust Nike and its outside law firm Boies Schiller to do it properly or ethically,” Avenatti says.

Six days after his first meeting with the company, on March 25, 2019, he was arrested on charges of trying to extort at least $25 million. (Geragos was never charged. “The fact that my life has been destroyed as a result of the Nike conviction and the government has given Geragos a complete pass while he continues to travel around the country on his private jet like a big shot," Avenatti says, “is a travesty.” Geragos declined to comment, citing his past representation of Avenatti in connection with his domestic violence arrest.)

In a successive press conference on the West Coast, California prosecutors charged Avenatti in the second federal case, accusing him of stealing from clients “in order to pay his own expense and debts.” Afterward, Avenatti agreed to three interviews to talk about the arrest. It was the last time he was in front of a television camera.

“Of course, I’m nervous,” he told one network. “I’m scared.”

For the next 10 months, Michael Avenatti lived at home in Los Angeles. He was still working as a lawyer, representing victims of the rapper R. Kelly, but by comparison to the year before, he carried on in relative obscurity, only occasionally heard from on Twitter or in the news.

Most people had already moved on from the story when, on Jan. 14, 2020, prosecutors issued a new warrant for his arrest. He was at a state bar disciplinary hearing in downtown Los Angeles that day, for the California embezzlement case. Prosecutors claimed he had made financial transactions that posed an “economic danger.” Even though they took him into custody, charges were never brought on those claims. But it was enough to revoke Avenatti’s bail hours before he was set to fly to New York, preparing to meet with his lawyers seven days before the Nike trial.

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Federal agents took him to the jail in Santa Ana, Calif., and placed him in solitary confinement, according to Avenatti and his lawyers. On his third day in Santa Ana, at about 5:30 a.m., a guard knocked on the cell door and told him to “pack up your shit.” He asked where he was going. Pack up your shit, the guard told him again. Jesus Christ, he thought. Here we go. What’s next?

He was taken to another part of the jail, where he put on the same Tom Ford suit he had been wearing at the bar hearing three days earlier. U.S. marshals cuffed his wrists and legs, and put a chain around his waist. A few hours later, he was on a private jet to Teterboro, N.J.

Avenatti didn’t know much about the Metropolitan Correctional Center before he arrived at 6:30 p.m. that evening. He knew the name MCC the way most people do: It’s the jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in August of 2019, awaiting trial on child sex abuse charges.

But he had never heard about 10 South, the highest security block in the jail. Epstein had been held in 9 South, one floor below, a “special housing unit” for alleged criminals who could be targets in general population. 10 South is the most secure floor in the facility, known primarily for handling prisoners who are held under “special administrative measures,” or SAMs, most often to guard against witness intimidation, or in cases that pose a threat to national security. In SAMS cases, detainees are placed in special facilities like 10 South, with severely limited contact with the outside world. Avenatti’s lawyers don’t believe the Federal Bureau of Prisons ever placed Avenatti on special administrative measures, making his placement in 10 South highly unusual. One of Avenatti’s federal public defenders, Andrew Dalack, who has represented multiple clients in 10 South, said: “I’m not personally familiar with any case in which a person was put on 10 South for a substantial period of time without SAMs or a high-risk security concern related to their communication.”

After he was processed at MCC, Avenatti met with a jail psychologist. It became apparent that she was trying to assess whether he would attempt to kill himself. He says he pleaded with her not to be placed in solitary confinement. “You can record me. You can do whatever you need to do,” he told her. “Put me in general population. I’ll take my chances.” At one point, he brought up Epstein. “I’m not going to embarrass you or the jail if you put me in general population.”

When the cell door locked behind him in 10 South, Avenatti was in shock. “In a cocoon almost,” he says, “like a self-created protective cocoon.”

His cell at MCC was about eight by 20 feet long. Everything inside was metal or concrete except for the mattress pad. There was a shower and a toilet. The windows were frosted except for a few worn slivers. If he positioned his head just so, he could see New York. There were two cameras in the cell, one on each side. Avenatti was told he couldn’t cover himself, even to use the bathroom, or he’d be punished. He couldn’t see the other cellmates in 10 South, but he came to learn that his neighbors included three suspected terrorists and a CIA officer accused of treason.

The 10 South block was known to get particularly cold. At night, Avenatti wore every jumpsuit he had with him. One guard eventually brought him a set of used long johns. Early on, he asked if he could get a book. The guards gave him The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump. Later, he was able to assemble a small collection of whatever he could get his hands on: David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day; Martin Luther King Jr.’s Strength to Love; Tim Tebow’s Shaken; a thick volume on the history of Iran.

When I shared the details of Avenatti’s case with Maureen Baird, a federal prison consultant and a senior executive warden at MCC from 2014 to 2016, she said she’d never heard of a white-collar case in 10 South. Normally, according to Baird, high-profile detainees are housed in the jail’s regular special housing unit, 9 South, while the warden reviews him for general population.

“It’s an anomaly. It’s bizarre,” she said.

Avenatti is convinced there is a more nefarious explanation.

One day in February, he was on his way back to MCC from court, accompanied by three guards, when a senior correctional officer intervened, he says. The senior officer led him upstairs, pausing in the vestibule outside 10 South. “You know why you’re here, right?” he said. Avenatti says the officer told him he was in 10 South at the direction of the attorney general, Bill Barr, and to have his lawyers “look into it.” Then he picked up the phone and buzzed Avenatti back to his cell. Dalack, Avenatti’s public defender, said the placement in 10 South was another example of the government “pursuing this as aggressively as they could.” At Avenatti’s sentencing hearing in the Nike case, Judge Paul G. Gardephe cited the “horrific conditions” in 10 South as a reason for imposing a lighter sentence — just 30 months in prison. “It’s hard to believe they could occur in the United States of America,” he said in the courtroom. The MCC warden at the time, Marti Licon-Vitale, explained that Avenatti was placed in 10 South out of “serious concerns” for his safety in general population, according a letter sent at the request of Judge Gardephe. (In a written response to questions, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons, Donald Murphy, said the department does not comment on “anecdotal allegations” or provide information about individual inmates. Murphy said inmates are held outside general population “as necessary” for safety reasons.)

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In March, Avenatti finally moved to general population. For most of that time, the jail was on lockdown, first after a detainee smuggled a loaded handgun into the facility, and later, because of the pandemic. Avenatti requested to be released on home confinement. The request was initially denied. Trump, now in the final year of his presidency, managing the first few weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak, tweeted in response to the news: “Gee, that’s too bad. Such a fine guy. Presidential aspirations you know!”

There were only a few times in 10 South that Avenatti was able to use the unit’s single rec room: It’s a big, cold room, with a stationary bike, a caged TV, a remote, a lawn chair, a large green parka, and a slatted window where winter air pours through.

The first time he went there was Valentine’s Day 2020. A guard he befriended allowed him to eat dinner and watch TV. It was the night of his conviction in the Nike case. Back home in in California, his daughters Lauren and Nicole, now ages 19 and 17, were reeling.

Lauren was in class before lunch when a friend texted her, “Hey, I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what he was talking about. “Have you not read the news?” he wrote. She opened up Google and that’s when she learned that her dad had been found guilty. “My heart stopped,” she told me.

“I just couldn’t even wrap my head around the fact that my dad was going to prison,” she said. “I hadn’t seen my dad as a criminal, ever. In that moment, I had to grow up really fast.”

Back in New York, Avenatti turned on CNN. Anderson Cooper and Jeffrey Toobin were discussing his conviction. “So I sat there on Valentine’s Day, as a convicted felon in 10 South, watching AC360 with Jeffrey Toobin, who was relishing the fact that I had just been convicted on multiple felony counts, as I ate my meal out of my plastic tray.”

“Anderson actually pushed back at one point.” Cooper, the “60 Minutes” host, had interviewed Avenatti all three times he appeared on the program.

“At one point Anderson said, ‘Well, you know, I mean, Michael Avenatti was a real attorney with real cases, right?’”

For a man in free fall, there are three options.

“I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking about this, and there are only three.”

The first two are escape or suicide, neither of which he says he’s considered. The first never works, he says, “and I’ve never run from anything in my life.” And the second would be too painful for his family. “I wouldn’t want to deliberately hurt my kids, my parents, and the people who care about me.”

“Or there’s the third option,” he says, “you can fight. That’s what I’m doing.”

Michael Avenatti’s fight is many things: legal, reputational, personal, historical. Maybe you find his arguments and his many gripes persuasive. Or maybe you find them absurd. Maybe you were one of the people, in the summer of 2018, who felt desperate to send someone after Trump. Perhaps you asked him for a selfie, or admired the skill with which he handled himself on television. Maybe you were a reporter who, like me, briefly covered his presidential aspirations. Maybe you thought, as Avenatti still does, that for a while, he was the best guy to beat Trump. Or maybe you hated him all along. When it started to crumble in late 2018, you knew there was something about that guy. You always had a feeling he was “full of shit.” Maybe you were right. Or maybe you haven’t thought about him since. But the reckoning for Avenatti, as with so much from Trump’s four years in office, is not finished. No matter where you land on the question of his downfall, we are a part of this story, too. He used the media, and we used him.

Avenatti is still embroiled in all three federal cases. He says the government has never approached him with a reasonable plea offer in connection with any legal matter. Next month in New York, he is set to begin trial in the final case to go to court, where federal prosecutors will argue that Avenatti stole $149,000 from Daniels’s $800,000 book deal, which Avenatti helped negotiate. (“I babysat that entire deal,” he says.) The case has turned personal. At Avenatti’s request, a judge has ordered Daniels to disclose her medical records, presumably to raise questions about her mental health. In the trial, you will hear “I would say a lot,” about Daniels’s activity in the paranormal space, said Robert Baum, Avenatti’s lead attorney in the case. She filmed episodes for an unreleased TV show called “Spooky Babes,” also the name of an Instagram account where a haunted doll named Susan, a mascot of sorts, is prominently featured. But the crux of the case comes down to the fee agreement Daniels and Avenatti had in place for the publication of her October 2018 memoir, Full Disclosure: Avenatti says he was entitled to a portion of the proceeds because he negotiated the deal. Daniels says Avenatti orally agreed to take nothing. As a result, Baum said, “her credibility becomes a major factor in the trial.” Daniels and her lawyer, Clark Brewster, declined to answer questions about the case.

“At this point,” Avenatti says, “the only question is: Have I hit bottom?”

8/9

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On house arrest, Avenatti is able to see his young son, age 7, and his two teenage daughters. Prosecutors asked him to live in the Central District of California for his embezzlement case, according to Avenatti, precluding a stay with his parents in St. Louis. He says prosecutors also stopped him from living with his ex-wife, Christine, with whom Avenatti is still close, because she might be a witness in the California case. “The whole goal here was to cut me off from any potential support — financial, emotional, or otherwise,” he says. “They wanted to cripple me.” When Manheimer took him in at the start of the pandemic, Avenatti was only supposed to stay for 90 days. It’s been almost 20 months, his home confinement extended by the judge in the California case, because of the pandemic, the government’s failure to produce exculpatory evidence, and to enable Avenatti to prepare for the upcoming Daniels trial. “Jay has been like a brother to me.”

“When he got here, he looked as thin as I’ve ever seen him,” Manheimer told me. “But I expected him to be in worse shape mentally. Even after he told me all about it, I don’t know how he was as put together as he was. But who knows when he was in his room by himself, what those moments are like.”

Avenatti’s son isn’t old enough to understand what happened, but he will be soon. After his sentencing in the Nike case, he sat down his daughters for the first time to explain what happened. If he is open about one regret, it is as a parent. “I really wish I had been a better father,” he says. “Allowing my kids to be exposed to what they’ve been exposed to as a result of the failings of their father — no child should have to go through what my kids have had to go through because of me.” At his sentencing hearing in the Nike case, his daughters wrote a letter to the judge pleading for leniency. Avenatti says he has still not read it because it is too painful.

This year, he asked them to watch an HBO documentary on Tiger Woods. He thought it might help them understand, though Avenatti wants to be clear, “I am not drawing a parallel between me and Tiger Woods. I’m not. All right? Just so we’re clear.” But there is a scene from the second episode that resonates with him: It’s 2019, and Woods, having endured scandals over infidelity and prescription drug use and suffered through multiple potentially career-ending injuries, is marching up the 18th fairway of the Masters, about to win his 15th major title. One of Woods’s old friends is talking: “A lot of people would spin it like he was a different man now — he’s the conquering hero. But these are the same people that, when he was riding high, they were pulling for him to fall. And when he failed, they jumped on him with both feet. And when he rose again, all of a sudden he is a virtuous man now, which to me is bullshit.”

Woods was a man just like any other man, says Avenatti, with his own imperfections and failings. That’s what he was trying to tell his daughters.

“When he got here, he looked as thin as I’ve ever seen him,” Manheimer told me. “But I expected him to be in worse shape mentally. Even after he told me all about it, I don’t know how he was as put together as he was. But who knows when he was in his room by himself, what those moments are like.”

Avenatti’s son isn’t old enough to understand what happened, but he will be soon. After his sentencing in the Nike case, he sat down his daughters for the first time to explain what happened. If he is open about one regret, it is as a parent. “I really wish I had been a better father,” he says. “Allowing my kids to be exposed to what they’ve been exposed to as a result of the failings of their father — no child should have to go through what my kids have had to go through because of me.” At his sentencing hearing in the Nike case, his daughters wrote a letter to the judge pleading for leniency. Avenatti says he has still not read it because it is too painful.

This year, he asked them to watch an HBO documentary on Tiger Woods. He thought it might help them understand, though Avenatti wants to be clear, “I am not drawing a parallel between me and Tiger Woods. I’m not. All right? Just so we’re clear.” But there is a scene from the second episode that resonates with him: It’s 2019, and Woods, having endured scandals over infidelity and prescription drug use and suffered through multiple potentially career-ending injuries, is marching up the 18th fairway of the Masters, about to win his 15th major title. One of Woods’s old friends is talking: “A lot of people would spin it like he was a different man now — he’s the conquering hero. But these are the same people that, when he was riding high, they were pulling for him to fall. And when he failed, they jumped on him with both feet. And when he rose again, all of a sudden he is a virtuous man now, which to me is bullshit.”

Woods was a man just like any other man, says Avenatti, with his own imperfections and failings. That’s what he was trying to tell his daughters.

These are sad stories. The saddest part, whatever you think of him, whatever he thinks, is that Michael Avenatti did this to himself, though he wouldn’t put it that way. The trouble is making sense of what it all adds up to, beyond pure entertainment value. It’s the thing he was always so good at — presenting his case, telling a story, synthesizing the facts, to a jury, to a TV camera, to his Twitter followers, to you. Now, it may be the one thing he can’t do.

If life is about “experiences,” he says, “and all those experiences coming together, almost to create a fabric of someone’s lifetime, then very few people on the planet have had the ride that I have had. I don’t know of anyone else who went from a potential presidential candidate, who I would argue was the greatest threat to Donald Trump — again, my truth, and I will always believe that and I think if some people were honest, they would agree — to El Chapo’s cell.”

“There are many times — ” He stops himself.

“There are not many times —”

He corrects again. “Basically all of the time — I don’t… I don’t see….”

“I don’t quite see how it all comes together yet.”

9/9

From: >>>/deepdigs/3436

HUGE WIN: Court Rules Against Democrat State Leaders – Will Allow Inspection of Fulton County, PA Dominion Voting Machines

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/huge-win-court-rules-democrat-state-leaders-will-allow-inspection-fulton-county-pa-dominion-voting-machines/

The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of The Amistad Project and Fulton County, Pennsylvania, and will allow the inspection of the Fulton County, PA Dominion Voting Machines to proceed.

State Democrats including the Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid sued to prevent the voting machine inspections earlier this month. Democrats have fought against audits in Pennsylvania and elsewhere since the 2020 election which is curious if they were so certain of their victory in 2020.

This is HUGE NEWS for Pennsylvania and for free and fair elections.

Via The Amistad Project:

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania/December 23, 2021 – The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania has ruled in favor of The Amistad Project and Fulton County, Pennsylvania, allowing the county to send its Dominion voting machines to the State Senate for inspection on January 10.

“The court recognized that it was improper to demand that the county – which owns the machines, and has the responsibility of running the election along with the legislature – can’t determine whether the machines worked properly,” said Phill Kline, director of The Amistad Project. “As the judge noted, there’s no justification for preventing the county from looking at their own machines.”

Pennsylvania’s attorney general and secretary of state had sued to prevent the inspection, which was originally scheduled for December 22, but the judge determined that it must be allowed to proceed, with a short delay to allow experts from both sides to come up with a formal protocol for the inspection.

“Executive branch officials were trying to stop the inspection altogether, but the judge did not grant their emergency motion to stop the inspection,” explained Amistad Project attorney Tom King. “They did not go to court seeking a delay; they sought to stop it, and they lost.”

via: https://www.revolver.news/2021/12/after-14-year-delay-james-webb-telescope-set-for-xmas-launch/

Webb Telescope Launch Could Shift Our Understanding of the Early Universe

After years of delay, the $10 billion observatory, successor to the Hubble, is set to launch into space on Dec. 25

https://www.wsj.com/articles/webb-telescope-launch-could-shift-our-understanding-of-the-early-universe-11640341802

https://archive.fo/zQP9P

A new era of astronomy will dawn Saturday, Dec. 25, when the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful space telescope ever constructed, lifts off from the edge of a South American jungle and begins a decadelong mission to catch the glitter of the first stars at the birth of the universe.

With six times the light-gathering power of the Hubble Space Telescope, which preceded it into space more than a generation ago, the Webb telescope will peer deeper into the cosmos—and farther back in time—to open a window on the universe as it took shape soon after the Big Bang.

“We want to look at those first galaxies growing,” said John Mather, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist and the senior project scientist for the Webb telescope at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “One of our top goals is to see how stars grow with their young planets.”

Astronomers will also use the new telescope to probe black holes at the centers of galaxies, search for the chemical signatures of life on extrasolar planets and, closer to home, study the frozen oceans on moons at the edge of our own solar system.

The $10 billion, truck-size telescope, now nestled inside the nose cone of a rocket, is poised for launch from Europe’s Spaceport along the Atlantic coast in French Guiana. Once it clears Earth’s atmosphere, it will set course on a 29-day voyage to a spot four times as far away as the moon. Plans call for the spacecraft to orbit the sun at this spot, called the second Lagrange point, at least through 2026, collecting distant starlight with its huge, gold-coated mirror and beaming back a steady stream of images and data.

The Webb’s ultrasensitive infrared sensors are designed to capture light emitted more than 13.6 billion years ago by primordial stars, gargantuan furnaces that were hundreds of times larger than any stars shining today. It could reveal the earliest star clusters and supernovas, where almost all the elements were forged.

“We want to see the first objects that formed as the universe cooled down after the Big Bang,” Dr. Mather said. “We don’t know exactly when the universe made the first stars and galaxies, or how for that matter. One way or another, the first stars must have influenced our own history, beginning with stirring up everything and producing the other chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium.”

Stretched by time and distance, that first starlight has shifted from visible or ultraviolet light into redder wavelengths that are invisible to the Hubble Space Telescope and most terrestrial telescopes, because moisture in the atmosphere strongly absorbs infrared radiation.

By looking in the infrared, the Webb telescope also will be able to see through the cosmic dust that ordinarily obscures exoplanets, which are those outside our solar system orbiting other stars, and galaxies.

“The Webb will be able to see in the infrared stars and galaxies that were a hundred times fainter than was previously possible,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which will manage the telescope once it is in space.

The Webb also carries an advanced chemical analyzer called the Near Infrared Spectrograph that collects data about variations in light to reveal the temperatures, masses and chemical compositions of stars and planets.

“We will be able to take a hundred spectra or more at the same time in a single exposure,” said Antonella Nota, a Webb project scientist with the European Space Agency. “Images are worth a thousand words; spectra, for astronomers, are worth a thousand images.”

In the telescope’s first year of operation, astronomers plan to use it to analyze atmospheres of 65 planets that orbit stars light-years away from our own solar system, seeking evidence of water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. “We will be able to look in the atmospheres of the planets to identify elements that are signs of life as we know it,” said Begoña Vila, an instrument systems engineer for the telescope.

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The Webb mission gets under way at a critical time for astronomy, as light pollution—including that caused by vast networks of satellites now being sent into Earth orbit—is making it hard to study the stars from our planet’s surface.

“Even at the North Pole there will be light pollution from satellites,” said Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at Campion College and the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, and the lead author of a study on light pollution to be published in the Astronomical Journal. So many brightly shining satellites girdling Earth “will have a devastating effect on astronomy and stargazing world-wide.”

From deep space, however, the view is still unobstructed.

Ten years late and 10 times over budget—in large part because of a series of design, production and quality-control lapses that a NASA review board laid at the feet of prime contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. and others—the Webb telescope is among the most expensive science instruments ever built. Engineers had to fix faulty welds, missing bolts and tears in the telescope’s giant sunshield, among other problems.

“The complexity of this first-ever program inevitably creates opportunities for human error in design, manufacturing, integration and testing,” Wesley Bush, then the chief executive officer of Northrop Grumman, said in testimony to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in 2018. “And we have experienced some errors.”

If all goes planned, the Webb telescope will join more than two dozen telescopes already in space, ranging from the vintage $11.3 billion Hubble telescope to the $188 million X-ray Polarimetry Observatory, which launched earlier this month to study pulsars, neutron stars and black holes.

But NASA scientists are acutely aware of the risks involved in sending such a complicated instrument into such a hostile environment—especially since the Webb telescope will be too far away for any repair missions of the sort that NASA mounted to correct problems with the Hubble telescope.

The Webb telescope’s gold-plated main mirror, measuring 21 feet in diameter, is too big to fit inside the nose cone of any existing rocket. So NASA engineers built it in 18 segments that fold up like the petals of an origami flower. They packed these and other parts of the telescope inside the European Ariane-5 rocket—including solar panels and a tennis-court-size sun screen designed to keep the instrument at its minus 390 degree Fahrenheit operating temperature.

Once in space, the mirror will take 10 days or so to unfold. NASA calls this remote-control effort one of the most complicated operations ever attempted in space. Like an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption, it will take 50 mechanical procedures involving 70 hinges, 90 cables, 140 releases and 400 pulleys, NASA officials said.

For the 18 mirror elements to function as a single, perfectly focused lens, telescope engineers said, each must be aligned by remote control to within a fraction of a wavelength of near-infrared light—about 1/10,000 the thickness of a human hair. To fine-tune them, 126 actuators will bend or flex each mirror into a specific prescription, a process that will likely take months.

“We will rebuild it in orbit,” Mike Menzel, lead systems engineer for the Webb at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said of the mirror. ”This has never been done before.”

All told, it will take about six months of setup and calibration before the telescope is ready to start scientific observations.

“I won’t breathe a sigh of relief until 180 days after launch, when we are operational,” said Bill Ochs, NASA Webb project manager.

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