Hello and welcome to Saturday, Aug. 22, 2026. I'm glad you're here. Bao, tooth fairies, and cat vet visits are all sharing the calendar, which is a genuinely odd trio to plan a day around.
My calendar says it's Be An Angel Day, Tooth Fairy Day, Bao Day, Eat a Peach Day, and Take Your Cat to the Vet Day. Do a good deed, eat a peach, order some bao for lunch, and haul the cat in for a checkup — just maybe don't tell the cat about the tooth fairy angle; it'll only raise questions. (Eat a Peach... that was a great album!)
Today In History:
1642: King Charles I raises his royal standard at Nottingham, formally opening the English Civil War.
1791: Enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue rise up in a massive uprising, launching the Haitian Revolution — the only successful slave revolt in history to establish an independent nation.
1849: Austria launches the first air raid in recorded history, sending unmanned, bomb-carrying balloons against Venice.
1851: The schooner yacht America wins a race around England's Isle of Wight, a victory that eventually gives its name to the America's Cup.
1864: Twelve nations adopt the First Geneva Convention, establishing the first international rules for the humane treatment of wounded soldiers.
1902: The Cadillac Motor Car Company is founded in Detroit.
1911: A painter arrives at the Louvre to sketch the wall where the Mona Lisa hangs and discovers it's gone, revealing the theft that had occurred the day before.
1922: Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins is ambushed and killed in County Cork during the Irish Civil War.
1985: British Airtours Flight 28M catches fire on the runway at Manchester Airport, killing 55 people before the plane can be fully evacuated.
1996: President Bill Clinton signs sweeping welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, into law.
Birthdays Today include Ray Bradbury, author, screenwriter (Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles); Tori Amos, singer-songwriter ("Cornflake Girl"); Valerie Harper, actor (Rhoda); and Cory Gardner, politician, former U.S. senator.
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday... hope it's a great one for you.
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I note over at Townhall the always-worthwhile Matt Vespa's latest, wherein we read:
President Trump was interviewed by his former attorney, Michael Cohen, the star witness in the hush money case, which verdict is under appeal. Trump said Cohen was weaponized against him by the Justice Department. Cohen agrees, adding that he felt coerced by the Feds. The case stems from the president's effort to pay adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 during the 2016 election.
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig effectively pronounced the case dead, leaving its former cheerleaders with nothing but a pile of sad confetti. There's a reason federal prosecutors originally passed on this nuclear hot potato while Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg sprinted to pick it up: the Feds knew Michael Cohen's credibility was a nuclear biohazard. As Honig pointed out, if Cohen is a liar, the entire foundation crumbles. If he was coerced, the trial was a farce. Take your pick — either way, the shell of a case is empty.
Yeah, about that...
While I've never fully trusted a word out of Michael Cohen's mouth in either direction, I lean toward believing his coercion claim here. It fits the pattern too cleanly not to. (Cohen is pictured above, by the way.)
Be honest, now. If Bragg was willing to weld together the legal Frankenstein's monster he actually built to get this conviction in the first place, there's no particular reason to think he'd suddenly develop scruples about how hard he leaned on his own star witness to get there.
Mind you, none of this is coming from some late-night outrage merchant on conservative talk radio, howling into a ring light. This is CNN's own senior legal analyst, standing on CNN's own soundstage, calmly dismantling the exact legal drama CNN itself spent two solid years treating as if it were holy scripture handed down from Sinai. Honig didn't bury this in an obscure Substack nobody reads. He dropped it directly into Jake Tapper's lap, on live television, and let the silence that followed do the talking. I'd genuinely have paid money to watch Tapper's face in that exact moment.
Vespa adds:
Honig has long said this case was being overblown, the process a mess, and has heavily criticized how the law was twisted to achieve liberal America's desired outcome.
Let's be clear about the timeline here:
Honig didn't have some sudden road-to-Damascus epiphany this week. Indeed, he's been saying this since before the ink on the original verdict had even finished drying. Back in May 2024, writing for New York Magazine, he was already warning that the prosecution's legal theory was held together with little more than Scotch tape and wishful thinking, writing plainly that prosecutors "contorted the law in an unprecedented manner in their quest to snare their prey." He doubled right back down the following day, torching the entire proceeding as an "unjustified mess." That earned him a live on-air scrap with Democrat strategist James Carville, who called the criticism "downright awful" — to which Honig calmly pointed out that Carville himself would hardly be defending a judge who'd donated to a "Re-elect Trump, MAGA forever" fund with the same enthusiasm.
This isn't a commentator suddenly discovering second thoughts. This is a man watching his own, fully telegraphed prediction from fifteen months ago crash headlong into reality, while the network that mostly ignored him at the time scrambles to figure out what to do with its own teleprompter.
It gets better, because Honig laid out the actual legal Frankenstein's monster in vivid, almost gleeful detail in that same original piece:
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg took "one expired state-level misdemeanor, stacked another expired state misdemeanor on top of it, then piled a federal campaign finance violation on top of that, and presto: an electroshocked state-level felony."
That's a former federal prosecutor — Honig himself spent years in the Southern District of New York, the same office that originally passed on this case — describing his own profession's handiwork as a corpse jolted upright with jumper cables. The Southern District passed. The FEC passed on it as a regulatory matter. Bragg's own predecessor as Manhattan DA had the exact same case sitting on his desk and passed too, going so far as to publicly brand star witness Michael Cohen "more than a problematic witness." Every professional who looked at this thing before politics got involved took one glance, put their hands in their pockets, and backed slowly out of the room. Bragg looked at the identical pile of rubble and decided to build an entire political career on top of it. And I hasten to add, he isn't alone in that.
This absurdity isn't some isolated accident of one overzealous DA having a bad week. It's the standard blueprint, deployed again and again, for nearly every serious attempt to politically immobilize Trump over the last decade and a half:
The Jenga Legal Strategy: Find a bizarre legal theory no self-respecting prosecutor would touch in broad daylight.
The Custom Venue: Stack a few creative statutory interpretations like children's blocks, drag the whole tower into the most hyper-partisan courtroom available, and in deep blue New York City, finding a friendly jury won’t exactly be hard.
The PR Payoff: Milk the resulting verdict for two solid years of breathless "CONVICTED FELON" chyrons, endless panel discussions, and a small cottage industry of lucrative cable-pundit book deals.
Now, with the star witness himself admitting on live television that he felt that federal agents pressured him into testifying the way he did, the entire jury-rigged scaffold is coming down in real time. And, naturally, the legacy press is acting as if the sudden structural failure utterly baffles it, and is wringing its hands as though nobody could possibly have predicted this. It's practically a recurring miracle at this point: a brand-new legal theory conjured out of thin air, aimed with surgical precision at exactly one specific American citizen, only to collapse the moment an actual working lawyer bothers to check the wiring. But sure. Let's all pretend to be shocked, right?.
And in case you think I'm reaching by calling this a pattern rather than a one-off, Honig himself just supplied fresh evidence of exactly the same dynamic playing out on the other side of the aisle. Just recently, discussing the case against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Honig called out James directly for railing against "political weaponization," and warning that it's being used to "silence truth and punish dissent" — despite having built her entire political career on doing precisely that to Trump first.
As Honig put it, flatly, right on CNN: "There's very little question that Donald Trump has politically targeted Letitia James... But let's also not whitewash history here. Letitia James did essentially the same thing to Donald Trump. She ran for office explicitly targeting him. She fundraised on that."
Well, good. Trump’s targeting James I see as a valid move, and there are very few who deserve that targeting more than Tish James. The case against Trump was demonstrably bogus, the actions of the prosecution at least questionable if not downright illegal, and yet, the leftist news media… I’m pointing at YOU, CNN and MSNBC, New York Times, et al... are to this day playing these cases against their hated enemy. And Trump isn’t supposed to say anything about the bias that the legal teams involved applied against him, and from which those same news outlets profited mightily?
Let's also recall, please, that James is making a political life out of all this. In New York, the AG traditionally stands for "Aspiring Governor." That's how we ended up with the now-disgraced Andrew Cuomo, remember. Today, with the wildly unpopular Kathy Hochul in some electoral trouble, don't think for a minute that Tish James isn't planning on taking advantage of that situation, in part campaigning on the false pretext of how she "took out" Donald J. Trump.
The sad, predictable part is that we'll almost certainly never see any real accountability land on the people who cobbled all of this lawfare together in the first place, James among them. Mostly because they've still got a small, dedicated army of true believers out there, pounding their fists on the rotting remains of that long-dead horse everyone once called "The Case Against Donald Trump." A look at social media these days confirms that with zero effort on my part.
Personally, I’d be happy with the sight of Alvin Bragg and Tish James being fitted for orange jumpsuits. Abuse of office, for openers. What would you give me for odds on that one? Even absent that, however, let’s hear no more about “34 felony convictions,” okay? I fully anticipate that whole mess being overturned.
When that happens seems an issue, mostly because of the machinations of the court systems. There are two separate appeal processes going on here.
Track one — the federal removal fight. In November 2025, the Second Circuit ordered federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein to take a second look at whether the case should move from state to federal court, given the Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling. Hellerstein heard arguments again in February 2026 — and as of the most recent reporting I can find (June 2026), he still hadn't issued a ruling. That's a full four-plus months of silence on just this one procedural question, with no indication a decision is imminent.
Track two — the actual New York state appeal on the merits. This is moving through the Appellate Division, First Department, but it's also crawling. As of about a month ago, I see by way of Bloomberg Law that the parties were still exchanging briefs — Bragg's office had a brief due, meaning the court hadn't even finished receiving all the arguments yet, let alone scheduled oral arguments or issued a ruling.
Can you imagine why in each case — they're dragging their feet? The excuse will be they're waiting on each other.
The court of public opinion will be rendering a verdict based on these new statements from Cohen, and the longstanding track of observations from Elie Honig. (Assuming the new statements get reported with the same vigor the original duct-taped cases were. Yeah, I know it's a fantasy, but I need to mention it for completeness.)
But the court system? I suggest we're about to see a clear demonstration of the gap between "the case is collapsing in the court of public opinion" and "the case is collapsing in an actual courtroom" is itself worth writing about — it's a live illustration of exactly how slow-moving institutional processes can leave a legal cloud hanging over someone for years after the underlying case has been publicly gutted. That pattern is also longstanding, as I pointed out the other day in my thought for the day:
Andrew Johnson declared the Civil War over a full year after the shooting had already stopped — proof that governments are often the last to officially notice what everyone else already knows is true.
I may write a whole column on that idea someday soon, because I have a feeling the concept is going to be playing large in our political future.
Thought for the Day: Nobody noticed the Mona Lisa was missing until a painter showed up expecting it to still be on the wall — proof that the things we trust most are often the ones we've stopped actually looking at.
VIP members: As always at this point, the floor is yours. Let's hear your thoughts in the comments.
Celebrate the weekend. Just make sure you survive the celebration, so we can plan on your being here tomorrow. See you then.
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