Eric Perkins

Virginia small business, franchising & nonprofit attorney. Helping entrepreneurs, biz owners & nonprofits stay out of court. Ambassador of tennis #RVABizLaw

[Eric Perkins @ericperkinslaw]

During National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, I am participating in the Jay Walkers Challenge to walk 800,000 steps in memory of lives lost each year to suicide. Please consider supporting Eric Perkins (Rotary Club of Short Pump)! https://t.co/QrBjtqTWnm

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

🇷🇺 The Trojan Horse in the Oval Office

For a decade Trump has insisted that every link between him and Moscow was a hoax, a witch hunt cooked up by sore losers. CNN now reports that fourteen Russian spy satellites swept over Prince Sultan Air Base two days before Iran struck it on March 27, wounding twelve Americans and destroying an AWACS aircraft that had been moved and was found anyway.

American officials say Russian data very likely fed that strike and several others, including one on a CIA facility in Riyadh, in a war that has by the Pentagon's own count killed at least eleven American service members.

This is where the hoax collides with the body count. Putin helps Tehran put missiles onto American bases, and the president answers with a warm phone call about trade, according to the Kremlin, and a plan to strip a third of America's forces out of Europe, which happens to be precisely what Moscow has wanted since 1949.

Whether it is design or vanity hardly matters any more, because America has wheeled a Trojan horse into the Oval Office and the damage is being done from the inside. This is, after all, a man who barks at allies and goes weak at the knees for anyone with a scowl and a secret police, and one suspects that had bin Laden only paid him a compliment, he too would have been a very, very smart guy who had been treated very unfairly.

The remarkable thing is that the whole world can see it. Europe sees it, Canada sees it and is taking notes, and Moscow and Tehran saw it first and acted accordingly. Only one nation on earth still hasn't worked it out, and it is the one paying in aircraft, bases, allies and lives. History will struggle to explain how a superpower allowed itself to be so thoroughly outmanoeuvred by a man it had been warned about for ten years.

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[Henry Winkler @hwinkler4real]

Fact

[Bo Gardiner @BoGardiner1]

Trump's former lawyer Ty Cobb last night in an interview described Todd Blanche's level of unscrupled ruthlessness, utter contempt for the rule of law, and loyalty to one evil man and not the country, as making Roy Cohn look like a jaywalker.

Regardless of party, moral and patriotic Americans should agree with him that Congressmembers too cowardly to use the power that voters gave them to rein in corruption and abuse of government power must have that power removed and given to persons who WILL use it.

So, this is the way, Senator. The only way.

[Dittie @DittiePE]

The DOE just admitted in court they were lying to your face.

In October, they killed $7.5B in energy grants and called it “waste.” Vought went on social media bragging about canceling “Green New Scam” funding.

New court filing this month: the cancellations had nothing to do with waste, cost, or performance. Zero. The DOE’s own lawyer admitted in writing that — with one exception — every single one of the 284 terminated grants was in a state that voted for Harris and has two Democratic senators.

Energy had recommended cutting 600+ grants in red AND blue states. The White House only pulled the trigger on the blue ones.

And in June, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Congress under oath: “No decisions were made on politics.”

That’s now directly contradicted by his own department’s court filing.

This is the same DOE that’s now writing the rules to give Trump’s political appointees veto power over every federal grant in the country — $1 trillion a year — starting in October.

They told you it wasn’t political. Then they admitted under oath that it was 100% political.

#RepublicanCostOfCorruption

https://t.co/ImrT3wxTtC

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

A Despicable Betrayal of the Dead

Four American soldiers died for this country last weekend. Their bodies were flown home. Their families stood on the tarmac at Dover and watched the flag-draped cases come off the plane. And then the fascist authoritarian Trump regime wiped their names off the official list of the war dead like they were a clerical inconvenience.

1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan.
Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad.
Pvt. Isabella Gonzales.
Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton.

One day the Pentagon's public casualty count said 18 Americans had been killed in the Iran war. The next day it said 14. The four most recent deaths — three in a missile attack in Jordan, one in Iraq — were simply deleted. Military sources told The New York Times the order came because the deaths happened after Trump's April "cease-fire." The Pentagon's official line was the pathetic excuse of "temporary data disruptions."

This is not a mistake. This is a calculated insult. These men and women put on the uniform, followed orders, and paid with their lives. The government they served responded by erasing them from the public record the moment their deaths became politically inconvenient. That is not leadership. That is cowardice dressed up as administration.

There is no honorable way to explain this. You do not get to decide that a soldier's death "doesn't count" because it happened after a speech. You do not get to scrub their names while their remains are still being received with ceremony. You do not get to treat the ultimate sacrifice as a data point that can be adjusted for better optics.

This is the purest form of disrespect: not an open sneer, but a quiet bureaucratic deletion that pretends the dead never existed on the official ledger. Every family who has lost a child in this war just received the same message — your grief is real, but Trump's version of the truth is more important.

That is not how a serious country treats its dead. It is how an authoritarian regime treats them when it has something to hide.

[Katie Lipton @katielipton]

Incredible stuff

[Eric Perkins @ericperkinslaw]

@Martina Testosterone has arguably been the most toxic substance known to humankind since the dawn of civilization.

[Charlotte Clymer 🇺🇦 @cmclymer]

Summer 2015. Several lifetimes ago. A different America.

Lindsey Graham, running for president, says this about Joe Biden. The same summer he said Trump would “kill” the GOP with his hateful comments.

Several lifetimes ago. A different America.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Let me tell you what just got reported, because you will not believe it until you see it laid out.

The Trump administration cut a billion-dollar tungsten deal with Kazakhstan. Tungsten is the metal we need for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Trump himself got on the phone to close it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick worked it from the inside, sending letters, leaning on the Kazakh president, lining up as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing.

Within weeks of those negotiations, investors tied to a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a 20% stake in an entity connected to the very same Kazakhstan project their father was negotiating. Around that same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Lutnick’s own sons, raised $210 million for a partner in the deal and pocketed the fees.

The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in.

Six days after the Trump sons and their partners moved their money, Lutnick signed the final deal.

The reporting found one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals.

The total federal funding flowing toward those companies tops $8.9 billion.

This is your tax money.

It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the President’s children and the Commerce Secretary’s children.

This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close.

We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked. Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket.

Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

https://t.co/yFOl7zvOhC

[Seth Abramson @SethAbramson]

People are missing the point.

It is not that the phrase Trump insisted be on new passports confirms that he doesn't know what a passport is.

It's that for a year not one person who works for him was willing to tell him so.

They will remain cowards when he declares martial law.

[Brian Cardone 🏴‍☠️ 🇺🇦 @cardon_brian]

Good god this is a crazy interview. Listen as Scott Pelley describes how Bari Weiss wanted journalists at CBS to cover the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota. This is why we can’t have oligarchs running our news outlets, this is absolutely devastating.

[Eric Perkins @ericperkinslaw]

@OsheaJacksonJr The Carrot Top of animal sounds. Well done.

[Eric Perkins @ericperkinslaw]

@JudyKurtz @CorySmithNews Nice job by the interviewers following up to get an answer to the question asked. More of this, please.

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

W A T C H T H I S R E T W E E T T H I S

[Eric Perkins @ericperkinslaw]

@Served_Podcast How about these classic “crampy” pics from Andy’s gutsy 4-hour 5-set victory over Michael Chang in the second round of the 2001 French Open…worth a Served hat maybe??? Thrilling match.

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

I feel compelled to post this banger of a clip showing Barbara Walters humiliate trump to his face, as a reminder to reporters: YOU DON'T HAVE TO ACCEPT HIM CALLING YOU "DUMMY."

This is outstanding. 👏👏👏

[Eric Perkins @ericperkinslaw]

Awesome accomplishment Wahoos! Congrats!

[Adam Parkhomenko @AdamParkhomenko]

The best argument re: Virginia decision I’ve heard is this: