Trump on Fox & Friends: "One thing I say is we have to have quick trials. I called it quick trial. 'Cause in China they do have quick trials, you know? ... They should have a trial the following day." pic.twitter.com/uDqImYOMVi
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2025
Oddly enough, I was reading more from Alexei Leonov last night, and he had a tale about Sergei Korolev, the Soviet Union's "Chief Designer":
As the evening drew to a close and people began to drift away, Korolev drew Yuri and me aside and asked us to stay behind. Servants cleared the long dining table at which we had all been sitting, but left one corner laid afresh. They brought out delicious pirozhki, meat and cabbage pies, which Korolev’s housemaid loved to cook. A bottle of smooth, three-star Armenian cognac—Winston Churchill’s favorite—was set on the table. The servants retired. Nina Ivanovna went to bed.When the three of us were alone, Korolev began to talk. It was almost as if he were talking to a priest, as if Sergei Pavlovich were in a confessional. He told us the extraordinary story of his life. As Yuri and I sat listening it was hard to believe that the great man who sat before us had endured so much.
Korolev began by telling us about the night he was arrested and sent to one of Stalin’s most remote and brutal prison camps. A car arrived late one night in April 1938 at his apartment on Konyushkovska Street. He was bundled into the car so quickly that he was unable to say a proper goodbye to his three-year-old daughter, Natasha, or to her mother, his first wife, Xenia Vincentini. He described the torture and beatings that followed as he was questioned endlessly by a young member of the NKVD secret police.
“Do you want some water?” his interrogator asked, and he said, “Yes.” As he was being handed a glass of water, the interrogator smashed the water jug over his head with the taunt: “You scientists are so weak. A water jug can make you faint.”
When it came time for Sergei Pavlovich’s “trial,” he was marched along a maze of corridors before being brought to a halt in front of a pair of double doors. The doors opened and he saw, at the rear of a brightly lit room, a table at which sat three men, all prominent members of the Communist Party. At first, Korolev said, he felt relieved, because he knew who the men were. In the center was People’s Commissar Klement Voroshikov. Later this troika, which became known as the Emergency Three, was exposed as having masterminded many of the purges of Stalin’s Great Terror, but at the time Korolev believed Voroshikov would give him a fair trial.
It was only when Voroshikov asked Korolev to hand over the document detailing his alleged crimes, that Korolev realized a document had been placed in his hand. It was read out—he was accused of inflating the cost of reconstructing a building where an agricultural institute had been based in order to set up a new institute for rocket engineering and space technology—and he was asked if he was guilty. When he denied the charges, one of the three shouted, “All you bastards say you’re not guilty. Give him ten years.” The so-called trial had lasted less than a minute.
Korolev, at least, avoided that shrug of eternity. Anywayz, a quick trial would've been handy in a certain case involving the Espionage Act...
Selah.
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