#impeachment witnesses

[lovegonelethal24]

NEW DISCOVERY!!!!

A BIG revelation about Naybar Hood, one of the recent witnesses called up to testify, has come to light recently. Reports that he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia have surfaced, raising serious questions about his reliability as a witness.

While his condition is no laughing matter, the inconsistencies in his testimony suddenly make a lot more sense. Did everything he claimed to witness really happen, or was it just another figment of his imagination?

Should Naybar Hood even be allowed to testify? Is it time to consider impeachment? Only time will tell...

[the-political-kitten]

Hmmmm.... now, why would the Republicans not take this opportunity? Because perhaps there is no there there?

That is epic!!!!

[wilwheaton]

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was acquitted at his impeachment trial today by 16 Republican Texas Senators. These 16 Senators banded together to form a partisan voting block on every count to prevent his conviction. The most corrupt Attorney General in America now continues in power knowing that he is completely above the law in Texas. The witnesses against him were some of his closest friends, associates, employees and appointees. They were all Republicans. The vote in the Texas House to impeach was overwhelming. But Paxton has shown that he is willing to nakedly abuse his power and do favors for his friends and political allies, and that is something 16 Texas Senators value highly in their AG.

BREAKING: 16 TX GOP Senators Ignore Paxton's Corruption & Acquit

Republicans are absolute trash.

[simply-ivanka]

Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees Release Report on Impeachment Inquiry Finding Joe Biden Has Committed Impeachable Conduct

Below are key findings from the impeachment inquiry report. The 291 page report can be found below.

From 2014 to the present, as part of a conspiracy to monetize Joe Biden’s office of public trust to enrich the Biden family, Biden family members and their associates received over $27 million from foreign individuals or entities. In order to obscure the source of these funds, the Biden family and their associates set up shell companies to conceal these payments from scrutiny. The Biden family used proceeds from these business activities to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars to Joe Biden—including thousands of dollars that are directly traceable to China. While Jim Biden claimed he gave this money to Joe Biden to repay personal loans, Jim Biden did not provide any evidence to support this claim. The Biden family’s receipt of millions of dollars required Joe Biden’s knowing participation in this conspiracy, including while he served as Vice President.

Joe Biden used his status as Vice President to garner favorable outcomes for his son’s and his business partners’ foreign business dealings. Witnesses acknowledged that Hunter Biden involved Vice President Biden in many of his business dealings with Russian, Romanian, Chinese, Kazakhstani, and Ukrainian individuals and companies. Then-Vice President Biden met or spoke with nearly every one of the Biden family’s foreign business associates, including those from Ukraine, China, Russia, and Kazakhstan. As a result, the Biden family has received millions of dollars from these foreign entities. 

The Biden family leveraged Joe Biden’s positions of public trust to obtain over $8 million in loans from Democratic benefactors. Millions of dollars in loans have not been repaid and the paperwork supporting many of the loans does not exist and has not been produced to the Committees. This raises serious questions about whether these funds were provided as gifts disguised as loans.

Under the Biden Administration, the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) afforded special treatment to President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.Several witnesses acknowledged the delicate approach used during the Hunter Biden case, describing the investigation as “sensitive” or “significant.” Evidence shows that Department officials slow-walked the investigation, informed defense counsel of future investigative actions, prevented line investigators from taking otherwise ordinary investigative steps, and allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the most serious felony charges. These unusual—and oftentimes in the view of witnesses, unprecedented—tactics conflicted with standard operating procedures and ultimately had the effect of benefiting Hunter Biden.

The Biden Justice Department misled Congress about the independence of law enforcement entities in the criminal investigation of Hunter Biden. Biden Administration political appointees exercised significant oversight and control over the investigation of the President’s son. Witnesses described how U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware and now-Special Counsel David Weiss, who oversaw the investigation and prosecution of Hunter Biden, had to seek (1) agreement from other U.S. Attorneys to bring cases in a district geographically distinct from his own and (2) approval from the Biden Justice Department’s Tax Division to bring specific charges or take investigative actions against Hunter Biden. Despite the clear conflict of interest, Weiss was only afforded special counsel status after the investigation came under congressional scrutiny.

The White House has obstructed the Committees’ impeachment inquiry by withholding key documents and witnesses. The White House has impeded the Committees’ investigation of President Biden’s unlawful retention of classified documents, by refusing to make relevant witnesses available for interviews and by erroneously asserting executive privilege over audio recordings from Special Counsel Hur’s interviews with President Biden. In addition, the White House is preventing the National Archives from turning over documents that are material to the Committees’ inquiry.

See report at the below link

[freesiablooming]

Korea is fine

Honestly, I barely got any sleep. This was something I could never have imagined. Martial law was declared, members of the National Assembly climbed over fences to enter the Assembly building, and in the dead of night, enraged citizens clashed with heavily armed special forces as they tried to storm the Assembly. For two hours, I watched everything unfold live on YouTube, trembling with anxiety and anger until the National Assembly passed a resolution to revoke martial law. I knew Yoon was disastrously foolish, but I’m still shocked that he thought declaring martial law in South Korea in 2024 would succeed, and he could do whatever we wanted.

Although I was alarmed, I still had faith in South Korea's rule of law and democratic system. What the president did was a blatant violation of the Constitution. There was no legitimate reason to declare martial law, and the military should never suppress the National Assembly. Moreover, if the Assembly demands the lifting of martial law, the president is constitutionally obliged to comply. The military also has no constitutional basis to follow an unlawful order from the president. For this reason, I didn’t think this crisis would last long. Such a scenario simply isn’t feasible in South Korea in 2024. Arresting citizens and lawmakers without warrants for defying martial law? That’s inconceivable. Yet, I can’t deny that seeing armed soldiers made me uneasy. What if they actually arrested lawmakers? What if they detained citizens after banning public gatherings? These concerns crossed my mind.

However, South Korean democracy and its citizens will never yield under pressure. Since the 1950s, we’ve fought tirelessly, shedding blood and sweat, to achieve democracy by the time we reached the 1990s. The public opinion toward martial law is resolute. Even when we see tanks and armed soldiers taking control of the capital, we feel not fear but rage. We’ve always stood up and resisted. We cannot be silenced. Historically, even during the era of absolute monarchy, Koreans openly criticized and chastised the king for not doing his job properly. Resistance against Injustice is in our cultural DNA. Recently in 2016, we experienced the impeachment of a president. Over the course of three months, from autumn to winter, a total of ten million citizens peacefully gathered in the streets, holding candlelight vigils. The protests were safe. Parents who wanted to teach their children about democracy brought strollers, and people sang impeachment songs, danced, and shared hand warmers. I was there too. I witnessed a historic moment where a peaceful citizen revolution succeeded and that memory remains vivid and powerful. That’s why I have faith in our democratic system. Sometimes, absurd things happen in politics, but we always manage to set things right. There is no way this unlawful martial law will succeed or that South Korean democracy will once again be trampled under the military's boots. Such an attempt cannot and will not persist for long.

Therefore, South Korea is fine. It is safe. A civil war will not break out. We are united, and our legal system functions properly. South Korea is not the kind of country you often see in international news—one plagued by frequent coups and internal conflicts. It is a developed democratic nation. This situation is as unsustainable as the House of Bourbon attempting a coup to reclaim the French throne, or a U.S. president declaring himself emperor and trying to turn the country into an empire.

Although last night’s events caused international media to stir, the Korean won to depreciate, concerns over capital flight to rise, and our credit rating and national prestige to take a hit, we will recover from this two-hour crisis. There is much work ahead—clearing the debris of this upheaval and restoring our nation’s dignity. But we will manage, so the world need not worry too much. Citizens will go about their daily lives, the markets will function smoothly, and everything will return to order.

Photos: Citizens blocking armed forces from entering the assembly last night

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) Statement / December 7th, 2024

The People Power Party who blocked the impeachment is an accomplice in treason!

Dissolve the People Power Party now!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Today, on December 7th, the impeachment motion against President Yoon failed in the National Assembly due to insufficient votes, as members of the People Power Party collectively walked out. The People Power Party has turned its back on the people's wishes, effectively admitting their complicity.

More than one million citizens gathered in front of the National Assembly. They came together because they cannot forgive a president who declared martial law and aimed weapons at his own people. Despite the cold winter weather, they took to the streets hoping desperately for the impeachment to pass.

However, the news from the Assembly was shocking. The ruling party members simply walked out, refusing to even participate in the vote. They abandoned their duty to the people. Today, citizens witnessed democracy taking a step backwards. They saw clearly who stands with those who would harm our democracy.

The People Power Party must be dissolved. Those who protect Yoon must face consequences. It would be a grave mistake to think this can be resolved through compromise or constitutional amendments for an early resignation. Through the people's judgment, Yoon, his associates, and the People Power Party will face severe consequences.

[mariacallous]

Whatever happens next, one day historians will have to explain why a candidate who earlier this year had been presented as disciplined started to veer off into unrestrained racist rhetoric and dancing for 40 minutes to his own playlist. Was it age, as plenty of commentators have speculated? Was it a brilliant attempt to balance dehumanizing attacks on minorities with an effort to make himself look human?

A much more sinister explanation must be taken seriously. We still assume that we are witnessing two campaigns for the presidency. But what if we are witnessing one campaign and one slow-motion coup, whose organizers need to go through the motion of campaigning for the plan to work? Since winning at the ballot box does not matter, taking a break to listen to Pavarotti isn’t a problem; conversely, a festival of racism and conspiracy theories, as at Madison Square Garden, is not about convincing any undecided voter, but motivating committed Trumpists to go along with another coup attempt.

To be sure, this can also sound like conspiracy theory. The point is not prediction, but to call for preparedness. After all, there is an overwhelming number of reasons why, should Trump lose, he will once more try to take power anyway. His followers have long been primed to assume that evil Democrats will steal the election. The unchecked racism fits into a logic of far-right populism more generally: far-right populists claim that they, and they alone, represent what they call “the silent majority” or “the real people” (the very expression Trump used on January 6 to address his supporters).

If far-right populists do not win elections, the reason can only be that the majority of the electorate was silenced by someone (liberal elites, of course). Or, for that matter, people who are not “real people” – fake Americans – must have participated in the election to bring about an illegitimate outcome. This explains the Republican obsession with finding proof of “non-citizen” voting.

Dozens of lawsuits have already been launched to put election results into doubt. As in 2020 and early 2021, Trump is likely to make sharing his lies a test of loyalty.

Here analogies with other far-right populists are again illuminating: it is doubtful that all followers of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland truly believe that relatively liberal prime minister Donald Tusk had colluded with Russians to have the country’s president, a member of PiS, killed in a plane crash in Smolensk in 2010. But professing the Smolensk conspiracy theory was not about making an empirical statement; it became a means to signal membership of a political tribe.

In theory, Republicans could seize the chance at last to break with Trump, who, after all, has only delivered defeats to the party. He has stated that he will not run again (though it would of course be naive to take any of his promises at face value). Yet there were already plenty of incentives to get rid of Trump in early 2021, and still Republicans did not disown, let alone impeach, him.

Most worryingly, Maga members have been primed to resort to violence. Trump and his allies – including the world’s richest man, who just happens to be a rightwing extremist – have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle. If Democrats win, Musk has claimed, there will not be any proper elections ever after; they will bring in more foreigners to secure a permanent majority. It is already half forgotten that Trump held his first major rally this election cycle in Waco, Texas.

Who knows whether Trump can really mobilize large numbers of people on the streets; it might be enough to prolong a sense of chaos. Vance has claimed that the 2020 election was problematic, because so many citizens had doubts about its “integrity” and Democrats prevented a “debate” which the country needed to have (never mind that Republicans had created the doubts in the first place). How long a debate would Vance like, exactly? Incidents like the infamous Brooks Brothers riot, where rightwingers in fancy suits stopped a recount in Florida in 2000, might accompany this debate. After all, as Jack Smith has claimed, Trump campaign operatives in 2020 already issued the order: “Make them riot.”

The hope may well be that, if decisions are kicked to the correct court, things could still go Republicans’ way. Trumpists know from the US supreme court’s decisions about ballot access and immunity earlier that some parts of the judiciary have given up on any conventional legal logic; they are likely simply to deliver whatever benefits Trump. The conservative justices’ decision this past week allowing the removal of voters from the rolls in Virginia so close to the election – a clear break with precedent – might well have been a preview of what a court captured by Trumpists is willing to do.

To be sure, the system as a whole is less vulnerable than in 2020. What is officially known as the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 makes it harder to challenge results in Congress; the theory that legislatures could overturn the outcome – popular among Trumpists in 2020 – has not found much legal support. But since Trump has everything to lose (including his freedom, given the charges still pending), there’s every reason to think that he’ll try everything.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Justin Baragona at The Independent:

Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and President-elect Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” took to his social media platform X to ominously accuse the key witness in Trump’s first impeachment of treason while calling for him to “pay the appropriate penalty.” Musk, who has been tasked by Trump to lead an outside agency on government efficiency named after a meme, took issue on Wednesday with comments made by former National Security Council official Alexander Vindman during an appearance on MSNBC.

Vindman, who testified in 2019 that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation into then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, cited reports that Musk had been engaged in secret conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin dating back to 2022. He then expressed concerns that Musk, who has federal contracts through his SpaceX, Tesla and Starlink companies, may have shared “state secrets” with Putin. “And [Putin’s] been using the richest man in the world to do his bidding. In some cases, that’s encouraging him probably to support Donald Trump,” Vindman told MSNBC. “That’s not speculation. We see how far in Elon has gone. And then using Twitter as a disinformation platform.” Reacting to a clip of Vindman’s remarks, Musk tweeted: “Vindman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty.”

Vindman in turn responded on X, tweeting: “Elon, here you go again making false and completely unfounded accusations without providing any specifics. That’s the kind of response one would expect from a conspiracy theorist. What oligarch? What treason? Let me help you out with the facts: I don’t take/have never taken money from any money from oligarchs Ukrainian or other otherwise.” He added: “You, Elon, appear to believe you can act with impunity and are attempting to silence your critics. I’m not intimidated.”

[...] Republicans and conservative media, meanwhile, have long accused Vindman of holding “dual loyalty,” citing the fact that his family fled Soviet-era Ukraine when he was 3 years old. After Vindman first testified before the House impeachment inquiry about Trump’s actions towards Zelensky, Fox News hosts and GOP lawmakers said he “has an affinity for Ukraine” while suggesting he was simultaneously advancing Ukrainian interests while working in the White House. As reported by The Intercept at the time, the “smear tactic” leaned heavily on antisemitic tropes, especially since Vindman himself is Jewish.

Oxygen thief Elon Musk launches unhinged attack against Col. Alexander Vindman by baselessly accusing him of “treason.”

[contemplatingoutlander]

Surprise, surprise! Another GOP "star witness" against the Bidens also has lots of ties to Russia.

One central issue in the Bobulinski timeline—his long-standing connections to a sanctioned Russian oligarch behind state-controlled energy company Rosneft—appears far more close and complex than he has suggested, including in his House testimony. Bobulinski was a partner with Hunter Biden and a small circle of other associates in a proposed 2017 investment deal involving their startup entity, called “SinoHawk,” and privately owned Chinese energy firm CEFC. In 2020, Bobulinski went public with claims that the finances involved not just Hunter Biden, but his father Joe Biden, who was out of office at the time of the negotiations. Republicans have pointed to Bobulinski’s claims as evidence of potential wrongdoing, and his allegations have fueled unproven but widespread speculation about a bribery scandal—even though many of these claims have been debunked, and years of GOP investigations have turned up no evidence of impeachable offenses. But as the inquiry has unspooled the details surrounding the proposal, Bobulinski’s own connections to Russia have come into clearer focus.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 11, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 12, 2024

Yesterday, Raw Story reported that Ivan Raiklin, Trump’s self-declared “Secretary of Retribution” has compiled a “Deep State target list” of 350 people he wants to see arrested and punished for “treason” if Trump is reelected. The list includes Democratic and Republican elected officials, journalists he considers to be Trump’s enemies, U.S. Capitol Police officers, and witnesses against Trump in his impeachment trials and the hearings concerning the events of January 6, 2021.

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story: “His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.” The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Raiklin said the list was just the beginning. “This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?” 

Former president Donald Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has tried to distance himself from the radical extremist blueprint outlined in Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Today, videos surfaced of Trump cheering the project on from the start. At a Heritage Foundation dinner in 2022, Trump, slurring his words, said: “Our country is going to hell…. This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do...when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming.”

On a right-wing podcast yesterday, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said that Trump’s agenda and Project 2025 have “tremendous” overlap. “There are some quibbles and differences of opinion here and there, which not only is okay, but it's actually good,” Roberts said. “I mean, we're gonna be able to sort those out once the presidential administration declares what their priorities are.” He said that Trump’s attempt to distance himself from the project was “a political tactical decision.” Media Matters uncovered a video in which Project 2025 director Paul Dans said that Trump is “very bought in with this.” 

The Heritage Foundation, the key author of Project 2025, is a sponsor of the Republican National Convention. 

Today the Heritage Foundation preemptively accused the Biden administration of cheating in the 2024 election and warned that Biden might try to hold the White House “by force.” It said that Biden and his administration could “circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president.” 

There is no indication that Biden, who has repeatedly said he will accept the election results, will try to launch a coup against the United States government. In contrast, Trump, who has refused to say he will accept the election result unless he agrees with it, has already done exactly what Heritage is trying to pin on Biden: Trump tried to stay in office against the will of the voters in 2021. 

Trump is currently under criminal indictment for that attempt, although the Supreme Court’s eye-popping July 1 decision in Trump v. U.S. declaring that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” means Trump can challenge those indictments. Indeed, in the wake of that decision, Trump’s lawyers have filed a motion to vacate the jury’s conviction of Trump on 24 felony counts related to the falsification of business records in his attempt to skew the 2016 election, and to dismiss the indictment. 

While the U.S. and our allies celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Erin Banco of Politico reported yesterday that Trump advisors have told foreign officials that Trump plans to scale back U.S. cooperation and support for NATO, including reducing the sharing of intelligence with NATO countries.

This seems likely to be related to the news that the U.S. intelligence discovered a series of Russian plots to assassinate executives from European defense companies that are supplying arms to Ukraine. Americans took that intelligence to Germany and foiled a Russian plot to kill the chief executive officer of a German arms manufacturer. 

Trump has stayed home playing golf for the past two weeks, but on Tuesday he held a rally at his Doral golf club outside of Miami, where he kept the audience waiting outside in 90-degree heat before he showed up an hour late. His 75-minute speech was, as The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reported, “full of evidence-free claims that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent; baseless accusations that overseas nations were sending to the US ‘most of their prisoners’; and a laughable assertion that a gathering of supporters numbering in the hundreds was really a crowd of 45,000.” He also claimed that Biden had quadrupled the price of bacon and said, “We don’t eat bacon any more.” 

Trump did not mention his vice presidential pick. For the first time since 1988, it appears the Republicans will go into their convention without knowing who that pick will be. 

Luscombe reported that the crowd “appeared mostly subdued,” yawning and playing on their phones. 

Today, the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Trump is “the only candidate in the race who is patently unfit for office—any office—and an imminent threat to democracy.” “If the [Republicans] had any decency left,” it wrote, they would dump him. Voters, the board said, must see the election as “a referendum on our 248-year democracy, and a choice between a trustworthy public servant who upholds American values and a serial liar who wants to push the country into authoritarianism.”

Almost two weeks after calling for Biden to step out of the 2024 race for the presidency, the editorial board of the New York Times also said that Trump is unfit to lead the United States of America, and urged voters “to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it.”

There was continued good news today about the American economy. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had collected more than $1 billion in overdue tax bills from millionaires. That crackdown was possible thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which funded an initiative to pursue high-income, high-wealth individuals who have an income of more than $1 million and owe more than $250,000 to the IRS. 

Republicans have repeatedly tried to cut the funding that made this enforcement possible. 

Today’s inflation report for June showed that inflation continues to cool, falling in June for the first time since the start of the pandemic. It declined in June by –0.1%, as gas and electricity prices dropped and as rent had its smallest monthly increase since August 2021. Statistics also show that workers’ wages continue to grow more quickly than prices. 

Yesterday, the AFL-CIO executive council voted unanimously to reaffirm its support for President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, saying: “Unions have never wavered in our support of them because they’ve never wavered in their commitment to working people.” The Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers Union quoted that statement and added: “BAC is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters across the labor movement in supporting the Biden-Harris re-election campaign.”

In a press conference this evening, Biden championed the economic boom his policies created for the middle class and reminded attending journalists that “none of you thought that would happen.” 

In that press conference, held after he presided over the three-day NATO summit and thus focused on foreign affairs, Biden answered press questions directly and fully, not only on his health but also on foreign affairs. He reiterated the importance of NATO and reminded reporters that he was key to reinforcing the alliance after Trump weakened it, then went on to talk about foreign affairs more broadly. He also noted that “I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other president,” adding: “And by the way I handed in my notes.” This was a reference to the fact that in an unprecedented move, Trump infamously refused to disclose the notes from one of his conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

At the same time that Biden was holding a press conference that focused on NATO and foreign affairs, Trump was meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Putin ally Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. On social media this evening, Trump indicated that he is trying to conduct his own foreign policy, although the Logan Act prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments, and reiterated his support for Putin’s call for “peace” in Ukraine. Their plan calls for giving Putin the western regions of Ukraine that were central to his 2016 support for Trump; Trump’s 2016 campaign manager promised Trump would look the other way as Putin absorbed them. 

Orbán, who has openly called for Trump’s reelection, posted: “Peace mission 5.0[.] It was an honour to visit President [Trump] at Mar-a-Lago today. We discussed ways to make [peace]. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[lemuel-apologist]

like, i've tried expressing this to (health) professionals before, but it's true that, if you're participating in the criminal justice system, you aren't "allowed" to be mentally ill. that goes for defendants especially. like, obviously, you are, kinda, in a clinical sense (as long as it's in the bounds of what they can deem sympathetic, or treat, or imprison, or defend, or impeach, whatever the fuck else), but you're... not... supposed to have symptoms of it, if you catch my drift? im bouncing off of joy's point here. it goes for interrogation, and it goes for the stand.

you're not allowed to be anxious; you're not allowed to be fidgety; you're not allowed to be anything. and god forbid you display symptoms of something worse than anxiety, right? (quote-unquote worse.)

i come from a family of very fidgety people. but, like-- fidgeting like that is very often seen as a sign of untrustworthiness. and you're not supposed to bring anything up to the stand with you other than your notes and anything meant to assist in presenting your evidence, as allowed by policy and law (depending on where you are, etc etc etc WHATEV).

im the kind of person who has to prepare to be on the stand to testify about scientific principles. if im an expert witness, my opinion is exclusionary, and i have exculpatory evidence, but the jury deems me untrustworthy because of my body language, my entire testimony is worthless. extrapolate this to the defendant. you've already been deemed guilty during interrogation because of your body language (because you're fidgety and anxious, and that was enough to push it further). if that continues on the stand, there are absolutely deleterious effects.

like, im on the stand for the sake of science. my aunt, my stepdad-- they're not on the stand for science, they're up there to defend themselves.

it's a pileup of really small social stigmas from people who think they've cracked a code on how people are. but most "body language analysis" is really just kind of bullshit. a lot of the behavioral analysis stuff they use is very "yeah, kinda, but no, because you're making a super broad generalization and applying it incorrectly," and then they stick their fingers in their ears and do something counterproductive that leads to further recidivism. but WHATEVER, WHAT DO I KNOW, I DIDN'T TAKE PSYCH.

[pennsyltuckyheathen]

MAGA Corncob Comer continues to show everyone what an ass-kisser and bootlicker he is for #TraitorTrump

Making himself and all MAGA look like idiots and stooges. These 'men' have no integrity and no allegiance to our country and its citizens.

Another "impeachment inquiry" intended to smear Biden backfires on MAGA as they continue to push Russian lies and propaganda.

[donald-trump-official]

Now it’s time to hear from the next Republican witness in this impeachment inquiry, Anita Sanchez. She was the assistant to Hunter bidens maid’s husband back in 2017 and she’s going to BLOW THIS CASE WIDE OPEN!

[gusty-wind]

On the call, Trump can be heard telling Raffensperger, "I just want to find 11,780 votes." That statement was one of the centerpieces of the former president's second impeachment. Was it definitive, though? In context, Trump had also asked Raffensperger to "find the fraud," indicating that he thought there were legitimate votes left to be uncovered. 

Regardless, Fulton County DA Fani Willis used the phone call as the foundation for her RICO prosecution against Trump and his associates. According to a new book published by Michael Isikoff (who was an original pusher of the Russian collusion hoax), that call was illegally recorded by Jordan Fuchs. 

Who is Fuchs? She is Raffensperger's Chief of Staff and has a very checkered history of political activism. Her hatred of Trump can be described as obsessive, and she was in Florida when she recorded the call in question. Why is that a problem? Because Florida is a two-party consent state. 

Here's the quote from Isikoff's book, which Fuchs was a primary source for.

Fuchs has never talked publicly about her taping of the phone call; she learned, after the fact, that Florida where she was at the time is one of fifteen states that requires two-party consent for the taping of phone calls. A lawyer for Raffensperger’s office asked the January 6 committee not to call her as a witness for reasons the committee’s lawyers assumed were due to her potential legal exposure. The committee agreed. But when she was called before a Fulton County special grand jury convened by Fani Willis, she was granted immunity and confirmed the taping, according to three sources with direct knowledge of her testimony.