#special prosecutor Robert Mueller

[darkmaga-returns]

Before marrying in 2021, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., was known to be a braggadocious libertine. No conservative wants to defend such behavior, and so many on the Right are remaining silent as Gaetz is accused of also engaging in criminal conduct, paying prostitutes, and having sex with a minor. The claims against Gaetz are but another information operation, however, mirroring the ones that previously targeted Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh. And this pattern will continue unabated unless Americans unflinchingly condemn the tactic — no matter the target.

We should have learned this lesson from Donald Trump’s first presidential run and time in office. From Crossfire Hurricane, to the pee-tape dossier, to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, unsupported and unbelievable accusations leaked to the public hampered Trump’s ability to advance his agenda. Time and again the charges proved unfounded, and yet in advance of the 2024 election, the lawfare continued. The country, however, had wised up by then and recognized the various criminal and civil charges leveled against Trump for what they were: an effort to interfere in the election.

Why then is anyone giving credence to the accusations against Gaetz, especially given the FBI — after thoroughly investigating the matter for two years — decided not to charge Gaetz? Rather, career prosecutors for the Department of Justice concluded there were credibility problems with “the two central witnesses” to the case.

[mightyflamethrower]

When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton.

What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump.

The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it.

In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher Steele had discovered Donald Trump to be a veritable Russian agent.

Hillary did not disclose that she had paid Steele—with checks hidden through three paywalls. The FBI, under Director James Comey, also hired the fraudster.

Yet almost nothing in his “Steele dossier” was true.

The FBI doctored evidence submitted to a FISA court. Comey leaked to the press confidential documents about his private conversations with President Trump.

Comey’s successor, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, lied on numerous occasions to federal investigators.

Both former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper repeatedly lied to the nation, saying that Trump was de facto working with the Russians.

The result? Trump lost the 2016 popular vote but still won the Electoral College.

Next, celebrities and well-funded liberals waged a media campaign to convince the electors to become “faithless.” Left-wing elites begged them to renounce their constitutional duties and instead throw the election to Hillary Clinton.

Once Trump was elected, “Russian collusion” was fired up again in hysterical fashion.

A special counsel, Robert Mueller, consumed 22 months of the Trump presidency. His investigation team constantly leaked falsehoods about the “walls closing in on” Trump.

After nearly two years, Mueller announced there was no evidence of a Trump effort to collude with Russia.

Next was the first impeachment of Trump—nearly the moment he lost the House in 2018.

Supposedly, Trump had leveraged Ukraine to investigate a corrupt Hunter Biden by delaying foreign aid.

Trump was impeached on a strictly partisan vote.

But later, no one denied that the drug-addled Hunter Biden had indeed gotten rich from Ukraine, or that Joe Biden had fired a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into his son’s misadventures while still vice president, or that Trump released all the military assistance designated by Congress, or that he included offensive weapons formerly denied Ukraine by the Obama-Biden administration.

Next, in 2020, when Hunter’s laptop turned up abandoned at a repair shop and full of incriminating evidence of more Biden family skullduggery, the left struck again.

It rounded up “51 former intelligence authorities” to mislead the American people on the eve of the vote that the laptop was likely a fake—once again cooked up by Russian disinformation experts to aid Trump.

And once more, that was another complete falsehood. But the lie proved useful to Joe Biden in the debates and campaign. And he won the election.

Next, the learn-nothing, forget-nothing left turned to the 2023-2024 campaign.

This time, their next extra-legal efforts were twofold.

One, they unsuccessfully sought to remove Trump from some 15 state ballots.

Two, local, state, and federal courts began to wage lawfare to convict and jail candidate Trump, or at least bankrupt him and keep him off the campaign trail.

Three county and state prosecutors campaigned on getting Trump on charges never filed before against a presidential candidate—and rarely against anyone else as well.

The Fani Willis Georgia lead prosecutor met secretly with the Biden White House counsel.

Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan team hired the third-ranking federal prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department.

Special counsel Jack Smith was found by a court to have been illegally appointed and much of his case was dismissed.

On July 14, a shooter nearly killed candidate Trump, nicking his ear after somehow firing a rifle from a rooftop a mere 140 yards away—while undetected by law enforcement inside the very same building below.

Prior to the shooting, Joe Biden had boasted to donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

Biden had railed nearly nonstop that a Trump victory would spell the end of democracy—a theme the left had fueled by comparing ad nauseam Trump to Adolf Hitler.

Yet here we are in mid-July 2024 and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, is alive and leads incumbent Biden—either because of, or despite, the crude efforts to destroy him.

After nearly a decade of utter madness, can we finally order the FBI, DOJ, and CIA to butt out of our elections?

Can a bankrupt media cease whipping up hysterias about a supposed Nazi-like takeover?

Can the left stop relying on washed-up British spies, corrupt ex-spooks, and teams of clownish partisan prosecutors?

Instead, why not, at last, just let the people choose their own president?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Andrew Prokop at Vox:

Seven days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump threw the nation into crisis. The country had wondered whether the new president would follow through on the extreme and authoritarian proposals he’d put forward in his campaign. On January 27, 2017, by executive order, Trump imposed an extreme version of his “Muslim ban” — barring people from seven mostly-Muslim countries from entering the United States.  Even people already approved as lawful permanent residents — people with green cards, who had been legally living and working in the US, often for years — could all of a sudden be turned away, refused entry to their adopted home. 

Chaos unfolded at airports, nationwide protests erupted, and to many, it felt like something new and genuinely frightening was taking place: a slide into an oppressive regime. But then the crisis ebbed. Just two days after the ban was imposed, widespread criticism pushed the administration to water down the policy — “clarifying” green card holders were exempt. Five days after that, a judge blocked the rest of the order from going into effect. The guardrails protecting democracy had, it seemed, held. This pattern recurred during Trump’s presidency. The president ordered or considered something outrageous. He faced pushback in response. And he usually, ultimately, ended up constrained. Sometimes Trump would eventually end up with a scaled-back version of what he wanted: a retooled travel ban, made less blatantly discriminatory, did eventually get court approval. Sometimes he’d manage to go quite far — as in his attempt to steal the 2020 election — before being thwarted. But often he’d fail entirely.

All this has led to a sort of complacency among many Americans about what a second Trump term would bring. There’s a mentality of: “It won’t be that bad — we got through it last time, right?” We did get through it last time. But that wasn’t for lack of Trump’s trying. It was because of the guardrails: those features of the political system, both formal and informal, that so often prevented Trump from actually doing the undemocratic things he tried to do. So to assess the peril a second Trump term poses for American democracy, we need to assess the condition of the guardrails. Worryingly, most of them have weakened since Trump first came to power; some have weakened very significantly. None appear to have gotten stronger.  We’re still a very long way from a system where the president can truly rule without any checks on his power. We can’t know right now exactly how often the guardrails would still hold Trump back, or how future crises would play out.

The guardrails: What they are

To understand what exactly the guardrails protecting American democracy are, think about how Trump’s corrupt ambitions were so often frustrated during his first term. When he fired FBI Director James Comey, he ended up with special counsel Robert Mueller. When he wanted Mueller fired, it didn’t happen. When Trump urged prosecutors to charge his political enemies, they largely didn’t. He tried to punish CNN for negative coverage by blocking their parent company’s sale to AT&T; the sale went through. He tried to get Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on the Biden family, but that effort blew up in his face and got him impeached.  He never went through with other things he mused about — like delaying the 2020 election due to the pandemic or using the military to crack down on racial justice unrest. And though his attempt to overturn Biden’s election win went further than almost anyone expected, it ultimately failed too.

In all these instances, there was pushback from part of the political system — often multiple parts — that either convinced or impelled Trump to back down.  We can think of the forces constraining Trump in two categories. First, there are all the other government officials, among whom power in the system is dispersed. These include:

Executive branch appointees, many of whom often refused to carry out Trump’s orders even though Trump himself appointed them

The career civil service — the permanent government employees who can’t be fired

Members of Congress, who pass or block laws, confirm nominees, and raise a stink when the administration does something they don’t like

The courts, charged with enforcing the law, who often ruled against Trump

State and local officials, such as the election administrators who certified Biden’s swing state wins in 2020 

Second, there are the informal constraints. These include:

The Republican Party, which, broadly defined, includes politicians, party officials, and interest groups Trump wants to keep on his side

The press, which can unearth damaging news and hammer a president with critical coverage

The public, who, when roused, can speak out, take to the streets, or vote politicians out of office

To be truly successful, a would-be authoritarian would need to coopt, weaken, or smash many of these rival power centers. 

Vox’s Andrew Prokop examines how the guardrails of democracy have held up since Donald Trump took office. The guardrails mostly kept Trump in check from his most blatantly authoritarian impulses during his term, but they have significantly weakened over his reign and afterwards.

If Trump comes back in again, all the remaining guardrails to his fascist rule will all but melt away.

Read the full story at Vox.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

[ravenkings]

When Donald J. Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to “go after” President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night after his arraignment earlier that day in Miami. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”

Mr. Trump’s message was that the Justice Department charged him only because he is Mr. Biden’s political opponent, so he would invert that supposed politicization. In reality, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, two Trump-appointed prosecutors are already investigating Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents and the financial dealings of his son, Hunter.

But by suggesting the current prosecutors investigating the Bidens were not “real,” Mr. Trump appeared to be promising his supporters that he would appoint an ally who would bring charges against his political enemies regardless of the facts.

The naked politics infusing Mr. Trump’s headline-generating threat underscored something significant. In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.

Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.

[...]

As the Republican Party has morphed in response to Mr. Trump’s influence, his attacks on federal law enforcement — which trace back to the early Russia investigation in 2017, the backlash to his firing of then-F.B.I. director James B. Comey Jr. and the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel — have become enmeshed in the ideology of his supporters.

Mr. Trump’s top rival for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent.

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are — quote — ‘independent,’” Mr. DeSantis said in May on Fox News. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”

Several other Republican candidates acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents — as outlined in the indictment prepared by the special counsel, Jack Smith, and his team — was a serious problem. But even these candidates ��� including Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, and former Vice President Mike Pence — have also accused the Justice Department of being overly politicized and meting out unequal justice.

The most powerful conservative think tanks are working on plans that would go far beyond “reforming” the F.B.I., even though its Senate-confirmed directors in the modern era have all been Republicans. They want to rip it up and start again.

[...]

[foreverlogical]

Congress has never recommended that a former U.S. president be charged with a crime before.

But former President Donald Trump just shattered that historical precedent. 

The committee investigating the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021 on Monday voted to refer Trump to the Department of Justice to be charged with multiple crimes relating to the deadly riot at the Capitol and his attempts to hold power despite losing the 2020 election. The suggested charges include conspiracy, false statements, and alleged Trump’s role in inciting and providing support to the violent mob.

Any decision to charge Trump will now fall to the Department of Justice. And while most legal experts say the committee’s referral is unlikely to have a big impact on the department’s thinking, the vote marks a historic moment in the history of the American presidency—and yet another milestone in Trump’s epic stretch of dubious distinctions. 

Trump is already known to history for being the first president to ever have been impeached by the House of Representatives twice. He also committed actions that, as detailed in investigator Robert Mueller’s final report, would have left him susceptible to being charged with obstruction of justice if he had not been the president at the time (and therefore protected by a DOJ policy against charging sitting presidents), according to a letter signed by over 1,000 former prosecutors. 

Trump has lost the best tools he used to deflect prosecutors during his presidency, and investigations are now swirling around him in multiple jurisdictions. The DOJ appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump for his role in Jan. 6, and also whether Trump should be charged for taking documents bearing classification markings from the White House to his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. 

In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating whether Trump and his allies should be charged for attempting to flip his 2020 electoral defeat in that state into a victory.

Now, the question becomes whether Trump will achieve the ultimate accolade of his recent trajectory: Become the first former president in U.S. history to be charged with a crime. 

The charges

The Jan. 6 committee said evidence exists to charge Trump with multiple crimes. One of the simplest is obstructing an official proceeding. 

The committee accused Trump of attempting to “corruptly” interfere with the Congressional certification of Biden’s victory, which was taking place on Jan. 6 when the mob attacked the Capitol. Such a charge would put Trump squarely in line with rank-and-file rioters, some 300 of whom have been charged with attempting to obstruct the official proceeding. 

But the committee also argued Trump should be charged with a far more obscure crime: The law that makes it illegal to incite or provide aid or comfort to an insurrection. 

That crime hasn’t been prosecuted since the U.S. Civil War, and legal experts say that makes it relatively less likely to be brought against a former president than some of the other potential charges he’s facing (including the more straightforward Mar-a-Lago documents case).

The committee also argued Trump committed a crime known as “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” 

That crime involves an agreement to obstruct a function of the U.S. government, such as collecting taxes. In this case, however, the accusation is about attempts to thwart the certification of an election. 

The committee also pointed to a statute that makes it illegal to use phoney documents to make false representations to officials. The committee said the plot to submit slates of fake electors to the National Archives, in an attempt to create the basis for declaring Trump the winner of the election, appears to have broken this law. 

“The evidence is clear that President Trump personally participated in a scheme to have the Trump electors meet, cast votes, and send their votes to the joint session of Congress in several states that Vice President Biden won,” the summary of the report states. 

VISIT WEBSITE

[mightyflamethrower]

When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton.

What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump.

The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it.

In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher Steele had discovered Donald Trump to be a veritable Russian agent.

Hillary did not disclose that she had paid Steele—with checks hidden through three paywalls. The FBI, under Director James Comey, also hired the fraudster.

Yet almost nothing in his “Steele dossier” was true.

The FBI doctored evidence submitted to a FISA court. Comey leaked to the press confidential documents about his private conversations with President Trump.

Comey’s successor, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, lied on numerous occasions to federal investigators.

Both former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper repeatedly lied to the nation, saying that Trump was de facto working with the Russians.

The result? Trump lost the 2016 popular vote but still won the Electoral College.

Next, celebrities and well-funded liberals waged a media campaign to convince the electors to become “faithless.” Left-wing elites begged them to renounce their constitutional duties and instead throw the election to Hillary Clinton.

Once Trump was elected, “Russian collusion” was fired up again in hysterical fashion.

A special counsel, Robert Mueller, consumed 22 months of the Trump presidency. His investigation team constantly leaked falsehoods about the “walls closing in on” Trump.

After nearly two years, Mueller announced there was no evidence of a Trump effort to collude with Russia.

Next was the first impeachment of Trump—nearly the moment he lost the House in 2018.

Supposedly, Trump had leveraged Ukraine to investigate a corrupt Hunter Biden by delaying foreign aid.

Trump was impeached on a strictly partisan vote.

But later, no one denied that the drug-addled Hunter Biden had indeed gotten rich from Ukraine, or that Joe Biden had fired a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into his son’s misadventures while still vice president, or that Trump released all the military assistance designated by Congress, or that he included offensive weapons formerly denied Ukraine by the Obama-Biden administration.

Next, in 2020, when Hunter’s laptop turned up abandoned at a repair shop and full of incriminating evidence of more Biden family skullduggery, the left struck again.

It rounded up “51 former intelligence authorities” to mislead the American people on the eve of the vote that the laptop was likely a fake—once again cooked up by Russian disinformation experts to aid Trump.

And once more, that was another complete falsehood. But the lie proved useful to Joe Biden in the debates and campaign. And he won the election.

Next, the learn-nothing, forget-nothing left turned to the 2023-2024 campaign.

This time, their next extra-legal efforts were twofold.

One, they unsuccessfully sought to remove Trump from some 15 state ballots.

Two, local, state, and federal courts began to wage lawfare to convict and jail candidate Trump, or at least bankrupt him and keep him off the campaign trail.

Three county and state prosecutors campaigned on getting Trump on charges never filed before against a presidential candidate—and rarely against anyone else as well.

The Fani Willis Georgia lead prosecutor met secretly with the Biden White House counsel.

Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan team hired the third-ranking federal prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department.

Special counsel Jack Smith was found by a court to have been illegally appointed and much of his case was dismissed.

On July 14, a shooter nearly killed candidate Trump, nicking his ear after somehow firing a rifle from a rooftop a mere 140 yards away—while undetected by law enforcement inside the very same building below.

Prior to the shooting, Joe Biden had boasted to donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

Biden had railed nearly nonstop that a Trump victory would spell the end of democracy—a theme the left had fueled by comparing ad nauseam Trump to Adolf Hitler.

Yet here we are in mid-July 2024 and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, is alive and leads incumbent Biden—either because of, or despite, the crude efforts to destroy him.

After nearly a decade of utter madness, can we finally order the FBI, DOJ, and CIA to butt out of our elections?

Can a bankrupt media cease whipping up hysterias about a supposed Nazi-like takeover?

Can the left stop relying on washed-up British spies, corrupt ex-spooks, and teams of clownish partisan prosecutors?

Instead, why not, at last, just let the people choose their own president?

[writer59january13]

Dot dot dot, and in other news devil's advocate claims Teflon Trump

courtesy the comfort of his mancave,

I (a mutated batman wannabe)

doth prattle and stump

and display wide whirled webbed and variegated tail feathers

(also known as rectrices) of mine,

cuz in actuality true bats as quoted verbatim from Google “lack tail feathers, but they do sport tails that vary in structure and can help with classification.

For example, vespertilionids have tails that run to the end of their uropatagiums, while molossids and rhinopomatids have tails that extend beyond the membrane. These species may use their tails to feel their way around when backing into crevices.

Other bats, like emballonurids, have tails that are shorter than the membrane and rise above it. They belong to the order Chiroptera, which means "hand wing". Bats have long fingers that form wings, and a thin membrane called a patagium that stretches between their finger bones. This membrane, along with their many movable joints, makes bats agile fliers” - end quote.

After aforementioned introduction regarding why I proudly pride myself with rare genetic anomaly

that evokes rumpled stilts skin, I not only feel analogous to a mysterious gnome-like character from the German fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, but also parade mutation

like an out of season mummer, who originally posted the following lines of this poem crafted August 15, 2023.

That unnamed demagogue reincarnate feels gifted to reign supreme

captivates, glorifies, lauds, renounces, yawps extreme

views bellows dogmatic fulminations

in an attempt to redeem

supposed stolen 2020 capital one bid and seal lock, stock and tight as a barrel the upcoming ⁦election Tuesday, November fifth, 2024⁩.

Which pseudo/quasi hunter chomping at the bit (biden his time)

will reap grim statistic, when citizens hopefully cast their ballots for the first female and biracial president in the popular vote 'videre licet' 2024 election) unbeknownst whether Kamala Harris the dark horse candidate will accrue majority votes after

ramping up diplomatic repartee

against mudslinging toward her,

whereby her opponent violently stirs cauldron

proffering toxic brew powerful blend to spellbind public

elixir ration to parlay a view to unleash vengeance laced with hate speech triggering doomsday clock to strike midnight when nuclear weapons get loosed out their silos on cue destroying vast swaths of flora and fauna, most innocent life forms will pay hefty due

to assuage aggressively cruel, enjoyably growling goal, and indubitably kick arse mindset

worse than dengue fever will ensue a combustible domino effect fueling global horror – scenario of webbed, wide world I eschew analogous to kindling tinder logs smoke jetting up fireplace flue witnessing sovereign spookiest

magnum opus – engendering, jump/kick starting, and transforming much of animal and plant life into goo, (especially after special prosecutor

Robert Mueller let go some years back) far scarier than any macabre production dreamt up by human frightful scenario hero she ma, or nog a saké (paltry in comparison) will rescue us from deadly debacle,

nor any safe haven such as cool igloo forsooth thee annihilation will surpass any prior world war, no one will be spared, neither gentile nor Jew which all out total mortal kombat, and attendant dystopian landscape

laying waste organisms livingsocial will instantaneously undergo cremation,

despite Georgia grand jury courtesy indicting former President Donald Trump

that rained down as Stormy Daniels upon his head and up the kazoo, where flecks of ashes will spread like Kudzu rendering world wide web

fetid, offal, and putrid far more noxious than the common loo yet even this general description falls far short to where mew tinny, sans hardy species (according to Google search);

such as tardigrade, mummichog, and cockroach decimating, heaving, leveling, poisoning nearly every cubic inch of Earth evincing voluminous vaporization extant eradication emphatically

nixed, punctuated, and radiated pulverization eviscerating bowels of mankind, where nary a survivor, especially foreigner could weather and withstand hollowed out no mans land

bereft of sustenance or water where seeds of life

and white lily when coalescence of oblate spheroid birthed, nursed, and weaned new life especially proto homo sapiens and subsequent kin grunting with ah and sheepish ewe where rambunctious fast tracked primates, yet inherent within genetic coda,

(perhaps poison ingredient bubbling within primordial soup - steeped qua pew tarnation housing crucible- analogous to planetary size mortar and pestle) queue sans predestination, where rue brick, dogma, and fealty

honoring justice slew by paws of one cancerous, fractious and idolatrous Lothario, who opened Pandora Box

(rigged by bobbies shut tight) thorough lee rendered civilization a footnote of cosmological history and universal view where if one eligible voter ideally chooses alternate Democratic, but hands down Republican candidate will clinch nomination,

witnessing elephants to stampede, the majority will exhale a collective whew and allow, enable and provide no end to speculation about decimation about me, you and continuance of the human zoo.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

It’s starting to seem as though there is no legal mechanism in American government — no matter the charge, the prosecutor or the venue — that can hold Donald Trump accountable for crimes he is charged with committing.

On Monday morning, the federal judge overseeing his classified-documents prosecution — widely agreed to be the most open-and-shut of the many indictments against him — dismissed all chargeson the grounds that Jack Smith, the special prosecutor in charge, had been appointed in violation of the Constitution.

Her argument was that there is no federal law authorizing the appointment of a special counsel, even though appointments like Smith’s have been made by presidents of both parties going back decades — including the Trump Justice Department’s appointment of Robert Mueller to investigate ties between Trump and Russia — and have been upheld in court.

It was a stunning, conveniently timed ruling from a judge who was appointed by Trump in the last days of his tenure and who has almost without exception ruled in his favor at every point of this prosecution — usually accompanied by lengthy delays and reasoning so inscrutable that even conservative appeals court judges have reversed her.

In this case, however, Judge Aileen Cannon had one particularly influential voice in her corner: Justice Clarence Thomas, who suggested that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional in the Supreme Court’s decision this month to immunize Trump and all future presidents for virtually all their “official” acts, no matter how criminal.

“If there is no law establishing the office that the special counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution,” Thomas wrote, in a brief concurrence joined by none of the other justices. (Arguably, he should have recused himself from that case, because of his wife’s advocacy.) And here you thought the immunity ruling couldn’t do any more damage than it already has.

Smith’s team will surely appeal the dismissal, and they have the much stronger case, based on precedents in the lower courts and the Supreme Court like Morrison v. Olson. That ruling upheld a law allowing for the appointment of prosecutors far more independent than Smith, who remains directly answerable to the attorney general. But the issue will eventually wind up before the Supreme Court, where Thomas’s voice could hold more sway.

If the Justice Department prevails as it should, it can do what it should have done long ago — seek to have the case reassigned to another judge, one who understands how the law works (or used to).

Of course, if Trump wins in November, he will eighty-six the entire prosecution, and Smith himself, whitewashing Trump’s federal rap sheet and making it easier for him to purloin as many classified documents as he pleases.

[arpov-blog-blog]

The mantra that Biden is too old to be an effective President is not supported by reality. He looked pretty damn effective handling the MAGA GOPers at the SOTU for the 2nd year in a row. Forget about the media coverage and get to work turning out the vote for Democrats up and down the ballots especially the Senate. We don't need Rick Scott at the Majority Leader, he wants to cut Medicare and Social Security...."The irate chorus aimed at one of America’s most storied media institutions followed finger-pointing at the legal system for failing to stop Trump in his tracks. Despite much wishful thinking, primary election results this week made clear that the nation is hurtling towards a Biden v Trump rematch in November.

That polling and media coverage are imperfect, and the wheels of justice of turn slowly, is beyond dispute. But whatever the merits of the arguments, critics argue that Democrats are at risk of playing a blame game that distracts them from the central mission: defeating Trump at the ballot box.

Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Commiseration is not a strategy and Democrats need to stop throwing political temper tantrums and do the work to unify and get Joe Biden re-elected. The courts, the media, late-night comedians are not going to save us. So this whining and complaining about these aspects being unfair is not a strategy for victory.”

Among some Democrats, there has long been a yearning for a saviour who will stop Trump in his tracks. Hopes were pinned on the special counsel Robert Mueller, but his Russia investigation lacked teeth and failed to bring the president down. Two impeachments came and went and the Senate missed a historic opportunity to bar from Trump running again.

Now resentment is focused on the supreme court and the attorney general, Merrick Garland, for dragging their feet on holding Trump accountable for his role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The court issued a unanimous decision that Colorado and other states do not have the power to remove Trump from the ballot for engaging in an insurrection.

A justice department case alleging that he sought to overturn the 2020 election, which had been due to begin this week, was postponed until the supreme court rules on whether he is immune from prosecution. And an election interference case in Georgia is also on hold because the prosecutor Fani Willis is dealing with allegations of a conflict of interest over a romantic relationship.

In Florida, where Trump is charged over his mishandling of classified government documents, he managed to draw a friendly judge who has indicated the trial will not start soon. That means the case likely to start first is one in New York relating to Trump paying hush money to an adult film star during the 2016 election campaign, widely portrayed in the media as the weakest of the four.

Yet such a case would have been devastating to any other candidate at any other moment in history. Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “He’s going to be on trial for 34 felony counts in less than three weeks and the mainstream media has barely indicated the importance of this.

“‘Oh, it’s just a hush money trial.’ No it’s not. He’s not on trial for hush money. He’s on trial for election fraud, not just paying the hush money but deceiving the American people by concealing it as a business expense.”

Lichtman added: “If this was anybody but Trump, any other presidential candidate on trial, it would be the trial of the century and the mainstream media would be screaming that, if the candidate got convicted, he should be bounced from from the campaign. Instead they’ve misrepresented and trivialised this case.”

Trump has long challenged media orthodoxies. During the 2016 campaign, the New York Times used the word “lie” in a headline – a move that would have been seen as judgmental and editorialising in the pre-Trump era. In 2019, the paper changed a headline, “Trump urges unity vs racism”, after an outcry from readers and progressive politicians.

Television has also struggled to find the right approach. There was much introspection over how saturation coverage of Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies and tweets gave him $5bn in free advertising, according to the media tracking firm mediaQuant. Cable news networks have drastically reduced their live coverage of Trump’s speeches, although some commentators warm that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, contending that voters need to see his unhinged antics, verbal gaffes and extremist agenda.

With Super Tuesday’s primary elections clearing the way for another Biden v Trump clash, some accuse the media of focusing too much on polls and not enough on the stakes, treating Trump as just another political candidate rather than an existential threat. They say the intense focus on Biden’s age – he is 81 – is wildly disproportionate when set against Trump’s authoritarianism and 91 criminal charges.

Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “The media has clearly not learned its lesson from 2016 or 2020 on how to cover Donald Trump. This is not a conventional horse race election. There’s nothing normal about any of this so, by covering Biden and Trump equally, it minimises Trump’s considerably disturbing behaviour, comments and plans for the future.

“The Democrats do have a legitimate complaint with the way the media is bothsides-ing this. The media should not be under any obligation to tell both sides of a lie or conspiracy theory or leading presidential candidate’s desire to tear up the constitution and become a dictator on day one. All things Donald Trump has said he would do.”

[mongowheelie]

Legal Expert Points to Another Trump Confession That 'Got Very Little Attention'

[worldofwardcraft]

Trump for the defense.

July 31, 2023

So far, Donald Trump's only formal defense against the multitude of criminal charges facing him (with more to come) has been "not guilty." First, in a Manhattan court in response to 34 state felony counts. And then in Miami answering 37 federal violations (to which last week's superseding indictment added three more).

However, outside a courtroom, Trump has advanced an array of defenses. None of which include any evidence proving his innocence, of course. Often, he simply asserts, "I did nothing wrong." Or else viciously attacks the motives, family, parentage and mental health of the prosecutors and judges.

One of his favorite tactics is to refer to any investigation or prosecution against him as a hoax. Back when Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued his report outlining Trump's election collusion with Russia, Trump called the probe "a hoax" that "should never happen to another president again."

Asked during a NATO Summit in 2019 about the congressional inquiry into his extortion of Ukraine's president, Trump said: “The impeachment thing is a hoax, it has turned out to be a hoax." His second impeachment, of course, was also a hoax. And more recently, he's taken to calling Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago "the Boxes Hoax."

Another familiar Trump defense is to call any investigation of him a witch hunt. Both his impeachments were witch hunts. And his New York indictment was part of a "witch hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement."

He accuses Fulton County DA Fani Willis of conducting a “strictly political witch hunt” by looking into his interference in Georgia's 2020 vote count. Plus, Trump whines that Smith's investigations into his theft of government documents and election subversion are both witch hunts.

But overuse has lessened the credibility of these excuses. Which is why Trump has been trying out some new material lately. In the documents case, he repeatedly cites the Presidential Records Act (he thinks it means all government records belong to the president). Or claims "prosecutorial misconduct" (one of his lawyers must have taught him that). He's also been leaning into the latest Republican fad — claiming any prosecution is a "weaponization" of government's law enforcement powers.

Now, however, Trump has come up with what he imagines is the ultimate defense:

Merrick Garland, Deranged Jack Smith, and coordinating Democrat "Prosecutors" in New York and Atlanta, have become the Campaign Managers for the most corrupt and incompetent President in United States history.

How could we have been so blind? It's all "election interference" intended to prevent him from regaining the presidency that is his by divine right. Maybe he should try "not guilty by reason of insanity."

[truck-fump]

Understanding the latest investigations into <b>Trump's</b> role in January 6 - NPR

New Post has been published on https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.npr.org/2023/07/23/1189659903/understanding-the-latest-investigations-into-trumps-role-in-january-6&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjUzM2UwMTY5ZmFhZTIwMGQ6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw1n-0r7UWuUhy0EQ0GIFngb

Understanding the latest investigations into Trump's role in January 6 - NPR

NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe asks Andrew Weissmann, one of the lead prosecutors on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, about Special Counsel Jack …