Today’s. Miscellaneous political news - Part 9

Under oath Weisselberg just took the fall for the whole tax evasion for the whole family... It was his own greed. He is so ashamed and embarrassed..

Allen Weisselberg tells court he victimized Trump family with his own 'greed'
Brad Reed
November 17, 2022

Longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg has fallen on his sword and is saying that he alone was to blame for the accounting tricks he used to fraudulently evade taxes.

As reported by The Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery, Trump Organization attorney Alan Futerfas on Thursday worked to separate Weisselberg from former President Donald Trump's company by getting him to testify under oath that the Trump family had no part in his tax evasion schemes.

During questioning, Futerfas asked Weisselberg whether he schemed with any Trump family member, to which Weisselberg replied, "No."

More......

www.rawstory.com/allen-weisselberg-trial/

But Congress doesn't prosecute ....

Heard earlier this afternoon that Secret Service Bobby Engel was testifying with the Jan 6 Select Committee today.

Interesting...

Did Ex-President Donald Trump bring upon himself the Federal Bureau of Investigation's execution of a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida on August 8th?

Thursday report in The Wall Street Journal strongly suggests that it was, and it all stemmed from Trump's negotiations with the National Archives to hand over the trove of top secret documents that he took from the White House which did not belong to him.

Trump wanted "the agency to explicitly say that there had been no raid on his Florida estate, according to people familiar with the matter," the Journal recalled. "The next day, the Archives issued another statement saying it had 'obtained the cooperation of Trump representatives' and that its officials 'did not visit or ‘raid'’ the Mar-a-Lago property."


But Trump's cooperation with the National Archives quickly waned after it started to become clear that the government was going to aggressively pursue the return of the clandestine files. That, the Journal explained, set Trump on a collision course with federal law enforcement.

"Trump’s transition early this year from fitful and often delayed cooperation to outright confrontation set up the battle still under way with the government," wrote correspondents Alex Leary, Aruna Viswanatha, and Sadie Gurman, adding that "the outcome could complicate his newly launched campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination."

Trump used his candidacy announcement on Tuesday night as a platform to declare himself a "victim" of a political system that is out to get him, which he has told his advisers is a tactic to intimidate the United States Department of Justice and Attorney General Merrick Garland away from criminally indicting him.

Garland has repeatedly stated that the pursuit of justice is not subject to politics and that nobody is above the law.

Yet Trump could have prevented the ongoing mess if he had simply returned the materials that he brought with him to Florida. Instead, however, Trump and his team of attorneys drummed up a laundry list of excuses as to why they supposedly belong to Trump. But that strategy backfired. Trump – though he maintains that he did nothing wrong – now finds himself in a legal quagmire that could cost him dearly.

"Rather than providing a way for Mr. Trump to justify keeping the documents, the theories he embraced—that the material was personal, privileged, declassified or some combination of all three—only heightened the confusion among Justice Department officials about the former president’s motivations, according to people familiar with the matter," the Journal pointed out. "Other evidence they had amassed prompted them to ask a court to allow them to send in agents to seize the remaining records. By May, the department was pursuing a criminal investigation that came to focus on the former president and his aides and include potential charges of obstruction."

Arguments from Trump's lawyers have ranged from dubious assertions of executive privilege (which was rejected), to Trump proclaiming that he mentally declassified documents outside of official protocols (which is not a thing), to unambiguously declaring that the sensitive contents inside the hundreds of boxes are "mine."

Additional trouble ensued in June after Trump's then-newly-hired counselor Evan Corcoran met with DOJ lawyer Jay Bratt, who was dispatched from Washington "to Mar-a-Lago along with three FBI agents to discuss how to deal with the remaining documents."

Corcoran "conducted a search, handed a packet of documents marked classified to the officials, and asked a custodian of the records, Christina Bobb, to certify that all of the remaining classified government documents in Mr. Trump’s possession had been turned over. Ms. Bobb signed that document only after insisting that it include language stating she was doing so 'based upon the information that has been provided to me,' and 'to the best of my knowledge,' according to people familiar with the matter" who spoke with the Journal.

"The certification failed to account for the roughly 100 documents with classified markings the FBI later found in its August search," the Journal continued. "Mr. Corcoran is now a central figure in the government’s investigation, according to people familiar with the matter. People close to Mr. Corcoran, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, have said he thinks he has done nothing wrong."

Nonetheless, Trump World is standing firm that Trump had every right to abscond with the hyper-sensitive items that included materials relating to a foreign power's nuclear capabilities.

www.rawstory.com/how-donald-trump-set-himself-up-to-be-raided-by-the-fbi/

They paid him off...

On Friday, the New York Post reported that Allen Weisselberg, the longtime CFO of the Trump Organization, revealed at trial that the children of former President Donald Trump realized he was using shady accounting tricks to cook the books at the company — and then gave him a huge raise.
***
When prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked the longtime chief financial officer if the Trump Org demoted or punished him in light of the discovery, he said no," said the report. "'Were you in fact given a raise … that totaled approximately $200,000?' Hoffinger asked. 'Correct,' Weisselberg replied on his final day of testimony."

www.rawstory.com/allen-weisselberg-trial-2658689039/

In a victory for voting rights, a judge allowed Saturday voting in the GA run-off.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/18/georgia-senate-runoff-saturday-voting-ruling/

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/18/house-democrats-jeffries-clark-aguilar/#link-JSNI5F7OMFFAJJBUAOPO3VCKCU

A Georgia judge ruled that Saturday early voting can take place in the highly watched Senate runoff election between Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) and Republican Herschel Walker.

As Matthew Brown reports, in a Friday afternoon ruling, Judge Thomas A. Cox Jr. found that a provision of Georgia’s election code cited by the secretary of state’s office as barring Saturday voting “does not specifically prohibit counties from conducting advanced voting on Saturday, November 26, 2022, for a runoff election.”
The court further noted that “there is an absence of settled law on this specific issue” in Georgia but that the intent of the state legislature was “obvious” in omitting any specific reference to a runoff election in the law.

Per Matthew, the ruling is a victory for Democrats and voting rights advocates, who had argued that the laws in question were vague and did not apply to a runoff election.

Officials in the secretary of state’s office had initially ruled that Saturday voting could take place in this year’s runoff election before backtracking after discovering a provision of the election code that barred voting in the days following a holiday. The Saturday at issue in the case would be two days after Thanksgiving and one day after a state holiday that — until 2015 — commemorated Robert E. Lee’s birthday.

Democrats brought the lawsuit shortly after the state issued guidance to counties advising against Saturday voting.

“I am delighted by the judge’s ruling. Obviously, I think it was the right call,” Warnock said at a rally on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology on Friday evening. “We should want every eligible voter to have an opportunity to vote and not having Saturday voting disproportionately impacts working class people in an adverse way.”

Free range happy humans lmao 🤣

www.instagram.com/reel/ClHA5qgA-p8/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

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