|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 17, 2024 0:20:57 GMT
Judge McAfee did exactly what Special Counsel Hur did to Biden.. Did nothing wrong, but...... Judge Scott McAfee ruled that while there was insufficient evidence that Willis enjoyed a personal profit from taking extravagant trips with Wade to Napa Valley and Belize, among other gifts during their affair, he wrote "an odor of mendacity remains" and that there are “reasonable questions” about whether Willis and Wade testified truthfully about the timing of their relationship that “further underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to cure it.” www.rawstory.com/goodman-cnn-fani-willis/BTW: Nathan Wade will be on NBC Meet the Press tomorrow, Sunday, morning.. |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 14:12:14 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 17, 2024 14:38:08 GMT
'they' believe him!
'nough said?
|
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 16:38:51 GMT
Hard to disagree with the judge on the relationship being a lapse in judgement. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/15/willis-wade-georgia-trump/Opinion Willis prevails in Georgia case, but her win is devastating By Ruth Marcus If the judge’s ruling that Fani T. Willis can remain in charge of the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump was a win for the Fulton County district attorney, and it was, I shudder to imagine what a loss would look like.The decision by Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee allows Willis to continue to lead the case, provided that Nathan Wade, the chief prosecutor with whom she had a romantic relationship, steps aside, as he did Friday afternoon. That conclusion, grounded on the finding that their romantic and financial entanglement created “a significant appearance of impropriety,” seems like a sensible outcome.Trump partisans will howl, but the evidence of the Willis-Wade affair did not rise to the level of requiring the disqualification of Willis and her entire office, or the consequent reassignment and potential shelving of the case against Trump and numerous co-defendants.That said, McAfee’s findings were nothing short of humiliating for Willis, for whom he once worked. This episode leaves her reputation in tatters, and, as McAfee suggested in his ruling, holds open the possibility of sanctions by, among others, the Georgia State Ethics Commission and the state bar.The essence of the complaint against Willis, lodged by defendant Mike Roman and joined by Trump, was that Willis benefited from hiring Wade because he paid for several vacations they took together. Willis and Wade said that they had “roughly” split expenses and that Willis repaid him in cash. McAfee assessed this assertion as “not so incredible as to be inherently unbelievable” — hardly a ringing endorsement a prosecutor wants to hear from the judge overseeing the biggest case of her career.And McAfee was just getting started.He said there wasn’t proof that Willis “arranged a financial scheme to enrich herself (or endear herself to Wade).” Then, he unloaded. He termed the relationship a “tremendous lapse in judgment.” He criticized “the unprofessional manner” of Willis’s combative testimony on the subject. He noted that “Georgia law does not permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices — even repeatedly.”
Ouch, ouch and ouch.Next, McAfee turned to the appearance of conflict and the associated question of when the Willis-Wade relationship started: Was it before she hired him or, as they both testified, only after he came onboard? Here McAfee correctly assessed that the defendants had not proven their claim that the romance came first — but he also correctly invoked the “odor of mendacity” surrounding the issue.“Reasonable questions,” he wrote, “about whether the District Attorney and her hand-selected lead [prosecutor] testified untruthfully about the timing of their relationship further underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to cure it.”Pause a moment to take that in. McAfee is saying — not just hinting but saying — that there are “reasonable questions” about whether Willis lied under oath.Likewise, McAfee cited Wade’s “patently unpersuasive explanation for the inaccurate interrogatories he submitted in his pending divorce.” In written answers to questions posed by his wife’s lawyers in his divorce case last May, Wade denied having sexual relations with others during his marriage, including while he and his wife were separated and “up to the present.” But in the hearing before McAfee, Wade acknowledged having sexual relations with Willis by then. He defended the false statement to the contrary in his answer to the interrogatory by claiming that his marriage was “irretrievably broken” by then. McAfee appropriately took him to task, saying his response “indicates a willingness on his part to wrongly conceal his relationship with the District Attorney.”Finally, McAfee turned to Willis’s speech Jan. 14, the day before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, at Big Bethel AME Church in Atlanta, in which she accused unnamed critics of “playing the race card” by going after her decision to hire Wade, who is Black. “The effect of this speech was to cast racial aspersions at an indicted Defendant’s decision to file this pretrial motion,” McAfee said. He said it hadn’t “crossed the line to the point where the Defendants have been denied the opportunity for a fundamentally fair trial” but was “still legally improper.”
McAfee, just 34 and new to the bench, is going to come in for criticism by both sides. He headed a chapter of College Republicans and joined the conservative Federalist Society in law school. He and his wife also contributed to Willis’s campaigns. Watching him on the bench, I was impressed by his even-keeled demeanor amid courtroom shenanigans, such as Willis’s volcanic interchange with defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, but also frustrated by his seeming willingness to let the evidentiary hearings stretch on.
Friday’s opinion calls it straight down the middle. Willis will stay, but it is hard to imagine a more devastating win |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 17:11:42 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by Scrapper100 on Mar 17, 2024 23:46:37 GMT
Yeah, he paints everything as a victory for himself. His father really messed up his head about being "a loser," which, of course, he is. For as much as he doesn’t want to identify as a loser he sure does play the victim card perfectly and often. I think someone should point this out to him 😂 |
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 18, 2024 15:43:05 GMT
TFG has notified the court that he cannot get coverage for the funds due in the NYC Fraud case..
|
|
|
|
Post by librarylady on Mar 18, 2024 17:14:24 GMT
He will now beg his followers to send money for his appeal.
|
|
dawnnikol
Prolific Pea
'A life without books is a life not lived.' Jay Kristoff
Posts: 8,566
Sept 21, 2015 18:39:25 GMT
|
Post by dawnnikol on Mar 18, 2024 17:23:12 GMT
Losers gonna lose, lose, lose:
|
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 19, 2024 2:21:13 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 19, 2024 2:41:16 GMT
She is going against what the 11th Circuit Court has decided for her!!
|
|
|
|
Post by Scrapper100 on Mar 19, 2024 3:22:00 GMT
Rachel Maddow show. Manafort returning to help Trump?
|
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 19, 2024 3:38:18 GMT
Rachel Maddow show. Manafort returning to help Trump? Only the best.. ..convicted felons!! |
|
|
|
Post by Scrapper100 on Mar 19, 2024 3:51:42 GMT
Rachel Maddow show. Manafort returning to help Trump? Only the best.. ..convicted felons!! Seriously though he only has a week and has been turned down by the reputable companies he is going to have to get it from somewhere. He is more desperate now than he was in 2020. I hope they are watching him like a hawk I fear for our national security. I would say the same thing if it were a democrat in similar circumstances. |
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 20, 2024 2:39:29 GMT
Ok, I need to correct the bond thing. He does not have to post the bond for $454 million ... He can appeal without posting a bond or cash, everyone has the right to appeal.
If he does NOT post a bond or cash, starting Monday, the State/AG James can start seizing his assets to cover the amount of the judgement.
The bond just makes it easier to collect the judgement.
|
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 20, 2024 17:49:52 GMT
Someone is VERY angry!! Make Note: he has already surrendered .. in Fulton County GA. So never doesn't count!! Donald Trump sent out a frantic fundraising plea centered around the possibility that Trump Tower might be seized as part of the massive New York fraud judgment leveled against him. *** "KEEP YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF TRUMP TOWER!" reads a fundraising email sent to supporters. "Insane radical Democrat AG Letitia James wants to SEIZE my properties in New York. THIS INCLUDES THE ICONIC TRUMP TOWER!""Democrats think this will intimidate me," the message adds. "They think that if they take my cash to stifle my campaign, that I'll give up! Here's one thing they don't know: WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!" The fundraising pitch accuses President Joe Biden of coordinating the civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions against Trump, accusing him of "election interference," and calls on a million supporters to donate money to his campaign. The fundraising pitch focuses on Trump Tower, probably his most famous property and his private residence until moving into the White House, and his former communications director identified that holding as one that would pain him to lose. "I think if it were to happen, 40 Wall Street [also known as the Trump Building] is probably the one that he would, I mean, he would hate it,'" said Stephanie Grisham, his White House communications director from July 2019 until April 2020. "But I think if she tried to seize Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster or Trump Tower even, I mean, those are his babies." www.rawstory.com/trump-tower-2667558849/ |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 21, 2024 20:33:37 GMT
Bad news for Trump in NY case regarding evidence www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/21/trump-new-york-trial-evidence-motions-business-merchan/Four-time indicted former president Donald Trump suffered arguably his worst loss(es) in any criminal matter this week when, in his New York trial for alleged falsification of business records, Judge Juan M. Merchan ruled against him in virtually all of his motions to exclude evidence. By contrast, the judge largely granted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s motions to exclude evidence for trial that Trump believed might be exculpatory. That does not bode well for Trump’s chances to avoid conviction when the case goes to trial, likely in a few weeks.
Trump, for example, moved to exclude testimony of former fixer Michael Cohen on the grounds Cohen is “a liar.” The court rebuked this desperate move: “This Court has been unable to locate any treatise, statute, or holding from courts in this jurisdiction, or others, that support Defendant’s rationale that a prosecution witness should be kept off the witness stand because his credibility has been previously called into question.” Trump’s lawyers can cross-examine Cohen at trial.
Trump also tried to keep back evidence of his intent to influence the 2016 election (a material part of Bragg’s case) and his intent to defraud. Having already ruled on these issues, Merchan scolded Trump’s counsel: “Rearguing this Court’s prior rulings in this manner is procedurally and professionally inappropriate and a waste of this Court’s valuable resources.” These motions were denied.
Trump also wanted to exclude evidence regarding a meeting in which Cohen, Trump and David Pecker (onetime head of American Media Inc.) discussed the “catch and kill” scheme to keep evidence of Trump’s sexual transgressions from voters. Since this evidence is directly germane to the issue of Trump’s intent to defraud, this motion also failed.
Merchan rebuffed Trump’s attempt to block the testimony of two people with damaging stories to tell about him. While excluding any of the lurid details of Trump’s interaction with them, Merchan nevertheless found: “The steps taken to secure the stories of [Dino] Sajudin and [Karen] McDougal complete the narrative of the agreement ... stemming the flow of negative information that could circulate about Defendant before it reaches the public eye.” He continued, “Locating and purchasing the information from [Stormy] Daniels not only completes the narrative of events that precipitated the falsification of business records but is also probative of the Defendant’s intent.” Evidence of Daniels’s polygraph test was excluded (although there is no indication Bragg intended to use it).
Likewise, the judge rejected Trump’s effort to exclude evidence including the “Access Hollywood” tape (the scandal that precipitated Trump’s effort to silence other women), Trump’s violation of federal campaign finance law (one rationale for elevating the crimes to felonies), Cohen’s guilty plea (although it cannot be used to prove Trump’s intent) and classification of the hush money as “promotional” expenses for AMI. Merchan also rejected Trump’s attempt to reargue that he and his organization were distinct entities.
Most important, Merchan refused to exclude more than 100 Trump statements since these can be classified as “admissions against interest.” Despite Trump’s plea, he will also allow in Allen Weisselberg’s notes, if the prosecutor shows they are business records.
In sum, the lion’s share of the evidence that Trump views as damaging will be heard by the jury. This underscores the quantity and strength of the facts that implicate Trump. It surely explains why he has been desperate to avoid trial.
Even worse for Trump, the judge granted the prosecutor’s key motions to exclude evidence and arguments that Trump hoped would sway the jury in his favor. Merchan knocked out most of Trump expert Bradley Smith’s potential testimony. “The People’s motion is granted to the extent that Smith may not testify as a lay (fact) witness; offer opinion testimony regarding the interpretation and application of federal campaign finance laws and how they relate to the facts in the instant matter, nor may Smith testify or offer an opinion as to whether the alleged conduct in this case does or does not constitute a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act.” (He can testify generally about what the law does.)
In addition, Trump will not get to introduce evidence that the Southern District of New York prosecutors and the Federal Election Commission declined to bring charges against him. Nor will he get to air his complaint about “selective prosecution” (a favorite excuse from Trump, who whines he is singled out by left-wing prosecutors). He will be barred from offering hearsay evidence about federal prosecutors’ opinions about Cohen’s credibility and from presenting evidence in support of a “reliance on counsel” (or “presence of counsel”) defense. The judge reserved for later the determination as to whether to admit evidence of Trump’s efforts to intimidate and harass witnesses as “consciousness of guilt.”
It is hard to see how the proceedings could have gone any worse for Trump (although some issues regarding “prior bad acts” were reserved for trial). Although commentators critical of Bragg knocked his case as “novel” or doubted he could introduce evidence of violation of federal campaign, Merchan found otherwise. Merchan’s orders confirm that this in many ways is potentially a traditional white-collar crime, in which falsification in furtherance of other crimes elevates the charges to felonies. The upshot is that Bragg will get to put on his case with evidence he thinks will support a guilty verdict. The jury will not hear some of Trump’s familiar excuses.
Merchan showed himself to be a serious judge who will not indulge Trump’s antics nor allow the trial to devolve into a spectacle. The case will be tried on straightforward law, and on the mound of evidence Bragg has accumulated. Based on these rulings, Trump should be quaking in his boots. |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 21, 2024 20:47:57 GMT
Florida documents case. I'm not sure that I fully understand the legal issues regarding judge Cannon's latest ruling, but it certainly seems unusual. www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/20/trump-cannon-judge-pra-jury-instructions/‘Very, very troubling’: Judges, lawyers flummoxed by Judge Cannon The jurist overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case in Florida has raised eyebrows and alarms with her latest order By Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein Lawyers and former judges said they are baffled by an order issued this week by the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s pending trial on charges that he mishandled classified documents — and believe her instructions suggest the case will not go to trial anytime soon.
“In my 30 years as a trial judge, I have never seen an order like this,” said Jeremy Fogel, who served on the federal bench in California and now runs the Berkeley Judicial Institute.
On Monday evening, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon ordered the defense lawyers and the prosecutors in the case to file submissions outlining proposed jury instructions based on two scenarios, each of which badly misstates the law and facts of the case, according to legal experts.
She has given the sides two weeks to craft jury instructions around competing interpretations of the Presidential Records Act, often referred to as the PRA. While the law says presidential records belong to the public and are to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of a presidency, Trump’s lawyers have argued the PRA gave Trump the right to keep classified materials as his personal property.
“What she has asked the parties to do is very, very troubling,” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts, said of Cannon. “She is giving credence to arguments that are on their face absurd. She is ignoring a raft of other motions, equally absurd, that are unreasonably delaying the case.”
Trump’s team has argued that under the PRA, he automatically designated the classified records he is accused of willfully retaining as personal documents when he removed them from the White House and took them to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club. Prosecutors and legal experts have rejected Trump’s interpretation and said the former president’s reading of the PRA is simply wrong.
Cannon is presiding over a case involving the first former U.S. president ever charged with a crime, and Fogel said it is not inappropriate for a judge in that situation to seek guidance. Still, he said, Cannon’s order is an unusual way to sequence the legal decisions and she may be putting “the cart before the horse.”
Typically, he said, judges make their rulings about the laws at the heart of the case — and then determine jury instructions closer to trial time.
“The more innocent interpretation is that she is just trying to get a sense of what the practical implications are if she decides one way or the other on the legal issues,” Fogel said. “The less charitable view is that she should decide the legal issues first and then decide how she should implement the law in the case.”
Cannon held a hearing weeks ago to discuss when to schedule the trial — one of four criminal cases Trump is facing as he again seeks the White House and has clinched enough delegates for the Republican nomination. Cannon has yet to make a decision on the trial date.
Last week’s hearing focused on two requests that Trump made to dismiss the case, one based on supposed flaws in the Espionage Act and another based on what Trump lawyers claim are the sweeping powers granted to him by the PRA.
Cannon, a Trump nominee who has been on the bench since late 2020, expressed skepticism toward both claims while also suggesting they may play a meaningful role in instructing the jury at the end of the trial. She quickly ruled against Trump’s claims about flaws in the Espionage Act and has yet to rule on the merits of the PRA request.
Her two-page order embraces at least the possibility that Trump’s PRA claims are valid, a stance that veteran national security lawyers questioned.
“The PRA is just not relevant here in any way it all; it provides no defense. To even allow it to be argued at trial would create confusion for the jury,” said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former U.S. attorney.
Ordinarily, a judge will take up the question of jury instructions much later in the process. McQuade called Cannon’s decision to reach for those questions ahead of a slew of other pretrial motions “premature and baffling.”
Cannon’s order suggests that she thinks the PRA is critical to the case — and that parts of the law are open to interpretation.
Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, said that’s just not true. He said Cannon seems to continually conflate the PRA with the Espionage Act, which makes unauthorized sharing or handling of national defense information a crime. Baron said the PRA does not influence whether someone can be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
“There is no ambiguity that the classified documents at issue in this case are presidential records,” Baron said. “He wasn’t indicted because he took newspaper clippings. He was indicted because he took documents that were marked as classified.”
Baron said the judge, who has not previously overseen a major national security trial, seems to be embracing a fantastical view of the law.
“Like the queen in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ Judge Cannon appears to be asking the jury to believe at least two impossible things before breakfast,” Baron said. “First, that a president has unfettered discretion to decide that documents marked ‘top secret’ are his own personal records, just because he decided to keep them for himself. And second, that a president can avoid criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act because he decided that classified records were really his under the PRA. In both cases, the judge profoundly misinterprets the law.”
When Trump was indicted last year on dozens of counts of mishandling classified documents and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them, Cannon set a trial date of May 20. That date is no longer possible, given still-unresolved issues involving presenting the classified evidence in court.
Prosecutors have asked for the trial to start in early July; Trump’s lawyers have argued it shouldn’t begin until after the November election or, at the earliest, August.
Cannon’s recent instructions seem to entertain the notion that Trump’s legal interpretation of the PRA could be presented to the jury.
The appeals court above Cannon has already determined, on a separate matter that is also part of the Trump documents case, that the former president cannot declare classified documents his personal property.
Trump “does not have a possessory interest in the documents at issue, so he does not suffer a cognizable harm if the United States reviews documents he neither owns nor has a personal interest in,” the appeals court found in September 2022, after Trump asked the court to appoint a special master, or a neutral arbiter, to sort through the materials the FBI had seized from Mar-a-Lago.
Cannon granted Trump’s special master request, prompting an appeal from the Justice Department. An appeals court panel then resoundingly reversed her decision.
Gertner, the former federal judge, said Cannon’s latest order means it is time for special counsel Jack Smith to try to get Cannon off the high-profile case — an exceedingly rare step for any prosecutor to take. “I think that the better route is for Smith to move to recuse her now — listing all of her rulings that make little sense, the delays, rulings so far out of the mainstream that they clearly suggest bias,” Gertner said.
Other lawyers said the legal standard for recusal is so high — not just under court rules, but also in Justice Department practice — that any discussion of attempting to remove Cannon from the case is far-fetched. Typically, recusals occur when a judge has a close personal relationship with someone involved in a case or owns a significant amount of stock in a company involved.
“It’s not enough to say this judge has ruled against my case several times, therefore they must be biased. That’s not going to do it,” said McQuade, the former U.S. attorney. “I’d be surprised if an effort to remove her would be successful, and that’s a bad look for the government.”
Veteran trial lawyers say it is not unusual for a judge to make it hard for one side to try their case — and jurists are often, but not always, harder on defense lawyers than on prosecutors.
But in the Trump documents case, lawyers said, Smith may simply have to weather whatever legal storms Cannon creates, and be patient and confident that the evidence his team has amassed will ultimately convince a jury. That is what happened when a previous special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, went to trial against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
In that trial, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III frequently made comments critical of the special counsel team and its handling of the case, questioning its judgment and limiting what evidence it could show the jury. Prosecutors pushed on, and Manafort was eventually convicted. |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 21, 2024 20:57:47 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 21, 2024 21:33:45 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 22, 2024 1:27:34 GMT
Trump's lawyers are definitely not the best and the brightest. Maybe because he has a habit of not paying them. Or maybe because he frequently attacks and insults judges and his own lawyers. I imagine he would be terrible client to work for, he probably thinks he's smarter than them and frequently ignores their advice. Or maybe lawyers don't want to work for him for ethical reasons. Or maybe, Rudy Giuliani's fall from grace is a lesson any reputable lawyer would want to avoid. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/21/trump-lawyers-head-scratching-legal-filings-just-keep-coming/Trump lawyers’ head-scratching legal filings just keep coming Analysis by Aaron Blake March 21, 2024 Former president Donald Trump’s legal team, in a Supreme Court filing this week, decided it would be a good idea to cite the past words of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
In doing so, though, they reinforced just how drastic what they seek is: absolute immunity for broadly defined presidential acts. Kavanaugh’s actual words cast that as unthinkable.
The filing is merely the latest head-scratching move from Trump’s lawyers. And it’s not even the first time they have filed something to the nation’s highest court that fits that description.
The current example involves the lawyers’ citation of a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article from Kavanaugh — almost a decade before his ascent to the Supreme Court.
To hear Trump’s lawyers tell it, Kavanaugh’s article reinforced the dangers of presidents being subject to criminal and civil actions.
“In short, ‘a President who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as President,’ ” the Trump team’s brief says, quoting Kavanaugh. It then adds, in its own words: “The same conclusion holds if that criminal investigation is waiting in the wings until he leaves office.”
Left unstated — but soon noted by law professor Ryan Goodman — was that Kavanaugh in the same article actually took a different position from the one Trump’s lawyers advanced.
While Kavanaugh posited that presidents shouldn’t have to face criminal investigations or prosecution while in office, he took no such position on post-presidential indictments. Indeed, he seemed to take the constitutionality of post-presidential indictments for granted.
“The point is not to put the President above the law or to eliminate checks on the President,” Kavanaugh said in the very next paragraph, “but simply to defer litigation and investigations until the President is out of office.”
The title of that section of Kavanaugh’s article is: “PROVIDE SITTING PRESIDENTS WITH A TEMPORARY DEFERRAL OF CIVIL SUITS AND OF CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS AND INVESTIGATIONS” — emphasis on “temporary.”
Kavanaugh wasn’t even arguing that a president was constitutionally immune from criminal investigation or prosecution while in office; he was merely saying that a president should be, and specifically that Congress should pass a law exempting the president from that.
The Trump team’s using Kavanaugh to make this argument — in a case that now sits before him — is particularly notable. Not only is Kavanaugh one of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court, but one of the potential stumbling blocks in Kavanaugh’s confirmation was his expansive view of presidential power. With Trump facing plenty of scrutiny midway through his tenure, Democrats argued that Kavanaugh was too deferential to the chief executive. His previous thoughts on immunity were a major topic of debate and a strike against him with Democrats.
But even then Kavanaugh didn’t go nearly as far as Trump now wants him and the rest of the Supreme Court to go. If it wasn’t already clear that Trump’s claim to full presidential immunity is extraordinary, spotlighting these words from Kavanaugh — of all people — would seem to drive it home.
Of course, few legal experts expect Trump’s immunity claim, which was roundly rejected by an appeals court last month, to succeed. For Trump, the main value of the Supreme Court’s taking up the case appears to be delay. But cuing this up for the nation’s highest court at the very least risks another embarrassing defeat at the hands of Trump-nominated justices such as Kavanaugh.
The Kavanaugh citation follows other dubious inclusions in Trump’s legal filings, both in the Supreme Court and in lower courts:
In late 2020, Trump lawyer John Eastman claimed near the start of a Supreme Court filing that Trump’s 2020 election loss was inexplicable, in part, because no other candidate had ever won Florida and Ohio while losing the presidency. In fact, Richard M. Nixon did in 1960.
In a legal brief earlier this year to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Trump’s lawyers cited a vaguely sourced document full of specious and long-debunked voter fraud claims — even as members of his campaign distanced themselves from the document. Trump’s lawyers argued that the document showed there remained “vigorous disputes and questions about the actual outcome of the 2020 Presidential election,” despite the document showing no such thing and actually demonstrating the opposite.
Trump lawyer Alina Habba weeks later suggested in a filing that the judge in Trump’s E. Jean Carroll defamation case might have a conflict of interest, citing a thinly sourced New York Post story alleging a decades-old professional relationship between him and Carroll’s lawyer. Habba quickly withdrew the suggestion just a day later as the claim fell apart. And even in her initial filing, she bolded and italicized text from the Code of Conduct for U.S. judges that undermined her claim to a conflict even if the story had been true.
Trump’s lawyers in an August brief to the D.C. district court cited a pair of highly dubious claims popularized by far-right social media influencers. One of them involved Biden’s November 2022 comment that he was “making sure [Trump], under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.” Trump’s lawyers claimed Biden was saying his “administration” would thwart Trump and that his comments added “an unprecedented political dimension to this prosecution.” This claim had been debunked repeatedly months earlier. Biden never cited his administration, and there’s no reason to believe he was referring to prosecutions.
These examples don’t even include the sloppy, error-riddled legal filings that characterized other Trump-aligned lawyers’ hasty efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump has pitched his many legal setbacks as a result of a biased and weaponized legal system. But when you have to reach for these kinds of arguments — including citing your own Supreme Court nominee who clearly took a position at odds with your own — it would seem to reinforce that you’re not working with much. |
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 22, 2024 2:34:14 GMT
^^^^..........^^^
Can't remember if it was Andrew Weissman, Neil(?) Katyl or both but the Kavanaugh piece was discussed the other day/evening. Their opinion was that filing was a mess all around..
|
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 22, 2024 2:43:28 GMT
Conservative pollster Frank Luntz broke the fourth wall to warn New York Attorney General Letitia James to hold off seizing Trump's stuff. "And I say this to the Attorney General right now," he said, aiming his right index finger into the CNN studio camera. "If you play politics on this, this is what the Secretary of State did in Colorado and what they did in I believe Maine -- his numbers went up in both states." *** For Luntz, it is pure political suicide for the Democrats to revel during Trump's financially vulnerable hour. youtu.be/SulyHgWXgnk?si=sLJC4-38gxWZBMSowww.rawstory.com/gop-pollster-letitia-james-elect-trump/ |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 22, 2024 3:28:05 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 22, 2024 15:31:44 GMT
Seems truth social is merging with Digital World Acquisition Corporation *. Shareholders in Digital World Acquisition Corporation voted to approve a merger with Donald Trump’s social media company. *. The tie-up could net the former Republican president an eventual windfall of $3 billion or more. *. The vote by DWAC shareholders comes two-and-a-half years after that so-called SPAC announced plans to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns the Truth Social app platform. *. It also comes as Trump faces the possibility that New York Attorney General Letitia James will start trying to collect on a massive $454 million civil fraud judgment against him next week. www.cnbc.com/2024/03/22/trump-could-net-3-billion-from-dwac-social-media-merger-vote.html*** Note: The company now known as "Trump Media" could begin to be publicly traded next week under the stock symbol DJT, Trump’s initials. |
|
|
|
Post by Scrapper100 on Mar 22, 2024 16:29:32 GMT
Seems truth social is merging with Digital World Acquisition Corporation *. Shareholders in Digital World Acquisition Corporation voted to approve a merger with Donald Trump’s social media company. *. The tie-up could net the former Republican president an eventual windfall of $3 billion or more. *. The vote by DWAC shareholders comes two-and-a-half years after that so-called SPAC announced plans to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns the Truth Social app platform. *. It also comes as Trump faces the possibility that New York Attorney General Letitia James will start trying to collect on a massive $454 million civil fraud judgment against him next week. www.cnbc.com/2024/03/22/trump-could-net-3-billion-from-dwac-social-media-merger-vote.html*** Note: The company now known as "Trump Media" could begin to be publicly traded next week under the stock symbol DJT, Trump’s initials. Meaning it would be easy to a foreign entity to buy shares and basically own TFG. It’s also an another way that TFG could screw people over by selling off a bunch if shares and tanking it’s value. Of course he might not want to do that if he is indebted to foreign entities. Jay Kuo wrote a piece in this today. |
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 22, 2024 18:09:24 GMT
Scrapper100 ^^^^^^ actually the stock is tanking right now
|
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 22, 2024 18:12:45 GMT
Falling. Down. ...down...down... Moments after Digital World Acquisition Corporation voted to merge with Trump Media, the parent company for Donald Trump's Truth Social platform, its stock took a quick drop — losing 12 percent of its value at one point. According to a report from CNBC, stock for the company which will be listed as DJT starting next week, began the day at $44.20 before taking a quick nosedive to below $38, before a bounceback to 3.5 percent below opening. The former president was expected to see a $3 billion windfall after the merger was completed but, by the time he is able to sell any portion of his stock, that dollar figure could change radically downward as other investors cash out. As CNBC is reporting, "A total of 11% of the tradable shares of DWAC are being sold short, FactSet data shows." "This means investors holding these positions are betting the price will fall before they have to buy the shares back and return them to the entities who loaned the shares to them," the report adds. www.rawstory.com/truth-social-stock/ |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 22, 2024 23:54:20 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 23, 2024 0:45:12 GMT
Judges must hold the linewww.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/29/judges-maga-lawlessness/As we saw on Jan. 6, when elected leaders defy the law, they invite their followers to do the same. Chaos reigns, the courts become powerless, and mob rule (directed by an authoritarian leader) prevails. When Trump lambastes judges and prosecutors and promises to “weaponize” the Justice Department, judges must maintain a zero-tolerance policy for officials’ (and former officials’) defiance of laws and court orders and ignore their claims of persecution. Judges should continue to denounce the contempt for courts, the law and truth Republicans routinely display.
If courts do not mete out severe consequences for willful disregard of the law and attacks on the legitimacy of the courts, Trump will succeed in ripping up the foundation of our democracy. Judges simply must hold the line.
|
|
