Still relevant a year later...

Anyone read the new Trump indictment?  A lot of the same issues discussed above.  As I predicted, the 'fake elector slate' looks like it'll be the pin which will be pulled out of the grenade, so it's worth revisiting the information gleaned from this committee explaining this scheme to get a solid footing.  A number of these individuals who were recruited to be alternate electors were under the impression that they would only be used in the contingency that Trump's team would ever be successful in proving enough fraud to change the state's official tally, and were vocally appalled in these interviews with congressional investigators once they learned that they were actually drafted on illegally fradulent certificates intended to be slipped into Mike Pence's hands to be substituted into the record on Jan. 6.  I understand that a number of these alternate electors have been granted immunity for their cooperation, and their testimony will amount to a huge portion of Jack Smith's prosecution.  The alternate electors in Georgia have been cooperating with the state investigation there (where we could see indictments as soon as this month), and just two weeks ago, in a little noticed but crucial development, the Michigan AG just arrested 16 of these fake electors from that state.

The "co-defendents" are not named, but they closely align to Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Justin Clark, Kenneth Chesebro and one additional "advisor" who may be anyone from Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, etc.

One very promising development in the indictment is the assertion of Trump's "intent" to deceive.  This was a concern that I focused on during last summer's hearings - is Trump just crazy enough to believe this bullshit, or was he fully cognizant of his deception?  As I put it at the time, "Trump is not crazy, he's craven", and it looks like Jack Smith at least is showing the confidence of someone who has the goods to confirm it.  The indictment is clear on this point: "These claims were false, and the Defendent knew they were false", "he deliberately disregarded the truth", straight-up references to "lies" abound.  So does Jack Smith have the hard evidence necessary to show that Trump, in fact, knew his case for election fraud was a ruse to cling to power?  Well, we know that Smith has been fishing for such corroboration from witnesses.  This gives him a leg up on the Jan. 6 Committee, which had not been able to offer proof for this essential piece of the plot.

So the other big question left unanswered from last summer's committee - what was the deal with the beef between the committee and the DoJ?  They weren't sharing information on testimonies, and there were suggestions that the DoJ had been dragging their feet on their own investigation.  Which may be true.  I think it's a very good question why a Special Council (like Jack Smith) wasn't appointed to the case earlier.  I mean, in 2021 would have seemed ideal.  But Smith was only appointed to the position in Aug. 2022, and only after the FBI raided Mar-A-Lago, and Smith was then given both cases.  Seems odd.  But at least since Smith's appointment, the case, or rather both cases, have evolved rapidly, resulting in indictments less than a year later.  It's worth wondering how fast a Jack Smith investigation could have moved in 2021, given a single-minded focus on just the one matter.  At the very least, we wouldn't have this spectre of the court trials colliding with the 2024 election timeline.  Maybe Merrick Garland was too chickenshit in 2021, didn't want the appearance of partisan prosecution following Jan. 6, focusing solely on charging actual rioters rather than looking into the broader scheme of Trump's election deceit.  Maybe it wasn't until the Mar-A-Lago raid that he realized that a Justice investigation (and likely conviction) of Trump was practically inevitable at that point, and threw a "by the way" assignment onto Jack Smith as cursory matter.  Whatever the case, I believe that history will determine that the DoJ waited at least a year too long to properly investigate and consolidate this prosecution of Trump, and, as the election season proceeds and Trump gets to endlessly claim "election interference", Garland will likely be portrayed as way more partisan than had he simply initiated the case in 2021 anyway.  The House GOP would be calling for his impeachment regardless of whether he had ever bothered to investigate Trump at all.
 

It's bad enough that every Pub defender of Trump is simply ignoring the entire part of the indictment about the fake elector conspiracy, instead framing it solely as if Trump's crime was merely questioning the election's legitimacy, but it's downright disgusting when Trump's lawyer, John Lauro, appears on all of the top five major news media Sunday morning programs, and only CNN even bothers to bring up the fake elector scheme to force Lauro to address it.  To be clear, it is exactly the fake elector scheme which is the substance behind all of the charges of "defrauding the government", "obstructing the certification" and "depriving legitimate votes".  It is the indictment.  And it also is clearly in need of being carefully explained to American voters in detail because there are so many people who do not understand how this is the heart of the indictment.  Chuck Todd's a weasel, but what's Stephanopoulos' excuse?

It's obvious from watching Joh Lauro's media appearances (and they are worth watching just to see how desperate and dishonest he is) to see how the Trump defense strategy is shaping up.

1) "Lying is Legal" - which is fun stuff, even if it's also basically the campaign slogan of one of the leading presidential candidates.  Lauro is essentially making the bluff that the government will be unable to prove that Trump did not believe his lies, but even if he did, lying falls within his free speech rights.  So he's either a liar or he's delusional.  Not only should voters be completely confident putting this liar (but only legal lies!) in the White House, they should rest assured that they'll also be entrusting a man who is so delusional as to be incapable of reasonably comprehending the reality of his 2020 election loss.  Hey, it's also not illegal to be a lunatic!  Make America Grate Again!

2) "Asking is not an 'action'" - "Your honor, I only asked that guy if he could kill my wife.  It's not like I held a gun to his head and forced him to do it."

3) "Violating the Constitution isn't technically criminal" - Even this one made Chuck Todd blush.

4) "Trump's stupid" - He's not a lawyer, how could he possibly know that the advice he was getting was illegal?  Just because the person giving him the advice told him it was illegal?  C'mon.  That's just one of many opinions.

5) Gaslight the media - You news folks should really be ashamed of yourselves for not standing up for a citizen's free speech rights.

6) Executive immunity - He was president when he engaged in this conspiracy, therefore it couldn't be illegal.  Hey, it worked for Nixon!
 

And by stepping around some of the most important details of these charges, aren't the 'mainstream media's playing right into the hands of critics who claim all the Trump is on trial for is being a tough guy, belligerent jerk?

By not focusing on substance, or any information that clarifies why this is happening, it is going to seem like these indictments are nothing but a tirade against the man's personality. His politics.

The fucks who run these organizations and the empty suits on these shows should be held morally culpable. They shake their head at all of the damage the Trump gets away with, but what the fuck about them. They're supposed to be smarter than that (him).

It's beyond shameful. There is absolutely no excuse

Jinnistan wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

The constant commission of mentioning the fake electors makes it pretty clear the media is not in the business of informing the populace, only ginning up easy talking points for talking heads to argue over.

It's wilful. As we already know, they are just about as responsible as any other person or entity for this fucking disaster.

The indictment is 45 pages, which is, I guess, a lot to ask the average American to strain their squinty eyes at.  But it makes clear the plan was to give these fake elector certificates to Mike Pence so he could count them instead of the legitimate electors from the battleground states.  Pence himself has reiterated that he was asked to "reject votes outright", meaning those votes for Biden which won him those states (which is the "deprive people their right to vote" part of the indictment).

I know that, push comes to shove, Trump will deny knowledge or understanding of any of this and try to throw all of the co-conspirators under the bus - ("I trusted them!") - but the confidence in the indictment gives me some faith that Jack Smith has iron-clad evidence of Trump's awareness and approval of this scheme which would make him culpable.  And this is why the note about "You're too honest" is so important, because it means that Trump understood his attempted scheme was fraudulent.

It shouldn't be so hard to explain this.

They aren't in the explaining business. They are in the destroying the world business.

It's hard to come up with good material over that mugshot.  It's just so pathetic.  It's like a child in the principal's office waiting to be paddled, "*sniff*, I don't even care."
 
So I started to consider what kind of possibilities there were among those doing the processing to kind of remind him where he is, you know?  Not like intimidation or outright hostility, but the more common passive-aggressive ways that COs like to dig in a bit.  I start wondering what the last comment Trump heard before that shot got snapped.  "You sure got a fine-ass daughter, Don."  "Don't forget to pat down his pussy, Bob."  "Say...'sane genius'!"

Then I started wondering about that motorcade over to the courthouse.  What was that traffic like?  How many Diet Cokes did Trump have on the plane?  A 77-year-old man, standing around for a half-hour.  I wonder if that look on his face is more about him realizing that he'd have to use one of them cold steel toilets.  You know he'd have to sit, with that big old prostate.  Oh, no toilet tissue?  "Well, you better grab some of those brown paper towels.  I don't think that's the 'gold' you're used to."

I sure it's not like they're treating him any different, right?
 

I think DeSantis thought he was taking a mugshot?  Somebody told him he also needed some coffee mug merch.
 

One would think that any news regarding Trump these days would receive a massive amount of coverage, and certainly there are a lot of seemingly silly stories about his more frivolous activities - like his all-caps social media posts - which arguably receive more coverage than they warrant.

So isn't it weird that a little over a week after the public disclosure of Trump's deposition in the New York City lawsuit accusing him of various tax fraud and manipuation, there's been hardly a squeak over what Trump had to say in that deposition?  If he had only pleaded the 5th, as he has in prior depositions, sure, I can see how it would fall short of news-worthiness.  But that's not what Trump did, and some of what he did say should merit a lot more scrutiny than it's gotten.

A key piece of evidence for Trump's tax fraud is the fact that his organization's official financial statements, required by the banks to which he has outstanding debts, have been shown to have substantially inflated values listed for his various properties, as a means of attracting a larger amount of borrowed cash against what are seemingly profitable assets.  When confronted about the demonstrably inaccurate value estimates for his various properties, Trump had something to say which should really be a scandal in itself.  His astonishing response was: "I have a clause in there that says, ‘Don’t believe the statement. Go out and do your own work.’ This statement is ‘worthless.’ It means nothing.....you’re supposed to pay no credence to what we say whatsoever."

The issue is that I completely believe him.  I have no doubt at all that Trump has had his lawyers attach legalese language to his numerous financial documents including such a "clause" which inevitably would completely neuter the very purpose of having to file any such document with the banks in the first place.  Why would any bank legally require such financial statements at all if it were understood that any such statement was "worthless" on its face?  What kind of dance is going on here?

So why hasn't this revelation in Trump's recent deposition seen a lot more coverage and outrage?  Could it be because such inserted legal clauses, such magical invocations of immunity to accountable disclosure, are in fact widespread among the contracts and legal documents of the wealthy land-owning elites?  Is Trump being so arrogant and self-assured here because he knows precisely how such inequitable advantages and protections of the billionaire class are both ingrained and unquestioned?  Why would corporate media want to focus the American people's attention on such an obvious but oh-so-obscure double standard?

Well, like Clifford Worley once said, "Am I lying?"  Trump's deposition is a public document, you can read it for yourselves?  If Trump were lying, why hasn't there been any pushback on this?  Yet, this deposition has gone uncovered and uncommented upon for over a week since it was released.  Note that the above article, being officially from the AP wire, does not appear on The Hill's front page or in its post history.  On a simple Google search, the only other mainstream media piece which directly refers to the above quote is from Newsweek, and rather than original reporting, this is actually a quote from Twitter Trump critic Ron Flipikowski: "This clause is basically a disclaimer at the beginning of the statements that any entity who receives them should conduct their own assessment of the value of his properties and he was not responsible if the valuations provided by him were incorrect.  Essentially, it is his position that this clause gives him immunity from being held liable for any misrepresentations since that disclaimer renders all the numbers in the statement 'worthless.'"

It seems like this deserves a lot more discussion.

Now back to Chuck Todd and the pressing question of "Why didn't Joe Biden stop the Maui fires with his powerful Old Man Breath?"
 

Trump has been riding pretty hard with his claim that US presidents have complete and total immunity for any and all acts they perform in the office.  Which we all know because why else would Richard Nixon resign and receive a pardon?  Earlier, the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on the argument, a cowardly abdication which was preferable to the Court's conservatives than tarnishing their integrity any further by acting like he might have a point (or risking Trump's wrath, whichever).





So instead, today we had the opportunity to listen to this theory being deliberated by the poor court which drew the shortest straw, the District of Columbia Federal Appeals Court.  The event was high profile enough to draw both Trump and Jack Smith together in the same room, the first time since Trump's arraignment.  But the star of the show was Trump's new lawyer John Sauer, making his Broadway debut, and keeping his fingers tightly crossed that he'll fare better than Trump's previous lawyers (Michael Cohen, Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Evan Corcoran and everyone else who got a bonus payment in the form of criminal charges).  Even the Republican-appointed judge had a deathly chagrin: "I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate the criminal law."  D'oh!  But of course if common sense had any legal currency in our times, we would definitely not be in this situation right now.  Tellingly, reporters are openly describing Trump's strategy without pointing out the inconvenient fact of how it proves the complete waste of time and taxpayer money they were all witnessing today: "If he retakes the White House, he could then seek to order the charges against him to be dropped or try to pardon himself."  And obviously he would want to do these things because he totally believes this immunity schtick is legit!  What president wouldn't want to pardon themselves for their completely legal and constitutionally protected conduct?

The money shot of the proceeding was probably when one of the judges posed a hypothetical to Sauer, as a way of testing the immunity claim, asking that if a president were to, say, order the Navy Seals to assassinate a political rival, he would be immune from prosecution, to which Sauer, sphincter-clinched, answered with a "qualified yes".  He repeated that answer with hypotheticals involving the selling of pardons or nuclear secrets.  Sauer assured that under such circumstances, the president could be lawfully impeached....assuming that such crimes were revealed during a president's tenure.  (Without a shred of self-awareness, Trump later would say, "I think it's very unfair when a political opponent is prosecuted".  The obvious follow-up question, to either Trump or his lawyer, is whether Trump intends to prosecute Biden for actions taken while he was in office, but of course he's already said that he does.)

John Sauer offered his own hypotheticals, which are not likely to put citizens at ease, mentioning that without respecting a president's immunity, "presidents could be prosecuted for giving Congress false information to enter war or for authorizing drone strikes targeting U.S. citizens abroad."  This is a cute whataboutist way of pointing out that Trump's predecessors could be opened to prosecution, but I think most Americans think they probably should be.  "If a president has to look over his shoulder or her shoulder every time he or she has to make a controversial decision and wonder if after I leave office, am I going to jail for this when my political opponents take power?"  Besides mourning the burden of having to consider the legality of one's presidential actions, this is also a unsubtle threat that if Trump is inevitably convicted, then Biden and any future Democrat president is fair game (which is already what the Biden impeachment effort amounts to).  "It would authorize, for example, the indictment of President Biden in the Western District of Texas after he leaves office for mismanaging the border, allegedly."  Yeah, "allegedly".  I'm just saying, your honor, it's a crazy world.

Speaking of impeachment, the appeals judges also noticed another slight hypocrisy in Trump's defense.  Today, his lawyers claimed that Trump's immunity could only be questioned and removed if and when he happened to be convicted by the Senate and impeached.  Which exposes a catch-22 in what Trump's lawyers were claiming during his impeachment proceedings, which was that the proper time for holding Trump accountable is once Trump is out of office, rather than an impeachment.  One judge pointed out that Trump may have been convicted in the Senate if a few Republican Senators had not been swayed that Trump would be investigated and charged after leaving office.  During the impeachment, "we should leave this for the courts to decide".  Now that he's in court, "he should have been impeached".  And if that isn't enough: "His lawyers have also argued that prosecuting him would constitute double jeopardy, since he was already impeached."  So whatever works.
 

It should be easy to take some solace in the fact that no one seems to be taking this Trump immunity defense seriously.  Even Republican stooge Jonathan Turley is chuckling.

But the frustration is with the court allowing these cynical tactics in the first place.  This type of bullshit should get tossed out with prejudice, considering how it's clearly a thinly-veiled delay tactic, so that Trump could eventually, potentially, retroactively absolve himself with the same corrupt power of the office he's asserting here.  This is why the cowardice of the Supreme Court, for example, is so infuriating.  I'm not convinced that Trump's three nominees are willing or inclined to entertain such a radical interpretation of presidential power, but they're scared of Trump's blowback.  Everyne knows that this issue will inevitably end up on their desk anyway, so, really, they're just aiding the delay tactic, but without having to soil their reputation by putting their thoughts on the argument on the record.

Also, isn't it really bizarre how little attention the mainstream press seems to be giving to that little story recently about how Trump's most influential strategist, Roger Stone, got caught on tape recommending the kidnapping of Justice Dept lawyers and assassinating Democrat congressmen? (And the ex-NYPD guy he's speaking with on the tape has declined to deny the tape's authenticity?)  I mean, you know, in context of what Trump seems to think a president should be able to get away with?

Instead we get three hours covering Gen. Austin's prostate.  Democracy certainly does die in darkness, guys.