China has an animal zodiac for each year on the calendar. I know for example that the European/Christian calendar corresponded 1970 to The Year of the Dog.
China is going to need to update their zodiac, because 2023 is going to be the Year of the Shitgibbon. This is the year a number of pundits and legal experts are claiming donald trump will finally face direct criminal charges for the crimes he's committed both before and during office as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice).
Over at MSNBC, columnist Jordan Rubin - who has a legal background working as prosecutor for the Manhattan's District Attorney's office (insert Law & Order ding-ding cue here) - makes the case that several ongoing investigations into trump's alleged misdeeds are set to wrap up soon with a lot of credible evidence the Justice Department can use to indict him:
On the one hand, it’s unremarkable to prophesy that a man who’s facing several probes by federal and state prosecutors for conduct that looks pretty unlawful will be charged with crimes.
On the other hand, it’s Trump, whose name hasn’t been synonymous with accountability.
There’s reason to think that will change...
...If anything, the feds’ search and seizure of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last summer felt like a watershed moment: federal law enforcement action against a former president who had seemingly lived a consequence-free life and might have continued to do so. Even an incremental step toward potential prosecution from the branch of government that can actually bring charges seems more significant than the legislative branch’s asserting Trump’s guilt by way of criminal referrals (both things, of course, can be and are significant).
Plus, the Mar-a-Lago case appears to be more straightforward than the sordid legal maze of January 6 and its tentacles. As former federal prosecutors said in a November memo analyzing the documents case, published at Just Security, “there is a strong basis to charge Trump.” With his special master detour officially crushed — by Trump-appointed judges, no less — he looks a step closer to charges related to his apparent mishandling of classified documents and obstruction.
Rubin does also note the state-level legal trouble trump is facing, but Jacob Shamsian over at Business Insider has more details on that:
Fulton County's district attorney, Fani Willis, launched her investigation shortly after Trump made an infamous call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, asking him to "find" enough votes to reverse Trump's 2020 electoral loss to now-President Joe Biden.
Court filings indicate the DA's investigation expanded to include Trump's allies who plotted to send fake electors to Congress on January 6, 2021, and hand Trump a second term.
Willis has swiftly moved the investigation forward. Over the past year, she empaneled a grand jury and fought court battles to ensure testimony from Gov. Brian Kemp; the state's Republican Party chairman, David Shafer; Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; and more than a dozen others who spoke with Trump at the time. Two other high-profile witnesses who fought grand jury subpoenas, Mark Meadows and Newt Gingrich, have their cases before appeals courts.
Trump and the fake electors could face charges of election fraud, improperly trying to influence government officials, and criminal solicitation, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.
As of December, Willis has gotten testimony from most of the main players in Trump's plot to overturn election results in Georgia. According to CNN, her office has been negotiating plea deals with participants in the fake-elector scheme.
If she's going to bring indictments, they could come soon...
Even without testimony from the likes of Meadows - who's facing his own legal woes to the point where pleading out is the only way he'll avoid hard time in prison - DA Willis reportedly has enough evidence to indict trump and others. It's just the niceties of getting the smaller fish (the fake electors who don't want jail time on their resumes) to plead out in order to catch the bigger fish (trump) with direct testimony that's slowing up the inevitable announcement.
The grand jury Willis is using now is only an investigatory one, which has to make referrals to a regular grand jury that can actually bring the charges for the DA to use. So there is another step to go through, but according to Georgia rules that regular grand jury has a two-month window to work in. Once the special grand jury is finished (likely February) the regular grand jury should be done late April.
Meaning I get a nice birthday gift in May when Willis issues the arrest warrants.
trump is still facing other legal woes such as the state civil case in New York over tax fraud is set for October 2023. The civil trial between trump and E. Jean Carroll - who accused him of rape and brought defamation charges when he mocked her - is set to begin April 17 (any settlement deal has to be done April 10, I think) this year. Both of these trials are likely to hit trump's wallets in ways that could well bankrupt him forever, as well as paint him a loser before the primary voters in 2024.
In 2016, trump bullied all the other Republican candidates while his opponents had nothing to hit him with - they couldn't attack his business failings because he shamelessly gaslight the public about them - and so they floundered. In 2024, anybody campaigning against trump will have proof on the debate stage that trump is a loser, a tax fraud, breaking laws he was sworn to uphold, and can force trump to be on the defensive instead of offensively attacking everyone else.
trump will be a broken man, one way or another, by the time 2024 rolls around.
Here's hoping trump will be broken sitting in a darkened jail cell for next New Year's.
5 comments:
Don't forget the new look New York is taking at the porn star hush money case. I think Fergus will see some consequences this year, though I don't hold out that much hope that it will be all that satisfying.
Satisfaction is not the point. Fergus isn't even really the point. The rectification of fifty years of Republican degradation of the US government is the point, and whatever happens to Fergus over his criming will only be the beginning of it.
On the lighter side, Bannon seems to believe he'll be going to federal prison this year.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
Accountability is the point.
Frank: accountability SHOULD HAVE been the point, ages ago, if our legal system took financial fraud more serious. Alas, it's taken us this long to get here.
Doug: Hey, Happy New Year.
Post a Comment