The modern Republican Party defends no virtue, performs no service to others, provides no leadership to our nation in any way.
In every respect, the Republican Party is still dead as a functioning political force. It is now an occupying army, treating other Americans - other humans - as targets for their greed, fear, and hate. Anyone in that party that can claim any rational capability cannot be turned around as a force for good: They have had a DECADE of trumpism to walk away, deny any support of such criminality... and they refused. They are too beholden to "owning the libs" that they cannot break from a corrupt, destructive faction.
This is why I've been screaming to the nation FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. There is nothing there to vote for, only against(against Blacks, against women, against Latinos, against gays/lesbians/trans, against fiscal sanity, against vaccines, against foreign allies, against holding any person of power/wealth accountable for their crimes).
I'm not taking crazy pills. The Republican downward spiral has been going on for decades now, and it's dragging the United States - and the world - down with it.
Just stop pandering to any Right-leaning faction you think you can appeal to. The Republicans killed the better angels of their nature ages ago. They'll just waste your time (and take your money). Just stop that. There's millions of Democratic and Independent voters to reach for to get them motivated to vote. There's millions more who aren't even registered to vote - and who can - that the Dems and other center-Left forces need to reach to get them in enough numbers to drive the corrupt GOP out of power at the state and federal levels.
Those are the Americans we need to stand up for the nation. Go talk to them, get them on board. Save the true Republic, Dems.
As part of Ron DeSantis' ambitious agenda - for his insane presidential hopes - in 2023 to "fight Wokeness" in Florida's educational system, we witnessed the Sunshine State's schools fall under the merciless attentions of Far Right wingnuts eager to purge "diversity" and any genuine standards at every level. As I wrote back in February 2023:
Not only are the classrooms at our public schools been emptied of every book so that DeSantis' foot soldier censors can refuse whichever titles they fear, but DeSantis is happily plugging in conservative political hacks into leadership roles at every major state university...
This is essentially a hostile takeover, not just by DeSantis but also by Far Right Republicans obsessed with dismantling higher educational systems they fear are too liberal...
DeSantis is essentially saying that things like civil rights and Title IX protections won't be upheld at state universities. Segregation and racial discrimination, sexual harassment, hostile workplaces, hostile classrooms... all of this will become the norm in DeSantis' Florida.
This is all echoed in DeSantis' efforts to shut down ANY discussion of "Critical Race Theory" essentially meaning our state cannot teach one iota of Florida's history regarding racism, slavery, Jim Crow, Civil Rights marches, all because Republicans are terrified that White People's Feelings (tm) will be hurt if we teach the facts that Yes Goddammit racism happened and keeps happening. He's just making sure that college students will be kept ignorant as much as our K-12 students.
(Christopher) Rufo is, by the by, a wingnut conservative hack actively campaigning to shut down public education of any kind in an obsessive desire to privatize something for greed and racism. DeSantis, desperate to win over 2024 Republican primary voters, is giving Rufo the opportunity to wreak havoc on Florida's educational system...
As Chris Mullin wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, DeSantis exploited Florida’s unusually centralized system of higher-education governance to insert political control directly into the classroom—stacking boards, replacing presidents, and rewriting curricula. His boldest gamble has been a complete takeover and ideological makeover of New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college on Sarasota Bay known for its experimental pedagogy and progressive-left campus culture. Charging poor performance and ideological bias, DeSantis announced plans in early 2023 to transform the school into a “Hillsdale of the South”—a reference to the small, selective, conservative-leaning Michigan college that eschews government funds and focuses on teaching the classics. The governor appointed six new conservative trustees to New College, including activist Christopher Rufo, who then fired its President, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran at more than double Okker’s salary. Within months, the new board abolished the gender studies program, dismissed faculty and administrators, created athletic teams, and secured tens of millions in state funding.
Two years later, the picture looks grim. New College’s four-year graduation rate has plummeted from 58.3 to 47.4 percent. The school’s U.S. News & World Report college ranking has fallen by nearly 60 spots, from 76th among national liberal-arts colleges in 2022 to 135th this year. Faculty and staff have fled, and students have followed them out the door. “It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme,” one professor told Inside Higher Ed. “Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts.” Spending at the college, meanwhile, has exploded. In Tallahassee, there is now open talk of either privatizing New College or shutting it down completely.
DeSantis’s justification for the takeover was that New College was an educational disaster—a failed experiment in left-wing academic culture.Though the school had its problems (it struggled, for instance, to reach its enrollment goals, as do many small, less-selective colleges around the country) and was indeed left leaning, it was far from a disaster. In fact, by most objective measures, it was a model of what a small public liberal-arts institution could achieve. As Aalia Thomas reported in the Washington Monthly in 2023, New College consistently ranked near the top of the magazine’s list of liberal arts colleges for upward mobility, research, and service. Its graduates earned PhDs at rates higher than many of the nation’s most prestigious private liberal arts colleges. Its curriculum mixed postcolonial theory with Aristotle and Voltaire. The college charged about $7,000 a year for low-to-medium-income students—a bargain compared to most similar liberal arts colleges. It enrolled a high share of Pell Grant recipients and produced civically engaged graduates—92.6 percent of its students were registered to vote in 2020. Far from failing, New College embodied many of the qualities conservatives say they prize in public higher education: affordability, rigor, civic virtue, and upward mobility.
The governor’s appointees arrived convinced they were rescuing a failing school. They replaced New College’s narrative-evaluation system with traditional grades. They bragged about making the college more “selective” (instead, the percentage of new students with a 4.0 or above high school grade point average decreased from 55.1 percent in 2022 to 42.1 percent in 2024). They recruited athletes and self-described “normal” students to reshape the culture, many of whom quickly transferred out. The campus began to change in telling ways: the reopened campus café, operated by a vendor tied to Corcoran, now serves coffee in cups printed with Bible verses, and the college has commissioned a statue of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to stand on campus in honor of “free speech.” All this change has been financed by an eye-watering boost in spending. The college’s budget has grown from $53,232,164 the year before the overhaul to $93,043,119 today—a 75 percent increase.
Even DeSantis allies are turning on the project. “There can be no question anymore about what the numbers really are,” said Eric Silagy, a DeSantis-appointed member of the state Board of Governors. Nathan Allen, who served as vice president of strategy for New College during the conservative takeover but has since resigned, suggested where the blame for those numbers should be placed: “New College is not a House or Senate project … It’s a Ron DeSantis project.” Corcoran himself has said, if New College doesn’t produce something different, “then we should be closed down.”
That Corcoran - a political hack hire who didn't deserve the job in the first place - is looking for the exit is a telling sign of how screwed up New College under Rufo and the other wingnuts turned out. And as much as this is all on DeSantis - pushing a political agenda on our state's schools - all of the state-level Republicans who backed DeSantis' efforts on this need to answer for their own corruption and incompetence here.
For the Republicans, this was never about improving the educational standards of Florida. This was about viewing public education as a cash cow, a means of filling their own pockets with state money while the system breaks down. It was about playing into the hypocrisy of accusing our schools and colleges of being 'broken' and 'corrupt', while being the ones in charge breaking it all and using their own corrupt urges to make it worse.
We've had almost 30 years of constant Republican (mis)rule in the state of Florida, a straight line of crooked behavior by our elected officials and their shady business allies. Why the hell should they be allowed to retain any office after these decades of deceit and destruction?
Update: Again, many thanks to Batocchio for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Sorry I'm not in a better mood. Please leave comments below, hopefully the revised Blogspot system is easier to navigate. I just want to hear from people. It's so lonely for me.
Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump. Smith effectively had no choice. Trump had promised to fire him and end the cases as soon as he took office on January 20. (The president-elect reportedly plans to fire not only Smith but also career attorneys who were assigned to his team.)
In both cases, these were crimes that only a president could commit: No one else could have attempted to remain in office by the same means, and few people could have made off with boxes full of these documents. And only a president-elect with nearly unlimited resources could have gotten away with them.
Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.
The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority...
I decried trump's tactics, and I hated how the legal system seemed to go out of its way to play the game by his rules not theirs. And yet this is how broken our American Justice has become:
But in Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump drew the ideal foil. The man overseeing the two cases against Trump is obsessive about proceduralism. His view was that the best way to restore the justice system, and the Justice Department, after the first Trump presidency was to do everything precisely by the book, no matter how long it took. It took quite a while—Smith was not appointed until November 2022, two months after the paperwork coup began and three months after the FBI seized documents at Mar-a-Lago. By the time Smith brought charges, in summer 2023, the timeline was tight, either for verdicts soon enough to inform voters or to avoid dismissal if a Republican won the presidential election...
Most important, Garland’s attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding accountable someone who had committed serious crimes in plain sight. And partly because of that, Trump will soon return to the White House with the power and intention to destroy all the independence and careful procedures that Garland took such pains to protect...
The lack of accountability for January 6 is an affront to the Constitution. But the lesson that Trump will take from charges being dropped, along with the immunity ruling, is that the system is not capable of holding him accountable for most rules that he violates. The affronts will continue.
With regards to the one criminal trial that did convict trump on 34 counts, even that is now facing turmoil as the prosecutors and judge try to figure out sentencing on someone who will be federally protected from the law. The civil trials that trump lost - the one involving tax fraud on his properties, and the ones involving his sexual assault and defamation on E. Jean Carroll - are likely to continue through the appellate process, but you can be damn sure trump will use every legal power the presidency can inflict on those rulings to weasel his way out of those matters.
I am angry at Garland - and at President Biden, who nominated Garland as a sign of professionalism and normalcy returning to the Justice Department - only as far as his inability to understand the seriousness and severity of everything trump represented. Dammit, man. trump was - still is - a clear and present danger to the United States.
I am more angry at a Republican Party that - confronted with multiple facts that trump was dangerous and criminal to boot - refused to hold trump accountable, and refused to regain any semblance of ethical responsibility towards the United States. They happily did something the Founders could never have imagined: They openly supported a convicted felon, tax fraud, and sex offender for the highest office in the land.
I am extremely angry at a Beltway media that repeatedly refused to remind the American public who and what trump really is. Not just the increasing signs of mental instability and the ongoing evidence of trump's sadism, sexism, and racism. They kept underplaying the facts that trump had been convicted of felonies, that he'd been exposed as a business fraud and gaslighter, that his contempt towards women drove him to acts of vulgarity. This is the same Beltway media that had fucking meltdowns over Hillary's emails, and they failed to point out how trump was the most corrupt person - in a field containing the likes of LBJ, Nixon, Harding, and Andrew Jackson - in presidential history.
But my deepest ire is for the 75 million or so fellow Americans who - with all the evidence that IS out there, with all the reporting that did happen that showed trump was a convicted felon and sex offender - still voted for a monster like him. There may have been a lot of low-information voters out there this cycle, and a number of them voted for trump without knowing - or comprehending - the facts that trump was a legal abomination. But enough of you knew. Enough of you knew he was a criminal and you voted for him anyway. Goddamn you.
trump is now the most dangerous person in America, because he's going to get granted executive powers - yet again - that he openly promises to abuse the minute he gets sworn into office. trump is going to twist the Department of Justice into his Department of Vengeance, attacking every person who exposed his criminal acts by turning them into criminals without evidence or rationale. Think of the disastrous Durham prosecutions that never proved trump's lies about the 2016 elections: Think of how worse it's going to be as trump pursues falsehoods and fantasies about 2020 being 'stolen' from him that four years of digging by his wingnut allies never confirmed. Think about all those people who were convicted for their roles in the January 6th Insurrection, that trump claims are 'heroes' and who'll get pardoned even after all those trials and juries proved how violent those insurrectionists are.
Think of how trump's entire existence - all the bankruptcies, all the acts of fraud he plead away - is proof that our legal system fails to hold everyone accountable. If you're poor, if you're a minority, if you're a woman, you won't find any justice with prosecutors or judges or cops who'll punish you even when you're innocent. If you're rich, if you're white, if you're male, you can buy and bully your way into favorable treatment and slaps on the wrist because you can afford the lawyers who play the game.
And if you're donald trump, you fucking get away with everything.
Update 5/8/24: I think I wrote this thing too fucking soon. When I insisted towards the end that trump was facing four criminal trials in short order, I jinxed it or something. Three of those trials are now suffering delays due to trump-appointed judges or his spamming of the appeals system, and the likelihood is trump won't see those three trials until 2025 after the November election. If that Shitgibbon pulls off a goddamn steal of the election - either through a broken Electoral College or getting a Republican-controlled Congress to gift it to him - he will shut those trials down and never answer for his sins. He's currently facing trial in Manhattan for his hush money schemes to silence stories about his sex scandals during the 2016 election, but he HAS to answer for the serious acts of insurrection and document theft he caused.
For the LOVE OF GOD, America, do NOT vote for trump or the Republicans this November...
The Friday decision from Judge Arthur Engoron orders Trump and his flagship organization to pay the bulk of that amount: nearly $355 million. Trump's two sons and co-defendants, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are each liable for $4 million. Allen Weisselberg, a former Trump Organization executive, is liable for $1 million. The total is even higher with interest — more than $450 million overall, according to the attorney general's office.
"Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin," Engoron wrote in the court filing. "Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways..."
If you want popcorn, that should be in Aisle 9 at your local Publix. If you don't have a local Publix I assure you there will soon be one. (evil laughter from Publix HQ in Lakeland FL)
The judge also decided to limit Trump and his co-defendants' ability to do business in the Empire State. Trump and his companies are prohibited from serving as an officer or director of any New York business or applying for loans for three years. His sons are limited from similar leadership roles for two years.
Jeffrey McConney, ex-controller of the Trump Organization and also a defendant, was not ordered to pay any amount, but he and Weisselberg are permanently barred from serving in the financial control function of any New York corporation or similar business entity registered or licensed in New York state.
One of the thing trump - and his sons - can't do is get any loans from banks that do business in New York, which was one of the ways he'd been inflating his personal wealth and perpetuating his ongoing grifts over the decades. Considering New York City is the financial capital of the world - well, it's one of the major centers along with London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and (checks notes) that one nation-state that allows shell companies to money-launder off-shore accounts - this is tossing a wooden shoe into trump's gears real quick. If trump is trying scheme up anything else to make money down the road... he might not be able to. At least not for the next three years.
I mentioned earlier that trump - like most rich folk - doesn't have a lot of real cash on hand to be able to pay these kinds of fines. Most of the wealth is on paper, on the estimated values on properties and businesses owned, and on the amounts floating around in investment portfolios and the stock markets. Either trump is going to be forced to sell a number of properties - at fair market value, NOT the inflated prices trump claimed - or use other people's money. There's a reason why a lot of people - myself included - viewed trump's effort to claim control of the RNC this week was to claim the revenues flowing in to the party organization's campaign coffers.
And he doesn't have that time afforded to him. trump is facing more court trials, specifically the criminal cases. A quick update on those:
The ruling comes at a crucial time for Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Engoron's decision comes a day after another judge set the date for what could be Trump's first criminal trial, related to hush money payments issued during the 2016 election.
He is facing a combined 91 state and federal charges, including several related to his role to stay in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden...
Just this week, the judge overseeing that Hush Money trial - the DA is trying to claim it's an "election interference" trial because trump evaded campaign finance rules and lied to voters about the matter, but seriously it's the Hush Money To Stormy Daniels case - ruled against trump's bid to have the case dismissed and set the jury selection to start March 25, 2024 (it's also Bustillo but it's a different NPR article, well that IS her beat):
New York Judge Juan Merchan has rejected an attempt to dismiss the charges in the hush money case against former President Donald Trump, and a jury trial will begin as originally scheduled on March 25.
The case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who charged Trump with 34 felony counts last year, alleging he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information before the 2016 presidential election. That included hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who was threatening to go public with charges that she had had an affair with Trump not long after he married Melania Trump. Trump, who was present for Thursday's court hearing before Merchan, has denied the affair.
The next trial was technically the matter in DC federal court regarding trump's involvement in the January 6th insurrection, with four felony counts there. However, Judge Chutkan postponed that trial awaiting the ruling on trump's claim of Absolute Immunity, which an appellate court rebuked and which the Supreme Court received this week to determine if they need to hear the matter.
A number of legal experts are arguing SCOTUS doesn't even need to hear the appeal, and that is a choice the justices can make. They could still take it, and deliberate the matter in order to give trump what he REALLY wants - more delay - but they'd still have to make a ruling on it this term year (by late summer if they pad it out). If they dismiss trump's appeal, this trial could start as early as mid-May (depending on another trial): If SCOTUS takes it, they still have to rule on it by August (and like the 11th District of Appeals, they dare not approve in favor of absolute presidential immunity, it would literally kill the Constitution) and the trial could start by September (cutting it close to Election Day).
If by some miracle the Mar-A-Lago trial does start by May, it's still expected to take two or three months to complete considering the sheer amount of classified documents - and their mishandling - to go through. It would affect whenever the DC trial starts, which I would argue deserves to go first because of its immediacy and its importance in confirming trump's culpability over the nightmare of January 6th. Hopefully this will get straightened out soon.
Thrown into this mix is the fourth criminal matter trump faces in Fulton County, Georgia... which hit a huge delay when one of the co-defendants filed a complaint against DA Fani Willis over possible misconduct with an affair with one of the special investigators hired by the DA's office. The judge overseeing that trial held a hearing the last two days, during which the worst part of trumpian (damn you Roy Cohn) legal tactics - public smearing of opponents - was on full display.
Thursday’s evidentiary hearing on the misconduct claim against Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis yielded a lot of drama but little evidence of wrongdoing, legal experts say.
Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee held a hearing after Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for Trump co-defendant Mike Roman, alleged an improper relationship between Willis and top prosecutor Nathan Wade and claimed that Wade used his earnings from the case to fund trips for the pair...
“I simply don’t see any new evidence that requires disqualification. It’s a credibility pissing match so far. Ugly. Dramatic. But the needle hasn’t moved,” tweeted Georgia State University Law Prof. Anthony Michael Kreis.
“As an excavation of a now-defunct relationship, it was Bravo-worthy (and frankly, sad). But as an evidentiary hearing, it wasn’t the win the defense promised, especially under the governing legal standard,” agreed MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin...
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC that the hearing featured “a lot of spectacle but not very much substance.”
"Ultimately, at the end of the day yesterday, it was just a big nothingburger," she said. "There was nothing to show that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade had the financial conflict of interest that Georgia law recognizes, something akin to a prosecutor who only gets paid if they win a case. That's the classic case in Georgia law where there is a conflict that results in disqualification. That wasn't there yesterday in the courtroom..."
If trump and his co-defendants were hoping to throw the whole prosecution out, that wasn't going to happen. At the least, the judge could have removed Willis from overseeing the matter and handing it off to another prosecutor in the DA's office. Whether it delays this trial any further - which legal experts considered an open-shut case because of so much direct evidence against trump including that audio tape - is unlikely, because it's all the other trials' schedules that's interfering when this one starts.
Again, to all the Republican voters out there, to all the Republican Party leaders out there: You could have avoided all this. trump was dirty and corrupt and vulgar in the years before 2016. You had all the warning signs when he first campaigned - the failed casinos, the civil trial involving trump's university scam, the reports of sexual assault, the open racism and sexism - that trump was going to be a disaster of a human being. AND YOU STILL VOTED FOR THAT.
We've had other corrupt men in high office before, just that none of them reached the criminal lows that trump has. trump's not facing criminal trials because he's a "great conservative American," he's facing criminal trials now because 40 years of bills over his bullshit are finally coming due.
The civil trials are mostly done, and trump has to pay those dues soon. The criminal trials start March, and the countdown to just even ONE felony conviction begins.
Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was in the White House, most of it from China.
The transactions, detailed in a 156-page report called “White House For Sale” that was produced by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him.
Using documents produced through a court fight, the report describes how foreign governments and their controlled entities, including a top U.S. adversary, interacted with Trump businesses while he was president. They paid millions to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York.
The Constitution prohibits federal officeholders from accepting money, payments or gifts “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments and monarchs unless they obtain “the consent of the Congress” to do so. The report notes that Mr. Trump never went to Congress to seek consent...
It so happened that in 2017 when this all started that Congress was under Republican control, and the Republicans are too cowardly and too crooked themselves to raise a fuss over trump's open corruption. trump didn't even need to bother Congresscritters who were happy to look the other way.
Among the countries patronizing Mr. Trump’s properties, China made the largest total payment — $5.5 million — to his business interests, the report found. Those payments included millions of dollars from China’s Embassy in the United States, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Hainan Airlines Holding Company.
Saudi Arabia was the second-largest spender, shelling out more than $615,000 at the Trump World Tower and Trump International Hotel...
The frustrating question to ask now - just as I'd been asking since 2017 - is WHEN THE FCK CAN WE CHARGE TRUMP FOR VIOLATING THE EMOLUMENTS CLAUSE?!
Part of me is worried that we may be too late: there is a thing about statute of limitations, that there's a ticking clock to when the legal system can't pursue the matter any further. Granted, trump was doing this all the way up to January 20, 2021: There is hope the clock hasn't run out.
But one of the things that kept coming up in the courts whenever the lawsuits were filed was who had standing to do so (this is from Laurel Wamsley for NPR back in 2019):
A constitutional challenge to President Trump's continued ownership of his businesses has been ordered dismissed by a federal appeals court.
The case was brought by the attorneys general of Washington, D.C., and Maryland, arguing that Trump had violated the domestic and foreign emoluments clauses of the U.S. Constitution by accepting money from state and foreign governments via his Washington hotel and business empire.
A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled unanimously that the attorneys general did not have the standing to bring the lawsuit and instructed a lower court to dismiss the lawsuit.
Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote in the opinion: "The District and Maryland's interest in enforcing the Emoluments Clauses is so attenuated and abstract that their prosecution of this case readily provokes the question of whether this action against the President is an appropriate use of the courts, which were created to resolve real cases and controversies between the parties."
In the ruling, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found the members of Congress did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit against the president for violating the clause, which bars federal officials from collecting payments from foreign governments without the approval of Congress.
In their unsigned ruling, the judges cited Supreme Court precedent, noting the 215 lawmakers filing the lawsuit are not the majority of Congress, and that they might have had standing if they had done so as a majority. "[O]nly an institution can assert an institutional injury," the ruling says...
This feels like moving the goal posts on the part of the courts: "Oh, only Congress can charge trump with Emoluments violations! No wait, only a MAJORITY of Congress members can charge trump! No wait, only a MAJORITY of BOTH HOUSES of Congress members can charge trump! No wait, only..."
/headdesk
For all the back and forth, all the debates over all the other crimes trump's been charged with, the one thing we KNOW trump committed - using his businesses to curry favor from foreign powers - is the one thing nobody seems able to charge him on.
What the hell, judges. What the hell, Republicans. You're letting the corruption flow freely anymore.
The only way to hold trump - and his Republican cronies - accountable is to deny him another chance to sit in the White House and violate the Emoluments Clause any further. Stop voting Republican, Americans. Stop voting for the crooks.
I was promised indictments for donald trump and his associates/handlers/lackeys involved in both the January 6th insurrection in Washington DC, as well as indictments in Fulton County Georgia covering trump's attempts to bully state elections officials into throwing the results and scheming fake electors to steal the 2020 Electoral College count.
Goddammit. The sooner we get these charges before a judge, the sooner we get trump in a courtroom before the November 2024 general election, and the sooner we can see trump dragged off in handcuffs when a jury finds him guilty - one hopes - on at least ONE of the multiple charges he's facing.
I am tired of the delays.
Indict him on everything, for the Love of Mom, Baseball, Apple Pie, and good music, just do it, and let God - and a competent jury - sort it all out.
Lemme quote from Lennon:
Ah, prosecutors asking questions Lost in confusion Well, I tell them trump insurrected Bring the solution
Well, they shake their heads and they look at me, as if I've no legal mind I tell them there's a hurry, I'm hoping trump finally sees doing time
I'm just sitting here watching the wheels of justice go round and round I really love to watch them charges roll No longer riding on the media go-around
I just hope to see trump go (to jail) I just hope to see trump go (to jail) I just hope tooooooooo see trump go (to jail)
(Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for adding this article to Crooks & Liars'Mike's Blog Round-Up on 06/22/23. Please take a few minutes to peruse the other articles I've written, and please leave comments!)
To all of the Far Right, MAGA-driven Republican voters siding with donald trump on his allegations of his indictments being a "WITCH HUNT" I ask a simple question.
Do you honestly think that all of these criminal charges and indictments on trump would happen to Chris Christie if he had been your 2016 Presidential candidate and had upset Hillary in the Electoral College?
The result in real life was that Christie avoided a courtroom. The federal and state investigations couldn't prove enough against him on many of those allegations and he skated. The Supreme Court overturned the convictions of two of his staffers who were involved in the bridge closing. One thing about a career politician like him is that he knows how to create plausible deniability between himself and his handlers. If he had been President, it certainly would have put a hold on the investigations (bloody OLC memo, mutter grumble).
But would a former President Christie be facing a "witch hunt" today by vengeful Democratic/liberal leadership of the Biden administration? There could have been a few unanswered questions after 2021 that Biden's people could have reopened to make Christie's life a living hell. And yet, no it did not happen.
Has there been a history - I'm thinking back to LBJ, who could be that petty - of previous Democratic Presidencies that turned the Justice Department into the Vengeance Department, anything that would suggest something like that happening now towards trump or any other Far Right figure? There were and still are a number of partisan Republican annoyances who could be jailed just for being so, but yet you don't see that happening (yet. To be honest: the January 6 Grand Jury may drop that hammer soon). For the love of GOD, Matt Gaetz is still a free man because the FBI and DOJ were not able to find enough evidence and credible eyewitness testimony - Gaetz's cohort Greenberg was compromised, and the teen girl Gaetz abused refused to testify - to bring him to court.
Also, there's no evidence that Christie would have risen to the level of criminal behavior - especially with the theft of classified documents and obstructive attempts to keep them - that trump has. Character still matters in the formation of Presidential behavior, and while Christie can be a bully there's no evidence he is as narcissistic as trump to where Christie would have crossed the lines trump has.
You can ask that simple question at the beginning of this article not only using Christie but of every other credible 2016 primaries choice for the GOP: Would Jeb Bush have done the things trump has? Would Marco Rubio? Would Scott Walker? Would John Kasich? Hell, would Ted Cruz be as stupid and crooked as trump when it comes to violating the federal laws - stealing classified documents, obstructing investigations, inciting insurrection and violence towards Congress - trump is alleged doing?
Let us be honest here: If the Republican voting base had not gone for donald trump, if they had agreed that their standard bearer could have been any of the other 2016 candidates, the Republican nominee would have been someone better versed and more savvy about the political and legal systems. That person would have had a (slightly) stronger Character. That candidate (and President) would have avoided the traps trump happily jumped into. And there would be nothing today for the federal justice system - which isn't liberal by nature, but has to uphold laws in as consistent a manner as possible - to pursue for indictments, either legitimately or for "witch hunts".
No. Everything that is happening to trump - every criminal charge getting laid at his feet - is tied directly to trump's nature as a con artist grifter obsessed with money, power, and leverage (or as his Russian buddies call it Kompromat). It has nothing to do with trump being conservative, or Republican, or Christian, or "great". It has everything to do with trump being a crook his entire adult life.
trump is calling it all "WITCH HUNT" not only because he's desperate to avoid criminal conviction, he is also convinced that the legal system is meant to inflict witch hunts and punishments on political opponents in the first place. You can look to how he pushed for dubious "investigations" into Hillary's 2016 campaign for "illegally spying on him" all of which ended up as John Durham's Special Counsel inquiries... which all ended with no proof of trump's allegations and acquittals on the two cases Durham brought to trial.
Durham's failures should in truth prove that the American legal system - from the federal courts to the Justice Department to the FBI to even the state police and courts - tries its best to avoid political attacks in spite of trump's accusations (and hopes, should he return to power). The legal system is not based on Narrative - the opinions and unproven fears of the partisan hacks - but on Fact - the evidence gathered, the testimony of witnesses, the relevant matters - and on the Facts trump is either lying to the public or he's lying to himself. It can be both.
Again, this is the simple question: If it had been anyone else in the White House other than trump, would we be honestly seeing criminal indictments on the things trump has done (and hilariously enough, things he's openly bragging about)?
Here is the simple answer: No. This is all on trump.
The horrifying thing is how the rest of the Republican Party now wants to behave like trump.
This is not going to get better anytime soon.
And yet, let justice be done.
Update: Later today I saw reports from the Washington Postthat the FBI and key Justice Department figures fought against any kind of investigation into trump's misconduct in the Presidency. This partly fits my argument that the federal law enforcement agencies are not "witch hunting" as trump proclaims, but this does point to a troubling unwillingness by the FBI and DOJ to hold ANY high-level figure accountable (as long as that figure isn't Hillary). That it took the DOJ almost a full year to open investigations into trump's involvement in the January 6th riot, and that the department dragged out the efforts by the National Archives to recover the stolen classified documents, signals how slow this move towards justice truly is.
There's a ticking clock here, America, and if trump delays any justice until Election Day 2024, we may well be screwed forever.
Republican Rep. George Santos surrendered to federal authorities at a courthouse in suburban Long Island on Wednesday facing 13 counts of criminal wrongdoing.
Federal prosecutors say he allegedly "devised and executed a scheme" aimed at defrauding donors to his 2022 political campaign.
"This indictment seeks to hold Santos accountable for various alleged fraudulent schemes and brazen misrepresentations," said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace in a statement...
According to the criminal indictments, Santos claimed money donated to his 2022 campaign would fuel his bid for office, paying for TV advertisements.
Instead, he allegedly spent the cash on luxury designer clothes and to make a car payment and pay personal credit card bills.
Santos also faces a charge that in 2020, he fraudulently applied to receive unemployment benefits when he was employed and running for Congress in his first bid for public office...
I've seen a number of people online question "why the hell commit unemployment benefits fraud when he was making more money with his actual job?" Because, as any con artist will tell you, it's all a game. Many conservatives already viewed unemployment aid as a rip-off committed by lazy freeloaders, why NOT jump in on that "scam" when the federal aid was increased to help during a global pandemic? Also wik, con artists love to have different revenue streams to line their pockets in case one scheme goes dry. Back to the shenanigans:
Long before these charges were filed, it was clear the freshman lawmaker had pushed the boundaries of conventional political scandal. After his victory in last November's midterms, it was revealed that he fabricated most of the persona presented to voters.
Santos lied in interviews and campaign documents about his education, his professional accomplishments, his record as a champion volleyball player and his family's experiences in the Holocaust.
He also faced multiple investigations into how he raised and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash, including a mysterious $700,000 gift he made to his own election effort.
It remains unclear where that money came from...
Which is why I've seen other people online imply that the federal prosecutors are not done filing charges on Santos. THESE are the matters they can present right now in a criminal trial to a judge and jury.
Why Santos - whose provable history underscores a lifetime of check fraud, charity rip-offs, and other low-scale cons - decided to move up to the major leagues to pull off scams he wasn't ready to run only makes sense when you step back and recognize that the entire modern Republican Party has happily turned itself into a massive money-making scheme.
The distance between a novice still-young con artist roughly a decade into the Game and an aging bloated con artist like donald trump who's been at this grifting for fifty years has now closed thanks to the unethical state of the GOP. As David A Graham noted at The Atlantic (paywall):
For Santos to be indicted the same day that a jury in Manhattan found former President Donald Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation against the writer E. Jean Carroll is a fitting symmetry. Both men engaged in ceaseless chicanery for years before entering politics, and both found immediate and unexpected success in their first runs for office. But both men are now also wrestling with the realization that although you can get away with a lot in private life, the political spotlight can sometimes light the way for litigants and prosecutors...
In this way, his story resembles a shorter, smaller-time imitation of Trump’s. In his life as a real-estate developer, entertainer, and self-promoter, Trump was often ensnared in scandals, but he was able to escape serious scrutiny and personal criminal consequences for them. Trump’s methods were not quite so brazen, though they were sometimes pretty blunt: inflating and deflating the value of assets in different filings, for example, or simply inventing square footage for buildings. For decades, he got away with this, but entering politics brought attention he didn’t want...
This is, once again, an indictment of a legal system that continually overlooks white collar crime until it's at a scale of disastrous proportions. It's also a massive indictment of a political environment - thanks to the odious Citizens United ruling by a Republican-shaped SCOTUS - of billions of campaign dollars tempting the grifters into more brazen public acts that cannot be ignored.
My mother just mentioned this to me while driving to and from my nephew's college graduation this weekend: "We jailed Martha Stewart for less." (Now I know where I got that attitude from) Even she gets how troubling all this corruption has gotten.
I hope Santos get exposed for more of the fraud he's committed (especially that $700,000 mystery loan). I hope trump gets nailed to the wall by the New York attorney general for his financial crimes.
Let all the con artists answer for their sins. It is high time we held white collar criminals to stern measures.
A lobbyist working the Texas state legislature gets wind of a bill that would go against his clients' interests, so he goes around offering campaign funds to willing legislators to drop the bill. A particular official is tricky to get but the lobbyist finally gets him to commit with a $10,000 donation. When the bill comes to a floor vote, the lobbyist is outraged to watch that official vote for the bill. He angrily confronts the man later on to find out the opposition had paid him off with a $50,000 donation. The lobbyist keeps cursing out the legislator, who finally shrugs and answers "you knew I was weak when I took the ten thousand." -- one of many Molly Ivins' apocryphal yet likely-true stories
The corruption of Far Right, holier-than-thou, hypocritical, two-faced conservatives is easy to spot when the rot is sitting atop the entire federal judiciary.
Ever since then, Thomas has worked under a cloud of unethical behavior that kept getting swept under the rug because those in charge - the Chief Justice is responsible for overseeing investigations into SCOTUS misconduct - would rather keep the conservative majority unified and in control of the Judiciary.
In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.
If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said...
The law in question appears to be the Ethics In Government Act, passed in 1978 as part of the post-Watergate reforms. Thomas apparently refused to file the paperwork that thousands of federal employees - from the President on down to the janitors at the Smithsonian - file every time they receive ANY kind of gift from persons who have or even might do business with the U.S. government.
Thomas refused to apply the laws to himself, exposing his judicial authority as hypocrisy, himself as a fraud. His claims to not understanding the law, or that he went by other people's bad advice, violates the common legal concept that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."
In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.
The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.
The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.
A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica...
This wasn't a misunderstanding or the gift of a friend, this was a business transaction and a clear violation of ethics.
It ought to be treated as violation of federal law.
Given the broken nature of Congress, and the historical failures of impeachment where partisan loyalty overrode the best interests of the nation, we should not expect any action out of them other than public posturing. The House Republicans will never turn on one of their justices responsible for the extremist rightward bent of the Supreme Court: The Senate Democrats may hold committees about Thomas' failures but can't get the two-thirds vote needed to remove him.
This is a matter that has to go to the Justice Department. Never mind the screams from the Far Right that this is "yet another witch hunt" against a Republican figure. Thomas is refusing to abide by the expected ethical norms of the office he holds, and he is flouting the legal system he is supposed to defend. If he's breaking a law, any law, he needs to be held accountable like any other citizen. No one, not a President nor a Senator nor a Justice should be above the law.
How can anyone accept a legal ruling from a Supreme Court Justice who will not hold himself accountable to the laws he applies to everyone else?
Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for adding me to Crooks & Liars'Mike's Blog Round-Up. Please take the time to look at the other articles on this site, and please support the pro-choice groups out there as the wingnut Republicans take away women's rights, especially here in Florida as the idiot governor sneaks in around midnight to sign a restrictive anti-abortion bill without media fanfare while Ft. Lauderdale floods, the bastard...
You want to see the real weaponization of the American justice system?
It's not from state district or federal attorneys going after donald trump for illegal misdeeds he's openly committed (and in the case of the stolen classified documents, something he still brags about).
One day after a jury convicted U.S. Army Sgt. Daniel Perry of murder for shooting and killing Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he wants Perry to receive a pardon.
Perry, 35, hasn't been sentenced yet, but the state pardons and parole board is already starting to review his case, at Abbott's request.
"I am working as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry," Abbott said over the weekend, via Twitter...
The governor didn't go into detail about why he believes Perry should be pardoned, but he cited Perry's attorney's explanation that Perry shot Foster in self-defense.
"Texas has one of the strongest 'Stand Your Ground' laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney," Abbott said...
The thing is, that jury weighed the evidence presented in court, and didn't believe Perry's claims of self-defense because eyewitnesses testified that Foster wasn't threatening Perry in that moment. It didn't help Perry that he bragged before going to the rally that he "might have to kill a few people." The jury did its job, and yet Abbott declared it 'nullification'.
One of the things I've heard and read about the legal system is how sacrosanct jury decisions are (just Google "juries are the bedrock" and see the results). The appellate system is loathe to overturn jury rulings unless there's proof the jury was tampered with or didn't receive the full facts of the case, and even then it's like moving mountains for the higher courts to do so.
The matter has barely been settled in a court of law, and already Abbott wants to overrule the whole trial. It's not the jury committing nullification (the refusal to accept the legal facts of the matter and rule in contravention to what the court instructed), it's the state governor.
Abbott is essentially guaranteeing a "Get Out of Jail Free" card for Perry, and signaling that he will offer the same deal to any other Far Right gunman eager to disrupt any protest or rally that offends their extremism.
Abbott isn't doing this because the trial was unfair, or because Perry is suffering any form of injustice (or requires some form of mercy due to medical emergency or personal loss). Abbott is doing this for partisan reasons, for pandering to the rabid Republican voting base convinced there's a shooting war between themselves and the dreaded Other (liberals, Blacks, immigrants, women, college students, and more). Abbott is doing this to "own the libs," and to make it clear that any protest - even peaceful ones guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution - can become a shooting gallery for MAGA wingnuts.
Abbott is doing this because Republicans don't believe in justice for all: Republicans want a skewed legal system that protects only them and punishes everyone else.
I went home with the waitress, the way I always do/ How was I to know, she was with the Russians, too?/
I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk/ Send lawyers guns and money, dad, get me out of this! - "Lawyers Guns and Money," Warren Zevon
So we'll just get straight to the facts.
Here's what the Manhattan District Attorney filed against donald trump in court this Tuesday April 4th. It ended up as 34 separate counts of Falsifying Business Records, bumped up to felony charges linked to "other crimes" which were implied to be related either to trump's tax records or to his 2016 Presidential campaign (that a straight-up Conspiracy charge wasn't added to the indictment threw a couple of observers off).
Alvin Bragg just explained the case. The argument is that in 2015 and 2016, Michael Cohen, David Pecker, Trump, and others agreed to conduct the catch-and-kill program to help Trump win. That violated three crimes, per Bragg:
New York State laws prohibiting the promotion of a candidate by false means
Federal campaign finance laws
Document falsification by American Media Inc (National Enquirer)
He alleges each invoice and check were an attempt to cover up those 2016 crimes...
There's been interest in how serious a matter this case will be for trump, considering the three other criminal investigations into his misdeeds. For some legal experts, this case is a minor thing and probably not even going to work. Ian Millhiser at Voxis worried the legal theory DA Bragg is using falls under 'dubious' at best:
The actual felony counts arise out of allegedly false entries that Trump made in various business records in order to make the payment to Daniels appear to be ordinary legal expenses paid to Cohen.
But Bragg built his case on an exceedingly uncertain legal theory. Even if Trump did the things he’s accused of, it’s not clear Bragg can legally charge Trump for them, at least under the felony version of New York’s false records law.
As Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office who played a significant role in the Trump investigation prior to his resignation in 2022, wrote in a recent book, a key legal question that will determine whether Trump can be charged under the felony version of New York’s false records law has never been resolved by any appellate court in the state of New York.
The felony statute requires Bragg to prove that Trump falsified records to cover up a crime. Bragg has evidence that Trump acted to cover up a federal crime, but it is not clear that Bragg is allowed to point to a federal crime in order to charge Trump under the New York state law...
And even if Bragg’s legal team convinces New York’s own courts that this prosecution may move forward, there is also a very real danger that the Supreme Court of the United States, with its GOP-appointed supermajority, could decide that it needs to weigh in on whether Trump should be shielded from this prosecution.
The Supreme Court has long held, under a doctrine known as the “rule of lenity,” that “fair warning should be given to the world, in language that the common world will understand, of what the law intends to do if a certain line is passed.” Thus, when the meaning of a criminal statute is unclear, the Constitution sometimes requires that statute to be read narrowly because an unclear criminal law did not give potential defendants “fair warning” that their conduct was illegal...
Bragg, in other words, has built one of the most controversial and high-profile criminal cases in American history upon the most uncertain of foundations. And that foundation could crumble into dust if the courts reject his legal arguments on a genuinely ambiguous question of law...
Bragg consistently framed the charges in his press conference as efforts to hold Trump accountable for lies to the public. The statement of facts alleges that Trump and his team set the hush-money payments in motion to better his chances in the 2016 election: “The Defendant did not want this information to become public because he was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy,” the district attorney writes of McDougal’s account of an affair. Trump schemed with Cohen to pay off Daniels after news broke in early October 2016 of the Access Hollywood tape, further endangering his campaign. As sketched by Bragg, this was a coordinated effort to deny American voters relevant information in advance of the election. According to the statement of facts, Trump initially suggested to Cohen “that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public.”
Trump did not just purchase silence ahead of the 2016 vote. He worked while he was in office to complete the cover-up. When The Wall Street Journal first began reporting about the payments to Daniels and McDougal in 2018, Trump lied repeatedly to the American public and claimed that he had no knowledge of the matter. Before that, as Bragg sets out and as Cohen admitted in his plea deal with the Southern District of New York, Trump repaid Cohen with a series of checks in 2017, after Trump had sworn the oath of office. According to Bragg, the two finalized the arrangements for repayment in a February 2017 meeting held in the Oval Office itself.
Even Jurecic admits Bragg needs to bring more facts to establish directly how the laws were broken. But she sees enough already to think Bragg has a solid criminal case to bring against trump. She also doesn't see any of this affecting the other - more damaging - criminal cases trump faces in Georgia and Washington DC. Even if Bragg misses his shot, Fulton County DA Fani Willis and Special Counsel Jack Smith won't.
So while the Manhattan indictments are nice, we still as a nation have a ways to go before we see justice done with all of trump's sins.
It’s tiring because of the awful shit I am going to have to listen to like “If they can do this to Trump they can do this to anyone!!!one!!!1ELEVEN” No fucking shit. They already do this to everyone else. Are you unaware of the carceral nature of the United States? Are you unaware that every prosecutor in the country chooses to threaten accused with horrible penalties from a jury trial to get them to plead to something lesser? Are you unaware that Michael fucking Cohen did jail time for this already? Are you this blissfully fucking ignorant that the reason we are JUST NOW indicting Trump is because his money and stature and position as President shielded him from earlier prosecution? Are you unaware he was the fucking unindicted co-conspirator in the Cohen case? Trump isn’t being targeted because he is Trump. He was PROTECTED until now because he was Trump. Fucking hell...
This all could have been avoided if enough Republican Party leaders - the elected Senators, Congressperons, Governors, esteemed elders, deep-pocket funders - admitted the trap that donald trump put them in back in 2016, when he threatened to run a third party vanity campaign that could have split Far Right voters and guaranteed a Hillary Clinton victory, and decided that Hillary was the devil they could deal with instead of trump.
This all could have been avoided if that Republican leadership admitted to themselves their Culture War bullshit that they've fed to their voter base - the racism, the sexism, the rage towards immigrants, the violence towards those they deemed Other - created a toxic situation where sensible, practical conservative leadership (yes, that can exist) was untenable, and washed themselves clean of that destructive dogma in order to deny trump his racist/sexist platform.
This all could have been avoided if the political parties - not just the Republicans but also the Democrats and Libertarians and Greens and other parties out there - set for themselves ethical standards for their Presidential candidates to swear to before allowing them to campaign. If they had a screening process where the candidate had to release all their tax returns to public review for the past 20 years, where the candidate had to sell all properties and businesses that would violate the Emoluments Clause before a single primary vote took place, where the candidate had to accept the legitimate results of any vote if they lost. Any single one of those requirements would have stopped trump before he could even start a fake fundraiser for himself.
This all could have been avoided if the Republicans gave up their fetish / worship of business leaders as potential Presidents. The idiotic belief that "Government can be run like a business," which is false as the objectives of a government - uphold laws and serve the public trust - goes against the objectives of a business - to sell products/services and build a profit. That false belief helped trump bluff his way onto the political stage even as a failed businessman.
This all could have been avoided if enough Americans said "Enough" and denied donald trump even the opportunity to scam and grift us. If enough of us set aside partisan bias - both conservative and liberal - and just recognize the lump of inhuman soulless flesh that trump really is.
In breaking news this weekend, various individuals have stepped up to announce their intentions to run as Presidential candidates for the Republican Party in the coming 2024 election cycle.
Across the United States, figures such as former investor Michael Milken, alleged Genovese crime family boss Liborio "Barney" Bellomo, and the desiccated corpse of Ponzi scheme financier Bernie Madoff appeared before reporters to confirm they were each filing paperwork with the Republican National Committee to have their names placed on the primary ballots in 2024.
Milken continued with a thumbs up gesture to his unpaid audience of volunteers and interns working for college credit. "If the Republican voting base are THIS happy to vote for an indicted con artist and tax cheat, well damn this is a crowd of suckers I can play to. Have at it, America!"
Meanwhile in New York, Bellomo appeared in front of the Bleecker Street Pizzeria with a group of supporters and various cast extras from the current hit show "Tulsa King" to announce his intentions to "better represent the ladies, gentlemen and working classes of New York City in ways this loser Trump guy never could."
"I mean, c'mon, look at this wannabe pretender to being a crime boss, he keeps relying on the worst mob lawyers and bagmen I've ever seen," Bellomo noted to the cheers of his audience. "If America wants a Mafioso running this nation, then why not call on the guys who actually know how? Trust me, people, I can run things, I know how to grease wheels, keep things running, I don't discriminate, hell I work with Russian and Chinese and Mexican gangs all the time, and I get things done. You don't see things blowing up on my watch, well except for that little thing in Philly, but if you ask me about that I'll deny it, I got an alibi I swear."
"My guys are getting the signatures we need as I speak," Bellomo concluded, with thumbs up towards the crowd. "We're getting on the ballots, and then we'll see who America respects more, a real Mob boss or one who tries to play one on Fox News! Let's go!"
"Brrraaaaiiinnsss. Brains. More brains... I... more... Cough, excuse me, I just woke up, I'll need some braaaaaiiiinnnnnss to get going. Still and all, I got more brrrrrraaaaaaaiiiinnnssss than Donald Trump. I got more bbbbbbbbbraaaaaaaainsssssssss than Trump's entire legal team. I need the brrrraaaaiiinnnsss of every Republican voter to feed me, and if they're stupid enough to vote for a convicted criminal, they might as well offer up their brrrrrraaaaiiiiinnnnsssss to the guy who did it longer and bigger and richer than that loser."
Madoff attempted to do a thumbs up pose for the cameras only to have his thumb pop off. "So if America wants a crook, better vote for the best crook of them all! And offer me your brrrraaaiiiiinnnssss!" He then proceeded to chase after the reporters at the event, feeling their craniums for brain size and then rejecting them in disgust.
...
Seriously, this isn't as lame-brained an April Fools as you might think. If crooked donald trump is still getting a majority of Republican voters to worship him, then this is the quality of candidates we should expect out of Republicans for the foreseeable future.
The indictment, confirmed Thursday by Joe Tacopina, a lawyer for Trump, and other people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss sealed criminal charges, is an extraordinary development after years of investigations into his business, political and personal dealings. It is likely to galvanize critics who say Trump lied and cheated his way to the top and embolden supporters who feel the Republican is being unfairly targeted by a Democratic prosecutor...
The indictment(s) is/are sealed for now, meaning we don't know the specifics, but we should find out soon, probably when trump is required to appear in court.
Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing and has repeatedly attacked the investigation as politically motivated, was expected to surrender to authorities next week, though the details were still being worked out, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss a matter that remained under seal...
The fate of the hush-money investigation seemed uncertain until word got out in early March that Bragg had invited Trump to testify before a grand jury, a signal that prosecutors were close to bringing charges.
Trump’s attorneys declined the invitation, but a lawyer closely allied with the former president briefly testified in an effort to undercut the credibility of Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.
Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to keep her silent about what she says was a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier after they met at a celebrity golf tournament.
Cohen was then reimbursed by Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, which also rewarded the lawyer with bonuses and extra payments logged internally as legal expenses. Over several months, Cohen said, the company paid him $420,000.
Earlier in 2016, Cohen had also arranged for the publisher of the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer to pay Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 to squelch her story of a Trump affair in a journalistically dubious practice known as “catch-and-kill.”
The payments to the women were intended to buy secrecy, but they backfired almost immediately as details of the arrangements leaked to the news media.
Federal prosecutors in New York ultimately charged Cohen in 2018 with violating federal campaign finance laws, arguing that the payments amounted to impermissible help to Trump’s presidential campaign. Cohen pleaded guilty to those charges and unrelated tax evasion counts and served time in federal prison.
Trump was implicated in court filings as having knowledge of the arrangements, but U.S. prosecutors at the time balked at bringing charges against him. The Justice Department has a longtime policy that it is likely unconstitutional to prosecute a sitting president in federal court...
The state legal system doesn't have to abide by that DOJ policy, but the implications of a sitting President under those circumstances obviously delayed matters until trump was out of the White House.
But this has never even happened for former Presidents before. For all the potential criminal misdeeds that Presidents could commit before, during, and/or after office, none of them have reached this accountability moment before. Nixon almost did until Ford pardoned him. Bill Clinton could have faced indictment but he made a plea agreement to suspend his law license for five years and pay fines.
It's official: donald trump is indicted. He is facing at least one felony criminal charge.
To everyone who complained about DA Alvin Bragg dragging his heels, please apologize.
Let the celebrations - and the worries about wingnut violence - begin!
(starts playing the one dance song from his teen years that still gets his feet moving)
"And now on with the opera. Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons and necking in the parlor!" - Groucho Marx, A Night At the Opera
Even with all this, those legal experts are also hinting that Bragg doesn't even have that strong a case. They're worried that juries tend to be lenient on matters where the defendant is covering up sexual affairs, that some of the witnesses against trump are tainted, and that Bragg waited too long to pursue this case risking trump's lawyers having a good chance to throw out part or all of the charges due to statutory limits. Those experts may not understand that 1) unlike previous adulterers who turn regretful on the stand, trump remains arrogant and defensive, and 2) Bragg and his team apparently uncovered a lot of financial corruption during their previous trial against trump's corporation to where a jury could convict on that instead of the affairs.
trump is still facing a serious criminal matter in Manhattan: That the experts believe this is the weakest case should tell everybody how fcked trump is going to be when the Fulton County GA indictments into election fraud (which has the slam-dunk evidence of trump himself on audio) - as well as the federal Special Counsel indictments into BOTH trump's theft of classified docs AND his involvement in the January 6th Insurrection - drop on him.
And for all the storm and fury trump is unleashing over these indictments, it may not even be the worst of it. trump's never faced a criminal court case (only civil cases), and trump's not prepared to deal with the likelihood the judge is going to set harsh restrictions on himself to keep him from raging against all this in public. Given the obvious attention this trial faces - this is international news, a former President facing historic justice - the judge could well insist on gag orders to prevent any pre-trial conflicts and risks to the defendant's (trump) right to a fair trial. Even to where the judge could put that gag order on the defendant himself, whose social media rants could well enflame people interfering with his own right to an honest jury of his peers.
trump's already issued threats to the DA's office and to Bragg directly, and Bragg is already receiving death threats by the boxload. Given this, the judge setting bail could arguably detain trump to stop or reduce trump's danger to the prosecution (and any jury being formed): If not in prison without bail, at least home arrest to where trump can't leave the city without permission from the courts. THAT would unleash a political firestorm our nation's never seen before. The odds of trump refusing to abide by any bail agreement are pretty fucking high.
Everything's not going to calm down. This weekend will be just another escalation of the wingnut madness we've been suffering since 2015, and next Tuesday is going to escalate even more. Gods help us.
