Between The Rock and The Dumb Place

With all of the unsettling things donald trump is doing to our international trade, our global standing, our farmers, and our tourism industry, it's the deeply insane shit he's posting on social media that distracts just a bit. But there may be something darker in trump's latest brain-fart to re-open the infamous Alcatraz prison as a holding place for the worst criminals the most defiant opponents (via Bill Chappell at NPR):

President Trump says he is ordering federal agencies to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz — the notorious maximum security prison that closed more than 60 years ago.

"I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America's most ruthless and violent Offenders," Trump said in a post on Truth Social...

Trump's message suggests he wants to restore Alcatraz to its original dual purpose. The twin goals for building the original prison, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, were "to deal with the most incorrigible inmates in Federal prisons, and to show the law-abiding public that the Federal Government was serious" about stopping rampant crime in the 1920s and 1930s..."

Trump did not provide details about a timeline for reopening the prison. And the National Park Service did not reply to NPR's request for comment about the president's new plan for Alcatraz before this story published.

But enacting Trump's proposal would come with a steep price tag, both for constructing and operating a new prison facility on an island whose most plentiful natural resource is sandstone.

Alcatraz was shuttered "because the institution was too expensive to continue operating," according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It said operating the island prison was nearly three times more expensive than any other federal prison at the time.

"This isolation meant that everything (food, supplies, water, fuel...) had to be brought to Alcatraz by boat," the bureau says. "For example, the island had no source of fresh water, so nearly one million gallons of water had to be barged to the island each week."

I remembered my travel to San Francisco for a librarian convention in June 2001 (right before 9/11, before air travel required 108 checkpoints and hoops to jump through) and saved the photos here and there on my computers. I made a visit out to the place in-between convention meetings and such.

Welcome to The Rock! - Sean Connery

I'm a librarian. OF COURSE I TOOK A PICTURE OF
ALCATRAZ'S LIBRARY!

I was 31 at the time. I had more hair back then.

(I'm not including the photos of my foray to Colma to pay my respects to Emperor Norton. Then again, Norton would be a far wiser and saner leader for America at this point)

I remember what the tour guide said about Alcatraz as a prison: The costs of shipping everything across the bay made it impractical, they couldn't install pipelines for water or fuel, and they had no way to add facilities like desalination plants. It also didn't help that by sitting in the middle of a saltwater bay, they dealt with serious corrosion of the steel and concrete that made it harder to maintain as a prison (this is what Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers took advantage of). I saw someone post on Bluesky how back in 1963 it cost the government three times what a normal prison cost, and held fewer prisoners. We're making more money out of Alcatraz as a tourist attraction than as a prison.

So why is trump suddenly fixated on converting an abandoned prison that would cost wasteful hundreds of millions of dollars to restore? (Other than trump being a brain-dead idiot that is)

We need to look closely at trump's Truth Social rant (well, to read someone else's screenshot, let's not login to that place shall we). Here's a screenshot from Bluesky via John Brooks  :

Yes, I agree, 8 years of you is indeed far too long

[image or embed]

— John Brooks (@johnbrooks.bsky.social) May 4, 2025 at 8:42 PM

Beneath the opening rants of using the prison to house "the dregs of society," and threatening to throw "violent offenders" into Alcatraz, trump is including "judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came to our country illegally." One of these things is not like the others... 

Don't forgot, right now trump is locked into a legal fight with federal judges who are refusing to bend to trump's agenda to ship without due process a number of criminal migrants but also too many honest legal migrants that trump's ICE thugs are rounding up under false pretenses and unproven allegations. We're close to the point where these judges are going to hold trump's DOJ lawyers in full contempt of their courts, and we're already in a constitutional crisis over trump's refusal to respect the Writ of Habeas Corpus and the Rule of Law.

Obviously frustrated with these legal barriers to his ambition to rule without restraint, trump is breaking out the bullying threats by telling everyone he's willing to jail these judges if they keep protecting the rights of those trump and his wingnut ilk condemned (without proof) as "criminals". But why threaten to send these judges to places like Leavenworth or Florence Supermax - places most Americans might not recognize - when he can threaten them with Alcatraz, one of the most infamous prisons in modern history (it defines a whole Trope, after all)? Everyone knows Alcatraz, even if they've never been to San Francisco to see it in person (and you can see it - once the bay fog lifts - pretty clearly along the bay shore).

All trump thinks they need to do is splash the prison with a new coat of paint, install some modern cots, put his name in large gold letters outside the main gate, and viola! Instant place of intimidation to his foes and allies alike.

And like all things trump thinks about, he honestly didn't think this through. The judges are going to ignore his threats because they're more concerned about upholding the Rule of Law (without that, judges lose all power and they know it). trump's already threatening migrants - especially the legal residents and their children - so yet another prison threat is no different than threatening them with shipping to El Salvador. And arguing to open such an expensive location for what is clearly an ego-driven fantasy undercuts every claim trump makes that he's "cutting costs" and saving us money.

We could laugh away trump's obsession with re-opening such a relic, but don't laugh away the underlying threat to it all. trump wants to break the judges against him, he wants to destroy every aspect of the Rule of Law.

In this, we need to stand firm. Like a Rock.

(yes, simile intended)

Where Would You Hide, America, When All the Laws Are Laid Flat

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's!
-- from A Man For All Seasons, written by Robert Bolt

trump's thugs are arresting judges now (via Alanna Durkin Richer, Devi Shastri, and Scott Bauer at AP News): 

Protesters chanted and marched Saturday outside the FBI after agents arrested a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities. The case has escalated a clash between the Trump administration and local authorities over the Republican president’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is accused of escorting the man and his lawyer out of her courtroom through the jury door last week after learning that immigration authorities were seeking his arrest. The man was taken into custody outside the courthouse after agents chased him on foot.

President Donald Trump’s administration has accused state and local officials of interfering with his immigration enforcement priorities. The arrest also comes amid a growing battle between the administration and the federal judiciary over the president’s executive actions over deportations and other matters...

Court papers suggest Dugan was alerted to the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the courthouse by her clerk, who was informed by an attorney that they appeared to be in the hallway.

The FBI affidavit describes Dugan as “visibly angry” over the arrival of immigration agents in the courthouse and says that she pronounced the situation “absurd” before leaving the bench and retreating to her chambers. It says she and another judge later approached members of the arrest team inside the courthouse, displaying what witnesses described as a “confrontational, angry demeanor.”

After a back-and-forth with officers over the warrant for the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, she demanded that the arrest team speak with the chief judge and led them away from the courtroom, the affidavit says.

After directing the arrest team to the chief judge’s office, investigators say, Dugan returned to the courtroom and was heard saying words to the effect of “wait, come with me” before ushering Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer through a jury door into a non-public area of the courthouse. The action was unusual, the affidavit says, because “only deputies, juries, court staff, and in-custody defendants being escorted by deputies used the back jury door. Defense attorneys and defendants who were not in custody never used the jury door.”

A sign that remained posted on Dugan’s courtroom door Friday advised that if any attorney or other court official “knows or believes that a person feels unsafe coming to the courthouse to courtroom 615,” they should notify the clerk and request an appearance via Zoom.

I may not be a lawyer or an expert on law, but from what I do know - my exposure as a journalism student and research librarian - is that judges don't like law enforcement entering their courtrooms threatening to arrest people there. There is an expectation - sort of like treating the spaces as holy ground - that people required to appear before their benches be protected if only in that moment from further police harassment of any kind.

It's become a popular trap for ICE agents, appearing at courthouses to "arrest" the migrants going through the established process to be in the U.S., who are required by the laws to show up regularly for hearings tracking their approval. trump's thugs want to scare these perfectly normal people - some who have broken no laws - into staying away from the courthouses - which is why judges want courts to be safe places - so that the agents can officially claim them breaking the rules and justify arresting them in the first place. It's a sadistic Catch-22 that shouldn't even be happening. 

Marcy Wheeler has her thoughts on the matter:

After Judge Dugan interacted with the arresting officers and, upon learning that they only had an administrative warrant and after telling them they needed a judicial warrant, she directed them to go meet with the Chief Judge (who wasn’t at the courthouse, but who spoke with the ICE officer on the phone). Then, Judge Dugan apparently adjourned Flores-Ruiz’ scheduled hearing and directed him and his attorney to leave via the jury door...

Flores-Ruiz appears to have gone, via back hallways, to the same sixth floor public hallway via which he had entered the court room. According the complaint, both DEA officers saw Flores-Ruiz in the public hallway before he entered the elevator...

Rather than arresting Flores-Ruiz, whom the officers knew was unarmed, there on the sixth floor, one of them rode down the elevator with him and his attorney and the other alerted the other officers. Four of them convened outside of the courthouse and chased him down the street and arrested him, just 22 minutes after he entered Judge Dugan’s courtroom at 8:43.

If the ICE agents were still able to track and arrest Flores-Ruiz, how the hell does that justify obstruction charges? And Dugan pointed out the agents had an administrative warrant, which doesn't really establish the authority to arrest somebody.

In a criminal complaint, the government charged Judge Dugan with 18 USC 1505, obstruction of a proceeding, and 18 USC 1071, concealing a person from arrest. [docket] The FBI arrested Judge Dugan at the courthouse on Friday amid a deliberate media frenzy, up to and including the FBI Director posting a picture of Judge Dugan’s arrest in violation of DOJ guidelines designed to prevent prejudice...

Both Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller also made comments that arguably violate rules prohibiting comments that prejudice a proceeding (remember that Judge Dale Ho already found that Pam Bondi’s public comments about the Eric Adams case likely violated local rules)...

For obstruction, it will be contested whether an immigration removal counts as an investigative proceeding. For concealment, it will be contested whether the administrative warrant qualifies, and whether directing Flores-Ruiz via a back hallway to the very same public hallway where the officers had planned to arrest him and had a chance to arrest him amounts to concealment.

Both charges will pivot on Judge Dugan’s intent: whether she had corrupt intent and the intent of helping him evade arrest entirely, or whether she wanted to protect the sanctity of her own courtroom.

Key to her intent is her belief, which she made clear to the officers, that they needed a judicial warrant...

It may also matter that, by description, she didn’t actually look at the administrative warrant, because it might matter if she knew whether Flores-Ruiz had been deported before. In a report published before the arrest, Dugan is quoted as stating that “a warrant was not presented in the hallway on the 6th floor,” and by description, she was not shown one.

Thus far, the complaint seems to want to suggest that Dugan had corrupt intent because she was angry...

But judges get angry for lots of reasons, including that someone showed up outside her courtroom to surprise someone with business in it.

Wheeler's key point:

The arrest has rightly been viewed as an attempt, at a time when Trump and his minions are already making wildly inappropriate attacks on judges, to bully the judiciary.

trump and his lackeys have been getting a lot of pushback from the federal judges over their violations of due process and established norms. So here's the bullies, finding excuses to arrest judges and put the fear of their executive abuses onto the entire third branch of our Constitutional government.

trump despises the legal system, mocks it with every criminal and civil violation all because he'd abused that system for decades, and he now has a Supreme Court in his pocket that will excuse away every sin he's committing now.

Our most basic rights established by the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, are all under attack. trump and his racist anti-immigrant allies may be attacking only the "dread Others" for now, but they are doing so by shredding due process, the writ of Habeas Corpus, every protection of the Rule of Law set up over centuries of British and American legal rulings that serve ALL AMERICANS to this day.

The second those "Others" - who are human, they are us in spite of the fears that the racists spread - lose legal protections under the Rule of Law, we - the rest of the nation - can and will lose those protections as well.

These judges are fighting to uphold the Rule of Law, defending the centuries of precedence and norms and case history.

And trump will throw every one of those judges into jail.

First they came for...

Update: looks like a late-day sharing at Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up from Steve in Manhattan. Thank you, Steve! 

With All of the Defenses of Any Other Criminal Defendant: AKA Trump Is Toast

After a month of waiting, the U.S. Court of Appeals hearing donald trump's claim of "absolute immunity" reached a verdict and dropped it this morning... right on top of trump's head like a 16-ton weight. Via Carrie Johnson at NPR:

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ruled that Donald Trump does not enjoy broad immunity from federal prosecution, a major legal setback for the former president, who said he will appeal.

They wrote that for the purposes of this criminal case, "former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant."

The ruling comes a month after lawyers for Trump made sweeping claims that he enjoyed immunity from federal prosecution, claims that lawyers for the special counsel said would "undermine democracy" and give presidents license to commit crimes while in the White House, such as accepting bribes for directing government contracts or selling nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary.

It would be "a striking paradox," the judges wrote, if the president, who alone has the constitutional duty to ensure that laws be faithfully executed, "were the sole officer capable of defying those laws with impunity."

Excuse me for a moment. (Runs around the room squeeing like it's another Fitzmas morning) Okay.

"We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter," the judges wrote. Doing so, they said, "would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three branches..."

As part of their ruling, the judges granted trump's team to file appeal up to the Supreme Court, but gave him a strict deadline of NEXT MONDAY, implying that they want this legal matter resolved quickly. Experts are pointing to the quick turnaround if SCOTUS hears the appeal that the highest court in the land would have to issue a ruling this summer at the latest, hopefully with trump facing his DC trial involving his efforts to undermine the 2020 election results well before 2024 Election Day.

If you want to read the ruling, the link to it is here.

Referring to Marcy Wheeler over at her Emptywheel blog, this is some of her takeaway from this ruling:

Let’s start with the last one, what I called posture. Judge Henderson had originally not favored an expedited review. This order forces Trump into an expedited appeals process.

The Clerk is directed to withhold issuance of the mandate through February 12, 2024. If, within that period, Appellant notifies the Clerk in writing that he has filed an application with the Supreme Court for a stay of the mandate pending the filing of a petition for a writ of certiorari, the Clerk is directed to withhold issuance of the mandate pending the Supreme Court’s final disposition of the application. The filing of a petition for rehearing or rehearing en banc will not result in any withholding of the mandate, although the grant of rehearing or rehearing en banc would result in a recall of the mandate if the mandate has already issued.

The only way he can stop Judge Chutkan from issuing opinions on the remaining motions to dismiss filed last fall is if he immediately appeals to SCOTUS for a stay pending appeal, which he has already said he’d done. The only way he can get that stay is if five Justices say they think Trump will succeed on the merits and vote to grant the stay.

Steve Vladeck says that SCOTUS has a lot of options, but the two most likely are to deny the stay or to grant an appeal in this term, committing to an opinion by June...

Finally, I noted that Judge Henderson seemed to have concerns about the scope of their decision — what she described “floodgates” of follow-on charges. She at least considered the wisdom of limiting this opinion to a former President’s unofficial acts — in this case, defined as those of an office-seeker under Blassingame.

Rather than going Blassingame, though, the panel’s top line holding went Big.

The operative language in this opinion rejects the notion of Presidential immunity categorically as a violation of separation of powers.

At bottom, former President Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three Branches. Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that, as to the President, the Congress could not legislate, the Executive could not prosecute and the Judiciary could not review. We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter. Careful evaluation of these concerns leads us to conclude that there is no functional justification for immunizing former Presidents from federal prosecution in general or for immunizing former President Trump from the specific charges in the Indictment. In so holding, we act, “not in derogation of the separation of powers, but to maintain their proper balance.” See Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. at 754...

Without any specific exemptions to relate, Wheeler is pointing out the appellate judges are leaving little wiggle room for the Supreme Court justices to give trump an escape route:

But they say if they did have to review whether the indictment charged Trump for official acts, the fact that so many of the alleged acts in the indictment pertain to Trump’s role as an office-seeker, and because Presidents have no role in election certifications, the indictment would survive that more particular review anyway.

This is the kind of out that Justice Kavanaugh took on a related issue, whether the interests of Congress in reviewing an attack on the election certification preempted any Executive Privilege claims.

That is, both the District and Circuit have already said that, if they were asked to consider whether this indictment withstands an immunity claim, it substantially would.

I have no idea what SCOTUS will do. But by producing a unanimous opinion with little surface area for Justices to grab hold, Judges Henderson, Pan, and Childs may have ended up producing the most expeditious result...

For myself, this is the key paragraph in the ruling (pg. 3) that underscores just how deep in trouble trump is:

Since then, hundreds of people who breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have been prosecuted and imprisoned. And on August 1, 2023, in Washington, D.C., former President Trump was charged in a four-count Indictment as a result of his actions challenging the election results and interfering with the sequence set forth in the Constitution for the transfer of power from one President to the next. Former President Trump moved to dismiss the Indictment and the district court denied his motion. Today, we affirm the denial. For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.

You can spot where the three judges are spelling out trump's culpability in the January 6th riots, by highlighting how the hundreds who rioted on his behalf have already faced justice themselves, and that trump is now due to face justice as well.

Best possible situation now is that the Supreme Court - lacking any legal loophole they can bring up in trump's defense - denies the appeal and lets the lower court ruling stand. They are well within their power to do so. They could still pick up this hot potato if they wanted to have the Highest Court In the Land put their imprint on the legal matter, but they would risk undermining the entire Constitution - destroying the checks and balances between the three branches - as the appellate court points out. And no matter what, they can't delay their ruling to save trump, as they're bound by the rules to get their decisions finalized by summer. Either they let trump run free - and destroy the rule of law altogether - or they let him face trial before the November elections.

Let justice be done. Let SCOTUS stand with the lower court ruling. Let trump face his day in federal court as soon as possible.

Preferably with a jury ruling on July 3rd so we can celebrate the next day with additional fervor.

The Far Right War Against the Rule of Law Reaches Israel

I've only recently noticed in the past month that Bibi "Bribe Guy" Netanyahu had returned to political power as Prime Minister of Israel, during the end of 2022 when I was distracted by the holidays.

And my first thought finding out he was back was "What the hell? I thought they kicked you out of the damn house!" 

My second thought was "What the hell? Isn't he STILL on trial over bribery charges???"

Anyway, the reason why I even noticed Netanyahu was back in power was because Israel is currently racked by massive protests over Netanyahu's plans to gut Israel's legal system to ensure his authoritarian rule never ends. Via Jonathan Guyer at Vox:

Hundreds of thousands of Israeli protesters have been demonstrating against the extreme-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since January. The protests have become some of the biggest in Israeli history and are drawing out the country’s most famous faces.

On Thursday, protesters plan to disrupt Netanyahu’s travel to Rome in a sign of defiance of his ultranationalist, illiberal government. They’re calling it a “day of resistance to the dictatorship.” This builds on two months of mass mobilization across Israel that have been squarely focused on the Netanyahu government’s set of judiciary overhauls, which would weaken the independence of the country’s high court and create the conditions for unchecked majoritarian rule.

The backlash to these proposals has reached even staunchly establishment groups in Israel: A group of fighter pilots are on strike, tech workers staged a work stoppage, and former prime ministers have joined the protests...

Netanyahu was elected to a sixth premiership this November, but this time with the most extreme, nationalistic, and exclusionary government in Israeli history.

From the get-go, the Israeli government has sought to make significant changes to the high court that would hollow out its independence and its power to serve as a check on the Israeli parliament, or the Knesset. The several bills put forward would restrict the court’s ability to overturn laws it sees as unconstitutional and allow a simple majority in the Knesset to reject its decisions. It would also give government lawmakers and appointees effective power over the committee of nine individuals that appoints judges, and rescind key authorities from the attorney general. These and other changes would weaken the independent judiciary’s power in a parliamentary system that otherwise lacks checks.

This is all complicated by the fact that Israel doesn’t have a constitution, but a set of regulations passed as the Basic Law. The proposal’s backers, like a group of Israeli academics who recently published an open letter in support, say the court has grown too powerful. But, according to a recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, “66 percent of Israelis think the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down a law if it is incompatible with the Basic Laws...”

I'd also question Netanyahu's motivations for backing these efforts against a legal system that's poised to hit him with felony convictions that could dash his efforts to stay in power for life. But then, this is what dictators do: Break the Law so that the Law only benefits themselves.

This is all part of a disturbing trend the past 10-20 years where even the most stable and respectable democratic nations - some of them having gone through decades of Cold War tensions to establish genuine rule of law - suffering the indignity of organized, deep-funded Far Right conservative movements taking control of their governments - through legal elections no less - and then for their own benefit gutting the legal systems they abused to gain power in the first place.

It's only when these Far Right politicians take a sledgehammer to the courts - where every nation's system of justice plays out - do the voters realize they've given power to dangerous demagogues. The protests will be massive, the majority of the citizens will be outraged... but the bastards now in power will hear none of it and happily wreck their nation's foundations all so they can hold onto that power a little while longer (before their own corruption collapses on them like a ruined house).

We're suffering it here in the United States as well, where extreme gerrymandering and a power structure that skews towards small-populated states has us in the grip of a Minority Party (hint: Republican) rule, even with Democrats (currently) in control of the Presidency and half of Congress. Israel may lean Conservative/Right in terms of politics, but even they have extremist factions - all of them now in power as Netanyahu can't form coalitions with anyone else - that do not honestly speak for the interests of the Israeli people.

The effects of the Far Right Israeli efforts to weaken their legal system is coming with a wave of violence and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian population that makes up a significant portion of Israel's voting base, and yet are getting driven out of their communities in Gaza and the West Bank with annexation efforts that threaten global efforts to resolve centuries of Jewish/Palestinian conflicts over the land they both claim as home. We're looking at the reality that yet other uprising by disenfranchised Palestinians re-sparking the horrors of Middle East violence will flow across the entire region and drag the United States (and other allies) into that mess all over again.

All because a goddamned crook kept getting elected back into the Prime Minister's office.

What the hell, Israeli voters. You let Bibi back into that house. What the actual hell.

Unfairness

Update: I'm a little late to this, my home Internet is buggy, but thank you M. Bouffant at Crooks & Liars for including this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up!

I've got a little too much rage in me to discuss the judge's ruling granting trump his delay-tactic Special Master bullshit, so I'll quote extensively from Emptywheel who goes into better legal detail than I can:

As noted yesterday, Judge Aileen Cannon enjoined the government from conducting a criminal investigation into violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction because around 4.5% — possibly as little as .5% — of the materials seized from Trump in 27 boxes amount to things more personal than MAGA hats and press clippings.

Her logic rests on a series of false claims about what amounts to being owned...

Cannon starts her decision on whether to appoint a Special Master not on the privilege questions, but on Richey, which is how one decides whether someone should get their property back. In her analysis of the second prong of Richey, she decides (virtually all of this entails Cannon doing things Trump’s attorneys did not do) that Trump does have a property interest in this material. She points to medical and tax records the likes of which she believes people should be able to steal from Ashely Biden with impunity and says those — a tiny fraction of the whole — gives Trump standing under Richey...

This is why I laid out how small a percentage of the seized records this involves. On August 8, the government seized 11,282 stolen government records, of which 103 are marked as classified, 1,673 press clippings, and around 64 “sets of material” that might be privileged. 

Those 64 sets of material have not been shared with the investigative team. They’ve been segregated by the privilege team. Cannon doesn’t even claim Trump owns them. He may not! They may be White House Counsel documents about the Mazars challenge or White House physician documents about Trump’s COVID treatment. We don’t know whether they do or not because they are being protected, for Trump’s sake.

But the claim that this personal information equates to a property interest is one of three things that Cannon cites to substantiate her claim that something among this vast swath of stolen documents is owned by Donald Trump...

That would be crazy enough. But to ensure she’d even get to this ruling, Cannon already refused to let DOJ share all this, the 520 pages of potentially privileged material and the tax and medical records therein. The filter team lawyers, Benjamin Hawk, asked to do so last Thursday. But Cannon told him no, because she wanted to do all this “holistically”...

So the only reason DOJ still has exclusive possession of the materials on which she hangs her Richey analysis is because she, Aileen Cannon, prohibited DOJ from sharing it, and she uses DOJ’s possession of it to prevent the government from investigating the thousands of government documents Trump stole.

As for the rest, she makes stuff up. As noted, she claims that in the government’s response they admitted that, “The Government also has acknowledged that it seized some “[p]ersonal effects without evidentiary value.” She returns to this citation several times to claim that the government has acknowledged it seized stuff it should not have. Tell me if you can find that acknowledgment in the passage she cites...

Go ahead and visit her website and leave a comment if you can find that acknowledgement. I've looked and I'm not seeing it.

Look at what she did!!! First, she took a subjunctive statement — that if the FBI were to find personal items without evidentiary value (like his passports, which they already returned, of which she makes no mention, because it would prove the government is right) — and outright lied and claimed it was a concession they had found such things. The reason she doesn’t mention the passports, by the way, is because the government said, “The location of the passports is relevant evidence in an investigation of unauthorized retention and mishandling of national defense information.” So even there, they asserted an investigative interest. But in a passage where the government states, outright, that the Plaintiff has not established the government has seized anything not covered by the warrant, Aileen Cannon simply invents a concession that says they took stuff that is unnecessary to the investigation. Makes it up!

And yet she uses it as part of her “proof” that there are personal belongings among the 11,000 stolen documents. And she invented it out of thin air...

To a legal expert like Emptywheel, this is a nightmare of invented interpretations of law. To a layman like myself, this is yet again a legal system bending over backwards to give undue and arguably illegal protections to a rich white man screaming about "fairness."

It's been noted before how trump's world-view is defined by "fairness." But not fairness as we'd define it as equal between others: trump operates on his belief that he should be accorded special - not equal treatment - when it came to running for the Presidency back in 2016. It's the same way he demanded being treated "fairly" by all the judges he had to approach to deal with his bankruptcy and fraud cases. He would scream "I'm not being treated fair!" and the media would take his complaints at face value than as the whining 5-year-old con artist trying to bluff his way out of a legal jam.

It has led to the ongoing nightmare of failure by our legal system to ever hold trump truly accountable for the sins he's committed for over 40 years. What's "unfair" for him has been the way our courts and cops have handled criminal subjects all along, but he gets the advantages of wealth - hiring lawyers and press agents to argue his case in both the courtroom and the public forum - and cultural privilege granted to rich white men, over and over again. Our state DAs and federal prosecutors should have gone after trump for long-whispered reports of fraud and money laundering as early as the 1990s.

It does not help that due to trump's 4-year-reign of error in the White House he gained the ability to pack the federal courts with judges like Cannon who either share the Far Right conservative mindset of "screwing the libs" or else owe trump the debt of giving him favorable "fair" treatment they would not give any other petitioner before their bench. By any ethical measure, Cannon should have recused herself from this matter, especially as trump was insisting on legal defenses that had no previous case history to stand on and was clearly looking for a friendly judge who owed him this.

And so now we stand as a nation on the edge of a legal criminal matter - one involving loss of classified documents on a scale of espionage we haven't seen since Ames, Hanssen, or the Rosenbergs! - coping with the real-world unfairness of a legal system that has rolled over far too many times for a known con-artist vulgarian in trump.

Gods help us.

Brief Observation of Watching trump's Lawyers Get Shamed (If They Ever COULD Be Shamed) in a Court Of Law

So there was some fun to be had on Monday when the lawyers that had been running around post-elections in late 2020 had to appear before a judge to answer for their shenanigans (via Adam Klasfeld at Law&Crime): 

In the first federal court reckoning since the failure of the so-called “Kraken” litigation, a judge on Monday told pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and their co-counsel that she was concerned that their legal team allowed dodgy affidavits to be filed.

“The court is concerned that these affidavits were submitted in bad faith,” U.S. District Judge Linda Parker said in a blockbuster remark...

More than half a year ago on Dec. 7, Judge Parker decisively rejected Powell and Wood’s effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan in a scathing, 36-page ruling.

“Plaintiffs ask this court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters,” Parker wrote. “This, the Court cannot, and will not, do.”

“The People have spoken,” she added.

Named after a mythical octopus-like creature, the “Kraken” is the name that Powell gave to her quadruple-armed effort to overturn election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Each bid failed, and every appeal was rejected. Parker convened the hearing on Monday to consider whether every lawyer who participated in legal offensive in her court should face sanctions, up to their referrals for disbarment proceedings...

You kind of need to read all of Klasfeld's article: In the details are various acts of fraud, questionable witnesses (like this "Spyder" who claimed to be Army Intelligence but turned out to be an Army mechanic), and various efforts by Lin Wood to distance himself from any legal liability of the shenanigans he signed up for.

via GIPHY

Which all kind of led up to this quote:

...Systematically questioning what, if any, vetting the “Kraken” legal team performed on a stack of affidavits, Judge Parker tore apart the allegations inside one of those declaration.

“This is really fantastical,” Parker said.

“How could any of you as officers of the court submit this affidavit?” she added...

My observation here is: Why the hell isn't Judge Parker whipping out Ye Olde Hammer of Contempt of Court to toss each of trump's inept and inaccurate lawyers straight into jail cells? Under any measurement of Common Sense, Wood and Powell and the others committed serious unethical acts and perpetuated an ongoing fraud on both the nation and the electoral process. Those lawyers made themselves look like fools - without evidence of fraud, without any legal history to back up their claims - and mocked each courtroom doing so.

I understand what Parker is doing now is reviewing the matter for sanctions, which seem to imply fines and disbarment charges when she makes her ruling. However, she should be able to issue Contempt charges under her own power as Judge, as a means of maintaining control of her courtroom.

Either there's a concern that going this route turns trump and his lawyers into martyrs, or that there's possibly a standard of judicial ethics restraining Parker (or any other judge that has do deal with trump's decades-long attack on the legal system) from going there. 

But from where I'm sitting, EVERYTHING that trump and his legal lackeys have done have been open and blatant acts of contempt towards everything the rule of law should stand for.

Contempt of Court is the FIRST thing those bastards should be held accountable for.

The Nasty Public Secret of trump's Failures

It's been something I've harped on a long time: how trump's reputation as a savvy businessman was all a lie when you look at his long history of bankruptcies, failed projects, and the honest-to-god killing of an entire sports league.

And now his tax returns from the 1980s and 1990s re-affirmed all of that, pointing out how trump lost more money than any other American taxpayer - even actual billionaires  - on a scale that suggests either sheer incompetence on trump's part... or blatant acts of fraud.

Consider this little tidbit about what trump did to play the Stock Markets (from Matthew Yglesias at Vox.com):

...He would secretly buy shares of stock in a company, publicly suggest he was planning to make a bid to buy the whole company, watch the share price rise in response to the Trump takeover rumors, and then sell his shares at a profit without actually doing anything.

He did this successfully with United Airlines in 1987, which led him to try it again with Hilton Hotels, Gillette, and Federated Department Stores in 1988. This was apparently a “fool me five times, shame on you” situation, however; investors caught on to the fact that Trump was running a scam, and it didn’t work anymore...

And yet from the reports we're getting, people on Wall Street figured out trump was pulling these Pump And Dumps. WHICH ARE AGAINST THE LAW. And yet... nobody charged him with sh-t while the statue of limitations were in effect. Unless the SOB has been doing it recently based on the latest tax returns trump still refuses to release, he can't be touched on the matter. Which sucks.

This is from a specific blog rant I wrote back during the 2016 campaign, about how trump developed this not-so-secret track record of screwing over his own employees and contractors to where someone, ANYONE, should have gone public with his deal-breaking and get his ass thrown in jail for it or something:

It's good that the stories are getting out there now, during a period that our voters can realize that Trump isn't a successful businessman, he's a successful thief. But it bothers me that someone like Trump was allowed to operate like this for over 40 years and got away with it. Shouldn't some requirement of business ethics DEMAND that a crook of Trump's venality be hauled into the spotlight for his sins long ago? Before it got worse?

Which all leads to this sad open secret about the law in the United States:

The law is entirely geared to favor the wealthy.

I mean, that's the whole point of the law when you think about it. Read up on the Code of Hammurabi. One of the earliest forms of codified law in Western civilization, it may have set down punishments for criminal acts but it also spelled out who owned what, the fair rate of exchange for goods and services, and other things people tended to argue over.

Every legal system is a reflection of that, and ultimately focused on one thing: How to do business. Look at your city and county ordinances. A lot of local laws focus on zoning and property rights (who owns what). Your state laws and statutes, there's a lot in there about property rights, theft protections, wages, money, regulations for business (who owns what). The US Code covers that stuff at the federal level.

When the Founders created the federal system under the Constitution, they did so because their original model of government under the Articles of Confederation did a lousy job of spelling out who owned what... and they feared the rise of mobs who would take from the rich - the Revolutionary Founders themselves - if they didn't set up a stronger system to enforce who owns what.

As a result, you ever take a good long look our legal system, you'll see there are two different rules for the poor and the rich. A lot of laws are set up to punish the poor - high bails, prison time for most low-income crimes, legal fees that a public defense can never cover - and protect the rich - lawyers on retainer to argue probation, harder standards of proof for financial fraud, etc.

Click on the link to the US Code covering Securities Fraud: it spells out penalties covering "fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 25 years, or both." Yet in practice the fines tend to be maybe ten thousands or hundred thousands of dollars, but never the amount that the fraudsters committed, meaning a lot of them can pay off fines with their equivalent of pocket change. And jail time? Usually measured by months instead of years. If you compared a guy who stole $10 million from an investment firm who pays a $50,000 fine and spends three months in jail to a guy who stole a flatscreen TV from WalMart who has no money to pay and spends three years in jail, you see all the rewards go to the white-collar crook while the low-income crook suffers more.

You might retort "Well we're arrested fraudsters before," and yes we've seen the likes of Boesky and Madoff and Milken head to court and even some jail time, but those are the painful exceptions to the hundreds pulling lower-scale scams. They were so brazen and reckless that they were easy to catch... and in most of their cases they ripped off fellow rich folk, which is the big no-no within their circles. And even then, it took years before anyone listened to the one investigator warning the financial world about Madoff. Even then, it takes years for white collar crooks to see the inside of a courtroom.

trump should have been one of those fraudsters who crossed those lines. he lied and cheated to a lot of fellow millionaires to pretend to be one of them... and yet he was routinely let off the hook. All because we as a nation do not take financial fraud crimes serious enough.

Let's admit it. Compared to all the sins we already know trump committed. We jailed Martha Stewart for less.

No one had the balls or decency to go after trump. Until it was too late.

Everything That's Wrong With Justice In America (w/Updates)

Update: once again, glad to see everyone visiting from Mike's Blog Round Up at Crooks & Liars, thanks again Batocchio! By the by, in terms of updating we should be getting Manafort's second sentence hearing in front of Judge Jackson today, so keep an eye on this site for further updates that are below!

So, still reeling a bit from the ruling last week by one of the judges overseeing Paul Manafort's fate. The immediate reaction I and others following the trial(s) of Manafort's crimes had when we heard Judge Ellis' sentencing the convicted felon to 47 months (with 9 months accrued meaning an even shorter sentence) fell between "stunned" and "outraged."

It's taken a day or two to recover from the anger of what seems an unjust ruling - that Manafort, found guilty of bank fraud and other frauds to the tune of millions of dollars was getting a shorter sentence than people getting 20 years for possessing a $20 bag of pot - to try and gain a better perspective.

At best, I can point to Ken White's take at the Atlantic. He's broken down the reactions to Manafort's light punishment from Ellis into six coherent arguments. I am going to add my own thoughts to each:

First, there can’t be a sentence without an investigation. After 9/11, the United States Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Offices that it controls shifted resources and focus from white-collar crime to drugs, guns, and immigration. In Los Angeles, the U.S. Attorney’s Office shuttered the Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section, where I served. Investigations of people like Manafort—people who have committed complex financial crimes—are time-consuming and resource-intensive. You can jail 20 drug traffickers for life with the resources it took to prosecute Manafort. America picks who goes to jail when it picks whom to investigate—which is one of the reasons so few people involved in the 2008 Wall Street debacle went to jail.

This is key. Our legal system has a finite amount of resources. It would be pretty to think every crook and questionable act can be investigated, but there's only so much our law enforcement can do at one time. I would note that we could well have chosen to investigate white collar crimes - acts of fraud that ruin thousands and cost billions (not even millions anymore) - but the lack of manpower (and lack of willpower) restricts such investigations. It's in that kind of environment the high-level crooks can raid and pillage with impunity (and kinda explains why a con artist like trump kept avoiding criminal investigations into fraud until now)...

Second, prosecutors have enormous power over who goes to jail and for how long. That power doesn’t just involve deciding who gets indicted. It involves deciding how he gets indicted. Manafort faced a recommended sentencing range of 19 to 24 years under U.S. sentencing guidelines. But that range was driven only in part by what he actually did. It was driven just as much by how the special counsel’s office chose to pursue the case—what charges it brought, what evidence it presented to Ellis, and what part of Manafort’s history it cited as “relevant conduct” at sentencing...

Manafort had committed a lot of questionable acts, but prosecutors only charged him on things they could prove in a courtroom. And even then, a jury has to accept the prosecutors' arguments (Manafort's jury in his first trial found him guilty on 8 charges out of 18, and one juror held out on the remaining 10). This is, as a side note, one of the reasons why prosecutors overcharge suspects in order to force plea deals...

Third, Congress has given Ellis the power to give people like Manafort a break, but has denied him that power when the defendant is accused of many blue-collar crimes. Last year, Ellis sentenced a 37-year-old man named Frederick Turner to 40 years in federal prison for methamphetamine distribution. He had no choice: Congress passed laws making 40 years the mandatory minimum sentence...

This is one of the points where the system itself is insane and broken: The mandatory minimums set by legislators - often pursuing their "tough on crime" and "war on drugs" election campaigns - make it difficult for judges to apply sentences that would be truthfully just. Even Ellis complained about the severity of jail time he was inflicting on Turner, and in Manafort's case where no mandatory time was required Ellis could well have wanted a more lenient punishment (the problem is Ellis is offering mercy to someone who hadn't earned it).

As White notes, there is a genuine legal distinction between what we call "Blue-Collar Crimes" - crimes committed by the poor such as robbery, burglary, drug dealing, acts of violence - and "White-Collar Crimes" - crimes committed by the wealthy or connected such as bribery, tax evasion, money laundering for drug dealers, and acts of fraud - to where we have essentially two legal systems. One for the poor and one for the rich. Guess which one profits Manafort?

Fourth, the U.S. sentencing guidelines treat some crimes more harshly than others, and though, unlike mandatory minimums, they are only recommendations, not strictures, they strongly influence judges. USA Today reported that fraud cases in Ellis’s district yielded an average sentence of 36 months, versus 66 months for firearms charges and 84 months for drug charges, all higher than the national average. Ellis announced that he was sentencing Manafort below the recommended guideline range because that range was far above what defendants received in similar cases. That is, in fact, a factor that he’s required by law to consider. Manafort’s case was arguably much more serious than others, but there’s no question that his sentencing range was atypically high for a white-collar defendant... 

This is the point where Ellis' ruling gets to be a joke. Ellis went and compared Manafort's fate to other white-collar criminals and deemed the prosecutors' recommended sentencing "too harsh". Nevermind the unique circumstances that Manafort is in, or the scale of severity Manafort's crimes are at. All Ellis is seeing is a first-time offender in his court and has decided that Manafort's "blameless life" didn't deserve any worse than the 19 1/2 years being recommended.

To quote another commentator from the Atlantic - Franklin Foer - about Judge Ellis' tone-deaf understanding, about how he looked at a decades-long criminal and still saw "a blameless life":

In an otherwise blameless life, Paul Manafort lobbied on behalf of the tobacco industry and wangled millions in tax breaks for corporations...

In an otherwise blameless life, he worked to keep arms flowing to the Angolan generalissimo Jonas Savimbi, a monstrous leader bankrolled by the apartheid government in South Africa. While Manafort helped portray his client as an anti-communist “freedom fighter,” Savimbi’s army planted millions of land mines in peasant fields, resulting in 15,000 amputees...

In an otherwise blameless life, Manafort was kicked out of the lobbying firm he co-founded, accused of inflating his expenses and cutting his partners out of deals...

In an otherwise blameless life, he spent a decade as the chief political adviser to a clique of former gangsters in Ukraine. This clique hoped to capture control of the state so that it could enrich itself with government contracts and privatization agreements. This was a group closely allied with the Kremlin, and Manafort masterminded its rise to power—thereby enabling Ukraine’s slide into Vladimir Putin’s orbit...

In an otherwise blameless life, he produced a public-relations campaign to convince Washington that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was acting within his democratic rights and duties when he imprisoned his most compelling rival for power...

In an otherwise blameless life, he stood mute as Yanukovych’s police killed 130 protesters in the Maidan...

In an otherwise blameless life, he tried to use his perch atop the Trump campaign to help salvage his sorry financial situation. He installed one of his protégés as the head of the pro-Trump super PAC Rebuilding America. His friend allegedly funneled $125,000 from the super PAC to pay off one of Manafort’s nagging debts...

In an otherwise blameless life, Manafort was found guilty of tax evasion on an industrial scale. Rather than paying his fair share to help fund national defense and public health, he kept his cash in Cyprus and wired it home to buy more than $1 million in bespoke clothing...

In an otherwise blameless life, he acted with impunity, as if the laws never applied to him. When presented with a chance to show remorse to the court, he couldn’t find that sentiment within his being...

All of those acts - and more - were not sudden, or an impulse, or based on the vagaries of foolish youthful intent. It's all a track record of bad behavior that profited from other people's sufferings without care to fact or rules or human decency.

Ellis is choosing to think of Manafort as a first-time offender rather than someone who had willfully broken and ignored laws, and only got away with it for years all because Manafort lived at a level of society where accountability to the law was merely optional.

Anyway, back to White:

Fifth, money drives cases. Manafort’s criminal defense cost more than most defendants make in a lifetime. Money can’t buy freedom—Manafort’s money couldn’t save him from multiple convictions, because the federal government’s power is overwhelming even to a multimillionaire. But money buys a capable defense with the resources it needs. An extremely experienced, qualified defense team with plenty of time makes a profound difference at every stage of a case. Even when rich people get convicted, money helps get them the best plea deals, the most persuasive sentencing presentations, and often the most lenient sentences.

This is another point where the rich have it easier over the poor in our legal system. People like Manafort can afford lawyers with better resources and better experience while people who can't afford a lawyer have to rely on Public Defenders handling 65-plus cases a month and unable to even get their clients out on bail (meaning a lot of poor people are stewing in the local lockup awaiting trials that are seven months to a year down the road, if ever). Manafort by the by was out on bail before/during the trial, but then got it revoked - by the judge in his other trial, more on that later - when it turned out he was trying to witness-tamper in such a crass manner the judge had no choice but to revoke. Meanwhile, poor defendants can't even that level of mercy. Our cash bond prison system is severely broken...

Sixth, and finally, judges are human. Racism and bias of every sort play a role in the system, but it’s too simplistic to say the problem is that particular judges are racist. The problem is that judges give breaks to people with whom they can identify—people whose humanity they recognize. We’re wired to identify with people like us. Judges—particularly federal judges—tend to come from backgrounds closer to Manafort’s than to the average drug dealer’s. Even when judges are born and raised in poverty, the process of becoming a lawyer, having a career, and becoming a judge makes them inexorably more like Manafort. The system has a homogenizing effect...

Ellis didn't see a globe-spanning criminal ruining thousands of lives, he saw someone who might have been a next-door neighbor at his gated community. This is where the bias of the judge him/herself distorts the need for justice.

Each of White's points are problems we've had with our legal system for some time, decades in fact. And sadly over those decades our legislators who write the laws and the administrators who enforce the laws have done little to balance the scales between rich and poor, against the racism and sexism, towards a truly honest courtroom where there can be "justice for all".

Sending Manafort to prison for barely under 40 months - remember, he's getting reduced for time served - doesn't seem just at all.

The only thing that prevents this from being a total mockery of the law is that Manafort is facing a second courtroom sentencing involving the other crimes he's committed in THAT jurisdiction. He'd already plead out to two conspiracy charges (related to Mueller's Russian investigations) in Judge Jackson's court... but he's also pulled off a lot of dumb stunts in her courtroom to where she's not going to show him any favor at all (she is also the presiding judge of Roger "Can't Keep My Mouth Shut" Stone, and she's already had enough of his BS as is).

There is hope that Manafort will still face stronger justice for his sins.

But in the meantime, Manafort's current leniency - to where it felt like he's getting a "Get Out of Jail Free" deal - exposes a broken American legal system in worse shape than our own bridges and highways.

Everything needs fixing, America. What the hell.

Revisions to the Update (3/13/19): Welp. Judge Jackson read him the riot act... and still only added 73 months on the two counts Manafort plead to... and made 30 of those months concurrent (same time) as his existing sentence... so he's looking at a total of 7.5 years for all the crap he's pulled for two decades. Gangbangers, seriously. Stop dealing drugs and getting life sentences on that. Get into the white-collar shit that Manafort does and get out of jail in less than a decade!!!

Followup to the Revisions to the Update (ten minutes later): The New York DA - think Jack McCoy from Law & Order, except 80 percent more real and 90 percent more pissed off - dropped grand jury charges (16 of them) on Manafort for state-level crimes. Separate from the crap Manafort was charged with at the federal level - avoiding double jeopardy issues - these are still tied into a lot of the financial crimes that Manafort committed. Meaning if trump pardons him NOW for the federal prison time, Manafort can't claim Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination. Essentially, trump can't save his buddy from these charges.

This had to have been a land-speed record by the legal system. The DA probably wanted to make sure he could do this before trump had time to break out his pen.

Additional Followup to the Followup to the Revisions (June 2021): Well dammit, this missed my notice but back in February 2021 the New York Supreme Court said the New York DA couldn't file those charges. Apparently, they did incur double jeopardy. Since trump pardoned Manafort towards the end of his term, this means Manafort walks away from answering for his years of fraud.

/headdesk

Only trump Could Make the Legal Institution Dumber

Oh ye Gods, this will never end in a sane and rational manner. Via Adam L Silverman at Balloon-Juice, picking up on the story out of the New York Times:

Legal turduckens Jay Sekulow and John Dowd prepared a twenty page legal memo explaining why the President could not obstruct justice and therefore should not be interviewed by the Special Counsel as part of the Special Counsel’s ongoing investigation. Someone leaked it to The New York Times...

As one would expect of a legal memo produced by a well-past-his-prime John Dowd and a never-was grifter of the religiously devout Jay Sekulow, the memo is full of errors in legal reasoning. Again from The New York Times (emphasis Silverman's):

“There could not possibly have been intent to obstruct an ‘investigation’ that had been neither confirmed nor denied to White House counsel,” the president’s lawyers wrote.
Moreover, F.B.I. investigations do not qualify as the sort of “proceeding” an obstruction-of-justice statute covers, they argued.

“Of course, the president of the United States is not above the law, but just as obvious and equally as true is the fact that the president should not be subjected to strained readings and forced applications of clearly irrelevant statutes,” Mr. Dowd and Mr. Sekulow wrote.

But the lawyers based those arguments on an outdated statute, without mentioning that Congress passed a broader law in 2002 that makes it a crime to obstruct proceedings that have not yet started.

Samuel W. Buell, a Duke Law School professor and white-collar criminal law specialist who was a lead prosecutor for the Justice Department’s Enron task force, said the real issue was whether Mr. Trump obstructed a potential grand jury investigation or trial — which do count as proceedings — even if the F.B.I. investigation had not yet developed into one of those. He called it inexplicable why the president’s legal team was making arguments that were focused on the wrong obstruction-of-justice statute...

If I could interpret: trump's legal team has the conclusion that trump wields broad executive power under Article II of the Constitution, and it was merely their job to fit the best possible legal history to defend that conclusion. They probably don't even care that they're basing it on a law that no longer exists, a law that most judges - even Republican ones - would ignore in favor of the 2002 law that supplanted it.

What the lawyers are arguing is that trump as President can never obstruct justice, and indeed can shut down any criminal investigation at any time and by his whim.

As pointed out on Southpaw's tweet: Under this logic, the president could open a booth on Pennsylvania Ave to accept bribes, people under federal investigation could stop by with a briefcase full of cash, and he could order their investigations closed—all without incurring any criminal liability for himself.

There is no goddamn way the Founders intended Article II to grant any President the power to be a crook.

Silverman also points out that trump's own lawyers make the argument that "the President did, indeed, author the fraudulent statement for his son (donald jr.) regarding the 9 June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Jr, Jared, Manafort, and a variety of Russian assets and agents." Another potential obstructive act, but also creates a situation where donnie junior is on record lying about that meeting to Congressional committees.

This remains the major problem of working with an unrepentant bullshitter like trump: He lies so often that you can't keep track, and his current statements / arguments will undermine previous ones with reckless abandon.

It would be frivolous to make mention that the leaked memo from Dowd's office was reportedly typed up in Comic Sans font.

Comic Sans font.

COMIC SANS FONT?!

The only font more evil than Papyrus.

PAPYRUS!!!

When you have a lawyer that works with the most unprofessional font in human history, you are not working with the best and brightest from the Martindale-Hubbell directory.

What is horrifying is how trump will push this argument to all ends, bully the system into accepting his interpretation, because he alone profits from it - both literal and metaphoric - on his path to Authoritarianism.

But how can we thrive when the would-be dictator is an idiot of the highest order, twisting his own legal help into idiots as well?

Troubling thoughts for troubling times.