U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal is accusing Pete Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, of witness intimidation because Parlatore suggested that Hegseth may sue the woman who accused him of sexual assault and received a settlement if he doesn’t get confirmed.
Trump NIH pick "considering a plan to link likelihood of receiving research grants to some measure of academic freedom…Bhattacharya wants to counter what he sees as a culture of conformity that ostracized him over his views on masking and school closures" http://www.wsj.com/health/healt…
The list compiled by the American Accountability Foundation includes 20 general officers or senior admirals and a disproportionate number of female officers. Those on the list in many cases seem to be targeted for public comments they made either in interviews or at events on diversity, and in some cases for retweeting posts that promote diversity.
The above-named group is a dark money organization that does not reveal its donors. Their leader is a former staffer for nutbag Sen. Ron Johnson.
These people what a Russian style military of only white cis straight males which Ted Cruz gave such praise to over our US military. The thing is the Russian military was stopped and driven out of a country by the rag tag Ukrainian military with gifted supplies dripping in. A diverse military of the entire population is the strongest one, which has been demonstrated over and over again. Talk about a group wanting purity in a place, this is what these bigot racist haters want. Hugs
Among Hegseth’s alleged “mistakes” are sexual assault, countless incidents of adultery (including with a coworker), at last one bastard child, drunkenly attempting to climb onto a strip club stage, on the job drinking, being fall down drunk at corporate events, shouting “kill all Muslims,” having white supremacist tattoos, belonging to a far-right misogynist Christian nationalist church, and running two nonprofits for veterans into the ground with what former colleagues call questionable spending on partying and travel. It’s what Jesus would want.
1. Bondi asked for a $25,000 campaign donation from Trump, and got it. 2. Then she dropped her state’s investigation into Trump University. 3. Now she’s Trump’s nominee for Attorney General.
Watch the clip and you’ll see an excited Lummis wave a copy of her bill, calling it a “present for President Trump.” Hayes calls the bill an “enormous heist” and an “explicit bailout” of bitcoin holders should the price plummet
Special counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks about an unsealed indictment against former President Donald Trump on Aug. 1, 2023, in Washington, D.C.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Donald Trump started this year fighting two federal prosecutions that threatened to send him to prison. But he will end it free and clear of his most significant criminal legal problems.
With his resounding victory at the polls, and a longstanding Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president, the key question is not if, but when, prosecutors move to dismiss or delay his federal election interference case in Washington, D.C.
Trump recently said he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” after he returned to the White House. Now, that won’t be necessary to bring his federal criminal troubles to an end.
Smith is taking steps to end both federal cases against Trump before the president-elect takes office, according to a source familiar with the Justice Department deliberations.
1. What are the outstanding cases the federal government has lodged against Trump?
A grand jury in Washington indicted Trump this year on four felony charges in connection with his effort to cling to power in 2020, culminating in the violent siege on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Judge Tanya Chutkan had set a trial date for March 2024, but that date came and went, after the Supreme Court accepted the case and ultimately handed Trump significant immunity from prosecution for official actions he took in the White House.
The judge is just now beginning to consider what parts of the prosecution’s case amount to official acts, and which are private conduct of a person seeking rather than holding office.
The Justice Department has appealed in a separate criminal case against Trump that accuses the former president of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort and refusing to the return them to the FBI.
Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, dismissed the documents case on July 15, the first day of the Republican National Convention this year, reasoning that the way the special counsel had been appointed violates the Constitution. The Justice Department has been seeking review by a higher court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
2. What does Trump’s election victory mean for these cases?
They’re on life support and likely to end even before the inauguration in January.
On the campaign trial, now President-elect Trump has vowed to fire the special counsel, Jack Smith, on his first day in office. But Trump would not need to dismiss Smith or order any new DOJ officials to fire Smith in order to end the criminal prosecutions.
President-elect Donald Trump delivers remarks during the Georgia state GOP convention in June 2023 after a grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents probe.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
In 2000, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the federal government on its powers and boundaries, concluded that a sitting president could not be indicted or prosecuted because that “would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.”
Administrations led by Republicans and Democrats have adopted the DOJ policy against prosecuting presidents.
The Florida case involving classified documents is a bit more complicated. DOJ could file notice with the appeals court that it is abandoning the appeal. But that case involves two other defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira.
Dismissing the appeal outright would also mean walking away from cases that prosecutors built against those two defendants, Trump’s personal aide and the property manager at Mar-a-Lago.
What’s more, the federal government may have a broader interest, because Cannon’s reasoning could upend the way special prosecutors have been appointed for decades.
But one DOJ veteran who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly told NPR that Cannon’s ruling would not be considered binding precedent, so the stakes could be lower.
Former Attorney General William Barr says voters have evaluated the allegations against Trump—and decisively rendered their own verdict.
“Further maneuvering on these cases in the weeks ahead would serve no legitimate purpose and only distract the country and the incoming administration from the task at hand,” Barr said in a written statement first reported by the Guardian.
3. What happens to the special counsel, Jack Smith?
Special counsels are obligated to file a report on their actions with the Attorney General when they finish their work. The current attorney general, Merrick Garland, has pledged to make most of those reports public.
If Smith’s written report is not complete by Inauguration Day, it will be up to new DOJ leaders to decide its fate.
Mike Davis, a Trump ally, told a conservative interviewer this week that the attorney general “is probably President Trump’s most important appointment.”
Davis told the interviewer that Smith’s entire office should be fired and said, “After today, Jack Smith, you’re going to be the hunted: legally, politically and financially. So lawyer up, buddy.”
4. Trump also faced criminal charges in two states, New York and Georgia. How will the election reshape those cases?
A jury in New York this year convicted Trump on 34 criminal charges related to bookkeeping for an alleged hush money payment to an adult film actress shortly before the 2016 election.
Justice Juan Merchan scheduled a hearing for Nov. 12 to assess how the Supreme Court’s immunity decision might affect that case. It’s not clear whether the criminal sentencing for Trump set for Thanksgiving week will occur. Trump’s lawyers may seek to stop it given the election results.
The case against Trump in Fulton County, Ga., over alleged election interference, has been on pause for months while a higher court considers possible conflicts of interest involving District Attorney Fani Willis. There’s a hearing scheduled in that appeal Dec. 5.
It, too, could be overtaken by events — and a strategy of delay and deflection by Trump’s lawyers that appears to have succeeded beyond imagination.
(Once upon a time, I worked for a lawyer, then for judges, so I follow legal blogs and Substacks because I appreciate the writing, and I’m just still interested in the work. This piece is current to news I saw this morning when I got up. After I got home from errand-running, the news was still true. So, here’s some educated commentary. Whether I have any legal experience or not, this decision nauseates me.)
The consequences of the ruling—legal and political—lie well beyond what major-media talking heads are acknowledging, and oddly are ruinous for not just our democracy but certain Trump talking points.
Donald Trump has spent over a year telling the voters he needs to have vote for him in November to stay out of state and/or federal prison for the rest of his natural life that his political rival Joe Biden—and President Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland—are puppeteering the two federal criminal cases remaining against him: one in Florida and one in Washington.
In court, Trump is saying exactly the opposite—meaning that he either doesn’t believe what he’s telling voters or doesn’t believe what he’s been representing to U.S. courts.
The Trump claim, in court, is that Special Counsel Jack Smith isn’t just too independent of the Biden administration and the Biden Department of Justice, but so independent that it’s illegal. In short, what Trump is saying in federal court is a grenade-toss aimed squarely at the center of the rhetoric he’s using to try to get reelected and avoid prison.
Which is why it’s so stunning—if also predictably hypocritical and deceitful—that the man celebrated a judge he appointed tossing out a federal criminal case she’s been delaying and mishandling from the start in a way many attorneys deem corrupt not by acknowledging what the ruling actually said (that Jack Smith is too independent of any Biden appointee or Biden himself), but reiterating his entirely distinct public rhetoric.
It is galling—yet somehow also par for the course—that a man infamous for lying or else invoking the Fifth Amendment under oath in court proceedings is in this post confirming for all America to see that he again lied in court by making claims about Jack Smith he now swears to voters he doesn’t actually believe.
Donald Trump insisting, in his usual, shrieking all-caps-punctuated terms, that “the Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL” the criminal cases against him—putting aside for the moment that there’s no evidence of this at all, that it doesn’t even make sense given that several of the cases referenced are state cases, or that some of the cases pre-date Jack Smith’s appointment—means, and unambiguously, that he now claims DOJ in fact has precisely the level of control over Smith he was demanding it have (and claiming it didn’t have) in the remote Florida district court where his Stolen Documents Case is being heard.
In short, if what Trump says above is true, it means his case was wrongly dismissed; if it’s not true, he’s lying to voters about major felony charges against him—charges that historically have led to prison time for other defendants—which in itself would seem to suggest a “consciousness of guilt” over his gross misconduct in stealing classified documents from the White House and then publicly claiming he’s entitled to sell them.
But it gets worse.
The order just issued by a Trump appointee who’s rather universally seen as also a Trump partisan wasn’t only timed in such a way that its release kicks off the RNC in Milwaukee with a major Trump victory; wasn’t only timed in such a way that it gives the man who made it possible—the man who appointed its judicial author to her job—a new argument to make, and to have others make, at every speech at the Convention; wasn’t only timed in such a way that the inevitable appeal of it by Jack Smith can’t possibly move through the federal courts in time for this trial to happen pre-election even if Judge Cannon’s ruling isoverturned; but was issued on grounds that now likely destroy the only other federal criminal case Mr. Trump has remaining: the one in DC.
Had Judge Cannon found a way to do the bidding of a man she hopes will appoint her to either a federal circuit court (or even the Supreme Court) that only encompassed the proceedings in the case before her—the Stolen Documents Case—it would have been a massive boon to Trump, but not necessarily a career-making one (keeping in mind that Trump has a demonstrated history of rewarding corrupt public officials in Florida, from making the man who protected him from fallout over his friend Jeffery Epstein’s child sex-trafficking, Alexander Acosta, his Secretary of Labor, to hiring as his lawyer Florida’s former corrupt Attorney General, Pam Bondi).
So that’s not what the judge did.
What Judge Cannon did is find a pre-textual basis to end Trump’s Florida case that also now requires that the same question—whether Jack Smith was legally appointed and is legally performing his duties—be presented and dealt with in the D.C. federal criminal case over January 6, which as it happens was the only case Trump still faces that until today had a chance of being heard pre-election.
In short, if Smith is an illegal player in Florida, he’s also an illegal player in D.C. And once Trump raises this newly minted issue in D.C.—which he will once SCOTUS stops artificially holding onto its recent presidential immunity decision for the maximum duration it can (refusing to send the ruling back to Judge Tanya Chutkan in D.C. for further proceedings is another under-reported SCOTUS gift to Trump)—either Judge Chutkan will agree with Judge Cannon and drop Trump’s D.C. criminal case or she will contradict Judge Cannon and create a need for SCOTUS to step in to resolve the divergent holdings in two federal jurisdictions. Either way, Trump wins, as we’ve already seen that SCOTUS will hold up any case of his five to ten times longer than it would for any other litigant, and Election Day is now well under 120 days off.
{Note: While some say this ruling by Cannon could lead to Jack Smith getting his wish that she be replaced on the case, that would be an extraordinary and unlikely remedy by the federal circuit court overseeing her, and in any case still wouldn’t produce a pre-election trial. And if Trump wins in November, he’ll unilaterally and corruptly order his new DOJ to end all cases against him, claiming as he does so that the very voters he’s lying to right now assented to him ending all cases against him simply by voting for him. See how that bait-and-switch works?}
It’s now clear that American voters will be asked to decide on the fitness for office of a man with 54 untried felonies, and because major media persistently wrongly deploys the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra of our justice system—to be clear, a mantra that only applies to jury duty, as voters are allowed to judge a man however they wish—it is likely that few in the media will point out that no responsible voting population can ever vote for a man with 54 untried felonies. To do so is civic malpractice. More likely, what we will hear from American major media is that Trump looked like a real badass in photos taken immediately after his attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Indeed, a recent Supreme Court ruling on Bribery that was made possible by judges Trump rammed through Congress in contravention of all nomination conventions made clear that bribes can be legally given to a politician provided the repayment for them occurs after the fact, so for all we know a newly emboldened Judge Cannon is just honoring that ruling by doing Trump a lawless “in-kind” solid now that she absolutely expects will be well-rewarded down the line.
And who knows? Maybe it will be. In a corrupted democracy with unequal application of the law—which America now is—anything’s possible and everything is permissible.
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