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Judge’s order in Mark Meadows case “could be very bad news” for Fani Willis.

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Judge’s order in Mark Meadows case “could be very bad news” for Fani Willis.

By Areeba Shah.

U.S. District Court Judge Steve Jones on Tuesday ordered Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and former president Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows to offer opinions on a key matter essential to addressing Meadows’s argument that his Georgia prosecution should be tried in federal court.

Jones asked both parties to provide their views on whether “a finding that at least one (but not all) of the overt acts charged occurred under the color of Meadow’s office [would] be sufficient for federal removal of a criminal prosecution under [the federal removal statute].”

When Meadows took the stand on Tuesday, he argued he was acting in his capacity as Trump’s top White House aide when he reached out to Georgia officials following the 2020 elections. Fulton County prosecutors, on the other hand, asserted that Meadows’ actions went well beyond the responsibilities of his federal position.

Meadows was charged in Willis’ sprawling racketeering indictment, which accuses him and 17 others of conspiring to subvert the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

In court documents, his legal team has already revealed their plans to seek the dismissal of the charges from a federal judge if the case is transferred to federal court, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Even if a judge doesn’t dismiss the charges, the shift to federal court would provide Meadows with a broader and potentially more conservative pool of jurors and bar cameras from entering the courtroom.

The pivotal point of contention for the removal hinges mainly on whether Meadows can prove that he was indicted for actions he carried out in his capacity as a federal official.

Clark Cunningham, professor of law at Georgia State University, also weighed in on X, formerly Twitter, arguing that this order “could be very bad news” for Willis.

“If I were the DA, I would ask grand jury for a superseding indictment that removes the name of Mark Meadows from Acts 5, 6, 7, and 19 of Count 1 (but continuing the allegations as to Donald Trump),” he wrote.

The first three alleged overt acts by Meadows (Acts 5, 6 and 7) are not necessary to establish his liability under RICO, but keeping them in the indictment now runs an “enormous risk” for the DA of losing the removal issue, in light of Judge Jones’ order, since these overt acts come closest to meeting the test for federal officer removal, he added.

Cunningham explained that Acts 5 and 7 involve White House meetings between Trump and state legislators, for which Meadows made “plausible claims” on the witness stand that his role was limited to what the Chief of Staff typically does. Act 6 alleges only that Meadows asked a member of Congress from Pennsylvania for the phone numbers of the leaders of the state legislature in Pennsylvania, again saying this was a typical task for a chief of staff.

“Act 19 alleges that Trump & Meadows met together with another White House staffer, John McEntee and asked him to prepare a memo for a strategy to disrupt the January 6 session of Congress,” Cunningham wrote. “Meadows testified firmly that Act 19 did not describe anything he had done and it is not worth continuing to try and prosecute Meadows for Act 19.”

Jones ordered that Willis and attorneys for Meadows file their briefs by 5 p.m. on Thursday.

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Dershowitz And Turley Pour Cold Water on Idea That Trump’s Trials Will Begin Before Election.

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Dershowitz And Turley Pour Cold Water on Idea That Trump’s Trials Will Begin Before Election.

Story by Arjun Singh

    • Legal experts said that former President Donald Trump’s criminal trials are unlikely to occur before the 2024 general election.
    • Trump’s criminal proceedings in four jurisdictions are currently in a pre-trial phase, involving discovery, motions, jury selection and interlocutory appeals — which experts believe will delay the process by over a year.
  • “It’s like asking a brain surgeon to perform an operation with three days’ notice,” said Alan Dershowitz.

Legal experts have said that former President Donald Trump’s trials in four separate criminal proceedings are unlikely to be held before the general election in November 2024.

Trump, who is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has been indicted four times in New YorkFloridaWashington, D.C. and Georgia on state and federal charges. Following Trump’s initial appearances, prosecutors in each jurisdiction have been seeking a speedy trial despite protests from his legal team, with experts saying it’s likely that the trials will occur after the general election.

“They’re trying to get convictions before the election,” said Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of the book “Get Trump,” to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “[But] they can’t get it done in two weeks, they know it will take longer than that.”

Dershowitz’s comments refer to the initial attempt by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump in Miami and Washington, D.C., to have the latter trial begin on Jan. 2, 2024, two weeks before the Iowa Caucuses. Trump has moved to have the trial pushed back to April 2026.

Meanwhile, in Florida, a federal judge tentatively set Aug. 14, 2024, as the beginning of his trial in Smith’s other case, where Trump is accused of violating the Espionage Act by refusing to return classified documents he stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, during his presidency.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has requested that Trump’s Georgia trial begin on March 4, 2024. After one of Trump’s co-defendants, Kenneth Chesebro, asserted his constitutional right to a speedy trial, Willis’s office moved for the trial to begin on Oct. 23, 2023.

Trump has opposed Willis’ request and filed a motion in opposition on Thursday. The complexity of the case and others Trump is facing, as well as the likelihood of appeals to pre-trial proceedings, lead legal experts to believe that it is unlikely any of Trump’s trials will begin before Nov. 5, 2024, when the general election is held.

“[I]t seems unlikely that most [trials] will proceed as scheduled. There are threshold challenges and dispositive motions that will have to be addressed. Some may involve appeals,” said Jonathan Turley, the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro professor of public interest law at The George Washington University Law School, to the DCNF. He added that “[t]hese dates seem highly optimistic and a tad opportunistic by prosecutors.”

In New York, where Trump has been indicted on 34 counts for allegedly falsifying business records related to his $150,000 payment to Stormy Daniels via former attorney Michael Cohen, his trial date has been scheduled for March 25, 2024, according to a judge’s oral order reported by The New York Times. By that date, all but four states will have held their presidential primary contests, according to 270ToWin.com.

“It’s like asking a brain surgeon to perform an operation with three days’ notice,” said Dershowitz, who said the prosecutors are trying to obtain “convictions [of Trump] before the election … it’s a rush to injustice.” He added that the courts will “probably need at least a year” in order to dispose of all pre-trial matters.

Those matters include the process of “discovery,” referring to the defendant’s efforts to gather evidence from the prosecution and construct a defense, motions to exclude evidence, jury selection and interlocutory appeals to the trial judge’s decisions by either party. “Jury selection alone in Georgia’s cases will take several months,” Dershowitz said, adding that “if [the courts] don’t accept the discovery timeline of Trump’s team, these are issues that could be appealed.”

The volume of discovery in each case is voluminous, particularly in Washington, D.C., where Trump has been charged related to his attempts to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. In that case, prosecutors turned over 11.6 million pages of discovery to Trump’s legal team following his arrangement on Aug. 3, much of which is subject to strict viewership requirements to safeguard witnesses, according to a court order

“If Trump loses his motions, he will appeal. If he loses at appellate court, he’ll ask to be heard before the Supreme Court. If there’s a ruling in favor of Trump, the state will likely appeal,” said Ronald Carlson, the Fuller E. Callaway professor emeritus at the University of Georgia School of Law, to the DCNF.

Trump’s team is cognizant of this fact and has invoked his criminal proceedings in other jurisdictions to seek later trial dates, according to an Aug. 17 filing by Trump’s attorneys at the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, opposing the special counsel’s proposed trial date. “President Trump must prepare for each of these trials in the coming months. All are independently complex and will require substantial work to defend … these cases will include numerous pre-and-post trial hearings,” they wrote.

The most immediate of these matters concern the removal of state court cases to federal court, which some of Trump’s co-defendants, such as former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, have petitioned to do. While a federal judge rejected his attempt to remove his case in New York, experts believe that Trump is likely to do so in Georgia.

“There will be multiple motions to remove the Georgia case to federal court for defendants like Trump and Meadows,” said Turley. Carlson said that the likelihood of a removal petition by even one defendant — given that Wills has vowed to prosecute all defendants together — means that pre-trial proceedings in that case “could take up to a year.” These motions create an “ample opportunity for him to delay the trial,” Carlson claimed.

For these reasons, it is unlikely that Trump will face a jury in any of his cases before voters cast their ballots on Nov. 5, 2024. Over 60% of Americans, including 89% of all Democrats, want Trump’s trials to be held before the election, according to an Ipsos poll released on Friday.

Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

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Jim Crows back. Liberal Democrats lock up Black Man in Georgia.

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Jim Crows back. Liberal Democrats lock up Black Man in Georgia. For those who were to young, Jim Crow laws were laws that Progressive Liberal white Democrats passed to keep the black man down. They’re back. And showing up in Georgia.

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Conservative Journalist Gets $300,000 After ‘Antifa’ Assault at Protest.

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Conservative Journalist Andy   $300,000 After ‘Antifa’ Assault at Protest. Progressive group Antifa in this country started out, as the military wing of BLM. BLM would start the protests and riot. Antifa would attack those who opposed BLM riots.

Back in 2019, Katherine Belyea, Madison Allen, and Joseph Evans—attacked him at the event. Evans, who now goes by the legal name Sammich Overkill Schott-Deputy, was accused of striking Ngo and initiating the confrontation. Allen was accused of hitting him with a sign, while Belyea was accused of throwing a milkshake at him.

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Report: Judge in Trump Jan 6 Case Previously Said in Open Court He’s Guilty of Crimes!

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Former President Donald Trump, left, can’t expect much of a fair trial on charges being brought before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, right. Chutkan has effectively pronounced Trump guilty already — and in open court. (Alex Brandon / AP ; Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts / AP)

This is giving kangaroo courts a bad name.

A kangaroo court is a parody of justice

The trial of former President Donald Trump in the District of Columbia isn’t even close to starting yet, but Americans who support the 45th president can already be sure of one thing: The judge has already reached her own verdict.

It’s been clear from the get-go that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is biased in the case being brought by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith that accuses Trump of four counts related to the Capitol incursion of Jan. 6, 2021: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.

But a review of Chutkan’s handling of Capitol incursion defendants by the website RealClearInvestigations yielded an explosive result: Chutkan is not only biased, she’s tacitly pronounced Trump guilty, in open court, of what are essentially the charges against him.

And she’s done it more than once.

In one case, Chutkan sentenced Christine Priola, a Cleveland woman, to 15 months in prison after Priola pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding and aiding and abetting, according to WJW in Cleveland.

But judging by Chutkan’s words from the bench at the Oct. 28 hearing, the real culprit was Donald Trump, and he deserved to be in prison, too.

The participants in the incursion “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant, not to the ideals of this country, and not to the principles of democracy,” Chutkan said, according to RealClearInvestigations.

“It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”

WHY IS SHE NOT REMOVED FROM THIS CASE?

“Free to this day”? Sounds an awful lot like Chutkan was wishing she was putting Donald Trump behind bars, not a former occupational therapist from Ohio.

In another case, she sentenced Texas resident Matthew Mazzocco to 45 days behind bars when, according to The Washington Post. Prosecutors had only asked for probation.

And, in Chutkan’s words, she made it clear that Trump was the man who should have been standing before her instead.

Mazzocco, Chutkan said, “went there to support one man who he viewed had the election taken from him. In total disregard of a lawfully conducted election, he went to the Capitol in support of one man, not in support of our country or in support of democracy.”

And that “one man” is going to be relying on Chutkan to dispense impartial justice in her courtroom?

With that kind of record, it’s more than understandable that Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican firebrand, has introduced a measure to censure Chutkan for her comments — not only regarding Trump himself but also comparing the Capitol incursion, unfavorably, to the Black Lives Matter rioters who burned American cities during the summer of 2020.

“But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riots posed to the foundation of our democracy,” she said at Mazzocco’s sentencing hearing, The Washington Post reported.

Gaetz clearly knows, just like any honest observer knows, that Chutkan has reached her own decision on the Trump case — and the decision is clearly going to color every decision she makes as it proceeds.

A kangaroo court is a parody of justice, where predetermined verdicts get the color of due process, the fiction that a legal proceeding has ensured the rights of the accused, as well as the rights and duties of the society whose rules he is supposed to have violated.

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Georgia Freedom Caucus Chair Signs Onto Move That Could End in Fulton County Prosecutor’s Impeachment

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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks in the Fulton County Government Center during a news conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on Aug. 14. (John Bazemore / AP)

The chair of Georgia’s Freedom Caucus said that it is time the Fulton County district attorney who has spent more than two years working up to the indictment of former President Donald Trump faced legislative scrutiny.

Trump was indicted last week on conspiracy charges related to his challenge of the 2020 election.

Republican state Rep. Charlice Byrd announced on social media that she is supporting an effort from Republican state Sen. Colton Moore to investigate DA Fani Willis.

“I was elected to do a job, not sit on the sidelines. Given the concerning nature of the recent indictment in Fulton County, I have signed on to Senator Colton Moore’s letter calling for an emergency special session. I encourage my colleagues to do the same,” she posted on her Facebook page.

In a statement posted on social media, she wrote “Having reviewed the evidence of possible corruption in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, specifically regarding the indictment of President Donald Trump and eighteen others, I believe it is time the General Assembly investigated this matter.”

She said that she supports Moore’s call for “an emergency special session of the General Assembly to investigate possible malfeasance.”

“If wrongdoing is found, as a duly elected member of the Georgia House of Representatives I am prepared to begin the impeachment process,” she wrote.

“The people demand this matter be investigated fully,” she wrote, calling upon other members to support the proposal.

“We must seek the truth by doing our constitutional duty of overseeing the judicial system, to ensure the oath of office enshrined in law, that every District Attorney must take before assuming office, is respected and adhered to,” she continued.

Last week, when Trump’s indictment was announced, Byrd posted on Facebook, “It’s a dark day in Georgia but the Georgia Freedom Caucus and our coalition partners won’t sit by and watch this totalitarian corruption.”

 

“We must strip all funding and, if appropriate, impeach Fani Willis,” Moore said in a statement last week when he announced his call for a special session, according to Breitbart.

“As a Georgia State Senator, I am officially calling for an emergency session to review the actions of Fani Willis. America is under attack. I’m not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors weaponize their elected offices to politically target their opponents,” he said.

The look of desperation.Joe Raedle / Getty

Trump will be arraigned on the charges against him on Thursday.


I guess these single-digit IQs think they can hold on to power forever. Otherwise, they’d be worried about what’s going to happen to them when the other side uses their tactics against them. — TPR

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Court Tosses Jan. 6 Sentence; Ruling May Impact Other Cases.

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Court Tosses Jan. 6 Sentence; Ruling May Impact Other Cases.

A federal appeals court on Friday ordered a new sentence for a North Carolina man who pleaded guilty to a petty offense in the Capitol riot — a ruling that could impact dozens of low-level cases in the massive Jan. 6, 2021 prosecution.

The appeals court in Washington said James Little was wrongly sentenced for his conviction on a misdemeanor offense to both prison time and probation, which is court-ordered monitoring of defendants who are not behind bars.

Little, who entered the Capitol but didn’t join in any destruction or violence, pleaded guilty in 2021 to a charge that carries up to six months behind bars. He was sentenced last year to 60 days in prison followed by three years of probation.

But the 2-1 opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that probation and imprisonment “may not be imposed as a single sentence” for a petty offense, adding “there are separate options on the menu.” Judge Robert Wilkins, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, dissented.

This from the AP.

The decision could invalidate the sentences of dozens of Jan. 6 defendants who received what is known as a “split sentence” for a petty offense. More than 80 other Jan. 6 defendants have been sentenced to both prison time and probation for the same misdemeanor offense as Little, according to an Associated Press analysis.

The practical effect, however, may be limited as almost all of them have likely already served their prison terms long ago. Little’s attorney had asked the appeals court to simply order an end to his probation monitoring since he already served his 60 days behind bars.

An attorney for Little declined to comment on Friday. The Justice Department could appeal the decision. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington said: “We are reviewing the Court’s ruling and will determine our next steps in accordance with the law.”

Some judges who have imposed such sentences in misdemeanor cases have stressed the need to keep tabs on Jan. 6 defendants after they serve their time to prevent them from engaging in such conduct during the next election. While on probation, defendants have to check in with a probation officer and follow certain conditions.

“The Court must not only punish Little for his conduct but also ensure that he will not engage in similar conduct again during the next election,” the judge who sentenced Little, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, wrote in a ruling last year.

“Some term of imprisonment may serve sentencing’s retributive goals. But only a longer-term period of probation is adequate to ensure that Little will not become an active participant in another riot,” he wrote.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Little went to President Donald Trump’s speech ahead of the riot and then walked to the Capitol, where he fist-bumped other rioters and went into the Senate Gallery, according to court records. After leaving the Capitol, he and others prayed on the Capitol steps and sang “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” by Twisted Sister, according to court documents.

More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Jan. 6 riot. More than 600 of them have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials decided by a jury or judge. About 600 have been sentenced, with over half getting terms of imprisonment ranging from three days to 18 years.

 

 
 
 

 

 

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The Georgia Indictment Was Triggered by Fake News.

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The Georgia Indictment Was Triggered by Fake News.

The indictment against President Donald Trump and 18 lawyers, aides, and supporters has been widely criticized, but even many of the critics have missed the most important flaw: the fact that the entire grand jury investigation began with a bit of fake news.

The fake news was reporting that Trump had told Georgia officials, by telephone, to fabricate votes.

In early January 2020, for example, Trump was reported to have told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to win.

Actually, what Trump said was: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state” (emphasis added).

Trump was not giving an order. He was talking about his own feelings. And as Scott Adams noted this week, Trump was speaking in the context of believing he had already won the state. He believed the proof was out there; he didn’t need to make anything up.

As George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley has noted: “While others have portrayed the statement as a raw call for fabricating the votes, it seems more likely that Trump was swatting back claims that there was no value to a statewide recount by pointing out that he wouldn’t have to find a statistically high number of votes to change the outcome of the election. It is telling that many politicians and pundits refuse to even acknowledge that obvious alternate meaning.”

The term “find” is also used colloquially, and often, in the context of counting votes. Political analysts on television routinely say that a candidate needs to “find” votes in one area or another, having already been cast, as results are reported by local precincts.

A week later, there was a mistaken report in the Washington Post on Jan. 9, 2021, that Trump had urged a Georgia election investigator, later named as Frances Watson, to “find the fraud.” The original headline was: “‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.”

The Post later had to issue a correction: “Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there.” But the inaccurate version of the Post‘s original story was repeated throughout the mainstream media before the correction was made.

That does not mean Trump’s conduct was praiseworthy. But there was nothing in his conversations — properly reported, at least — to suggest that he had done anything illegal, especially given that he knew lawyers and skeptical officials were listening to him.

Nevertheless, these reports were partly what prompted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to launch her investigation, starting with a “special grand jury” and leading to the current indictment.

CNN recently reported that the conversation with Brad Raffensperger were what “kicked off the local district attorney’s investigation.” That conversation, and others, were reported — and misquoted — in a highly partisan context, when Democrats were looking for any way to punish Trump and his supporters.

In Trump’s second impeachment trial, for example, which centered on the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, the Democrats’ House impeachment managers presented the fake “find the fraud” quote as if it were real, effectively falsifying evidence in the Senate.

It was not the first time fake news had factored into an impeachment.

Trump’s first impeachment was prompted by misleading, second-hand, anonymous media reports about his telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The transcript, which Trump declassified and released, showed that there had been no “quid pro quo” for an investigation into (accurate, it turns out) suspicions of Joe Biden’s role in Ukraine. But Democrats stuck with the fake news, even making up a fake transcript.

The pattern in both cases was the same: incriminating media reports, based on leaks that likely came from anti-Trump sources, triggered an investigation that had too much political momentum to be stopped once the contrary, first-hand evidence emerged.

Another fake news story that helped launch an investigation was the claim that Trump asked Russia to hack into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails. Trump joked about Russia finding Clinton’s emails during a press conference in July 2017. His critics claimed that his rather obvious attempt at humor was, in fact, an invitation to a geopolitical rival to commit espionage.

That prompted then-CIA director John Brennan to start a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. That investigation fed the “Russia collusion” hoax, which became an attempt to undo the results of the 2016 election. No major figure — not Clinton, nor her lawyers, nor the officials responsible for pushing the lie — was indicted, though Special Counsel John H. Durham convicted an FBI lawyer of falsifying an email (and lost two other cases, likely, in part, because of jury nullification).

It is unclear whether the “special grand jury” in Georgia heard about the calls to Raffensperger and Watson, though it reportedly heard recordings of another call, with Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives David Ralston.

All three calls are referred to in the indictment approved by a formal, subsequent grand jury on Monday. But the indictment does not cite the falsely reported quotes from those calls, or even an accurate version of Trump’s statement to Raffensperger, which launched Willis’s investigation.

That is because the actual quotes from those calls are, arguably, exculpatory, just like the Ukraine transcript. But it is too late.

Once again, the partisan media, amplifying the political prejudices of anti-Trump officials, has brought the country to the brink.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.

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Inside the progressive war on the Supreme Court The longer the spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds.I

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Inside the progressive war on the Supreme Court. The longer the spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds.

In the basement of a Washington, DC restaurant, 200 ticket-purchasing fans have gathered to witness the live recording of a multifaceted conversation about the villainy and corruption of the Supreme Court, and one justice in particular. It only seems appropriate to order the shrimp and grits: it costs $19.99 and comes with a white-wine tomato sauce. This may seem rather hifalutin, but it also comes in a glass mason jar that references tired hipster kitsch — perfectly suitable for a live podcast hosted by Slate.

Shrimp and grits are the uptown incarnation of staples from the Carolina Lowcountry, where the Gullah Geechee people, who live on the Sea Islands along the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, would catch small creek shrimp in their bare hands to eat themselves or sell on the streets of the cities and towns. Grits, from ground dried corn, have a more troublesome history: they were distributed by slaveholders as part of slaves’ food allowances. Historical records show Carolina slave children would get one pint of grits a day for most of the year, with salt.

Clarence Thomas’s mother tongue was not English, but Gullah — a lilting language that sounds like music, a mysterious linguistic cocktail of English, Creole and West African. (Experts disagree on its exact origin.) Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, the second child of Leola Williams. His father abandoned them when he was two. When he was six, his younger brother accidentally burned down the shack they lived in, and they were both sent to be raised by his grandfather in Savannah.

This is the origin story of today’s most hated Supreme Court justice, if you poll the Slate audience. It is also the main focus for a well-funded, well-organized Democratic campaign to put the Supreme Court under siege — not just in the press, but in the public too. And many on the left seem to like it that way. If you can’t transform the judiciary through the process of government, transform it by making it a job people are afraid to take.

 

 

In March 2020 Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer stood surrounded by protesters and pointed at the Supreme Court Building, bellowing: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Since then, the last of the three branches of government with respect for norms has indeed been at the center of a whirlwind — even as Democrats repeatedly claim to be the stalwart defenders of democracy, norms, the Constitution and the rule of law.

When the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the most significant culture-war decision in a generation — was leaked, the justices’ families and children were mapped and targeted, and their homes picketed illegally without any reaction from Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice. A twenty-six-year-old man even traveled across the country intending to murder Brett Kavanaugh and his family. He showed up on the justice’s suburban street with a Glock-17 and a plethora of tools — zip ties, duct tape, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a crowbar and padded boots for stealth. With last-minute misgivings, he called 911 and told the operator he had traveled from California “to kill a specific United States Supreme Court justice.” His online messages showed he had wanted to kill as many as three; he had conducted internet searches for “most effective place to stab someone,” “assassin skills,” “assassin equipment” and “assassinations.” He was arrested and indicted — he pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. (Authorities still claim to have no idea who leaked the opinion.)

In the opening episode of a podcast series focused on Clarence Thomas, Slate host Joel Anderson begins with his own peaceful version of a home confrontation. In “America’s Blackest Child,” he knocks on the screened-porch door of a modest single-story white house on a Savannah street. The ninety-four-year-old Leola Williams, happy to oblige a visitor, welcomes Anderson inside, where he discovers the shocking scene you would expect from any proud Southern mother: pictures of her family, including her son Clarence, covering the walls.

Anderson sounds awkward in the podcast audio from Mrs. Williams’s home, as if he knows he’s crossed a line. But he showed no such qualms when he appeared on television with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan to promote the episode, instead expressing surprise there was no security to stop him outside the house. “If they had had a chance to tell me to not come, they probably would have, but when you show up it’s hard to turn someone away from your front door,” he said. The MSNBC segment is mostly devoted to accusing Thomas of being a hypocrite for his anticipated ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v. Harvard. (Thomas joined the 6-3 majority in the decision announced on June 29.) Speculating on his likely vote, Hasan described it as an example of a minority “pulling up the drawbridge after themselves.” Asked why Thomas would choose to become a member of the “radical right,” Anderson had the answer: “He wanted to make money.”

Money is central to the story the left wants to tell about Thomas and the Supreme Court more generally. As is this little white house in Savannah. A ProPublica investigation revealed this spring that billionaire conservative Harlan Crow bought the property from Thomas and his family several years ago.

 

The relationship between Thomas and Crow, a major Republican donor the justice and his wife Virginia say is a close friend they’ve known for years, has been the primary focus of ProPublica’s “Friends of the Court” series, which seeks to pin all manner of ethical lapses and alleged inappropriate and illegal behavior on conservative justices.

ProPublica’s work has been the centerpiece of a flood of reporting across multiple media outlets focusing on what is being framed as a Supreme Court irrevocably compromised by relationships with well-heeled benefactors. The original series is a slog of filings and reports interspersed with vacation photos dug up from corners of the internet and quotes from various ethics experts — who also are of the left — denouncing the dire nature of a corrupt court.

At first glance, many of these stories look pretty bad. They paint a picture of lifetime-appointed justices palling around with powerful billionaires who shepherd them on fishing trips and to hunting lodges, take them on vacations to exotic locales and contribute indirectly or directly to supporting their legacies. It’s not a pretty picture. Yet even slightly closer inspection reveals that there are enormous reasons to take the breathless reporting with a pinch of salt.

The best example yet of the absurdly disproportionate reporting came in an over-the-top piece by Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian. The article revealed that seven Washington attorneys had used Venmo to send Christmas party money to a top aide of Thomas’s. Noticeably absent from the hair-on-fire “conflict of interest!” piece were the amounts in question, which turned out, according to one of the payers, to be $20 for an annual “lunch buffet consisting of hot dogs, hamburgers and chicken tenders” held for Thomas’s former clerks. Scandalous!

Then there’s the travel. The Judicial Conference, the administrative body which sets the rules for things such as travel disclosures, requires justices to report where they go, when they went and the nature of expenses, but not total costs. They are not required to disclose “any food, lodging or entertainment received as ‘personal hospitality of any individual.’” The rules further define the scope of hospitality: “hospitality extended for a non-business purpose by one, not a corporation or organization… on property or facilities owned by [a] person.”

The argument that the loophole should be smaller might be valid, but the rules are what they are. Demanding justices retroactively report something they weren’t required to report at the time is absurd — ex post facto rulemaking, if you will — and implying they were doing something untoward by following the rules as written is disingenuous. And it’s clear enough that justices of many stripes have long proceeded by the ethics rules as they stand.

 

 

The New York Times acknowledged in their editorial on the issue that “Justice Stephen Breyer took at least 225 subsidized trips from 2004 to 2018, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, including trips to Europe, Japan, India and Hawaii… Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got a private tour of Israel in 2018 that was paid for by an Israeli billionaire, Morris Kahn, who has had business before the court.” And OpenSecrets reported that the top two trip-getters in 2021 and 2022 were tied, with Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan both at eight. So yes, both sides do it.

In fact, the single most overlooked story in recent years may relate to the Notorious RBG. According to the Washington Free Beacon, a $1 million prize given to her by the left-leaning globalist Berggruen Institute raised eyebrows (the Judicial Conference limits honoraria to $2,000), but RBG said she would instead donate the amount to a variety of charities. Only later did it become clear that she had wanted the list of recipients to remain hidden, and Berggruen complied on its requisite Form 990 — preventing the public from knowing if any of the recipients had business before the court.

Republican senator Mike Lee raised the issue in a July Judiciary Committee hearing on a court-targeting bill backed by Democratic senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin. “This might have some very significant ramifications if she was still serving on the court,” Lee said. “We don’t yet know exactly what was done with that, whether she carried out the apparent intention of the stated purpose of intent at the outset to donate it to charity.”

As for that house in Georgia: Crow’s spokesman has said he ultimately wants to turn Thomas’s childhood home into a museum, “telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court justice.” Thomas’s share of the sale was a third of $133,000, and it’s still not entirely clear if he even reported it incorrectly, though he reportedly intends to amend it as necessary.

The longer this spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds. The Washington Post devoted a 3,300-word hit piece on the effort spearheaded by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to honor Thomas on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment. The public relations campaign was designed to push back against a fictionalized HBO glorification of Anita Hill, who testified against Thomas during his confirmation hearings, and included the promotion of a documentary, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.

The Post paints this entirely typical PR campaign in dark, secretive terms, even drilling down to investigate a “Justice Thomas Fan Account” which posted clips and quotes from the justice. “The account’s posts about the justice generated nearly 21,000 impressions,” the Post reports — a laughably small amount, no offense to the earnest creator.

The Post has yet to conduct a similar deep dive into the promotional campaign around the 2018 documentary RBG, which was acquired and distributed by Participant Media, a production company with an explicitly leftist activist mission founded by Canadian billionaire and former eBay president Jeff Skoll, who has given millions to leftist causes. Nor have they shown any interest in investigating the promotion and creation of the 2018 dramatic film, On the Basis of Sex, based on a script by Ginsburg’s nephew, and starring Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer (though the Post’s Style section did publish a meet-cute piece titled “That time Ruth Bader Ginsburg checked out Armie Hammer,” doing their part to promote the film’s Washington premiere). Participant Media also produced this laudatory fictionalized biopic for roughly $20 million, though it’s unclear if that amount also paid for the movie’s promotional pop rap “Here Comes the Change” performed by Ke$ha, with official artwork by Shepard Fairey, or the Jonas Åkerlund-directed music video, which as of this writing has 818,000 views on YouTube — tragically, the fewest of any Ke$ha music video.

 

 

Stepping back from all of this, what we see is a series of breathless reports designed to inflate perceptions of bias without the facts necessary to establish anything of the sort. At most, justices may have to refile forms or clarify their reporting to the ethics body. Due to a change in policy by the Judicial Conference this spring, they’ll also have to report when they fly on a private jet — something they didn’t have to do before. But if that’s all you think it takes to buy a Supreme Court justice, imagine what Hunter Biden could get you for $5 million.

“All these breathless ‘investigations’ amount to nothingburger concern-trolling of justices whose opinions progressive activists don’t like,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court. “The left simply can’t stand that a majority of the Supreme Court is finally, after decades of hand-waving, interpreting the Constitution based on what it says instead of nebulous conceptions of social justice.”

At the Slate podcast taping, Anderson’s first guest of the night was Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of course — his Democratic colleague, Illinois senator Dick Durbin, was supposed to be there too, but he came down with Covid. Anderson’s first question jumped right to the point: given all the horrible things now established about Clarence Thomas, he asked: “So Senator Whitehouse, do you think he should resign?”

“In all decency, he should,” Whitehouse said, to applause. “But there’s just no world in which that happens that I can foresee. He’s just that determined to stay there and make his points and exercise his resentments.”

The senator, infamous for his membership in an all-white Rhode Island beach club, is promoting his book, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court, describing “an evil spiral back and forth” bent on the “court capture” of the judiciary.

“I told my caucus, the Senate caucus, that we have a problem with the Supreme Court: it’s now a political organization, we have to treat it as such. And I basically got booed back into my chair,” Whitehouse said. “I got told ‘oh, no, no, the Supreme Court relies on public confidence, we can’t possibly do that.’ So I realized I had to do my homework. And that’s where… the book and all of that came from. Prove your case, write your prosecution memo.”

In Whitehouse’s frame, an “omertà” of secretive groups funded by malevolent billionaires — whom he tags as fossil-fuel interests bent on preventing bipartisan climate-change policy — are operating the court like shabby robed puppets.

“We don’t know all of that yet,” Whitehouse said. “I think we’re going to find out a lot more.” Invited to make the case for his latest piece of legislation targeting all of this (is this a Slate podcast or a Democratic activism group?), Whitehouse calls it “one of the silver linings of this set of really sickening revelations about the Supreme Court.”

 

 

“This is a multi-front battle,” Whitehouse said. “Moving the legislation forward, I think we’ll hit tipping points as the behavior of the Supreme Court justices becomes more well known, as further revelations come. We’re preparing for that moment.”

There’s little subtlety in Whitehouse’s comments to a friendly DC crowd about the degree to which the activity swirling around the Supreme Court is an ideological information operation. Democratic politicians have all the reason in the world to promote the effort to do so: the biggest funders of their partisan priorities are all paying for it.

Of the justices targeted in the recent spate of hit pieces, Samuel Alito has been the most aggressive in pushing back. He wrote a prebuttal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal after ProPublica sent him a series of questions inquiring about a fishing trip he took as a guest of right-leaning billionaire Paul Singer. Alito’s response was thorough and ruthless, detailing the skewed and inaccurate framing of the piece and prompting ProPublica’s story to be redrafted, with an explainer for the “Unprecedented Wall Street Journal Pre-buttal.”

If leaking Alito’s opinion in Dobbs was supposed to have cowed the justice, it clearly hasn’t. “Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” he told the Journal in April. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.” The experience prompted the justice to be more confrontational. If he were a meme, one former clerk joked, Alito would be Michael Jordan in The Last Dance: “And I took that personally.”

Whitehouse and his fellow leftists would do anything to alter the conservative course the court has taken in recent years — even radical steps like court-packing. In the fall of 2019, along with four other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Whitehouse sent a brief to the court on a New York gun rights case. “The Supreme Court is not well, and the people know it,” they warned. “Perhaps the court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured.’”

For Whitehouse and those who would blow up the Supreme Court, dark money spent to this end is the good kind, and the activist groups and the journalists they push to echo their priorities are the noble pursuers of truth. The Judicial Crisis Network is a conspiracy, but progressive organizations like Fix the Court and Demand Justice are pure crusaders. The conservative Federalist Society is evil, but the leftist American Constitution Society is good. What this effort seeks to establish is a mutually justifying feedback loop. Democratic senators level severe allegations, activists parcel fever swamp stories to the press who then report on it, allowing the senators to point to these reports as legitimizing what was claimed in the first place.

Assisting in this effort are multiple billionaire-funded advocacy groups, bent on echoing the case for extreme measures to transform the court. They include Fix the Court, a spinoff from the New Venture Fund, managed by for-profit company Arabella Advisors, the center of the left’s dark money network — it spent over $1 billion in liberal efforts in 2020. Demand Justice, another Soros-backed group, was more explicitly focused on the push to pack the court — its board includes Elie Mystal, an MSNBC commentator who is most famous for calling the Constitution “trash.”

“While Whitehouse is championing supposed ‘ethics reform’ at the Supreme Court, he himself has sponsored environmental legislation pushed by the Ocean Conservancy, a group that has paid his wife as a consultant and policy advisor for years,” JCN president Carrie Severino said. “This isn’t about ethics for Whitehouse, but rather increasing the number of tools the left has at its disposal to intimidate the conservative members of the court.”

The central role of ProPublica should not escape notice. It was founded and continues to be funded by the Sandler family of San Francisco, who sold their bank Golden West to Wachovia right before its ludicrously profitable collection of dubious adjustable-rate mortgages played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. Their family foundation is a huge backer of leftist causes, including the Center for American Progress, Human Rights Watch and Earthjustice.

Today ProPublica is also backed by a who’s-who of partisan Democratic billionaire donors, including George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Laurene Powell Jobs, Donald Sussman and, until it was compelled to return the first tranche of a $5 million donation, notorious crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried. All this billionaire largesse helps ProPublica pay top dollar for staff — its editor in chief currently makes more than $100,000 more each year than a justice of the Supreme Court.

For some reason, these billionaires don’t raise the hackles of Sheldon Whitehouse or Joel Anderson, or lots of others who are likely to tune into a multipart Slate podcast framing Clarence Thomas as a man who sold out black people for white money. Or, as one of the night’s other guests proclaimed of Thomas’s long ago divorce, “trading the black doll for the white doll.” There are hoots, laughs and murmurs in response.

At the opening of the show, Anderson led off with an odd extended monologue focused on Thomas’s high-school sports prowess, interspersed with audio from interviews with multiple figures from his past, most of whom spoke in praise of his arm strength with a football and gift for quick passing on the basketball court. The audience laughed when they are told he tried out for the Holy Cross football team but that he struggled taking hits; Anderson closes by expressing skepticism that the 5’8” Clarence could ever dunk. The audience claps.

They clap to confirm each other in their viewpoints. To remind each other that anger at the Supreme Court, over abortion or affirmative action or everything else, isn’t a mark of Democratic impotence or foolish mismanagement of the filibuster or RBG’s refusal to retire under Obama, you see — it’s those evil fossil-fuel billionaires like Harlan Crow who are to blame. Because as the good Senator Whitehouse, a son and grandson of ambassadors and bishops, assured them at the podcast party, it’s Thomas who is a creature of “resentments.” It’s the skinny Gullah kid who ran through the Lowcountry scrub, the place where his ancestors ate their pint of grits and the creek shrimp they could catch, boiled in the brackish salt water for flavor. That kid is the one who took the wrong lesson from the American experience, who wants to pull up the drawbridge behind him. You see, you understand. He’s the resentful one. We can all agree about that.

There is no apparent awareness that the persecution of Thomas is rooted in their resentments: not of his rulings as such, but the fact that he survived the full force of their apparatus, that his origin story is his survival. They have to destroy him because he exists: because the force of the counterexample shows them to be impotent, shows there is another path. It is a species of derangement. As a threat, Clarence Thomas is literally existential. Of course Clarence Thomas can dunk. He’s been dunking on these folks for years. All they can do is podcast about it.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2023 World edition. 

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Fulton County Clerk on Leaked Trump Indictment- Yet Another “Explanation”

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Well, it’s another day and we’re getting yet another explanation from Fulton Country officials when it comes to the posted-then-deleted document that appeared to be the indictment against former President Donald Trump — and it might be the wildest one yet.

As Townhall reported previously, a document that showed a number of charges under Trump’s name appeared on the Fulton County clerk’s website on Monday around noon, but was quickly removed. Later that night, when the grand jury voted on the indictment, it turned out that Trump was charged with exactly the same counts as had appeared on the clerk’s website hours before the grand jury had completed its work. County officials called the deleted document “fictitious” initially on Monday, then changed tact on Tuesday to say it was the result of a “trial run” used to “test” the system of posting indictments in anticipation of the grand jury’s vote.

At no time, however, amid the changing stories, have Fulton County officials explained why the document posted initially was an exact match for the charges the grand jury actually handed up hours later.

On Wednesday, we got another story — this time directly from Fulton County Clerk Ché Alexander — that added more information but did little to clear up the situation.

Here’s what she had to say when she broke her silence in an interview with Atlanta ABC affiliate WSB-TV:

She says she was under a lot of pressure to make sure the process went smoothly. In trying to be perfect she says she made a mistake.

She says she hit send instead of hitting save. “I am human,” she said. And she says she wanted to get the documents to the public as soon as possible.

“And that’s how the mishap happened.”

Alexander said this had nothing to do with the D.A.’s office and there was nothing sinister about the mistake she made.

“I have no dog in the fight,” she pointed out.

She says in an effort to handle the indictment perfectly, she messed up. “I did a work sample in the system. And when I hit save, it went to the press queue.”

Some news reporters saw it before it was deleted. At least one outlet published it.

Alexander says what was published was unofficial. “It wasn’t an official document. It wasn’t official charges. It was the dry run. It was a work sample,” she said.

Even though it had a case number. But Alexander says it didn’t have a stamp or other markings that would have made it official.

Jones asked her why did she release a statement calling the document “fictitious.”

“That was the best word that I could come up with. It was fictitious. It wasn’t real. It didn’t have a stamp on it,” she stated.

Jones asked her why she didn’t just say it was an error. Alexander says the word ‘fictitious’ is what her team came up with…

Alexander says she was under a lot of worldwide pressure to get this right. Now she says she just wants to explain what happened and get back to work. “I tell my staff we just want to be transparent. I don’t have anything to hide,” Alexander said.

Alexander says her mistake had no impact on the grand jury and its decision.

Yep, the latest version of events is that the clerk “hit send instead of save.” Notably, there’s still no explanation for how the test run which went awry happened to include the exact counts on which Trump was later indicted by the grand jury, but with any luck there will be yet another explanation or statement from the clerk’s office yet to be released in the days ahead.


Sorry, (Ms) Charley, but your “explanation” won’t wash. As the owner of several websites across different hosts, I can tell you that the “Save” and “Send” (or “Publish”) are NOT next to each other.

under a lot of worldwide pressure to get this right.”

WORLDWIDE pressure???????? Who the @$#%$! does she think she’s fooling? Oh, right. Leftist drones accept anything — no matter how outrageous — as long as it comes from an approved source –TPR

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